Once Was a Time

by Leila Sales

  But he was right about one thing: I wasn’t just here to make conversation.

  “Okay,” I said, my voice low as well. “I want something from you. But it’s not to play some trick on you or make fun of you or anything. I want . . . I want to go to Italy with you.”

  Jake raised his eyes from the ground to stare at me for a long moment. “You’re kidding,” he said flatly.

  “No.”

  He threw his cup to the ground, splashing water everywhere. His face was still red, but gone was his apologetic tone. Now he shouted right into my face. “What is wrong with you? Where do you get off? Do you think you’re so amazing that you can be selfish and hurtful for years, and then you just get to show up and ask for some huge favor, like we’re friends, and I’m going to say yes because . . . why? Because you’re sooo important that I’d just fall all over myself to do something nice for you? Get over yourself, Charlotte!”

  By the time he finished speaking, I was crying. I covered my eyes with my hands, as if that would keep him from noticing.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d wept. I’d stopped at some point. There are only so many times you can cry over the same sadness.

  “Oh, come on,” Jake said, but his voice was hesitant again. “Charlotte. Ugh, I shouldn’t have said all that. Here, why don’t you sit down.”

  I sat on the bench swing, trying to catch the tears with my fingers before they made it down my cheeks.

  “Can I get you some water or something?” Jake asked awkwardly. “Or a tissue? This one has some paint on it, but . . .”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Jake, I’m sorry. You were the first person I met when I got to Sutton, and you helped me. That means so much to me. I wouldn’t ask you for help again now if I didn’t really, really need it. Please, can I go to Italy with you? I’ll pay for my plane ticket. I have money saved up from working at the library. I can do it. But my foster parents won’t go with me, and I don’t know another way to get there. I will run away if I have to. I will buy a plane ticket and just go.”

  I shuddered. Starting my life over from scratch here in Sutton had been so hard, the last thing I wanted was to do it again. To go to Italy not speaking the language or knowing the customs, having no friends and no place to stay. If I was lucky I would find another Miss Timms, another Mr. Babcock, another Dakota to take me under her wing. If I wasn’t lucky, then who knew what would happen to me.

  But I would go anyway. I wasn’t being melodramatic when I said that to Jake. Nothing would stop me from looking for Kitty.

  “Are you crazy?” Jake asked, looking at me with what I thought might be admiration. “What’s in Italy that could be that important?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes, it does matter.” Jake sat down on the swing next to me. “If you want me to ask my mom if you can come to Italy on our family vacation—you, a girl she’s never met before, never even heard me talk about—then you need to tell me why.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Fine.”

  He kicked his foot against the dirt below, lightly swinging us back and forth. A few minutes went by while I tried to find the words to explain myself. I would never be able to tell my real friends the truth about Kitty, or about myself. But Jake—well, he was just himself: awkward and embarrassing, immature and wimpy. He never hid any of that. Even if he wanted to, it seemed like he couldn’t. And I thought that maybe, to Jake, I could just be myself, too.

  But first I’d have to remember who that was.

  I started by asking him the same question I’d asked Miss Timms, three years before. “Do you believe in time travel?”

  “Of course,” Jake said without even stopping to think about it. “Don’t you?”

  Chapter 25

  “So let me get this straight,” Jake said some time later, still sitting next to me on the swing, after I’d explained to him as much as I was able. “You’re saying that you were born in 1930, in England, and that first day I saw you, you had just time traveled here—here, to Sutton? Who would bother to time travel to Sutton?”

  “I know it sounds ridiculous . . .” I said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me all of this in the first place?” Jake demanded. “You are way more interesting than I thought you were.”

  “I’m very interesting,” I protested, offended.

  “No, you’re exactly the same as a zillion other people,” he replied. “Except that you’re a time traveler, apparently. So that changes things. I’m obsessed with time travel.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Pretty much any sort of sci-fi, I love. Time travel is great, also intergalactic space travel, teleportation is a good kind of travel, too. . . . Also robots, smart houses, movies where the Internet becomes sentient and starts tearing down humanity. . . . Oh, aliens! Aliens rock.”

  I laughed. “Do you actually believe all of that could be real?”

  Jake’s face closed up again, like a light switch had been flicked. “Are you making fun of me?” he asked flatly.

  “No! I’m not, honest.” I wondered how long it took, how many people had to be mean to you for how many years, before you just started to assume, when someone asked you a question, that they were out to ridicule you.

  “Well, if you really want to know: Yeah, I do believe all of that could be real. If not right now, then someday. If one magical thing is possible—like you time traveling—then couldn’t it all be possible?”

  “I remember when I first got here,” I said, “and I discovered the Internet. I thought that was magical.” A little thrill zinged through my body. This was the first time I’d been able to talk like this to anyone, to admit the truth about why this world seemed so foreign to me.

  “Every invention was science fiction at some point,” Jake said. “I bet two hundred years ago, there were sci-fi stories with cars and TVs in them, and people read them and thought, ‘That sounds great, but it could never happen!’ If you can imagine something, then maybe you can make it real.”

  “I believe that, too,” I said. “And that’s why I have to go to Italy, as soon as I can.”

  “Wait, so what exactly do you think is in Italy?” Jake asked.

  “Kitty.” And I explained to him what had happened since I found the postcard she had left for me in my favorite book. How the postcard was from a hotel in Florence. How there was some Italian physicist who knew about time travel, maybe more than anyone in the world except for me, and the only way I could think that he might know all that would be if he’d met Kitty and she had told him.

  “I’m not positive that Kitty is there,” I concluded, “but it’s my best bet. I believe that she left me that postcard as a clue. Kitty loved games and puzzles. She wouldn’t leave this postcard just randomly. She would choose a specific postcard for a specific reason. She would trust me to figure it out. So that’s what I need to do.”

  Jake’s eyes were wide as he drank all of this in. “But why make it a big riddle?” he asked. “If she was going to leave you a message, why not have it say, ‘Here’s my e-mail address and phone number, please get in touch’?”

  “Because maybe she couldn’t,” I replied. “Maybe it wasn’t safe to do so.”

  “Not safe, how?”

  I shrugged. “If someone could figure out how to time travel on purpose, how it works, that information would be invaluable. You could harness that power to do . . . well, pretty much anything. Kill Adolf Hitler as a baby and prevent World War Two. Meet Albert Einstein and convince him not to tell President Franklin D. Roosevelt to develop the atomic bomb. Stop the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The options are limitless. That’s why the British government spent so much money trying to figure out how time travel worked. That’s why Kitty and I were kidnapped, and why there were people—maybe a lot more people than we knew about—who would kill if tha
t’s what it took to get that secret for themselves. And maybe that’s why Kitty couldn’t just announce her address for any stranger to find.”

  “But it was years and years ago that those Nazis kidnapped you,” Jake countered. “And then Germany lost the war. All the bad guys are dead by now or in jail, I’m sure.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “But if Kitty doesn’t want to be easily found, I trust that she has a good reason for it.”

  Jake shivered. I knew how he felt. I would feel safer with Kitty by my side. I always did.

  “So can I come with you to Italy?” I asked.

  Jake nodded slightly. “I’ll talk to my mom. I’ll do everything I can. But here’s the deal: If I’m doing this for you, then you have to do some things for me.”

  “Anything,” I promised.

  “One, if we go on this trip together, you have to treat me like a normal human being. No name-calling, no taking photos to send to your friends with mean commentary, no judging me for being nice to my mom or whatever. This is my vacation away from people like you, and you are not going to ruin it for me.”

  “Of course,” I said. People like you. Did Jake really think I was the sort of person who would do things like that? Just because Dakota and Kianna did, that didn’t mean I was the same as them.

  “Two,” Jake went on listing his conditions. “You have to get all your friends to be nice to me. When school starts, make them say hello to me sometimes. When we’re picking teams in gym, they can’t pick me last. When they have big parties and invite, like, everyone in the class, they have to invite me, too.”

  “Absolutely,” I promised, with no idea how to make that happen.

  “And three: Whatever you find out about time travel,” he went on, “you have to tell me all of it. Every last thing.”

  “You’ll be the first to know.” Then I added, trying to lighten the mood, “Hey, maybe our trip will be fun!”

  Jake leveled his gaze at me. “This is a business agreement, Charlotte. It has nothing to do with fun.”

  “Right.” I lowered my gaze. “I’m sorry that I’ve hurt your feelings,” I mumbled.

  Jake acted like he hadn’t heard. “Do we have a deal?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Deal.” We shook on it.

  “Good,” he said. “Now that that’s taken care of, let’s get you to Italy.”

  Chapter 26

  And so began a campaign of intensive pleading, promising, and bargaining. Jake’s mom worked especially hard to convince Melanie and Keith. She was a lawyer, so she was good at arguing, and she’d traveled all over the world. She gave my foster parents a whole speech about what an unbelievable multicultural awakening this would be for me, and how safe I would be, and how little freedom I would have, and how strict their sightseeing itinerary was. It worked so well that I developed a new concern—that Melanie and Keith would let me go, and then I’d be too busy visiting museums and Roman ruins to search for Kitty.

  “I guess Italy sounds nice,” Keith said dubiously over breakfast, “but why do you even want to go on a ten-day trip with a kid you barely know?”

  “I know Jake,” I said, offended. “He’s been in my class for three years.”

  “Sure, but you never invite him over or anything.”

  “Honey,” Melanie said to Keith, giving him a meaningful look, “I think Charlotte has a crush on this boy.”

  “Oh,” Keith said. He raised his eyebrows like he finally understood everything in the universe.

  “No, I don’t,” I protested, but weakly, because if my having a crush was an acceptable explanation for why I wanted to go to Italy, then I would gladly let Melanie and Keith believe that. “Anyway, I want to try to find my cousin,” I reminded him. That was the story Jake and I had told our parents: that Kitty was my cousin, the only family I knew of, and I thought she was living in Florence. It was pretty close to the truth, after all. And if there was one upside to being an orphan, it was that people really wanted to help you find any family you could.

  “Let’s see what Mr. Babcock says,” Melanie decided.

  Again I presented my whole case—how I really wanted to go, how meaningful finding any family member would be to me, how I’d saved up the money from my job at the library, how I already had a passport from the time we had driven up to Canada to go camping. Mr. Babcock ran a background check on Jake’s mom and turned up nothing wrong with her, so “I think it could be a great experience for Charlotte,” he told my foster parents.

  And that settled it. I was going to Italy.

  “I’m sorry I won’t be here to finish packing up,” I told Miss Timms on Thursday as we taped together more boxes. “We’re flying to Rome next week.” I looked around the library. There were still a lot of books left on the shelves, and I did feel bad leaving her to handle them all herself.

  “That’s okay, hon,” she said. “I’ve never seen you this excited about anything. I understand. Go, have an amazing time, and tell me all about your adventures when you come home.”

  “Will you still be here?” I asked in a small voice, focusing on the tape gun in my hand. I didn’t want to think about Miss Timms finding work elsewhere, moving away. But I also didn’t want to be surprised, to return from Italy and find that she’d already left me.

  “Oh, yes. The library’s official last day is September first. So until then, I’ll just be serving the needs of the community as best I can, considering that we’ll have barely any books and I can’t let them check out anything.” She rolled her eyes. “Just what a librarian lives for, right?”

  “It’s not fair,” I said quietly.

  “No, it’s not. But I just keep telling myself that maybe this adventure needs to come to an end so that a new adventure can begin.”

  * * *

  The next couple of days were a whirlwind of shopping for trip supplies, doing laundry, deciding which books to bring with me, and packing. I was far too busy for anything else, and I managed to convince myself that was the reason I kept avoiding Dakota, Sydney, and Kianna’s calls.

  But when Sydney messaged me and asked if I wanted to join them for manicures on Saturday, I reluctantly agreed. After all, I’d promised that I would make them start being nice to Jake. I might as well begin working on that now.

  At the nail salon, everything seemed like normal, and I started to relax. I shouldn’t have been so nervous to tell my friends about my trip. It didn’t really affect them, and maybe they would be excited for me, like Miss Timms was.

  We spent ages picking out our nail polish colors, as we always did. It wasn’t enough just to get colors that each one of us liked; we needed colors that complemented one another, so we could take photos of our nails all together. This time, after much deliberation, we decided to go with rainbow sparkles—so Dakota would wear red sparkles, I would do yellow, Kianna would be green, and Sydney would be blue. Together, a rainbow. I recalled Jake’s remark that I was “exactly the same as a zillion other people,” and for one wild moment I wanted to paint my nails black, just to prove him wrong.

  Kianna excitedly described the various photos we could do once our nails were done. “Like we could stand in rainbow order and each hold our finger over our lips,” she said, “like we’re saying shh. And then we could—”

  “Ooh, do you guys want to go into Chicago next weekend?” Dakota interrupted. “My mom said she’d drive us. It would be like one last end-of-summer, back-to-school blowout. We could get tickets to see a musical—wouldn’t that be cool?”

  “Yeah!” Sydney said. “I haven’t been to Chicago in so long. My parents never want to drive that far. And I bet there would be good stuff for you to take pictures of,” she suggested to Kianna.

  Kianna nodded with excitement as her manicurist rubbed lotion on her hands. “Like the Wrigley Building!”

  This was my opening. My hand felt clammy as my mani­cur
ist held it, but I licked my lips and spoke up. “It sounds really fun, but I won’t be able to join you next weekend. I’m going to be out of town.”

  “Where?” asked Sydney.

  “In Italy.” And I forced myself to add, “With Jake Adler and his family.”

  “What?” All three of them leaned in at the same time, Kianna sloshing the bowl of water that her nails were resting in.

  “Why?” Sydney asked.

  “Because I want to see Italy,” I answered. “And I think my cousin lives there.”

  “But why with Jake?”

  “Because he’s going to Italy.”

  “When did all of this happen?” Dakota demanded.

  “Just a couple days ago. Honestly, it’s all been . . . very sudden.”

  “Are your parents making you go?” Kianna asked, clearly puzzled. “I mean, Jake is just so weird.”

  “Can you tell them you don’t want to go?” Dakota asked. “Tell them my mom already got us tickets to see Phantom of the Opera in Chicago. That might help convince them.”

  I tried to explain, as my manicurist started painting the yellow sparkles onto my nails. “Jake’s not really that weird, you know. I think he’s nice.” And I wasn’t just saying that because I’d promised him I would make my friends like him. I thought he really must be nice, or else he wouldn’t let me go to Italy with him in the first place.

  “Hold on a second,” Dakota asked, holding up a hand. Her manicurist pulled it back down so she could keep working. “Charlotte, do you want to go on this trip with Jake?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s why I’m going.”

  “That’s a really dumb move,” Dakota advised me.

  “I’ll be back before you know it,” I said. I was surprised to realize that I wasn’t feeling nervous anymore. Now I was just feeling annoyed. “I don’t see what the problem is. Who says that I can’t be friends with Jake and you?”