Once Was a Time

by Leila Sales

  “When I moved here,” she said, “naturally I told everyone my name was Catherine Blair, and by now my Italian accent sounds almost like a native’s.”

  “Impressive. I can’t speak any other language. But I can mostly do an American accent.”

  “Yes, I noticed that,” Kitty said drily. “Not my favorite of the world’s accents, alas, but you carry it well.”

  “Did you ever have kids, or get married?” I asked her. “Was Ron Alama a code name for your husband?”

  Kitty laughed with surprise. “Ron Alama? How did you even hear of him?”

  “I read one of his papers,” I told her. “And I figured out that it was your way of telling me to go to Manarola.”

  “Lottie, I think you’re cleverer than I am. I did invent the name Ron Alama as an anagram of Manarola, but that was just for my own amusement, not because I ever once suspected you would be alive to find that name and piece together what it signified. Ron Alama was my own code name, for my own scientific research. As I continued to research time travel, I made a few useful discoveries with more everyday applications.”

  “That was you who came up with a way to treat cancer?”

  Kitty smiled and picked a low-hanging orange from one of her trees. “It was.” She told me that the other scientists who she worked with directly obviously knew that she was a woman, but they respected her decision to publish her findings under a male pseudonym. One of her colleagues even gamely volunteered to be the “face” of Ron Alama, posing for that headshot I’d seen all over the Internet. What none of them knew was that, to Kitty, this radiation treatment was just a step along the way toward her ultimate goal of creating a time travel portal.

  “That radiation treatment improved the quality of life for quite a number of people in hospitals all over the world. You may not know it to look at my little cottage here, but I made an awful lot of money from that discovery as well. Suffice it to say that I will be well cared-for no matter how much longer I live, and had I had any children—which I did not—they also would find all their needs financially provided for.”

  “So you’re rich?” I asked.

  “Well . . .” Kitty demurred.

  “You are! You are a rich inventor. I love it. My best friend is a rich inventor who knows how time travel works. Of course.”

  I tore off the peel on the orange Kitty had picked, offered her half, and took the other half for myself. It smelled more like an orange than I’d ever known an orange could smell.

  “Here’s what I don’t understand,” I said. “You didn’t know that I traveled to Sutton in 2013. You didn’t create the name Ron Alama so that I could find you here. You didn’t even put up the ‘Wills Tower’ sign for me?”

  “I did not,” Kitty said. “I just liked it as a name for my house because I’m up so high in the mountains here, looking out over everything—it’s what I imagined living in Wills Tower might feel like.”

  “So why did you put that note in A Little Princess at the Sutton library? That’s what I don’t get.”

  “I have a theory,” Kitty answered. “So, as I told you, I’ve never been to Sutton. I’ve never even been to Wisconsin. I don’t really know why anybody would—sorry, Lottie.”

  “I’m not offended,” I told her.

  “The closest I’ve ever been was Chicago. And even then, it’s probably been, gosh, twenty years since I was there? But I wonder if the Chicago Public Library’s copy of A Little Princess might have somehow wound up in Sutton.”

  “It definitely could have,” I told her. “Miss Timms—the librarian—told me that some of the books in our collection were handed down from the Chicago library. A Little Princess could have been one of them. But . . . why would you have put this note in there in the first place? If that wasn’t supposed to be a clue telling me how to find you, then why bother?”

  “Because I always put notes in copies of A Little Princess.”

  “What? Really?”

  “Yes. Every time I see the book, into it goes a postcard or a piece of stationery or some such. You remember: My parents always told me that you must leave a note.”

  “Are your notes always about me?”

  “Yes. They’re all more or less like the note you showed me a few minutes ago. Different stationery or postcards, sometimes slightly different wording, but that’s the gist of every one of them.

  “As I said, Lottie, I have traveled all over the world. I’ve been to more than a hundred countries on every continent except Antarctica. And I’ve put notes about you in every copy of A Little Princess, in every language, in every place where I found it.”

  “Why?”

  “It was silly,” Kitty said. “It wasn’t scientific at all. Every rational part of my brain told me that you would have gone too far into the past or future for you to ever find one of these notes. But I kept leaving them anyway, just in case, because . . .” She smiled at me. “Because it was silly, but I had hope.” She took my hand in hers, the orange juice on our fingers sticking them together. “I love you,” she said simply.

  “I will always love you,” I said to Kitty.

  “Do you want to see what my mom gave me yesterday?” Jake asked me.

  “Sure.” We were standing outside Sutton Middle School, waiting for the doors to open and the day to begin. It was December now, nearly four months after our trip to Italy, and so chilly that I could see our breath forming little clouds in the air as we talked.

  Jake pulled a plastic figurine out of his wheelie backpack and held it up. “Awesome, right?”

  I inspected it closely. It looked pretty much the same as Jake’s other action figures—and he had hundreds of them, I knew now from all the times I’d hung out at his house. “It seems awesome,” I agreed. “Who is it?”

  “Starfox! He’s an Eternal and he has superhuman strength and protective abilities. Like he can fall from a ten-story building and not even get hurt.” Jake lifted the figure as if to demonstrate, then paused. “I don’t want to test it, though. Just because it works in the comic books doesn’t mean it’s going to work on a plastic toy.”

  I laughed.

  “What are you reading?” Jake asked, gesturing to the book in my hands.

  “A Monster Calls.” I flipped it around so he could see the front cover.

  “‘By Patrick Ness,’” he read. He looked up at me. “Wow, you’re already on the Ns?”

  “I’m skipping some of the books now,” I explained. “I’m just doing the interesting-looking ones, so it goes faster. Well, I guess not that much faster, because there are a lot of interesting-looking ones.”

  The first thing Kitty did after I found her was to make a donation to the Sutton Public Library—a donation big enough to keep it open for years and years. I didn’t know how to thank her enough, but she just said, “Lottie, that’s what I made the money for.”

  I’d spent the rest of my summer break and the first couple weeks of September helping Miss Timms unpack all the books we’d boxed up, and quickly the library was looking as good as ever—maybe even more so, now that Miss Timms could afford to replace some of the older computers and armchairs.

  Now, the school doors opened, and Jake and I joined the press of students trying to get in out of the cold.

  “Charlotte!” I turned and saw Sydney hurrying toward me. “Is it okay if my dad drops me off at seven tonight instead of six? He has to work late.”

  “Sure!” We headed through the doors together.

  Dakota had been true to her word: Our friendship was over. And with it went my friendship with Kianna, Gavin’s phone calls, and a lot of other people who’d been part of my day-to-day life in Sutton. But not all of them.

  Sydney and I still did a lot of the things I used to do with the whole group—we’d paint each other’s nails whatever crazy colors and patterns we felt like, and gossip about who
had crushes on whom, and go out to the movies. Sydney kept hanging out with our old friends, too. Unlike Dakota, she didn’t think she had to choose one or the other.

  “Do you know what your grandmother’s making for dinner?” Sydney went on. “I am obsessed with her cooking.”

  After funding the library, the second thing Kitty did was leave Manarola and move to Sutton.

  “Are you sure?” I’d asked her. “It’s so beautiful where you live, and Sutton is so . . . well . . .”

  “American,” Kitty supplied. “I know. But I’ve stayed more than long enough in Italy. I’ve let myself grow comfortable there. There’s still time in my life for at least one more adventure.”

  “Sutton’s not exactly an adventure,” I warned her.

  “Everything you and I do together is an adventure,” she told me. And that was true.

  Kitty bought a modest house in Sutton, not too far from Melanie and Keith’s, and she decorated it the same as she had her house in Manarola: filled with books, and artifacts from her travels. She started a small garden—no lemon or orange trees here, though, as she said the climate wasn’t right. She cooked a lot, pasta and fish dishes that even Melanie and Keith admitted, with surprise, were much better than the Italian restaurant at the mall.

  The people who knew me in Sutton, like Sydney and Miss Timms, were all enthralled by her, this petite old lady who spoke several languages and could tell stories from so many places and times. “What a cool grandma!” Melanie told me. Only Jake knew the truth about who Kitty really was to me.

  As for Jake, we spent a lot of time together now. Everything in Sutton was different from Italy, but when we were together, it was almost like we were back there, in that beautiful, golden summer when all dreams seemed achievable. Often I would sit and read while Jake sketched, or we would plan out our imaginary next trips to other places in the world—or sometimes other times in history or other planets in the sky, since, as Jake said, you just never know.

  That was my life, day after day. Then those days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, and the months into seasons. And just like that, years went by.

  I kept getting older. And of course Kitty did, too. Eventually she couldn’t garden anymore, though she still liked to look at her flowers. It became hard for her to cook, and then it became hard for her to eat. When she couldn’t walk around anymore, I moved her African masks and Mexican wall hangings and Russian lacquer boxes near her bed, so she could still be reminded of how far she had traveled and how much she had done.

  When her doctor said it was only a matter of time, I sat by Kitty’s bedside, reading books to myself and talking to her on the rare occasions when she was awake.

  “I’m going to miss you,” I said.

  “Of course you will,” she replied. “But I’ll always be with you. Wherever you go, I’ll be with you.”

  “I know you will,” I said. “And wherever you go, I’ll be with you.”

  She opened and closed her lips a few times, as if she was trying to say something.

  “Do you need anything?” I asked. “I’ll get you whatever you want.”

  “No,” Kitty said. “Just stay with me before I go.”

  So I held her hand. And I stayed.

  Acknowledgments

  I am overwhelmed with gratitude to everyone who helped me turn the dream of Lottie and Kitty’s story into a reality.

  I will never be able to say thank you enough to my editor, Tamra Tuller, for believing in this story, believing in me, and knowing just how to turn this into the book it was meant to be.

  Thanks to the rest of the team at Chronicle, including Ginee Seo, Sally Kim, Lara Starr, Taylor Norman, Daria Harper, Claire Fletcher, Marie Oishi, Kayla Ferriera, and Vicky Walker for welcoming me into your family of authors and working so hard to make this book a success.

  To Stephen Barbara, for your enthusiasm, ingenuity, and perseverance. You make me believe that any creative undertaking is possible, as long as I have you by my side.

  To my aides in achieving historical British accuracy, including my language specialist Carol Mason; the Churchill War Rooms and Churchill Museum; and Juliet Gardiner’s The Children’s War: The Second World War Through the Eyes of the Children of Britain.

  To the Mamas and the Papas, whose song “Once Was a Time I Thought” inspired this book’s title.

  To Allison Smith, for taking that first trip to Cinque Terre with me.

  To Brian Pennington, for supporting me the entire time I was writing this.

  To all the friends I made in Bristol, especially Usman Ahmed, who advised on the Britishisms, and Hannah Slarks.

  To the Type A Retreat girls—Emily Heddleson, Lexa Hillyer, Lauren Oliver, Jess Rothenberg, Rebecca Serle, and Courtney Sheinmel. It was sitting by your sides that I wrote the first words of this novel—just as I have written so many other words in the years I’ve been lucky enough to know you.

  To Kendra Levin, one of the best editors (and friends) I know, for helping me craft this plot from the very beginning.

  To my father, Michael Sales, whose wisdom and love pro­vided the inspiration for the character of Lottie’s dad.

  And to my mother, Amy Sales, because everything we do together is an adventure.

  Leila Sales

  Leila Sales is the author of the young adult novels Mostly Good Girls, Past Perfect, This Song Will Save Your Life, and Tonight the Streets Are Ours. She grew up outside of Boston, Massachusetts, graduated with a degree in psychology from the University of Chicago, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Like the characters in Once Was a Time, Leila loves books, travel, imaginary games, and her friends. Learn more at LeilaSales.com, and follow her on Twitter @LeilaSalesBooks.