“What took you so long?” She said, sounding a little annoyed.
“Relax. You know I always let my phone ring three times before I answer. It’s my thing.”
“Well get over it.”
“Why? It’s not like there’s something urgent going on, some crisis that only Tess Turner can fix,” I replied sarcastically. “Unless you count these nine million empty boxes waiting for me in my room.” I glance at them again, my stomach knotting up.
“You mean I’m not urgent enough for you? I’m hurt.”
“Yeah, well, as that great philosopher once said, ‘get over it.’”
“Very funny. So you want me to come over and help you? I’m not doing anything.”
“You seriously need to get a life,” I said, half teasing, half serious. I opened my dresser drawer, grabbed an armload of underwear and socks and tossed them in the nearest box. “Packing is definitely not the most productive use of one’s Thursday night.” The sound of thunder rumbled up out of nowhere. “Besides, it looks like it’s going to rain.”
“So?”
“So nothing. It was just an observation.”
“Well, the offer is there,” she said, tentatively. “If you want it.”
“Nah,” I said. “I’m almost done anyway.”
“Suit yourself,” Dani said. “See you around.”
Scratch that, I thought. See you… never. Why didn’t I get to decide where I live? Why did my parents get to decide? How is that even remotely fair? What I really wanted to do right then was put all my things back in my drawers, plop back down on my bed and listen to some music, really loud. But I couldn’t. I was stuck. There was no getting out of this now.
I drag my feet on the ground, slowing down, admiring the bracelet, which has a flower, a musical note, and my initials, among others. My favorite one is a star with a tiny pink crystal in the center. It has gotten windy, and my hair starts whipping around in a frenzy, covering my face. It’s long and black, so I can’t see much through it, but I catch a glimpse of Dani’s head, looking upward in slow motion, then her whole body is up, she’s on her feet, running toward me. For a split second, our eyes sort of lock together, and it seems like one of those corny beach scenes from some dumb old movie, where two people are running toward each other. Only I’m not running and she is, and suddenly, all I notice is her hair. Would you believe it’s fanned out above her head, fluttering in the wind like some ridiculous flower with enormous long petals? It’s really weird and I start to laugh. It’s then I realize the wind has stopped. Which doesn’t make sense because of her hair, flying around.
In that flash, Dani’s eyes meet mine and she sticks her arm out and her mouth drops open to say something, pointing toward me. I am a little embarrassed that she is pointing at me, but I don’t have time to think about it, because the world starts spinning, my whole body curving into the arc of the swing. There is a strange cracking sound, a flash of light.
I feel the heat first, like one enormous slap across my entire body. I let go of the chains and drop forward. I keep my eyes open long enough to see Dani’s body, lying on the ground like a limp doll. All I can see is black sky. Then I feel something like a cord being yanked through my body, from my toes to my ears, and all of a sudden, I realize I am thirteen.
I am thirteen, but I will never, ever be the same again.
Closure
When I woke up, I was covered in sweat, wrapped up in my sheet. I ran my hand across my face and my fingers got tangled in something. What was going on? Then I remembered. Project Zero. The simulation. The wires attached to my head. There were three of them. I pulled them off and looked at the clock. It was 6 a.m. My parents, apparently, did not come in to check on me. I gathered up the equipment and put it back in the black duffle bag Zach gave me and slid it under my bed.
I crawled back in bed and pulled the covers up over my shoulders, trying to piece together what I’d just experienced. It was surprisingly vivid—the party, the swing, Dani running toward me. I replayed the sequence in my head two or three times, but everything just froze on Dani, her wild hair and that look on her face that was both fear and determination all at once. Dani, I realized, was trying to protect me, warn me to get off the swing and take cover. It would have made a great story, her courageous act. Not thinking of herself, she simply lunged forward, her hand outstretched. And then, it was just over.
Tears were running down my face like faucets by the time I’d gone over the scene the third time. I kept thinking it was like skipping backwards in a movie, only I kept hoping the ending would be different, and it never was. This one would go down in history as an epic fail. I wiped my tears on the bedcover. If you want to know the truth, I started to get mad. Why did she bother trying to save me anyway? Why did she have to leave me with such a crappy story to tell? Maybe I’d just bury it away, I thought. Leave all this stuff with Zach behind and just forget all of it. Never tell a soul. It made me feel a little better to think I could be free from the past, but still, it didn’t seem quite right. I tried to picture myself, sitting around the table with a bunch of ladies when I’m like seventy, telling them how my best friend died trying to save me. But that wasn’t quite right either.
I wanted to call Zach but it was too early, plus it was Saturday, so he wouldn’t be up for a while anyway. I lay there for about thirty minutes until I heard my mom making coffee downstairs, then decided to get dressed and take a walk. It would be chilly, but I needed some fresh air.
My mom was sitting in the living room flipping through a magazine, coffee mug in one hand, her morning ritual.
“You’re up early,” she said.
“I couldn’t go back to sleep,” I said, sitting on the couch.
Mom sipped her coffee, steam swirling around her nose. “You have plans today?”
“Not really. I’m thinking about going for a walk or something.”
“Hmmm,” Mom said, going back to her magazine.
Mom and I had never really talked about what happened that day at my party, not in depth anyway. It was just one of those subjects families avoid because it’s easier that way. What I really wanted to know more than anything just then, was where she died. I couldn’t remember where the park was.
“Mom can I ask you something?” I asked. “About the accident?”
My mom put the magazine away and set her coffee on the side table, looked at me. Just as I suspected, she was uncomfortable with the subject. “What?” Her eyes darted, like they did when she was nervous.
“How come you’ve never taken me there? To where it happened?”
She looked down, searching for an answer. “We thought it would be too hard ...”
“For me or for you?”
She shot me a look of surprise and confusion all rolled into one. “We were just trying to protect you.”
“From what? The worst has already happened. How could that have made any difference?”
Mom’s face contorted into a sad grimace. “I’m sorry, honey.” Her voice cracked.
It sort of made me mad, her response. What right did she have to be so sad? I was the one who’d been through the hard stuff. “What are you sorry for?”
Mom sniffled, wiped her nose with a tissue. “For not taking you there. For not thinking about what you might want—I don’t know. For everything.”
“Well, it’s not like we can’t still go.” I offered.
“Maybe,” Mom considered. “It would be good for you.” She had brightened up a bit, with this new possibility. She’d never thought that returning to the scene of the tragedy could be helpful. “If you’re sure.”
I nodded. “I’m sure.”
By noon that day, Mom had planned the whole day around going to Fuller Park, where Dani died. It was on the other side of town, so we’d drive, take a lunch. She even brought Dad to the outing. I didn’t really want my
closure to become a family event, but whatever. I guess my parents had been through hell, too. It’s not easy losing your daughter for four years, not knowing if she’d come back. I know it sounds crazy, but somehow I think going through something like that would be worse than death. Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t like I wanted to be dead. I just thought sometimes it would have been easier for my parents. Then when I thought about Dani and how much it hurt to lose her, I wasn’t so sure.
I rode the whole way to the park in silence, partly because I felt sick to my stomach, and partly because I just didn’t have anything to say. My parents felt the same way, apparently, because they didn’t even have the radio on, listening to their old 80s songs like they usually did. They were somber, but not sad, really. More like relieved—like we were all doing something productive, finally, together—something that would end a bad chapter in our lives. But somehow, I felt like that chapter was just beginning. I’m weird like that. Endings are just beginnings in a new light.
My dad glided the car into the parking lot, a slow crawl into a spot. We all just sat there dumb for a few minutes, waiting for someone else to make a move. Finally, Dad stretched his arm over the back of the front seat and turned around.
“You ok?”
I was thinking I’d been better, but I nodded anyway. “Yeah.”
He glanced nervously at Mom.
“I’m sorry about California,” I said. “I sorta messed that up for you.”
Dad looked confused for a moment, and then sighed. “That’s not—it wasn’t important—we just wanted you to get well.”
I gave him a weak smile. “I’ll try not to let you down.”
Dad got out first and I joined him. Mom stayed in the car, her eyes glazed over. I felt sorry for her, a little bit, thinking how hard it would be to revisit such a bad memory. Dad walked me over to a faded pavilion where we had my party, describing in too much detail who was there and what they were doing. I wanted to stop him and just say get on with it, but he clearly needed to tell me these things for some reason. It was like he needed to remember it just right. He laughed when he told about Mom singing some song she liked that he hated. Girls Just Wanna Have Fun he called it. “Dumbest song ever,” he added.
He stopped talking and paused, looking up at the sky like he was afraid a storm would crop up right then and there. Thankfully the sky was clear as a bell—blue sky and everything. It was a beautiful day.
“And over there…” he said, pointing off toward a big pond, “is the swing.”
What a dump, I thought. Everything was old and rundown, chipped paint and rust everywhere. You could tell the grass wasn’t kept up. No one was around. It was like a ghost town—or ghost park, I guess.
Ironically, I wasn’t immediately drawn to the swing, but to these really old ride-on toys, circus animals on big springs. They looked ancient, the paint all worn off, rusty handles. There was an elephant, a horse, a tiger and one that was so worn smooth that I wasn’t even sure what it was. There was no paint on the face. That one was my favorite and that is where I went first.
I sat on it for a long time, thinking mostly about Dani. For some reason, it was easier to think about her, out there in the open where no one would know or look at me funny if I started crying. The thing is, I was just so mad at Dani. What was she thinking, trying to get me off that swing? My parents told me that just before the lightning hit, she came running for me, grabbed the chain to get me out of there. But it was too late, for both of us. Only, I lived and she didn’t. It was like a bad dream, a big dumb joke the universe played on both of us. She was trying to help me, and she died. Something’s not quite right about that.
But I would have done the same thing. I would have saved Dani in a heartbeat.
Sitting there felt sort of peaceful in a way. There were no weird thoughts or messages in my head, just me and an old place from my past. A real place that changed my life forever. It’s crazy, but it felt good to be there. I guess you could say I felt closer to Dani there. The weirdest part of all? I didn’t feel sad. I wasn’t struggling to picture things in my mind. After the simulation, I knew all of it, of course, every little detail. I knew what Dani’s hair looked like, the color of her shirt, the sound of the wind whipping the empty swing next to me. It was like now that I had a memory of it, I didn’t have to wonder about it anymore. It had happened—to me. And I was going to have to live with it.
I noticed that dad had gone back to the car, so I jumped off and dusted the rusty powder off my pants. It was time to get back to my life, whatever it turned out to be. I wasn’t sure just who that was yet, but I knew it would be someone Dani would have loved getting to know.
Change The Past
Meetings at the lab with Zach became a regular after-school event. After a while, we didn’t even have to say anything. We just showed up. We did a lot of talking, reading through Zach’s dad’s research, reading files. I found out a whole lot more about myself than I ever knew, lots of things I’d forgotten. I fell in the bathtub when I was four years old and had a severe concussion, for example. My mom made my kindergarten graduation dress and I refused to wear it because it was blue instead of purple. I didn’t remember any of these things—and my parents certainly never talked about them.
Zach and I didn’t talk too much about the simulation. For one thing, it scared the crud out of me. I sort of wanted to forget it. Plus, Zach had warned me that if anyone found out about what we were doing, things could get dicey. That was the exact word he’d used. I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I didn’t really want to find out. It was like we had some unwritten pact. What happens between us stays between us, so close we don’t even need to talk about it.
So we just spent time together, mainly. The lab was sort of like our secret place, where we could go to get away from our parents and all our friends and all the stupid drama at school. For the first time since I lost Dani, I was starting to feel like I had a best friend again. And the last thing I wanted to do was mess that up.
One day we were sitting there and out of the blue, Zach got all serious and scrunched up his eyebrows like he does. I guess he was ready to hear about the simulation.
“What was it like for you?”
“Sort of like watching a movie.” I shrugged.
“And your reaction? Did you feel better at all? About what happened?”
“You mean like at peace about it or something?”
He nodded. “Exactly. See I’m trying to get at the core principals of my dad’s research, but I’m coming up with some things that just don’t make sense to me. Like that, for example. Why relive the past? What’s the point? That’s why we have a memory.”
“Yes, but memory is imperfect,” I noted. “I’m the poster child for that.”
“True,” he laughed. “But why do we need to know exactly what happened? It doesn’t change anything.”
“No, but it’s sort of cool—you know, that it’s possible to—” Go back in time, I was thinking, but didn’t want to say it. We’d avoided those sort of expressions when talking about this stuff. It just sounded plain crazy.
“See the past.” He said. “Yeah, it is.”
I was starting to daydream just then, thinking back to the day I woke up from the coma, lying in that bed with those white blankets wrapped tightly across my legs. What happened in that one moment was like the turning point between my old life and the new. One moment that stood out from all the rest. Sometimes things have to remain, no matter what happens before or after.
“Zach, are you thinking what I’m thinking?" I said, offhandedly.
“I don’t know, what are you thinking?”
“Maybe your dad didn’t just want to revisit the past—maybe he wanted to change it.”
Zach had been tapping his pencil furiously and suddenly stopped. A flash across his eyes. “That’s it,” he said. “That has to
be it.”
“If we can change the past,” I said. “Then we can change what happened to Dani.”
“Tess, I don’t know…”
“We could bring her back.”
“Besides, it might not even work.”
“Zach,” I pleaded. “We'll never know unless we try.”
“We don’t know all the implications...”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll do it.” I exclaimed. “If it will bring Dani back, I’ll do it. Please, Zach. She was my best friend. Besides, if she was willing to save my life back then, the least I can do is return the favor.” I had started crying, apparently, because Zach reached up and wiped my cheek. “I miss her so much,” I whispered.
Zach looked visibly tired, I noticed, as if the whole world were resting on his shoulders just then. “Let me work on it,” he sighed. “Do some more research.”
I squealed, hugged him like mad. “Thank you, Zach!”
He sat back and gave me a crooked grin. With his sharp jaw line and the wild whorls in his hair, I felt a warm flip-flop inside, a tiny love punch. You are so mine, I thought. All mine. I grinned back, thinking he looked like he just got out of bed and I almost giggled, but then I got this really funny feeling in my stomach all of a sudden, like someone had grabbed hold of it and squeezed really hard. I gasped.
A scene flashed in my head: Dani and the Dork, sitting on that park bench four years ago, at my birthday party. For so long, all I could see was Dani, running toward me with her hair all wild, the flash of light that swallowed everything. But this time, I was looking at the Dork. Zach. Zach! Dork! Zach was the Dork!
My hands started quivering uncontrollably. “No,” I said, shaking my head. “No way.”
I started to get up and leave, but Zach's face softened and he took my hands. “So you just figured it out.”
“You mean you’re—back then? But how? Why didn’t you tell me?”
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