by D. S. Murphy
But I couldn’t let it go. I put on a coat and a scarf and went back outside. Eric looked up as I approached, and took off his headphones.
“Keeping warm?” I said.
“Yeah, sure,” he said, blowing on his hands. But he didn’t smile. His expression said what do you want?
“I know we haven’t talked for a long time, but I’ve been dealing with something and I thought you might be able to help me,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows. “Shoot,” he said. But he looked worried, like I was going to ask him a big favor.
“What do you know about time travel?” I asked.
“For real?” he said, looking around. “This isn’t a prank? No hidden cameras?”
“I wouldn’t do that to you,” I said quietly.
He looked me over, but finally seemed satisfied.
“Well in that case,” he said, lifting the corners of his mouth, “I think we need some tea.”
I hadn’t been in Eric’s room for five years. Most of the toys and action figures were gone, replaced by books and a sprawling computer system with two monitors. His room was painted indigo, with a small map of the world in one corner, and the solar system in the other corner. Book littered his floor, along with clothes and video games. He shoved some of the mess in the corner and muttered an apology.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve seen worse.”
“Start with this,” he said, pulling a book off the shelf and tossing it at me.
“The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. A classic. Can’t go wrong. Can I ask why you’re interested?”
“I had this crazy dream...” I said. “It was just so real. I can’t get it out of my head.”
I followed him downstairs, where he put on an electric kettle.
“So in this dream,” he said, reaching for a pair of mugs, “you thought you were in the future? How could you tell?”
I took a deep breath in relief. I didn’t realize how badly I’d needed to talk about this. Crys would have just told me to forget about it.
“I was in the future, but it was all ruined, like... abandoned. And there were dead people; skeletons. And monsters...”
“Sounds like your typical post-apocalyptic novel,” he grinned. “Maybe you’ve been reading too much—or waiting for the movies to come out, if that’s your thing now.”
There was a sharpness in his voice: a disapproval that said I don’t know who you are anymore. But I ignored it.
“Yeah but the details,” I continued. “I flipped through a book and I could read it. I picked up something from the ground. I felt chilly, I smelled things, I had conversations—”
I cut myself with a knife. I pressed my lips together.
“Anything different about your diet or habits?” he asked. “Something that would affect your sleep?” Of course Eric was going to jump straight to the most rational answer. But maybe that’s why I was here.
“You don’t think it’s possible to see the future, to have visions?”
“I don’t believe in dreams and prophecies, if that’s what you’re asking. That stuff usually is just wish-fulfillment and seeing patterns where none exist. Usually fortune tellers just feed you vague bullshit that will probably happen, or at least make you feel good in the present. Or else something you’ll have to interpret later, so when something happens to you, you’ll think back and say aha, so that’s what she was talking about.”
“So, skeptic, then.”
“Yeah, about that kind of stuff. But real time travel? Scientifically? Doesn’t seem impossible. Maybe time is a dimension that we don’t understand yet. We still barely understand space, or normal physics. Time is relative. If you take a long space voyage and come back to earth, more time will have passed on earth than you’ve experienced. So one year for you could be one hundred years for the people on earth.”
“I didn’t dream about spaceships... I was still on earth.” In Brett Peters’ house.
“But time travel machines might work a similar way. Or maybe you don’t even need a machine. Did you ever read Stitches in Time?”
“Um, no,” I said, holding my tea cup with both hands and enjoying the warmth on my fingers. “Missed that one.”
“Classic book... it’s about how, maybe time and space can be folded up, like a piece of paper, and you can pass through from one point to the other. Maybe you just have to know how to do it, and concentrate.”
“If you did see the future, is there any way to prove whether or not it was real?” I asked.
“Sure,” Eric nodded. “Did you see anything different about the future that doesn’t match with reality? If so, you just need to wait for that thing to happen. Though it isn’t likely anybody will believe you after the fact. To be safe, you should write those things down in a sealed envelope, and ask someone else to keep it for you. Otherwise, you can’t be sure that you aren’t just fooling yourself.”
“Um... but also... I was kind of with some other people, and they stayed with me. So... it means my body was still here in the present, when I was in the future.”
“Wait, you were sleeping with other people?” he asked.
“I was at a party, and I kind of passed out.”
“You passed out?” his eyes widened. “How much were you drinking?”
“Not a lot, okay? And I’m fine. I had like, one drink and one hit of the bong.”
“Weed?” Eric frowned. He looked like he was disappointed in me.
The leaf had actually looked more like a purple flower. Did anybody at the party actually say it was weed, or had I just assumed that?
“Maybe,” I said.
“So this wasn’t a dream.”
“I don’t know what it was, okay? I’m just—I don’t have anybody else to talk to about this, and you’re good with weird.”
We glared at each other for a second, but then he laughed.
“Thanks, I think.” He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
“Fine,” he said, leaning his elbows on the table. “Let’s figure this out. Could you interact with objects?”
“Yes, I picked up a book and looked through it. And I held... other objects.”
“So you were corporeal. What were you wearing?”
“Huh?”
“Did you have clothes on? Were they the same clothes you had on when you had the dream? Maybe it was a duplicate of you, in a different timeline. You travelled, but the you of this timeline was still here. Just an additional version of you entered into a future timeline.”
“You mean, I took over future me’s body? I don’t think so. I was wearing the same clothes. I put something in my pocket too, but it wasn’t there when I woke up.” I thought that was the smoking gun, that proved I’d made it all up, but it didn’t faze Eric.
“That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe the thing in the future didn’t exist yet in the past. Maybe you can’t bring anything backwards with you into the present. Next time you party too hard, see if you can bring anything with you into the future.”
“There won’t be a next time,” I said. “Does this mean you believe me?”
“Not even a little bit,” he smiled. He was making fun of me.
I pushed off from the counter stool and put the mug back on the counter. “Thanks for the tea. I’ve got some homework to do.”
“Yeah, um, sure,” Eric held the front door open for me. “Listen, Alicia, if you have any more weird dreams… it was nice to talk with you again.” He looked sad. For a second I thought he was going to say something mushy like I’ve missed hanging out with you. I threw my scarf over my shoulder and left before he could.
***
My older sister, Tamara, showed up that night with Chinese food. She usually brought dinner on Sunday nights, it was our weekly family time. She was a Junior at a liberal arts school in St. Louis. We used to have fun together, but she changed after mom died. I’d been really young, and Tamara had basically raised me on her own while Dad worked. After graduation, she could have
gone anywhere in the country, but she stayed nearby, I think to keep tabs on Dad and me and make sure everything was going okay.
Now she used all her energy to save the world. She was always talking about some protest she was organizing, usually about the environment. I pushed the food around on my plate as she launched into another one of her rants.
“It’s insane, they take all these soybeans and they genetically modify them to be stronger and more resistant to bugs and stuff. But then they put pressure on all the farmers to use their strain of soybeans. And if they don’t, they get thugs to go in and vandalize the property.”
“That’s hard to believe,” my dad said, rubbing his chin. “Sounds like rumormongering to me. I don’t suppose anything like that has been proven.”
“If not then why would anybody else be bothering poor farmers? Who picks on farmers? It’s because they are trying to hold out, they just want to work hard and make a decent living, good people, you know—but these huge corporations come in and say, you have to use our strain of vegetables, and buy directly from us, and pay us a percentage of your earnings. And the ones that say no, they start having accidents, until they go out of business. You think that’s coincidence? Bad luck? No way. Zamonta knows exactly what they’re doing. They’re putting everybody else out of business. And that means soon, there won’t be any locally produced, non-GMO produce available. No organic apples or pears. Just the Franken-Fruit. Identical. Pest-resistant.”
I rolled my eyes. I’d heard kids talk about stuff like this at school, but I’d never bought into it.
“What’s so bad about pest-resistant fruit?” I asked. “Doesn’t that mean they can use less pesticides? Isn’t that good?” I didn’t really care one way or another, but something about my sister’s certainty always made me want to poke holes in her arguments. That much certainty could be dangerous. She dodged my question with another fact, something she always did that pissed me off.
“Did you know that we throw away almost 40% of our food, before we even eat it? We have such a warped idea about what a peach is these days, if it’s not just perfect, farmers let it rot on the ground.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” I asked.
“We’re wasting perfectly good food,” Tamara snapped, “because of some ideal shape we’ve decided peaches have to be, even though the other ones are just as good.”
I opened my mouth to tell her that argument didn’t make any sense, but Dad interrupted.
“I’m sure it’s complicated,” he said, holding up his hands to calm down the fight he could smell brewing.
“Anyway,” Tamara continued, glaring at me, “we’re organizing a debate with one of the representatives. I think normally they’d turn down this kind of thing but because he’s local and I’m local, they think it’d be a good idea. They really need local support. They’ve got enough money to buy out anybody else, but if the community in this area is against them... I mean they’ve got their main headquarters here, this is where they do most of their research and testing. Did you even know that? This is about the debate.” She pulled some fliers out of her bag and slid them across the table.
“It’ll be a city council meeting, open to everybody. See if you can get some friends at your high school to come, or just pass these out.” She nodded at the stack of fliers and I picked one up.
“Um, sure,” I said. My friends wouldn’t go, and I probably wouldn’t go either, but I could pretend if it meant getting through dinner. The flier read like a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream.
Is Zamonta destroying the world? Are genetically modified foods really safe? Find out! We will ask the tough questions, and put the world’s biggest source of consumable genetic modification on trial for the first time ever, in this public debate.
My eyes latched onto the word modification and I reread the sentence slowly. But it seemed harmless. My sister’s name was listed as well as the Zamonta representative she’d be debating. My fork froze halfway to my mouth, danging chow mein.
“Kyle Peters?” I asked.
“You know him?” Tamara said.
“I think... I go to school with his son,” I said. I didn’t mention I had psychotic breakdown at his house last night.
“Could be, he probably lives around here, the company isn’t far away. You should come. I think most people don’t even know what goes on back there, what they’re really researching or working on. We need to put some pressure on them, so they know people care about what they eat.”
I nodded. Maybe Brett would be there. Suddenly I wondered where Brett had gotten the weed from, if it had really been weed at all.
4
I was walking my bike out of the garage Monday morning when I saw Brett’s black jeep parked outside my house. My heart pounded as I wheeled over to him. What was he doing here?
He rolled down the window and grinned at me, like showing up at my house at 7:30am was totally normal.
“Um, hi,” I said.
“Thought you might need a ride,” he said. He looked perfect, as always, with khakis and a dark blue button-down.
“I’ve got a bike,” I said lamely. He can see that, idiot.
“Yeah but after what happened Saturday, maybe you should take it easy for a few days. Right?”
I shrugged. Brett Peters wanted to give me a lift to school. Why was I being difficult?
“Let me just put my bike away,” I said quickly. I threw my bike in the garage and locked the door behind me. My palms were sweaty as I opened up the passenger door and climbed in next to Brett. I thought Courtney and her friends were going to pop out from somewhere and prank me, but the back seat was empty.
I held my hands up to the heater, blowing warm air on my fingers. Even the seats were heated. I don’t think I’d ever been in a car this nice. I calmed down after we’d driven a few blocks, but my mind was still racing. Was this really happening?
“So, I just wanted to make sure you were okay,” Brett said. “And let you know, you know, I’m really sorry. And if you need anything, or have any problems, you can come talk to me about them.”
I nodded, unsure what he wanted from me.
“I just don’t want this to turn into a big deal, or become a problem later on…” he said.
Oh. So that’s why he picked me up. He was afraid I’d tell someone, or that our family would sue his family or something. He was doing damage control. My chest ached with disappointment, and then I felt stupid for letting it get to me. What had I expected? This wasn’t a fairy tale. Guys like Brett didn’t date girls like me.
“Also, it would be really bad if my dad found out about this. Really, really bad. I kind of stole that stuff from him.”
“It wasn’t marijuana?” I asked.
“I thought it was,” Brett said. “But after what happened to you, I did some research. Now I’m not so sure. But, basically this has to disappear. I don’t want the whole school talking about how we smoked at my house. My dad could get in a lot of trouble. So could I.”
“I’m not going to tell anyone,” I said, sinking lower into the chair and looking out the window. He thinks I’m a gossip and a snitch.
“I’d get in trouble too. And it wasn’t exactly my most glorious moment. It’s not something I’d go bragging about.”
He smiled. It hit me like a warm ray of sun, even though it was gray and dreary outside.
“Great,” he said. “The less anybody knows about what happened, the better. For both of us.”
He pulled into the parking lot and we got out of the jeep. Courtney and her friends were waiting near the main doors. She saw us coming, and her eyes widened. Part of me felt smug. I knew she was going to freak out about Brett giving me a ride. Another part of me panicked. Even if Courtney had been willing to forget about what happened at the party, she wasn’t going to let this slide.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said, “see you later.” I darted away from Brett, feeling Courtney’s eyes burning a hole in my back as I headed ar
ound the building to one of the side entrances. No point in provoking Courtney before Brett had a chance to smooth things over.
The picture I’d seen in my vision popped into my mind again. Prom king and queen. Even though I was still sure it could never happen, it didn’t seem as totally impossible as it had yesterday. I mean, at least he knew my name now. Even if he did think I was a tattle-tale. But then I remembered the skeleton. The dead girl with the doll. If there was even a miniscule chance that what I’d seen in the yearbook was real, did that mean everything else could be as well?
I decided to take Eric’s advice, even though it seemed crazy. I wrote down a few of the things I’d seen in my vision; things that would be easy to verify. Then I folded up the paper into a crude envelope and sealed it with tape. I handed it to Crys during first period.
“What’s this? Party invitation?” she said.
“It’s... an experiment. Don’t open it. Just keep it, hide it somewhere. Make sure there’s no way I could find it or change anything. Actually—sign your name over the fold on the back so you’ll know if it’s been opened.”
“Like a magic trick?” she raised one eyebrow at me. “Aren’t you a little old for this kind of stuff?”
“Just do it. Please?” I said.
She shrugged, then pulled out a pen and signed her name. She put the sealed paper in her backpack. When she was done, she smiled at me and gave me a knowing look.
“I heard a rumor that Brett gave you a ride to school. Please tell me it’s true.” I couldn’t control my mouth as it smiled back at her. She raised her palm to high-five me. The butterflies did celebratory flips and dances in my stomach.
“It’s not what you think,” I said. “He just wanted to make sure I wouldn’t tell anyone what happened. He’s afraid of getting in trouble.”
“The ship might have sailed on that one,” Crys said. “It’s all over school already.”