by D. S. Murphy
“It’s okay. I asked Eric to help me with some math homework, I’m a little behind and I know he’s good with numbers.”
“Well, I hope I’ll be seeing you more often then,” she said, giving me a one armed squeeze. I wondered when the last time Eric had had a friend over. I suddenly felt very guilty for Mrs. Patton. After my mom died, I spent a lot of time at Eric’s house, doing arts and crafts, baking cookies. Then I just stopped coming. I hadn’t thought about her feelings.
We went up into Eric’s bedroom again and I sat on his bed.
“So? New adventures?” he smirked. I didn’t care if he believed me, I just needed someone to talk to.
“Yeah. I did what you said. Tried to find some proof. Then I went back.”
“Back… to the future. I can’t believe I just said that out loud.”
“But listen, when I went back this time, I went into this guy’s house, and he had a picture of me.”
“Whoa, trippy.”
“Doesn’t that just prove it’s all in my head? I mean, some random guy in the future has a picture of me in his house, and I just happen to find my way right there?”
“First of all, there’s no question that this is all in your head. But let’s continue, as a thought experiment. Did you recognize the guy?”
“No, it was a total stranger.”
“A stranger to you now. But that could just mean that you haven’t met him yet. Maybe he’s your future boyfriend or something.”
“Ew, gross. He was like, thirty-something.”
“Do you know when you were?
“I think it’s like twenty years in the future.”
“If so, he’d be about your age.”
“Yeah if I was still around.” I thought he was going to ask me why I didn’t meet my future self—I was sure the question was on the tip of his tongue. But he must have realized the answer. I wasn’t around anymore in the future. Maybe I wouldn’t even survive the first wave. Holy shit, what if one of the mods I’d killed was my future self?
“Don’t look so freaked out,” Eric said. “So this guy in the future had a picture of you on his wall. Maybe you met him somewhere. Maybe you told him you were a time traveler. Do you know his name?”
“Tracy Kettleman.”
“And you know where he lives?”
I hesitated. The streets in the future were the same as they were now. My eyes widened as I realized what Eric was getting at.
“I know where he lives,” I said.
“Well then, why don’t we go pay him a visit?”
***
We went the next day. It had taken Jake and I three hours to walk from Zamonta to Tracy’s house. We made the drive in less than ten minutes. I didn’t know exactly where we were going so I just told Eric where to turn. I had him slow down when we reached Wildwood. I realized now we were on the edge of the Rockwoods reservation—my parents used to take my sister and I hiking there when we were younger. In the future, it was hard to tell where the reservation started, since everything was so overgrown. But now it was a huge wall of green. It also wasn’t as flat as most of Missouri, this area was hilly and there was a bit of a view.
“We’re looking for a big, square building, but I don’t see anything like that,” I said.
“Maybe it hasn’t been built yet. Are we in the right place?” He said, slowing the car down.
It was hard to tell, but it seemed right.
“I think it’s that one,” I said, pointing at an ordinary looking one-floor house. It was white with green trim.
“Now what?” I asked.
“We go knock, I guess.”
“And say what exactly?”
“See if he knows who you are. Maybe he’s already stalking you or something.”
“Great, thanks for that.”
“Or we sit here, stake-out style.”
“Let’s try that first,” I said. “Unless you have somewhere else to be?”
“Good thing I brought snacks,” Eric said, pulling out a package of chips.
We hadn’t been there five minutes when there was a knock on the window. I jumped and my heart started pounding. Outside was a boy with long blond hair and a white tank top. He had the beginning of a scraggly beard.
“Help you with something?” he asked.
“Um, no we’re good,” Eric said quickly.
“I’m just wondering why you’re parked out here watching my house.”
I looked at the kid closely and froze. It was him. I was pretty sure anyway.
“You’re Tracy Kettleman,” I said.
He masked his surprise well.
“Who wants to know?” he said, eyeing me coolly.
Shit. I had no idea what to say next, and now I’d made him suspicious. I looked to Eric for help.
“We work at a real estate agency, they sent us out to track down leads on possibly home sales, you know, to get a jump on the market. Your name was on the list. Are you looking to sell?”
Young Tracy scowled and I thought I saw a sliver of fear.
“Not that I know of,” he said. “But if we were, my name wouldn’t have been on the list, it would have been my dad’s name—he owns it.”
“Must have been a clerical error,” Eric said, whipping out a pen. “What’s your dad’s name?”
Tracy looked us over slowly.
“Don’t suppose you have a card on you?” he asked.
Eric fake-searched his pockets.
“Sorry, must have left them. We’re just there part-time.”
“And which real estate agency do you work for?”
Eric and I exchanged a desperate glance.
“That’s what I thought. Look I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing here, but you better get the fuck off this street or I’m calling the police. My dad’s a lawyer, so whatever kind of con you were planning, try it on someone else.”
Eric pulled away started driving back towards my place. But it didn’t seem like he was in a rush to get home.
“Coffee?” he asked. I nodded absently.
We stopped at a diner, I ordered a hot chocolate and he ordered a plate of onion rings.
“I don’t get it,” Eric said once we’d gotten our food.
“Get what?” I asked.
“You. I thought maybe this was some weird game. Or maybe you really did have some kind of dream and are trying to track down the pieces. But it really seemed like you didn’t know that guy.”
“I’d never seen him before.”
“Yeah but you knew his name, and where he lived. So whatever this is, it’s not all in your head, right? But it’s the not knowing how it got there that confuses me. You don’t seem like you’re lying. So it seems like you might just be forgetting. Maybe you do know Tracy somehow, but part of you is repressing it.”
“That’s not what’s happening.”
“So I’m supposed to believe you’re really a time-traveler? You think that’s easy to accept?”
“You didn’t have to come with me.”
“That’s not the point. I want to be here for you, if you need me to be. I just want to make sure I’m actually helping you, and not encouraging some fantasy. You’ve put me into a strange position. I should probably tell my mother, or your father, or something… I mean, Alicia, you might need real help.”
He furrowed his brow and gave me a worried look. For some reason it seemed funny to me. He had a point, and sometimes I questioned my sanity too. But we’d know for sure in a few days. I wished I could tell Eric about the bombing, and the game scores, but I didn’t want to freak him out anymore, and I’m not sure I could trust him not to talk if I started sounding dangerous.
“Let’s say, in one of my visions, that I found out about something big,” I said. “Big like a terrorist attack.”
“And then it came true?” he asked.
“Let’s say it hasn’t yet. Let’s say there’s still time to stop it. What would you do?”
He was silent for a few moments,
thinking.
“Is this part of the same future timeline you saw, where everything was destroyed?”
“In the destroyed future I was in, this was something that had already happened.”
“So it might be something necessary, integral to that future timeline. Changing it could mean disrupting that future. Normally, time travelers go backwards, not forwards. So they have to be careful about not changing something that will erase themselves. But you said the future is already messed up, I mean you already want to change it, right? There’s nothing there you don’t mind losing?”
For some reason I thought of Jake, and bit my lip. But I shook my head. He wasn’t real. He didn’t even exist yet.
“So then, stop the terrorist attack. Save the people involved, possibly change the future.”
I nodded. I’d come to the same conclusion, but it was a relief to hear someone else say it.
***
The next day I was a zombie in class. I sat by myself at lunch, picking at my tray. Spaghetti and meatballs, with green beans. Not the worst school lunch in the world, but eating anything these days made me feel queasy. Crys was sitting with Cody at one of the senior tables, not far from Brett and Courtney. This was so weird, I felt like I was being ostracized for no reason. It wasn’t my fault all this was going on. And I hated knowing Brett thought I was a liar. But screw him—I didn’t need permission to do what I thought was the right thing. Just before lunch was over, Crys came and joined me.
“I convinced Cody that you’re right, we need to call and warn someone.”
“What does Brett think?” I hated that I cared.
“He agrees. He was just overthinking it, and he still doesn’t trust you. Plus he doesn’t want to get in trouble, and he thinks if you tell the police about a bomb threat, there will be an investigation, and they might track you down and question you, and then you might tell them about the drugs.”
“I can’t believe he’s worried about that. People could die.”
“I think he’s just protecting his father. You can’t blame him for that.”
“Can’t I?” I always felt like I understood Brett, like we were meant to be together. I was realizing I actually didn’t know him that well.
“Also, Cody was saying, we should warn them, to see if we can change the future. With the game scores, we can’t influence those. Those are going to be whatever they will be. But this… this is something we can test, and try to change. While saving people. So we’d get two answers, whether what you’re seeing is objectively true, and whether we can influence things. Also, Brett thinks you should wait until the night before. If you called now, there wouldn’t be anything to find.”
I nodded. Out of the corner of my eye I saw someone with long blond hair. My eyes widened and my heart started pounding. Tracy Kettleman. He went to this school? How come I never noticed him before? It seemed like my reality was slipping away from me.
Time seemed to slow down. The pink flickers came into my vision and for a second I panicked, thinking I was going to trip again spontaneously, and pass out in the middle of the lunchroom. Instead my senses heightened. Over the din of conversations I heard a hushed whisper and a giggle. A silent warning bell went off in my head. It was like getting a text with the phone set on vibrate. A subtle buzz, that nobody else notices, but still makes you jump. I felt a buzz like that, and turned around to see an open milk carton spinning through the air towards me.
It was headed in my direction, but not directly at me. It looked like it was going to hit Crys. She turned as well. I narrowed my eyes in concentration, watching the milk carton spinning through the pink and orange flames. I analyzed its rotation and the center of axis; I felt like I was doing a math problem. Heads swiveled to watch it.
I saw Courtney, her eyes lit up with excitement and malice. One of her friends was halfway standing, with her arm still outstretched. Milk was already spilling out of the cartoon as it flew, a few drops here or there. When it hit Crys the liquid would gush out, drenching her. She’d smell like sour milk by the end of the day.
So I reached up and caught it. I snatched the carton in mid-air, like I was picking an apple off a tree, without spilling another drop. Then came the applause.
12
My cheeks were burning from the attention, so I sat down quickly. Courtney was giving me dagger eyes, and a lot of students were still clapping.
“That was seriously awesome,” Crys said, her eyes wide. “How’d you do it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s like a side effect. A time distortion or something—sometimes things just seem to be moving really slowly.”
I was distracted watching Tracy. How come I never noticed him before? How was he involved in all this? Then I saw a familiar red coat, as Mrs. Neary cut through the cafeteria. She stopped at Courtney’s table, then Courtney pointed towards us and she headed our way.
Mrs. Neary had short, curly brown hair and thin lips. She was attractive, for an older woman, but my skin crawled as she approached us. The last time I’d seen her, she didn’t have a face, and my brain kept juxtaposing her future self over her current look.
“Hi Alicia, Crys. The senior girls are saying you stole their milk, is that true?”
“Were they expecting us to return it to them?” Crys asked. “I figured they were done with it, since, you know, they threw it at us.”
“Is that what happened?” Mrs. Neary asked.
“Ask anyone. Everyone saw it.” I said.
It was devastating watching Mrs. Neary trying to assert authority over a meaningless high school issue like this. I wondered if she had any family—why did she end up all alone at school on D-day? Was there a way to warn her, to save her? I couldn’t think like that, saving everyone one by one. I had to save everybody. I had to stop it from happening. But that meant finding out what really happened, and probably tripping again—I couldn’t do that without Brett. I had no way to get phylia on my own. There was nothing to do but wait.
Thankfully, the next three days passed quickly. On Wednesday night Tamara came over for dinner. She couldn’t make it on Thursday so we were having our family Thanksgiving a day early. We’d tried keeping up Thanksgiving for the first couple years after mom died. Dad made a big effort to cook everything. I helped. It was fun at first, then it just started feeling like too much work. The food wasn’t as good, and the empty chair at the head of the table made the whole event feel wrong—especially when we tried to go around and say what we were thankful for. Dad always got choked up searching for something to say, and usually said he was thankful for us. The whole thing became an ordeal, something to dread rather than look forward to, so a few years ago we’d just given up. Now we ordered pizza and kept it casual.
“How’s school?” Tamara asked as we were eating.
“Fine,” I said.
“Thanks for coming to my thing the other night, that was really nice of you.”
“Thing?” Dad said.
“The debate. With Zamonta. I told you about it last week.”
“Oh right,” he said looking at me. “You went? I didn’t think you were interested in that kind of stuff.”
“More than just a little interested, she went for the jugular. What you said about genetically modified products changing human DNA… brilliant. I’m pretty sure that’s impossible, but it’ll stick in people’s minds anyway. Where’d you come up with that idea?”
I shrugged, “I think it was something I saw on TV once.”
After dinner I took my laptop into my room and shut the door. I googled terror threats and found an anonymous hotline number that had been set up for warnings.
My hands were shaking as I dialed the number.
“Department of Homeland Security, how can I help you?”
“I think there’s going to be a bomb at the Macy’s day parade tomorrow.”
“Where are you getting this information?”
“I heard some guys talking, in a bar. They said they were going t
o hide a bomb in a mermaid float. That’s all I know.”
“Did you see their faces? Can you describe them? Ethnicity or race?”
“It was dark,” I said.
“What bar were you in? When was this? I see you’re coming from a Missouri number, you’re saying you saw these men in Missouri, but they’re planning to detonate a bomb in New York tomorrow?
Shit.
“Just, check the mermaid float. Warn someone. Please.”
“We evaluate every tip based on likelihood of the source information. We’ll take your warning seriously and pass it along. Unless there’s anything else you can tell me about these men?”
I shook my head lamely. She thanked me and hung up. I had a knot in the pit of my stomach. Something told me she didn’t believe me.
When I went downstairs again, the dishes were done and Tamara was cleaning out the fridge.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said. “It’s not like it’s your mess.”
“Someone has to,” she said, opening a jar and making a face. “This is disgusting. Half of this stuff has gone bad. You and dad never throw anything out.”
“Sorry, I’ve just got a lot going on.”
“Seriously? It’s high school. And you’re smart, it can’t be that hard for you. You need to step up, be more responsible. I can’t take care of you all the time.”
I wanted to yell back at her. No big deal, I’m just trying to save the world. But go ahead and worry about tidying up. Instead I helped clean up until Tamara was satisfied, sulking the whole time. We said an awkward goodbye, then she left.
In my room again, I couldn’t sleep. Thanksgiving was always a depressing holiday, worse than Christmas. I missed my mom. I got into my closet and began going through a stack of old school papers and projects, until I found the macaroni-turkey my mom and I had made just before she died. It was half-finished. I remember the night we’d been working on it. It was early November. She’d gotten a phone call and had to go into work late. She was always doing that. She promised we’d finish it together later, but that was the last time I ever saw her alive. I kept that project pinned to my bulletin board for over a year, hoping somehow that she’s fulfill her promise. But eventually I buried it in the bottom of my closet. I pulled off a piece of macaroni, it was stained orange with marker. I put it on a piece of string and tied it around my neck. Somehow it seemed appropriate.