23 Minutes

by Vivian Vande Velde

  Text copyright © 2016 by Vivian Vande Velde

  All rights reserved.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, contact permissions@highlights.com.

  Boyds Mills Press

  An Imprint of Highlights

  815 Church Street

  Honesdale, Pennsylvania 18431

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-1-62979-441-9 (hc)

  ISBN: 978-1-62979-561-4 (e-book)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015953497

  First edition

  The text of this book is set in Chaparral.

  Design by Barbara Grzeslo

  Production by Sue Cole

  10987654321

  Dedicated to those

  who try to make things better

  for at-risk children and teens

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  THE STORY STARTS WITH AN ACT OF STUNNING VIOLENCE.

  Or … well … maybe not exactly.

  Maybe, exactly, the story starts when Zoe walks into the bank—except she doesn’t recognize it as a story yet. She just knows the sky has opened up in a late-autumn downpour so that she feels as though she’s standing under the shower at the campground—the one that’s strong and steady but has only two temperatures: cold and very cold. Zoe has never understood the point of camping. Haven’t people evolved for thousands of years precisely so that they do not have to sleep on the ground, or pee and crap outdoors, or have to eat half-raw food that’s been charred over a fire? But the people who run group homes for teens nobody wants to foster always seem to feel that “roughing it” is a way to Build Community Spirit. And to Bond with the Disadvantaged Youth of Our City. As though they weren’t in a group home exactly because they’d had a rough time already. Zoe feels that an overnight at a Holiday Inn, hanging out in the hot tub, ordering room service, and watching on-demand movies, would make much more satisfying building and bonding experiences. Not that anybody has ever asked Zoe.

  So the rain starts fast and hard and just a degree or two warmer than sleet, and Zoe dashes through the first door she comes to and finds herself in a bank.

  That’s more a prelude than a beginning to the story: the foreword, the setup.

  Then there are the supporting characters: the snotty bank teller and the full-of-himself bank guard. As well as the one bank customer, the one who stands out from the fewer-than-a-dozen other customers—the young guy Zoe immediately pegs as an up-and-coming business exec or a junior lawyer at a prestigious law firm (the kind that does not advertise on TV). Zoe prides herself on being able to evaluate people quickly. It’s been a necessity for survival. But this guy has an engaging smile and takes the time to speak kindly to her, even after she walks into him, steps on his foot, and drips rainwater on him and his expensive shoes. Lastly, and of course, there’s the bank robber—although Zoe doesn’t know yet that he is a bank robber.

  Not much here to say story.

  It doesn’t really pick up speed until the robbery starts to go awry, until they’re all within twenty feet of each other—even closer if you’re willing to discount that one bank teller. Without her, they’re really in a tight cluster: Zoe on her knees on the floor, the guard with his gun drawn and aimed at the head of the would-be robber, the would-be robber with his gun drawn and aimed at the head of the guy who was nice to Zoe.

  Should I say it now? she wonders, several times, until finally, after all the shouting and gun-waving and threatening to shoot anyone and everyone, the robber’s attention is firmly on someone else besides Zoe. Finally, she sees she might actually have a moment or two in which to use her special ability and get away.

  If only that opportunity weren’t a result of the young CEO (or whatever he is) intentionally stepping between her and the robber.

  Is he stupid or suicidal? Zoe asks herself.

  But this is unfairly diminishing him. His eyes are blue and wide and have enough fear in them to say he knows exactly what he’s done, enough defiance to declare he’d make the same choice again.

  And that holds Zoe where she is.

  The situation gets even worse, with more shouting, more threatening—and then there are two simultaneous shots. Or too close to simultaneous to make a difference.

  Leaving Zoe spattered in the blood of both the thief and the customer she’d almost had time to grow to like. Not to mention bits of bone. And what she very fervently tries to convince herself could not possibly really be pieces of brain matter.

  That’s how the story starts.

  CHAPTER 2

  OK … PERHAPS THAT’S A BIT TOO SPARE A TELLING.

  So, for this one time only: a playback of the exact same twenty-three minutes, just with more detail.

  Which, of course, is totally not the way Zoe’s ability to play back time works. Not that Zoe understands much about how it does work.

  Sometimes she speculates that she was born this way and just didn’t discover it until she became a teen, that it’s a latent, half-baked magical capability, or some sort of genetic mutation inflicted on her by a universe with a twisted sense of humor. She likes the idea that there might, in fact, be others like her—even if, by playback’s very nature, that would be hard, if not impossible, to know.

  Or maybe the skill or knack or talent came because she almost died at age ten, when her appendix burst, after her mother waited so long to bring her to the doctor because—as Mom explained at the hospital—“She’s always complaining about something.”

  Or it may all have started that time Zoe was twelve, when she remained outside during a storm, watching nature’s show, the smell of ozone tickling her nose. She could feel the hairs on her arms stand up as the rumbles of thunder came just about simultaneous to the jags of lightning—closer and closer, and louder and brighter, till that one bolt of lightning hit the flagpole in the Durans’ yard right next door, throwing Zoe off the steps and onto her back, her whole body a-tingle with electrical spiders. At twelve, Zoe knew enough not to seek solace from her mother for what had just happened, knew how her mother would have reacted: by giving Zoe a taste of the back of her hand, chiding, “Stupid thing—without the sense to come in out of the rain. You got what you deserved.”

  However … whenever … whyever the ability to play back time came to her, Zoe has it, and has been aware of having it for two and a half years now, since she was thirteen.

  Zoe is walking in the downtown shopping area, not shopping, but with nowhere to go, when the clouds suddenly burst with Noah-and-the-ark ferocity. She shoves her folder of papers under her t-shirt, but the rain is cold and relentless, so she ducks into the nearest doorway, which is a branch of Spencerport Savings and Loan. This is not an especially good choice, as there is not much for a fifteen-year-old who doesn’t even have a bank account to do here. Zoe rubs her arms—one at a time because she still has the folder pressed protectively against herself—and wishes she’d brought her jacket when she left this morning.

  No, what Zoe really wishes is that she could play back the entire day. A do-over starting with not mouthing off to Mrs. Davies.

  But twenty-three minutes is her limit, and twenty-three minutes after her confrontation with Mrs. Davies, Zoe was still too angry to even think about backing off. Now it’s way too late to do anything about it.

  Too damn impuls
ive—she’s heard that before.

  Besides, she knows from past experience what a slippery thing playing back time can be. She has used it in instances both serious and frivolous, and she estimates she has a ten percent chance of actually improving any given initial situation. Her mind goes—as it so often does lately when she thinks about playback—to how she progressed from tongue-tied to awkwardly flirting to successfully flirting with that cute guy at the bus stop … only to find out that the guy was her best friend Delia’s new love interest, who was supposed to be waiting for Delia. And no minutes left to play back to ignoring him. Delia still hasn’t forgiven her—and that’s without knowing anything about playback, so she doesn’t even have a clue how relentlessly Zoe pursued him.

  In the two and a half years she’s had this ability, playback has cost her more than it’s gained, and Zoe has come to think of her life as being like one of those choose-your-own-adventure books—one where it’s best to read through once and settle, because the choices only go from bad to worse.

  So, Zoe is cold and she’s wet, and Mrs. Davies is pissed off at her: OK, well, there’s nothing new in that.

  There are about a dozen customers in the bank this afternoon, the first Friday of November. The bank guard standing inside, just by the entrance, is looking at her with suspicion and disapproval, perhaps for dripping puddles onto the floor, perhaps because he suspects she has chosen the bank as a place for hanging around with her teenage hoodlum friends, now that the mall three blocks over has instituted a policy prohibiting teens from being there unless they’re accompanied by a parent.

  His level of concern is not appeased even after she pulls her folder from under her shirt and goes to the tall table that has cubbyholes for deposit and withdrawal slips. Whereas the folder itself is water-spotted, the papers inside are undamaged. That’s good. She supposes. Although, now that she’s calmed down after her skirmish with Mrs. Davies, she has to ask herself: How important, really, are these papers? Probably not worth the trouble she’s in.

  Zoe takes a pink bank slip, without even looking close enough to see whether it’s for deposits or withdrawals. She picks up the pen, which—for all that it looks like the kind sold by the dozen at the dollar store—is attached to the counter by a chain. Then she turns the bank slip over, and on the empty back side writes down the names of the other girls on her floor. There is no particular reason for doing this other than to see if she can remember them all, and mostly to take up time. She starts with Delia, even though Delia is no longer speaking to her.

  Another slip of paper, and she works on recording the names of all the actors who have played James Bond in the movies. Yet another slip for Snow White’s seven dwarves. And another for Santa’s reindeer. Except she can only think of eight reindeer, and if you include Rudolph—which she has—she knows there should be nine.

  All right, she can’t stay at this table all afternoon. Although she refuses to glance in his direction, because that would make her look as though she has a guilty conscience, she’s sure the guard is watching her and counting the number of slips she’s using up.

  Zoe stuffs the slips into her folder and gets in line to wait for the next available teller, hoping this will indicate to the guard that she has legitimate bank business.

  That next available teller turns out to sound as disapproving as the guard looks when she asks Zoe, “May I help you?” As though she resents having to pretend someone like Zoe is a genuine customer. As though she suspects Zoe is here to ask for a handout, or to try to sell candy to support her school’s soccer team, despite the sign by the door that says “No Soliciting”—which, in this neighborhood, could mean candy or something else entirely. Zoe speaks right up, knowing instinctively that this teller is the kind of adult who feels that all kids mumble. She asks, “Do you have any of those presidential dollars?”

  The woman’s smile does not seem any less forced than her offer to be of assistance. “Who are you looking for?”

  Zoe does not tell her that, grammatically speaking, this should be: For whom are you looking? In a world of shifting group homes and social workers who burn out or move on just when you get used to them, Zoe likes the order imposed on language by grammar. Still, she generally tries to avoid attention. So she simply answers, “William Henry Harrison.”

  William Henry Harrison is Zoe’s favorite president. He was only in office for thirty-two days, and he was sick for just about all of them, since he caught pneumonia at his inauguration, and then he died. Zoe figures you just have to love someone who’s that damn unlucky.

  “Harrison …” The teller opens her change drawer and looks through some loose coins, murmuring, “Pierce … Adams … other Adams … FDR …,” perhaps thinking Zoe might be convinced to revise her presidential dollar needs. “No, sorry.” Yet another insincere smile.

  “That’s OK,” Zoe says. She isn’t even sure, now that she thinks about it, whether she has a dollar’s worth of change in her pocket to pay for a presidential dollar.

  She steps away from the teller counter. There’s a coffee bar set up on a low table in the sitting area, with a sign that says “COMPLIMENTARY COFFEE FOR OUR CUSTOMERS.” Outdoors, it’s still pouring, and coffee would certainly help chase away the chill in her bones, but she wonders if asking for and not receiving a William Henry Harrison dollar qualifies her as a customer.

  Without glancing at the guard to see if he’s still watching her, she goes back to the bank-slips stand, which is just to the side of the row of tellers. She opens her folder. She shuffles her papers. Takes yet another slip from its cubbyhole and once again tries for the reindeer names. Still only eight. She compares with her previous list, hoping it’s a different eight; but, no, there’s someone she’s consistently leaving out.

  And still no sign of the rain letting up. Zoe decides she will take the drenching required to cross the street to the card shop. She might even find something appropriate for Mrs. Davies. It would be just like Hallmark to have a line of cards for people who need to apologize to their housemothers. Not that Zoe would actually buy a card. But she could memorize a suitable sentiment.

  Just as she steps away from the table, into the bank strides a twitchy, self-absorbed-looking man who obviously takes the weather as a personal affront. Zoe can tell all this from his posture, since he’s huddled into his raincoat: head down, shoulders up, hands jammed into pockets. He nearly plows into Zoe, proving yet again what Zoe already knows: Kids, even older kids who have done their best to make themselves look tough, are invisible.

  Zoe takes a hurried step back despite her oft-declared opinion that the world would be a better place if people would simply refrain from walking in any direction they aren’t actually facing.

  And so she walks backward onto the foot of the young man, a customer who has come to use the deposit or withdrawal slips.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he says—polite, not sarcastic—even though she and not he is the one clearly at fault. He catches hold of her left elbow—possibly to keep her from falling, since she’s off-balance; possibly simply to protect himself from further trampling.

  The forms Zoe has been pretending to fill out slide free from her folder and flutter floor-ward, along with a few of the pages she has risked Mrs. Davies’s wrath to get hold of.

  “I am such an idiot,” Zoe mutters.

  “No, really, this sort of thing happens to everyone.”

  The young man has paperwork of his own, though he has sensibly chosen to keep his held securely in one of those pouch-like office envelopes that close with a string. Still, he crouches down to help retrieve Zoe’s papers. He’s probably only eight or nine years older than she is, but at this time in their lives that’s a pretty big difference: He moves with the self-assurance of an adult. A successful adult, she decides, with a snap judgment of his haircut and his clothes. Clearly, he goes to a stylist, not a simple barber or a trainee at the Rochester School of Beauty, where Zoe goes—when Zoe goes. And he wears his tailored jacket an
d button-down shirt without a tie and paired with jeans, a look she labels a bit too self-consciously trendy. She understands that her look—a ponytail coupled with thrift-shop jeans and tee—labels her a loser. Her hair is dyed blue (intentionally so) and is cut raggedly (more happenstance than statement). Normally, Zoe is pleased with her look, as it lets her fit in where she wants to, and pretty much scares everyone else away.

  Zoe isn’t familiar enough with banks to know if it’s reasonable to have five separate slips (three pink and two white), but suspects it probably is not. “It’s OK, it’s OK,” she tells the guy, snatching the papers from his hands so he can’t see that she’s only written on the backs of them, and that what she’s written are lists of names rather than numbers, which might at least seem to be bank- or money-related.

  “Thank you,” she says. She’s so intent on retrieving the bank slips that she loses track of holding tight to her folder. The rest of her papers slide free and cascade to the floor between them.

  “You’re welcome.” His voice is nice without sounding put on. Except he’s looking at one of the slips that has landed list-side-up, clearly revealing her lack of banking seriousness:

  Rudolph

  Vixen

  Dasher

  Comet

  Dancer

  Cupid

  Donner

  Prancer

  He’s frowning, and she’s sure he’s about to report her to the proper authorities. Or at the very least, to take back what he said about her not being an idiot.

  But what he says is, “Blitzen.” He looks up at her, and she realizes he’s somewhere between friendly and amused. “The one you’ve left out is Blitzen.”

  “Thank you,” Zoe repeats, aware that now she is mumbling.

  Wonderful. He thinks she’s cute in a clumsy, gawky-little-kid way. People always seem to assume short girls are younger than they really are.

  As for him … he has good hair—light brown and well-styled—but his features are more interesting than attractive, Zoe thinks.