So was Vera. Vera was my best friend with the laugh that embarrassed her, the popular girl who wore stylish clothes and ignored me, and the child therapist who admired the same teacher that I did.
And so was Wylie—Wylie the awkward alien-enthusiast and Wylie the long-haired guy with the theatrical friends and Wylie the teacher who loved Japan were the same guy.
Everything is motionless at every instant, and the instants are all we have. They’re like photographs, the moments of our lives.
How it changed me to know this, I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t going to help me untie the knots in the quantum foam. I felt calmer, though. Calmer than I’d felt the day before, even if I also felt a little less sure about everything.
* * *
—
After school the next day, Airika and I stopped at the redwood stump so she could put on her roller skates.
“Did you know there’s a roller rink down in the valley?” I said. “It’s called Roller Burger. People had birthday parties there when I was little. Maybe we could go there next weekend.”
Airika said, “Really? I thought all the roller rinks around here were out of business. It’s kind of retro.”
I pulled out my phone and checked: Roller Burger had been closed for twelve years. Oops. “Maybe we could go someplace else.”
“Ugh, it can’t be next weekend,” said Airika. “I haven’t told you yet. I’m pretending it’s not happening. We take off Friday morning for a whole week.”
Rex was standing with Jazz beside the bike rack. “Hawaii, Fi. Can you believe that junk? We’re missing school to be trapped in some ridiculous hotel with, like, nine waterfalls.”
“Why Hawaii?” I asked.
“Rex is Hawaiian,” said Airika. “His grandma lives alone down there.”
“Like most capitalists with a credit card, my dad is too impulsive,” said Rex. “He booked tickets last week without telling any of us. First class. So bougie. The man is the source of much suffering.”
I kind of wanted to laugh. The closest I’d ever seen Rex come to complaining was because he was skipping school to fly first class to Hawaii.
We all went up the path to Highway 1. Jazz and I said goodbye to Rex and Airika and waved as we watched them walk away.
The foghorns moaned, low and majestic. A yellow warbler fluttered in a berry bush. Wild lilies with creamy faces swayed beside a rock. I got the sense that Jazz and I were stretching out the watching-them-walk-away moment so we could linger on the we’re-about-to-be-alone-together moment. It was lovely.
Finally, Jazz spun on his heel. He was wearing white wingtips that day. All of Jazz’s shoes looked like they were made for unnecessary spinning. And for dancing up staircases and possibly for diving into swimming pools, fully dressed.
“Shall we go for a bike ride?” he asked.
I said, “I don’t have a bike.”
Jazz lifted one shoulder. “I didn’t bring mine anyway. Walk to the beach?”
“Sure. But I should tell my parents….”
So Jazz and I walked to the bookshop. On the way, I asked him to tell me his story.
“What kind of story?” he asked.
“Your story,” I said. “About you.”
Jazz started snapping his fingers. “That’s it. That’s where we’ll start. It won’t make us even, but it’ll be a big step.”
“Even?” I asked.
“In a true friendship, it’s best to alternate revealing what a freak show your life is.” Jazz swept his hand in the air. “When Eva Jackson graduated from high school, her life’s mission was to surf. So she rented a shack on the beach. Her front yard was sand, shells and bottle caps. It was, to use the local expression, hella gnarly. But life missions have a way of changing, and when Eva’s son, Mo, was born, Eva was only nineteen.”
“So your real name is Mo,” I said. “I always thought you had a fake name.”
“No, no. Listen,” said Jazz, looking toward the horizon, like he needed to find a clear spot where his story could land. “Jeremiah Jackson was the only child of Eva’s uncle Vic. Yes, folks: Vic Jackson, the gambler who stole money from his own sister, his own parents, his son’s mother, any and every human being he got close to, to bet on a roll of the dice. Yes, Vic Jackson was a cheater. Sure, Vic Jackson was a drunk. But man, was that dude handsome. Almost as handsome as his son. And his smile could send lights racing around a sign. But the man had the attention span of a—hey! Look at the size of that jackpot! Be back in five.”
I wanted to clarify: Vic Jackson was Jeremiah’s father? His father was a gambler? And why was Jazz telling his story in the third person? It was sort of confusing. But he’d just asked me to listen, so I bit my tongue.
“ ‘Be back in five,’ ” said Jazz, fluttering his fingers. “That’s what Vic Jackson said the night he left his fourteen-year-old son sitting on a curb outside a Las Vegas casino called the Starlight. Naturally, Jeremiah knew better than to believe his father. The hustler had left his son sitting on so many curbs, outside of so many casinos—or worse, trapped inside a hotel room with nothing to do except watch television or practice magic tricks in front of the mirror—that Jeremiah managed to pick up on the pattern.”
I said, “Wait. What?”
We turned from Highway 1 onto Main Street. Jazz’s hand kept making bold strokes in the air. Like he was conducting his story. Like his life was a song. “But Jeremiah prided himself on giving people the benefit of the doubt. So for the full five minutes, he waited. He watched a hundred oldsters spill out of a tour bus and shuffle into the Starlight. They were probably heading straight to the slot machines, but the boy let himself imagine them waltzing into a ballroom to the tunes of a pompadoured crooner in a three-piece suit who was wearing a chrysanthemum corsage.”
I said, “That sounds like something you would wear.”
Jazz put his conducting hand in his pocket and looked down. “Yes, Nephele Weather. It is something I would wear.” Our feet were in sync. We were taking the same steps. “Jeremiah Jackson loved Las Vegas, theoretically. The lights. The music. The magic. It definitely should’ve been fun. When five minutes had passed, the boy stood. He said, ‘Me? I won’t be back in five. In fact, I’m not planning to come back at all.’ ”
Jazz stopped in front of Dougie’s Donut Shoppe and pointed at me.
“Is this boring? I’m boring you.”
“No! It’s not boring. It’s…” It was terrifying. But I didn’t want him to stop talking. So I said, “Keep going.”
Jazz looked up at a bottlebrush tree. Its feathery red blooms made it look like it was decorated with boas. Like a Las Vegas dancer.
“Long story short, I took the cash I’d been sneaking out of Dirty Vic’s wallet—they call him that, the other dentists, because everybody wants a dirty dentist, right?—and I walked to the bus station. It was, like, a hundred and ten degrees. By the time I got to the station, I was drenched in sweat. And I bought myself a ticket to San Francisco. I’d heard that my super-cool cousin Eva was living somewhere near there with her son. That’s Mo. He’s sooo cute.”
I said, “You did?”
“The bus ride was incredible,” said Jazz. “Headlights. Billboards. I got this humongous ice tea. The guy in the seat next to me was a veteran. From the army. He was hilarious. And also sad. Total poet. All of it was awesome. Awesome. I was so inspired—” Jazz looked at me and adjusted his hat. “The boy was so inspired he gave himself a new name.”
I said, “Ah. So it is a fake name.”
“Jazz Shipreck’s father was a dentist. He kept meaning to fix his son’s tooth. Teeth, but there was that one obvious problem: the chipped saber tooth that made the boy look like the Jabberwock.”
I said, “It really doesn’t.”
We stopped outside the Big Blue Wave. Red leaves blew around our feet.
“Ah yes, well, there’s a long story there involving the mother’s boyfriend and an argument during which the man announced that the boy’s mother had to choose between him and her son. That’s when the mother put the boy on the plane from Santiago to Las Vegas to live with the father he’d only met once. Lousy, lousy story.”
Jazz opened the door to the bookshop. “Shall we?” he said. He didn’t wait for me to respond; he just went inside, straight to the counter. Dad was changing the record. He turned around. They shook hands. I stood in the doorway watching them, trying to let what Jeremiah had just told me sink in. His mother had chosen her boyfriend over him. His father had abandoned him in a parking lot.
No wonder he told his life story like it had happened to someone else. It shouldn’t have happened to him. To anyone.
Jazz and Dad were talking about guitars. An alley cat wound itself around Jazz’s legs and he stroked it. I thought about how much people love to stand at the checkout counter, talking to my father. He’s the type of person who makes other people feel comfortable. Dad and Jazz had that in common.
I turned around and looked out at our sleepy Main Street. The new place with the expensive ice cream. The drugstore next door, where locals bought soft serve for a quarter of the price. The cruddy gray laundromat that always seemed lonely with its windows lit up in the fog.
Sometimes you meet someone and there’s something there instantly. You can’t describe it. You can’t see it. You can feel it, but you don’t know what it is.
As different as our lives had been, I understood now one crucial thing Jazz and I had in common. We were both on a first-name basis with the universe’s dark side. Something had happened that was too big. Too big to know what to make of it. Too big to ever get over it. Something far too big to handle alone.
That night, I stayed up until midnight looking at pictures of knots and fell asleep thinking about Jazz.
The next morning on the walk to school, the wind was vicious. I was wearing a scarf Mom had knitted out of scraps of leftover yarn in clashing colors. My brain was exhausted; I hadn’t gotten nearly enough sleep. But I felt more determined than ever to solve my problem. Hearing Jazz’s story had made me realize something. Yes, I was lost in a scary situation, but scary things were happening to kids everywhere. Scarier things. Much scarier. I wanted to be as brave as Jazz—but it was more than that. I wanted to be as nice as him. Not that it didn’t make sense to be frustrated and angry and lost and confused. I couldn’t not be. It just felt selfish, somehow, to let those feelings rule my life. Jazz proved that they didn’t have to. I was imagining what it would be like to hold hands with Jazz and, like, I don’t know—become time travelers together, or something—when I walked face-first into a redwood tree. And those things are difficult to miss.
“Nephele?” called a voice, a voice who was…who? A muffled echo.
I looked up into the web of branches and spiky leaves. “Massive,” I said. “This is one massive tree.”
“Nephele!” Someone was shaking me. Who? Shipreck? “NEPHELE!”
The boy who tied bones in knots was shaking my shoulders. His eyes were blue ice with a droplet of purple ink melting. A smack of sunshine bounced off of his blowing black curls. The shipwrecked boy was shaking me. I felt like we’d met once long, long ago.
“I…” I heard myself speaking. I wondered what I was going to say. What could I say?
I’m stuck, Jazz Shipreck. I’m trapped. I am maybe about to faint in your arms, like a princess in one of those stories I could never quite pay attention to, owing to their complete lack of math.
I am so, so terribly alone. Help me, Jeremiah. Help me find my way home.
“Nephele, are you okay?”
Jazz’s features came into focus. The jagged tooth, the scar above his eye.
“Should I slap you?” he asked.
That woke me up. “Only if you want to get slapped back.”
“Well, what? Are you hysterical? Comatose? You’re freaking me out!”
Jazz’s hair went up and down in swoops and kinks and swerves. Like his mind. Like mine. I checked to see if anybody was around. Nobody was, but I still yanked him behind the tree. Then I said, “I need you, Jeremiah,” which I quickly realized he interpreted as a sign I was going to kiss him. His eyes were wide and he took a deep breath. No, no, no. I took a step back. “Jeremiah Jackson Shipreck, you cannot tell anyone what I’m about to say.”
His hair seemed to stand on end. “I won’t! I swear!”
“I am stuck in a time-travel loop.”
Far above our heads, an owl hooted.
He said, “Mi scusi?”
I asked, “What does that mean?”
He said, “It means—”
“Listen. I’m trying to tell you something that’s gonna be impossible for you to believe. But it’s important that I tell you the truth. I can’t lie to you. Not if we want to become real friends.”
“We’re already real friends, Fi. No?”
“Yes,” I said.
“So…?”
I looked at him and took a breath. “Jeremiah, I have been in ninth grade for ten years. I figured out how to travel through time. Almost, I mean. And now I’m stuck.”
He smiled. He put his hands on his hips. “Stuck.”
“Stuck, yes, stuck, as in, I can’t get out of the loop,” I said. “I mean, I could stop looping right now—give up and grow up—but that’s not what I want. I want to fix my timeship, fix the black holes I drilled in my parents’ brains and make my life go back to normal. But I’m stuck. And nobody can help me but…”
I hesitated to say the thing I sensed I might have to say eventually—since the first day of school, when Jazz had snagged his backpack on the door.
How could I have known then? How?
I looked toward the ocean. We couldn’t see it, but we could hear it, its distant waves crashing into foam, making small modifications to the shore with every smash, every wash—some that happened immediately, others that wouldn’t emerge for tens, hundreds, even thousands of years.
Jazz wouldn’t believe me right away. He couldn’t. He shouldn’t.
But I was almost certain that he’d believe me eventually.
At that moment, he only knew that I was telling him something massive. And even if he thought that the massive thing was that I was bananas, he was going to hear me out.
“Are we starting a role-playing game right now?” Jeremiah held up his hands. “Because I would be totally into that.”
I looked at my combat boots as they sank into the sand. For a minute or so, we just stood there.
Then I started to feel stupid. Now that I’d said it out loud, there was no denying how crazy it sounded. As confident as I’d been a few seconds ago, the longer Jeremiah was quiet, the more I began to worry that I’d been wrong. That I’d be alone with my secret forever.
When Jazz finally spoke, his voice was calm. “So what you’re telling me is…that this is happening. You’re staying the same age while everybody else gets older. And inside you’re not some creepy twenty-four-year-old hanging out with a bunch of teenagers?”
“I think I’m a teenager. I mean, I’m pretty sure.”
“You seem like a teenager.” He laughed. “Wow. It’s just—yeah. And you’re sure that…?”
I looked into his eyes and nodded.
His smile changed into a steady look, something thoughtful.
Then he nodded back. Like a person who knew that a question had just chosen him. Whether it was the time-travel question or the Is-this-girl-nuts? question or the question about which question was the right question to ask didn’t matter yet. All that mattered was that he cared enough to find out.
“And nobody else can help you get unstuck, Nephele Weather,” he said. “Nobody but me.”
* * *
/>
—
On the walk to school, I filled Jazz in on the details. From the green kitchen table, which was my first clue that my timeship had a terrible flaw, to my decade of lunch meetings with Mrs. Saint Johnabelle. I even told him about Vera Knight. The only subject I avoided was Wylie Buford. Somehow, what I knew about Mr. Zuluti’s past felt private.
Jazz was spinning a pinecone in the palm of his hand. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. Not how I expected this day to go down.”
“Me either,” I said. “What were you doing outside anyway?”
“Coming to your house to walk you to school.”
“Really? How did you know where I live?”
Jazz held the pinecone like he was testing its weight. “Remember that night at the bookshop after the slide show when you told Airika she was going to hate you?”
“I can’t believe I did that.”
“I followed you out the back door.”
He did?
“You did?”
Jazz nodded at the ground. “You were standing on your porch with this mist all around you. You looked so lonely. I wanted to talk to you and tell you I knew exactly how you felt. But I realized I was being creepy. Following you. So I chickened out. But now it’s like, hey, I definitely can’t be more out there than this girl. Can I come over to your house after school?”
“Does it matter what I say? You’ll follow me home anyway.”
Jazz nodded. “I definitely will. I feel like I just need to check out…”
Time Travel for Love and Profit Page 16