Ooh! Or I messed up last week’s history test. I could zip back, retake it, and be home before dinner.
Or...
He paused. Just the other day he’d sat down on the couch with his dad, who happened to be watching a classic old movie called Back to the Future about a high school kid who drives a car so fast he goes back in time. He lands on the day his parents met, interferes with them meeting, and has to spend the rest of the movie trying to undo his oopsie. So, having witnessed firsthand Marty McSomebody’s potentially life-or-not-ever-alive race against time to unite his parents and invent rock and roll, Julian vowed to never use the eTab to go back in time. After all, who could know what chaos might be unleashed?
An on-and-off buzzing sound caught his attention. It went buzz...pause...buzz...pause.
A big green telephone icon flashed in sync with the buzz. It went glow...off...glow...off. He touched it, cautiously, as always.
His dad’s face popped onto the screen.
“Dad?”
“Hi, Julian. Your mother has let me know quite clearly that dinner is in thirteen minutes. I thought I’d warn you before she starts wondering where you might be hiding and decides to unleash the Scream Of Infinity, as I like to call it.”
“That’s funny, Dad. That name. Hey, I didn’t know we could talk over this thing.”
“We couldn’t. At least not until now, after my last software push. As part of it, you also have….”
“Software push?”
“Yeah. I occasionally need to send a software update to the eTab. It all happens in the background. Anyway, I was looking at family cell phone plans this afternoon. I figured it was about time for you to have a phone. And boy! Do you have any idea how expensive those calling and texting and data and whatever else plans are? I think my first car payment was less. So, I thought I’d figure out a way to leverage Wi-Fi and piggyback on the encrypted data stream over the 802.11x protocol and—I’m confusing you, aren’t I?”
“You always do, Dad.”
“Consistency has always been an important part—what the smart folks call ‘a mainstay’—of my game. Unfortunately, the range is limited. Five hundred feet. Three miles, tops. Though if I could get my hands on the source code the phone companies use...”
“I’m at the library. I’ll be home in five minutes. Tell Mom. And thanks for the heads-up, Dad.”
Julian pressed the telephone icon again, rolled up the eTab, and raced home, arriving just as his mom was completing her deep-breathing exercises in preparation for the Banshee Blast Of Infinity, his new name for the tsunami of sound.
“Oh, good. You’re here,” she said sweetly before exhaling for a good thirty seconds.
At the dinner table, Julian’s fork attacked his food while his mind attacked the good and bad points of limited time travel.
(Actually, he could devote only a portion of his brain to considering several reasonably harmless applications of time travel because he needed to stay engaged enough to take part in the required family dinnertime discussion.)
What could I do if I jumped ahead ten, twenty, or thirty minutes? he thought.
He could excuse himself from the table for a minute, run one hundred and one feet down the street, and skip ahead to dessert, bypassing dinner and, more to the point, the broccoli.
He could jump to the end of the baseball game on TV, then go back and make a bet with his dad as to who would win. However, he realized that doing so would violate his stated vow to never jump back in time, which also ruled out skipping ahead thirty minutes to the post-exam answer review in class, then going back to take the test.
But his thoughts—what the dreamy folks call “flights of fancy”—remained rooted in the innocent fascination of a twelve-year-old brain, and he never considered possibilities beyond his limited world.
In time—years, to be imprecise—he would.
CHAPTER 5
“Wake up, Little Sleepy Man. Let me see that adorable bedhead of yours.”
“Aw, Mom. It’s too early. Just six more minutes.”
“Six minutes? Why the crooked number, slugger?” Mrs. Newcomber asked. Contrary to stereotypes, it was Mrs. Newcomber who was the baseball fan of the family. (Mr. Newcomber, on the other hand, preferred Australian rules football, which as far as Julian could tell, had no actual rules.) As such she would sprinkle, if not ladle, terms like “crooked numbers,” “can of corn,” and “put some mustard on it” into conversations. Her love of the great American pastime came as no surprise to Julian. Mr. Newcomber often pointed out that his wife, in her pre-wife days, had been a pretty awesome—what the smart folks call “formidable”—fast-pitch softball player. Ever modest, Mrs. Newcomber would dismiss his comment with an “aw, shucks” wave of her hand. But at dinner, if Julian asked her to pass him a roll, she would put enough “pepper” on it to leave a red mark emblazoned on the center of his chest if he failed to snag the whole wheat fireball.
“You’ve got five,” she said, displaying the sense of humor that at times seemed indistinguishable from her husband’s. “If you’re not down there in, now it’s four-and-a-half, you’re outta here.”
With a dramatic sigh, Julian literally fell out of the top bunk, allowing him to take full advantage of the Tramp-O-Floor to spring across the room and into the clothes hanging in the InstaDressed Harness (two more of Mr. Newcomber’s inventions, if you’re keeping score) strung across the open closet door. Though both were exceptionally handy, suffice to say if Julian forgot to open his closet door before going to bed, their use made for a less-than-stellar start to the day.
Three-and-two-thirds-minutes later, Julian sat down to his sausage and cereal (not in the same bowl; that only happened when his dad fixed breakfast) and ate quietly. Of course, Dylan managed to fill the silence, as he always did.
“Mama? Mama? Mama? Mama? Mama? I don’t think I can go to my piano lesson today, after school,” he said.
“Why not?”
“I have a little headache.”
“I’m sure it will be all better by the time you get home.”
“But what if it’s not Mama?”
“Trust me, sweetie. It will be.”
“OK. But Mama? Mama? What if it’s not?”
“Then Mama will take care of it,” she said, pulling from one of the drawers a power drill (kept there for that very purpose) and revving it up, all the while suppressing her evil smile.
“My head feels a lot better all of a sudden. And I’m hungry,” Dylan said as he began shoveling cereal.
And serenity once again descended on the kitchen table.
After putting the twins on the bus (the elementary school did not lie within the comfy confines of the town, but rather out on the fringes of the county, about five minutes by car and an eternity by school bus), Mrs. Newcomber kissed Julian on the head and prepared to send him, independent boy that he was, on his way.
“Mom?” Julian asked. “Would you walk me to school?”
“Sure, Little Man.”
They walked in silence while Julian’s mouth tried to form the words his head wanted to say. He hadn’t quite gotten there when his mom forced his hand. Or, mouth, as it were.
“So, what’s up, Julian?”
At grown-up school, they must teach parents how to read their children’s minds, Julian thought.
“Mom. If you could jump ahead, would you?”
“Do you mean like this?” she asked, planting a foot firmly and heaving herself a good eight feet down the sidewalk (Mrs. Newcomber also was long jumper in college). “Not too bad,” she said, looking back at her launch point. “Though in all fairness, the slope here probably bought me another six inches.”
“Truly impressive. But I don’t mean jump ahead like that. I meant, in time.”
“You’re starting to sound like your father. Which may or may not be a good thing.”
Julian assumed that was the sense of humor talking. He pressed on, “Well, would you?”
“Why would
I want to?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you have a hard day coming up. Maybe you have things you’re not looking forward to. And you want to get them over with. Get them behind you. So, you jump ahead.” A little something in a quiet corner of his brain whispered, Are you sure you’re not talking about yourself, and about almost any day, and about almost anywhere you’ve lived so far? Julian shushed the voice, not wanting to think about the challenge of trying to fit in yet again, not to mention the looming jump up to a new school for grade seven.
“I know it’s been tough on you. All this moving. But you should try to make some friends. Really try. Something tells me we’re going to be here a while. I really think we’ve found our home.”
“Good to know. But that’s not what I was thinking.” Yup. Mindreading 101 at grown-up school. “Well, maybe it was. A little. But my point is…No one really needs a car. You can walk everywhere. Especially here. In our hometown.” Julian liked the sound of that. “But we have cars, and we use things like cars, to make it easier on ourselves. What’s different about skipping a day to make things easier on yourself?”
“You know, giving birth to you was quite an effort.”
“It was?”
“They don’t call it ‘labor’ for nothing, kiddo. Trust me, it was hard. What about that day? Should I have skipped that one?”
“Probably not.”
“And even if jumping ahead meant I’d keep you, but just skip the pain…I’m still not sure I would.”
“Why not?”
“Pain is a part of life. If you never know what pain feels like, then you probably won’t know what real happiness feels like.”
“Oh,” was all he could think to say in the face of his mom’s deep—what the smart folks call “profound”—8:00 a.m. philosophy lesson. Though it wasn’t really what he wanted to know, it was something he needed to know.
“The point, Julian, is, every day—every moment of every day—is a gift. And if you keep refusing gifts…”
“Thanks, Mom,” he said before hugging her, extra hard, and dashing up the concrete path.
On those occasions when Mr. Newcomber was feeling philosophical, he would say, “The universe has a strange sense of humor.” Mrs. Newcomber usually would counter with something along the lines of “The universe enjoys whacking you upside the head because you insist on poking a finger in its eye.”
Whatever the universe’s motivation, on this day it must have been feeling particularly puckish—a term Julian would not come to learn until eleventh grade, but from then on, would use in conversation whenever he could—as strange, inescapable references to time kept finding their way into his day.
The morning announcements concluded with a reminder to set clocks ahead the coming weekend because the time would change.
In English, the class read the poems “To Think of Time” by Walt Whitman, “Against that time, if ever that time come,” by William Shakespeare, and “Time Long Past” by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
In science class, the teacher explained that in a vacuum, two objects will fall to Earth in the same amount of time, regardless of weight.
Even the cafeteria conspired to taunt him, as lunch was meatloaf and twice-baked potatoes which, in theory, could come from the kitchen of a time-traveling cook.
Given all the time signs circling his head like impatient vultures, Julian decided on the way home that he had to talk to his dad. After his snack.
Once the plates were in the sink and soaking, he went out back to the workshop. Mr. Newcomber was nowhere to be seen, meaning either he was not there, or he finally had succeeded in his quest to invent invisibility.
“Dad? Dad!”
No answer. Not there, it was.
Back in the house Julian found his mom, happily concocting something in the kitchen.
“Mom? Where’s Dad?”
“He’s at a conference with Dylan’s teacher, Mrs. Malice.”
“Don’t you usually go to those sorts of things?”
His mom shrugged. Even though she didn’t say it, Julian knew his mom was less than fond of Mrs. Malice. She probably sent Mr. Newcomber to the conference just to fluster, if not flummox, her.
Though Julian really wanted to speak with his dad, his absence offered an interesting, and potentially ill-fated, opportunity. With his dad out of the house, Julian could safely test some of the other theories he had concocted throughout the day, knowing his work would not be interrupted by a panicked paternal parent.
Upstairs, his after-school snack now a mere memory in his tummy, Julian and his co-conspirator the pen augmented The Plan.
STEP 4: CHANGE THE DATE.
The successfully tested hypothesis from last night’s library experiment proved Julian could manually change the eTab clock, with the result being the six-minute jump would skip ahead based on the contrived time, as opposed to the actual time.
But what if he changed the calendar? Could he travel forward a day? Days? Weeks?
“How much worse could it be?” he asked, his less-than-mature brain not yet able to think through all the ramifications that would challenge, if not outright confound, even a more mature mind.
He thought long and hard about when he would want to travel ahead to.
Christmas morning, for obvious reasons.
His high school graduation, which would save him a lot of work.
Ultimately, he decided the safest choice would be trip to the near-future. Tomorrow. Tomorrow early, like 12:01 a.m. Worst case, Julian figured he would just be tired the next day, since he would miss a little sleep by discarding the two hours between 10:00 and 12:00. Though in light of the fact that yesterday he jumped to his seat at the kitchen table, he considered it a very real possibility he would find himself in bed, awake. Or perhaps asleep. In his pajamas. Or his clothes.
He began to superficially understand why time travel was confusing.
STEP 5: STOP WORRYING AND JUST DO IT!
Free from fear, seeing as how he was just following The Plan, Julian confidently tapped the gear icon on the eTab. The calendar loomed large, both on his screen and the little corner of his mind that wasn’t totally on board with The Plan. He pushed the little blue box ahead, one space to the right. He OKed the change, then opened the clock and prepared to shave eight hours from his life.
“OK. All set,” he said to no one. “I’m ready. Ready, willing, and able. OK, so I’m going to do it. It’ll be fine. No problems at all. No problema.” (He figured using a Spanish word could count as homework, in case his mom later asked what he had been doing.) Julian anguished for another minute.
“Really what could go wrong? Just a little tap. One little tap. One teeny tap. OK, so here I go. On three. One...two...”
He stopped when the vacuum cleaner noise filled the room.
“Wait! No! I didn’t...” he said to the same no one. “Really, I...”
The sound came from the closet. The door was closed. But from around the edges shone a rectangular outline of light—what the smart folks call “a corona,” though generally coronas are round. He got up, tiptoed over, and reached out, now feeling trepidation. He reached out, cautiously, toward the doorknob. His fingers inches away, the noise stopped, the light faded (or maybe it snapped off—Julian wasn’t worried about the details), and the door flew open. Out stepped a grown-up. He stopped and looked every which way—up, down, left, right—amazed (though not as amazed as Julian). The man stood as still as a statue, taking in every detail of the room, except for the detail known as Julian, who by this time, had quietly faded into the wall, thankful that today he had worn his favorite shirt, the one colored eggshell matte. (Julian often wondered if there might be some connection between his mom’s homemaking thing and the fact that everyone in the family had a lot of clothes matching the paint on the walls.) He thought about screaming. He wanted to scream. He prepared to scream. But for some reason he could not. He stared at the man, thinking something about him seemed somehow familiar.
&nbs
p; “Who are—”
“Man! After ten years, you’d think I’d be used to that,” the stranger said, stretching and twisting his neck, sending a sickening, yet impressive, cascade of crackles racing down his spine. “Wow! This room is just like I remember it.”
“Just like you remember it? What do you mean?”
“This used to be my room,” the man said.
“Are you the person who sold this house to my parents?” he asked.
“No, Silly Man. Don’t you recognize me?”
Julian thought he might have. Sort of. But he didn’t want to admit it.
“No,” he lied.
“Julian, I’m you. Ten years from now. No, wait. Nine. No, wait again. Eight. Yes, eight. Seven? No, eight. Final answer.”
“No you’re not.”
“Yes I am.”
“You’re lying!”
“I’m not.”
“You don’t look like you’re from the future.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not wearing...I don’t know, silver, shiny metal clothes. And you’re not carrying a laser gun.”
“I told you. I’m from ten years in the future. Scratch that. Eight years in the future. Not one hundred. We don’t have those things. At least not yet. But as long as Dad is still inventing, who knows?”
“Fine. That makes sense. The silver clothing, laser gun part. But still, you can’t be from the future.”
“Yes I can.”
“That’s impossible. It can’t be.”
“It’s not, and it can.”
“But how—”
The stranger pulled from his pocket a slightly beat-up piece of blank black paper.
“Do you recognize this?” he asked.
“No,” Julian said.
“Now you’re lying. Of course you recognize it,” the stranger said.
“OK. It’s my eTab.”
“Actually, it’s my eTab. The eTab version 2.0, to be specific.”
The man swiped. It came to life. All of the app icons were completely different. All except for one.
The Dad Five-Minute Warning app.
The familiar clock face was still there. It was huger, though. Way bigger than that of the eTab 1.0. And it had a lot of numbers. Way more than his.
The Extraordinary eTab of Julian Newcomber Page 3