“OK, June 30, 1863,” Grown-up Julian said, entered the precious digits. “And here we—”
“Wait!” yelled Young Julian.
“What?”
“Didn’t the Battle of Gettysburg begin on July 1st?”
“Yes! You were paying attention. I’m so glad. We’re on our way. Now then...three...two—”
“Wait!”
“What?”
“So why are you going back to June 30?”
The distant rumble began reaching Julian’s ears.
“Because I’ll never be able to find my cell phone on that battlefield. I mean, it was loud, and smoky, and—I did mention bullets were flying, didn’t I?”
“Yes, but—”
“Do you really think I’m going to crawl around on all fours looking for it?”
“I suppose that would be pretty stupid.”
“I suppose it would. So, what I’m going to do is go back to the day before and wait for myself to show up. And when I do, I’m going to tell myself to just leave it in my pocket, and not bother with any pictures. That way, I can’t lose it.”
“Won’t it be weird? Going back to the middle of the Civil War and seeing yourself there?” Young Julian asked.
“Any weirder than this?” said Grown-up Julian, pointing first at himself, then his younger self, and once more at each of them for good measure.
“I guess not.”
The leaves on the trees above them began rustling, even though it was a windless afternoon.
“Do you feel something?”
“Something like the ground beneath our feet shaking, as if an earthquake were about to come around the corner behind me and rattle the teeth out of our mouths?”
“Yeah.”
“No. I don’t. Now hurry.”
“OK. Goodbye, Young Me. And good luck.” Grown-up Julian tapped the screen. The vacuum cleaner sound covered the growing storm. “I think it’s going to work!” said Grown-up Julian. “I can’t thank you enough.”
“We sure turned out OK.”
“We did. One last thing. Microwave butter popcorn, and flypaper.”
“What?”
“Microwave butter popcorn and flypaper. Remember them. Sorry.”
“No!”
“And a sling sh—” Grown-up Julian disappeared in a flash of light.
Young Julian breathed a well-deserved sigh of relief. Unfortunately, his relief was brief.
“HEY!” the voice behind him yelled.
He turned.
Biff’s fist, coming at his eye, was the last thing Julian remembered seeing.
That evening, back at home, Julian sat alone in his room, grateful Grown-up Julian had stashed—what the smart folks call “surreptitiously placed”—a small tube of Shiner-B-Gone in his pocket. He would have had a hard time explaining to his mom why he’d gotten a black eye.
He opened the old, dusty footlocker he had found in the attic and dragged down to his room after school. On it, he had taped a sign.
BEWARE!
STRANGE—WHAT THE SMART FOLKS CALL
UNPREDICTABLE—OBJECTS INSIDE.
Julian chose the plural form of the word “object” because he somehow knew—what the smart folks call “suspected”—this would not be the last of his dad’s misbehaving inventions.
He placed the eTab inside, shut the lid, clicked the padlock closed, and put the key on a chain that he then slipped around his neck. Then he went downstairs to what he hoped would be a normal dinner.
If such a thing were possible in the Newcomber house.
END
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank...
My wonderful wife Jean, who tolerates this mental illness of mine called “writing”
My children, who may or may not resemble the Newcomber kids
The Village of Chagrin Falls, which definitely resembles Whispering Falls, and hopefully someday will serve as the filming location for the screen adaptation And all the folks at Common Deer Press, who believed in this wacky enterprise
ABOUT
Michael Seese has published three books: Haunting Valley, a collection of fictional ghost stories centered around his home town; Scrappy Business Contingency Planning, which teaches corporate BCP professionals how to prepare for bad things; and Scrappy Information Security, which teaches us all how to keep the cyber-criminals away. He was inspired to write eTab after countless readings of the Junie B. Jones series to his children. Other than that, Michael spends his spare time rasslin’ with the young’uns.
Visit www.MichaelSeese.com or follow @MSeeseTweets to laugh with him or at him.
The Extraordinary eTab of Julian Newcomber Page 11