His mind told him his dad was right.
He had to choose one.
Twenty hours.
10
ADAM SAID HE’D BE at Lianna’s by 7:00. And it was already 6:50.
He took a deep breath and looked out his bedroom window, toward the Frazers’ house.
Their front door opened. Lianna emerged, frowning. Arms folded, she paced across her porch.
She’s mad at me.
No. He wasn’t late yet. It was something else.
She’s just had a fight with Ripley. She’s dumping him.
Because of me.
Adam felt a rush.
He was happy. Exhilarated.
Forget it. Don’t even think about it.
He could not allow himself to be distracted. Lianna was a friend. Nothing else.
Besides, girls like her didn’t go out with guys like Adam.
He pulled himself away from the window. The videocamera was sitting on his bed. He picked it up, trying to decide whether or not to take it.
Outside, a little dog was yapping loudly—Stetson, the mutt that belonged to Lianna’s next-door neighbors. Adam watched him scamper onto the Frazers’ porch, leaping onto Lianna’s leg.
Adam smiled. Stetson looked a lot like Jazz.
Jazz. Who died the night before Edgar did.
Tonight. Adam lifted the videocamera to his eye. He trained it on Lianna’s house.
The street was no longer a streak of dry blacktop.
It was snow-covered, just as it had been four years ago. A melted snow dinosaur stood on the lawn. The snowplows had been through, piling the drifts high against the curb. But Lianna’s driveway had been dug out, and a dark blue Chevy was parked in it.
Adam could see the entire Frazer family silhouetted in the living room lights —the ten-year-old Lianna, her parents, her brother, and someone else…
The front door opened. Jazz came scampering out first, followed by the others.
Under the porch light, Adam could see a shock of white hair.
Lianna’s grandma.
She was heading for her car.
Jazz was jumping up, placing his paws on her coat. Grandma petted him.
She’s going to kill him.
Adam looked up. Into the present. Lianna had returned into the house. The street was empty.
He grabbed the camera, bolted from his room, and raced outside.
As he ran toward Lianna’s, he raised the camera. The rubber flap of the viewfinder pounded into his eye socket.
His feet pounded dry pavement— even though the image was snowbound, his body was behind the lens. In the present.
Grandma was in the car, waving out the window. The exhaust pipe belched smoke.
Clunk. The car shuddered as she put it in gear. She looked over her right shoulder.
Mr. Frazer shooed Jazz away from the back of the car. Yapping wildly, the little dog ran to the front.
“NO!” Adam yelled. Uselessly.
The car lurched forward.
Still holding the camera to his eye, Adam ran toward Jazz. He reached his other hand forward.
STOP HIM!
His hand was in the frame now. Adam could see its faint shimmer.
He felt Jazz’s fur.
He shoved as hard as he could.
The motion threw him off balance. The camera went flying.
And Adam fell in front of the car.
11
HE WAS PINNED TO the driveway. Under the car.
I’m dead. I tried to save two people and now I’m dead.
“Adam! What are you doing?”
Lianna’s voice. Coming from the direction of the house.
In the sudden silence, he noticed the car was not moving. The engine was off.
He slid out from underneath. No snow on the ground.
Back.
In the present.
His head was throbbing. As he caught his breath, he noticed the car in the driveway. A newish green Volvo.
He didn’t remember seeing it when he was looking out his window a moment ago, without the camera.
How could I have missed it?
It didn’t matter. The videocamera was lying in the driveway. Dented. He scrambled toward it and quickly looked through the viewfinder.
The past glowed back at him.
Snow. The blue Chevy. Mr. and Mrs. Frazer at the driver’s side, talking with Grandma heatedly.
“Adam?” Lianna was standing before him now. “Are you okay?”
Adam lowered the camera. “It didn’t work.”
“What didn’t?”
“I went into the past and tried to change it.”
“After all we talked about?” Lianna was angry.
Adam examined the camera. “I don’t get it. Something should have happened.”
“But nothing did, huh? I was right, wasn’t I?”
“I thought I pushed him.”
“Who?”
Look at the tape. See what went wrong.
Adam pressed the EJECT button.
The bay whirred open. But it was empty.
“What happened to the tape?” Adam asked.
“You left it at Ripley’s,” Lianna reminded him. “Now come inside. Your head is all banged up. And you’re late for dessert and movies.”
Adam slouched into the house after her.
Forget about helping Edgar.
All you can do is watch.
Watch the dead die again.
As Adam stepped into the living room, a blur of red-brown streaked toward him.
He staggered back.
He felt the weight of two small feet pressing into his thighs.
“Down, boy!” Lianna commanded. “Jazz, leave him alone!”
He did it.
Two new files have popped up ACTIVE.
Two?
One of them is the dog’s
12
I DID IT.
The dog was all over him. Licking him. Yapping excitedly.
It was shaggier than the dog Adam had just seen in the viewfinder. Older.
But definitely alive.
Lianna pulled Jazz away. “I don’t know why he always does this to you, Adam. He just loves you so-o-o much.”
“But—but—this is—how can you be so calm?” Adam stammered.
He knelt down and hugged the cocker spaniel. He felt the warmth of Jazz’s tongue on his cheek.
“Liannaaaaa!” a voice called from the kitchen. “Is your boyfriend here yet?”
“Yes!” Lianna called back. She smiled at Adam. “Sorry. That’s what she says about any male.”
Adam nodded. But he wasn’t listening. He was staring at the white-haired woman in the kitchen entryway.
Lianna’s grandmother.
“Oh…my…god,” he murmured.
“I know.” Lianna nodded, sniffing deeply. “Those cookies smell awesome. Let’s go before Sam eats them all.”
But she died in the train wreck.
I didn’t save her—just Jazz.
Adam felt light-headed as he walked to the kitchen.
Mr. and Mrs. Frazer were bustling around, doing chores. Grandma was taking a tin of hot cookies to the table. Sam was reaching over her shoulder for an early helping.
Lianna sneered at her brother. “Pig.”
“Swallow, please,” Mrs. Frazer said.
Adam sat numbly. Grandma was approaching the table again with a tray of steaming mugs. “Here’s your hot chocolate, Adam. With mini-marshmallows, just the way you like it.”
How does she know that?
Adam tried to recall memories of Grandma, but he didn’t have many. A couple of handshakes and some small talk, that was it.
It doesn’t matter.
Everything’s different now. I saved Jazz, and everything’s different.
He suddenly thought about the car in the driveway.
“Uh, Mrs. Frazer…” he began tentatively. “Your Chevy…what ever happened to it?”
“I sol
d that hunk of junk, oh, three or four years ago,” Grandma said. “The gears kept slipping.”
“She almost ran over Jazz,” Sam piped up.
Grandma sighed sadly. “Poor little puppy. I went into Drive instead of Reverse, and he was in front of the car.”
“I never saw a dog jump so far,” Mr. Frazer said.
Adam nearly choked on a marshmallow.
“I like my Volvo much better,” Grandma said. “It makes me feel like a teenager.”
“You drive like one,” Sam commented.
“Sam!” Lianna said.
“The car’s all dented up,” Sam explained. “Dad says Grandma should give up driving.”
“Oh?” Grandma said.
Lianna’s dad and mom exchanged an apprehensive glance. “All I meant,” Mr. Frazer said gently, “was that you might…consider giving up driving. Your eyesight—”
Grandma gave a little derisive hoot. “My eyes are holding steady, thank you very much.”
She still drives.
She never killed Jazz, so she never gave up driving. And because she didn’t give up driving, she never took that train…
It was all becoming clear.
Saving Jazz had saved Grandma.
Adam downed his hot chocolate in one gulp and stood up. “Thanks for the dessert. Lianna? Can we see that movie now?”
“Sure.”
Taking his videocamera, he went into the den.
He let Lianna in and shut the door tightly.
“I don’t believe this,” he said. “I am spinning. Do you realize what this means?”
Lianna glanced at him curiously. “What what means?”
“Grandma. Jazz. They’re alive.”
“Why shouldn’t they be?”
Her eyes were blank. Baffled.
She doesn’t know.
“Lianna, you know about the videocamera, right? About what it can do?”
“Adam, of course I do. That’s why we’re here. To talk about Ripley’s ridiculous idea. It’s bad enough you want to go. How can you possibly let him? And what on earth do you mean by—”
“I have to go. Because I can change the past, Lianna. I just did it. I saved Jazz’s life—and your grandmother’s.”
“Uh…say that again?”
“Lianna, listen to me. As of a few minutes ago, you had no Grandma and no Jazz. Do you remember that?”
Lianna shrank back. “Adam, something has happened to you. You’re crazy.”
“Okay. How about the big train derailment about two years ago—it killed about twenty people?”
“What’s that got to do with—”
“Your grandmother was supposed to be on that train. Why? Because she was supposed to have given up driving. Why? Because exactly four years ago, on that day when her Chevy slipped into Drive, she ran over Jazz. She killed him. But I changed that, Lianna!”
Lianna reached for the doorknob, but Adam placed himself in her way.
“Let me go, Adam.”
“Don’t you see? I went into the past. I knew what was going to happen to Jazz, and I stopped it from happening. And now the whole past has just…reshuffled. As if the accident never happened.”
“Please. Go home before I scream!”
“Don’t. Think about it, Lianna! Didn’t you say I couldn’t change the past, because what’s done is done?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what if I can? What if I did? What if Jazz and Grandma really were dead, and I saved them? What’s done is done, right? Their deaths suddenly never happened—so you have no memory of it!”
“Nothing happened to them!”
“So that proves it!”
“Just because you say so? Just because you claim Grandma and Jazz died, I’m supposed to accept that? Adam, you could say that up until ten minutes ago, we were all chimpanzees—but zoom, you went into the past, changed that, and wiped out all memories.”
Hopeless.
How could she believe him? How could anyone believe a story like this?
I wouldn’t believe it.
He flopped down onto the sofa.
“And what about your memory?” Lianna asked. “Wouldn’t it be wiped out, too, if what you say is true? Why do you remember these deaths?”
“I don’t know! Maybe it’s because I did the time travel. I saw both versions. I mean, I’m the same person. Even if I jump back and forth in time, my memory stays in a straight line. It records everything I see.”
“That is the most horrible, ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” Lianna said.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. If only I’d had a tape in the camera!
Adam spotted a package of blank videotapes in the Frazers’ wall unit. He stood up and took one. “The next time I go into the past,” he said, “I’ll have proof.”
He pressed EJECT and shoved the tape into the slot.
It stopped halfway.
He pushed harder. No luck.
“What the—?” Adam peered into the tape bay. Bits of plastic and metal were twisted off, mangled. “It’s broken.”
“You dropped it pretty hard on the driveway.”
“That wouldn’t damage it on the inside, would it?”
Maybe…or maybe it’s something else.
Adam thought back. He’d had the camera with him all day. No one could have tinkered with it.
Except for one time.
“Lianna, when I left Ripley’s bedroom to get snacks, what did he do?”
“Are you suggesting…?” Lianna’s voice trailed off. “Well, I did go to the bathroom for a minute. But Ripley wouldn’t have done something like that.”
“You said he wants to time travel. Maybe he tried to rig this for himself.”
“You think so?”
Adam’s head was throbbing. He stretched out on the sofa and took a few deep breaths.
Okay. Think.
You don’t really need that tape.
The camera will work without it. It did for Jazz.
Just don’t let Ripley near the camera before tomorrow.
“Sometimes I don’t know what I see in him,” Lianna said quietly. She began running her fingers through Adam’s hair. “I mean, we’re still together and all, but each day we seem farther apart.”
Adam felt a sudden rush of feeling. And exhaustion.
His eyes were beginning to close.
“Go ahead,” Lianna whispered. “Sleep.”
She put a movie in the VCR. A dreamy, sappy soundtrack began to play.
Adam drifted off in a cloud of thoughts—Ripley, Lianna, Edgar, and a thousand other people all swirling around to the music of Lianna’s video.
Then, once again, the accident began to assemble itself in a dream. Once again, he saw the ice and the swirl of hockey uniforms.
But the perspective was different. The dream was framed as if Adam were watching the past through the videocamera lens.
And just as the event unfolded, just as Edgar began skating around the younger Adam, taunting and teasing, Adam felt a tug. As if someone had entered the dream and was trying to take away his camera.
Ripley. It must be Ripley.
Adam’s eyes opened.
Lianna was slowly pulling the videocamera out of his arms.
“What are you doing?” Adam cried out.
Lianna recoiled, letting go of the videocamera. “Nothing!”
“You’re taking it!”
“I am not! How could you even think that? I just wanted you to be comfortable.”
Easy. Take it easy.
“Sorry,” Adam muttered.
“Adam, you are paranoid.”
“I know. It’s just—I had this dream—I was watching the accident—Ripley was taking my camera away.”
“Adam, trust me. He will not get that camera. No way. No matter what he tells me to do—?
Lianna’s face suddenly froze.
Adam’s sleep-addled mind snapped to full attention. “What has he told you to do?”
“Nothing.
”
“Did he tell you to take the camera?”
“It doesn’t matter, Adam. I have a mind of my own.”
Adam felt a chill. He took the camera and stood up. “I better get home. Sorry, Lianna. I guess I am paranoid—and nervous.”
Lianna shrugged and turned back to the TV. “I’ll let you know how the movie ends.”
Adam felt weak as he walked home.
He glanced backward at Grandma’s car.
Was it there earlier?
He couldn’t remember.
Maybe the whole episode was all some kind of concoction. Maybe Grandma and Jazz never died.
After the accident, the doctors had told him he’d had a concussion. Concussions were serious. You may forget things, they’d said. You may see things that haven’t occurred.
And it may not happen right away. It may happen much later, when you least expect it.
Four years later?
Was that what was happening?
Maybe the camera was one big illusion.
Maybe I’m totally cracking up.
No. Not new.
13
ZING.
Adam sprang out of bed.
He’d fallen asleep.
The videocamera was beside his bed.
Think.
Clear your head.
Okay, maybe this was some kind of vision. A concussion side effect.
But too many questions remained.
Why do I have no memory of Jazz or Grandma over the last four years?
How did that image of my old room get on the tape?
He couldn’t afford to doubt.
He had to try.
He had to plan.
What if the rescue failed? What if three o’clock came and went and Edgar was still dead?
That would be it. No adjusting the camera. No turning back again.
It’ll be like killing him twice.
Could he do something beforehand—keep him away?
He flicked on his desk lamp.
His clock showed 10:07 P.M.
Seventeen hours.
THINK!
Edgar’s room.
No. It was Ripley’s. Adam couldn’t pop over there at this hour. Ripley would steal the camera.
Edgar’s not the only one I can warn.
Adam reached for the videocamera. He turned it on and looked through the view-finder, scanning the room.
There. At his desk.
His younger self sat, fidgeting, absorbed in a computer game.
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