Springback

by Jana Miller

  The look I gave him was probably somewhere between uncertainty and panic as I tried to come up with an excuse not to. Trying to morph it into something more neutral, I answered, “Oh, no thanks. I actually just had a couple quick questions for you.” Then I can rewind this before you go tell your girlfriend about me.

  “Just a couple?” He looked at me incredulously. “Well, I have a ton, and they’re definitely not going to be quick.”

  I swallowed, not even totally clear on the reasons this made me so nervous. “Uh, okay. I actually have somewhere I need to be, so can I just ask you my quick questions, and then we’ll talk about yours…later?” Or…never?

  He blew out a breath. “When? Like tomorrow at lunch?”

  I felt my eyes widen a little. “At lunch?” With people around? “Um—” Maybe today would actually be better. I bit my lip. “I’ve got to get to the library right now, but if you want to meet me—”

  “The library? Like, the city library?”

  “Yeah, I volunteer there.”

  “You volunteer at the library?” His raised eyebrows and nodding head might have been convincing if it weren’t for the tenseness in his lips as he held in a laugh or a mocking smile.

  Suddenly it was clear to me why I felt so reluctant about all of this. I cared too much, and he didn’t seem to care at all. I was worried about what everybody would think, worried about Nikki, even worried about Jake’s opinion of me, and he was worried about—nothing. He didn’t care. He could throw around smiles and jokes and carelessly tell adorable redheads my most guarded secret when he didn’t even know me. And then he could stand here making fun of me for what I liked to do.

  Forget it. I didn’t need his help—not today, anyway—and for someone so determined to talk to me, he sure wasn’t trying to get on my good side. I looked at him evenly, refusing to let him make me feel like a nerd for volunteering at the library. “Yes, Jake. It’s a thing people do.” I turned abruptly and told him, “See you tomorrow” before speeding up to cut through a courtyard.

  Chapter Five

  I tried to convince myself not to rewind the day. He needed to know, and I needed to have someone to talk to about it. Still, rewinding was my auto-response to stress, and I came very close to doing it. Only the erratic flickering of the strands and the unsettling unknowns they brought up stopped me.

  I’d made it about a block from the school before Jake pulled up next to me in his car. I glanced over and then looked forward again, pretending I didn’t realize who it was. Maybe if I ignored him . . .

  But he reached over to manually roll down the passenger-side window of his car, which rolled slowly to catch up with me as he shouted, “Chloe!”

  I sighed and looked at him.

  “Get in!” He said it with a smile, like this was something we did every day.

  I tried to smile back. “No thanks. I’m good,” I answered, but when I kept walking, he just let his car inch forward along with me.

  “I thought we were going to talk!” I glanced over but kept walking. “It’s not like I don’t know where you’re going,” he said.

  I stopped and looked at him, scrunching up my face in a look of disgust. “You know that makes you sound like a stalker, right?”

  He gave an offended scoff.

  I kept walking, and he had to maneuver around a parked car before pulling over next to me again. “Hey.” His voice was more serious, so I stopped and turned to look at him. “Even if I turn out to be some creeper, you can always rewind, right? And never talk to me again.”

  I folded my arms and sighed, looking down the sidewalk.

  “I need you, Chloe.” I looked back at him, and when I saw his mock-serious expression, I rolled my eyes and started walking again.

  He let the car roll forward. “Come on, I’ve only been doing this for a couple months, and it’s killing me not to talk to anyone about it!”

  A couple months? I stopped walking as memories of my first two months of rewinding crept into my mind. What would it have been like to have somebody to help me through that?

  I studied Jake for a moment, trying to imagine him feeling even half as vulnerable and powerless as I’d felt back then. “The puppy dog eyes won’t help you,” I informed him, and when he smoothed his features into an actual serious expression, I took a deep breath and let it all out at once. “Fine.”

  He grinned, and I opened the door and got in. It was definitely an old car. The steering wheel had bits torn out of it and the radio face was cracked. “Nice cassette player,” I said, fighting a smile.

  “Thanks. I have some sweet 80s tapes if you want to listen to them. But first, I have a lot of questions.”

  “Have you really only been doing this two months?”

  He ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah. It’s been really…crazy.”

  “Lots of headaches?”

  “Yes!” he exclaimed. “Every time! And I get dizzy, but not just when I rewind. Random times.”

  I nodded. “I think it’s just a side effect of rewinding. I’ve tried to figure out if there’s a pattern, but there isn’t. I get those little jolts whether or not I’ve been messing with time, and it’s not usually a big deal unless you rewind too far. But lately—”

  “I got one today in the library,” he interrupted. “Right before you told me that weird stuff about toothpaste and…physics.”

  I shrugged. “And I got one before creative writing started.” Right before you acknowledged my presence in public. “It happens a lot.”

  He perked up. “You did?”

  “Yeah…?”

  “What if it’s when somebody else rewinds? You rewound in the middle of our conversation, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I felt it!”

  I blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “I felt it. I got the vertigo thing.”

  “You did? So what about—” I stopped as my stomach flip-flopped. “Wait, are you saying you rewound something at the beginning of class today?”

  He glanced at me. “Yup.”

  “What did you rewind?”

  He took a second checking the intersection at a stop sign before continuing on. “Uh, you.” He glanced at me. “I mean, a conversation we had.”

  My cheeks heated. We’d had a conversation and I didn’t remember it? “What did we say?” I demanded.

  “Hey, I asked you earlier if we could talk later, and you said yes. So I started talking to you.”

  “About rewinding time?” I was incredulous.

  “No! Not about rewinding time. I’m not stupid. I just…asked you how things were going or something.”

  “What? Why?”

  “What do you mean why? Because that’s one of the things people say to each other when they talk. I was talking to you. But you looked at me”—he glanced at my face—“pretty much like you’re looking at me now, so I rewound it.”

  I’d had my mouth open, ready to berate him for whatever he’d said, but instead I just closed it. “Oh.”

  He glanced at me warily. “So…can I ask you my questions now?”

  I really wanted to ask about the jolt and the strands, but I kind of owed him for how rude I’d been so far. “I might not be much help, but go ahead.”

  “Awesome. Okay, so, how long have you been able to rewind?”

  I tucked my hair behind my ear. “Since I was nine.”

  Jake’s eyes bugged out. “Are you kidding me?” He had to force himself to look back at the road. “You could reverse time when you were only nine?” I nodded. “What is that, like eight years?”

  “Seven,” I said, nodding slowly.

  He let out a low whistle. “So you must be pretty good at it by now, huh?”

  “I guess.” I lifted a shoulder. “It’s not like I have anyone to compare it to.”

  “So you really don’t know anybody else who can do it?”

  “Nope.”

  “But wait,” he said. “Didn’t you say you got those dizzy things�
��“

  “Vertigo jolts.”

  “Yeah, those. Didn’t you get them even before I started rewinding?”

  “Yeah, but—” I’d never even considered that the jolts could be caused by somebody else. “I’ve never met anyone else who can manipulate time, so I didn’t think they were—”

  “Wait, manipulate? Can you do more than just rewind?” His eagerness was almost entertaining.

  “Not really.” He was threatening to pull us way off topic. “Did you feel the huge vertigo jolt last week?”

  His eyes went huge. “Yes! It sucked. I stayed home from school the next day.”

  “Yeah, I know. I did too. But…I guess you don’t have any idea where it came from?”

  “No idea.”

  My shoulders drooped a little. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting. “Are the strands flickery and weird for you now?” I asked.

  “The strands?”

  “The—the things you pull to rewind. You called it a river in your story—is that how you see it?”

  His face cleared. “Oh. No, I changed it to a river for my story because I couldn’t think of a good way to describe the stringy things,” he said as he pulled into a parking space at the library. “Plus I thought it would sound cooler to be controlling water. And ‘river of time’ sounds more epic.”

  Definitely more epic than “stringy things.” No wonder he’d changed it. “Okay, so…are the stringy things flickering for you?”

  “Yeah, and they feel like they’re—electrified or something. It was crazy hard to rewind today.”

  I nodded and opened the car door. “Well, thanks for the ride.”

  “Sure. But you know I’m coming in with you, right? I’m not done talking about this.”

  * * *

  I asked him to give me at least ten minutes before he came in so I could check in and get set up with whatever I needed to do. I figured hidden in rows of books was as good a place as any to have a private conversation about a strange superpower.

  “Hey, how long have you known about me?” he asked when he found me shelving a cart of books.

  “What?”

  “You said something about my story—my superpower story,” he said, looking more thoughtful than usual. “You’ve known since then?” I bit my lip. “Did you only tell me because something went wrong?”

  I shook my head. “No. I mean, this time, yeah, it was because something went wrong, but I told you after you read your story.”

  “And you rewound it?”

  So I had to explain how I’d found out, rewound, told him, and rewound again. I tried not to sound too defensive or blame him too much, but I still felt huffy when I told him about how he’d told Lindy.

  He let out a bark of a laugh. “I do that all the time.”

  “What?”

  “I tell people what I can do, then I rewind it.” He was grinning. “It’s good practice, and it’s fun to see how people react. What did Lindy say that time?”

  I stared at him.“Uh, she sort of played along.” How many times had he told her? “So you—you probably would have rewound that?”

  “Well, yeah.” He said it like it was obvious. “No way would I let her remember that. Nobody actually knows; it doesn’t work to tell people for real.”

  I sighed, a mixture of annoyance and relief, and his face registered understanding.

  “You thought I was telling your secret,” he said slowly. My face heated, but he didn’t make fun of me. “That’s why you didn’t want to talk to me—you didn’t think you could trust me.”

  I pressed my lips together and shrugged.

  He nodded slowly. “Well—I guess that makes sense,” he finally said. Then he pinned me with a sincere look. “I won’t tell your secret, Chloe.” His eyebrows rose a little. “Okay?”

  I just swallowed and nodded, trying to accept his sincerity.

  “So,” he said after a moment, picking up a book from my cart and studying the call number. “The electrified strings—this has never happened before?”

  “No,” I said emphatically. “Definitely not. It’s freaking me out.”

  “And you think it has to do with the big jolt?” he asked as he put the book away.

  “It would make sense,” I said. “Either they were caused by the same thing, or one caused the other.”

  “And you’ve never felt a jolt like that before either?”

  “No. There have always been little waves, but I’ve never felt anything this strong unless I caused it myself, by going too far or rewinding accidentally. This one was so intense it made me throw up.”

  “So…maybe you accidentally—”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t rewound accidentally for years,” I told him. “And I would have to go back really far to cause that big of a jolt. And even if that did happen, I’d remember it.”

  “So—somebody else?”

  I was still wrapping my mind around the idea that any jolt I didn’t directly cause wasn’t just a side effect; it was somebody else rewinding. “The thing is, your own rewinds feel stronger to you than the other ones—other people’s. Your own big rewind might make you really sick, but I guess it would just give someone else a little vertigo or a headache.” I almost felt sick just imagining other people being affected by my rewinds. Had I been giving other rewinders headaches and vertigo all these years?

  With Jake’s help, I’d finished with my cart of books, so I went to get another one but ended up helping another volunteer with her cart before I could get back to Jake.

  When I passed the computers fifteen minutes later, he waved me over and whisper-called, “Excuse me, miss? Do you work here?”

  I rolled my eyes, refusing to smile as I walked over. “Yes, young man?”

  He grinned. “I’m doing some research on time travel, but nothing I’m finding is helpful. Any suggestions?”

  I glanced at his screen, which showed a web page about wormholes. Along the top of the browser were tabs with titles about Einstein, quantum theory, and time machines. The same subjects that had seriously messed with my brain and given me headaches when I’d tried researching my abilities a few years ago. I knew they would get him nowhere.

  “Are you wanting to learn about time travel,” I asked, “or time manipulation?”

  He perked up. “What’s the difference?”

  “In one, a person travels to different times, but time itself doesn’t move. And in the other, a person actually manipulates time—backward, forward, or stopping it.”

  He rubbed his hands together. “Perfect.” He turned back to the computer, satisfied. “Thanks. Wait—stopping time?” He leaned toward me. “And going forward?”

  I sat down, glancing around and lowering my voice before I told him, “Neither of them really work. I can’t figure out how to hold the strands still enough to stop time.”

  “Huh.” He sounded disappointed.

  “And I’ve tried going forward, but it’s just confusing.”

  “Confusing how?”

  “It’s like”—I tried to figure out how to describe it—“maybe the possibility of things that could happen? You’ll see one person in three different places.” Jake’s eyebrows went up, and I could tell he already definitely wanted to try it. “None of it has happened yet, so it’s impossible to force your way through it. People haven’t made their choices or reacted to other people yet.”

  His face was intent as he nodded to himself, bviously deep in thought. “That’s cool.”

  “It is kind of cool,” I agreed. “Kind of useless, but interesting.” I gestured to his computer monitor. “I hate to tell you this, but even if you look up time manipulation, all you’ll find is superhero fan sites.” Apparently, unlike with time travel, not many people seemed to think time manipulation was a real thing, so anything about it online generally involved comic book characters.

  He slumped a little before gesturing to me. “That’s exactly why I need you!” he said. “You’ve already done all this, and
you have seven years on me. There must be tons you know that I don’t.”

  I laughed a little. “I doubt there’s tons,” I told him. “Once you know the basics of rewinding, there’s not really a whole lot more you need to know.” I glanced around again, and my stomach did a flip when I saw Leah coming in. I didn’t even hear Jake’s question as I sternly told my stomach that there was no reason Leah would be suspicious of me talking to Jake. She didn’t know that we weren’t friends, so she wouldn’t think it was weird for us to talk.

  Still, I thought as she starts toward me, I might as well intercept Leah before he could open his mouth around her.

  “Just a sec,” I told Jake as I shot out of my chair. I hurried toward Leah, but she’d stopped and was looking past me toward Jake, seeming almost unsure. “Hey,” I said as I approached her. “How’s it going?”

  She blinked and turned to me. “Good,” she said. “It’s good. I was just—” She glanced at Jake again. “Is he your friend?”

  I swallowed. “Oh. Um, yeah, kind of.”

  Leah nodded, and when she didn’t say anything else, I added, “I’m just—helping him with some research—today.”

  She nodded again. I’d never seen her looking anything but relaxed, but right now, looked a little bit—lost. “Hey, how are you feeling today?” she asked suddenly.

  I opened my mouth, thrown off by the abrupt switch, thinking I should be asking her that question. “Oh,” I said. “I’m good.”

  “Good.” She nodded and glanced at Jake again before saying, “Well, I’ll let you get back to your friend.” She smiled. “See ya.”

  “See ya,” I echoed as I watched her go.

  “Who’s your hot friend?” Jake asked as I returned to my seat.

  I rolled my eyes. “She’s too old for you,” I answered. “She goes to NAU.”

  He smiled. “Even better,” he said as he watched her disappear into the children’s section.

  “Don’t you have a girlfriend?” I asked, wrinkling my nose.

  “Yeah.” He looked at me. “What, I can’t think other girls are hot?” I just raised an eyebrow at him, and he looked back toward Leah. “Why doesn’t she just go to Cline?”

  I shrugged. “She’s in a children’s lit class. Maybe they don’t have many kids’ books at the campus library.”