by Jana Miller
“Hm.” He nodded slowly.
“Anyway,” I said pointedly, “what was your question?”
He pulled his eyes back toward me, almost shaking himself, like he was trying to remember life before Leah. “Oh yeah,” he said after a second. “Can you only repeat something once?”
“Like—one period of time?”
“I mean, after I rewind, the strands stop glowing. They don’t work for a while. So I can only repeat something once, right?”
“Oh! No, not exactly. You can repeat it again, but it has to be from a point farther along the timeline than the first rewind. Here—do you have some paper?”
He opened his backpack and got out a notebook and pen for me, and I drew a line across a page. Then I traced from left to right along the line. “So I’m going along on my original timeline, and I rewind from here”—I marked a point with an X and then reversed my tracing —“to here.” I marked another point, to the left of the first. “The time between these is my repeat, and I can’t manipulate time during it.” I scribbled over the segment on the timeline. “But once I get past this rewind point,” I explained, tracing past the original X, “I can rewind again. Once it resets, I can go back as far as I want again. Well, as far as I can. Physically.”
He looked up at me. “How far back can you go?”
I hesitated only briefly. “Three days,” I answered, looking up at him.
His eyes got huge. “Three days!? Shut up!” He pressed his hands into the sides of his head and then pushed his hair back. “I can only do a few hours! How long did it take you to get that far?”
I smiled wryly. “About three years.”
“Oh.” He dropped his hands, visibly disappointed, but then leaned forward again. “Okay, keep going.”
I looked down at my drawing. “Since you can’t rewind in a repeat, it’s better to overshoot when you rewind than to not go back far enough. Otherwise you have to wait until the repeat is done and try again, this time going back farther. And you’ll already have the headache.”
He nodded. “Got it.”
I looked up at the clock. “I need to get back to work,” I said, standing up.
“But wait,” he said as he followed me. “Sometimes the cords come back to life after a jolt.”
I looked back at him. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t think it always lasts for the whole repeat. There have been a couple times when I feel the vertigo jolt, like a while after I rewound, and then I check the cords and they’re humming again.”
I thought for a moment. “I don’t think I’ve ever checked that,” I said. “When I was younger, I thought there were times when they came back on partway through my repeat, but…I don’t know, it was never consistent.” I got a cart of books and he walked back with me to the nonfiction section.
“So here’s what I’ve been wondering,” he said as he pulled a couple books off of my cart. “When we rewind time, do we rewind . . . the whole world?”
“Like, are there unsuspecting Japanese people and . . . Eskimos and fish and . . . plants that get rewound too?”
He snorted. “I hadn’t thought about plants or—okay, or any of those things—but, yeah. Do we control time for everyone? The whole earth? Or”—his voice cracked slightly—“more than the whole earth?”
Like the entire universe? I grimaced. “Kind of too much to think about, huh?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Well,” I responded, taking a deep breath, “all I know is that the clock goes backwards when I rewind. I’ve watched it. And I also know that the time it is here in Arizona is the same time relative to the rest of the country and the rest of the world as it always is, no matter how many times or how far back I rewind. So as far as I can tell—yes.” I felt the weight of saying it out loud. “We rewind time for the whole world.”
Jake let out a long, slow breath through his mouth. “Okay,” he said with a nod. “That’s kind of what I thought.” He paused. “And now you really think there’s something wrong with…time itself?”
I bit my lip. “That’s kind of what I’m afraid of,” I answered slowly. I fidgeted with a book before admitting, “And I’m wondering if maybe I should stop rewinding.”
“What?” Jake blurted. “No way.” He shook his head emphatically. “We’ll figure it out. We just—”
“What if we make it worse, Jake?” I whispered. “The cords are messed up. What if something serious happens to them?”
He froze momentarily, mouth open, then swallowed. “Well—yeah, they’ve been weird for a couple days, but . . .” He trailed off and I looked at him expectantly. But what? He was clearly at a loss, though, looking around, starting to form words a couple of times but then closing his mouth again.
“What if it’s unstable?” I pressed. “It could actually be dangerous.”
He sighed then looked at me resolutely. “We’ll figure it out. I’ll work on it.” And he walked back to the computers. Apparently, internet research was his version of working on it.
I continued shelving, but my stomach was in knots as I mulled over the idea that there could be something wrong with the strands—with time itself. And then there was the fact that all these years, there had been someone else rewinding. Maybe even more than one person. I didn’t know how to feel about it. In a way it made me feel like I wasn’t quite so alone, but in another way, it scared me. What if there were people out there who rewound for selfish—or even evil—purposes? Like…rewinding bad guys? I imagined an evil mob boss who tortured people and then rewound, keeping the information he gathered but never getting caught since even his victims wouldn’t remember. I shuddered at how quickly my thoughts had turned morbid.
I wondered if there was some way to figure out where the other jolts were coming from. Jake and I had felt each other’s rewinds, but the other jolts had always been so subtle. Did that mean that the other rewinders were far away? Or that they didn’t go back as far, or were better at it? And what about that one huge jolt? I shook my head. Too many questions.
Chapter Six
I was so lost in thought I didn’t notice Leah approaching me until she spoke. “Hey,” she said quietly. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Sure,” I answered, not sure why she would ask permission.
“Can we sit down?” she asked.
“Oh—” I looked over to the desks she’d indicated. “Um, yeah.”
She took a deep breath once we’d taken chairs across from each other at the desk. “Listen,” she began. “Normally, I would ease into this, but I’m just”—she shook her head a little and I noticed that her normally relaxed demeanor still hadn’t returned; she looked tired and strained. “I don’t have the patience for it this time. I need your help.” She hesitated a moment and then dropped both her hands flat onto the desk and looked straight at me. “I can rewind time. I see glowing cords, and when I pull on them, I can make time go backwards.”
What? My breathing stopped.
“And,” she added slowly, “I know you can do it, too.”
I tried to swallow, but my mouth was dry. How did she know? “What—” My mind was racing with questions, but something didn’t feel right. She was telling me this just hours after I’d told Jake. What were the odds? What was going on?
“What makes you think that?” I finally got out.
“Actually, we’ve known for a while,” she admitted, rubbing her face with a hand in a wrung-out sort of gesture. “But I just—”
I didn’t think. I grabbed the time strands and yanked.
I wasn’t even sure why I was rewinding at first; it was just instinct.
I was a little more prepared for the buzz of tiny shocks the strands gave me this time, though I still had a hard time holding on to them. I didn’t know what was going on with Leah, but she’d just dropped a major bomb on me, and something about it felt wrong. This was too much of a coincidence, and there was something else.
No wonder she’d seemed off when I�
��d tried to talk to her earlier. She hadn’t wanted to talk to me in front of Jake.
I let my time at the library rewind as I tried to pinpoint what had triggered the instinct to rewind. All I knew was that rewinding would assure me that I would remember the conversation, and she wouldn’t. Because if I didn’t—and if she really could rewind—then she could erase anything she said to me and I’d never know.
When she’d said, “Actually, we’ve known for a while,” who else was included in “we,” and how had they found out? And why hadn’t she talked to me about it sooner? Or wait—maybe she had, because she’d said something else that had raised alarm bells for me too. “Normally I would ease into this.” So this was something she did “normally,” like on a regular basis? I was forming a really creepy mental picture of some covert government agency experimenting on people like me. Using us. It was as bad as the mob-boss scenario. Apparently I had a very active imagination.
Or maybe she was actually a scout for some time manipulation academy. Like in every fantasy book ever. And they’d finally found me so they could take me to be with my own kind, to learn the ways . . .
And then I realized she’d also said something about “this time.” As in, she’d done this other times. And if she’d told me before, she must have rewound it. Had I said something wrong the other times? Not been worthy to enter the world of rewinders?
How many times had we had this conversation? Part of me wished I’d given her longer—waited to see what she wanted from me or what she might tell me before I rewound, but that would have given her the opportunity to rewind the conversation herself, and I wanted to keep at least this memory.
I focused on my rewind. I was purposely going back farther than necessary, knowing that Leah—and maybe others—would feel the jolt when I let go. I couldn’t have that happen in the library or soon before, because she might connect it to the conversation she planned on having with me and—
And what? I didn’t even know what I suspected; I just didn’t like the idea of her knowing things about me—taking them from me and not letting me remember.
While I wanted my jolt to be as far back as possible to avoid Leah getting suspicious, I also really didn’t want to redo telling Jake in the first place, so I let go before creative writing started. I hung out in the bathroom for a few minutes between classes to let the worst of the vertigo pass, and once the headache took its place, I inconspicuously swallowed some ibuprofen before wandering into creative writing late.
* * *
Jake looked up when I came in, and the confusion in his face reminded me that he would have felt my jolt just now. I sat down and worked backwards in my memory to figure out what he would have been expecting. This morning I’d proven to him that I could rewind, then he’d gotten excited and said we’d talk later—in class. So that was it; he probably thought I was avoiding talking to him. Which I actually had the first time. It felt like a long time ago.
Resting my head in my hands, I tried to focus on Leah, but I couldn’t come up with much by way of a theory. Had she been planning on asking me questions or telling me something? Hadn’t she said she needed my help? She would show up at the library again, and I needed to have a plan: either let her talk to me again, or avoid her and…and what? Spy on her?
I still bolted out of the classroom when the bell rang, but this time when Jake offered me a ride I just accepted, telling him I was actually going to the library and that he could come and bug me there.
“Bug you?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
My cheeks heated as I realized I was several hours ahead of him mentally. I remembered spending a lot more time with him than he remembered spending with me.
I cleared my throat. “Uh, I rewound a few hours. Sorry.”
“What? When?” he asked, perking up.
“Um, I got to about four o’clock this afternoon, and then I rewound to just before creative writing. Did you feel it?”
“Yes!” He was as excited as he had been the first time he’d figured out the vertigo jolts. “So that dizzy thing happens when someone else rewinds?”
“Yeah.” I didn’t want to tell him he’d been the one to figure that out. “I’ll have to explain some stuff to you. But you know how you feel other little jolts sometimes?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, I’ve been feeling your vertigo jolts for two months, but I also feel the smaller ones.” I let that sink in for a second and could tell by his expression when it clicked for him.
“So there are other rewinders too.”
I explained to him about Leah as we got into his car and he started it, but he didn’t pull out of the parking lot yet as we discussed what this could mean.
I asked Jake all the unanswerable questions I’d been asking myself. I wished I had pumped her for more information, but then she may have gotten suspicious and beat me to the rewind. I wondered if she knew about Jake. He didn’t know her, but…could she know him?
“Well,” Jake said after I’d dumped all my questions on him, “only one way to find out.” He pulled out of the parking space and I stared at him until he explained, “You have to talk to her. Ask her.”
I swallowed. “But—but what if she’s not…on our side?”
He glanced at me before turning out of the parking lot. “Our side? Are there sides I should know about?”
“I don’t know,” I muttered. I’d started imagining evil time manipulators and crazy cults, and I was regretting never having dug deeper into research about time manipulation. I had no idea if there were sides; I just knew this was weird. Maybe there was no way to prove it, but I was sure Leah had rewound me before. What could we have said in previous conversations that she didn’t want me to remember?
“Well, either way, you need to talk to her,” he said.
I sighed. “I know. But if something goes wrong, or it seems like she’s going to…do something, you’ll have to rewind.”
“Why me? I can’t go back as far as you can. And I won’t even be part of the conversation.”
“I can’t do it because I’m still in my repeat, so unless it’s later than the point where I went back from, I can’t rewind again.”
“Wait, what?”
I realized I’d rewound over the first time I’d explained this to him. “I won’t be able to access the cords again until—”
Suddenly, I was hit with a wave of vertigo as Jake let go of the steering wheel and then grabbed it again, swerving as he pulled over abruptly. He braked so hard I lurched forward and was snapped back by my seatbelt.
“Sorry!” he exclaimed wildly. “Sorry, that was really bad.”
I pressed my hand to the side of my head, a dizzy headache pounding against my temples. Too many rewinds today. “What happened? You rewound? What—?”
He pressed his forehead against the steering wheel, obviously far dizzier than I was. “I panicked. She said you’re not supposed to be able to do it.”
“Supposed to do what? Who—Leah said that?” This was trippy to say the least. It was like he’d gone forward in time without me, even though I knew he’d just done the same thing I had done today; I just didn’t remember it.
He lifted his head, eyes closed, and cradled the sides of his head with his hands. “Yeah. She said nobody but her family is supposed to be able to manipulate time—”
“Her family?” There was a whole family of rewinders I’d never known about?
“Actually, she said something about two families, and how only her family is supposed to do it because they were chosen.” He squeezed his eyes tighter. “Man, those cords really have a kick now. This is way worse than usual.”
“Wait, chosen?”
“For the gift.”
“Leah’s family was chosen for the gift? Like, the gift to rewind?”
“She called it pulling time, but yeah.”
I closed my eyes, thinking. “How can anyone be chosen? Wouldn’t just having the ability make us chosen?”
Jake
just laid his head back against the headrest and raised his hands and shoulders in a slow-motion kind of shrug.
“Okay. Well, what else did she say?”
Jake rested his head against the headrest and opened his eyes. “That she needs your help.”
My eyebrows shot up. “My help with what?” She didn’t think I had the right to rewind, but she wanted me to help her with something?
He closed his eyes again. “Can we go somewhere else to talk? The sun is kind of…bright.”
I looked around. We were pulled over in front of an old house a couple of blocks from the library. I hesitated. I was supposed to be there soon, but I wasn’t ready to talk to Leah again. “Okay, but you have to tell me exactly what she said.”
“Deal.”
* * *
After I called the volunteer supervisor to let her know I couldn’t make it, Jake suggested we go to his house to try to figure things out. I didn’t want to—I barely knew him—but we couldn’t go to mine since I was supposed to be at the library, and everywhere else felt too public.
When we got to his apartment, I was surprised to see a petite blonde woman in scrubs on her hands and knees in front of the couch, pulling a shoe out from under it. “Hey!” she said brightly, looking up as we came in. Then she was rushing around, grabbing keys and a purse—into which she dropped her shoe before she seemed to realize what she was doing.
“You late?” Jake asked, squinting at the whirlwind who was obviously his mom as she pulled the shoe out and stuck it under her arm.
“When am I not?” she exclaimed, grabbing a bagel and a water bottle from the counter.
“Mom, this is Chloe,” Jake said as he watched her in amusement, leaning against the wall.
“Hi, Chloe!”
“And you still haven’t put your shoe on.”
“What?” she gave an exasperated sigh as she looked at her full hands, obviously not noticing the strain of his voice from his headache. She rolled her eyes at herself. “Oh, I’ll just put it on in the car. Bye!” And she breezed past me with a smile, sticking the bagel in her mouth and reaching to open the door, but taking it back out—without opening the door—to tell me, “Oh, and I’m Allison. It was nice to meet you!”
