Springback

by Jana Miller

  “No, I just came back.” I was surprised at the seriousness in his voice. “Can you come outside?”

  “Um…yeah.” Between Janie’s teasing and my mom’s tendency toward giddiness any time I even mentioned a boy, I definitely didn’t want him staying here. “Actually, meet me at the trail around the corner. I’ll just tell my mom I’m going on a bike ride.”

  “Okay.”

  Jake was standing with his back against his car, arms folded, when I got to the trailhead, and he looked—guilty. Or nervous.

  I eyed him curiously as I got off of my bike, noticing the tension coming off of him. “What’s up?” I asked.

  He gestured toward the trail and pushed away from the car before shoving his hands in his pockets, going up briefly on his toes.

  I looked around for something to do with my bike but ended up just walking it, not wanting to leave it. I cast several awkward glances his way, waiting for him to explain himself as we walked side by side for almost a full minute in silence.

  He started abruptly. “Leah called me.”

  My eyebrows pulled up mildly. “Okay…?”

  “Since we’re, like…related.”

  He paused and I glanced at him. And…?

  “She called on Saturday night to tell me some more stuff.”

  I furrowed my eyebrows. “Just you?”

  “Yeah.”

  My chest felt tight, partly from knowing that Leah was keeping things from me again, but mostly because Jake had had two days to tell me this. “Why?”

  “I guess because”—he held up his hands to show his confusion—“I’m a member of the Stoneman family and you’re not?”

  I huffed and halfway rolled my eyes. I hadn’t thought Leah really bought in to that family rivalry stuff. “But you’re telling me anyway?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve known you longer. Guess my ‘family loyalty’ isn’t…well, it just isn’t. Why would I be loyal to them?”

  I nodded, letting out the breath I’d been holding on to. “So what did she tell you?”

  He raised his eyebrows, his eyes lighting up for a moment. “Leah’s family has an amulet that's been passed down for years. Generations. They don't know how old it is, and Leah has never actually seen it, but it's what allows us to manipulate time."

  "An—amulet?" I repeated. “Isn’t that like a little piece of jewelry or something?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. And Grandpa Gene used to have it. He described it in his journal. It was an emerald pendant with copper designs.” He pulled out a scrap of paper from his pocket. “I drew this when she described it to me.” It was a spiral inside a square with an X going through the whole thing. “In the journal he talks about it being the key to entering the Ring of Time.”

  I studied it for a moment, wishing it looked familiar so we could have something to go on. “So…the amulet is kind of what we were imagining the ‘ring’ would be when you first heard her say it. It controls everything.”

  “Yes! Exactly!” Something about Jake’s excitement made me nervous. “In the Stoneman family, one person in each generation is chosen to learn the gift of rewinding. Leah, her mom, her grandpa, our great-grandma…back I don't know how many generations. But they also shared the ability with your family. I don't know how it started—Leah thinks someone in her family—our family—taught someone in yours. But then the accident happened, back in the twenties.”

  And here we were again. The accident that ruined everything. “Leah said she didn’t know much about that,” I said, even though I was getting the distinct impression that now he knew all about it.

  “She knows more than she told us at first. She said that two kids from my family and two kids from your family went out into the woods one day—nobody knows what they were doing exactly, but it had to do with manipulating time—but something went wrong, and the Stoneman girl died.” He seemed a little reluctant to continue. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I just waited. “Leah told me that Lillian has always said it was your family's fault, because they weren't careful with the gift. They taught all their kids to rewind, even though the Stonemans warned them it wasn't safe to have so many time manipulators active at once."

  We were already walking at a slow pace, but as I tried to digest this information, feeling ashamed and offended all at once on my family’s behalf, my feet barely moved. “What’s unsafe about it?” I asked, glancing at him.

  “I don’t know,” he answered, face thoughtful. “Maybe their rewinds overlapped in weird ways? Maybe…”

  “Maybe they rewound each other so much it got confusing or made people mad,” I suggested.

  “I guess there could be all sorts of problems,” he agreed.

  I slowed to a stop, staring at the dirt path in front of me, feeling sort of small and guilty. Finally I asked, "Do…do you think it was my family's fault?"

  He shook his head a little, lifting his hands in a helpless gesture. "I have no idea. There's really no way of knowing. I don't really think it matters, though. It was almost a century ago. But that's why Lillian thinks we should be the only ones pulling—your family was supposedly irresponsible with it.”

  "Did your family—make mine stop?" I felt like I'd just found out I was the daughter of a criminal.

  He shook his head. "I guess it was a mutual decision. A big two-family meeting or something."

  That was slightly reassuring, but I still felt somehow inferior to Jake and Leah and their perfect Stoneman ancestry. Or maybe I was just afraid that they saw me as inferior. Either way, it was like an invisible line had been drawn.

  I bit my lower lip, trying to focus on the information instead of on my self-consciousness. “Well, that gives us somewhere to start, right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, like Leah said—we need to learn more about the accident. Maybe it was like what happened to Gene when he tried to enter the Ring. Or like what Lillian did last week. And we need to learn more about the amulet, what it does, who has it—”

  “Well, Lillian must have it,” Jake interrupted. “How else could she enter the Ring?”

  I stopped walking and stared at him. “Did Leah tell you they have it?”

  “Well, no, but Lillian tried something, so don’t you think she has it?” He plowed on when I didn’t answer. “I think we need to get the amulet from Lillian so we can fix the Ring.”

  “What makes you think we can fix the Ring if we get it? We have no idea how to use it.”

  “That’s why we’re also trying to get more information,” he insisted. “We can figure things out as we go along. But we can’t do anything without the amulet, so that’s gotta be our first priority. I think we should search their house for it.”

  Anxiety squeezed my chest. “Search their house?” I repeated. “What, like sneak in?”

  He pulled back. “What? No. Leah will let us in. She can search with us, if she hasn’t already.”

  I bit my lip, the risks and the unknowns tumbling in my gut. I shook my head. “It’s not like she’s just going to have the amulet lying around where anybody can find it.”

  Jake groaned. “This isn’t the only option, Chloe. I’m totally open to other ideas. What do you want to do? How could we find it?”

  “I don’t know. You do what you want—you can search with Leah. I’ll—I’ll check my family stuff. I’ll see if Melvin was in my family.”

  He eyed me. “Okay,” he said. “But…you do know that you’ll eventually need to take some risks, right?”

  I scowled. He seemed to have very different plans than I did. “Risks? Why?” What did he expect this to turn into—some superhero movie? “Jake, this isn’t even my problem to fix. They’re the ones—”

  “Don’t you want to do things with this, Chloe?” he suddenly asked, turning fully toward me, his hands rising almost imploringly. “Use your ability for something worthwhile?” My eyes widened at the implied accusation as he studied my face. “Why are you so scared of everything?” He said it like I was
a puzzle he was trying to solve, but that didn’t make it feel like less of slap in the face.

  I tried to blink away my hurt as he turned away for a moment, pushing his hands through his hair in frustration.

  “I—” I wasn’t sure how to respond. I couldn’t claim not to be scared, but he wasn’t exactly inviting any emotional sharing at the moment.

  “And who put you in charge, anyway?” he added suddenly, turning back to me. “‘No big changes’.” He even used air quotes. “Why do you get to make the rules?”

  I opened my mouth, shocked at his sudden change in tone and wondering how long he’d wanted to say these things, but no words would come out. He thought I didn’t want to do anything with my power? He thought I wasn’t taking any risks? “I don’t make rules, Jake. Just because I don’t jump off cliffs doesn’t mean I made up gravity. It’s already there; I just choose to respect it. Maybe you should talk to your family about making up rules.” I knew it wasn’t fair to turn it around on him, but it wasn’t fair for him to talk to me like that either. “Lillian’s the one who thinks she’s in charge of who can use the strands of time. And Leah’s the one deciding who gets to know what, when she’s the one asking for help from us.”

  He ran his hands through his hair in frustration again. “Why do you have to keep coming up with excuses? Why do you always want to run away from it?” He leaned forward, giving me a hard look. “If we can fix this, even if we can’t become Masters of Time, we’d be like superheroes, Chloe.” His intensity startled me so much I couldn’t even scoff at his superhero reference. Since when had he been considering becoming a Master of Time at all? “Haven’t you ever thought about all the good you could do?” I started shaking my head as he asked, “Why would you waste that?”

  “It doesn’t work,” I burst out, hurt that he would accuse me of wasting this amazing ability.

  “What doesn’t?”

  I leaned my bike against the trail’s plastic rail fence so I could fully face him. “I can’t fix tragedies.” My chest seized up as memories of trying so hard to go back far enough to save Max flooded my brain and I tried to push them away. “Even things that are my own fault.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “Not if they’re big enough,” I insisted.“I can only change little things. And I can only change what I can change. I’m not a secret agent or a superhero. Just because I can rewind time doesn’t mean I can—fly to Washington and stop an assassination or something. I’ve thought about this a lot, Jake. Yes, I do what I can, but I’m only one person, and I’m only sixteen. I can only go back a few days at the most, and I can only change my own actions.”

  “But one person can make a big difference,” he insisted.

  “Sure, if they’re in the right place at the right time.” My voice rose to match his intensity. “If they don’t have to convince other people to go along with their crazy predictions in order to make the change. If they find out in time to make a difference. If they don’t mess it up even more—”

  “But that’s not even what we’re trying to do. All we need to do is figure out how to fix the Ring, and then we could do so much more. Maybe you can’t do much on your own, but if we—”

  “Don’t you get it, Jake? We’re not Masters of Time. There are limitations on what we can do. On how far back we can rewind. On what we can tell people.” He tried to argue, but I talked over him. “And even if none of that were a problem, I really can’t prevent tragedies.”

  He folded his arms. “Just because you haven’t before doesn’t mean you can’t.”

  I sighed. “You’re not listening, Jake. I’m not saying that I won’t or that I haven’t tried. I’m saying that there are—forces at work”—I didn’t know how to describe the rules that seemed to control my ability—“something that stops me from making big changes.”

  He stared at me and I realized I was going to have to explain it. He had to understand if we were going to be able to do any good together. I sighed and shoved my hands in my pockets, leaning back against the fence.

  “A couple of years ago,” I began, “my sister was hit by a car.”

  He pulled back. “Janie?”

  I nodded slowly. “When she was in elementary school. She was crossing the street at her bus stop on the way home from school. She broke her leg and got a concussion. It was the first really big thing I tried to fix with my ability.” I had his full attention now, and I forged ahead, actually feeling relieved to finally have someone to tell. “She was late getting home that day, so when I heard the sirens from my house, I ran down the street to her bus stop. The driver who’d hit her had just kept going, but the bus driver was still there, and when he told me what had happened, I knew I could fix it. So I went back half an hour and met her at the bus stop. She was bugged, because she likes doing things on her own, and I had to grab her arm to stop her when this red car came speeding by, but I stopped her. She didn’t get hit.”

  I glanced at Jake, whose eyes lit up. “So it did work!”

  “It worked,” I acknowledged with a bit of a shrug and a nod. “She wasn’t hit—that day.”

  I paused.

  “But the next day, she was. Same time, same car. And it wasn’t just a broken bone and a concussion this time. She was paralyzed from the waist down. I waited to see how bad she was, and to see if the police found out anything about the driver. Maybe I could stop it some other way.” I clenched my jaw and stared at nothing as I saw her lying in the hospital bed, knowing I had made it worse. Jake didn’t say anything.

  “I shouldn’t have waited, because the police didn’t find out anything that day. So I tried again. I rewound—several hours this time—and I went to the bus stop. I tried to get her to wait until the red car passed. But Janie was mad. She thought I’d just come to baby her, like I was shoving it in her face that she hadn’t been careful enough the day before. She pulled away from me—and I followed her into the street to grab her, right as the car came around the corner.” I could still see it in my mind, in horrible, stomach-clenching slow motion: the red sedan coming for us, a flash of a woman’s face and dark hair behind the wheel. My voice screaming Janie’s name.

  My breath stopped as I remembered, and Jake’s hand on my arm prompted me to continue. “We were both hit. I was thrown to the side, but she was hit head-on since she’d gotten farther into the street than the other times.” Because of me. Just like with Max. A tear hit my hand and I reached up to wipe my eyes. I’d never told anybody about this before. “I’m pretty sure she was killed instantly. I hit my head when I fell, and I could barely open my eyes to see her body lying there.”

  I paused for so long, my mind stuck on the image, that Jake quietly asked, “What did you do?”

  I had almost forgotten he was there. I wiped at my face, embarrassed to be crying about something that had happened so long ago. “I decided to rewind both days. I was starting to black out, but I knew I couldn’t lose another sibling. I forced myself to concentrate and see the strands. But they were off.” I closed my eyes as I remembered that moment. “I was maybe fifteen minutes into my repeat, and I’d made it so much worse. But I couldn’t stay awake any longer. I blacked out knowing my sister was dead.”

  Jake let out a breath and I looked over to see that his face was slack, his eyes wide.

  “When I woke up, I was in the hospital, and my parents…” I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders. “I’m sure you can imagine,” I muttered.

  “You had to wait?” he asked quietly.

  I nodded. “Three hours.”

  He shook his head, eyebrows raised and pushed together. “Longest three hours of your life.”

  I nodded. “Luckily they had me on some sort of pain killers, so I tried to sleep the whole time so my parents wouldn’t come in and talk to me about it. I—I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle that.” I bit my lip. “The worst part was that I wasn’t sure—not a hundred percent—that I’d actually be able to save her. I didn’t know the rules about th
at yet.” I turned to him and took a shuddering breath. “So that’s why I care about the rules.”

  Jake swallowed and nodded. “But you did save her,” he reminded me.

  I nodded. “I did. My repeat ended two hours after I woke up, and then I made myself wait until I was sure I could do it—go back the full two days. Because two days is hard.”

  “Well yeah,” Jake said. “I can’t even do half a day without landing in bed with a migraine.”

  “But I did it,” I said. “I went back two days, and—I let her get hit. Let her get the broken leg and concussion.” I let out a huff of something between a chuckle and a sob, rolling my eyes to the sky to stop more tears from spilling. “I let her get hit by a car. I knew it was coming. I knew I could stop it.” I was now staring past Jake, letting the bitterness come in a wave. “But I knew that stopping it would make it worse, so I sat on the couch, and I watched the clock. Until I heard the sirens.” I remembered sitting there, alternating between sitting on my hands and pressing them to my cheeks as I’d waited. “I can rewind time, and I just sat there. I let my sister get hit by a car.” I shifted my gaze to his face, somehow satisfied at the horror I saw there. “So I learned my lesson. Crappy things happen, and we have to let them. This isn’t a superpower. It’s a curse. A cruel trick.”

  Jake slowly opened his mouth, taking a breath and then holding it like he was waiting for the words to come to him. I straightened up, away from the fence, and put my hands on my bike’s handlebars.

  “Chloe—”

  “So now you know,” I said as I turned my bike around and swung a leg over. “Now you know why I have my dumb rules.” I thought about Leah. “And why I’m a little hesitant to help someone mess with any of it, especially someone who won’t even tell me the whole truth.”

  His face looked pained as reached for me. “Chloe—”

  “Don’t,” I interrupted, shaking my head as I set a foot on one pedal. “It’s fine. I should go.”

  I could tell he wanted to say more, but he pushed his lips together and nodded.