Springback

by Jana Miller

  I pressed my hands into my eyes and then wiped at my wet face with the back of my hands, my breath still coming in gasps. I didn’t even know what to tell him. I gulped a breath. “What day is it?”

  He eyed me. “It’s—Monday. Did you rewind?”

  “Monday?” I looked around, disoriented. “So—two days? Three days?” I mumbled. I’d rewound over two days without even paying attention. And with that realization came the slam of a headache, this one a buzzing pain I assumed was from the damaged cords.

  “You rewound three days?” he asked.

  “I—I guess…I wasn’t paying attention…” I trailed off, trying to figure out how much I’d just erased for him.

  He took a long-suffering breath. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  I took a shaky breath, the energy draining from me as my panic subsided. “Um,” I began, looking around as I wiped my eyes. “Where are we going?”

  “We just left school,” he answered, still looking utterly confused. “You asked me for a ride—we’re going to pick up your sister.”

  I tried to focus on him and orient myself to the timeline. “So just a little more than two days,” I mumbled. Then I swallowed, realizing everything I’d rewound. Our crazy accidental rewind and getting grounded. Our argument that had ended in me telling him about the car accidents. Even Jake meeting Janie, which was going to happen right now. It was so much. So many moments with so many people that I could never get back. My thoughts wandered to eating lunch with Jake’s friends, making up with Leah at the library, baking cookies with Maya. Even with all the anxiety of the last few days, I found that the only part I was actually relieved to erase was being grounded.

  I pulled myself from those memories to the ones that had specifically to do with time manipulation—tracing backwards to what Jake had known two days ago, what we had learned since then.

  “So…you know about the amulet?” I began.

  Jake’s face went slack. “I was going to tell you—”

  I waved him off. “It’s fine. I was mad, but it was dumb.” At least we were skipping the part where I got all huffy about family rivalries and the amulet—though I couldn’t bring myself to be completely relieved about that. There had somehow been a lot wrapped up in those tough, awkward moments and tough conversations that I wished Jake and Leah could remember.

  “I’m just trying to figure out what I need to tell you,” I explained. “Where to start.”

  “Well…are you okay now?” he asked. “Should we go get your sister or do you need a minute?”

  I closed my eyes and rested my head against the seat. “We should go get her. I’ll explain after we drop her off.”

  He started driving again, and to avoid thinking about what had just happened at Leah’s house, I backed up to something else. “Did Leah tell you that she’s supposed to practice stopping time yet?” I asked.

  “Stopping time? No.”

  “Okay, maybe that’s tonight. Or tomorrow. I’m not sure. But Leah’s mom”—I couldn’t even say her name—“told her to practice stopping time, and that they’re going to do something important,” I began, trying not to slur my words through the pain and exhaustion and vertigo. “So you and I tried it, but we accidentally rewound together.” I didn’t have time to fully explain had happened before we pulled over to pick up Janie.

  Janie stared at us, and it took a nudge from Jake for me to realize this hadn’t happened for her yet. I rolled down my window. “Hey, get in. Jake’s giving us a ride home.”

  I ignored Janie’s teasing “Hi-i-i, Jake,” and his matching response, and after another minute of my continued silence, Janie leaned forward and asked, “Do you have a migraine?”

  I’d almost forgotten that I did have a migraine forming. I nodded slowly, and Janie knew not to bug me the rest of the ride, though I registered that Jake kept her entertained.

  “I’ll be in in a few minutes,” I told Janie when she got out, not even looking to see what she would think of that.

  Exhaustion had taken the place of my panic, and after I’d taken some more painkillers—wondering just how much ibuprofen my body could handle before I’d have lasting damage to my stomach, and cursing the Ring of Time and Lillian for yet another horrible side effect—I continued my recap for Jake in a monotone. I told him about our argument and about Janie’s accidents. I told him that was why I had been so adamant about no big changes, and he seemed to get it.

  I told him about the Emerald Tablet, about Apollonius, about the journals in Scottsdale.

  But even after rehashing all of that, I could barely force the words out as I described driving to Leah’s house, knocking on the door, and seeing Lillian’s face.

  “I recognized her.”

  Jake’s face was absolutely still as I turned to him and croaked out the words.

  “She’s the one who hit my sister with her car.”

  * * *

  “Man,” Jake said for the third time.

  “Yeah.”

  “Man.” He couldn’t seem to get past that point, even though he’d already gone through the same questions and accusations and disbelief as I had—though without the emotional breakdown and panic attack.

  “Why would she do that?” he finally asked. “I mean, if she wasn’t trying to kill you or Janie, why would she do something so dangerous? What was the point?”

  I tried to tamp down the anger that question brought up in me so I could answer rationally. “She made it so I had to let it happen,” I said. “The only reason I can think of is that she wanted me to be…afraid of using my power.” And it had worked. “She wants to control who can do it.”

  Jake shook his head. “Are you kidding me?” he said, disgusted. “What a—” He blew out his breath, unable to find the words.

  “I am so tired of this,” I mumbled, leaning my head back and closing my eyes.

  “Of rewinding?” Jake asked quietly.

  “Of all of it.” I swallowed. “Of having a useless ability for no reason.”

  “You really think it’s useless?” he asked after a minute. I was surprised by the disappointment in his voice and looked at him. “I guess I was kind of hoping there was a good reason for it,” he admitted.

  “Sure there is,” I said bitterly, staring straight ahead. “Our ancestors were dumb and passed on an unnatural ‘gift’.”

  “There has to be a real reason.”

  “Why?” I answered in a flat voice. “Why does there have to be? Maybe we’re just freaks with no purpose.” My voice was so tainted by cynicism that I almost didn’t recognize it as my own. “Or maybe the powers that be are just messing with us. Punishing us for—” I stopped abruptly and turned away. “For whatever.”

  “Punishing us?” He paused. “For what?” I swallowed and gazed unseeing out my window. His voice was different when he spoke again. “Do you think you’re…being punished?”

  I just shook my head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “You think you got your ability to rewind because of something you did wrong?” he asked slowly.

  I pressed my lips together.

  Jake’s attempts to start a question drew my attention, and when I turned back to him he was looking at me intently. “What happened when you were nine, Chloe?”

  My breathing hitched, his question too perceptive.

  “That’s when you got your ability, right?” I nodded reluctantly, and after a pause he asked, “What happened that triggered it?”

  I looked at him for a long moment and swallowed my tears back. “Max,” I finally said. “My brother.” I took a stuttering breath. “He—he was three.” I looked away before I made myself say it. “He drowned at Lake Powell.”

  He didn’t respond and I didn’t look at him, not wanting to see the sympathy or shock that I knew would be there. But after everything, he probably deserved to know.

  “We went with some family friends who had a houseboat,” I continued. “I was—I was playing with him on the beach…I was
in charge of him.” I stared off, remembering the sand, the houseboat on the blue water, the red cliffs surrounding parts of the lake. I could feel Jake’s steady gaze on me. “I brought him back to my mom, but…I guess she didn’t hear him come in, or he didn’t go to her, or…I don’t know, but she didn’t realize I had passed him off to her.”

  I felt Jake’s gaze on me. “Then…nobody could find him.” I stared unblinking as a tear escaped my eye. “Nobody could find him.” I didn’t want to tell him the rest, about when they did find him, about the panic and screams, about the long wait followed by sirens and the ambulance.

  I waited for a moment for the memories to fade. “I got my ability four days later,” I said eventually. “The day of the funeral. I think it’s because…because I wanted to go back so bad. I knew the exact moment I would go back and redo—the exact moment.” I could still picture it. “When I took him back inside the houseboat and told Max to go to Mom, I should have gone with him. I should have said, ‘Mom, here’s Max,’ and made sure she heard me and saw him and knew I was leaving. Instead I just left. I thought he was going to her.” I shook my head. “I just left him.”

  I took a shuddering breath and Jake leaned forward into my line of sight so I would look at him. “Chloe.” I knew what he was going to say, but I let him. “You don’t think it was your fault, do you?”

  Of course I did. Of course it was my fault. And I’d known he was going to say it, but hearing the words out loud…I had never said them out loud. Even though my parents had known I blamed myself when it first happened, they thought they’d convinced me otherwise. Or that the psychologist had done some good. But of course they hadn’t. They couldn’t make it not my fault.

  They couldn’t rewind time.

  But I could.

  And I still couldn’t make it not my fault—no matter how hard I’d pushed and how many migraines I’d given myself trying to go back far enough.

  Jake didn’t try to convince me it wasn’t my fault. He didn’t say he was sorry. He just sat quietly for a long time.

  Eventually he cleared his throat. “I’ve never—had someone close to me die,” he began, “but I know that feeling…the guilt. Wanting to go back.” I turned and raised my eyebrows at him in question. He wasn’t looking at me. “I think maybe that’s what—I don’t know—triggered my powers?”

  “The guilt?”

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  I waited for him to explain, to tell me what he’d done that had caused that kind of desperate desire to change the past, but he didn’t say anything else. I was so emotionally drained that I didn’t see any reason to press the issue. He would tell me eventually.

  “So…” I said, “our abilities were triggered by really wanting to go back in time. By being—desperate enough.” I looked to him and he nodded. My eyebrows came together in confusion. “But doesn’t everyone have regrets like that? Don’t most people have a moment in time they wish they could go back and fix?”

  “Maybe,” Jake responded. “But I had already been dreaming about the strands before it happened. The ability was waiting to come out.”

  I nodded slowly. “We really must have inherited it.” A realization struck me. “Leah and her mom didn’t know it could be inherited, did they? They thought it had to be taught. That’s why they didn’t keep track of my family before.”

  “Yeah.” Jake’s voice was laced with irritation. “Nobody was threatening Lillian’s empire before you.”

  I groaned. “I have zero interest in threatening anything Lillian is doing. At least I didn’t—until she came after me and my sister. And ruined the freaking Ring of Time.” I shook my head. “What is wrong with her?”

  “You don’t think Leah knows about what her mom did, do you?” Jake asked suddenly. “I mean, Leah’s trying to fix stuff. She wants to help us…”

  I didn’t want to go back to not trusting Leah. I wanted to go back to being her friend; that’s what had felt right. But this was too huge to ignore—too important to not wonder if Leah had really been that naive about her mom. “She’s not technically helping us,” I mumbled. “She’s the one who needs our help.”

  “But that doesn’t necessarily mean she knew,” he pointed out.

  “I know,” I said with a sigh. “And I want to trust her. I mean, I do trust her. I didn’t for a while, but…” I trailed off, the uncertainty eating at me.

  Jake nodded. “I get it. But we have to remember, she’s grown up believing that her mom’s way is just how things are. She’s been told that her family is responsible for time manipulation, like they’re some sort of guardians. Plus, someone was killed all those years ago in her family—or, our family—and they’ve always blamed yours. It’s been passed down as truth.”

  “So…does that mean we should trust her because it’s not her fault…or that we shouldn’t because she’s been brainwashed?”

  Jake scrubbed at his face. “Let’s find out if Leah knew. About her mom and Janie.”

  I gave him a sidelong glance. “How?”

  He shrugged. “Ask her?”

  * * *

  My migraine fully set in that evening, and when I didn’t get out of bed the next morning, my mom checked on me and, as usual, brought my prescription. I gratefully took it and let sleep claim me again.

  I didn’t fully wake up until Jake texted me after school, to check on me and to tell me that the strands, once again, were worse. He said they were flickering off for longer periods of time, and that he could hardly rewind at all.

  Chloe: Is it because of me?

  Jake: What do you mean?

  I squinted at the phone.

  Chloe: My big rewind. Do you think it made it worse?

  It took him a minute to respond.

  Jake: I don’t know, I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe.

  Chloe: Our messed-up rewind made it worse the other night.

  Jake: You must have rewound over that, because I have no idea what you’re talking about.

  When I went downstairs, my mom showed me the family tree she’d shown me in the original timeline, and I had her print it out for me again, shoving the pages in my backpack so I could show Jake the next time I saw him.

  * * *

  It wasn’t until the next morning that I realized that Jake’s hypothesis—that rewinding over Lillian’s breaking of the Ring might fix it—was definitely wrong. My two-day rewind had reversed our epic stopping-time-turned-accidental-rewind fail, but it hadn’t put the cords back to how they’d been before that. Instead, it had made them even worse.

  And it wasn’t until Wednesday between classes, when I tried to explain all of that to Jake, that I realized he’d never even made that hypothesis in this timeline. He didn’t even remember our epic fail, so I’d just confused him for no reason.

  Of course, being Jake, he still had to figure it out and try to come up with another solution anyway. “So rewinding over Lillian’s whatever-she-did won’t help,” he summarized. “Even if we could get back that far.”

  “Right. Any rewinding we do now will only make it worse.”

  Jake groaned. “So even if we could go all the way back to when she found the journal and stop her from even trying it at all—”

  “No use,” I confirmed, shaking my head. “The damage would still be done, and we’d make it worse.”

  He actually growled a little before blowing out a breath and shaking it off. “Okay. Well, back to plan A. Or—whatever plan it is.”

  “Which plan is that?”

  “Get Melvin’s journal and find out how to fix the Ring. Find the amulet, steal it from Lillian,” he summarized.

  This time I didn’t argue with the impossible-sounding plan. I just braced myself and nodded.

  “But first”—he dipped his chin and pinned me with a look—“Leah.”

  I pushed down the nerves and nodded again.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Maya didn’t seem as patient with me at lunch that day as usual. She sighed when I ask
ed her to repeat herself a second time. “What’s with you today?” she finally asked. “I know you had a bad migraine yesterday, but…you seem extra spacey.”

  “Do I?” I asked. “Sorry. My headache isn’t totally gone, and…I don’t know, I guess I’m kind of distracted.”

  “By…?”

  I was surprised at all the questions. Usually Maya was so understanding about my weirdness. “I don’t know,” I stammered. “By…everything, I guess. School stuff and…” rewinding stuff and Jake and Leah and the Ring of Time…

  “And Jake?” she asked pointedly.

  Alarmed, I glanced over at Nikki and Jordyn, but as usual they were having their own conversation. “What? No. What do you mean?”

  I was sure I’d rewound my text-argument with Jake when I was at her house. What else could she be talking about?

  “Seems like you’re hanging out with him a lot lately,” she said. “I saw you talking to him between classes the other day, and I know you’ve been texting him. But you haven’t said anything about him.”

  “Yes I did,” I said, my voice getting higher. “I told you we’re friends, didn’t I?”

  “Friends,” she repeated drily.

  “I—” I shrugged. “Yeah, friends. What else do you want me to say?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know, it just seems like there’s a lot you aren’t telling me.”

  I picked at my sandwich. You have no idea.

  “We—we kind of have a lot in common,” I confessed, trying to be honest without seeming too mysterious. “He gets migraines a lot like I do. Sometimes even at the same time.”

  From the look on her face, that was one of the weirder things I could have told her, but she nodded. “Okay,” she said. After a pause she added, “I just—it seems like you and I haven’t hung out much lately. Like you’re ditching me for him.” She seemed embarrassed just saying it, so I leaned in to her shoulder.

  “What!?” I said. “No way. I would never ditch you for a guy. Hey, let’s go to your house and make cookies for your mom tomorrow, okay?”