by Jana Miller
I was pretty sure Maya had been telling me something before interrupting herself with that question. I just shrugged, because I’d been asking myself the same question.
“What did you do this weekend?” she asked.
“Umm…” I snuck into a crazy woman’s office. I went to hippie stores. I couldn’t think of anything I’d done that weekend that I could actually tell her about. I told Janie I can rewind time. I met Jake’s dad. Wait, that sounded normal enough. “I met Jake’s dad,” I mumbled.
When Maya didn’t respond, I looked at her and saw she was staring at me like I’d just told her I’d finally grown my unicorn horn. “What?”
She chewed slowly. “You…met Jake’s dad?”
“Yeah…” I answered just as slowly. “He doesn’t live here—he came to visit…”
“Huh.” She stuck her tongue into her lower lip, then took a drink. “Like…all weekend?”
I scowled. “What?”
“You were meeting him all weekend?”
Her tone startled me. “No.”
“Like…when I invited you to go to a movie, or when I asked if you could come help me watch my brothers because my mom was in premature labor?”
My eyes widened, not only because I’d had no idea about her mom, but because suddenly I realized she was ticked. “She—what? Oh my gosh, Maya, is she okay? I had no idea!”
She bit her lip. “I texted you. And I called you and left a message.”
I pressed my hands into my eyes and forehead. “Maya, I am so sorry. I—my phone got lost, and—the battery died—and I didn’t feel good—”
She was shaking her head. “It’s fine. I get it. You’re always feeling crappy.” She pressed her lips together, then said to herself, “And you have to meet your new best friend’s dad.”
“Maya,” I pled, lowering my hands to look at her as my heart fell to my stomach. “He is not my new best friend. I just—” I couldn’t even explain it. I couldn’t explain anything.
I had no excuses.
“Is your mom okay?” I asked timidly.
She shrugged. “Yeah. It was a false alarm. She’s fine.”
I nodded. “Good. I’m glad.”
“Wait, what happened with your mom?” Jordyn asked, apparently done with her conversation with Nikki.
I was grateful when Maya started talking to her, because it gave me the opportunity to dwell on the fact that I was a horrible friend. I’d completely abandoned her. But was that really my fault? I really did have some pretty serious stuff going on. I just couldn’t tell her about it.
I lowered my head into my hands again. My lame brain was feeling fuzzy, and I kept having random bits and pieces of rewind memories intrude on my focus, which was spotty already because of my migraine. Jake wasn’t even at school, so I assumed his was worse than mine. He had texted Leah and me saying that Rob was still in town, trying to track down any information he could on the amulet, and that he’d also mentioned his head hurting.
But the two people whose headaches really concerned me were Janie and my mom. Now that I knew Janie could see the strands, I had to assume that my mom was connected to the Ring as well. Did that mean that all of my cousins on that side, and all of Jake and Leah’s relatives, had headaches right now too? Had Rob had a headache when he came and talked to us? I wondered if Gene was okay. I hoped Lillian was in excruciating pain.
And with that thought came the most complete memory I’d had so far of Leah’s rewind: confronting Lillian at her house. We’d been there to talk to Gene, but Lillian had showed up unexpectedly and acted like I was just another of Leah’s friends. My anger flared now just as it was when I’d blurted out, “I know who you are.”
Her smile faltered briefly but she recovered and raised her eyebrows delicately. “Do you?”
“Yes. And I know what you did.” I was trembling, my stomach in knots, but I couldn’t not say anything. I felt Jake and Leah both go stock-still at my sides.
Lillian plastered a look of pure confusion on her face. “What I did?” She even had the audacity to smile a little as she glanced from Jake to Leah and back to me. “What is it that I did?”
“You—” But my breathing was coming too fast and I couldn’t say it.
“Her sister, Mom,” Leah said with a quiet disgust. “She saw you.”
Lillian’s perfect eyebrows pulled together. “Her sister saw me? When?”
“Wow,” Jake said, his voice thick with sarcasm. “You’re pathetic. Chloe saw you when you hit her sister with your car. She knows it was you, and we’re pretty sure we know why you did it.”
Lillian took a moment to process that, her expression still neutral. “Oh, that.” She pierced me with a gaze. “And what reason is that?”
“You’re just—confessing it?” I sputtered. “You’re not even going to pretend—”
“Why would I pretend?” she interrupted, looking mildly surprised. “I had everything under control. Your sister was never in any real danger.”
My eyes couldn’t have gone any wider; my body couldn’t have been tenser. “Never in any danger?” I repeated, my voice trembling with rage. “You killed her!”
“Now, you know that’s not true.”
“It IS true! You killed her, and you almost killed me, and I had to rewind it!”
“Well, see now, there you go. You rewound it. You were there and I was there, both of us competent at pulling time. Do you really think I would have let her die?” She was so poised, so convinced of her own logic and her own rightness.
“How is she supposed to know what you would or wouldn’t have done, Mom?” Leah demanded. “All she knows is that you hit her sister with a car, on purpose, three times. What did you expect her to think?”
Lillian lifted one shoulder. “Most likely what she ended up believing,” she said, looking back at me with interest. “What did you think after that happened?”
I’d been right. She had calculated the cost and deemed it worthy. She excused it because she could have rewound anything that didn’t go to plan.
“That’s sick,” Jake muttered. “Did you purposely make it worse every time?”
“Honestly, I don’t remember most of it. But how perfect that it was worse every time.” She seemed pleasantly surprised. “The plan was simply to keep going until she assumed it was inevitable.”
I couldn’t be here anymore. I couldn’t talk to this woman. She was blocking the doorway, but it didn’t matter anymore. I pushed myself forward and shoved past her, tears of fury blurring my vision, and turned down the hall to the front door as I heard Leah say, “How convenient that you only remember doing it once.”
I felt like I might be sick as the memory ended, fading into a silent car ride home with Jake. I stumbled to my feet and headed toward the bathroom, where I stayed for a long time.
There really was no reason for me to be here. I wasn’t getting anything out of my classes, and Maya was mad at me. I dug for my phone so I could call my mom, but saw that I had missed a call—from Susie. My stomach flipped as I touched the voicemail icon and listened to her cheery voice telling me that she was home—and that we were more than welcome to come get those boxes any time.
* * *
I texted Jake and Leah, then called my mom and begged her to pick me up from school.
She took me home, and once she’d done everything she could to help me with my migraine, I assured her that I was just fine to stay home in bed by myself for the rest of the day.
Ten minutes later, Leah picked me up, and then we went and got Jake.
He looked impressed as he got in the car. “Ditching school and your house, huh, delinquent?” he asked me with a wink. I rolled my eyes and told him it was his job to come up with a plausible reason for me not to be home if my parents got home before I did. Which they probably would.
“Just tell them you were feeling better so I came and picked you up to…get some fresh air,” he threw out.
Huh. That could work.
> “Hey, speaking of picking me up,” I said, giving him an accusing look, “why does my sister think you and I went on a date during Leah’s rewind?”
“What?” Leah sputtered. “She what? Wait a minute, how does she know about the rewind? And—a date?”
I leaned my head back against my seat. “I had to tell her,” I confessed. “She’s been remembering things.” At Jake’s sputter, I added, “And she’s been dreaming about the strands. She inherited it too. She and my mom have both had headaches this week.”
“What?” Leah said again. “Chloe, why didn’t you tell us?”
I scowled. “I just found out last night. I mean, I guess I knew about the headaches before that, but…it was only a couple days ago. But does it really matter? We can’t do anything about it—not anything we aren’t already doing.”
“It’s a huge deal,” Jake said. “What if everyone who’s related to us can feel it? What else might happen?”
“I know, and I thought of that,” I said. “But I’m just saying it doesn’t really change what we’re doing. It just means we have even more of a reason to get those journals and figure out how to fix it, and to find the amulet.” Jake and Leah both tried to start talking, but I spoke over them. “AND, Jake, you still didn’t answer my question about the date she remembers.”
I looked back at him to see that he was leaning his head back against his head rest just like I had been. “I dunno,” he answered. “I haven’t remembered anything like that.”
“Leah?” I asked. “Any idea?”
She furrowed her forehead. “I know that you guys got together the night before my mom tried to enter the Ring. You were probably pretty desperate, so maybe you told your mom—”
“That it was a date,” I completed for her, the idea sparking another bit of the memory.
“Why would that help?” Jake asked.
I felt my face go warm. “She’s been trying to get me to talk to her about boys forever,” I admitted. “She’s all excited for me to start dating.”
I remembered now. I’d texted Jake to come pick me up, warning him that I’d had to tell my mom it was a date so she’d let me go, and that she would be embarrassingly excited to see him.
He’d responded, Finally! Our first date!, and I’d rolled my eyes.
My mom was completely charmed with his impeccable date manners and didn’t even ask when we’d be home.
I shoved him as soon as the door closed behind us. “Nice shirt.”
He preened and smoothed it down. “Thanks. My mom gave it to me for Christmas.”
“And is that cologne?”
He gave me a sidelong, suggestive glance. “Why?” he asked, nudging me. “You like it?”
I shook my head. “You are enjoying this way too much.”
“You know, I really am,” he agreed.
“Just don’t forget you already have a girlfriend,” I teasingly warned. “No funny stuff.”
He barked a laugh as he jumped ahead of me to open my door.
“So,” he said as he got in and started the car. “Where shall we go? I didn’t get us reservations anywhere.”
“Shut up,” I said, one side of my mouth lifting against my will.
“Hey, I’m just trying to be a good date. I don’t want your mom to disapprove.”
“Okay,” I remember it,” I reported. “All we did was go to your house and study the notebooks and journals from Susie’s box.”
Jake cocked an eyebrow. “So pretty much best date ever.”
And finally, now that we were on our way to get them, I started to remember the journals.
“There was some lady’s diary,” I said suddenly as I remembered. “And Melvin Wright’s journal and one full of meeting minutes, from family meetings.”
“Yes!” Leah said. “You remember them?”
“Kind of. I remember looking at them…”
“Did we find anything helpful?” Jake asked.
I closed my eyes again, rubbing my temples. “Yeah. I think we did.”
I just didn’t know what.
* * *
I knew that Scottsdale was the “rich” part of the Phoenix valley, but the massive house in the posh gated community was even bigger than Lillian’s.
Susie didn’t exactly match her house, though. She opened the door with a big smile, her long gray hair pulled into a high messy ponytail, sporting yoga pants and a floral blouse. “Chloe!” she exclaimed, looking from Leah to me and back again. “It’s so nice to meet you!”
“You too,” I answered so she’d know that I was Chloe. “Thank you so much for letting us come.”
“Of course!” she responded, pulling me into a hug. “We’re family! Third cousins once removed, I believe.”
I smiled. “These are my friends, Jake and Leah.”
She hugged them too, then insisted on giving us cookies and milk before she showed us her storage room upstairs. I tried to hurry us along without seeming rude. I really didn’t want my parents to get home before me.
The storage room was a mess.
The rest of the house was beautiful and perfect and immaculate, but the storage room was just a storage room, and it looked far from organized.
Luckily, she had a general idea of where to find the boxes, and she only had to open three before she figured out where they were. I could see some sort of fabric folded in the top of the first one as she had Jake move it to the middle of the room, and Leah and I grabbed the second one. For a minute I was afraid Susie was going to stay with us while we looked through them, but she told us she’d be in the kitchen if we needed her and hustled out.
A nervous shiver went up my spine as I eyed the boxes, and Leah and Jake looked at me expectantly. Then we knelt down around them and found that the fabric on top was an old-fashioned apron. And under that, we found black-and-white family photos, recipes, kids’ drawings, and framed embroidery intermingled with newspaper articles, hard-cover journals, and ledgers. The second box was more of the same, but most of the box was taken up with a delicate china tea set we definitely didn’t need. We started pulling things out one by one and sorting them into piles, glancing through the journals to see if anything popped out at us.
A folded lace tablecloth was the last item in the first box, but when I picked it up, it wasn’t just a tablecloth; it was something wrapped in a tablecloth—another book. Unwrapping it, I found a scuffed, brown hard-cover book, the front titled NOTES in gold lettering inside a gold border. The covers were warped outward, the gold edges of the pages flaring out. Some of the pages had come loose from the binding, and several sheets of folded paper were sticking out past the pages of the book, their edges worn and torn.
I opened it to the middle and saw diagrams, notes, questions, equations, and symbols filling every inch of the page, all written in cursive so loopy I could hardly read it. Turning the page, I stared at a drawing of a dragon and a snake surrounding a circle, inside of which was drawn a six-pointed star containing various symbols. The rest of the journal was just as incomprehensible. Languages I didn’t recognize, drawings of artifacts, maps, shapes, and symbols stared back at me, at once thrilling and terrifying.
Slowly I looked up to see Leah and Jake staring at the book in my hands.
We’d found it.
I swallowed. “It’s—” I began, then looked down at it again and turned to the front. The name Melvin Wright was scrawled inside the front cover, with the dates 1863-1889 written under that. “It’s his.”
They came and sat on either side of me as I carefully turned pages and we took it all in.
This was going to take a long time to figure out.
We gathered the things we thought would be useful and consolidated them into one box, which Susie gladly let us take with us. “Oh my goodness, yes! Do you want anything else?” she offered with a laugh. “Honestly, you could take ten boxes and I would have no idea what was missing!”
On the way home, I sat in the back with the box next to me and looked
through the other journals. My back had started hurting on the way to Scottsdale, and I hoped that sitting in the back seat wouldn’t make it worse, because I was excited about looking through the box more. There were two from the 20s, one a Scribbling Diary, according to the cover, the other a Diary & Housekeeping Book for 1926. It was fun to look through the daily account entries carefully written by Diana Wright, who could have been my great-great grandmother, for all I knew. The third book was the ledger I’d remembered of minutes from family meetings, meticulously recorded for years.
I passed a couple of the kids’ drawings up to Jake, who agreed that all the yellow markings in them were definitely reminiscent of the strands of time.
Finally, I opened Melvin Wright’s journal again and pulled out the additional pages one by one to open them. One was a diagram, just as befuddling as everything else I’d seen, but the shape of it caught my eye.
I handed the diagram to Jake, who held it up for Leah to glance at. “What in the world…?” Her voice was soft, as if talking just to herself. “It looks just like the amulet.”
Jake let out a whoop. “Alchemy of time, anyone?”
A spiral shape inside a square took up most of the page, surrounded by designs both geometric and organic: spirals, suns, moons, stars, crosses, diamonds, wavy lines, numbers, and concentric circles. Honestly, it looked a little like the doodles that filled my history notebook. Leah kept stealing glances at it and asking questions as Jake tried to make sense of the symbols, but mostly he just made stuff up.
“Wait,” he said, “I think this is like a title. Katie? Catty?”
“What?” I leaned forward to see that he was pointing to the word κάτι. “That must be Greek, I said. “Kah-tee, maybe?”
“Oh, yeah,” Jake agreed. “Probably means secrets of the universe.”
Finally Leah interrupted. “Okay, how are we really going to figure this out?”
“Should we just start at the beginning of this?” I asked, holding up Melvin’s journal. “Or is there a chance there will be a simplified version in one of these?” I gestured to the other two journals.
Jake made a face as Leah glanced back. “If nothing has caught your eye just from looking through it, maybe you need to start at the beginning.”
