All Our Yesterdays

by Cristin Terrill

“’Night, Marina.”

  He hangs up and walks away, and a moment later the light in his room goes out. I press my face close to my window and exhale, fogging up the pane of glass, and draw a heart with one fingertip.

  “What did you do?” Tamsin says when I open the door.

  “Nothing!” I say. “I couldn’t say or do anything! He said he needed to tell me something, and I said I did, too, but then I couldn’t. So I just pretended like things were normal, and then Finn Abbott came over—”

  Tamsin makes a face.

  “—and I left! I need your help.”

  She loops my arm in hers. “You’re pretty much a hopeless case, Marina, but if anyone can salvage your pathetic love life, it’s me.”

  She leads me upstairs and sits me down on my bed while she goes through my closet, jewelry, and makeup—most of which she helped me pick out—and assembles her tools. Sophie arrives twenty minutes later with a bag of shoes and a rolling suitcase full of cosmetics and hair products. They start to argue about the merits of sparkle versus no sparkle and send me off to take a shower.

  When I emerge in my robe, they’re both ready for me. Sophie sits me down in my desk chair, where an array of products is lined up, waiting for me. “We’ve got this,” she says. “You’re going to look hot.”

  Tamsin starts on my makeup and Sophie on my hair, and I just close my eyes and let it happen. They’re good at this kind of stuff, and I’m obviously not. Not looking stupid tonight is step number one in not being stupid.

  Now I just need to figure out how to act.

  “We were talking while you were in the shower,” Tamsin says, “and we’ve decided he’s definitely just being shy, and you have to take charge.”

  “Uh-huh,” Sophie says, working through a snarl in my hair.

  “But how do I do that?” I say.

  “You’ve got to embrace your inner hotness.” Tam tilts my chin up, and I open my eyes. “You’re best friends with James Shaw. You live in the best part of town, your dad practically runs the World Bank, and ever since you became friends with us, you’re one of the most popular girls at Sidwell. You’re D.C. royalty, Marina, and you’ve got to own that already. The boy would be lucky to have you.”

  I guess she’s right. I have come a long way. James used to be my only real friend at Sidwell, until the stupid genius graduated when I was still thirteen and left me stranded. But then Tamsin and Sophie took me under their wing, and now everyone turns their heads when I walk into a room.

  “Okay,” I say. “Yeah. Yeah. I can do this.”

  “Of course you can,” Tam says. “Just be confident.”

  “Just rip his clothes off!” Sophie says. “He’s a boy. He won’t be able to resist.”

  “Oh my God, Soph,” Tamsin says. “You are such a slut.”

  Sophie beams. “I know.” Tamsin and I laugh, and Sophie adds, “But I’m not wrong, am I?”

  “No, you’re not.” Tamsin motions for me to open my mouth and starts applying lipstick. “You should totally sleep with him. Hello, you’re going to some fancy party that probably has an open bar, and your parents are out of town. It’s perfect. Plus, you’re sixteen already. Go much longer and it starts to get embarrassing.”

  “And having James Shaw as your first, oh my God!”

  Tamsin’s words send ice through my veins. It starts to get embarrassing. I flash back to me at thirteen, hovering at the entrance to the dining hall, with absolutely nowhere to go, seeing each table as a potential land mine. I ate in a locked bathroom stall for the first two weeks of school just to avoid it, just like James once told me he did for an entire semester, hiding in the bathroom by sitting cross-legged on the toilet whenever the things outside the door got to be too much for him. I can’t ever be that girl again.

  Besides, I love James. He’s sweet and famous and handsome. Why shouldn’t I sleep with him?

  “Totally,” I say, and although it sounds weak in my ears, they don’t seem to notice.

  For the next half hour, I suffer through Tam and Sophie pulling and poking and prodding at me, all while they dispense sex advice that makes my stomach churn with nerves. I’m not a total innocent, but Tam still complains that my skin is too flushed for her to do my makeup right.

  The doorbell rings while they’re putting on the finishing touches. James is so afraid of being late for things that he usually sets himself a couple of alarms and ends up arriving fifteen minutes early. Even from up here, I hear Luz cry out in pleasure as she answers the door and the muted stream of rapid-fire Spanish that passes between them.

  “Okay, all done!” Tamsin says. “Ready to see?”

  Sophie covers my eyes as they position me in front of the full-length mirror in the corner, then lifts them away with a “Ta-da!”

  I take a long look at myself. My dress is awesome, that much I know. I risked Dad’s wrath by buying it, charging it to his credit card and hoping he wouldn’t notice that it was twice the budget he gave me. He did, but it was worth it. The dress is deep blue and sparkly, like the sky twenty minutes after the sunset, filled with ten thousand stars.

  The rest of me is more problematic, even after the application of Tamsin’s and Sophie’s considerable skills. I smile at myself in the mirror the way I imagine I’ll smile when I see James, so I can see what he will. And what he’ll see is: an awesome dress on a girl with a bump in her nose, a giant pimple on her chin that no amount of concealer was able to conceal, fat cheeks, and a total lack of boobs to do her killer dress justice. (Plus softly curling hair and a perfect smoky eye, courtesy of her friends.)

  I suppress a sigh for their sakes. The right clothes and makeup fool most people, but just once it would be nice to actually be pretty.

  “It’s great, you guys!” I say and hope they don’t hear the false note in my voice. “You did such an amazing job.”

  Sophie hands me the crystal-encrusted clutch she stole from my mom’s closet, and the three of us head downstairs.

  James is sitting at the kitchen counter, looking like a lost movie star in his custom black tux, eating an empanada from the towering plate Luz has put in front of him. He turns when we come in, and powdered sugar clings to one corner of his lips as he stares at me. Or, more likely, at the giant pimple on my face. I lick my lips nervously and taste the waxy, faintly vanilla flavor of Sophie’s lip gloss.

  “Oh, mija!” Luz says. “You look beautiful.”

  James stands, and I can practically feel Sophie and Tamsin holding their breaths as they hover over my shoulders.

  “Ready to go?” he says. My heart sinks, like I was expecting my beauty to so stun him that he would drop to his knees and declare his everlasting love for me right here in the kitchen. Because I’m a moron.

  “You bet she’s ready,” Sophie says, nudging me in the back as she steps forward. Her talent for making even the most mundane statements sound dirty is unrivaled. “Hi, James.”

  “Uh, hi . . . there,” James says, blushing and looking pretty much anywhere but at Sophie. Her perfect blond curls and pillowy lips intimidate a lot of guys, but they scare the hell out of James. Even if he can’t ever remember her name.

  “How was Connecticut?” Tamsin asks, stepping around me to join Sophie next to James. “We sure missed you around here.”

  James frowns. “F-fine. Worked a lot. You know.”

  “Yeah? What are you working on?”

  “I, uh . . . It’s kind of hard to explain. . . .”

  Tam and Sophie look at James like his stuttering is the most fascinating thing they’ve ever heard. Meanwhile, I think they’ve completely forgotten me back here.

  James looks at his watch and then at me. “Sorry, but we should get going, Marina.”

  “Right,” I say, even though I know it’s still early. It’s my job as James’s best friend to save him from his own awkwardness, but if I’m honest, it’s also because I hate watching him talk to Sophie and Tamsin. Maybe I’m just jealous because in my bones I feel like James is mine
, but there’s something almost predatory about the way they act around him. Sometimes I even wonder if it’s really me they like or if it’s just my proximity to him.

  Tamsin and Sophie follow me to the front hall to say their good-byes. They’re full of giggles and innuendo, but my smile feels plastered on.

  “Call me later!” Tamsin whispers when she kisses my cheek, and then they’re out the door.

  “You want something to eat before you go?” Luz calls from the kitchen.

  “They’re serving dinner at the fund-raiser.” I pull my long coat and the spotless white cashmere scarf I only wear on special occasions out of the hall closet. Somewhere behind me I can feel James approach, his presence altering the weight of the air.

  “But you might get hungry before then!” Luz says. “Take a snack, at least. An apple. You don’t eat enough.”

  “I eat plenty,” I say. If she had her way, I’d be plain and fat. But I take the apple Luz rushes into the hallway to give me anyway, just to make her happy.

  James likewise takes the orange she hands him and sticks it in his pocket, which looks ridiculous, and then holds my coat open for me. His hand brushes my hair as he helps settle the fabric on my shoulders, sending a tingle of gooseflesh down my arms. I hear Sophie’s voice in my head, explaining exactly how best to separate a boy from his clothes.

  I wrap my scarf around my neck and briefly contemplate strangling myself with it, just to put me out of my misery already.

  Five

  Em

  Consciousness returns to me before my body does. I would panic if I had a heart to pound or blood to rush or a brain to process, but I feel nothing. There’s no sensation and no thought, just a vast, endless expanse of nothing.

  Did it work? Or is this death?

  I slowly start to feel things again. First it’s the incredible heaviness of my head, which is like a dull block of wood pulling me down, but I don’t care because it’s such a relief to have a head again. Then there’s the scratch of a rough surface against my cheek and an aching tingle in my limbs, which reminds me I have limbs.

  Finn is my first coherent thought. I try to move, to reach for him, but I’m frozen.

  The tingle intensifies until it becomes pain, bright and sharp and stabbing through my solidifying flesh. I try to scream but only hear a low moan that I vaguely realize must be coming from me.

  I manage to flutter my eyelids open, revealing glimpses of a blurry, too-bright world. I suck gasping, raspy breaths through lungs that feel brand new.

  Somewhere, Finn says my name.

  A hot roil rushes over my body, convulsing my muscles in waves of spasms. I struggle up onto one elbow as I heave up the meager contents of my stomach, and it feels like my body is trying to turn itself inside out. Finn’s hands are suddenly on me, brushing the hair back from my sticky cheek, and I lean gratefully into his cool skin.

  The spell passes, and I’m able to open my eyes. Finn’s sitting beside me, practically doubled over, as obviously exhausted and aching as I am.

  “You okay?” he asks.

  I nod and drag my sleeve across my sweaty forehead. “Think so. That was awful.”

  “Yeah, give me a flying car over this any day.”

  He looks around us, eyes sweeping over every inch of the bare warehouse like it’s some strange, alien planet. Seconds ago we were in a tiny room surrounded by soldiers, but now we’re in some kind of storage space, the labyrinthine halls that stood on top of the particle collider replaced with row after row of unidentifiable junk.

  “We really did it,” he says. “I don’t believe it.”

  I don’t feel the same awe. Time travel isn’t a wonder; it’s an abomination.

  Finn tucks a strand of hair behind my ears, like it’s a natural thing, something he’s done every day for years. “Do you think you can stand up?”

  My body still feels hollow and unsubstantial, as though I accidentally left some of it four years in the future. “I don’t know. Will you be able to catch me if I fall?”

  “Doubt it,” he says, “but I’ll let you land on top of me. I’ll make a nice squooshy landing.”

  I smile. “My hero.”

  The two of us start the journey to our feet, doing each other as much harm as good along the way. When he totters, he nearly brings me down with him, and vice versa, but it doesn’t occur to me that I should let go of him until we’ve moved from our knees to a shaky crouch.

  We stand and struggle to stay upright, but once we’re steady, Finn grins and hugs me. He’s so pleased to have accomplished such a minor feat that I can’t help but laugh. He laughs, too, and soon we’re both hysterical, clinging to each other and gasping. I don’t know if it’s the lingering disorientation from the trip or just joy at finally being free, but it’s the happiest I’ve been in months. Years.

  But somehow through our laughter, I still hear the click.

  “Freeze!”

  Finn goes rigid in my arms, and I lift my hands into the air like the good little prisoner I am. The soldier who snuck up on us as we laughed takes a step closer, his gun aimed at my head.

  “What are you doing here?” he asks. A fine tremor travels from his hands through the weapon, making it waver before him.

  I squint at him, my eyes still watering and blurry, and then I recognize the face.

  “Connor?”

  He takes some convincing, but once I hand him the photograph of him and his future wife—Laura, I learn, a waitress at the diner he frequents who’s already turned him down twice for a date—Mike Connor begins to come around.

  Not that I would blame him for shooting us on the spot.

  At my request, Connor takes us toward a far corner of the building. In four years, this will be a classified government facility housing the world’s largest particle collider, but right now, as Connor explains to us as we walk, it’s just a military warehouse storing hundreds of old vehicles, small munitions awaiting disposal, and other odds and ends. Connor is a minor officer in charge of the graveyard shift.

  I can’t stop sneaking glances at him as we move. Only moments ago I was watching an older version of him die, one with gray hair at his temples and fine lines etched into the corners of his eyes. Only four years separate the two Connors, but this one looks a decade younger and softer. The future aged Connor before his time as much as it did Finn and me. This young Connor looks to me like some kind of apparition, a living ghost.

  He’s already dead, unless Finn and I save him.

  “I don’t understand this,” Connor says as we walk. “I mean, I believe you, ’cause I saw you appear out of nowhere and you’ve got that picture, but I feel like my head’s about to explode here.”

  “It’s actually pretty simple,” I say. “Do you know Einstein’s theory of relativity?”

  Connor just stares at me. “Let’s assume I don’t.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t either, until . . . well.” I shake my head to clear that line of thought. “Basically, space and time are really one thing, a kind of giant film stretched across the universe called space-time. Dense objects warp the fabric of space-time, like the way a trampoline dips when someone stands on it. If you’ve got something heavy enough, like insanely heavy, it can punch a hole right through.”

  “Okay, I get that.”

  “Well, in the future the government develops this massive particle collider called Cassandra. When they slam the right subatomic particles into one another under the right conditions, the particles hypercondense on impact and become heavy enough to punch a tiny hole in space-time. We came through that hole.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the future needs to be changed. We need to destroy Cassandra before it’s ever built, or it’s going to end the world. People weren’t meant to travel in time.”

  “But . . .” Connor presses his fingers into his temples. “If you destroy the machine before it gets built—”

  “Then it will never have existed for us to travel back in time to destr
oy it?” Finn says.

  “Right.”

  I nod. “It’s a paradox. But the thing about time is that it’s not actually linear, the way we think of it. This person I once knew, he had this theory about time, that it had a kind of consciousness. It cleans things up and keeps itself from being torn apart by paradoxes by freezing certain events and keeping them from being changed. Action—like us doing something to stop Cassandra being built—sticks, while passivity—us never coming back to stop the machine because we couldn’t make the trip—doesn’t. When we . . . do what we have to do to destroy Cassandra, it should become a frozen event, safe from paradoxes.”

  “How do you get back to your time?” Connor asks.

  Finn glances at me before answering. “We don’t.”

  “Oh.” Connor’s face darkens. “Right. Well, here we are.”

  We’ve reached the back corner of the warehouse. In front of us is a small drain in the concrete floor. Five and a half inches across, thirty-two holes, but no nickel-size dent yet, and no cinder-block walls caging it in.

  “What is it for?” I ask. “I wondered every day I was in that cell.”

  Connor shrugs. “They’re all over. In case the sprinklers go off or there’s flooding.”

  Such a benign answer. I remember all the horrible things I’d imagined it was for, how I’d spent hours staring at it, picturing my blood swirling away down it.

  “You need to learn everything you can about this building,” I say, “all of its ins and outs. That’s why they’ll keep you around instead of reassigning you somewhere else when they take over this place. You’re loyal and you work hard, and that’ll get you promoted. Someday you’ll hear about me stealing a spoon, and that’s when you’ll know we’re ready for you to break us out.”

  “Jesus, I can’t believe you’re really saying these things,” he says. “It sounds so impossible.”

  “I wish it were.”

  “How did I know to break you out the very first time?” he says. “You weren’t here to tell me before it ever happened.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I guess that version of you and me must have learned to trust each other somehow.”