The Time Fetch

by Amy Herrick

  “Well, if what you’re saying is true, how come when I jump up . . .” Here she slid down from her stool, threw her arms in the air, and jumped. All her earrings and silver charms jingled and clinked. “How come I still come down in the same place? According to my calculations, every second the earth should be turning about one half a mile.”

  Mr. Ross positively beamed. “You’ve been thinking!”

  There was a rustling and murmuring in the seats around her. Apparently everybody, except Mr. Ross, knew what she was doing. She kept a record of how long she could keep him off topic for each period. His mind was always bubbling with so many ideas and theories, it was very easy to get him going on some completely unrelated subject.

  “And you’re almost right. At the equator, the earth turns a little less than a half kilometer every second. So how come you come down in the same place?”

  “That’s what I asked you.”

  “Ahhh—but you already know the answer. Everybody in here should know the answer. Think back. Why are you weightless in space and heavy on earth? Edward? How about you? What do you think?”

  Dweebo, whose head was resting on his hand, eyes half closed, roused himself slowly.

  “Very dangerous. Very dangerous,” Feenix whispered to the class. “You’re not supposed to wake a sleepwalker. You can give them a heart attack. Does anybody know CPR? Oh my God, imagine having to give Dweebo CPR! Eeew!”

  “Edward?” Mr. Ross persisted. “Why are you weightless in space and heavy on earth?”

  Dweebo blinked. “Gravity?” he asked.

  “Give that man an exploding cigar,” Mr. Ross said happily.

  Dweebo was glaring at her. Extra point for Feenix. “And, it’s gravity,” Mr. Ross said, “that pulls us back down into the same place after we jump in the air. And it’s why, if you throw a stone into the air it doesn’t just keep going, but eventually slows and falls back to earth. And speaking of which, who remembered today’s assignment to bring in a rock?” He looked around the room expectantly.

  But Feenix was ready. “Hey, Mr. Ross, look at this!” She had picked up one of the jars from his table. “The fruit flies have had babies.”

  He was such an easy mark. She almost felt a little guilty. But not really. He trotted right over and took the jar from her. He lifted it up for everybody to see. It was crammed with nasty little bitty flying bugs.

  “Ah, drosophila. Amazing creatures. I was wondering when someone would notice. You know, first of all, they don’t live much more than ten days.”

  “Ten days?” Feenix said, shaking her head, staring in wonder at the jar.

  “Why bother?” someone else asked, “if you’re only going to get ten days?”

  “Maybe time is different for them,” Feenix said. “Right, Mr. Ross? Maybe like each day is ten years to a fruit fly.”

  “Well, it’s an excellent question from our point of view,” Mr. Ross answered thoughtfully. “But to them, well I doubt they give it any more thought than they give anything else.”

  “Yes, but what I’d like to know,” said Feenix, “is—what is time? Does time move? Or do we just move through it? Is it a made-up thing or does it really exist?”

  Mr. Ross’s ears were practically wiggling with excitement. Feenix could hear little snickers here and there, but Mr. Ross didn’t notice a thing. “Time!” he crowed. “This lady would like to know what time is. Anybody want to take a stab at that one?”

  “It’s the past, the present, and the future,” someone volunteered. “It’s seconds and minutes and hours.”

  “Yes,” Feenix insisted, “but what is it? Is it stuff? Is it something that physically exists? Or is it just one of those things people have made up to explain something like—like—lines of latitude on a globe?”

  Seriously Detestable Robert raised his hand. He thought he was Einstein’s second coming. He said in a bored voice, “It’s the fourth dimension.”

  “Aha. The fourth dimension!” Mr. Ross exclaimed. “Remind us—what are the first three dimensions?”

  “Length, width, height.” Robert had this way of sniffing like the ignorance of the rest of the class smelled like a giant fart.

  “Okay. So the length, the width, and the height give things their shape, right? Let’s start with height. What would a world without height look like? Somebody else besides Robert, please.”

  There was a long, indifferent silence. Who cared? But then Danton spoke up. Naturally. Feenix could never believe how good-natured he was. He couldn’t stand to see a teacher on the spot. “Flat? They’d be flat?’

  “Exactly!” Mr. Ross smiled at him. “Without height we would have a two-dimensional world.” He held up a piece of paper flat on his palm. “If there was no height, you wouldn’t be able to look at this from the side, only the top. It would have no thickness. Things cannot really exist in space if they have no height, right? He gave everybody a moment to contemplate this. “But what about time?” he asked. “What if you had three dimensions and no time?”

  Someone volunteered that everything would freeze in place.

  “Aha. What do you think, people? Is that what would happen? If time was suddenly removed from our universe, would everything freeze?”

  “No,” said Robert with annoyance. “You could never really make everything freeze because everything in the universe is made of atoms and atoms are little bits of energy that are always moving. If you took time away, then the atoms couldn’t move forward either and everything would just collapse. According to the mathematician Hermann Minkowski you can’t separate time from the other dimensions. They’re woven together like a fabric. You can’t have one without the other.”

  Mr. Ross was practically glowing. “Very, very interesting, Robert. Anybody else? Anybody else have any thoughts? Feel free to speculate. Theories abound in this field. What about you, Edward?”

  Dweebo came in from whatever dimension he had drifted off to. Feenix often suspected that he was not as clueless as he looked. He blinked at her now like an old turtle and said, “What happened to rocks? I thought we were supposed to be talking about rocks.”

  For a moment Mr. Ross was confused. “Oh. Yes. You’re right,” he said pulling himself together. “How did we get off on that tangent?”

  “Well, gee,” Edward said, looking away from Feenix. “I haven’t got a clue, but I have a rock.”

  “All righty then,” said Mr. Ross. “Let’s see it.”

  Dweebo reached into his pocket and pulled something out. As he did, the windows rattled loudly and the wind gave a long low howl.

  Dweebo got up. Slow as mud. He brought his rock to where Mr. Ross was standing.

  Mr. Ross bent over and peered at it with interest. He reached out and Dweebo’s fingers tightened around it protectively.

  “It appears to be covered with some sort of matter,” said Mr. Ross. “Why don’t you go clean it at the sink?”

  Dweebo did as he was told. He moved across the room at his own turtle-footed pace, looking at no one. When he brought the stone back, everyone could see that its surface was marbled, pearly gray and pink.

  What was that smell? Feenix sat up, her bracelet clinking. It was wonderful. Familiar, somehow, but also very strange.

  “Where, exactly, did you find this?” Mr. Ross asked. He tried to take the stone from Dweebo’s hand, but Dweebo wouldn’t let go. “Did you go to the park, as I asked you guys to do?”

  “Well, uh, no. Not exactly. But I was like walking along and it was so interesting looking, I thought you would . . . um . . . appreciate it.”

  He was right. Mr. Ross couldn’t take his eyes off the thing. “Well, what do you think? Igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic? Let the rest of the class take a look. Let’s see what they think.”

  Dweebo walked slowly to the front of the room and approached Danton first. Danton leaned forward curiously.

  Feenix always thought that when Danton sat down he looked like a folded up grasshopper, his elbows and knees sticking ou
t all over the place. When he stood up the story changed. Standing up, everything came together. On his feet he looked ready for everything. He was very tall. Taller than her, for sure, and he was getting taller every day. Humongous feet and hands and this unbelievable sunshiny smile. His skin was obviously the product of some ethnic funny business like in her own family. Though his was darker. It reminded her of shiny nutshells. She left him alone. Her mission was to wake people up and he was already wide awake. He moved easily from crowd to crowd, though he never quite seemed to settle anywhere. She could tell, too, that he didn’t exactly approve of her. Well, many people didn’t. So what? Most great minds were not appreciated in their own time.

  As Dweebo approached him, Danton flashed his grin and then reached out and touched the rock.

  “Igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic?” Mr. Ross questioned.

  “Uhh. Igneous?”

  Mr. Ross didn’t say anything. “Show the rest of the group, Edward.”

  Edward approached Brigit.

  Oh boy. Feenix held her breath. Everybody held their breath. Brigit had shown up here at the Community Magnet Middle School for Misfits and Dimwits about three weeks ago. She had yet to say a word. She was red-haired and pale skinned, and she had this very colorful disability.

  Feenix waited hopefully.

  Brigit leaned forward and touched the stone. Odd, but the disability did not manifest itself.

  Mr. Ross ignored the wind rattling at the window. “So what do you think?” he asked Brigit gently. Brigit pulled her hand back and gave a tiny shake of her head.

  Feenix was next and Dweebo was slowly and reluctantly approaching her. Dweebo’s expression was as coldly distant as the planet Pluto. She was about to tell him that his fly was down. Which it wasn’t. Then her attention was distracted by the rock.

  What was it? It looked like a regular rock, but also it didn’t. And there was that smell again.

  “Let me get a better look at it,” she said. And her fingers curled around it, without waiting for his permission.

  “Hey!” he objected.

  She had the weirdest impression that the stone nearly jumped into her hand.

  Now the wind gave a great wolf howl. It threw itself against the window and there was a loud shattering sound as glass exploded into the room.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Edward Loses It

  Edward just stood where he was, watching all the commotion. Everyone else jumped up from their seats and moved away from the window, laughing and yelling. There was glass all over the floor and the wind was shooting around the room with a high-pitched whistling sound blowing papers into the air.

  Feenix had stepped away from him, and Edward saw how amused she was by everybody else’s excitement. She just loved it when people got discombobulated.

  He had a feeling she knew perfectly well he was watching her, but she didn’t turn in his direction. After a while she moved away and started searching for something on the floor. She bent down and when she came back up she had her ridiculous pink purse.

  Meanwhile, Mr. Ross was calling for everyone to keep calm. “Into the hallway, please. One at a time. No pushing. Let’s go. You over there, under that desk, let’s not be ridiculous. Edward, you can move a little faster than that.”

  He managed to shepherd everyone out into the hallway and sit them down against the wall while he sent Danton to go get the custodian.

  Calmly, Mr. Ross went up and down the line of kids to make sure no one had been hurt. Except for some minor scrapes everyone was fine. No sooner had he finished checking everyone out than the bell rang again.

  In study hall Edward considered the problem of time. He’d actually been listening fairly closely to the discussion. He wondered what Mr. Ross would make of his aunt’s theory that time was a great treasure and without it everything would happen at once. He would undoubtedly think she had marshmallows for brains. Her theories were generally without any scientific foundation. He had a brief, horrifying vision of her lecturing Mr. Ross about the Great Web of Being. Just the thought made him want to sink into the ground with mortification. He would have to be very careful to make sure they never met.

  His thoughts went back to time. Would everything just collapse if there were no time? Edward’s guess was that time was just another illusion like the illusion that things around us were solid. The past, after all, had already vanished and the future didn’t exist yet. As for the present, how could you ever get hold of that, either? By the time you had the thought, “here is the present,” that moment was already gone. Wasn’t time another one of those things people invented just to get them through the day? Something that depended completely upon your point of view? What did fruit flies feel about living only ten days, he wondered? And what about rocks? Did a million years feel like a short time to a rock? If you were a rock—

  It wasn’t until that moment that he remembered. How could he have forgotten? His stone. He started to get up out of his chair, then wondered what he thought he was doing. Really. It was only an old rock and the science room was all the way up on the third floor. Way too much physical exertion. He sat back down. He tried to put it out of his mind.

  The thought of the stone kept coming back to him.

  Somehow he didn’t like the idea of anybody else picking it up. The stone pulled at him. At last he found himself rising from his seat and heading toward the stairway.

  When he got to the science room it was empty. Someone had swept up the glass and put a large sheet of cardboard over the broken window. The air was chilly, but the wind was gone.

  He searched the floor. He searched the desks. He searched among the shelves and jars and boxes and terrariums that were Mr. Ross’s pride and joy.

  The stone was nowhere to be found.

  At lunch Edward spotted an empty seat over by a couple of guys he knew. They were playing chess and they were so totally in another dimension, they probably wouldn’t even look up.

  The cafeteria was a minefield, but Edward’s shield of invisibility was coming along well. Most people barely noticed him because they assumed that nobody was home. Which was exactly as he wanted it. He had a rich and busy interior life and he liked to keep it interruption-free.

  As he headed toward the empty seat, Edward had to pass by two girls giggling and carefully dividing up a Twinkie with a plastic knife. Happily, they ignored him.

  But then, just as he sat down, someone made a loud farting sound.

  “Oh, that Dweebo, what a bean machine.”

  The person was attempting to change her voice, but it was a low, sandpapery voice that was impossible to disguise. Edward would have recognized it anywhere.

  The two girls sawing at the Twinkie looked up and stared at him and burst into loud laughter. The two guys playing chess paused. They gazed at him curiously, then decided he was just some sort of temporary hologram projection or something. They returned to their playing.

  Edward sat down. He pulled out the cheese and pickle sandwich on rye his aunt had made him. His favorite. She made the bread herself, too. He took a large bite and considered which entertainment to choose.

  He could play the Change One Variable game. That was where you tried to imagine what would happen to the world if you changed just one small thing—like, what if people had three eyes instead of two? Or, what if there were eight days in the week, instead of seven?

  Or he could work on one of his inventions. He had a lot of invention ideas he was always tossing around in his head, but he wasn’t exactly in the mood for that amount of effort.

  No. What he settled on was the game he called Imagine Different Ways to Make Feenix Suffer.

  That was a reliable old favorite.

  The first thing he did was have her trip and fall down the stairs. The second thing he did was have her deliver an English report without knowing that she had a piece of spinach stuck between her front teeth. The third thing he did was tie her to a stake and pile up lots of wood around her feet. Then he set fi
re to the wood. The little flames were just beginning to lick at her boots when he was startled out of his pleasant dreaming. Brigit, who had been carrying her lunch tray toward an empty seat, had stopped suddenly right where she was.

  Brigit had first shown up at the school a few weeks ago in November. It was now the middle of December. No one had yet heard her speak a single word. There were many rumors about this. Some people decided she didn’t speak English. Other people said she was deaf, but could read lips. Someone else claimed to have seen the inside of her mouth once when she yawned and that she didn’t have a tongue.

  Edward was sure that if anyone had given him a choice between starting at a new school three months into the year or disguising himself in a clown suit and joining a traveling circus, he would have chosen the clown-suit thing.

  But apparently no one had offered Brigit this choice.

  His theory was that she was extremely shy. Besides the fact that she never spoke, she was an insane blusher.

  Right now she was staring at a spot on the ground right in front of her feet. Edward tried to figure out what she was staring at. He couldn’t see anything remarkable, just the usual junk on the floor—an empty squashed milk carton, a couple of cupcake wrappers, and a grape.

  Brigit took a hesitant step forward and, as she did, another grape appeared. It rolled out from underneath the table and hit her foot. She looked around nervously and another grape came shooting out from under the table. Unable to help herself, she stepped squarely onto it. The thing squished juicily. Now there was another and another—more and more, five, six, ten grapes rolling crazily across her path. Muffled laughter came from across the table.

  Brigit stopped moving and kept her eyes fixed on the floor.

  Here it comes. Oh no, Edward thought. He heard the laughter growing from behind them and watched Brigit with hopeless fascination.

  She began to blush. Brigit had red hair, which she wore in a long braid down her back. She was one of those red-headed people with that very milky, show-through kind of skin. The blush began slowly, like a match dropped into a dry forest. As the heat surged up into her neck and spread over her face, she turned a bright burning rose color. The blush was so intense it was hard to take your eyes off it. Although it was embarrassing to look at, too. Painful almost.