The Power of Un

by Nancy Etchemendy

“Whoa!” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  I blinked at him. His face glowed bright with eagerness and excitement. He was, after all, looking forward to a thrilling ride he’d never tried before.

  “Nothing. I just … I just …” I figured I might as well tell him right then. “Ash, I can’t go on this ride.”

  “What?” He looked as if I’d just told him I was growing a tail. “What’s the matter?”

  I rubbed my sleeve hastily across my eyes, still wet with tears. How much more embarrassing could life get? “Nothing,” I said for the second time. “I can’t go on this ride, that’s all. You can go by yourself if you want. It’s O.K.”

  “Are you out of your mind? We’ve been planning this for weeks! You have to go! It won’t be any fun without you.”

  I shook my head. “Trust me. If I go, somebody’s going to get hit by a truck.”

  For a minute, he didn’t believe me. I could see his eyes moving as he tried to figure out what was going on, wondering if I’d turned chicken and was just using a lame excuse to get out of the ride. But at this point in the last version of time, he’d known about the unner; he’d even used it himself. He knew about Roxy and the accident that hadn’t happened yet. I watched as he decided to trust me.

  “You sure?” he said.

  I nodded.

  His shoulders and the corners of his mouth drooped. He wasn’t very good at hiding disappointment. “Can we try again later?” he asked as he turned around to begin working his way out of the line.

  “Maybe,” I said, following him. If there’s a miracle, I thought.

  It was a tight squeeze. The line behind us was longer than it had been before, and there were a lot of people packed between the two metal guide rails leading up to the ride. It was hard for them to make space for us.

  I accidentally stepped on a girl’s foot. She shrieked. You’d have thought I was wearing jackboots with spikes in the soles—how much could an ordinary pair of canvas high tops hurt?

  Then I saw her look up and bat her eyes at the guy she was with. He was big, and his T-shirt bulged with muscles, but I was so worried about Rainy and Roxy that somehow those facts didn’t register right away. What did register was that she was faking to make it look as if I’d hurt her more than I really had. I’ve seen girls try to start fights between boys a number of times, and I have to say I just don’t get it. What’s the point? It makes me really mad, and this time was no exception.

  I said the first thing that came into my head: “Gripes, don’t have a cow.”

  The boyfriend turned toward me, his chunky face twisted in an angry scowl. “Watch it, shrimp!” he said, and he grabbed the front of my jacket, jerking me right off my feet.

  People around us grumbled and squealed, upset at being jostled. Ash turned around and said, “Hey! Leave my friend alone!”

  “You want me to leave him alone? O.K.” The guy sneered and threw me over the railing like a sack of potatoes. I somersaulted across the dirt and lay there gasping, all the wind knocked out of me.

  “The unner!” I heard Ash cry.

  Then there was another sound—the crunch of breaking plastic. I sat up just in time to see the unner spinning beneath the feet of people who didn’t even notice they were kicking it, pieces spraying in all directions.

  Ash squeezed under the railing and scurried into the crowd on his hands and knees like a mad mouse. He lunged toward what was left of the device, covering it with his body. Somebody stumbled over him. I heard him grunt. He got to his feet, shook himself off, and hurried over to help me up. He was still watching the ground in a stunned way as stray bits of the unner continued to ricochet from one person’s feet to another’s.

  I spit out dirt as Ash handed me the mass of unidentifiable parts and dangling connectors. “This can’t be happening,” I said, staring at it, unwilling to believe my own eyes.

  “Sorry,” said Ash. “I tried to get it. I really did.” He looked almost as desperate as I felt. “What now?”

  “Now?” I said. I felt half dead inside, almost the way I had in our Roxyless house after the first accident. It was hard to think or even feel. Nothing seemed real anymore. But I guess some part of me knew what was going on, and that part took over, urging me forward into my last chance of saving the world as I knew it.

  I looked across the midway toward the pony ride and there, just as before, stood Roxy and Rainy, hand in hand. In my dazed state, they seemed as joyful and radiant as a pair of angels outlined in carnival lights. I’d rather have croaked right there than watch anything bad happen to either one of them. They walked toward the booth where the blond woman hawked her candy apples.

  “Can I please, please have one?” said Roxy. “I love candy apples!”

  “Sure,” said Rainy, smiling. She stroked Roxy’s hair.

  I walked over to them, trying a smile of my own. “Pretty hard to eat those without front teeth,” I said.

  Lorraine looked up. “Oh, Gib! Ash! Hi,” she said. She started to grin but stopped halfway, probably remembering how rude I’d been when I left the house.

  Roxy stuck her tongue out at me and said, “Doesn’t matter. I can so eat it without my front teeth.” Then she looked at me hard. “Eeeuuw! What happened to you?”

  I looked down at myself. I was filthy. Pale dust caked my shirt and jacket, and unidentifiable carnival gunk was stuck to my jeans. I didn’t even want to know what my face looked like. The tip of my nose felt funny, and when I reached up to touch it, my finger came away red. I’d scraped it in exactly the same place as I had when I tripped in the woods an eternity ago.

  “Gosh, Gib, what did happen to you? You look like you’ve been in a fight,” said Lorraine. Worry lines dented her forehead, and I thought, Maybe she doesn’t hate me. Not deeply, anyway.

  I smiled. “Oh, I’m O.K. I mean, it wasn’t exactly a fight. Just kind of. No big deal.” I looked down at Roxy. “How about that candy apple?” I said. I took her hand, the one Lorraine wasn’t holding. I thought Roxy might object, but instead she was happy.

  “Yaaaay! You guys can swing me!” she said, lifting her feet off the ground, practically tearing our arms out of their sockets. Rainy and I rolled our eyes at each other at the exact same time, then laughed as we swung Roxy toward the snack booth.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw the mangy stray dog running our way. I thought maybe I could distract Roxy, so I said, “Hey, Rox, want to see a trick I learned?”

  She put her feet back on the ground and looked at me with suspicion. “What kind of trick? Is it a mean one?”

  “Would I play a mean trick on you?”

  She frowned, unconvinced, and I knew why Of course I would play a mean trick on her. I’d certainly done it enough times in the past.

  But now the only thing that mattered was keeping her distracted, whether she believed me or not, so I tried frantically to think up a trick, any trick. I spotted a box of paper-wrapped soda straws on the counter beside the mustard. “Watch this!” I tugged her toward the counter so I could reach a straw with one hand while holding on to her with the other. I bit the end of the paper off and began to inch it down the straw, thinking I’d show her how to blow into one end and shoot the paper off the other like an arrow. It didn’t have to be a great trick, after all, just a distracting one.

  “Two candy apples, please,” said Lorraine, and she dropped Roxy’s hand so she could open her coin purse. But I still held the other hand and I tightened my grip just for good measure.

  “Hey, that hurts!” Roxy yelled.

  Instinctively, I relaxed my hand a little. Roxy sensed it and slipped free, glaring at me and rubbing her wrist as if I’d mortally wounded her. I dropped the straw and reached to grab hold of her again, but she dodged. She was fast. It was like trying to catch a bird.

  The dog ran right between us, panting and wild-eyed, his fur brushing our shins. Now that I saw him up close, he looked lost and confused, and I was glad I’d stopped myself from hitting him with rocks in
front of our house.

  “Oh, poor doggy! You need help!” cried Roxy, grinning like a maniac. Before I could stop her, she was gone.

  I ran after her, dodging mothers with strollers and bumping into people. Everything I saw was clouded by despair, and I thought that maybe some events were small, like pebbles in a river. You could pick them up and toss them away without much trouble. But other events were like boulders that stuck up high and were so huge and heavy that the water of time changed course to flow around them, and they were nearly impossible to move. Maybe this moment was just too massive to erase. Maybe the best I could hope for was to shift it ever so slightly.

  Thanks to the unner, there were now three of us trying to move that boulder—though Rainy didn’t know that’s what she was doing. She and Ash and I sped through the carnival like crazy heroes in a comic book no one’s ever heard of.

  “Stop that little girl!” Ash yelled, turning heads as he ran past. But nobody moved to help us.

  “Roxy, stop!” Lorraine cried, a few steps behind him.

  “Stop, Roxy!” I shrieked. But she ran on as if she hadn’t heard. Not knowing what else to do, I shouted at the dog. “Stop, you doofus mutt!”

  The dog turned and looked at me for about half a second, then took off again.

  By the time we reached the curb, Roxy was almost on top of the dog, I was almost on top of her, and Ash and Lorraine were almost on top of me. Ash and Rainy lunged toward Roxy and the dog at the same time. I remember thinking I couldn’t let it happen; we were all going to end up dead in the street unless I stopped us somehow. With one last, desperate push, I leaped harder and farther than any of the others. Ash, Rainy, Roxy, and the dog piled into me, pushing me over the curb. I thought, as I watched the wheels of the truck spin toward me, that even if it wasn’t the best possible ending, it was all right. Better me than my sister or my friends.

  13

  MY THOUGHTS ABOUT THE UNIVERSE

  You know I didn’t die—otherwise I wouldn’t be telling this story. I can’t remember much about what happened next, but Ash and Rainy told me later that I did a somersault into the street, the truck flying toward me, its tires smoking like something straight from the underworld. It almost stopped in time.

  Which is how I happen to be telling you this story while lying here on a cot under the autumn stars, suffering nothing worse than a badly broken leg. Some people think it’s terribly unfair, what happened to me, like a punishment I don’t deserve. “Poor Gib,” I heard one of our neighbors say to another when she thought no one else was listening. “It’s so awful. All that pain, all those surgeries, and even so he’ll never be able to run with the other kids again.” Others, including my parents, think I’m a hero because I kept Ash and Roxy and Rainy from ending up under the truck, too. They see it as bravery and incredible luck.

  But I wasn’t feeling brave at the time; in fact, I was scared out of my mind. I’m not very comfortable talking about luck anymore. And I’m not sure I ever really believed bad things happen because people deserve them. I definitely don’t believe that now. I think it’s something else—something more like balance, or lessons we need to learn but can’t any other way. Which is kind of spooky, too, because if things happen so we can learn stuff from them, that means there must be a Big Teacher out there somewhere, thinking up Major Lesson Plans. I did learn something, though it’s awfully hard to put it into words. And I know I made some kind of bargain so things would turn out the way they did; I’m just not sure what it is yet.

  I have a few clues, though.

  The doctor says I’ll probably have a bad limp for the rest of my life, which pretty much answers the main question about the old guy in the woods—the stranger who knew way more than he possibly could have about my private life and who walked with a very bad limp. Ash was right. He had to be me. Funny how you’re always the last person to recognize yourself.

  My mom signed up for a high-tech grocery delivery service, and they gave her a special little terminal to plug into our home computer. Something about it seemed familiar, and when I looked closely, I saw what it was. It had a big red button that said ORDER. I opened the cigar box where I’ve been keeping the remains of the unner and discovered the order button was missing. But now I know where to find it when the time comes.

  The thing that totally convinced me of Old Gib’s true identity, though, was the dog. Roxy refused to let go of that crazy stray, even after the paramedics had rushed me away and Ash and Rainy and the policemen were left trying to figure out what to do with her. So the dog came to live at our house—temporarily, of course. Mom and Dad put an ad in the newspaper describing it and asking its owners to phone. But nobody ever called. Roxy was ecstatic, because the deal was that if we didn’t get an answer within two weeks, she could keep the dog.

  “I can name him now, right?” she said yesterday, clasping her hands together, jumping up and down. I smiled at her, thinking that I’d never, ever have to play doggy again.

  Dad said yes, she could give the dog a name. He and Mom had been strict about it, insisting that we couldn’t name him until we were sure he was ours. So we’d just been calling him “mutt” or “dog” or “boy.”

  Roxy stared at him so hard she actually held still for maybe two seconds. Then she shouted, “I’ve got it! I know his name! Dooms!”

  Mom frowned and said, “Roxy, that’s not very nice. How would you like to be called Doofus?”

  Roxy pursed her lips and lifted her nose. “I’d be proud to be named Doofus, considering.”

  “Considering what?” said Mom.

  “Gib called him Doofus Mutt when we were all chasing him, and it must have been the right name, because Doofus stopped and looked right at Gib. He really did. No fooling!”

  “Doofus?” said Dad.

  “Doofus,” said Mom.

  They looked at each other and shook their heads. But I was grinning, because I finally understood why the old man had asked how Doofus was. We had no dog named Doofus yet, but he knew there was one waiting in our near future. And judging from the way he asked, Doofus mattered as much to him as he already does to me.

  The only reasonable conclusion is that I have a busy and exciting life ahead. Think about it: I’m going to have to invent both the unner and some method of time travel that’ll make it possible for me to deliver it to my younger self. And when I do, I’m going to be in a hurry. Otherwise, why would I forget the zero, and why would I always have to leave myself in the woods too soon? The really big question is why I would be in a hurry. If I can travel in time, then I should have all the time in the world. It gives me the shivers to think about it, but there’s only one answer. I keep remembering how slowly Old Gib moved, and how easily he got tired. I must be so old that I’m dying when I solve the problem of time travel. It makes me want to get started right away.

  I’ve still got plenty of unanswered questions. I wish I knew exactly what Old Gib meant when he said I’m important in the world, and so is Roxy. I’m guessing that at some point in the future, Roxy and I will do some big or little thing that makes a bunch of other things happen. And in the end, whatever those things are, they’re important in some mysterious way we won’t understand till we get there.

  All I know for sure, though, is that sometimes what seems bad is actually not so bad after all, and what seems good might not be when you see the big picture. Maybe bad things happen because without them we couldn’t recognize good things. Maybe there’s some law like conservation of motion, and for every good thing there has to be an equal and opposite bad thing. Take Ash winning that plane, for example. The day after the carnival, he took it over to the park, started it up, and flew it straight into a tree. Turns out it was a piece of junk, and the controls didn’t work. Ultimately, winning it made him just as mad and disappointed as not winning it. But then who knows which of us would have wound up under the truck if I hadn’t used the unner to help him win. There’s just no way to tell.

  It’s all incredibl
y complicated. I’ve been lying here worrying a lot about whether I messed things up royally by first inventing and then using the unner. Suppose there really is Somebody in charge—Somebody who has, or had, a perfectly balanced Plan. Did my using the unner change it? Or was the unner part of the Plan in the first place? I hope, in the end, unning what happened to Roxy was for the best, because it’ll be a long time before I know for sure, if I ever do, and even longer before I have the Power of Un again. If Madam Isis were here, I’d ask her if I did the right thing. But she isn’t, and maybe it’s just as well. Even if she knows bits and pieces of the future, how could she answer a question like that? How could anybody?

  Nobody’s out here now except me and the stars and Doofus scratching a flea. But I think I hear Ash’s voice in the house, and maybe Rainy’s, too. They said they’d come over tonight so we could watch some movies together.

  I hope we choose the right ones.