“Sure, you are. Doesn’t mean you aren’t one at times,” she replied, only stopping her walk to damn me before heading to the gym.
Ouch.
Jenna waved excitedly when she saw us. The other girls, cheer robots as Josephine properly deemed them, stopped and stared as I walked in with Josephine.
This was going to be loads of fun.
“Hey guys! Has he passed his addiction on to you?” Jenna asked, eyeing the coffee in our hands.
“Um. No. I just...” Josephine fumbled. It probably would have been a good idea to get a coffee for Jenna as well. Instead, I’m sure we looked pretty chummy walking in together with our discount coffee.
“So, how many posters do I need to put up?” I asked before leaning in and giving Jenna a kiss. I could hear the whispering around us begin. The next few moments were going to be very important in Operation Save My School Status, and the ball was most certainly in Jenna’s court.
“Only a few...”
“How many, Jenna?”
“You love me right?” she asked, a little louder than needed.
I grinned. “I love you enough to hang up every poster you and your friends created, paper cuts and all, without a single complaint.”
Jenna laughed. “That’s what I thought. We’re partnering up. Why don’t you and Jo start down on E hall?”
Good move, Jenna. If Jenna openly trusted us to be alone together, maybe the 'bots would lay off. They wouldn’t feel the need to protect her from the Big Bad Boyfriend.
“Sounds good, Jenna. Thanks again for calling me to help,” Josephine added with a smile. Her smile was a little less believable in comparison with Jenna’s, but Jenna was a cheerleader—she had a lot of practice. Besides, Jenna wasn’t the one they wanted to crucify. Either way, things looked good for Jenna. If I were cheating on her, not that I ever would, she would be the saint. If I wasn’t, she was the understanding and mature girlfriend who trusted her boyfriend and helped those socially beneath her.
Twenty minutes later, Josephine and I had hung up all of the posters Jenna had given us. We worked silently and methodically. We were a good team. “This coffee is pretty good,” I said as we both took a seat on one of the benches in the school, neither one of us able to stomach hanging another Go! Fight! Win! poster.
“Big compliment coming from the coffee snob,” she replied, stretching her long legs in front of her.
“I am not a coffee snob. Jeesh. For someone who claims she is bullied, you certainly have called me a lot of names this morning,” I replied.
“Like I could hurt your feelings,” she scoffed.
I cleared my throat. “Maybe you could,” I replied quietly. Because she did. Even if everything she said was honest, it still wasn’t fun to hear them. That’s the price of truth. I could see her start to apologize, but I stopped her. “Don’t say you’re sorry. I think for this whole partnership to work we have to be honest with each other.”
“I think you’re right. You want to know how else this partnership could become stronger?” she asked.
“Do tell.”
“You bring the coffee tomorrow.”
I clanked my cup against hers in a mock cheers. “No problem.”
She smiled, wrapping the drawstring of her hoodie around and around her free wrist. “Good. I can’t be supporting your addiction with my six dollars an hour I make at the library.”
“Six dollars an hour to shelve books? They are really overpaying you,” I joked.
“Funny,” Josephine said as she began to stand up.
“Where you going?” I asked.
“People are going to start coming in here any moment. You know, that whole school thing?”
“And?”
Josephine laughed, pulling her hood over her head. She took a step away from me. “You did real good telling Jenna we’re friends and all, and coming to the meet, but you’re not ready for that yet. I respect that. I can’t expect you to handle things the same way I do. Besides, it’s not like I’ve ever been popular, so can’t say I entirely understand the situation.”
She was right. The thought of the entire school walking in and seeing Josephine and I sitting on a bench with our coffees seemed pretty daunting. I’d rather the news work its way through the school from the mouths of the bots. Less in my face. I wasn’t above admitting the whole thing still made me a little nervous.
I nodded. Josephine nodded back before turning away from me and heading down the hallway.
I stood up. “Wait. So, we’re friends then?”
“Looks like it,” she called over her shoulder.
“Have a great day, Jo,” I called out, liking the way her name sounded on my tongue.
Chapter 21
So, apparently, our whole time traveling thing isn’t limited to the future. Super. I threw down a flier promising a sure-fire way to protect your computer from Y2K and headed to the front of the school.
After the shift, I came out of the bathroom to find Shepherd High full of students. Not exactly the future world I remembered. Gone was the dust. Gone was the death. Gone was the sense of dread and foreboding that seemed to consume me every second I existed in that world.
Now all I felt was utter confusion. It wasn’t much different than what I felt any given day, but this time I had to worry about fitting in. Jo was lucky. Most of the kids seemed to be devouring the whole hoodie look. Did all the kids in the 90’s have body issues, or was it just an obsession with ennui? Ennui. See, I was paying attention when Jenna was talking about her French class.
I ducked my head and tried to blend in with the crowd. Me. Logan Middleton.
I bee lined it to the front of the school, almost stopping dead in my tracks when I saw someone actually using a beeper. A beeper! I hoped Jo still intended to me meet in front of the school. Despite the change in location, it seemed like a smart idea to keep the same plan intact. When I found her shuffling her feet awkwardly in the front lobby, her hood pushed almost entirely over her face, I almost cheered.
I put my hand on her back and gently pushed her out the front doors. My town was back. Well, not exactly the town I knew and loved, but at least I wasn’t looking at its destruction.
“Hold on,” I said, pulling a napkin out of my pocket. “You still have some blood under your nose.” I gently dabbed the napkin against her skin. Jo’s cheeks flushed, and I wondered if she still wasn’t cool with the idea of me touching her.
Jo mumbled something, but the sounds of cars passing by on the busy road outside of Shepherd High made it impossible to hear her. I guess she wasn’t used to having to speak so loud when we shifted, not when most everything that made a sound was dead or destroyed in the world we usually shifted to.
“What now?” I asked, looking around me. Sure, I didn’t like shifting, but I much preferred shifting to the past than the other option.
“He said this could happen,” Jo replied, zipping and unzipping her hoodie. She was nervous.
“Who did?”
“Ben.”
I tried to keep my face controlled, not let her see how mad it made me that she was still talking to him. I didn’t like the idea of them working together without me. She was my partner after all. “And what did Bentham have to say?”
“He said sometimes the shifts take you to the past. Not that it’s really the past because technically it’s still our present. The same rules apply. We can still get hurt. We can still die.”
“Die? From what? Unless you plan on crossing that road without looking both ways, I think you’re good.”
“Well, we are weakened when we time travel this way.”
She had my attention now. “How so?” I asked, looking more intently at my new/old surroundings.
“Well, we are in a double existence.”
“You have to know I’m already lost.”
Jo sighed; obviously frustrated she wasn’t working with boy genius, Bentham. “This is our past. We already exist in this world. What year is it? 98? 99? We�
��re kids. But we’re also here now as teenagers. We won’t be as strong. And if we get hurt, our bodies will be a lot harder to heal. Ben and Randall call it Broken Existence.”
“How often do you and Bentham talk?” I asked.
Jo rolled her eyes. “Not important. Let me get our bag, and then we can figure out why this year is important.”
“Bag?”
“I got the idea from Ben. It’s just basic supplies. Extra clothes. Food. Water. Knives. A gun. I buried it near the track field. I figure it would still be there in the future since we both know how unpopular track is. It’s a good idea to be prepared for whatever comes when we shift, especially since we know the survivors already know our point of entrance.”
“Yep. Great idea. Except we’re in the past now, Jo. You hid the bag in our present, hoping it would be there in our future. There’s no way it’s going to be here now. Since, according to the time line, you haven’t even hid the bag yet.”
“Son of a b,” Jo stammered.
Wow. For once, I caught onto something faster than Jo.
For the next two hours or so Jo and I wandered around Virginia Beach. We didn’t really know what to do with ourselves. I spent most of the time pointing out differences between past Virginia Beach and present. Things like how the Mexican restaurant on Kempsville had changed names like ten times in the past ten years. Jo wasn’t so interested in my useless trivia.
Why were we thrown back into this particular year was still a mystery. Jo was quiet. More quiet than usual. I wanted to ask her what was wrong, but I wasn’t quite sure we had reached the touchy-feely-share-our-innermost-secrets part of our friendship.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to be that type of friend to anyone.
Tired of aimlessly wandering, I began to shift our walking to Jenna’s house. I knew we were situated years before the illness that would take her from me, but I still wanted to make sure she was safe. If Jo had any idea this was my plan, she didn’t let on. She seemed to have crawled inside herself so deep that anything could jump out as us, and I was sure we’d both be dead before she even raised her fists to defend us.
She was probably just missing Bentham or some lame crap like that.
“What are we doing here?” Jo asked. Her voice filled with accusation when she finally noticed we were on Jenna’s street.
“I just wanted to check on her,” I replied innocently.
“She’s like, what, five? She’s probably safe. Coloring in her damn coloring book or something. Can we go?”
“What’s with the attitude? It’s not like we have anything better to do,” I challenged.
“He told me this might happened,” she whispered, pulling her hands inside the sleeves of her hoodie and wrapping her arms around her waist.
“He told you we’d fight? Big whoop. Anyone could tell you that. It’s what we do best,” I spat out.
Jo began to pace. “No. He told me when we shift to the past it’s because we’re meant to learn something.”
“Learn something about what?”
“Ourselves. Each other.”
I ran a hand through my hair, frustrated that once again Bentham seemed to be making sense. “Fine. It’s 1999. Did anything important happen to you in 1999?”
“I think it’s Christmas 1999 or nearly Christmas. The kids in the hallway at school seemed pretty jazzed. Maybe it’s the day before break,” she said, motioning to the Christmas lights that sporadically covered the houses on Jenna’s street. The fact that I hadn’t noticed them was pretty embarrassing. Maybe Jo wasn’t the only one feeling a bit distracted.
“Considering I don’t remember anything about Christmas 1999, I can’t say anything important happened in my life,” I replied, throwing my hands up. Nope. Probably a typical Christmas. My uncle would order Chinese food and we would watch football. He’d take me to the store a few days before and let me pick out all my presents. No Santa. No magic. Nothing.
A crash of thunder made both of us jump. This was typical weather for Christmas in Virginia Beach. Rain. Forty degrees. Miserable. I pulled my jacket over my head in a vain attempt to protect myself from the torrential downpour that was falling on us.
I’m dreaming of a wet Christmas.
Was this why we shifted? To stand around in a rainstorm comparing crappy Christmases?
“I don’t think anyone’s home,” Jo commented. She looked pretty miserable standing in the rain, her hoodie no match for the rain or cooler air. I never saw her wearing a proper jacket. Did she have one?
I looked back at Jenna’s house, fearing Jo wouldn’t like me staring at her so much. It made sense Jenna and her family would be gone on Christmas. They were always traveling. No holiday was celebrated in a normal fashion. That was part of Jenna’s appeal. Her family always tried to include me in the magic they effortlessly created. Last year for her sixteenth birthday, Jenna’s mom transformed the house into a fifties sock-hop. Every inch of the house was covered in posters of 50’s icons like Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. She even rented poodle skirts for all the girls. No doubt her family was on vacation somewhere. It was nearing six. If they were home, the lights would be on, and no doubt caroling would be heard.
I jogged to Jenna’s front door, hoping the giant flowerpot that let me sneak into their house so many times while they were out was still there. If Jenna’s father knew how easily the stash of keys allowed me to ravage his daughter, I doubt he would feel invincible enough to hide an extra set of car and house keys under something as simple as a flowerpot. I asked him about his hiding place once, and he told me it was because it was so simple-minded that no one would think to look there.
“Come on. We can wait out the storm in here,” I yelled to Jo, jingling the keys in the air. Jo shook her head. Great. What was the problem now? I jogged back over to her, both of us getting more and more drenched by the second.
“Are those car keys?” she asked.
I nodded. The water was starting to drip off my nose into my mouth.
“If their car’s still here, I think we should wait in there. You know, in case we have to make a run for it or something,” she replied. Her black hoodie was now folding itself against her body.
“Always thinking defense, Jo. Follow me,” I said, running over to where Jenna’s father parked the mini-van. I knew he would have the car in 1999. It was his prized possession other than his two children. It was the first car he bought after he got married. He told me he always knew he wanted a family, and this was a symbol of this need—the need to belong to a family.
A need I could understand.
Once in the car, the silence covered us. The streets were quiet and empty. All we could hear was the rain. I wanted to bring up to Jo how on LOST rain seemed to signal some really craptastic event, but didn’t think she wanted to discuss television. Even time traveling television.
I hated the silence of the car. Most likely many families were getting ready to participate in some holiday activity. Even though it wasn’t really Christmas, it felt a little pathetic sitting in a car with a sullen Jo in a rainstorm while the rest of the world was basking in yuletide cheer.
I looked over at Jo who sat crouched over, shivering. I reached my hand out to turn on the heat.
“Don’t. We shouldn’t turn the car on. Don’t want people to see two weirdos just sitting in a car. They might get suspicious,” she said through chattering teeth.
“You’re paranoid. And you’re freezing. I’m turning the heat on. Besides, it’s not like they’re any survivors roaming around,” I replied, reaching forward.
Jo smacked my hand away. “You ever think there might be some things worse than survivors, Middleton?” she asked, her voice rising. Her eyes darted across the street, and that’s when it hit me. That’s when I remembered. She used to live on this street too.
“Jo? We shifted back here because of you. Didn’t we?”
She glared at me before turning away. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course I do, Jo. Nothing of any importance has ever happened to me. My parents died before I could remember them or learn to miss them. That’s about it. So, we have to be here for you. What happened on Christmas 1999?”
“Nothing,” she stammered again, her voice catching.
A set of headlights cut across our windshield. A taxicab pulled into the driveway of Jo’s childhood home. “Who is that, Jo?”
“No one. Just drop it.” She was rocking back and forth now, her eyes tightly closed. Was she about to freak out on me?
A skeezy looking man stepped out of the car, throwing a look down the street. He rang the doorbell. While he waited, his hand kept rubbing at his nose. I’d seen enough drug/mob movies to know this was tell-tale sign of a junkie. That combined with the way he kept scratching at his skin confirmed it.
The next thing I saw nearly stopped my heart.
A young Jo answered the door. Her hair was a wild nest of red curls. I couldn’t see her facial expression through the rain, but I could tell by her body language she wasn’t thrilled to see the man. Her little head was bent down. Her eyes on the floor. When she wouldn’t open the door all the way, the man pushed through her, slamming the door shut behind him.
Something took over me then. Something words will never be able to describe. Something I’d never felt before. I wrapped my hands around the steering wheel, the knuckles on my fingers turning white. “Who is that man, Jo?” I growled. I almost jumped at the sound of my own voice. Never had it sounded so dark, so reckless.
Jo’s hands moved to her head and she pushed her face into her lap. “Someone will stop it,” she yelled into her skin. Her voice came out frantic, muffled, unsure.
I grabbed her by the arm to force her to look at me. My touch caused Jo to throw herself against the passenger side door. Her hands curled into fists in front of her. “I’m not going to hurt you, Jo. But I need you to tell me. I’m your partner for a reason. This is the reason. We’re meant to help each other through all this. Please, Jo. There’s something to learn here. It’s important.”
Jo closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths. When she opened them, she looked directly at me. “My father..” She stopped. Took another deep breath. Closed her eyes again. “My father got in some trouble with some drug guy. Owed him some money. He...he...he told him about me...and the man...the man...”
Because You Exist (Light in the Dark #1) Page 12
