Turnabout

by Carmen Webster Buxton

  I tried not to think about my freaky teleportation, but on my break I stopped to open the brown paper bag to get my wallet. When I took out my belt, not only was it still buckled, the tip was still wrapped tight to the belt with a narrow strip of duct tape. That belt was way too big for me—one of Mom’s thrift shop purchases—so I had taped the end of it to stop it flopping down like I had a tail.

  Which meant that somehow the belt had come off me without ever having been unbuckled.

  BECCA must have found another translator, because she didn’t ask me about the book again. But Thursday morning a few minutes before the first period bell, Doofie Slater stopped me in the hall outside the school cafeteria.

  “Hey, Miller, I want to talk to you.”

  Since he had his hand clamped on my shoulder I stopped. Doofie was the star of Clara Barton’s championship wrestling team, and he had a build that showed it. “What is it, Doo-Doug?” No one ever called him Doofie to his face—not without paying for it.

  “It’s that test in Spanish.”

  What he was doing in Spanish 3 I’d never understand. He couldn’t speak Spanish worth a damn, and he only needed two years of a foreign language to graduate. Maybe he thought a third year would help him with college admissions. “What about the test?”

  He frowned and lowered his voice to a growl. “I didn’t get a chance to read the book. When you take the test, be sure to keep your paper turned so I can see it.”

  I snorted. “And risk getting suspended? I don’t think so.”

  His grip on my shoulder tightened painfully. “You’re the only one who sits close enough to me. Do it, or you’ll be sorry.”

  He wrenched my shoulder back, let me go, and stalked off.

  I went to Chemistry and tried to forget about it, but I couldn’t. Doofie had beat up three guys since school started, and it was just barely September. I really didn’t want to be number four, but I didn’t want to cave either. Letting him read my paper without being obvious would be tricky because I’m left-handed. I always turned the paper sideways, and I could barely read what I was writing, let alone a guy behind me. And having a suspension on my record would blow my scholarship chances out of the water.

  Three periods later I got to Spanish, and saw Doofie already in his seat. He hunched over the desk, clenched his fists, and scowled at me.

  “Señor Slater,” Walters said. “Estás listo?”

  “Uh.” Doofie’s lips moved as he repeated the words silently, and decided he he was indeed ready. “Si, Señor Walters.”

  “Bién.” Mr. Walters moved up and down the aisles passing out test papers. “I will speak in English this one time so that no one will have an excuse not to understand. You have until the end of class to complete the test. When you finish, come up to my desk and turn your paper in. Then return to your desk and sit. You may read anything you like until the bell rings. When the bell rings, I will immediately collect any papers that haven’t already been turned in.”

  Clear as always. Mr. Walters was a pretty good teacher. I bent my head over my paper, conscious of Doofie’s eyes on the back of my head. He sat in the row behind me but one seat to my left.

  I read the questions and made myself concentrate. After I did the first one, I felt something sharp poking into my back.

  “Miller!” Doofie muttered the name like it was a curse.

  Mr. Walters’ head came up. “Did you need something, Señor Slater?”

  Doofie shifted in his seat. “No.”

  Lucky for him the word was the same in Spanish as in English.

  I made myself go back to the test. Doofie poked me a few more times, and then tried to read LaShelle Brennan’s paper. LaShelle was a good student; she sat directly in front of Doofie, but she was as tall as him if not as wide, so I don’t think he could see much. I noticed he knew better than to poke her with a pencil. LaShelle didn’t take shit from anyone.

  I shut out the worry and the distractions and made myself finish the test. Once I was done, I walked it up to Mr. Walters’ desk.

  “Graciás,” he said as I put it down in his in-box. “No erés un hombre sin vergüenza, o sin honor.”

  I wasn’t a man without shame or without honor? What did that mean?

  I walked back to my seat in the full glare of Doofie Slater’s angry gaze, sat down, and pretended to read my English book.

  When the bell rang, Walters collected the few remaining papers, including Doofie’s.

  It was lunch time and everyone filed out in a hurry except me. I lingered, waiting to make sure Doofie had gone ahead. I was wondering if Walters would let me sit in his class for a while. I’d miss lunch, but so what.

  Walters was already grading the tests; he didn’t even look up. I grabbed my books and headed for the door to scope out the view from the window.

  The corridor had emptied out pretty quickly as everyone hurried to lunch. But there, right across from my window, it looked like Becca Sommers was getting mouth-to-mouth while standing up. She had her back to the lockers, so I could see her face but not the guy’s.

  I knew I shouldn’t stare, but I couldn’t help myself. All I could think about was how close I’d gotten to being the guy with his tongue down her throat. I remembered how her nails had raked my skin, and how great it had felt.

  And then just as I was thinking I should turn away before I needed to sit down, suddenly Doofie Slater’s face appeared in the window, his nose only inches from mine and his teeth bared in an angry scowl.

  Three

  I wanted to run, but I couldn’t move! When Doofie put his hand on the door latch, I gripped my side of it, trying to keep him from opening the door. I half turned toward the teacher’s desk, but Walters wasn’t there. My heart started to pound as I glanced around the room. I had just glimpsed Walters through the window in the door to the supply room when the door latch slid from my hands as Doofie forced it downwards and started to push the door open. I wished desperately that I had gone straight to the cafeteria, where there would have been too many witnesses for Doofie to beat me up.

  Just as I twisted around to call out for Walters, the classroom warped. For a flash of a second, the desks and chairs, the walls, everything, sort of melted, like in that weird Dali painting of a watch draped over a landscape, and then everything dissolved into an odd pearly gray something—not quite a mist, but not solid looking either—that surrounded me. Then that disappeared and I was in a grassy meadow surrounded by sheep, and then that all melted, and I was in a corner of the school cafeteria with people milling all around me.

  I managed to grab my jeans before they slid any farther than my butt and yanked them up to my waist. I put my books down and sank onto a bench at the nearest table. I had lost another damn belt, and this one actually fit.

  But how had I gotten to the cafeteria? Where the hell was that meadow? And was I going crazy?

  RYAN shook his head. “Dude, you must be going crazy.”

  I put down the bag of chips Ryan had bought for me and let out a strangled snort of protest. “If it’s all in my head, then where’s my belt, my wallet, and my cell?”

  I was glad I had left my iPod in my locker. Mom was going to flip when I told her I had lost the wallet again, right after I said I’d found it. Not to mention I’d have to spend the rest of the day holding up my pants. But losing my cell was the worst because I couldn’t afford another one.

  Why had the cell phone gone this time? What was different about my jump from Becca’s closet to home versus from Spanish class to the cafeteria? My phone had made it the first time. I remembered gripping it while I crouched in Becca’s closet.

  “I can loan you my belt,” Ryan said. “I have an actual butt, and my pants will stay up better.”

  I ignored the slam and glanced around the still-crowded cafeteria. “I’m not going to exchange articles of clothing with you. That’s how rumors get started.”

  Just about then Mr. Walters came up to our table and put a brown paper lunch bag on the
table in front of me. “I believe you left these in my classroom, Mr. Miller.”

  I started when he came up, and then tried to look casual as I opened the bag. My belt had been unbuckled and neatly coiled into a tight circle so it fit into the bag. My cell phone sat on top of my wallet. So they had all stayed where I had been.

  “Uh, thanks—graciás, Señor Walters.”

  “De nada.” He gave me a peculiar look, almost a sardonic smile. “Next time, you should try holding on to them.”

  He walked away without waiting for me to ask what he meant.

  It took me a moment to figure out that the emphasis was as important as the words. “He knows!”

  “What?” Ryan twisted his mouth into a confused grimace. “Who knows what?”

  “Walters knows about the jumping or teleporting or whatever it is.” I pounded on the table. “Anything I was holding or touching jumped with me—my clothes, my shoes, my backpack—this time my books. Anything I wasn’t actually touching—my skin wasn’t touching—like my belt and the stuff in my pockets, stayed behind.”

  Ryan sat slack-faced for a second, and then he nodded. “Whoa! Mr. Walters could be your watcher or guide or something!”

  Ryan watched way too much SyFi Channel.

  I HAD to wait until after school to talk to Mr. Walters. I hurried, but he was locking his classroom door when I turned the corner to the south corridor.

  “Mr. Walters!”

  He looked up at my shout. “Yes?”

  I ran the last dozen yards. “Can I talk to you, please, Mr. Walters?”

  He glanced up and down the corridor. A few kids were getting stuff from their lockers, but no one was paying us any attention. Walters looked inscrutable for a moment, like he was making up his mind, and then he reached into his pocket and took out a three-by-five card. “Here. This is my address.”

  I looked down at it. He lived in a small townhouse development in my neighborhood.

  “Come to see me this evening,” Walters added. “I’ll expect you at 8:30 sharp. Be on time.” He frowned. “My daughter has homework to finish, and it’s a school night.”

  I’d heard he was a widower, even though he wore a wedding ring. I’d never been to a teacher’s house before, and I wasn’t too sure I liked the idea. “I have a ten o’clock curfew on school nights.”

  “It shouldn’t be a problem.”

  I hoped that meant whatever explanation he could give me wouldn’t last long—not that it meant he kept power tools in his bedroom and it wouldn’t take long to cut up my corpse. “Okay, I’ll be there.”

  He nodded once and headed for the exit, giving me the briefest of glances over his shoulder as he walked.

  I sure hoped I wasn’t making a mistake. And I hoped Mr. Walters could explain what was happening to me.

  “SPANISH?” Mom said, her forehead pleating into its semi-permanent crease. She leaned back in the recliner and unrolled some fuzzy yellow yarn. “Why would you need tutoring in Spanish? You’ve gotten an A every semester.”

  “Spanish 3 is a lot harder.” I cast around for an excuse for sudden failure. Luckily, Mom didn’t speak any Spanish that didn’t come from the menu at Taco Bell. “The irregular reflexive nominative verbs are killing me.”

  Lorrie looked up from the TV long enough to give me a suspicious look, but fortunately, she hadn’t had any foreign language classes yet.

  “Where does Mr. Walters live?” Mom asked.

  I’d written out the address for her because I knew she’d ask for it.

  Mom glanced at the paper and stuffed it into her pocket. “Don’t be late.” She went back to looping yarn around her knitting needle. The sweater was for Lorrie, and it was half done. “School tomorrow.”

  Like I could forget. “I won’t be late.” I had a sudden sense of unease—a sort of tickle on the back of my neck, like the characters in horror movies must get when they realize the monster is right behind them. I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to do it, but I leaned over and kissed the top of Mom’s head. “See you later, Mom. Bye, Squirt.”

  Mom looked up, her expression confused. “Everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine.”

  I hoped I was telling the truth. But nothing could be fine until I figured out why I kept winking out of reality.

  A GIRL of twelve or so answered my knock. She looked a little like Walters—same brown hair, same straight nose, same square chin. But she had brown eyes instead of blue, and skin as smooth and soft as cream.

  The girl at the door turned as soon as she saw me waiting on her porch. “He’s here, Daida.”

  For a second I thought she had called her father da-da, but it was a different word. She said it with a strange inflection, too, a sharp emphasis on the first syllable.

  “Come in, Mr. Miller,” Walters’ voice called. He stepped out of the kitchen drying his hands on a dish towel. “Have you finished your homework, Ruveka?”

  The girl nodded as I stepped into the living room.

  “Very well.” Walters held up his left index finger. “One hour of television, and then bed.”

  Ruveka disappeared into a doorway, and Walters waved a hand at the sofa.

  I sat on a futon sofa with oatmeal colored cushions. The furniture was a little better than ours, but not a lot. It looked like it came from a low end retail store instead of a thrift shop.

  “Now,” Walters said, sinking into a chair. “What did you want to talk to me about, Mr. Miller?”

  I opened my mouth to ask him about the teleporting and realized I had no idea how to ask the right questions without sounding like a wing nut. “Um, did you notice me waiting to leave your class right after the test this morning?”

  He nodded. “I do seem to remember you standing by the door.”

  I couldn’t think of a good way to ask him if he had seen me disappear. If I hadn’t been so freaked out by what had happened to me, I would have given up and gone home right then. “When I left, you were in the supply room. Did you happen to see me leave?”

  Walters must have been great at poker. His expression gave nothing away. “I did, actually.”

  I cleared my throat. “And how did I leave?”

  He didn’t say anything. Finally, he rubbed his eyes for a second, and then said, “I have a question first. What were you staring at in the corridor before Mr. Slater confronted you through the window?”

  Now this was an easy question. I was pretty sure Walters wouldn’t try to pin a PDA violation on Becca. “I was watching Becca Sommers make out with a guy.”

  Walters nodded. “I thought it must have been something like that.”

  What the hell did that mean? Did he think I was a perv or something?

  Walters stared right at me. “You sort of faded around the edges for a second, and then you vanished entirely.”

  I sucked in a breath and held it. I didn’t know whether to be relieved I wasn’t crazy or scared by the fact that I had somehow teleported from one room to another.

  “Your belt and the contents of your pockets hit the floor,” Walters went on, “so I knew you must have made the Turn.”

  Funny how I could hear the capital letter T in turn just from the way he said the word. “The Turn?”

  He nodded. “You’re left-handed, right?”

  I nodded.

  “And you’ve obviously hit puberty so the testosterone is flowing.” He gave me a faint smile. “I was glad to see you in the cafeteria. Not everyone makes a full Turn the first time.”

  Suddenly light-headed, I let my breath out with a whoosh. “It wasn’t the first time.”

  His eyes opened wider. “No?”

  “No.” I could feel a ton of questions bubbling to the top of my mind. “What the hell is the Turn? And where was the meadow?”

  “Meadow?” He cocked his head. “You Turned through a meadow? Were there any people there?”

  “I didn’t see anyone except some sheep.” My hands itched to grab his shirt and shake the informatio
n out of him. “Where was I?”

  Walters held his hands palm up, like he was pleading with me. “It’s going to be difficult for you to understand.”

  I snorted. “More difficult than believing I can teleport from one place to another? I don’t think so.”

  “Okay.” Another pause, but this one was like he was choosing his words carefully. “The world we live in—the world we see—is not the only world there is. There’s another version of Earth that shares the same space with us, but it has a different—a very different—history.”

  It would have sounded crazy a week ago, but now his story offered hope that I wasn’t nuts. “Okay, but how and why do I keep going there?”

  Walters shrugged. “I don’t know how it works. The only part I know for sure is a man who’s left handed and the right age can make the Turn from our world to theirs—and back again if he’s lucky.”

  It sounded too easy. “Then why doesn’t it happen to lots of guys?”

  His shook his head in a gesture of frustration. “I don’t know. No one knows. We used to compare notes about it. Most of us liked music—although none of us were musicians—but the only things all of us had in common were being male, being left-handed, and being scared out of our wits right after having or thinking about sex.”

  I tried to parse that sentence. “Who is ‘we’?”

  He ran one hand through his hair. “Let me start at the beginning—my beginning.”

  That sounded logical, even if I was in a hurry to know what the hell he meant. “Okay.”

  He took a deep breath and let it out. “I was five years older than you the first time I Turned. My girlfriend and I had gone camping. Right after we made love in our tent, I went out to use the porta-john and surprised a bear trying to break into our cooler. Just as I turned to run the twenty yards to my girlfriend’s car, the darkness melted into a mist and then a different kind of darkness. And then I found myself in the car.” He shook his head. “The doors were still locked. I was stark naked and didn’t have the keys.”