He’d had a bear, and I’d had Officer Sommers. But Walters had gotten laid, and all I had gotten was pissed off. “What happened to your girlfriend?”
“Nothing. The bear ripped the cooler open, gulped down our cold cuts and ambled off. Once I stopped shaking, I let myself out of the car, woke her up, and made her drive me home. We broke up the next day.”
His first Turn had left him as confused as I had been. “So, when was the next time?”
He grinned, but not like he was really amused. “It was a few years later. I had stopped thinking about the camping trip. I persuaded myself I must have blacked out for a few seconds while I let myself into the car.” His grin slipped. “Then when I was twenty-six, I took a vacation in Mexico. I was sitting in a pool-side bar watching an attractive young woman in a bikini rub sunblock all over herself when a couple of guys with handguns held up the place. The bartender pulled a shotgun. I was frantically wishing I had stayed in my room when the pool and the bar seemed to melt. All at once I stood in the middle of a market square surrounded by oddly-dressed women babbling away in a foreign language. A fraction of a second later I was standing in my hotel room and hearing the gunshots from downstairs.”
The sequence seemed clear. I’d done it twice, myself, but only once with my eyes open. “So you get turned on, then you get really scared, and then it happens?”
He nodded. “I assume it’s some combination of hormones and adrenalin. Some guys need to be really aroused and others just have to think about a pretty girl.”
How did he know that? “What about the left-handed part?”
He lifted one hand as if to bat my question away. “Maybe our brains work differently. I tried to study the mechanics of it while I was in Dodomah, but I only got as far as gathering statistics.”
He had said he would start at the beginning, but it felt like I had walked into a theater in the middle of a movie. “Dodomah?”
His eyes got a faraway look. He stared at a picture on the wall behind me, but I didn’t think he really saw it. “On the third time, I only made a half Turn. I came out in the city-state of Dodomah. In the other Earth there are few nations as we know them but many, many city-states.”
His story still wasn’t making a lot of sense. “You mean you were there long enough to learn their history?”
He smiled with a strange kind of wry sadness. “I was there for almost eight years.” He jerked his head toward the corridor where I could hear the muted tones of a TV. “Where do you think Ruveka comes from?”
I didn’t know what to say. It seemed incredible. Even having had my mind twisted into a pretzel by the last few days, it was hard to swallow.
Walters seemed to know I was having a hard time with it. I could tell by the way he was watching me.
“So why did you tell me all this?” I asked. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll tell someone?”
That same sad smile came back. “I don’t think you’ll tell anyone—not anyone in authority. I never did.” He set his shoulders like someone facing an unpleasant task. “And I’m telling you about this just in case you ever make a half Turn and end up there.” He leaned forward, his gaze suddenly intent, and I knew that this was the important part. He had told me this whole long story only to get to what he really cared about. “If that happens, if you end up in Dodomah, I’m hoping you’ll be able to find out what happened to my wife—and maybe come back to tell me about it.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Your wife?” I repeated, feeling like an idiot.
“Yes, my wife.” His smile had gone, and now he just looked sad. “Ruveka’s mother.”
I cleared my throat. “I thought your wife was dead.”
He nodded. “Quite possibly, she is.” He stood up abruptly, like he couldn’t sit still, and paced a few steps, back and forth. “Bejida was the Ocan Garun of Dodomah—like a general and a queen combined. Her lieutenants organized a coup to unseat her. The palace was under siege, and Bejida begged me to take Ruveka to safety, so I did.”
“How?” I said. It sounded like something Ryan would watch on the SyFi Channel.
Mr. Walters’ face twitched, like it hurt him to remember. “Fear wasn’t a problem. I could hear the women outside screaming for Bejida’s blood. Ruveka was crying in terror when I picked her up. Bejida hugged me and began to—to get me turned on. I told her to hold on to me, but at the last second, she said her duty to her people wouldn’t allow her to leave them. Just as she let go, she and the rest of the room started to melt. A second later, Ruveka and I were alone in a gray mist.”
“And then you arrived here?”
“Upstate New York, actually. It’s where I’m from, so it was in my mind.” He shuddered. “I came out on my grandfather’s farm—except now an interstate runs through it. Ruveka and I were nearly killed.”
It was hard for me to picture stuffy, respectable Walters popping into upstate New York from another universe. “How did you end up teaching school in Bethesda?”
His face got a funny look—not angry or anything, more cautious, or even scared. “As I said, I studied the men who Turned from our Earth. I discovered they had started arriving in Dodomah in the mid 1960s.”
So it was a new sort of thing, then, not something that had always been true.
“Also,” Walters went on, “younger men Turned much more often than middle-aged men, and they tended to arrive more from some places than others—possibly the ability to Turn runs in families. Over the years there had been more guys from this area than anywhere else on the East coast. So I got a job teaching in a high school and kept an eye on my left-handed male students, hoping to find someone who might Turn.”
I was having trouble believing him. Oh, I believed he believed it. I just didn’t think it was possible.
“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” Walters said.
“No,” I said automatically. Not actually psychotic, just mildly delusional.
“Ruveka!” Walters called. “Would you come here, please?”
After a few seconds the girl appeared in the doorway from the corridor and frowned at him. “You said one hour.”
He smiled and sat down again. “I know. I’m sorry. Tomorrow you may have two hours, and I’ll do the dishes by myself.”
Her expression brightened. “What is it, then?”
Walters nodded at me. “This young man wants to see what your mother looks like.”
I expected the girl to fetch a photo album or a portrait or something, but she didn’t. Instead she came over to where I sat.
“What’s your name?” she asked me.
“Jason Miller.”
She looked me up and down. “My mother’s name is Bejida Urbi Siti. This is what she looks like.” She suddenly placed her hand on my forehead. She had a cool touch, but after a second her hand seemed to grow warmer—or maybe it was my forehead that grew warmer.
Like a memory I had never had or a vivid daydream, a picture formed in my mind. In a huge hall lined with white marble pillars, a tall, black-haired woman in a red pantsuit stood in front of a large group of soldiers in drab gray trousers and even drabber jackets. The soldiers stood in formation and carried long, thick sticks that resembled rifles but the barrels looked too thick for real guns. They held the rifle-like things in front of them as if to salute the black-haired woman as she walked past. After a moment, I realized all the soldiers were women, too.
The black-haired woman turned and faced me. She smiled and held out her arms. I noticed first that her pantsuit was more of a tunic and really tight trousers than anything I’d seen a woman wear. Then I realized she was totally hot—liquid brown eyes, a wide mouth that needed no lipstick to look lush, and a figure that could have gotten her a contract modeling swimsuits any day.
Ruveka moved her hand away and the image vanished from my mind.
I looked at Walters and blinked. He looked the same as always—ordinary in a dorky sort of way. Shit, he had married out of his league.
“Thank you,
Ruveka,” Walters said. “You may go back to your program.”
She headed for the door but stopped to give him a stern look. “Two hours tomorrow?”
He nodded. “Two hours tomorrow.”
She gave a little skip, and waved at me. “Goodbye, Mr. Miller.”
As soon as the door shut, I turned to her father. “How does she do that?”
He blinked as if he were suddenly tired. “I don’t know. Many women can do it in Dodomah.” He leaned back in his chair. “Things are different on Makoro.”
“Makoro?”
“That’s what they call their world. It just means Earth in their language.”
I had other questions. “Why were all the soldiers female?”
Walters smiled, but it was a bitter smile. “Because there aren’t enough men on Makoro. That’s why they fight over those of us who make the Turn.”
I WALKED back from Walters’ place really slowly, thinking over what he’d said.
Could it be real? The idea of another version of Earth seemed impossible—something out of a made-for-TV movie. And even if there was another, weirder version of earth, how was it I was one of the guys who could go back and forth between the two without even trying? I’d never been special in any way before, and that wasn’t how I wanted to start.
What I kept coming back to was, incredible as the story sounded, it fit what had happened to me perfectly.
So if it was real, the question most on my mind was could I ever learn to control this talent or curse or whatever. Walters didn’t seem to think so. He had Turned four times in his life, two full Turns and two half Turns, and only on the last one had he been trying to Turn.
I still had a lot of questions, but Walters hadn’t wanted to talk anymore. I’d left shortly after he told me that ever since they’d had a devastating war a few centuries before, fewer than ten percent of babies born on Makoro were male, and even those died more often than the girl babies.
It sounded like a horny guy’s dream, but Walters didn’t seem that fond of the place, only of his wife. According to him, men in Makoro lived restricted lives locked away in heavily guarded quarters. There were no families as I knew them. Instead, five to ten women shared a single husband.
I didn’t know whether to hope I Turned again or not. Clara Barton High School had more girls than boys, and a ten to one ratio didn’t sound bad at all.
But the getting locked up part would definitely not be cool. I decided the safest thing to do was to not get scared and turned on at the same time. Which meant it would be best to avoid both Doofie Slater and Becca Sommers.
Four
“Jason!”
I turned from my open locker and found myself nose to nose with Becca Sommers. I backed up a couple of steps and almost bumped into Ryan, whose locker was only three over from mine. “Oh, hey, Becca.”
“Do you think you could help me study for the Spanish test?” Becca gave me warm smile. “You’re so good at languages.”
I was good at Spanish, anyway. I’d never tried any other languages. “I have to work.”
Her smile slipped a little. “All weekend?”
Only Saturday actually. I had my first in-car driver’s ed session Saturday morning, and I had to work a full shift after that, but I was free all day Sunday. I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell Becca that. It had been several weeks since I had made the Turn from her closet, and I’d been keeping my distance from her, trying to pretend it had never happened. “Most of it. Sorry. Maybe someone in your class can help?”
Her lower lip protruded in a deliberate pout. “No one in my class is as fluent as you are.”
I wondered how she knew that since we were two periods apart in Walters’ schedule. Before I could comment, she put a finger tip on my left wrist.
“Couldn’t you find an hour to help me?”
I knew she was trying to play me. I knew she wasn’t attracted to me for me. She wanted a conjugal visit that focused on verbs, not sex. But still, I could feel myself responding. It was like she exuded a scent I couldn’t resist, no matter how hard I tried. “I guess I could spare an hour on Sunday afternoon.”
Her smile lit up her face and made her blue eyes sparkle. She really was a pretty girl. “Perfect.” She flicked the back of my hand in a gesture that might have been a high speed caress—or it could have been just carelessness. “How about the library at 2:30?”
A public place would be good—no need for her cop father to get worked up. And the library had decent bus service, so I could be sure I could get there and back. “Okay.”
She gave me a cheerful wave, spun around, and strolled off.
I figured she was giving me a good view on purpose so I watched her ass sway without any sense of guilt.
“Dude,” Ryan said from behind me, “you are so dead.”
I knew he was right. There was no way I could avoid the turned on part. I would just have to be sure there was nothing scary at the public library.
WHY was it every driving instructor I ever heard of was an immigrant? At least Mr. Aiyuku’s English was good, not like the woman who had taught the classroom sessions. She had called me Jay-sone Mee-lair. Mr. Aiyuku had a slight, rather odd accent but he was perfectly understandable. All too understandable sometimes.
“Shit!” Mr. Aiyuku slammed on the instructor’s brake. “What the fuck are you doing? You almost hit that car.”
I took my foot off the accelerator. So I had a problem with judging distance? I’d only been driving in traffic for ninety minutes. “I thought I had time.”
He waited until I had pulled into the mall parking lot to really let me have it. “You think I went through hell in Rwanda only to die on a fucking street in this fucking town?”
I wasn’t sure I believed the Rwanda part. He might be black, but he didn’t sound African to me. “Sorry.”
He waved a hand toward a far corner of the parking lot where the driving school had set up some orange plastic traffic cones to block out parking spaces. “Never mind. Let’s work on your parallel parking.”
I pulled up and tried to line the back end of the car up with the first cone, going over in my mind everything Ryan had told me when he was practicing parallel parking for his test. It was hard to see the cone because someone had run over it and the tip was bent over.
Mr. Aiyuku pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. I guessed he wasn’t so worried about dying anymore. “We don’t have all day,” he said.
I pivoted the steering wheel, eased up on the brake, and let the car crawl backwards into the space. Just as my seat was even with the first cone, I started to straighten out. The car slid into the space nice and straight, and I never even touched the cones.
“Not bad.” Mr. Aiyuku took a puff of his cigarette and put the window down to flick ash outside as he glanced at the dashboard clock. “Shit, it’s not as late as I thought.” He waved a hand. “Go ahead and pull into traffic again. We’ll drive once around the mall, and then you can go.”
“When is my next session?”
“You have to call the office to set it up.” He pulled a piece of aluminum foil out of his pocket and stubbed the cigarette out into it. I guessed he wasn’t supposed to smoke in the car. Good thing for him swearing didn’t leave evidence.
I drove once around the mall, taking my time, because it wasn’t two full hours yet, and I liked the sensation of being in charge. Except for a few sessions in an empty parking lot, Mom had refused to let me practice in her car until I had all three of the in-car sessions that came with my driver’s ed course.
Mr. Aiyuku was getting antsy by the time we got back to the space reserved for the driver’s ed car. A girl with dark glasses, a tweed jacket, and bright blue hair waited there with her log book in her hand.
Mr. Aiyuku got out when I did and looked the girl up and down. “You’re not a doper, are you?” he said. “I don’t drive with dopers.”
She pushed the shades up on her head and glared at him. “Blue hair means I do
n’t like to be constrained by arbitrary rules. It doesn’t mean I use drugs.”
Mr. Aiyuku asked to see her permit. I gave her another look while she pulled out her wallet. Kind of skinny. Not really pretty but definitely attractive. She wore her blue hair in a sort of funny cut—long on the sides and shorter in back. Her eyebrows were light brown and her eyes a color between blue and green. She barely came up to my chin, but she seemed taller because she was so slender. She wasn’t totally flat-chested, but she was a long way from stacked. “First time driving?” I asked.
She turned the glare on me as she put away her permit. “No. I know how to drive, actually. I just need the certificate to get my license.”
She sounded damn sure of herself. I had a ten minute wait until the bus was due, so I stood by the driver’s ed car while Aiyuku checked the girl’s log book and then told her to get in. The windows were up but I could see he was rattling on while she buckled her seat belt and adjusted the mirrors.
She gave him a brief glance and put the shades back on. Then she pulled the car out of the space, drove over to the traffic light, put on her turn signal, paused just long enough to be legal, and made a right turn on the red light, pulling into the far right lane with a smoothness I envied.
I sighed as I started for the bus stop. Even once I got my license, my chances of getting to drive anywhere were slim. I would have to pay for the increase in Mom’s insurance myself, and I was short two hundred bucks.
For just a moment I thought about Ryan. His folks had given him the Hyundai on his sixteenth birthday—not a cool car, but it was brand new and all his. I felt bad for being jealous of my best friend. Ryan had stood by me since our first day in eighth grade gym class when I couldn’t climb that stupid rope. It wasn’t his fault his folks were so much better off than my mom.
It wasn’t even his fault he was better looking than me. Allie Tedlock, the prettiest girl in our Honors English class, had asked him out for coffee the second week of school. Ryan was shy with girls, but he’d had sense enough to say yes. With me, whenever a girl seemed to show interest in me, it always turned out like it had with Becca—they wanted something besides me.
Turnabout Page 3
