The Ethan I Was Before

by Ali Standish

  Time Travel

  DURING ENGLISH, SUZANNE PASSES me a note: Lunch 2day? ☺

  Kacey used to pass me notes.

  They were folded into little footballs—not squares, like Suzanne’s. She would flick them to me when our teacher had turned around to write something on the board. Pizza despues de la escuela? if we were in Spanish class, or R U coming 2 my soccer game today? during math.

  Suzanne’s handwriting is big and loopy. Kacey had neat handwriting that could have belonged to either a boy or a girl. I can see it now, as if her tidy letters have been etched onto my brain.

  I crumple the note before Ms. Silva can catch me with it, and Suzanne stares expectantly at me while the other kids finish their vocabulary warm-up. I give a half nod and muster an awkward smirk.

  Ms. Silva hands out copies of a novel about time travel that I already read earlier this year in my old school. I don’t say anything, though. First, because I don’t want her to assign me another book. Second, because I liked the book a lot. And third, because I don’t really say much these days anyway.

  “Yes, Coralee?” Ms. Silva asks.

  Coralee is sitting across the room, on the windowsill, with her hand in the air. Apparently no one remembered to get her a desk either.

  “Ms. Silva, this book is about time travel, right?”

  “That’s right,” Ms. Silva agrees. Her hair is swirled into a loose knot today and she wears an orange dress.

  “But it says that it’s historical fiction,” Coralee says, holding her book up and pointing to the back. I turn my copy, which has a corner ripped off, to the back cover. Sure enough, the label in the bottom right-hand corner reads Historical Fiction.

  The boy next to Daniel, whose name I think is John or Johnny, rolls his eyes. “What a dork,” he mutters.

  “What’s the question, Coralee?” Ms. Silva asks patiently.

  “Well, if it’s about time travel, shouldn’t it be classified as science fiction instead of historical fiction? Isn’t historical fiction supposed to be realistic? So does that mean the publisher thinks that time travel is real?”

  Ms. Silva puts a nail to her mouth and taps at her bottom lip. She seems to be taking Coralee’s question very seriously because she doesn’t respond right away.

  “That’s an interesting question,” she says finally. “But maybe it’s one that we can answer better once we’re finished reading the novel. Then we can decide as a class what we think. Can you remember that question until we finish?”

  Coralee grins. “Is that a challenge?”

  Ms. Silva smiles back at her. “Who knows?” she says. “Maybe we’ll all be time-travel believers before we’re done.”

  I know how the book ends. It didn’t make me believe in time travel.

  I wish that it had.

  Ways I Could Fix Things If I Could Time Travel

  1. I could have convinced Kacey that we didn’t need to go to that stupid party.

  2. If that didn’t work, I could have hammered nails into her dad’s tires so he couldn’t drive us there.

  3. Or I could have told her I wanted to stay inside the party with all the other kids.

  4. Or fallen down the stairs and broken my leg on purpose, so she’d have to go with me to the hospital.

  5. Or just not dared her to do it.

  6. There are a million ways I could fix things, if I had the chance.

  Everybody Needs a Friend

  BACK IN BOSTON, DR. Gorman gave me a journal and told me that I should start making lists. “That might help you to make sense of your world and yourself as it exists now,” she said. “The Ethan you were before may be gone, but now you have the chance to get to know the new Ethan.”

  I doubt that Dr. Gorman would appreciate my time-travel list. She would say that I’m “fixating.” That was the word she used when I told her about staring at Kacey’s window.

  She was right, though. The lists do help. Sometimes I write my lists down in my journal, but other times I just make them up in my head.

  Like right now in the lunch line, I’m making a list of all the foods I miss from Boston: (1) Mrs. Reid’s oatmeal-no-raisin cookies—Kacey hated raisins. (2) Fenway Franks and fries. It’s distracting me from my pizza slice, which is drowning in a puddle of grease. It looks like the kind of pizza you might find a hair in.

  So I don’t notice until I’m almost to the register that my lunch money is no longer crumpled in the corner of my tray. I look around as I inch closer to the cashier. It’s not on the metal buffet. It’s not on the floor. It’s not under the plate that’s holding my greasy hair pizza.

  That’s when I hear someone laughing. When I turn around, Suzanne’s friend Daniel is standing there with the thickset boy who seems to be his sidekick. They both have mean grins plastered on their faces.

  Suzanne hovers behind them, biting her lip.

  Only two people separate me from the register.

  “Um. Did you see where my money went?” I ask Daniel.

  He stops laughing and looks innocently at his friend. “I didn’t see anything, Jonno,” he says. “Did you?”

  Jonno shakes his head and leers at me with a crooked-toothed smile.

  I may not be sure if I want new friends, but I know I don’t want new enemies. Having enemies means drawing attention, and that’s the last thing I want.

  “Look—” I start.

  But before I can make a feeble attempt at convincing Daniel to give my lunch money back, Coralee marches up behind him and taps him on the shoulder.

  He turns around and looks at her like she’s a gnat that won’t stop buzzing in his ear. “What do you want, Bite-Size?” he asks.

  “Give the new kid his money back,” she says. She barely comes up to his shoulder, but she rests her fists on her hips and stands with her feet firmly planted. She looks up at him like a determined little tree in the face of a hurricane.

  “Why should I? No one’s going to make me,” Daniel says with a smirk.

  “It’s not like you need any extra cash,” says Coralee, pointing a finger at the expensive logo on his shirt. “So what’s the point? You’re just terrorizing him because you think your girlfriend might like him more than you.”

  I jerk my head back automatically. Is that why Suzanne keeps trying to be my friend? Because she likes me?

  I glance at her just long enough to see that she’s blushing. Daniel stands up straighter, and some of the hilarity drains from his face. “She’s not my girlfriend,” he says, recovering. “And how do you know I wasn’t stealing his money for you, Coralee? Maybe I was just trying to be nice. We all know you could use it.”

  I don’t know Coralee, but I know Daniel has crossed a line.

  “Hey,” I say. “That was—”

  “Kid! Let’s go!”

  The lunch lady is glaring at me. It’s my turn to pay, so I slide my tray slowly up to the register.

  Coralee’s eyes narrow. “Maybe I could use it,” she says. “But I don’t think Mr. Beasley would be very happy if I told him you were bullying the new kid. Isn’t bullying against the law now?”

  “That’s two dollars and fifty cents,” the lunch lady wheezes. She has an angry-looking rash on one of her arms that she keeps scratching. Any appetite I had left disappears completely.

  I want to mutter something about changing my mind, but just then Daniel thrusts my money back at me so that I have to grip the dollar bills against my chest. I hand them over to the lunch lady, who stops scratching long enough to take the money.

  As she hands me my change, I hear Daniel say something under his breath. I can’t make out everything, but I catch the word snitch.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Coralee says to me. “He’s just mad because he knows I could take him in a fight. And I have, too.”

  I pick up my tray and gaze out at table upon table of strangers.

  Suzanne sidles up next to me. “Daniel and Jonno were just kidding around,” she says. “It’s no big deal. Just come si
t at our table. Once they see you’re cool, you’ll be one of us.”

  But I don’t want to be one of them.

  “I’m sitting over there,” says another voice. On my other side, Coralee points to a pink lunch box three tables away. “Why don’t you come sit with me?”

  Coralee starts walking. I hesitate for a second. Then I shuffle away from the register, catching up to her.

  “Hey,” I say. “Hey, why are you being so nice to me?”

  I must look confused, because she laughs and puts a hand on my back to guide me through the cafeteria. “Everyone needs a friend, new kid. Even weirdos like you.”

  An Invitation

  ONCE I SIT DOWN and take a sip of milk, the room comes back into focus. I see Suzanne whispering with Maisie. She shoots a glance toward me, then looks away and tosses her hair. Across from them, with their backs to me, sit Daniel and Jonno. In the far corner, Herman and his Doritos have a table to themselves. Mr. Charles walks between the tables, watching the students. All around me, chatter and laughter swells and bubbles like an ocean tide.

  And across from me, Coralee unpacks the contents of her lunch box.

  She looks at me with concern through a thick layer of eyelashes. She has cartoon-character eyes.

  “Are you okay?” she asks. “You look kind of freaked out.”

  “I’m fine,” I reply.

  “If you say so,” she says, taking a bite of her PB&J.

  “Thanks for helping me,” I add. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Sure I did,” Coralee says with a shrug. “Daniel and Jonno are creeps. Everyone knows it. And Suzanne is—well—Suzanne. She does like you, you know.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” I say firmly. The last thing I want is to be dragged into some kind of love triangle.

  “Then how come I overheard her in the bathroom this morning telling Maisie how cute and mysterious you are?”

  I don’t answer. I don’t want to talk about this anymore.

  But I feel like I need to make conversation, say something normal, so that Coralee won’t think I’m some kind of freak. “This pizza looks disgusting,” I say. “I wish I had brought my lunch.”

  “I always bring mine because I’m a vegetarian. And the school doesn’t provide vegetarian meals. Can you believe it? Isn’t that the stupidest thing you ever heard?”

  I nod, but I don’t really have strong feelings on whether the cafeteria serves tofu scramble or not.

  “Don’t you want to know why I’m a vegetarian?” she asks, blinking at me.

  “I guess.”

  “It’s because I love animals. Especially horses. Horses belong in pastures, not between hamburger buns, don’t you think? Did you know some countries actually eat horses? Dogs, guinea pigs, you name it. If it’s a pet, somebody somewhere eats it. Some places around here serve alligator burgers, which also makes me especially angry because I had a pet alligator once.”

  I try to keep up with Coralee, but she’s talking really fast, especially considering that we’re in Georgia.

  “You probably don’t believe me,” she continues. “That’s okay, a lot of people don’t, but it’s true. I won a baby alligator at the county fair as a prize in one of those tossing games. I named him Tiny, and we kept him in the bathtub until he got too big. Then I had to set him loose, and I never saw him again. Isn’t that sad?”

  “Cool,” I reply finally. It’s the first word I can find, and I’m surprised when more follow. “Not that you never saw him again, I mean. My mom’s a vegetarian too. But I don’t think she would let me keep an alligator in the tub.”

  “Cool,” Coralee echoes. “About your mom.” She flashes a smile at me. “Do you like animals?”

  “I guess so.”

  Kacey had a pet cat named Punky growing up, but since Dad is severely allergic to fur, we never had any.

  “You’re probably bummed about missing the field trip to see the red wolves, too, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I say truthfully. “That would have been pretty fun.”

  “You have to feel sorry for an animal like that,” Coralee says, pausing to sip from her juice box. “An animal people care so little about that it was almost hunted to extinction without anybody speaking up for it? And they weren’t even hunting it for food. Every creature should have someone looking out for it. Don’t you think?”

  I nod.

  “You better hurry,” she says, glancing at my pizza. “Lunch is almost over.”

  “That’s okay,” I say. “I’m not hungry.”

  Mom would never let me get away with that excuse. After the incident, all food started to taste like charcoal to me, so I stopped eating until she threatened to take me to the hospital to get a feeding tube inserted. She still likes to look at my plate and cluck her teeth to guilt me into eating every last bite.

  “Did you get those packets of make-up work to do?” Coralee asks.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Bummer.”

  “Me too. Wanna work on them together after school?”

  “Sure.”

  The moment the word comes out of my mouth, I can’t believe I’ve said it. All day, I’ve been looking forward to going home and sitting by myself in the window seat. Where I can stare at the marsh and try not to think about Kacey. I wonder if I can backtrack, make an excuse to get myself out of it, but Coralee is already talking location.

  “Let’s go to the library,” she says. “It’s close by, and there’s always saltwater taffy there.”

  “Sure,” I say again, my excuses dying on my lips. “Sounds good.”

  The bell rings. Mr. Charles yells at us to clear our tables. As I pick up my untouched pizza, I think that it wouldn’t have mattered after all if Daniel had taken my money.

  On my way out of the cafeteria, Suzanne catches up to me. “It was a big mistake to sit with that girl,” she says. Her voice is icy, but her cheeks are flushed.

  My eyes flash toward Coralee, who’s walking just a few steps ahead of me.

  “I was trying to be nice, trying to help you be popular. I stuck my neck out for you. But I guess Daniel and Jonno were right. You’re not meant for our lunch table.”

  Then she flips her hair again and stalks off, bumping Coralee’s shoulder on purpose as she passes her.

  Coralee turns back to look at me and cocks an eyebrow. “Guess you don’t have to worry about her liking you anymore.”

  The Library

  “I DIDN’T KNOW THERE was a library here,” I say.

  Coralee is walking beside me, pushing her bike through the throng of kids making their way home or toward the Fish House for fries and a shake. Some of them shout greetings to her, which she returns with a grin or a wave.

  “It’s not an official library,” Coralee admits. “But it’s better.”

  “Because of the taffy?” I ask.

  “Among other things.”

  We walk out of the school parking lot, passing a snarl of minivans.

  Before we left, I called Mom from Ms. Silva’s room to tell her I was going to study after school with a friend. At first she said no, but the idea that I might make an actual friend was too tantalizing for her to refuse.

  “You’ll be with an adult?” she asked.

  Coralee, not bothering to hide the fact that she was eavesdropping, nodded at me.

  “Yes, Mom,” I replied, embarrassed.

  “You call me as soon as you get there so I can speak with an adult.”

  “Okay,” I said, and hung up.

  “Your mom is kind of overprotective, huh?” Coralee asks as we turn onto Main Street.

  “Um, yeah.”

  “You can tell her not to worry,” she says. “Nothing bad ever happens in Palm Knot. In fact, nothing ever happens here, period.”

  “So you went to this school?” I ask. “Before?”

  “Yep,” she says. Now that we’re out of the crowd, she hops on her bike and pedals it slowly alongside me.

  “Why’d you leave?”

  “
Because I got a scholarship,” she says. “To a boarding school in Atlanta for prodigies.”

  I feel my eyebrows raise. “You’re a prodigy?” I’ve never met a prodigy before.

  Maybe that explains why Coralee seems to have ten thoughts for every one of mine.

  “It means a genius,” she says.

  “I know. What do you do?” I ask. “I mean, what kind of prodigy are you?”

  “Violin,” she says simply, pedaling in a lazy circle.

  “So why are you back here?”

  “I got kicked out. It’s actually a funny story.”

  I wait for her to go on, but she just looks at me. “Can I hear it?” I say.

  Apparently, those are the magic words, because once I ask, she jabbers all the way past the Texaco, the Fish House, and the Pink Palm. She’s like a bird that’s been waiting all night for dawn to start her morning warble.

  “And so all the musicians hate the dancers, because they always act like they’re so much better than us, you know?”

  Across the street, I see Herman disappear into the Sand Pit, maybe to replenish his supply of Doritos.

  “So anyway, we got into this prank war. And I had this idea to break into the dance studio one night with a couple buckets of water and some dish soap—”

  Sweat already streams down my back and gathers in beads on my forehead. We’ve only walked two blocks. We pass a fallen frond from one of the palm trees lining the bay, and I want to grab it to fan myself.

  But I don’t because that would be weird.

  “Like a giant Slip’N Slide. It was So. Much. Fun,” Coralee says.

  Broken white lines of tide glide into the bay and break gently against the rock wall. Shards of light glimmer on the water, and I have to shade my eyes. It reminds me of how the sun used to reflect off the snow in Boston so bad, it could give you a sunburn on your nose if you weren’t careful.

  Even though it’s a million degrees outside, thinking about the snow makes a shiver rattle in my chest. I try to concentrate on Coralee’s story instead.

  She’s wheezing with laughter now. “They were slipping and sliding everywhere in their little shoes, and they started clinging to each other, which just made them all fall. Like a herd of frilly pink flamingos.”