“No,” Melly said impatiently. “It’s because—” She stopped.
“I think I know what you mean,” Anny Beth said. “It’s that—” But she couldn’t finish either.
Frowning, A. J. shook her head. “You two are going to have to help me out here. I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.” She leaned against a tree trunk and waited.
“When I wanted to come here all those years ago—when I wanted to have a baby . . . ,” Melly started slowly. “I was looking for something. Not just scenery. I wanted to find a . . . a purpose for my life. And now—”
“What?” A. J. asked.
“Now I don’t need one anymore. Everything’s settled. We found you. I’m just waiting to die again.”
A. J. kicked at some leaves on the ground. “You don’t know that,” she said. “Whatever happened to ‘life’s full of uncertainty’? You might do another turnabout, in which case you’d have another whole life to live—”
“But why?” Melly said. “What would the purpose of that be?”
“You found purpose in this lifetime. Surely you could do that again,” A. J. said. But she didn’t sound very sure of herself.
“Maybe,” Melly said doubtfully. “When I was an adult again. But now there’s nothing I’m supposed to do. Before, when I was a teacher and a nurse and everything else, I had a reason for living. And even just a couple months ago we were trying to outsmart the agency, and trying to find someone to take care of us. But now—we’re just playing. Entertaining ourselves. Taking hikes, having picnics . . .”
A. J. nodded, finally seeming to understand. “I have some ideas of things for you to do,” she said.
“What?” Melly asked eagerly.
“I think the agency needs some advice. I think society needs some advice. If the agency really is going to make PT-1 available, or at least its research available, there are going to be all sorts of ethics boards meeting and discussing what this means for society and what humanity should do about it. They may decide to ban PT-1 the way they banned cloning. They may decide to give it to everyone. Either way they’d make a better decision if you two shared your experiences.”
Anny Beth and Melly stared at her in dismay, utterly speechless. Anny Beth was the first one to regain her voice.
“But you promised us privacy!” Anny Beth protested. “We’d make spectacles of ourselves. We’d be just like all those bozos with their own twenty-four-hour video broadcasts, telling the world every thought that crossed our minds—”
“No,” A. J. said. “Neither of you would be like that. You’d be thoughtful and wise and reveal only what needed to be revealed. You could teach our whole society the difference between openness and exhibitionism.”
“We’ve spent eighty-four years trying to avoid being exposed. And now you want us to tell our stories? Just like that?” Melly asked.
“You ran halfway across the country trying to avoid me, and then you sought me out. You promised Dr. Reed you’d never come to Kentucky, and then you did. You gave up your families, and then you took them back. You vowed you’d never return to the agency, but then you did,” A. J. said. “Shall I go on?”
It made Melly dizzy thinking about all the turnabouts she’d made in the past few weeks. A. J. made her and Anny Beth sound as reversible as, well, teenagers, trying on a different image or philosophy every other day. But it wasn’t that. She remembered Anny Beth saying out in the desert, “You live long enough, you’re bound to have to eat your words one time or another.”
A. J. continued, speaking more softly. “You guys haven’t lived your lives scandalously enough to keep the interest of the tabloid media for long. If you went forward and spoke out about PT-1, there would be a buzz for a week or so, but then you’d be left alone. They’d go on to the next hyped event du jour. And you could take part in the serious discussion of what this really means for humanity.”
Melly bit her lip and looked back out at the sky and trees. “I’ll—” She looked at Anny Beth. “We’ll think about it.”
“Oh, great,” Anny Beth grumbled. “Do you feel better? Making me think—always having to have some purpose.” She turned and shouted out at the scenery, “I just want to have fun.”
The words echoed: “—fun . . . fun . . . fun.” But Anny Beth grinned and nodded at Melly when she turned around.
“Reckon we could try our hands at writing a book or something,” she said. “Maybe we could even do it anonymously, avoid the tabloids entirely. You think?”
Melly thought how strange Anny Beth’s suggestion would have sounded to her the last time she was fifteen. How could she, Amelia Hazelwood, write a book? But now—A. J. was right. She did have things to say. She had a purpose again.
Impulsively Melly threw her arms around Anny Beth’s neck, then included A. J. in the hug too.
“What a family,” A. J. said, laughing.
For a long time the three of them stood on the edge of the precipice, looking out as far as they could see.
Then, “Race you down the hill?” Anny Beth asked.
For an answer Melly took off running, wind in her hair, pulse pounding in her ears, a clear path ahead of her.
Clear, at least, until the next bend in the road.
Author’s Note
I picked a fairly obscure scientific theory to explain the unaging in Turnabout. So I was stunned when that theory began making headlines before I’d even finished writing the book.
Though I didn’t exactly toe the line scientifically in this book, the telomeres that Dr. Reed raves about during Project Turnabout aren’t fiction. They do exist, and they are indeed like beads on a necklace. They’re repeating sequences of genetic material on the ends of chromosomes. (I realize I probably just lost everybody who didn’t cram for some sort of genetics exam within the past twenty-four hours. To explain: Chromosomes are chains of genes, linked in pairs in the nuclei in your body’s cells. It’s like having a recipe for everything about you in every cell in your body.)
Telomeres don’t have any direct impact on, say, what color your eyes are or how tall you grow, the way other parts of your chromosomes do. Some scientists compare telomeres to the plastic tips of shoelaces—they keep the shoelaces from unraveling. But in most normal human cells, every time the cell reproduces, the telomeres get shorter. If you don’t like the necklace or shoelace analogy, you can think of it this way: It’s like making a photocopy on a copy machine with a shrinking screen—every time you make a copy, part of the copy gets cut off. As long as the telomeres are there, it’s not that big a deal to lose part of the copy, because the telomeres protect the important stuff. They function like a nonessential frame.
Until you run out of frame, and the copier starts losing part of the picture.
With an explanation like that it’s easy to jump to conclusions—when your cells are almost out of telomeres, you get old. And when they’re gone, you die, right?
Sorry. It’s not nearly that simple.
If you’re really interested in the science behind all this, I’ll explain. If you’re just curious about whether you or your friends or your parents or your great-aunt Enid will ever unage, skip ahead a few paragraphs. I’ll get past the technical stuff. I promise.
Back in 1961 a researcher named Leonard Hayflick discovered that normal human cells in test tubes divide about fifty times and then die. The Hayflick Limit appeared ironclad: If you take cells that have divided twenty times and stick them in the freezer for a year, when they thaw, they divide about thirty more times and then die. In contrast to cancer cells, which can reproduce endlessly, normal cells clearly had some sort of internal clock telling them when to die.
About a decade later a Russian scientist, Alexey Olovnikov, suggested that the shortening telomeres just might be that internal clock. But the scientific world didn’t embrace the idea immediately. Part of the problem was the old chicken-and-egg question: Which comes first? Scientists weren’t sure whether the shorter telomeres caused the cells
to age and die, or whether the cells aging and dying caused the shorter telomeres.
But in January 1998, when I was about halfway through writing this book, researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, and Geron Corporation in Menlo Park, California, announced that they had figured out how to restore telomeres—preventing the cells from dying. Using an enzyme called telomerase, they allowed otherwise normal cells to divide many times past the Hayflick Limit.
The headline for the USA Today story about the announcement proclaimed, ‘FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH’ FOR CELLS DISCOVERED.
I was more than a little freaked out by the notion that my book might be obsolete before it was even published.
But the 1998 announcement just concerned cells in a test tube, a far cry from experiments on elderly people in nursing homes. Also, some scientists worried that the telomerase might cause normal cells to begin acting like cancer cells. After all, it’s telomerase that some cancer cells use to stay immortal.
And many questions remain about translating test tube results to real humans. The relationship between cells living and dying, and humans living and dying, is still not completely clear. Just to give one example: The cells of the brain and heart—certainly two of our most important organs—stop dividing in youth. So how could telomere loss be blamed when brains and hearts age and die?
As I write this, research continues. The Geron Corporation scientists are hoping their work will lead to “therapeutic opportunities for age-related diseases,” according to the New York Times. As far as I know, no one is expecting to produce anything like PT-1, if that’s even possible. Although some observers hype the potential for immortality, most scientists are looking at narrower changes: combating cancer, treating hardened arteries, growing new skin for burn victims, reversing vision loss, eliminating wrinkles. For the foreseeable future, at least, people will still die—the telomere research might just help them live longer and stay healthier before death.
So your great-aunt Enid’s chances for complete unaging look pretty slim. Your parents’ odds aren’t much better. But will people who are kids today ever face the kind of decisions Melly and Anny Beth faced?
Beats me.
Would you want to?
MARGARET PETERSON HADDIX is the author of many memorable novels for young readers, including Just Ella, Among the Hidden, and Running Out of Time. Her work has been honored with the International Reading Association Children’s Book Award, American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults and Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers citations, and several state readers’ choice awards. Margaret graduated from Miami University with degrees in creative writing, journalism, and history, and has worked as a newspaper reporter and a community college instructor. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband, Doug, and their children, Meredith and Connor.
Where did the idea for Turnabout come from? “I bought a card for a friend, joking that it’s actually good that we get older, not younger, on our birthdays because—as the punch line went—who would want to live through puberty twice? It made me wonder: What if someone had to? I already had age and aging on my mind because I’d just attended my grandmother’s ninetieth birthday party, and I’d recently visited my husband’s grandmother in Kentucky, a month before her death. Somehow all those things—the card’s question, the ninetieth birthday, the Kentucky visit—meshed in my mind. Turnabout was the result.”
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