by Megan Crewe
For a few minutes, when I wake up in the thin early morning sunlight, it feels like a perfectly normal day. I’ll get up, head to cross-country practice, sit through my classes. Coach will bark at anyone who ran over their previous time, the teachers will review the homework and assign more, the halls will be full of the usual raucous chatter. Beautifully, amazingly normal.
Then I go downstairs to grab breakfast.
“Busy day yesterday?” Mom says as I come into the kitchen. She yawns, holding the kettle under the tap.
I freeze. “What?”
“Whatever you got up to, you must have really tired yourself out,” she goes on in her usual breezy voice. “I called your name a couple times when dinner was ready and you didn’t even twitch. I thought if you were that far out, you probably needed the sleep.”
“Oh,” I say. “Yeah.” Dinner. All that jumping—morning to evening to afternoon—I’d lost any sense of schedule.
But I can’t exactly say that. “I, ah, I guess I didn’t get enough sleep the night before. I stayed up kind of late getting an essay done. And we ran a hard practice yesterday morning.”
Mom nods as if this all makes perfect sense, which I guess it does. Except it’s not true. These are the first words I’ve spoken to Mom in what feels like days and I’m spouting lies.
The wonderful sense of normal starts to recede with a knot in my gut.
My stomach seems completely aware that it missed dinner. It grumbles as soon as I open the bag of bread, with a pang of hunger that shoots right through me. I have to grip the counter for a second, afraid I’m going to puke. Not that there’s anything in there right now to throw up.
Two days of Traveling, give or take, and all I’ve eaten was a bag of trail mix and a few bites of pecan pie.
I manage to gather myself before Mom notices, and pop two slices of bread in the toaster. When she ducks out, I make myself two sandwiches as I wait for the toast—one for lunch and one for right after practice. I feel like I could eat five breakfasts, but if I fill up too much before the run, I really will puke.
I’m gulping down bites of toast slathered in peanut butter when Mom comes back in, holding a spiral-bound book. When she flips it open, I realize it’s one of Noam’s sketchpads. I stop chewing.
“I started thinking, after we talked the other night,” she says, her eyes on the book. “Maybe we’ve gone too far, boxing all Noam’s things away as if we’re pretending he was never here. It might be nice to have a couple of his pictures framed, put up in the house. What do you think of this one?”
She presents a colored pencil drawing of a vine creeping down a latticework fence, one bright red bloom in the midst of the pointed leaves. It’s one of his more polished pieces, only sketchy around the edges, the shades of green bringing out the textures and shadows so the vine seems to emerge from the page.
I swallow the sticky lump in my mouth. “It’s great,” I say, and it is. But I have to tuck my hands under the table and press my fingernails into my palms to hold back the tears that want to spring into my eyes. Imagine what he could have done, if Darryl hadn’t— If those boys from school hadn’t—
Mom keeps flipping through the sketchpad, oblivious. And I remember nothing’s changed for her. Noam is still as distant to her, a memory from twelve years ago, as he was to me when we talked on Tuesday.
She doesn’t know. In her mind, he could still be wandering the world out there, alone, or with new friends . . .
“Skylar?” Mom says, and I realize she’s looking at me now. “If it bothers you, honey, we don’t have to do it.”
“No,” I say quickly. “Of course, it’s fine. It’s a good idea.”
She smiles and wanders back into the hall, maybe trying to decide where to hang the pictures. The rest of my toast catches in my throat going down.
They need to know. She and Dad—it isn’t right for them to have nothing but that uncertainty—it isn’t right that Noam’s life trailed off without any acknowledgment. It isn’t right that Darryl and the other boys never had to own up to what they did.
I have to figure out a way for my parents to find out. I mull it over as I clean up my dishes. Noam’s yearbooks are in that box upstairs. I could find Darryl’s full name—and maybe Babyface’s and his tall friend’s too, if their photos look enough like they did in person. That would be a start.
I think maybe I can work out a plan while I run. The rhythm usually helps me sort out my thoughts. But a half hour later, as I’m pounding along the paths in the park, a different sort of uneasiness drifts over me. There’s a hollowness in the team, in the space around me, even though Marie’s running with me like she often does. A sense of something missing, so hazy it slides away from me whenever I try to latch onto it, only to slink back the moment I let it go.
Is there a shift, something about the park, about us? I can’t pick out any specific vibe of wrongness. It’s just not exactly right.
I manage to tune it out during calculus and Spanish. But when I walk into the cafeteria and Angela waves to me from where she’s sitting with Lisa and Evan, it rises over me again. The table is too empty.
Of course it’s not. I sit down and the four of us fill the space, just like always. Still, the apprehension won’t stop niggling at me. I glance over my shoulder a few times, half expecting to see someone standing there, waiting for us to notice. It’s just the usual cafeteria crowd.
“So, I think it’s time we start making winter holiday plans,” Lisa declares, and Angela grins.
“You can never wait long, can you?”
“Didn’t we—” I start, and hesitate. I was going to say, Didn’t we talk about that yesterday? But we didn’t, did we?
I try to think back to our conversation in the pie shop, but the memory is slippery. I asked Lisa about the battle, I remember that. And . . . the rest is a haze. I picture the four of us, sitting around the table: Lisa by the window, Evan on one side, and Jasmin, who’s been hanging out with us sometimes since we all had English together last year . . .
A whisper shivers through me. Wrong. The image blurs. I blink, but I can’t seem to focus on anything in that moment.
Around me, the conversation has veered off in another direction.
“You’re all coming to the dance, right?” Angela says.
“Of course,” I say automatically, and Evan mock grumbles, “I don’t think I was given a choice,” and Angela and I giggle as Lisa punches his shoulder. The whisper slips away, but the vague uneasiness remains.
“You’ve got to ask someone to dance,” I tell Angela, trying to bury it. “Time for a new crush.”
Her cheeks flush and her gaze darts toward Teyo, a few tables over . . . with the sophomore girlfriend he hooked up with last month. A chill tickles over my skin.
“We’ll see,” Angela says, turning back to us.
“If you don’t pick someone, I’m going to do it for you,” Lisa announces. Angela squeals in protest. And I just breathe.
Everything’s okay. Win and Thlo and the others are speeding back to Kemya to assemble Jeanant’s weapon, and everything here is perfectly, perfectly fine. Nothing’s felt really wrong, after all. I’m just being paranoid, psyching myself out.
My pulse keeps thrumming in my head. My fingers itch for my lost bracelet. But it wasn’t helping that much anyway, in the end. I think of bringing the weapon parts to Thlo, a beam exploding the generator over our heads . . .
Not for seventeen more years.
I can’t quite shake it off. My nerves are still buzzing when we get up to head to our next classes. “See you,” Angela says, turning down the hall toward her geography room, and the uneasiness bursts into a sudden panic.
“Ang—” I blurt out.
She pauses, looking back. “Yeah?” she says. That oh so normal worry line crinkles up in the middle of her forehead. It should bother me that
I’m worrying her, but somehow I’m relieved to see it.
Be careful, I think. Stay safe. Don’t disappear.
It’s not as though she could help it, though, could she? Who knows what shifts the Kemyate scientists above us will make in the next seventeen years? In the weeks or months or years it takes after that for Win’s group to find the right moment to take down the time field generator? All our lives are going to be rewritten hundreds, maybe thousands more times . . .
I open my mouth, those fears prickling through me. All I can force out is, “The dance. It’s going to be great.”
She smiles. “Thanks,” she says.
I hurry off to physics. A sweat’s broken over my skin. I concentrate on the rows of lockers, the numbers on the doors, my desk there in the middle of the classroom. An aimless drone of apprehension hums in my ears. I grit my teeth as the teacher starts to write on the board, and close my eyes. Three times three is nine. Three times nine is twenty-seven. I picture the numbers in their steady spiral, winding around me like armor.
No matter what the Travelers and the scientists playing with our planet do, they can’t shift that. They can’t stop three times three from equaling nine—
Or can they?
It’s an absurd idea, but the moment my mind’s latched onto it, I can’t shake it. I make myself open my binder and copy Ms. Cavoy’s notes, but it’s still there, in the back of my head.
I don’t know. I did so much, I fought so hard to protect everyone I care about, and I still don’t know whether a single one of us is really safe.
I’m never going to know. Seventeen years from now, I can start wondering if it’s happened yet, if the fishbowl around us has been shattered and the watching figures in their satellite have finally gone home, but there’ll be nothing to tell me for sure. I can’t help; I can’t hurry it along; I can’t do anything but wait, like one more clueless goldfish.
I did my best. More than anyone else on Earth could ever imagine. So why do I feel like something horribly important has slipped through my fingers?
Physics passes in a fog. I stumble through the recitations in Spanish, ones I’m sure I knew by heart a couple days ago. Finally, the clock ticks across the last few minutes toward final bell. Bags rustle as my classmates pack up their books, ready to be done.
It’s not done, I think. I stare out the window, over the school’s courtyard to the street beyond.
How am I going to get through another seventeen years feeling like this?
I suppress a shudder, and narrow my eyes. The interlocking stones of the courtyard. Seven bikes chained to the rack. A green van rumbling by. Maybe, if I can just absorb every movement, every detail in my view—
All at once, the frantic buzz inside me quiets.
Win’s outside. Standing on the other side of the street beside the bus shelter, turned toward the front doors, as if he’s meant to be there.
The bell rings. Without any conscious thought, I’m moving. Snatching up my backpack, shoving in my notebook as I’m rushing for the door. When I hit the stairwell, I’m running. Down, and out the front doors, and across the road, toward the smile that splits across Win’s face when he sees me.
“You came back,” I say, breathless, as I come to a halt in front of him.
The first few students are ambling out the school doors behind me. Win draws back behind the bus shelter, and I follow.
“Yes,” he says, and then, in a rush, “This might sound completely ridiculous, but I thought there was a chance, and I can still bring you back so you haven’t lost any more time here, and—”
“What?” I interrupt. The hum that’s filling me now isn’t apprehension. It’s anticipation. “Win, just ask.”
“I talked to Thlo,” he says, slowing down. “Just now, after you left—it hasn’t been long for us, but I came today so you’d have had time to think. She’s approved it. You’ve helped us so much already, and I thought . . . maybe you’d want to come back to Kemya with us. To see Jeanant’s plan through to the end. We can make it work.”
He still hasn’t actually asked anything, but the question is obvious. The remains of my anxiety wash away. This is it. This is what I needed. I couldn’t deal with being back because I’m not actually done fighting: for the planet, for my parents, for Angela and Lisa and Evan. I don’t have to be.
I don’t care if I have to go to the other end of the universe to do it. I’m going to see that generator burn. I’m going to know it really is done, for good.
Nothing has ever felt more right.
“Yes,” I say.
“Yes?” Win repeats.
“Yes, I’ll come.”
“Oh. Well.” He breaks into a grin so wide it’s dazzling. “Then we should get going. We’ve got a galaxy to cross.”
He holds out his hand, and I take it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have to acknowledge, with gratitude, the books and authors that helped me figure out my own rules of time travel (as unscientific as mine may be): Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku, Time Traveler by Dr. Ronald L. Mallett, and Black Holes & Time Warps by Kip S. Thorne.
Many thanks to the Toronto Speculative Fiction Writers Group, who got the story on the right track; to friends and critique partners Amanda Coppedge, Deva Fagan, and Jenny Moss, who helped me take the book from early draft to finished novel; to my agent, Josh Adams, who found the trilogy not one but two homes; to my editors, Miriam Juskowicz and Lynne Missen, who guided me in bringing Skylar’s story into better clarity; to everyone at Amazon Skyscape and Penguin Canada who has helped bring this book to life; and to my family and friends for their continuing support, and their patience and understanding when I’m deep in the writing cave.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PHOTO © 2013 CHRIS BLANCHENOT
MEGAN CREWE is the celebrated author of the Fallen World trilogy and the novel Give Up the Ghost, which was shortlisted for the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. She majored in psychology at York University and has spent much of the last twelve years working as a behavioral therapist and school aid for children and teens with special needs. She lives in Toronto, Canada, with her husband and three cats.
