Autumn's Wish

by Bella Thorne

  Only it’s not a locket. What’s inside is an array of steampunkish open cogs that whirr and click and spin. On top of the cogs are four windows, one at the top and bottom of the locket and one on each side. The top window shows the number 10 in a blocky old-style font, the left window says “December,” the right “19,” and the bottom window…

  I stop breathing and I nearly drop the medallion.

  “Dios mio,” Eddy says softly. She crosses herself, and I know she sees it too.

  The windows show a date. The exact date my father died.

  “Why would he give this to me?” I ask, my voice shaking. “I don’t want it.”

  Eddy pretends to spit on the ground. “No. You don’t say that about a gift from the spirit world. If your father wants you to have this, there’s a good reason.”

  That’s what she says, but she starts pacing around the room, muttering prayers in Spanish.

  Still, she’s right. My dad loves me. No part of his spirit would come back to torture me with the day he died. There has to be another reason he gave me this thing. He has to believe it’ll help me bring peace and harmony to my little corner of the world.

  I peer more closely at the whirring gears and windows and realize that there are tiny metal wheels next to the left, right, and bottom windows—the ones controlling the date. I push my thumb down onto the bumpy metal next to the word “December” and roll it up.

  “January,” it says in the window.

  My heart pumps faster. I’m getting an idea of what this might do.

  I turn the wheel on the right, and the numbers spin up to 31, then start over at 1.

  This thing…this calendar…it doesn’t just show the date; it lets me set the date. And why would it let me set the date unless…

  My heart is beating so fast now I think it’ll slam out of my chest and hit the wall. I wheel to Eddy and grab her arms, stopping her in her tracks.

  “It’s time travel!” I shout, not even caring how ridiculous that sounds. “I can set a date and I can go there!”

  But Eddy’s still too upset from seeing Dad’s death day to understand. She looks at me with unfocused eyes. “A date?” she asks. Then her face relaxes into a blissful smile. “Ah, I have a date. With Juan-Carlos Falciano. So guapo…”

  Oh no. Eddy’s lost in the past, dreaming about my grandfather.

  “Muy guapo,” I agree. “Very handsome.”

  I get her settled back in her chair where she can daydream in peace and turn my attention back to the locket. I’m right about it. I know I am. The map took me to a place, and this watch-calendar will take me to a date. A date where I can bring peace and harmony to my little corner of the world.

  My breath catches and I bite my fist to stop myself from screaming out loud because suddenly I get it.

  I know exactly where to go. Or when to go.

  I’ll go to the day before my dad died. I’ll convince him not to take the motorcycle drive that killed him. I’ll stop his accident before it ever happens. I’ll have him back.

  My heart swells up and fills my chest. I love my dad so much. This is what he wants from me. This is what he’s been building up to with the diary and the map. He wasn’t supposed to die at all, and now I can make that right. I can bring him back and we’ll have the life we were meant to have all along.

  Fingers trembling, I carefully set the date: December 18, two years ago. There’s no way to set a place, but it was kind of like that with the map too. When I wrote “Jenna,” I went to my Jenna, not some other random person with that name.

  My dad’s spirit is in this locket. He wants me to do this. He’ll know where I want to go.

  I close the locket and grip it tightly in my hand. Squeezing my eyes shut, I imagine going to him. December 18. He’ll be at our Aventura house, but it’ll be mostly empty, because we’ll still be in Stillwater. He’ll have just come from Century Acres to check on Eddy. I’ll appear in the family room and run outside to find him swimming laps in the pool, like he told us he did every day. And even though he knows I’m supposed to be back home, he won’t be surprised to see me, because he’ll just know. I’ll make him promise he won’t get on his motorcycle tomorrow, and when I come back to now he’ll be there, sitting at the dinner table with Erick and Mom, just waiting for me to come home. I’ll run into his arms and he’ll wrap me in the tightest hug ever. “Thank you, baby,” he’ll say softly into the top of my head. “I love you.” “I love you, too, Daddy,” I’ll say, and I’ll squeeze him even tighter. And even though Mom and Erick will have no idea why we’re acting like we haven’t seen each other in ages, Dad will know I followed his mission for me and saved him. And I won’t care if all my friends scatter for college and everything else changes because I’ll have him back, and I’ll know that everything else will be okay.

  It’s so real. I can feel his arms around me and hear his voice. My heart races again as I sense the change in the air and know that I’ve shifted somehow. I’m not where I was before. I’m there, at the house two years ago, and all I have to do is open my eyes to make all my dreams come true.

  I fling my eyes open…but all I see is Eddy, asleep in her chair.

  I haven’t gone anywhere at all.

  I haven’t saved him.

  He’s gone…forever.

  The pain slashes into me like a thousand knives. My legs buckle and I crumple to the floor, screaming down into the carpet. I cry until I’m completely wrung out.

  At some point I hear the door click open.

  “Autumn?” a kind male voice asks. “Autumn, is that you?”

  The man crouches down next to me, and I swim through a foggy daze to understand.

  “Autumn?”

  It’s Ezra, one of the aides at Century Acres. He knows me well because I volunteered a lot last year.

  “I’m fine,” I say. I sound like I’m talking through cotton, and my face feels stiff and swollen from crying. I can’t possibly explain what happened, so I go for the one thing that usually stops guys from asking anything else. “Bad cramps. I curled up down here and I guess I fell asleep.”

  Ezra sucks in his breath and steps back. He might be a nursing assistant, but he’s still male. “Eddy’s out too,” he says. “I brought her dinner. Should I leave it in the kitchen?”

  The “kitchen” was a small counter with a sink, a mini fridge, and a few cabinets, but it was all Eddy needed.

  “Sure,” I say. “Thanks.”

  I wait for Ezra to leave before I get to my feet. I look longingly at Eddy’s empty bed. It would be nice to crawl under the covers and stay there for a decade or two.

  My phone buzzes in my pocket. I want to ignore it, but it might be Mom, wondering where I am, so I answer without even looking at the caller ID.

  “Hey!” Jenna says brightly. “Did you go see Eddy? Did you get the new gift?”

  I open my mouth to answer, but I just start crying again. Jenna doesn’t push. She knows I’ll tell her everything when I’m ready.

  I must be completely drained of all fluid because the tears don’t take long to stop. I tell Jenna everything, and she lets me spill it all without saying anything.

  “So I was wrong,” I finish dully. “The thing doesn’t work at all. I can’t bring him back.”

  When Jenna spoke, her voice was soft and gentle. “Autumn…of course you can’t bring him back. You can’t change the past.”

  “Then why would he give me this thing?” I wail. “It’s not like I can change the future. It hasn’t happened yet!”

  “Right,” Jenna says. “But if you see what’s happening then and you don’t like it, you can change things now to make the future better. Like…if you jumped forward and saw yourself actually married to Kyler Leeds, you could come back and change things up so you don’t make such a hideously horrible choice.”

  “Ignoring that,” I say. “So…you don’t think Dad meant for this to bring him back?”

  “That was never his thing, right?” Jenna says. “If
it was, you could have wished him back with the diary.”

  My heart sinks a little because I know she’s right. At the same time, I feel kind of better. The locket didn’t fail. I didn’t mess it up. I just didn’t understand what Dad wanted me to do. But now that I do…

  “Will you stay on the phone with me?” I ask Jenna.

  “Are you going to try it?”

  I nod, which is ridiculous since we’re not on FaceTime and she has no clue what I’m doing. “Yeah.”

  “Totally,” she says. “When are you going to go?”

  “Right now.”

  “No,” Jenna says. “I mean, you’re going to go to…when?”

  I bite my lip and think about it. I could go a few months into the future and see where we’re all going to college…but what am I going to do, change where people want to go? I could travel twenty years into the future and see where we all end up…but that’s so far away, and I don’t think I could handle it if I see that something really horrible happens to one of us. I shudder. Maybe sometime I’ll do that, but not yet.

  “Three years in the future,” I tell Jenna. “That’s enough time for all of us to be settled into college, right? If we all grow apart…I’d see it by then, right?”

  “Right,” Jenna says. “But if you do see us growing apart, don’t believe it. I promise I won’t let it happen.”

  “Deal,” I say.

  The medallion is still on the floor, where I left it. I put Jenna on speakerphone and pick it up, gently rubbing my thumb over the zemi. I think about how sure I was that I could bring back my dad and I almost start crying again, but I don’t. He wants me to do something else with this gift, and I won’t let him down. I press the latch, flip open the locket, and set the dials. September 21, three years in the future.

  “Okay, I set it,” I tell Jenna. “Now I’m gonna close it up and see what happens.”

  “I won’t hang up,” Jenna promises. “I’ll be right here.”

  I nod. I know she can’t see me, but I’m too nervous to say anything else. I don’t even know where I should wish to go.

  I close my hand around the locket, squeeze it tight, and empty my mind of everything but one thought:

  Take me where I should go, Daddy. Wherever I need to go.

  My eyes are still closed when I hear the song “YMCA” by the Village People blaring far too loudly in my ears. Naturally, I assume I’m in hell. Or at a bar mitzvah. A bar mitzvah in hell.

  I open my eyes just in time to see a short elderly woman in a purple silk dress fling her “Y” hand toward my head.

  “Whoa! Hey! Look out!” I shout.

  But she doesn’t hear me. She smacks the back of her hand right into my face.

  Literally. Into my face. Her hand goes through.

  Or stops somewhere in the middle of my brain. I don’t know. I can’t see where it lands and I don’t feel anything. I just see the hand zip toward my eyes, disappear, and then zip away again a second later.

  Whoa.

  I take a deep breath, although I have no idea if I’m actually physically breathing right now. I mean, if I had lungs, I’d have a solid body…and if I had a body, the old woman would have smacked against it, right?

  I drop to the floor as the Village People call out another “Y.” Getting impaled might not hurt me, but it’s weird enough to make me dizzy and a little nauseous. I’ll avoid it if I can.

  I reach into my back pocket to text Jenna what’s going on, but then I remember I left the phone on the bed in Eddy’s room. I also notice that the couple of dollars I had stuffed into the pocket aren’t there anymore. The locket, however, is still tucked into my palm. I slip its chain over my neck and go over the three things I’ve learned in the last two seconds:

  1. Wherever I am, people can’t see, hear, or touch me.

  2. Nothing comes with me but the clothes I’m wearing and the locket.

  3. “YMCA” will never die.

  Looking down, I’m not shocked to see I’m on a dance floor covered with boogeying people, so I crawl between them until I get to an open space where I can stand and check everything out.

  It’s definitely some kind of big-deal formal event. All the guys are in suits or even tuxes, all the women in gowns. There’s a stage at the front of the room where a DJ rocks out to the record, making all the arm motions and revving people up each time the chorus comes around, shouting, “Come on…you all know what to do!” The dance floor is crowded, but there are still plenty of people sitting at round tables scattered throughout the room. I scan them for someone I know, and maybe a clue about why Dad sent me here.

  “Oh, hey!” I cry, waving my arm in the air. “Amanda!”

  It’s one of Mom’s friends, her first employee at Catches Falls, and she’s sitting at a table with a guy I think is her date and two other couples. She clearly didn’t hear me, so I run over to her…and only remember I’m some kind of invisible ghost creature when a waiter with a tray of steak dinners walks right through me.

  Mmmm…steak. It smells really good. And the fries with it are the kind my mom and I like best—thin and crisp and…I’m salivating right now, they smell so amazing. Seriously, no one would mind if I snuck one off a plate, right? They can’t see me. They won’t even notice.

  I run up to the waiter and reach for the easiest prey—a French fry so long it sticks way off the plate. I can snag it without even shifting anything else. I pinch it between my fingers…but my fingers go right through. Of course they do. My fingers aren’t really here. Neither is my mouth, tongue, or stomach. I need to lodge an official complaint with my dad’s spirit. It’s so not cool to let me smell amazing things and not taste them.

  Giving up on the food, I turn back to Amanda. I stand behind her and try to get her attention, but there’s no way. I can’t even get a good look at her face or hear what she’s saying because the room’s too noisy and she’s bent over in close conversation with the other people at the table.

  Guess there’s one way to change that. I move to the spot directly across from Amanda, take a deep breath, and walk through the table until I’m standing with the floral centerpiece lodged somewhere around my liver. I duck down lower so I can see Amanda’s face more clearly.

  “Hey, Amanda!” I say, even though I know she can’t hear me. “You look amazing. You were so skinny before. Mom and I used to worry. But seriously, you’re gorgeous. And is this your boyfriend? Very cute. So tell me, what’s this party all about?”

  I stay silent now and listen to the conversation around me. It’s not much to go on. Gossip about people I don’t even know. And while it’s kind of fascinating to imagine which dance floor demon Leanna might be and why she’s dating yet another married man, I have work to do. I’m about to leave the table and look around some more when Amanda looks beyond me and lights up, excited.

  “Oh! Oh! It’s happening!” she shouts. “I want to see this. Everybody be quiet!”

  I wheel around toward the dance floor and stage and see that the rest of the room feels the same way. The dance floor is empty except for the DJ, who stands next to a giant tiered cake that someone rolled into place.

  So it’s a wedding, then. Got it.

  My throat suddenly closes. Is it my wedding? Why else would Amanda be here if it wasn’t my wedding? I mean, we’re not super close but my mom would totally invite her to my wedding.

  Why am I getting married in three years? I’ll only be twenty!

  Who am I marrying in three years?

  I start to hyperventilate. I should probably breathe into a paper bag, but I couldn’t grab one if I wanted to. Another note to Spirit of Dad: ghost body should not have freak-out abilities when there’s nothing I can do about them.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for cake!” the DJ cries cheesily. “You know what to do, happy couple….”

  He grins toward one of the tables, but everyone is standing now and even though I crane my neck, I can’t see who’s sitting there. Then I remember I’m Ms
. Ghost Body with a centerpiece lodged in my abdomen and push my way forward, but I only get a few steps before I see the bride and groom. They’re on the dance floor now, but the bride isn’t me. I can only see her from the back, but she has brown curls. Did I dye and curl my hair? She also kind of looks shorter than me. Do I shrink in three years?

  The groom turns first, and I’m sorry, but I ghost-vomit a little in my mouth. I don’t want to be mean, but he’s old. Like, older than my mom old. And he’s not hot-older-guy old either. He’s weirdly tall, with gangly alien-dude arms and legs and a bald spot so large and shiny you could burn ants with the light that lasers off it. The hair he lacks on his head is all over his face, in a bushy blond mustache and beard.

  This can’t be my wedding. Mom would never let me get married to this man. Not in three years. This is insane. I want to find her and scream at her to tell me what’s going on, but then the bride turns around and the universe socks me in the stomach.

  My mom is the bride. The beautiful, glowing, smiling bride. She’s holding a piece of wedding cake just like the groom and they beam at each other as she reaches up and he reaches down to delicately feed each other a single bite, before the groom runs his finger through the frosting and dollops it on Mom’s nose.

  Everyone applauds and cheers, but I run to the stage and get in their faces.

  “I object!” I scream. “I object on the grounds that you are married to Reinaldo Falciano and you love him!”

  No one’s paying attention to me, least of all my mom, who lets Ant-Burner-Head sweep her into his arms for a dance to some Frank Sinatra song, which is completely ridiculous because Mom hates Sinatra, and she and Dad always laughed that the whole Rat Pack thing was totally overrated, so why on earth would she dance to it at her wedding, especially when she’s already married!

  The dance floor is quickly filling up, but Gangly Limbs stands a full head taller than anyone else in the universe, so I still see him across the room. I stalk toward him, completely ignoring the couples I walk through on the way, until he and my mom are right in front of me. Mom’s in his arms, smiling up at him like he’s the dreamiest man alive.