Traveler

by L. E. DeLano

“Why are you calling me? I texted you,” I say angrily.

  “I’m aware of that,” he replies, completely unconcerned. “So what do you want? You reached out to me, remember?”

  “And you were supposed to text me back,” I say, still perturbed that he’s broken a serious social rule here.

  “Sorry. I prefer conversation.” He lets out an audible sigh.

  “What if—what if I don’t want to do this?” I ask tentatively. “If I decide to be a normal person, maybe whoever it is that’s hunting me will leave me alone.”

  “But you’re not a normal person,” he says. “It’s a moot point. And that wouldn’t stop them. They’ve killed you before, and they’ll kill you again. They’ve already tried once.”

  “We don’t know that for sure. That one was my fault. I walked into the forklift.”

  “You keep coming up with excuses,” he says. “But this is your life now. You are a Traveler, and we need your help to figure out how to save you. Do you really want to ignore what you are and just be a sitting duck?”

  I am suddenly incredibly tired.

  “I don’t want to hear any more about it, Finn.”

  “You need to hear it.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do. Or you wouldn’t have called.”

  “Texted.”

  “Whatever.”

  I punch the end button and throw the phone down on the bedcovers.

  12

  The Other Side

  I wake the next morning to Danny, sitting on my bed and shaking my shoulder so hard my teeth rattle.

  “Ugh…,” I say. “Danny, get off.” I yank at the covers he’s sitting on, trying to roll over, but I give up. He won’t be budged.

  “You have to get up,” he says. “You have to work soon.”

  I glance at the clock. “Not till one,” I tell him. “It’s only eleven.”

  “You have to get up,” he insists. “Mom said to make sure.”

  “I’m up, I’m up.” I sit up in bed so he’ll leave, mentally cursing my mother as he shuts the door behind him.

  I roll out of bed, spread the covers back up, and slide into some plain gray sweatpants and a black T-shirt before I brush my teeth. I took a shower before bed last night, and my hair is skewed from sleeping on it wet. I shove it back into a ponytail, and I’m staring at myself in the mirror.

  My eyes shift away from the face in front of me, noting the hoodie hanging over the back of the chair behind me, the book on the edge of the bed, the messy coverlet.…

  But I made my bed. I resist the urge to turn around and check. I know it, though. I had set the book on the end of my neatly made bed. I would bet money on it. As I look longer, the hoodie on the back of the chair seems to deepen from navy into black. My carpet gives way to hardwood, with a rug over it. My room seems to grow longer and wider, and a computer desk appears next to my bed.

  I put my hand to the glass, and she does the same. A moment later, I am through.

  My room is very different. She’s really into black-light posters, for some reason. And it’s messy—not only is the bed not made, but clothes are strewn everywhere and the dresser is cluttered. Books are lying on the floor, and I don’t recognize the titles.

  I move out of my room, down the stairs, and into the rest of the house, which appears to be quiet, for the most part. The place is wild to look at—the walls are all different colors than they are in my house, shades of blue and green instead of sand and tan. There are strange bohemian pictures and pieces of artwork everywhere, and the curtains have been replaced with pouffy, patterned scarves, draped artlessly over elaborate curtain rods.

  “Interesting,” I say. “It looks like Walt Disney threw up in here.”

  There’s got to be somebody around somewhere. I realize that I know my way through the house, even though it’s not really anything like mine.

  I continue on through the house until I reach the French doors, which open up onto what I know before I see it is a spacious deck, overlooking a very large, very green backyard. The kitchen is off to the left, and I’m surprised for a moment to see my brother, rummaging through the cupboards. His hair is shorter, and he’s not quite as chubby, though still solidly built.

  “Danny? Hey, are you looking for something?” I ask.

  He turns and looks me right in the eye. “Do you know where Mom put the Oreos? I swear, she hides them from me. I think she wants them for herself.”

  I stare at him, openmouthed.

  “Jess?” He waves his hand side to side. “You’re zoning out on me.”

  “N-no, I don’t know what she did with them,” I manage to answer.

  He lets out a sigh. “Okay. Change of plans. Guess I’ll make popcorn.”

  He goes back to rummaging, and I am frozen.

  I cannot imagine Danny without his autism. It’s as much a part of him as his brown hair or his love of video games. Part of me says I don’t know this other guy, but I know I do.

  I know he played football in high school, linebacker. He also sang in the chorus and had a solo in the final concert of his senior year that made everyone cry because it was so good. He works part-time at the loading dock of a manufacturing company across town, and he also goes to college. He’s studying public relations.

  He’s Danny. My Danny, but not my Danny.

  Suddenly, I’m frightened. I want to go back. But at the same time, I’m fascinated. I can have a conversation with Danny. One where I don’t have to play word games to get information from him or hear him quote movie dialogue while I try to figure out how that applies to what he’s really trying to say to me. He can just talk, and I can just listen.

  “Lunch is out back, if you want it,” he tells me over his shoulder. “Mom ordered from that new wings place.”

  I swallow my apprehension and decide I’m going to stay just a little longer. I open the sliding glass doors and stop dead in my tracks.

  My parents are sitting together on side-by-side lounge chairs next to a moderate-sized pool.

  We have a pool. And my parents are together.

  “We’ve got wings!” my mom calls out.

  I look at them, wide-eyed.

  I realize that I’m blowing my cover here. I’d better act more … normal. But this does not feel normal.

  “Hi,” I manage to say.

  “You hungry?” Dad asks, reaching out to offer me the bucket of wings.

  “I don’t think I can eat.”

  “Are you feeling sick?” Dad asks.

  I take a moment and just look at them. They look like this is no big deal. Like the way we used to be. My parents divorced when I was nine and they’re still civil with each other, but it would be a stretch to say they parted as friends. My dad still lives in town, and I see him one night a week and every other weekend, but I can’t stop staring at him now.

  They look content—with life, with each other. And I have a lump in my throat so big I know I can’t speak. I shake my head no.

  “It’s because she came downstairs last night and ate a ton of snacks,” Mom says, reaching for the wings bucket and heading back into the house. I give my dad an awkward smile and trail behind her, still feeling like my head is swimming.

  “That’s not healthy, you know,” Mom scolds me as she puts the rest of the wings in a plastic container. “Missing sleep and loading up on junk is only going to make you sick.”

  “I know,” I say. “I just couldn’t sleep.”

  “If you had a date on a Saturday night, you wouldn’t be home eating,” Danny snarks from the living room.

  My mother rolls her eyes. “Danny, that’s enough.”

  “Just giving some free advice.” He shrugs. “The girl needs a love life.”

  “Danny!” Mom objects.

  “Just sayin’,” he defends himself.

  I look over at him sitting on the couch with a bowl of microwave popcorn balanced in his lap. I suppose some things are universal. He catches me staring and makes a face
at Mom. I smile, unable to help myself.

  “Jessa.”

  I turn to look at her again. “Yeah?”

  “Just … take a multivitamin or something. Humor me.”

  “I will.”

  She steps back out the door, and I look over at the clock in the kitchen. I assume time runs concurrently—and if so, I really should get back.

  I take one last look at my “normal” brother. I want to ask him a million questions. I want to sit and talk to him for hours. I mean, if I’m me, he’s still him, right? He can tell me everything I really want to know.

  Except it wouldn’t really be him. Not the way I know him.

  I move up the stairs to my bedroom. This time I make it through the mirror much more quickly, leaving my could-have-been life to another me.

  I back slowly away from the mirror, not entirely sure about what I just experienced. Then I glance down at myself.

  “Why am I wearing this?” I say aloud, and my eyes go to the mirror again. She changed me into a pair of jeans I had stuffed in the bottom of my closet because they’re red. I went through a colored-jeans phase in ninth grade, but I wouldn’t be caught dead in them now.

  She added a bright-yellow-and-green flannel, layered over a blue-flowered T-shirt that’s part of a sleepwear set. I look incredibly tacky. It only takes me a moment to get changed back into my T-shirt and sweatpants, and I wad up the other clothes, throwing them far back into my closet.

  I can hear Danny downstairs, and he’s shouting at someone—possibly the TV, since my mom is at work. I have an overwhelming urge to see him, so I race down the stairs and there he is … having an imaginary sword fight with Finn.

  “Hey,” I say.

  They both stop to look at me. They’re each clutching a cardboard tube from the center of a roll of paper towels—my mom collects them for craft projects at the retirement home where she and Danny work.

  “Took you long enough,” Finn says. “Weren’t you changing your clothes?”

  “I—uh … when did you get here? And why are you sword fighting?” This day is getting more and more bizarre.

  “Jessa! You came back!” Danny smiles at me. “I’m giving Finn lessons.”

  “We were watching The Princess Bride,” Finn explains. He looks at me oddly. “And you let me in. Then you ran out of here to change your clothes.”

  I’m still looking at Danny strangely, and I know it shows on my face. He’s my Danny, and I didn’t realize how glad I’d be to have him back, but … did he realize I had changed? I mean, not just my clothes?

  “Jessa…?”

  Finn realizes something is wrong. “Danny, we’ll do some more later, okay?” he promises. “I have to go help Jessa with her homework.”

  I feel Finn’s hand on my arm as he leads me back up the stairs to my room.

  “Okay,” he says, shutting the door behind him. “What’s wrong?”

  “I … traveled.”

  He looks surprised. “By yourself?”

  I nod. “And it was a lot like home, but my parents were still together.”

  His eyes soften. “Sometimes it’s hard on the other side,” he says. “You can’t ever predict what it’s going to be like, unless you’ve been there before. Sometimes, not even then.”

  “And Danny. He—he—” I stammer, trying to wrap my head around it. “He didn’t have autism. How is that possible?”

  “Who knows?” Finn shrugs. “They’re not sure what causes autism, exactly, are they?”

  “Not entirely, though they have found some genetic links.”

  “So his genes combined in a different way—maybe because of external factors, like your mom was exposed to something during pregnancy, or maybe it was just timing as he moved from one stage of development to another. It could have been any or all of that,” Finn explains.

  I sink down on my bed, still not sure how to process everything. As crazy as all that just was, I have a really weird feeling in my gut right now. Like there’s a giant fist around my stomach. I think about my parents sitting there, side by side, and tears burn at my eyes again. I force my thoughts away from Danny, because I know I really will start crying if I think about all of it together.

  “You okay?” Finn asks sympathetically. “It sounds like that was a lot to face.”

  “Yeah,” I say quietly. That is a serious understatement. “Does that happen sometimes? Experiencing a reality that you kind of don’t want to leave?”

  He looks away from me.

  “Yes, it happens. You’ll learn to get over it.”

  I set my elbows on my knees and put my forehead in my hands. “I just want to write. That’s all. I want to be a writer.”

  Finn sits down on the bed next to me.

  “Nobody’s stopping you. You’ve got an amazing gift. Take it as far as you want to go. None of that has to change.”

  “Everything’s changed.” I stand up and start walking for the door.

  “Jessa, think about all this for a moment,” he says, grabbing my shoulders and turning me to face him. “You’ve got something here that any writer would kill to have—unlimited worlds to explore, and all at the touch of your fingertips. How is that a bad thing?”

  “How do you do it, Finn?” I ask him. “How do you keep from getting attached to people you know in these other realities?”

  His hands are still on my shoulders, and they slide up to gently cup my face. “You don’t. Not always.” For a long moment, his eyes hold mine; then he drops his hands and shoves them in his pockets. “But it’s better if you don’t let yourself.”

  “I don’t think I’m cut out for this.”

  “And Mario and I know for a fact that you are.”

  “So we’re back to me having no choice in the matter,” I say glumly. “Look, I appreciate that I have access to all this writing material. It’s just everything that goes with it that I’m not so confident about.”

  “I know. But I’m not worried,” Finn says.

  “Why?” I ask, shaking my head. “What makes you all so sure about me? It’s not like I’ve got superpowers or anything.”

  He pushes a strand of hair behind my ear.

  “I’m always sure about you, Jessa,” he says.

  13

  Possibilities

  It’s Monday, and I’m back at school. Somehow, this reality now seems surreal, and I’m living in some bizarre fantasy world in my head. I see the world around me with new eyes. Every nuance, every tiny decision falls like a rock hitting the surface of a frozen lake, causing cracks that spread, shattering the surface.

  Do I want pizza or chicken noodle soup for lunch? Should I wear the blue hoodie or the gray one? What if my mom leaves five minutes late for work? What if Danny puts two packs of frosting on his Toaster Strudel?

  The possibilities breed more possibilities, cycling on into infinity, and now I know there’s a group of superpowered reality travelers who keep it moving smoothly. All these years I’ve been harvesting my dreams for story ideas and I never had an inkling that I was really experiencing any of it.

  I certainly never, in my wildest dreams, thought I’d really be meeting Finn in the flesh or that he’d be trying to help me navigate this sea full of crazy. My mind is still whirling over all that I’ve seen, and I’ve only been to two other realities. How many are there? Thousands? Millions?

  I find Ben leaning on my locker right before history class, and I wonder for a moment what he would have been like in the reality I visited yesterday. The memories from the other me surface, and I sift through them.

  There was no Finn in that reality. But there was a Ben. He and I traveled in different social circles, and we didn’t speak much. But I did have a slight crush on him.

  I let that sink in for a moment as I walk toward him in my reality, and to say this is a weird sensation would be a serious understatement.

  It’s not that I never considered Ben as romance material. I actually did at one time, when he first moved here from New Mexi
co a year ago. He was the focus of lots of female attention. Some of it was because he was new, from someplace most of the school considered to be “exotic,” and this is a small, boring town. But he’s also easy to look at.

  We’ve only just gotten a class with each other this semester in AP Honors History, and then he joined Spanish Club. By the time we started hanging out, I’d begun dreaming of Finn on a nightly basis. How does anyone compete with your dream guy? It was a losing battle from the start, but I couldn’t very well explain that to Ben without sounding like a complete head case.

  I do like being around Ben, though. He makes me laugh, and he doesn’t mind if we just hang out or occasionally do goofy stuff like playing Band Hero or binge-watching Netflix. Most of all, he’s good with Danny, and not a lot of guys are. I think he makes people feel uncomfortable, and they don’t know how to talk to him. Ben never worries about any of that. He just treats Danny like a normal person.

  My mind flashes to Finn, pretending to sword fight with my brother, and I break into a wide grin as I reach for the handle on my locker.

  “Do I have food on my shirt or something?” Ben asks.

  I glance over at him. “Not that I can see. Why?”

  “I figured you were smiling because you were fixing to bust on me for something. What’s got you in such a good mood?”

  “I was just remembering something funny,” I reply. “How was your game yesterday?”

  “We lost.”

  “Sorry.” I grab my binder and my history book out of my locker, and he closes it for me before falling into step next to me.

  “It’s okay.” He shrugs. “We suck.”

  “Go team,” I snark. “That’s the spirit!”

  “I don’t see you out on a field anywhere, St. Clair.” He bumps me with his shoulder.

  “Hey, how’d the diorama turn out?”

  “It’s done and it’s good. Perfection.”

  “Ah,” I say wisely. “The perfect partner project. I knew I could count on you.”

  We make our way into history class, where I put my pen on the paper and start working on my latest piece for creative writing class.

  I listen to Mr. Draper drone on with half an ear as I start to form my story. My protagonist is a superhero guy who will appear to a person, and he’s summoned there when they utter the phrase, “I’m all alone.”