Walking into my house I felt like an intruder. The stuff was familiar but weird, as if they weren’t mine to touch or use. My mother noticed I was taking in the surroundings.
“You want a pop?”
“Sure, thanks.” I turned on the television and flopped down on the couch, which was orders of magnitude more comfortable than the bed at the hospital. Someone had stacked my textbooks and notebook on the coffee table; on the top was Jeannine’s neat script with a list of homework and study assignments. I picked up the phone on the glass end table and dialed her house. Jeannine was the daughter of a Cuban immigrant who had fled to the US when Fidel Castro took power. Which was like, all her dad could talk about, so Jay and me tried to stay as far away from him as possible. It’s hard pretending to be completely shocked when you’ve heard the story for the twelve-thousandth time.
“So I can’t take a few days off from school without you peer pressuring me to do homework?”
“Hey you! Are you home? You want visitors?” I could see her face in my mind, perfect white teeth, long neck hidden by her straight chestnut hair until she swept it away to twirl it, and cheekbones that framed her many intense expressions. I suddenly felt every minute of the month I’d spent conked out, and wanted to see her.
“Sure, I’m accepting visitors.”
“Oh, your Highness, of course.”
I laughed.
“Besides, I’ll enjoy getting you to redo all the homework from the past month for me.”
“Of course you would. I’ll tell Jay to join me.”
“You know, I think I’m more in one-on-one mode today, if that’s okay.”
“Oh, sure, okay.” A brief pause. “Give me half an hour.”
“See you soon,” I said, and hung up.
I didn’t want Jay around when I talked to Jeannine, because I had to tell someone about my experience. And I couldn’t share with Jay that my brain had made me female in my vision. Though come to think of it I wasn’t sure I could reveal that to Jeannine, either.
***
Weeds invaded the old concrete slab where our suburban tract ended; the area just past a boundary fence was a hangout we’d discovered in grade school. We walked to the rusted iron fence and pushed ourselves in between the gap where a few supports were missing. Daylight flickered through the trees here. Compared to the forests in my hallucination, these trees were mangy, sad leftovers from whatever woods were originally here before the houses. In the distance a jackhammer tore the shit out of concrete and occasional trucks rumbled by on the freeway half a mile away. I’d kind of missed the noise of home.
“You look too thin,” said Jeannine. She was in nurse mode.
“Hello to you too.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, playing with her long hair. Like most of the other girls in school, she wore it parted in the middle and pulled around her face like curtains. I gave her a look that I hoped was reassuring.
“No, it’s okay. I think I’ve forgotten how to take teasing.”
She smiled then and I thought about not telling her about my unreal time in the valley. I mean, talking about it would make me look unhinged, right?
But Jeannine asked me what I wanted to talk about just a moment too soon, before I could come up with a cover story and there I was, unable to think of a good lie. I should have prepared before she showed up at my front door. What a schmuck.
“So what if I had a really insano story to tell you?”
“So what if you did?” she asked, sitting carefully on an old stump.
I told her about the first two neurology test sessions, about the snapshots of images and snippets of conversation that haunted me before my third appointment in the study. She nodded, leaning in and listening even though I worried I sounded like I’d lost all sense of reality.
“Well, but you’ve seen weird things after your seizures before, right? Weren’t you witness to some fake forest fire?”
“It was a blue shed,” I said, correcting her. “But this was different, especially the last time. Way more intense.”
I wasn’t selling it very well. I was a rambling maniac. I tried to give her better details. That yellow coffee container, the sound of Lucas’s legs snapping, how the horse smelled.
Explaining that I’d spent several hours in the same place, done things I’d never experienced in real life—down to the feeling of the smooth river stones in my hands—I noticed that Jeannine was puzzling through my story in the same way I was.
I stopped talking and looked at her.
“So now you think I’m crazy.”
“Si, creo que usted está loco,” she said, and laughed, waving her arms around in the air as if she would fall off her perch.
“No, no, I don’t think you’re crazy, Jack. But there’s probably some other explanation. There has to be.”
“Okay. Like what other explanation?” I was ready to hear a believable answer from her. Because while I’d told myself this whole time that my experiences were strange seizure-induced visions, I was realizing just in this conversation that I didn’t believe my own explanation. Holy shit, holy shit. What if… what if the town and all of it were… real?
“Well, you certainly know what horses look like, even if you don’t know how to ride one.”
Good point, Jeannine! I thought back to that morning. Had I ever seen a valley like that, or a town square? The inside of a tavern? Maybe in a western movie? I wasn’t a fan of westerns. Maybe I’d seen something like that in ads for Little House on the Prairie? I supposed brains were capable of creating new scenery based on things they’d experienced before. But then goose bumps sprang up on my forearms.
“I was in an office in the back of the tavern, looking for coffee, and I found a package, wrapped in yellow paper. I think it was called Arbuckle’s. How would I know that?”
She sat quietly, computing some idea. “Okay, here’s what you do. Today is Friday. Come to the library with me tomorrow and we’ll see if we can find it there. And in the meantime, draw what you remembered. Then we’ll check it out.”
“It’s a date,” I said, without thinking. Jeannine blushed. Dumbass alert. Idiot child of auto mechanic and worrywart says something ridiculous, news at eleven.
I agreed, nodding like a bobblehead, but I knew already that I’d never heard of this coffee brand before.
Even if Jeannine was sure there was some other explanation for my experiences, I was worried. What if, just if, I wasn’t hallucinating? What if all of this wasn’t my spazzy brain cells, but something else?
What if I’d really jumped back in time?
***
The public library was in the middle of town, at the center of the extremely boring historic district. The one-story building looked like an oversized brown shoebox, magically plunked down next to a small lake. Well, “lake” was a bit of an overstatement. It was little more than an overgrown pond, tiny enough to be ignored for most of the year until it froze over in winter, and then screaming for anything to do, people with ice skates would descend on it, scraping along every inch, most of them waving their arms wildly for balance. An “outside” library reading room looked out on the lake, which really meant we could get a lot closer to the stinky water if we wanted, which we didn’t. We left our bikes in the rack outside the tall glass front doors, and Jeannine heaved one open and looked relieved for the inside heating. She marched up to the card catalog, and of course she was a library regular so she already pretty much knew where everything was. She pulled out a skinny drawer by its tiny brass knob and began flicking through the subject headings, two handed, each flip of an index finger giving her half a second to decide if the card had what she wanted.
“Here we go,” she said, scribbling the location number on a scrap of paper. She tucked a pencil stub behind her ear. Lucky pencil.
“Shockingly enough, it’s in the history section.”
“Be still my beating heart,” I said.
“Do you have your drawing with you?”
“If only the pictures were in color it would be easier to spot,” I said, running my pointer finger along the page. No sooner had I finished my sentence than I gasped, unsnapping my pocket and yanking out my crumpled paper. I placed my sketch on the page, next to the photo.
The heavy black writing against the light background, words scrawled across the package in an arc: they were the same. I mean for real, my drawing was hideous, but it was clearly an attempt to represent the label.
“Wow,” said Jeannine.
Oh no.
If she were convinced, then maybe my experience was real. Like really real. Her eyes darted back and forth between the images.
“It is quite a coincidence,” was all she whispered.
We walked our bikes back home for the last quarter mile; it had rained while we’d been in the library, and the leaves on the roadway made biking uphill too slippery for us. Ice puffed out from in front of our faces as we made the steep climb to our development. At the end we stood in the street between our two houses. Her hair didn’t look much different from the rain, but I looked like a misty rat.
“Look, you must have seen that box somewhere else, and then remembered it in your seizure,” said Jeannine.
“I guess so.” I hid my disappointment. Jeannine was the smartest person I knew. If she wasn’t entertaining the notion that I’d traveled through time, I figured I shouldn’t, either. Maybe my epilepsy was playing with my memory. Or maybe I had crossed the line into delusional raving lunatic. How would someone know if they were out of touch with reality, anyway? Wasn’t that like, in the definition?
“I just. . . it seemed so real. Not like a dream.” Way to sell it, Jack.
“I know you want to believe that something actually happened to you during the study, but honestly? There’s no other explanation, Jack. You were in the hospital, you seized, the doctors admitted you, and you woke up. You didn’t go anywhere else.”
That was a good point. Doctor Who had a T.A.R.D.I.S. for his time travel. I didn’t even have my own phone line.
She continued.
“You must have forgotten that you’d learned about that coffee name. I’ve been reading up and our subconscious minds are way more powerful than we realize.”
I nodded.
“I know, I know, there’s no other way to explain it. You’re right, I saw that label at some time in my life and forgot about it.”
She gave me a long look. I tried not to cringe by her sizing up of me. “You’re agreeing with me too easily.”
“What? What does that mean?”
“You really think you traveled back there, is what I mean.” I made a mental note to start hanging out with stupider people.
I shook my head, but she stopped me. She took hold of my handlebars.
“The mind is a mysterious thing. You know that better than anyone. It plays tricks on us. We see things—we see all kinds of things all the time and they don’t even register, but our brains pick up on them and store them away.”
“You sound like Mr. Garrison in biology.”
“I’ve had a whole month of classes that you got to skip, silly.”
“Right.”
“Didn’t you say you tasted a sandwich once, that you hadn’t eaten?”
Ham and cheese, on grilled rye bread with the rind of the ham still attached, yes, I thought. I remembered it like I’d just eaten it again. It was like a super-memory. “Sure.”
“Well, brains are powerful things. It takes a whole room to hold a supercomputer, but our computers are all in our skulls.” She tapped on her temple to illustrate her point, which frankly, I understood before she demonstrated it.
“But it felt really real.” Way to go, Shakespeare. What a way with words.
“I’m just glad you’re back, Jack. I missed you.”
“You did?”
“Yes,” she said, and she started walking again. “Jay missed you, too.”
“Oh.” I missed him too, and I hadn’t spent any time with him since coming home from the hospital. “Well, I’m here now.”
“Good.” We were outside her house across the street, four doors down from mine. “Now that you’re back, you can forget all about that whole ordeal.” She gave me a quick hug, and told me she’d see me on the bus on Monday.
Forget, I should just forget. If I could have forgotten the town and Lucas, I would have. I doubted, however, that it was possible to pretend it didn’t happen.
I was in this alone. Whatever the hell “this” was.
CHAPTER FIVE
I TRIED TO GET GOOD at pretending everything was normal, but most mornings I woke up with the sounds of tree branches snapping and Lucas staring up at the sky in a crumpled heap. Jay and Jeannine and I had taken to hanging out even more often in the wrecked concrete factory, before it started getting too cold outside. We nursed hot mugs of coffee, discussing which rock groups we liked and how awful our algebra teacher was. Sister Cordelia should have retired years earlier; now she just snapped at us. And she couldn’t even remember how to write the quadratic equation.
I zoned in and out of the discussion, wondering if I’d be let back into the epilepsy study, because maybe I could get to the bottom of what was going on with me. I stopped daydreaming long enough to notice they were talking about The Fog.
“I don’t want to see it,” said Jeannine, waving her arms in front of her as if in some sort of defense from bad movies.
“Come on, it’s going to be awesome,” said Sanjay. I smiled at both of them, glad enough to talk about horror movies. Something was still off though—it wasn’t entirely unlike the sensation when my neurology was thinking about betraying me again. I hope I don’t start seizing out here.
“I bet it won’t be as scary as Night of the Living Dead,” I said.
Jay rolled his eyes.
“Oh come on,” he said, “it’ll be way better. The killer’s not going to stagger around like a stupid zombie.”
“Stagger or not, those zombies can take out a whole town.”
“All you need is a flamethrower and blam, movie over.”
“Come on Jay, are you saying the creature in The Fog would survive a flamethrower?”
“I’m saying most things know how to get out of range of a flamethrower, geez.”
“Okay boys, I have to get home for dinner,” said Jeannine. “Take care of your hand, Jack.”
“Yeah, or you’ll turn into the living undead,” Jay said, hanging his head and raising up his shoulders to approximate the bad posture I’d have as a zombie.
We squeezed through the break in the fence and Jay jumped on his bike, waving as he pedaled off around the corner.
“I think it’s good that you’re getting back in the swing of things,” said Jeannine. “But you still seem a little off-kilter.”
“Yeah, maybe I am. I shouldn’t be, I know.”
She stopped walking and put her hand on my forearm. She was warm.
“What?” I asked.
“Jack, you spent nearly a month in the hospital. You’re worrying that you actually went back in time, which is impossible. You’re behind in your classes and wondering if you’re crazy? I don’t know, that sounds like a lot of shit to worry about. Give yourself a break.”
It sounded so reasonable when she said it. But I couldn’t just relax and take things in stride. Something was wrong, something had changed inside of me, and I needed to figure out what it was. I didn’t really care if it was a stupid electrical impulse or if I’d really for real jumped through time and space. I had to figure out what had happened because right now, everything around me felt fake and stupid.
I looked her in the eyes, her pretty almond-shaped eyes,
and I lied to her.
“You’re right. I need to settle down. Everything’s really okay.”
“Exactly. You’ve got friends, you should lean on them. It’s okay.”
“I just have to ask you one thing,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Please don’t start singing.”
She gave a fake gasp and pushed me away. “Like I’d waste my breath on you!”
“Not your breath, your art!”
She was already well ahead of me. “Either! Both!”
I walked up the steps to my house, my stomach nagging me for dinner the moment I smelled my mother’s cooking. It smelled like barbequed rib night.
I pushed through the front door, kicking off my shoes in the foyer and bracing myself for King to rush at me. In seconds I had a wet-nosed retriever all over me. I knelt down and hugged him.
“You’re a good dog, King. A very good dog.” And you don’t look at me like I’ve lost my mind. At least I felt some connection to him, even if I was struggling with the rest of my existence.
Soon enough though, I’d leave them behind again.
***
I set the thin plates around the table and plunked the utensils, tucking white paper napkins under the forks. Mom sighed.
“What?” I stared at the table, wondering what I was missing.
“It’s nothing.”
“No, it’s not nothing. What’s wrong?”
“It’s just that my mother’s dinner table always looked so much nicer. Maybe we should buy new china. Get some linen napkins. I don’t know.”
“Well I think it’s great,” said Dad, walking into the kitchen. He used a loud voice, which he usually brought out when Mom was in one of her blue spells. She gave him a little smile.
“Well, you are easy to please,” she said, and turned to the counter, picking up a bowl of potato salad. And then she pivoted again to face me.
“Jacky, you’re feeling better?” Once again she was inspecting me head to toe.
The Unintentional Time Traveler (Time Guardians Book 1) Page 5
