The Unintentional Time Traveler (Time Guardians Book 1)

by Everett Maroon

  “Well, get cleaned up, and stick your head out in the garage to say bye before you drive off to school,” he said to me, his face turned back to the open hood of the car.

  I said okay, but I didn’t mean it. And then it dawned on me.

  I drive now?

  ***

  Clearly I had some kind of issue with grooming, or at least, that’s what all of the bottles and jars of products lined up on the bathroom shelves told me. Waxes and shampoos and hair conditioner stood at attention, soldiers in the battle against hair on my face. I had set up shaving gel and aftershave next to the sink, and uh, two different razors. Why did I need two different razors? One for each side?

  I leaned on the sink, only then noticing that there was no padding on the porcelain. The faucet had regular old handles. If I wanted to leave the hot water running now, I could. And still, I was actually me. Maybe.

  I rooted around for the bottle of Klonopin, but couldn’t find any little blue pills. I studied my face in the mirror, feeling stupid. Yes, I was the same, if not a lot more developed. I was solid, with a firmness I’d lacked in my earlier years.

  I didn’t like it.

  In the shower, I let the hot water run over me until I turned red. This isn’t right. I need to be somewhere else. I have to get back and help them. After showering the plush towel covered up my nakedness and I breathed a little easier. As I didn’t have any experience with shaving, I didn’t know what to do with the razor, so I skipped any attempt to rid my face of hair, hoping nobody would comment. I found my school uniform—in larger sizes—and headed downstairs. I was not ready for what had happened to my mother.

  “Hi, Jack,” she said in a sing-song from the kitchen. It was a fake brand of happy. She glanced my way, looking at me only for a second or two. I sat down next to her, trying to take it all in.

  “Good morning, Mom.”

  “Sure,” she said. Her coffee was losing steam, but she only stroked the handle of her cup, not drinking it. Most probably my father had poured it for her. I wondered sadly when he had taken over the task from me, or maybe it was today he’d done it.

  Mom’s skin looked gray and dry, especially around her fingernails, which she had bitten to the quick. Her robe was stained and smelled a little, mostly of spoiled milk and body odor. She looked lost somewhere inside herself. I reached out and held her hand. She didn’t notice it immediately, but then she pulled away from me.

  “Mom?”

  Silence.

  “Mom? I have a question.”

  “Sure, Jack.” The melody had evaporated. She was all monotone now.

  “Did something happen to you?”

  “What?”

  I asked her again. She drew in air. I felt a rock in my throat waiting for her to speak.

  “Oh. You know. My pills don’t work anymore. We’re trying new medicine.” Each word out of her seemed to take great effort, and she faded away again at the end of the sentence.

  She was quiet, still fingering her mug. I kissed her temple fast and pulled away. Sinking my hands into my trouser pockets, I headed out to the garage to see my father. I hoped he could give me answers. He slid out from under a 1970 Camaro Z28, one of his favorite muscle cars. Bright red with two broad white racing stripes, the body was in good condition except for some rust over the wheels. Its position in the far-side parking spot of the garage meant it was his current pet project. Dad didn’t like to work on his own cars at the shop, unless there was some special piece of equipment he needed to use.

  “Going scruffy today, is that it?” my father asked me.

  “I just didn’t feel like shaving,” I said. He scooted out again, asked for a wrench, and I pulled one from his rollaway tool chest. He’d kept the same organization system all these years. Thank the baby Jesus.

  “You’re never going to hang onto that pretty Jeannine Gonzalez if you don’t look tidy,” he said from under the car. Three different colors on the body parts meant that this was not a project near completion.

  “I think it’ll be okay,” I said, trying to figure out how to turn the conversation over to Mom. Wait, what about Jeannine?

  “Well, it doesn’t matter. You could date anyone you wanted.”

  I blinked. I was pretty sure the girls had opinions about who they wanted to date, too.

  “So Dad, can we talk about Mom?”

  He rolled out again and stood up, then held onto the work counter, facing away from me. “What do you want talk about?”

  “I don’t like these new pills,” I said. I needed to make sure I didn’t reveal my ignorance of what was wrong with her. “She’s kind of spaced out.”

  He turned around, frowning. “She’s been spaced out for two years, Jackson. Where the hell have you been?”

  “I just—”

  “Don’t ‘just’ me. We’ve tried one therapy after another, and I can’t afford to put her in some fancy clinic while they find something that works for her. What do you want me to do?”

  I floundered, not finding words. But he waited for me to speak; inside he had more patience for me.

  “I miss her. I want her back, all of her. I mean, you must miss her, too.”

  “Jack, sometimes medicine wears out, or people adjust. You were lucky.”

  “Lucky?” I was missing something big here.

  “Yes, lucky, and you better be thankful! Your epilepsy is gone. And hers will always be with her.”

  What?

  ***

  I stormed out of the garage, down to the sidewalk, figuring it was time to catch the bus to school, when Jeannine saw me. She had grown taller and uh, curvier, in a way that Jacqueline, who was more straight up and down, hadn’t acquired. She still had her long hair, but it had a bouncy curliness instead of the straight locks she’d worn our freshman year. She gave me a big smile and waved; it was large enough that I thought she’d heard my father yelling. I trotted across the street to her.

  “You look like you’re waiting for the bus,” she said, and then she touched my collarbone. Well aren’t we touchy feely today? And then as she curled around me, kissing me full on the lips, my father’s comment made a lot more sense.

  Holy shit, Jeannine and I are an item.

  “Do I not wait for the bus?” I asked, impressed by my sudden ability to distract. She tasted like Scope and strawberries.

  “You’re silly. We all drive now.” I looked over toward Sanjay’s house, but didn’t see anything other than his mother’s crusty Impala in the driveway. Jeannine caught my glance and patted me on the shoulder.

  “It’s okay for friends to drift apart,” she said. She played with a coil of my hair and I did my best not to flinch. I’d crushed on Jeannine for years, but now it felt off. I don’t know if it was because we were different people, or because of Lucas, or all my time-hopping, but I wasn’t ready to be sucking face with her just yet.

  I had to figure another relationship out now, too? With the stench of the burning house still in my nose, the screams of people scrambling to get out still ringing in my ears? It was like lugging ghosts around all day.

  “Honey bear, are you all right?”

  “I’m okay,” I said, forcing what I hoped was easiness into my voice. “Do you mind driving today?”

  “Oh, sure,” she said. Of course I had surprised her. For one, I should be ecstatic about driving epilepsy-free, never needing to bum a ride. I should act like some manly guy who would never let his girlfriend drive him around. But also I wasn’t sure if we attended the same school.

  I’d wanted to come home for so long, but now that I was here? Now I just missed them. Him. Oh, Lucas. I wish you’d believed me. I wish we had more time. Except, wait. We could have time, maybe. If I could jump back the next time I went to Dr. Dorfpoodle’s…I stopped my pondering because I wasn’t in the study anymore, was I?

  “Would you like to get in the car with me, Jack, or were you planning on jogging behind me?”

  She stood with the car door open, her gorgeous ha
ir shining in the sun, and I was still at the edge of our driveway, my father tinkering in fantasyland under a Camaro and my mother probably still in the kitchen caressing a mug like it was a cat. Everything around me was a complete disaster, and all I could think about was some boy I made up in my head? Or from another time? What the helling hell? I have lost my mind.

  “Coming!” I trotted over to her, stopping suddenly so I wouldn’t get hit by a sedan.

  “Seriously, honey, where are you this morning?”

  “I didn’t sleep well last night,” I said, climbing into the passenger seat of her Firebird. Everything inside was vinyl and gray or red or cheap chrome and the whole interior smelled like janked-up steering fluid.

  She tousled my hair again, cooing at me. Was this how Lucas expected Jacqueline to act? She was sweet, but where had the whip-smart girl I’d known gone?

  “I can make you feel better,” she said, leaning in. And before I could say anything, she was kissing me, pushing through my lips with her tongue.

  “Jeannine, Jeannine, stop.” This was not what I wanted or needed right now.

  “What is the issue with you? Shit, Jack.”

  “I just…I don’t feel well. Can you just take us to school?”

  She stabbed the key into the ignition and turned on the radio.

  “If you’re that sick you should just stay home.” She pulled away from the curb and I looked out the window, trying to pick out what was new to me in the neighborhood.

  If I wasn’t going to jump back through my erratic brainwaves, maybe I’d never see Marion again. Though all I’d wanted was to come back to my reality, now I worried about not helping Jacqueline, Lucas, and the Underground.

  Maybe there was something I could do about it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  HOPPING INTO JEANNINE’S CAR was my best decision of the morning. After our rough start, I put my hand on her knee and she started talking to me again. It was weird to be on the other end of the knee touch but it seemed rude to be so cold to someone who wasn’t expecting it. In the twenty minutes it took us to get to school—it was in fact the same high school—I learned that we were now seniors, that my brainwaves had turned normal my sophomore year and I’d tapered off my medication over several months. But Jay and I had stopped speaking around then, and now the three of us never hung out anymore.

  Jeannine was definitely more grown up. And once she was done playing kissyface with me, I saw she was full of self-confidence and had big plans for her future.

  “So tell me again which colleges you applied to,” I said.

  She ticked them off: Wellesley, Vassar, Smith, Sarah Lawrence, and Syracuse. All of them were women’s colleges except Syracuse.

  “You like, hate men or something?” I asked.

  Jeannine laughed. “Please. I wouldn’t hang out with you if I did.”

  “Uh, yeah. Good point.”

  “Are you feeling any better?” she asked.

  “I’m fine, I’m just a little tired and out of it is all. So anyway, why the girl-only colleges?” I didn’t want to be obvious but I was curious.

  “Vassar and Wellesley are co-ed now,” she said. “But I think it’s easier to learn with fewer distractions. They’re not about football programs or MRS degrees. You men take up a lot of space! Or maybe you’ve missed the whole women’s movement.”

  “No, I think it’s great.” I wondered what Jacqueline would do if she had the chance to go to college. She’d probably thumb her nose at it and call them a bunch of snobs.

  Jeannine turned into the parking lot at school. At some point since I’d last been here they’d restriped the spaces. Seniors had assigned parking spots. I had no idea which was mine.

  We walked into the lobby and I stood next to the huge statue of Saint Francis. He was stepping on a snake, because that was some nod to his ability to fight evil even as he was like, rescuing baby sheep and puppies from the clutches of Satan. I had stared at the snake before. Like, years before.

  I walked down the hall with the seniors’ lockers, and kept expecting people to be shocked at my appearance. But it was I who had to keep from marveling at my classmates. The boys had grown several inches and many of them had filled out. A lot of them weren’t paying any particular attention to how they smelled. The girls were taller too, less gangly than they’d been in ninth grade. Some of the teachers were new. Senior lockers were the biggest in the school, as if we needed more space. Freshmen lockers were slender, with a cubbyhole we could spring open once we’d opened the thin door. These lockers were humongous, and I couldn’t think of why we were granted so much more space. Maybe it was for the heavy wool varsity jackets.

  Like my assigned parking space, I also had no clue which locker was mine. Not only that, but as I looked down the row of locks that dangled from each one, I realized I didn’t know my combination. Why couldn’t I at least have my own memories? This time traveling stuff left something to be desired.

  Jeannine noticed my hesitation, as I hadn’t made it past the third foot of the corridor.

  “Jack?”

  “You know, I’m just going to hit the rest room,” I said. “Catch you later in—” I stopped, not having any clue what classes I attended.

  “Calculus?” She was starting to look worried.

  “Yes. See you then.” I smiled, probably more broadly than I should have. Jeannine saw another friend, waved, and walked away shaking her head at me. Yes, enjoy your cockadoodle friend, Jackson. Also known as Jacqueline. From fifty-five years ago.

  In the middle of the hallway I saw Mr. Christenson, who I’d had first year for Spanish. Maybe he could help me.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Christenson,” I said, coming up behind him.

  “Yes?” He looked at my scraggly appearance, and frowned. “Mr. Inman, good hygiene is more than just a catch phrase in health class. You should have shaved this morning. And where is your tie? You know that’s a uniform requirement.”

  “My apologies, sir.” This was not going well.

  He stood back and crossed his arms over his broad chest.

  “Are you being disingenuous with me, young man?” I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded bad.

  “No, Mr. Christenson, I just have a small problem.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “I don’t remember which is my locker.”

  He studied me, looking in my eyes for something.

  “I thought you were finished with that terrible disease.”

  “I–it’s not a seizure, sir. I just don’t remember which is mine.” Maybe I should just turn and run.

  “For good measure, let’s go to the nurse.” He clamped a hand on my shoulder and pointed us toward the nurse’s office. I squirmed and broke free.

  “Just playing a joke, Mr. C. Senior prank! I’m totally fine.” I jogged away and waved at him to like, keep it light, and then I cut down the stairs next to the gymnasium. I turned a corner so fast on my way to the library that a few of the posters announcing the next school dance flapped against the green cinder block walls. The librarian was the same as when I was a first year.

  “Hello, Jack,” she said when she noticed me, “Why aren’t you in homeroom?”

  “I have a project for first period from Sister Phadelus,” I said, hoping I looked self-assured. “She wanted me to get started on it early.”

  Sister Phadelus had a bad reputation, or to put it bluntly, she got pissed and yelled a lot. Nobody would ever use her in a scheme. There weren’t enough chalkboard erasers in the world to clap clean to satisfy an angry nun like her.

  The librarian, Miss Radise, was a tired older woman who seemed much happier to have her nose in a book than to speak to another human being. She must have figured I was either crazy to lie or pitiful for having any kind of project for Sr. Phadelus, so she waved me on. I knew what I wanted. I was there to find proof, either way, that I was really jumping through time, or totally lost in a seizure. Was Lucas real or not? Marion? If it was a dream I
could let it go, sink into this life and get back on track, epilepsy-free. But if those people really existed and I somehow had any ability to fix what was going on with them, then I wanted to help. I had to help.

  I looked at the signs hanging from the ceiling to find the right section. Cartography, there it was. Narrow drawers held all kinds of maps, organized by place alphabetically. I wasn’t sure if I should look for United States or Kentucky, but I yanked open the K drawer. A city map of Kalamazoo, wherever that was. Kansas. There it was—Kentucky. I stuck my index finger on the paper and started looking for the town.

  There it was. Marion, near the western border with Illinois. Wow I do not know my geography at all, I thought. Marion was a real place after all, and I was sure I hadn’t come across it in my real life.

  It’s time to believe. No more doubts. I really went there.

  Now that I’d found Marion, I started looking for Black Mountain. It was in the southeast clear across the state. I found the scale for figuring out miles and made a little gasp when I realized the two points were three hundred and fifty miles apart. That would have been a long way to hold people hostage, but if someone’s intent was to kill them far away from town, it made more sense.

  The back of my neck tingled, and not in a good way. If my school had these maps, maybe I could find newspapers from the 20s? I put the papers back in order in the drawer and went over to the microfiche section. Bells rang. End of first period. Second period would start in four minutes, and who knows when someone would come looking for me, or call my parents at home. But I had no idea what room I’d be in, what class I was in, and I was three years behind and would be clueless about the material.

  Even if I wanted to stay here, in my time, I need to help Lucas and the others first. And figure out how to get back here at the right spot.

  I looked for newspapers, and found a big box of microfilm in spools held together with rubber bands. Great library system we have here. The box was marked “Regional Newspapers.” I found the Bowling Green Daily Times on three spools and put the first one in the machine, fumbling with the clips that were supposed to hold the film. Bells clanged again. The first roll of film went from 1890 to 1891. Oh no. What if there wasn’t anything from the time period I’d visited? Second spool, also random, from 1915 to 1916. My hands shook as I clipped in the last spool.