by Shawn Inmon
“Very comforting. Any strategy tips for surviving this?”
“Sure. Protect the gonads at all times. One of those balls whistles into your franks and beans and you can kiss ever having kids goodbye.”
“Great. Important safety tip, Egon.” Shit. Ghostbusters won’t exist for another decade.
It didn’t matter, as Billy had resolutely marched into the center of the floor, leaning forward as if eager to rush for the supply of balls. Thomas joined him, then noticed that Michael Hollister looked even more uncomfortable on the other side. The tight t-shirt and skimpy red shorts accentuated his tall, thin frame. He was scanning the field in front of him, looking like a fox with a foot caught in a trap.
Coach Raymer blew one shrill blast. All the athletes charged forward into the center-court chaos. Thomas and Billy took one fake-out step toward the balls, then retreated to safety at the back. That safety did not last long, for the initial volleys wiped out nearly half of both teams. Thomas tried to do a crab walk, keeping one eye on both groups of players. Never mind glory. I want to survive this.
One of the football players threw a low fastball at Billy. It skipped under his sneakers, but he cried, “Damn it! Nicked me!” and trotted down to the other end of the gym with a wink at Thomas.
Thomas glared at him. Good strategy. Bastard. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a big, sweaty player running toward him, winding up. Thomas turned away by reflex, but not quickly enough. The ball caught him right in the throat. A howl of “Nice shot, Muller!” went up from the back line as Thomas went down, half-stunned.
Feels like he knocked my Adam’s apple through the back of my throat. But it's a good excuse to take a rest, he thought, as he sort of scuttled off to the side to recover. Had he not done so, of course, he would have remained a legitimate target of opportunity. Meanwhile, the mayhem on the court continued.
As Thomas reached the bottom bleachers outside the court sideline, he kept an eye on the action, lest some sadist target him even in the bleachers. Just then, he saw Stan Monroe pick a target and fire. Thomas remembered Stan as the JV quarterback and starting centerfielder that year, with an arm like a rifle.
Stan unleashed a whistler directly to Michael’s groin, bringing a brief wince from Thomas before he remembered who had just taken the hit. Michael folded over so fast he fell face first to the ground, then assumed the position—legs drawn up, fists tight to his groin, feet moving feebly while gasping for air. Every boy in the gym knew exactly what he was feeling.
Even the relaxed standards of Middle Falls High School P.E. sportsmanship dictated that such a shot entitled the victim to a few moments of safe writhing before heading to the back line, a rule Thomas had always been glad to milk. This was Michael Hollister, though. His family’s position in the community had long kept at bay the bullying his odd behavior might have otherwise brought on, but it didn't change how anyone felt.
The players on Michael’s side backed away, leaving him curled in the fetal position near midcourt. Stan silently mouthed, “One, two, three.” On three, every player holding a ball threw with every bit of mustard he could put on it. Half a dozen balls hit Michael simultaneously, bouncing off his head, his arms, his back.
Michael whimpered a moment, but drew himself up to his knees, gathered himself, then stood; first tentatively, then straighter. His face was an absolute mask. He walked toward three of the biggest opposing players, looking right through them. They stood aside. Limping a bit, he walked past them, past the bleachers, and into the locker room.
Why do I think some poor cat or forest creature is going to die tonight?
Chapter Twenty-Four
AFTER P.E. WAS over, in which he suffered no further devastating whistlers, Thomas dressed out in his jeans and t-shirt and headed to the lunchroom to meet Carrie. All the lunchroom buzz was about Michael's nut shot. Wherever Thomas looked around the room, he saw people miming the action. By the end of the lunch hour, everyone in school will be claiming to have seen it. He punched his ticket, collected his plate of hamburger gravy poured over toast with a side of cholesterol, and let the thoughts wander back to his father's term for this dish: “S.O.S.," which stood for "shit on a shingle.” Like nearly all young able-bodied adult males of his day, his father had once been drafted into the Army, and Thomas had never heard him say a good word about the experience.
The end of the line was in sight when Carrie finally came in, carrying a small brown-bag lunch. Moving apparently by radar, she joined Thomas at his table. “Mind blown yet?” There was actually a twinkle in her eyes.
She’s enjoying this. “Consider it blown.”
“What’s everyone talking about?”
“Michael Hollister got hit in the cajones in gym class, then given a code red by the rest of the team.”
“Code red?”
Shit. What’s wrong with me today? A Few Good Men is a long time away. "Sorry. That’s from a movie that hasn’t come out yet. I keep doing that today. Not sure what’s wrong with me. We were playing dodge ball in gym class and Michael got hit in the nuts, fell down, then everyone let him have it.”
“Oh. Sounds horrible. You don't seem too bothered by it. Are you glad for some reason?"
Shit! That revelation can wait. Shift gears. “Well, I got it in the neck just before that, but nothing like he got.”
She looked at his neck with brief concern, then took a bite of her sandwich and swallowed. “So, what do you want to know?”
“So much. You said you are on your thirteenth life. Do you always wake up at the same time and place? Do the circumstances ever change? Have you figured out how much you can change the future?”
Carrie rolled her eyes a bit. “Teenage boys. I swear, always in such a hurry about things. Slow down. I’ll answer as many questions as I can, but there’s still a lot I don’t know. First, yes, I wake up in the exact same place and time. For me, it’s waking up on the couch in my parents' house with a stiff neck on a warm afternoon, the summer that I turned twelve, just a few weeks before I started junior high. Nothing particularly noteworthy about that day, it’s just where I start.”
Thomas nodded. Like a “save point” in a video game.
“Is it rude for me to ask how old you really are?”
“Of course it’s rude. That’s not the kind of question you ever ask a woman.”
Thomas thought she was serious until he saw the ghost of a smile cross her lips.
“It gets harder and harder to keep track of these things.” She paused, looked up and to her right, thinking. “I suppose I’ve lived about sixty-five years, altogether. Does that creep you out, knowing that I’m really an old lady?”
“Well, I was fifty-four years old a few weeks ago, so, no.”
Carrie’s eyes widened. “Oh. You made it that far? All the way to when?”
“2016.”
“So, like Jetsons stuff, then? Flying cars, teleportation, that sort of thing?”
“No, not exactly. Wait. What’s the farthest you’ve made it?”
She cast her eyes down. “I’ve never made it to 1980.”
Thomas felt a tingle at the back of his neck. Thirteen lives, but she’s never made it out of her teens? What the hell is going on with her?
“What—how...?“ Is there a tactful way to ask this?
“How come I keep dying?” He nodded. Her shoulders shrugged in futility. “When I started over the first time, I didn’t handle it very well. I was nineteen, but woke up in a twelve-year-old body. I messed things up pretty good. It seemed like every change I made turned out for the worse. First, my dog got run over when she was just a puppy. Then my grandma died. Then, my mom got sick and died, too. But none of them had died in my first life, so I figured it was all my fault and I gave up.”
“Gave up? You mean you killed yourself?"
"Yep. Before you ask, pills."
"I get that. That’s how I started over too–pills with liquor.”
“Right. My third life, same story. Mom g
ot sick and died again. I killed myself again. That time, I was pretty sure I was going to get another shot at setting things right. Problem was, I didn’t know what I was doing that was causing Mom to get sick. So, I started experimenting, doing things differently each time. In life #4, I tried being the perfect child. That was better for a while. Mom didn’t get sick, but right after I graduated from high school, Dad was killed in a car accident. I killed myself so often, I called it the suicide express. Don’t like how your life is going? Swallow a bunch of pills and start over."
Thomas put his fork down and gave that some thought.
"I can’t recommend it, actually," Carrie continued. "I’ve been thinking about what I was doing to my parents in those other lives, each time they found me dead. I won’t do that again. I’m trying to live as long as I can this time. I’m tired of living the same years over and over. I want to see what’s on the horizon after 1980.”
Hmmm. The Iranian hostage crisis, MTV, a Flock of Seagulls, The Brat Pack, Members Only jackets, Miami Vice, The Challenger explosion, the fall of the Berlin Wall. Like any decade, some good, some awful—most of it mediocrity, soon assigned to oblivion.
“That’s good. I’m glad.” I would like to reach out and hold your hand, Carrie Copeland, but I don’t have the guts. “So, this time… your mom and dad?”
“Mom died last year,” she whispered. “But I’ve finally realized everyone has their own fate. Most of my lives, she’s died. Is that my fault, or is it just what’s destined to happen with her?”
Good question. I could ask the same about Zack and the car crash. Is it just his destiny to die young? If I don’t go to that kegger, will something else get him instead?
“I’ve finally decided I can’t control everything,” Carrie went on. “Instead, I’m just lying low, trying to make as few ripples as I possibly can.”
“Is that why you act so—“ Thomas realized he had started a sentence that had no good ending.
“What, weird? Sad? Repressed? What?”
“Yeah, I guess. I didn’t mean it like that, though. In the hallway this morning, you seemed like a different person when you were talking to me.”
“I was just caught off guard. Thirteen lives, however many years it’s been, and the whole time, I thought I was the only one. When I heard you bitching out the bitches, I just knew—he’s not making that up. Somehow, he knows the future. After all this time, it was like I recognized one of my own."
"That was the first you suspected?"
"Not quite. I knew something was up that day you talked to me in class, though I wasn't sure exactly what. In all my lives, I hadn’t talked to you before. If I’d stayed calm and thought about it, I would have let you just go on thinking you were the only time traveler in the world.” She shrugged. “But I didn’t.”
“I’m glad you didn't. It's been killing me not to be able to talk about it with anyone. I don’t know how you’ve handled it.”
Carrie shrugged. “I talked to Mom about it once. I think that was life number five.”
“And how did that go?”
“Not so great. I ended up having to see a shrink for a while. Eventually, I told them I was having trouble sleeping, they wrote me a prescription, and I rode the express again. I won’t do that again, either.”
“Ah. Yeah, that’s something I was afraid of. I keep messing things up with Mom, and Zack, and I can just imagine what they would think if I told them the truth.” Thomas forked some of the chipped beef into his mouth, then wrinkled his nose. “Oh, my God. That’s awful.” He took a drink of milk to wash the taste away.
“Why do you think I bring my lunch every day?”
“I thought it was just one more piece of your overall disguise. Didn’t know it was self-defense. So. Where do we go from here? It feels like we are members of a pretty exclusive club.”
Carrie looked over his head, a faraway expression on her face. “There have been times I’ve wondered about other people—whether or not they might be going through what I am. There’s got to be others, but I never had the nerve to ask them about it.”
“Now that you did, are we going to go back to pretending like we don’t know each other?”
“That’s probably best, don’t you think? You’re already ruining your reputation by hanging out with Cootie Carrie.”
“I just realized something. This is your thirteenth life, but you’ve never been older than nineteen. You’ve spent, what, like 30 years in junior high and high school? That’s got to qualify as an inner circle of Hell, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it does. If I have to go through Oregon State History or Algebra II one more time, I think I might go insane.”
“Good, then you can help me. It’s been almost thirty years for me, and I think I’m flunking Algebra.”
A smile flickered in her eyes. “Maybe. What have you got to trade?”
“Seriously? I’ve got thirty-five years of future history you don’t know, at least from the world I was living in. We’re not going to have flying cars in 2016, but we made computers that carry the entire world’s information and are so small they fit in the pockets of our jeans. Of course, we mostly use those computers to look at videos of cats, but no one said humanity was smart. We didn’t make it back to the moon, but satellites and global positioning systems made sure you didn’t get lost. We elected a black president in 2008, and the Supreme Court made gay marriage legal in 2014. We made a lot of progress.”
“Are all of those things progress?”
“ Maybe it doesn’t feel that way in 1976, but it did at the time. It feels weird to talk about things in the past tense that are decades in the future.”
Carrie shook her head. “Thanks for that, but I don’t think I want to know. After spending so many years mostly knowing what’s going to happen next, I’d like to be surprised for a while. I’ll help you with your algebra, but please don’t tell me what’s supposed to happen. It probably won’t happen again here in this life anyway.”
“What do you mean? Do things change that much?”
Carrie nodded and took a bite out of her apple before saying, “Gerald Ford is President, right?”
“Yes, of course.”
“No, it's not ‘of course,’ like it’s written in stone. Ford has been the president, and Carter gets elected in November in most of my lives, but sometimes things change. Agnew was president once, Ford won reelection once, and another time, Ted Kennedy won.”
“Wow. Okay.” President Agnew. Holy crap. “But, why do we assume that we are the only ones who could be impacting this new world? Isn’t it possible that a thousand different people woke up at the same time you did, or years before?”
“Of course it’s possible. That’s why I said I don’t have all the answers. There is one thing I do know, though. There are certain watershed moments, large and small, that happen every time.”
“Like what?”
“It’s weird things. Like, Elvis Presley always dies on August 16, 1977. My dad drops and breaks his favorite coffee cup on March 27, 1977. I only remember that one because that’s my sixteenth birthday. Weird things like that repeat.”
Is Zack dying a repeater moment like that? How about Michael Hollister killing all those people? Speaking of which…
“There’s one more thing I’ve got to tell you about the future, then I promise I won’t tell you any more. Do you know anything about Michael Hollister?”
Chewing a bite of her bologna sandwich, Carrie said, “I didn't before today, except that his family is rich. Now I know he got hit in the groin and everyone's laughing about it. Seems pretty cruel to me, and I'm kind of surprised that you saw any comedy in it. Doesn't seem like the person you've decided to be this time.”
“There's a reason for that. In my first life, he grew up into a serial killer.”
“Like Ted Bundy?”
“Wait. You know who Ted Bundy is? Oh wait, right, you would have seen him on the news. Anyway, yes, like Ted Bundy. He was called the 'Ne
cktie Killer,' and he strangled twenty-seven people."
Carrie shuddered. "You are honest-to-god serious."
"Yes," Thomas said, simply. Maybe all the details of his animal butcher shop can wait, but one can't. "I'm already on his radar. Last weekend, he kidnapped Amy, my dog. I thought he had killed her, but he didn’t, though he hurt her. He is a dangerous person. In my last life, he didn’t start killing for a few years after high school. I wonder if maybe he just didn’t start the life of a full-blown serial killer until later, but still was playing his sick games all the way back in high school.”
“Oh, God, I knew he was weird, but I didn’t think he was kill-people-and-bury-them-in-the-woods weird.”
“I thought maybe that was one of the reasons I woke up back here–to stop Michael from killing all those people.”
Carrie paused, gentled her voice. “And to stop yourself from driving drunk with Zack?”
Thomas’s mouth dropped slightly ajar. Goddamn it. Of course. She would know about that. Everybody in school knew about it.
“Yes,” Thomas said firmly. “I wasn’t drunk that night. I’d only had half a beer, but, yes. To stop myself from killing Zack.” Now it was Thomas’s turn to pause. “In all your lives—“
Carrie interrupted, “—did you have a wreck and Zack was killed? Yes. Every time."
Thomas said nothing. It took all his energy to avoid tearing up.
"I’m sorry. I just thought it was—“
“—one of those, what did you call it? Watershed moments? Like Elvis dying on the crapper or your dad always breaking his coffee cup?”
She nodded, silent now. The room clattered and bustled with students were picking up their trays, scraping their leftovers into garbage cans, and exiting the cafeteria.
“I’m sorry, Tommy. I really am. This time you’ll know what’s coming, so maybe you can change it. I’ve got to go. I’m the student aide at the office, and that’s the one place you don’t want to be tardy.”
“Can I call you tonight?”
“No, not tonight. Let’s give ourselves a rest to think all this over. We’re not in a hurry, right?”
