23 Minutes

by Vivian Vande Velde

The woman who’d told her the time in the first playback makes a wide detour around her, bumping into the teenage girl who is still too busy talking on her phone to be aware of anything else.

  Zoe passes the other woman, the one with the two kids, as they’re leaving the candy store. Pushover, Zoe thinks at the mother scornfully, before she sees that they haven’t bought candy—they’ve stopped to put a donation in the jar to raise money for muscular dystrophy. This is unexpected.

  Not that this causes her to like them any better or anything.

  She walks faster than she did the first time, to make up for dallying while trying to decide what to do.

  But she’s overcompensated, because when she gets to the bank, the rain hasn’t started yet. Should she go in even though she’s a minute or so early? What possible repercussions could that have? And would they necessarily be bad?

  Silly question, she chides herself. Of course they’d be bad.

  On the other hand, she is also concerned about hanging around outside the bank door. Will the guard notice and be even more suspicious of her? And what bad thing could that lead to? Is the robber watching the place, and will his suspicions be aroused?

  Ooh, she thinks, that might actually be a good thing. He might decide to postpone his robbery until some other day, or he might choose another bank. She couldn’t possibly be responsible for people under those circumstances.

  Which is the point at which nature steps in and empties a sky-full of rainwater onto her.

  Zoe dutifully shoves the folder under her Guns N’ Roses t-shirt and enters.

  The guard scowls at her, a look like he’s bitten down into what he thought was a fluffy piece of sugar candy but turned out to be a lemon-flavored rock.

  Obviously there’s no way she will ever be anything other than a source of irritation to him.

  She heads for the table with the deposit/withdrawal slips, then remembers that the first time, she took the folder out from under her shirt before going there.

  She takes it out now, but worries that things are already irrevocably wrong.

  Uh-huh. How much more wrong can you get than intentionally placing yourself in the path of a bank robber with a proven track record of killing indiscriminately?

  Zoe moves to the table and takes a form. Pink is for deposits, she notices this time; white for withdrawals. She uses some of each and writes down the names of Santa’s reindeer. She knows she made other lists before but can’t remember what they were, so she just goes ahead and makes several copies of the same one. This time, thanks to Mr. President’s previous intervention, she has all nine names.

  As she’s watching the people lining up for the tellers, she wonders if she’s spending too much time looking at them, and if that is making the guard more suspicious than the first time. Her gaze wanders—despite her best intentions—to the office where Mr. President is currently sitting talking to one of the managers. Probably not asking for a loan, she decides; he looks too relaxed to be begging. She settles on the theory that he’s investing a sum of money he inherited from a maiden aunt—he was no doubt her favorite nephew.

  She forces herself to stop staring and speculating. She worries she’s spent too long gawking in a direction she never even noticed before.

  The last person in the tellers’ line at the moment is the same woman with the pointy-toed shoes whom Zoe believes she stood behind last time.

  So Zoe gets in line. Has the same non-conversation with the same teller about presidential coins in general and William Henry Harrison—the Original—in particular. Once again, the teller looks resentful that she needs to play nice and pretend she considers Zoe a valued customer.

  Finished with that, Zoe goes off to the side and stands at the forms table again.

  This time she’s aware of Mr. President coming out of the office with his envelope of papers, which he puts down beside her as he reaches for one of the deposit slips.

  Through the main entrance, Zoe sees the robber get out of his car and sprint across the street.

  How could she have not noticed, before, that his face is very suspiciously just-about-entirely obscured?

  Previously, the bank guard did not believe her when she said a robber was about to enter the bank. Her plan this time is to wait until the robber is at the counter. Then she will run over and tell the guard, “Look! That guy has a gun.” Hopefully the guard will not blow her off once he actually sees the man.

  For now, Zoe intentionally steps backward—fortunately finding Mr. President’s foot right away, so she doesn’t have to be obvious with multiple tries. She flings her folder of papers in the general direction of his knees.

  “Sorry,” she says before he can get a word out. “Sorry. I am such an idiot.”

  She fervently hopes she hasn’t made him suspicious of her, just because she’s trying to get him down on the floor a few seconds early.

  But apparently not.

  “These things happen to everyone,” he assures her.

  They both crouch down and scramble for the papers. Even though Zoe has angled herself differently, to be able to keep watch on the counter behind which the tellers are positioned, this time she and Mr. President manage to collect all the papers from the group home and all the bank slips quickly enough that the guard doesn’t come over. Zoe wonders what disaster that will precipitate.

  Neither Zoe nor Mr. President has stood yet. Zoe is aware that he is looking closely at her, scrutinizing. Did he do that before?

  She can’t be sure and, in any case, pretends not to notice as she aligns the papers to fit them back into the folder.

  He asks, quiet and gentle, “Are you all right?”

  Which is new, but doesn’t sound dangerous.

  “Yeah, sure,” she says, even as the front door opens, letting in the soon-to-be robber on a blast of cold, rainy air.

  Mr. President is watching her, and the bank guard is watching both of them. Neither notices the man with the raincoat and the cap, and the bulkiness in his right-hand pocket.

  Mr. President asks Zoe, “Truly?”

  Truly? Zoe thinks. Who actually says truly? She believes the only time she’s ever used the word truly was when her language arts teacher had the class practice writing what she called “friendly” letters (as opposed to “business” letters, not as opposed to “unfriendly” letters), some of which ended with Sincerely, and others, Yours truly.

  “Yeah,” she repeats to Mr. President. “Truly.” She glances at him just in time to see him stealing a look down at her hands, holding one of the Santa’s reindeer sheets. He’s holding one, too, except his is on a pink form, while hers is on white. Ah! she thinks, too late. I shouldn’t have included Blitzen. Now they have nothing to talk about. By way of explanation, she offers, “It’s been a very rough day.” Her voice unexpectedly quavers, like she’s talking into an electric fan.

  He looks up at that exact moment, and their eyes meet.

  The breath she’s been trying to steady catches. Because they’re crouching on the floor so close to each other without him standing taller than she is, or because of some trick of the lighting, or because of … of something …

  Has she ever seen bluer eyes? How could she not have noticed them before? She was looking directly into his eyes when … when … yeah, leave it at before. She remembers vaguely noting that they were blue, and that they seemed to hold equal measures of being scared and being brave. But she did not note the striking color.

  The only trouble is that remembering the moment right before the gunman pulled the trigger is abruptly followed by remembering the moment right after.

  She winces, her face and arms once again feeling flicked by his blood.

  Mr. President looks alarmed. Even touches the back of her hand with his fingertips. “Do you need help? Is there someone I can call?”

  That would be one yes and one no.

  And she can no longer bear to think of him in connection with the ill-fated William Henry Harrison.

  Fo
r him, the next words out of her mouth must sound bizarrely appropriate to absolutely nothing: “What’s your name?” she asks.

  He looks startled, but doesn’t demand Why? Though her question clearly puzzles him, he answers, “Daniel.”

  She likes that he says Daniel, not Dan or Danny—not that it makes any difference or that it’s any of her business. She says, “I want to thank you, Daniel.”

  Her intensity has him looking even more mystified, and just the slightest bit worried.

  “For your kindness,” she clarifies, which—in the interval they’re currently living—clarifies nothing.

  He’s still frowning in concentration, trying to follow, and she’s thinking that her earlier assessment—more interesting than attractive—was way off. She’d thought before that he had a great smile. Now she’s thinking that his looks as a whole are growing on her.

  Which is downright ridiculous, because he’s still too old for her.

  Not to mention that they’re still in a bank that’s about to get shot up by a robber.

  Just as she’s thinking that, one of the tellers squeals in alarm.

  I was supposed to have been watching HIM, Zoe chides herself: the man she knew had come here to rob the bank. Not Daniel.

  Still, she’s able to catch up in a heartbeat. At this moment, there are seven other customers in the bank, none waiting in line. The robber is in front of the teller, the one who does not have any William Henry Harrison coins, the one who looked pissed off at having to wait on Zoe, little suspecting then that waiting on Zoe would turn out to be the least of her problems.

  The next teller over, the one at the station to the extreme right, has just slid a lumpy canvas bag over to her. Zoe can see there are stacks of money packed inside, and a piece of paper lying on top, no doubt a Hand over the money or die note. By squealing rather than quietly and efficiently filling the bag and then passing it on its way down the line, the second teller has alerted everyone in the room that something is very seriously amiss.

  The robber pulls his right hand fully out of his pocket, revealing the gun.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Zoe is aware of Daniel. Still crouched on the floor after helping her to pick up her papers, he has taken all this in. She can tell—maybe feeling it through that lightest touch of his fingertips on the back of her hand, maybe just because she can tell—that he’s about to move, to do something in a misguided attempt to help. There’s no time to warn him not to try a foolhardy intervention.

  There’s barely time for her to catch hold of the cuff of his jacket, to try to hold him back, away from harm.

  His eyes shift to her, which gives her the moment she needs to whisper, “Don’t. You’ll only get killed.”

  He could take it as a panicky it’s-always-better-not-to-get-involved response.

  But she doesn’t think he does.

  Of course, there’s no way for him to guess that she actually knows he’ll get killed if he intervenes, but he hesitates, apparently choosing watchfulness over action, at least for this instant.

  The officious bank guard, who has been paying close enough attention to Zoe and Daniel that he has not gotten distracted by the attractive twenty-something, is standing closer to the teller counter than before. “Hey!” he says, and moves his hand toward his gun.

  The robber shoots him.

  And Daniel proves he’s terrible at staying on the sidelines and doing nothing. He lunges forward, slipping out of Zoe’s grasp. Somehow, still barely more upright than in a crouch, he has once again gotten himself positioned between Zoe and the gunman.

  Who shoots a second time.

  Daniel falls back against her, knocking her down off her knees and onto her bottom.

  He’s gasping, having a hard time catching his breath, and Zoe puts a steadying arm around him, despite the nearly overpowering smell of blood, despite the massive wet stickiness she feels on his chest. Please let him keep breathing, she thinks to God, because surely a chest wound is better than a head wound. People can survive being shot in the chest.

  Sometimes.

  Her father did.

  But meanwhile she’s distracted because she’s also thinking that, yeah, Daniel is an adult guy, but he’s not all that big. And yet, Zoe feels as though she’s been slammed into by … well, the image that comes to her mind is a freight train, not that she’s ever been run into by a freight train, but she’s certain it must feel like this.

  So that is what Zoe is thinking as Daniel falls backward onto her, except the pain is centered on her upper left chest near her shoulder. Heart attack? she wonders, remembering having heard somewhere that severe pain in the left shoulder or upper arm is a warning sign.

  Not for fifteen-year-old girls, though.

  She looks down at herself and sees that she’s once more covered with Daniel’s blood.

  Her head feels as though someone has stuffed it with a collection of pins, all trying to work their way out through her skull. And for some reason the pins seem to be humming as they work their way through brain and bone. Very Zen. Even so, she’s aware of her surroundings, and that the robber is continuing his spree by shooting the attractive twenty-something, as well as Ms. No-I-have-no-William-Henry-Harrison-coins-bank-teller.

  But for some reason the whole bank is tipping. Except, no—it’s Zoe who’s tipping. And she looks down again at her bloody shirt—Guns N’ Roses, indeed—before she realizes that some of the blood is her own.

  A lot of it is her own.

  The bullet has gone through Daniel and into her.

  And she’s about to pass out.

  She can no longer hear Daniel’s raspy breathing. He has slumped forward. He might be unconscious, or he might be dead, or maybe it’s just that the humming in her own head has gotten too loud. With no time to even check whether Daniel is alive, she shoves him off her. Kicks herself away, using his body as leverage. What kind of monster is she for even being able to do this? She hates herself, because it seems that a better person should be paralyzed by empathy for the young man she had hoped to save. But she can’t playback her way out of here while touching anyone else. She knows this from experimenting when she was thirteen.

  She wraps her arms around herself.

  Sees the gunman’s attention has been attracted by her movement.

  He aims the gun at her.

  She says, “Playback,” but can’t hear her own voice over the roar of the gun.

  CHAPTER 7

  TIME RESETS TO 1:16.

  Zoe has just gone from sitting on the floor in the bank to standing—in front of the hat and purse boutique, of course.

  She’s also just been shot. Twice, she suspects.

  Still, the bullets, the wounds, have not traveled back in time with her. Because that’s just not the way things work: Nothing ever travels back with her, only her memories—her damn memories.

  It wasn’t that long ago that she was thinking she’d just come as close as she ever had to dying, and now here she is again, having come even closer.

  This is not a personal best record she ever wants to visit again.

  Whatever else happens, there’s one thing in the world she absolutely knows will not: She will not go back into that bank.

  Off-balance, she teeters and falls to her knees, not sure if she’s fallen from the sudden shift from sitting to standing as time played back, or by the realization of how very, very, very close she came to getting killed. Or by the thought that she has no more left to give. She cannot bring herself to go back. Surely no one—God, the universe, even Daniel himself—could expect her to try again after that.

  One way or another, Daniel will die within the next twenty-three minutes, and probably a whole bunch of other people will, too.

  All she’s accomplished is to get to know Daniel a little bit better than simply as the sweet, nameless bank customer who died within moments of being kind to her.

  It’s not fair, it’s not fair, she thinks, covering her face. She doesn’t want him
to die; she doesn’t want herself to die.

  Someone has laid a hand on her shoulder. “Miss,” a voice says. “Hon. You all right?”

  Not Daniel’s voice.

  Never again Daniel’s voice.

  Zoe looks up.

  The biker guy walking his Chihuahua has stopped and is leaning down to look at her with a solicitous expression. The Chihuahua is yapping at her, dragging its leash through the folder and the papers that are littering the ground around her knees, doing an excellent job of shuffling and spreading them.

  After what’s just happened, it’s hard to be concerned about that.

  She hears the biker guy answer someone, “I don’t know. She just fell. I was looking right at her, but I didn’t see what happened.”

  A small crowd has gathered. The department store saleswoman, the one who once told her the time, slows but does not stop.

  The girl with the cell phone that does not have unlimited minutes asks, “Is she all right? Should I call 911?”

  “No!” Zoe practically screams at her.

  Everyone freezes, except for glancing at each other from the corners of their eyes. See that? everyone seems to be silently asking. Oh yeah, everyone mentally answers. Don’t let her get excited …

  Zoe doesn’t want to sound like a crazy person. Been there, done that, as part of the awfulness of being thirteen. Never again, she’s promised herself. She forces her voice into a calmer register. “Sorry,” she says. She doesn’t exactly sound normal, even to her own ears, but she keeps working at it. “I just mean …” One final steadying breath. “There’s no need for that. I’m fine. Really. Thank you for your concern.” Strangers. Strangers are acting concerned. About her. She doesn’t remember that ever happening before. In her experience, strangers are oblivious. Or casually cruel. She’s not exactly sure what to make of this new experience, but the feeling is not unpleasant.

  Cell Phone Girl still looks a bit scared of her. “OK,” she says, and resumes walking. And talking on her cell phone.

  Zoe says, “I just … twisted my ankle.” She tries to force a laugh, but it comes out more of a snort. “Wow, did I go down fast.”