23 Minutes

by Vivian Vande Velde

  And there’s Delia’s ex-boyfriend, the one before the one at the bus stop, the reputed drug dealer. Zoe had given him the benefit of the doubt, not believing what the other girls said about him because she’d thought he looked—well, not exactly upstanding, but not exactly disreputable either. Until that time, watching a pick-up basketball game, he’d pulled out a gun and took a shot at a guy for hogging the ball. Never mind that he’d hit the nearby Dumpster instead of the player, or that he claimed the Dumpster had been his target all along: Zoe has clearly demonstrated she is not good at reading people.

  But still. In Zoe’s experience, people who have guns fire them.

  Who brings a gun to a family counseling session?

  Or to a basketball game in a city park?

  Who brings a gun to a bank?

  Zoe’s mind refuses to accept the obvious.

  Till suddenly things fall into place.

  Daniel can’t be trusted. Any more than her mother. Or Delia’s ex-boyfriend.

  That look? That expression that flitted across Daniel’s face when he first saw the bank robber, that emotion or feeling she wasn’t able to give a name to? She has a name for it now. That was recognition. Daniel recognized the robber. And now Zoe realizes: The robber recognized Daniel. That was why the man started shooting. He knew Daniel could identify him. That was why he wanted to take Daniel hostage, and why Daniel balked, why he was so sure he would never survive should he be taken away from witnesses. He’s never going to let me go, Zoe remembers him saying. He’s never going to let any of us go. So you might as well just shoot him now.

  They recognized each other.

  And yet Daniel isn’t a cop.

  But he’s carrying a gun

  She had called him Mr. President after William Henry Harrison, bad luck president extraordinaire.

  How much more bad luck can you have than to be inside a bank, planning to rob it—at the exact same time another robber of your acquaintance walks in to hold up that same bank?

  If there are other reasons for Daniel to be carrying a concealed weapon, another explanation for why he recognized the robber, Zoe doesn’t have time to try to figure them out.

  “Crap!” she says.

  She tries to scramble to her feet. But her position is awkward, what with sitting on that step so her knees are higher than her waist, and what with being more or less wedged between Daniel and the banister. Somehow her legs get tangled in his and she teeters on the edge of that top stair.

  And all the while, she’s still saying, “Crap crap crap!” knowing she’s about to fall the entire length of the staircase.

  Except that Daniel has caught hold of her wrist. This keeps her from tumbling backward, but also keeps her from being able to transport herself with the playback spell.

  “What is it?” he asks. “What’s wrong?”

  She just barely manages to keep from falling fully onto him by twisting so that—almost as bad—she lands back exactly where she started from, sitting hard, her thigh brushing against his, which, just a few heartbeats ago, would have caused her distress for an entirely different reason.

  “Zoe?” he says. Calmly. Gently. Concerned. “What’s happened? What’s frightened you?”

  “Let go of me!” she shouts at him. Once more she tries to stand, tries to yank her arm out of his grasp. Uses her other hand to beat at his hand holding her. “Let go of me!”

  Still looking at her with that mixture of confusion and … and something that certainly looks like the desire to help—he tells her, “Careful. I’m letting go.” And then—once he’s sure releasing her won’t catapult her backward down the stairs—he does: He lets go of her arm.

  But he can’t be trusted.

  She manages to step back onto the less precarious footing of the landing. Away from his touch.

  “Zoe,” he says, sounding as reasonable as she could have ever wished for, “Don’t be afraid. Whatever kind of trouble you’re in, let me help you.”

  But he’s the trouble.

  She puts her arms around herself and wishes herself away from him.

  CHAPTER 9

  TIME RESETS TO 1:16.

  Zoe’s ponytail elastic is once again holding her hair. She is embarrassed for herself—and furious with herself—that she wanted to look nice for Daniel.

  She has never felt so betrayed. Not when her mother would hit her. Not when her father would pretend he didn’t notice. Not when her friends and her friends’ parents and her teachers and her doctors refused to believe her about her ability to play back time.

  But this is worse.

  All this while she was feeling sorry for him, trying to help him, trying to save him—risking her life to save him—and here he is, just as bad as the man who shot him.

  Because Daniel, too, brought a gun into the bank. Maybe just to threaten. But surely someone who plans a crime and supplies himself with a weapon knows there’s a chance he might end up using it. Some of the kids in the places she’s stayed have scars that can prove this. As does her father.

  Is it purest coincidence that Zoe has seen Daniel killed? Couldn’t it just as easily have ended the exact opposite way?—with Daniel waving the gun and menacing tellers and customers alike, with Daniel shooting the other bank robber point-blank in the head?

  Zoe needs some physical release for her anger. Anger management has never been one of her particular problems. But she’s heard enough from the other girls to be familiar with some of the buzzwords. A time-out doesn’t seem relevant for this situation. Deep breaths. Think before you speak. Identify possible solutions. She guesses these techniques are as meaningless to the people they’re inflicted on as her own doctors’ therapies were for her.

  She wants to hit someone. Specifically, she wants to hit Daniel, but he’s back at the Victorian house, talking to the lawyer on the second floor. Perhaps asking about the legal ramifications of armed robbery. Daniel is a careful person, she thinks (with—all right! all right!—maybe a bit of bitterness): He’s a planner. He would surely weigh the consequences and decide if the risks were worthwhile.

  How could you? she mentally screams at him.

  Some of the boys with whom Zoe has come up through the ranks go to the gym, take out their frustrations on a punching bag. She isn’t sure if the girls do this also.

  But in any case, Zoe isn’t in a gym. She’s out on the street, in front of the hat and purse boutique, and there is nothing around that offers itself up as suitable punching material. The brick wall? The window? Zoe isn’t so far gone into rage as to injure herself. Or one of the passersby.

  Besides, her hands are full. She once more is holding the folder of papers she stole from the group home.

  Well, they will have to do.

  She will rip the whole folder in half. She’s seen people rip a phone book in half, which looks eminently satisfying, and the folder is a fraction of that thickness.

  But she finds she isn’t strong enough.

  She lets the folder itself drop to the street, thinking the manila is too thick. But apparently there are still too many pages. She sticks half under her arm, and still has no luck. Halves what she has left. Still no joy. Half again, and she’s barely able to manage that.

  This is my life, Zoe thinks, for what the folder holds is the information the group home has gathered on her. All the various doctors’ evaluations, the social workers’ reports, the P-34 forms filled in by a succession of housemothers.

  Except it’s not her life. It’s people’s perceptions of who she is. And they’re as wrong about her as she was about Daniel. Destroying this folder full of misinformation in increments of fewer than a dozen pages at a time is not nearly as satisfying as doing the whole thing at once. Or as punching Daniel.

  Someone passing by gives a loud Hmph! full of scorn and self-satisfaction, and Zoe looks up to see the mother with two children. She isn’t sure if it’s the mother or the boy who has vocalized this disapproval, but it’s the girl who whines, “Mommy, she’s l
ittering! She shouldn’t be littering! Somebody’s going to need to clean up after her!”

  “Somebody will,” Mommy assures her, hustling both children away.

  Coming from the other direction, Miss Aloha-Pants, who once helped Zoe pick up these papers, now aligns herself with the mother and kids, muttering to them while inclining her head to indicate Zoe, “Some people.”

  Zoe sees that several of the sheets she’d shoved under her arm have slid loose and fallen. Like there’s nothing in the world worse than a litterbug, Zoe thinks. Still, she stoops to gather them up. And as she does so, drops some of the ragged pieces from the little bit she was able to rip.

  Her mind flashes back—not a playback, just a vivid memory such as a normal person might have—to being inside the bank with all those deposit and withdrawal slips. Daniel stooping down to help her gather them up. Daniel supplying her with the name that had evaded her recall: Blitzen.

  What kind of bank robber, Zoe asks herself, knows the names of Santa’s reindeer?

  Yeah, she retorts to herself, you wouldn’t be so eager to fit a different meaning to what you KNOW was going on if he didn’t have those gorgeous blue eyes.

  That’s the trouble with the world vs. TV and movies, she reasons. Hollywood makes you think all bad guys look like bad guys. Swarthy. Ugly. Yellow-toothed and pockmarked. The kind of guys who kick kittens and spit when they talk.

  Not the kind of guys who smile kindly and try to put you at your ease when you’ve been clumsy and are clearly out of your element. Who try to get overbearing bank guards not to hassle you.

  That just goes to prove he has a disregard for authority, Zoe tells herself.

  But she knows this is the stupidest thing she’s told herself all day.

  There’s a world of difference between angling to let the bank guard leave her alone so she can be out of the rain, and holding up the bank.

  But that’s what he was going to do, she reminds herself. He was going to rob the bank.

  She tries to convince herself that Daniel is not the kind of bank robber who would start shooting indiscriminately.

  But the truth is: She obviously knows nothing about him.

  She can’t help remembering the first shooting she ever witnessed, which—until today—she had assumed would be the only shooting she ever witnessed: how she sat, paralyzed by shock and fear, while the Family Counseling receptionist—the receptionist!—talked Mom into putting the gun down. While the receptionist called for an ambulance. While the receptionist administered the first aid that saved Dad’s life. While the receptionist made excuses for Zoe, saying, “You’re just a kid. You’re just thirteen. Of course there was nothing you could do.” Letting Zoe off too easily because she didn’t know about playback. Didn’t know Zoe could have stopped it, could have made it go away—if only Zoe hadn’t squandered her ten playbacks for that particular twenty-three-minute block of time by trying to get Mom and Dad to stop arguing during the ride and in the waiting room.

  Proof, finally, of what her mother had always claimed: that Zoe was a waste of time and effort.

  If Zoe does nothing this time, the outcome will be the same as when she watched from the card shop. She will not be there to distract Daniel, and somehow or other that results in a whole bunch of people dying.

  She realizes where this train of thought is leading because she has skirted this issue already. That the original events were the best: where only Daniel dies—well, and the robber himself—and where she ends up spattered by their blood. Except now she knows Daniel deserves to die.

  Sort of.

  Well, not really.

  She can’t convince herself of that.

  And no matter if he does deserve it: She can’t bring herself to intentionally cause it to happen.

  Not because of the eyes, the hair, the smile, the kindness.

  But because she’s the kind of person who can’t make those village-vs.-the-child decisions.

  Not deciding is deciding, the sociology teacher had insisted.

  Zoe revisits the question she asked herself before: What kind of bank robber knows the names of Santa’s reindeer?

  The question she realizes she should be asking herself is: What kind of bank robber lets himself get distracted by helping an awkward girl feel at ease?

  Daniel has not acted like a bank robber.

  But neither has he acted like a policeman. Even an off-duty policeman. Or an FBI agent, for that matter.

  Or at least she doesn’t think so, with her admittedly limited experience with law enforcement people.

  He knew the bank robber, she reminds herself.

  Can she let him die? Him, and a whole bunch of others, just because she thinks a policeman would have identified himself to her while they were sitting there drinking cocoa and chatting at Dunkin’ Donuts?

  There wasn’t that much time, she tells herself.

  First, he didn’t know what she wanted.

  Then, she sounded like a crazy person, talking about dead friends no longer being dead, and about knowing what was going to happen in the future.

  Until what she was saying started to happen. Until he saw for himself. And only then was he convinced. Or maybe he just wanted to believe because he couldn’t stand watching those people in the bank get killed. Even after she warned him, I’ve seen you die, he gave her the word armadillo.

  Rather than saying, “I’m a policeman.”

  Which might have seemed irrelevant at the time.

  She mutters to herself, “Blitzen.”

  The biker guy walking his Chihuahua glances her way with a sour expression and asks, “You talking to me?” in a tone that indicates she’d better not be.

  Zoe ignores him. She puts her arms around herself and says, “Playback.”

  CHAPTER 10

  TIME RESETS TO 1:16.

  Zoe doesn’t take the ten seconds to tuck her folder under her shirt or the five extra steps to dump it into the trash. She just clutches the pack of papers, but doesn’t worry if she loses bits and pieces of it—the story of her former life—as she runs as fast as she can to Independence Street. To the Fitzhugh House. She slams the front door so hard that a man—possibly the M. Van Der Meer of “M. Van Der Meer, Designer”—opens his first-floor door to peek out at her.

  She scowls, not even exactly in his direction, and he retreats back into his room.

  A moment later, she hears Daniel’s voice as he takes leave of the second-floor office.

  Zoe has remained by the foot of the stairs, safe from Daniel’s touch. Safe from the blueness of his eyes.

  He’s about to start down the stairs when she calls up to him, “Are you a policeman?”

  Daniel ponders her, or the question, a moment before answering, “No …”

  Zoe considers turning and leaving.

  Instead, she says, “But you’re carrying a gun.”

  Daniel glances around the foyer. Perhaps he doesn’t like her broadcasting this information. Perhaps he’s being alert for ambush, which either a policeman or a bank robber might be. Even more slowly than he gave his previous answer, he says, “Yes …”

  Every nerve ending is telling Zoe to get out of there.

  She’s getting pretty good at ignoring her instincts.

  But she does have her arms wrapped around herself, ready. She can say playback faster than he can get downstairs. Faster, she hopes, than he can draw the gun, if that becomes his intent. Though it’s hard to think of him doing that. She asks, “Are you planning on robbing the bank?”

  Like ANYONE would answer yes, Zoe chides herself.

  His expression says he’s surprised by her question, incredulous that she would ask, and that he’s wondering who the hell she is.

  Instead of sharing any of that, he tells her, “No, to the bank question. Let me show you something. Don’t be alarmed.” He’s started down the stairs again, while simultaneously reaching into the inside pocket of his jacket.

  And as soon as he’s said not to be ala
rmed, Zoe is more alarmed than ever.

  “Don’t come any closer,” she warns, stepping backward, toward the door.

  Daniel stops partway down. He’s holding a card, which he tosses in her direction.

  Of course, Zoe is totally distracted by trying to catch it—and yet still manages to miss. But fortunately Daniel doesn’t take advantage, and stays where he is even while she goes to pick it up off the floor.

  The card is laminated, and there’s a picture of Daniel. For a moment Zoe thinks he’s showing her his driver’s license. Then the words sink in:

  Daniel Lentini

  Private Investigator

  “OK?” he asks. “May I come down? You’re not afraid of me?”

  She looks up at him and doesn’t know what to say.

  Private investigator. It was not a possibility that had even crossed her mind.

  I almost let him die, Zoe thinks. I assumed the worst, and I was prepared to let him die.

  He takes her silence as permission to move.

  She’s aware of him walking down the stairs slowly, evidently to avoid spooking her—either that, or for dramatic effect—and she has yet to make up her mind if this is a good thing or bad.

  She still hasn’t decided, even when he’s standing directly in front of her.

  He’s not exactly annoyed, but neither is he amused. He says, “And now it’s my turn: Who are you? What’s going on?”

  ANYBODY can have a card printed, she tells herself. She also tells herself that if she hadn’t changed her mind, he would have died, and it would have been on her soul.

  She says, “I—I saw the gun, and I …” The identification card has started vibrating.