“Before I forget. Next time you feel a shift coming on, you might want to go to the restroom.”
“Why?”
“Because people will start to ask questions if you keep falling out of your seat in class and keep having massive nosebleeds. And I get the feeling we’re not really supposed to let other people know about this. Not that they would ever believe us.”
Call it instinct, but I had the same feeling. This was our secret to keep.
Chosen.
Awesome.
Lucky us.
Chapter 10
Here’s the thing about time travel—it always occurs at the most inconvenient of times. I mean it doesn’t happen while you’re having an awkward conversation with Jamie from yearbook who no doubt has made a doll from your very own hair, but you have to be nice to her because if you don’t that picture of you with the booger hanging out of your nose will somehow make it in. It doesn’t happen when your uncle makes you go to dinner with Bob Flemming, a big booster club supporter, who insists on bringing his bimbo girlfriends to dinner who treat you like a kid despite only being a few years older than you. And it doesn’t happen when your girlfriend keeps trying to take advantage of you and your equipment just won’t work. No, despite the one time it saved me from Shakespeare, who I just don’t get why people go nutso over, time travel pretty much comes when you least expect or want it.
The second time I felt the shift coming on was during football practice a few days after pretending to know anything about time travel at the Shell gas station. I almost didn’t make it to the bathroom in time before completely blacking out. I had gotten sacked in practice, and it took awhile to feel the effects of the shift work its way through the pain of getting my ass handed to me because my o-line couldn’t block worth a crap. Stumbling through a chorus of “stop being a baby,” and “Betty White could take hits better than you,” I made it into the locker room.
When I came to, the silence let me know I was once again in a future I hoped would never come into existence. I didn’t waste time trying to convince myself it was all a dream. There was no going back to that. I scrambled to my feet and headed into the main building to look for Josephine. I checked and re-checked every girl’s bathroom, not above nor too frantic to note that the girls’ bathroom didn’t have couches and air fresheners as rumored.
When I made my way to the front of the building, I found Josephine waiting for me, and she didn’t exactly look thrilled.
“What have you been?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe searching for you.”
Josephine threw up her hands and looked around. “Isn’t this where we ran into each other the last time?”
“You said you went into a bathroom to avoid people knowing you were going all wonky. More wonky than usual that is. I looked for you there.”
“You spent the last twenty minutes perving around girls’ bathrooms?” she asked, tugging on the zipper of her hoodie, which was clearly not going up any further.
“Oh, God. I didn’t know we took the time to set a meeting place,” I said with a shake of my head.
“Well, I guess now we have.”
“Fine,” I spat.
“Fine.”
What we found outside of the school wasn’t much different than the last time we shifted. Same old pile of I Can’t Believe This Happened rubble. We didn’t find Mr. Ambiguous either. Did I want answers? Sure. But part of me needed to find my own place in this new world before I could decide who or what to trust.
Compared to our first tour of the future, our second tour was starting off as a bust. It was hot, much too hot for the fall of our other present—the present where I was getting ready for what was going to be a tough game against Kennedy High. Maybe it wasn’t fall in this present? Despite the heat, Josephine kept her hoodie zipped up.
I chuckled to myself.
“Want to share what’s so amusing? We’ve been walking around this prophetic war zone for like two hours now, and even I can’t walk around that long moping without getting a little antsy.”
Was it weird to say that if this girl would maybe shed her black clothing and let me actually see her face for more than five minutes at a time, I might actually think she was pretty funny? I might actually like her.
“You do realize if you took the hoodie off you might not sweat to death,” I said, looking at her over my shoulder. We had been walking around in circles for two hours, searching for some clue as to what happened to our city, and what we were supposed to do about it. So far, all we had seen was a bunch of burned cars, busted windows, and dead people. Lots of dead people. Rotting bodies sitting in cars. Rotting bodies curled up in alleyways. Rotting bodies decaying casually in the patio chairs of the Starbucks.