Because You Exist(43)

I put my hand on her back and gently pushed her out the front doors. My town was back. Well, not exactly the town I knew and loved, but at least I wasn’t looking at its destruction.

“Hold on,” I said, pulling a napkin out of my pocket. “You still have some blood under your nose.” I gently dabbed the napkin against her skin. Jo’s cheeks flushed, and I wondered if she still wasn’t cool with the idea of me touching her.

Jo mumbled something, but the sounds of cars passing by on the busy road outside of Shepherd High made it impossible to hear her. I guess she wasn’t used to having to speak so loud when we shifted, not when most everything that made a sound was dead or destroyed in the world we usually shifted to.

“What now?” I asked, looking around me. Sure, I didn’t like shifting, but I much preferred shifting to the past than the other option.

“He said this could happen,” Jo replied, zipping and unzipping her hoodie. She was nervous.

“Who did?”

“Ben.”

I tried to keep my face controlled, not let her see how mad it made me that she was still talking to him. I didn’t like the idea of them working together without me. She was my partner after all. “And what did Bentham have to say?”

“He said sometimes the shifts take you to the past. Not that it’s really the past because technically it’s still our present. The same rules apply. We can still get hurt. We can still die.”

“Die? From what? Unless you plan on crossing that road without looking both ways, I think you’re good.”

“Well, we are weakened when we time travel this way.”

She had my attention now. “How so?” I asked, looking more intently at my new/old surroundings.

“Well, we are in a double existence.”

“You have to know I’m already lost.”

Jo sighed; obviously frustrated she wasn’t working with boy genius, Bentham. “This is our past. We already exist in this world. What year is it? 98? 99? We’re kids. But we’re also here now as teenagers. We won’t be as strong. And if we get hurt, our bodies will be a lot harder to heal. Ben and Randall call it Broken Existence.”

“How often do you and Bentham talk?” I asked.

Jo rolled her eyes. “Not important. Let me get our bag, and then we can figure out why this year is important.”

“Bag?”

“I got the idea from Ben. It’s just basic supplies. Extra clothes. Food. Water. Knives. A gun. I buried it near the track field. I figure it would still be there in the future since we both know how unpopular track is. It’s a good idea to be prepared for whatever comes when we shift, especially since we know the survivors already know our point of entrance.”

“Yep. Great idea. Except we’re in the past now, Jo. You hid the bag in our present, hoping it would be there in our future. There’s no way it’s going to be here now. Since, according to the time line, you haven’t even hid the bag yet.”

“Son of a b,” Jo stammered.

Wow. For once, I caught onto something faster than Jo.

For the next two hours or so Jo and I wandered around Virginia Beach. We didn’t really know what to do with ourselves. I spent most of the time pointing out differences between past Virginia Beach and present. Things like how the Mexican restaurant on Kempsville had changed names like ten times in the past ten years. Jo wasn’t so interested in my useless trivia.

Why were we thrown back into this particular year was still a mystery. Jo was quiet. More quiet than usual. I wanted to ask her what was wrong, but I wasn’t quite sure we had reached the touchy-feely-share-our-innermost-secrets part of our friendship.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to be that type of friend to anyone.

Tired of aimlessly wandering, I began to shift our walking to Jenna’s house. I knew we were situated years before the illness that would take her from me, but I still wanted to make sure she was safe. If Jo had any idea this was my plan, she didn’t let on. She seemed to have crawled inside herself so deep that anything could jump out as us, and I was sure we’d both be dead before she even raised her fists to defend us.

She was probably just missing Bentham or some lame crap like that.

“What are we doing here?” Jo asked. Her voice filled with accusation when she finally noticed we were on Jenna’s street.

“I just wanted to check on her,” I replied innocently.

“She’s like, what, five? She’s probably safe. Coloring in her damn coloring book or something. Can we go?”

“What’s with the attitude? It’s not like we have anything better to do,” I challenged.