“You can’t. Go back to class.”
“I don’t think so. Come on—I have the choice of going back to trigonometry or walking across the school with a beautiful girl on a warm spring day. Which do you honestly think I’m going to choose?”
I looked at him in amazement. He was actually trying to flirt with me when I was right on the very edge of losing it. For no reason I could explain, tears rushed to my eyes and I was caught between laughing hysterically and crying. I sat down in the middle of the soccer field and put my head in my hands.
“Oh, hey! No, I’m sorry,” he said. “Don’t… don’t cry. Really…”
I kept my head down for a moment to pull myself together, taking deep breaths. “I’m okay,” I said. “It’s just been a bad, bad day.” When I looked up, he was sitting on the field in front of me, his face level with mine. His gray eyes, which had little flecks of blue, were full of concern and he gave me a tentative, sympathetic smile. He reminded me of a big friendly puppy and I wasn’t sure how I was going to shake him.
I remembered my school ID and tugged the cord out of my shirt. It was there, beneath my Metro card. I pulled it out, holding it up for him to see. “I really am a student, see? I have proof.”
He leaned forward to read the ID. “Prudence Katherine Pierce-Keller. Cool monogram—PKPK. Hi, Prudence. I’m Trey.”
I grimaced. “It’s Kate, please.”
Laughing, he pulled his own ID out of the gray messenger bag that was slung over his shoulder and handed it to me.
“Lawrence A. Coleman the Third,” I read. “What’s the A for?”
“Alma. My great-grandmother’s maiden name.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah—granddad is Larry; dad is Lars. No good versions left—not that I really like the first two—so Mom went with Trey.” He held up three fingers. “You know, for being number three.”
I nodded and got to my feet, handing him back his ID. I put my own ID back into the holder and took out one of the keys. There was a small white tag attached, on which someone in the school administration had written the number 117 and the name Keller. “This key, Trey, fits the front door to that last little house over there. My dad, Harry Keller, lives in that house, and so do I for the better part of each week.”
He was walking beside me again. “If this key fits,” I continued, “you can go back and tell Mrs… Dees?” Trey nodded. “You can tell Mrs. Dees that I’m fine. Just a silly girl who should have eaten her lunch. Deal?”
“Deal. But not until you’re inside.”
“Fine,” I agreed. “I’m going to open the door, heat up some leftover jambalaya that’s in the fridge, and take a very long nap.”
I sighed, aware as I walked up the front steps of the cottage that I was saying all of this as much to reassure myself as to convince Trey. I really needed to open the door and see that Dad was there, that Mrs. Dees was a substitute because he’d come down with a cold or something else, and that I’d just imagined him being in the classroom. I kept telling myself that Katherine and Connor were crazy, or maybe the past few days were just one extended bad dream. I held the key out with shaky hands and, with Trey watching, finally managed to insert it in the doorknob.
To my immense relief, it opened. I turned back toward Trey and gave him a huge smile. “See! I told you this was my—” I stopped suddenly as I saw his face, then followed his gaze inside the open door.
Everything in the cottage was wrong. The couch where I slept had been replaced by two overstuffed chairs. A braided rug was on the floor. And then I saw what Trey was staring at—a framed photograph of Mrs. Dees with two small children, next to a large white mug that held pens and pencils. The red letters on the mug read #1 Grandma.
“No!” I backed out of the doorway. “The key fit! You saw it, didn’t you? It fit!”
Trey closed the door, making sure it locked. I sank onto the front steps, and after a moment he sat down beside me. “So… you want to tell me what you think is going on?”
I looked at him. What difference would it make? It wasn’t like he would believe me. I tugged the CHRONOS key out of my blouse. “What color is this?”
His gaze shifted from me to the medallion. “Brown, bronze—not sure what you’d call it. It looks old.”
“Well, it’s bright blue for me. There’s an hourglass in the middle.”
“Blue. Really? I can see the hourglass, but…”
I raised my eyebrows. “You see an hourglass in the middle, and the sand is moving back and forth?” Trey shook his head. “I didn’t think so. If I hold this in my hand for too long, my grandmother says that I’ll vanish to some point back in time. Or forward, maybe. It nearly happened to me yesterday.”