If it hadn’t been for anxiety about the rapidly approaching trial jumps and a hollow ache whenever I thought about my parents, I would have been happy. And there was also the gnawing fear each time I watched Trey drive away—the fear that he wouldn’t be back, that another time shift would occur and he wouldn’t even remember my name.
All of this—the happiness, the fear, everything—made me miss Charlayne. In my previous life, she would have been texting me five times a day to find out how things were going with Trey and filling me in on which guy she was dating, considering dating, and/or planning to dump. I had gotten very used to using her as a sounding board for my ideas. Talking to her always made me feel stronger and more capable, and with so much on the line, I really needed that kind of support.
One night after Trey left, I brought the laptop over to the bed and stretched out, pulling up Facebook so that I could look at Charlayne’s page. I knew that only “friends” could view some sections but some of her photos were public. I thought it might make me feel better just to see her smile.
Charlayne’s page wasn’t there, however, and that had me puzzled. She’d joined Facebook about a year before I transferred to Roosevelt, and had been the one who’d convinced me to start posting. If this latest time shift was fairly localized, as Connor had said, then the only thing that should have changed in Charlayne’s life was that she and I never met—meaning her page should still be active.
I Googled Charlayne Singleton and her address. Nothing. I removed the address and typed in Roosevelt High School. Still nothing, so I decided to try her brother, Joseph. He had played three sports last year, when he was a senior, and his parents had a scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings on a table all by itself in the living room. Charlayne referred to it scathingly as the Joseph Shrine, but her dad said that she’d been the loudest voice cheering him on from the stands.
Several hits popped up for Joseph Singleton in the DC area—mostly sports-related, but not at Roosevelt. It was the second link from the bottom, however, that caught my eye—a wedding announcement in the Washington Post “Style” section. “Joseph Singleton, Felicia Castor.” The wedding had been held in February at the Cyrist temple on Sixteenth Street, the same church I’d attended with Charlayne a few months before. I scanned the article and read that Felicia’s parents had been members of the Temple since they were children—not a big surprise—but the next sentence was a shocker. “Parents of the groom, Mary and Bernard Singleton, have been members of the Temple since 1981.”
A picture of the bridal party appeared below the text. Joseph, tall and handsome in a resplendent white tux, beamed happily at the camera, his arm around his new bride. There were three bridesmaids, each clutching a small bouquet of flowers against her chest. The face at the end caught my eye and I clicked to enlarge the photo. Her smile was more subdued than the wild, exuberant grin I’d hoped to see on her website, but it was definitely Charlayne—with the pink petals of the lotus flower clear and distinct on her left hand.
12
My first test jumps went smoothly, despite the fact that I was terrified. I set two stable points within the house—one in the library, which was my departure point, and one in the kitchen, which was my destination. I had planned to do my first jump from the library to the kitchen at around noon, when I had been down there eating lunch, but Katherine suggested avoiding situations where I might encounter myself.
“Why?” I asked. “What will happen if I see myself? Does it disrupt the space-time continuum or something like that?”
Katherine laughed. “No, dear,” she said. “It’s just very tough on your brain. I’d wait a bit, until you’re more accustomed to the process. It’s not something you want to do regularly, anyway, and never for more than a minute or so. You have to reconcile two conflicting sets of memories and it always gave me the most awful headache. Saul claimed that he had no problem with it, but everyone else I knew dreaded the test where we had to go backward and engage a past self in conversation. We’d been warned that we would be totally useless for hours afterward and they were correct—it’s a real sensory overload. I heard some lurid stories about the early days of CHRONOS, when they were testing the limits of the system. A few people became rather… unhinged, if you will, trying to reconcile several hours’ worth of conflicting memories. One girl had to be institutionalized. Really unpleasant.”
That sounded almost as bad as disrupting the space-time continuum, so I discarded any ideas I might have had about sitting down for a long chat with myself. I decided to jump backward about three hours, to a quarter after twelve, when Connor had gone down to the kitchen to fix a sandwich. I was so nervous that it took nearly a minute for me to pull up the visual of the kitchen and another thirty seconds or so to set the arrival time. Once I had it locked in, I followed Katherine’s advice and blinked my eyes, holding the image of the kitchen in my mind. When I opened my eyes again, I was in the kitchen. Connor was by the fridge, stacking ham on a slice of wheat bread. The kitchen clock read a quarter after noon.