A World Without You

  The Doc looks a little nonplussed, but he recovers quickly. “Bo’s such a good student,” he says. He reaches for me like he’s going to ruffle my hair, but I’m not ten years old, and that’s kind of a weird thing for him to do anyway, so I duck out of his reach and get into the passenger seat.

  Dad doesn’t speak as we drive off.

  “What was that about?” I ask.

  “What was what about?”

  “What did Dr. Franklin say to you?”

  Dad turns the blinker on well before he needs to, and he doesn’t speak as he crosses the bridge, taking us off Pear Island and toward Ipswich.

  “Bad business,” he finally says when the car bumps from the bridge to the road.

  “What do you mean?”

  Dad shakes his head. “There’s some bad business going on at that school.”

  Oh. The Doctor told him about the officials visiting.

  I wonder what Dad thinks about it all. He knows I have power—he and Mom had to approve me going to Berkshire, and the Doctor told them how it’s structured just for people like me, even though my particular power is super rare.

  Mom was all for me going; it was Dad who hesitated.

  It was Dad who called me a freak.

  Not to my face. Never to my face. But I really wanted to go to the Berk. I couldn’t stand my high school, even though Phoebe loves the place. And my mom wanted me to go, even though it’s crazy expensive. She argued that it would help me fit in better with society after graduation and that the education was really good and could lead to future opportunities, blah, blah—she was for it.

  Not Dad. Sure, the tuition was high, but I don’t think he minded that. Honestly, I think he’d be pretty cool paying almost anything to get me out of the house and out of his realm of responsibility.

  Dad was against Berkshire because it meant he had to admit that I wasn’t normal. That I wasn’t fixable. That traveling through time wasn’t a “phase” I was going through.

  Most people would be like, “Your kid has a superpower? Cool!” Not Dad.

  I remember what he said the night Dr. Franklin came over to discuss the program. They thought I was in bed, but I wasn’t.

  “I don’t want this place on his permanent record, Martha,” Dad had said, ice clinking in his glass. “I don’t want every future employee looking at his résumé to know that he’s a freak.”

  It wasn’t that he called me a freak. It was the way he said it. Like he really meant it. Like he believed it.

  Things haven’t been that great with Dad since then.

  CHAPTER 18

  Phoebe

  I hear the door click open, and two sets of heavy feet stomp on the tiled floor of the kitchen. Why are boys—men—always so loud when they walk? It’s like they have a need to announce their arrival.

  “We’re home!” Dad shouts, which, obviously.

  I swing my feet over the side of the bed, tossing my book onto a pillow, but I don’t get up. It’s weird, but I’m not really sure what to do next. Bo’s my brother, but to rush out of my room and greet him with a hug and a smile wouldn’t feel right. We’re not brother and sister like that. We share the same memories of growing up, but that’s basically where our relationship ends.

  “Phoebe!” Mom yells from the bottom of the staircase. “Come say hello to your brother!”

  “Why?” He’s home every weekend. There’s no point in making a production of it.

  “Phoebe!”

  I roll my eyes and get up off the bed, grabbing an empty glass on my way out the door. I fiddle with it as I descend the stairs.

  Mom has Bo wrapped up in a hug, and I squeeze past them to refill my glass with Diet Coke from the fridge.

  “Hey,” I say to Bo.

  “Hey,” he says back.

  I return to my room.

  Usually, Mom lectures me about spending too much time in my bedroom. Not on the weekends, though.

  I camp out on my bed with my laptop and As I Lay Dying—extra credit for AP lit, even though I hate Faulkner. The rest of the family pretty much follows suit. Dad hides in his office. Bo keeps his notebook in front of his face, blocking anyone from making eye contact. Only Mom flits around the house, dusting, vacuuming, straightening pictures, cleaning mirrors, going from room to room as if she can fill all the empty spaces.

  At noon, there’s a bang on Bo’s bedroom door, across the hall from mine. For a moment, I freeze, not unlike a rabbit that’s heard a predator. You can tell a lot from the sound of knuckles on a door. A tap-tap knock is friendly; a quick rap is urgent. This was the deep thud of a fist against wood. I creep off my bed, tentatively inching my own door open so I can see what’s going on.

  Dad stands in the hallway with a power drill in his hand.

  “What?” Bo asks. He means, What do you want? but I hear the old sullenness in his voice, the challenge in his tone, just like he used to sound so often before he went to Berkshire. That one word—“What?”—holds more of a threat than his balled-up fists.

  “I’m taking the door down.” Dad’s white-knuckled hand has a tight grip on the drill.

  “What?” Bo repeats. “Why?”

  “Dr. Franklin,” Dad says, as if that’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.

  I take a step further back into my room, although I linger near my open door.

  “The Doc wouldn’t just tell you to take my bedroom door away,” Bo says, his voice rising. “Stop! Why are you doing this?”

  Dad stomps forward, his large presence enough to make Bo back down. Dad touches the power drill to one of the screws.

  “Wait!” Bo says. “This is ridiculous!”

  “We have to keep an eye on you,” Dad says, his attention on the hinge. The drill whirs, and one screw is out.

  “What the hell?” Bo shouts.

  “Watch your language!” Dad whirls around, glaring at him.

  “Treat me like a human being, then!”

  “We’re doing this for your safety,” Dad growls.

  “The hell you are.”

  “I said, watch your language!”

  “If I could close my damn door, you wouldn’t have to listen to me!”

  I carefully shut my bedroom door, but I can still hear them fighting in the hallway. My phone buzzes, and I pick it up. It’s a text from Rosemarie: a picture of her face with her eyes rolled into the back of her head and a slack expression. Entertain meeeeeeeee.

  In the hallway, Dad shouts something about safety, while Bo storms into the bathroom, slamming the door shut. A second later, Bo opens the door and yells down the hall: “Is it okay to pee behind a closed door? Or do you want to remove this one too?”

  What’s up? I type into my phone.

  “Son of a bitch!” Dad shouts, and then I hear the drill bang against the hardwood floor. I’m not sure if he’s cursing because he dropped the drill, or if he threw the drill down because he’s mad at Bo.

  Can I come over? Rosemarie texts. Super bored.

  Nah, I type. My friends know that Bo is at a special academy, but they think it’s a military school or something. And they don’t know that he’s home every weekend. It’s not really a secret; I’d just rather not discuss him at all. Life’s more boring here, I text.

  Then you come here.

  I look up from my phone, at my closed bedroom door. Outside, my dad has resumed drilling, and I can hear the sound of ripping wood.

  I can’t. Mom wants me home.

  Come onnnnnnn, Rosemarie says. Tell your mom it’s my birthday.

  Lol, that’s next month.

  Rosemarie sends me a shrugging emoticon. They don’t know that. And my gramps is over, so we do have cake.

  Outside, the hallway is silent. Lololol, be right over.

  I stuff my phone into my pants pocket. I hesitate for a second,
then I twist the doorknob slowly and peek outside.

  Bo’s door is gone. The wood at the bottom of the doorframe is splintered, as if Dad kicked it off instead of bothering with the drill. There’s a huge, white gouge in the floor from where the drill fell on it. The bathroom door is still shut, and Dad’s nowhere in sight.

  I creep down the hall, away from my bedroom and past Dad’s locked office door. I wait until I’m at the bottom of the steps before I call softly, “Mom?” She doesn’t answer, so I go looking for her. I find her in the den, on her hands and knees, polishing the wide wooden legs of the coffee table so forcefully that the little brooch she’s wearing on her blouse shakes. Dad gave Mom that pin after I was born: a tiny golden bee dangling from an enameled bow to represent my and Bo’s names. Mom always wears it on the weekends when Bo is home, but never on the days between visits.

  “Can I go over to Rosemarie’s?” I ask.

  “Family dinner tonight,” Mom says without even looking up. Before Bo went to Berkshire, she never really cared about the idea of “family dinner.” Sure, she cooked, and sometimes we ate together, but it wasn’t a requirement. Now, though, she’s adamant: When Bo is home, we “eat as a family.” It never feels natural, though. Mom always places food on the table like it’s an offering, and even though she says the point is to stay connected, she hardly talks at all.

  “It’s Rosemarie’s birthday,” I say.

  Mom pauses and sits back on her heels. “Why didn’t you tell me about it before?”

  “I got the dates mixed up. She’s really mad I’m not there already.”

  I can tell that Mom is wavering, though her eyes glance up at the ceiling, toward Bo’s room. But rather than cave, she says, “Ask your father.”

  I groan. “Come on, Mom. Don’t make me do that.”

  She’s no longer polishing the coffee table, but she doesn’t look up at me either.

  “Please,” I say. “It’s not that big of a deal. It’s one night, and I’ll be home before nine. Come on.”

  “Fine,” she tells the coffee table in a small voice.

  “Thank you!” I say, bouncing on my heels. I turn to go, but then turn back, drop to my knees, and give my mom an awkward half hug.

  I rush to leave, pausing before I pull the kitchen door closed behind me. Just a few minutes ago, there was nothing but shouting and the drill and slamming doors. Now there’s nothing at all.

  • • •

  Rosemarie lives about fifteen minutes away from me if I stomp on the gas of my old clunker, but to be fair, the car barely tops fifty when I do that. This car was my reward for being the normal child. Mom didn’t phrase it like that, of course she didn’t, but it’s the truth. Bo got sent to a fancy school, and I got a car that cost less than one month’s tuition. But I love it anyway. It’s mine. And it’s freedom. Not that I would ever really go anywhere with it—knowing my luck, it’d break down if I tried to drive more than an hour at a time—but the car is full of potential. I could go. Theoretically.

  It’s always so unsettling, the way everything changes when Bo comes home. During the week, when he’s gone, life is normal: school for me, work for Dad, whatever Mom busies herself with all day. After dinner every night, I sit in the den with Dad while he watches the Patriots or ESPN and I text Rosemarie and Jenny. Eventually, Mom makes popcorn and joins Dad on the couch. Sometimes, we each do our own separate thing, but there’s still always a sense of home. Of family.

  Bo’s part of the family, I remind myself.

  He is. He is. It’s just that he’s a part of a different family. When Bo’s in the house, everything is so much quieter, so much heavier. Except when it isn’t, like this afternoon. The family-with-Bo is like the spikes of a heart monitor—a loud burst, followed by nothing, followed by another loud burst.

  To be fair, there’s always been silence in the family. Before Bo went to Berkshire, it was there to protect everyone from the toxic mix of my brother and my father. But the silence filling the house now is different. It’s informed silence. It’s a silence born from the fact that we know—we all know—something is really wrong with Bo. It’s not angry teenage rebellion that can be fixed by grounding him or taking his bedroom door down or whatever else Dad has tried. He can’t be punished into normalcy.

  We’re not ignoring the problem, not really. We’re all aware it’s there, even Bo. We see the edges of this new Bo, this Bo who’s special, different. We’re not ignoring it. We’re just carefully, carefully avoiding it.

  The silence in our house now is born from the need for intense concentration, as we all carefully step around the truth we wish we didn’t know, the person we can’t help that Bo became, the future we’re all afraid is collapsing around us, falling as silent and cold and crushing as snow.

  CHAPTER 19

  I stare at the gaping hole in my wall and wonder what Dad’s going to do with the door.

  I wonder why he took the door. Dr. Franklin definitely wouldn’t tell him to do that.

  Something’s not right. Whatever the Doc told Dad before we left Berkshire made him feel like he couldn’t trust me, but I can’t figure it out. Is Dr. Franklin trying to make sure I can’t work on saving Sofía?

  If that was his plan, it was a stupid one. I don’t need to be at school to use the timestream. But a little privacy would be nice. I rip the duvet off my bed and bunch the top sheet in my hand, pulling it closer. Grabbing a stapler from my desk, I stand up on a chair and drape the sheet over the doorframe, stapling it into place. It’s not a door, but it’s something.

  I just don’t get it. If they’re not going to trust me with a door, why bother bringing me home at all? Mom kept insisting I come for the weekend, but where is she? Downstairs, cleaning. And Dad’s just in his office. I sweep aside my sheet-door and step into the hallway, turning in a slow circle with my arms held wide. Here I am, I think. You wanted me, so here I am. But of course, no one sees. No one cares. My parents have no idea what to do with me.

  Hell, I don’t know what to do with me. Phoebe’s room—with its door—stands right in front of me. I turn my back on it and return to my room. It’d be easier if I were like her. She’s everything my parents ever wanted. Ambitious, driven, studious, and—most important of all—normal. I’m sure she has her whole life planned, just like I’m sure it’s 100 percent parent-approved. Graduate, college, job. I wonder where she’ll go. I bet she’s already writing her application essays. But me? I doubt I could get into any college, and even if I could, I couldn’t go. Not unless I knew I could control my powers. And control feels a long way off right now. The truth of the matter is that I may never have control. I may never have “normal” in my grasp.

  That’s the biggest difference between my sister and me. I may be able to travel through time, but she knows more about the future than I do.

  I sit in the center of my bed, staring at my curtain door.

  I could know the future, I realize. The timestream hides the future in thin, almost invisible filaments, but I found them before. I could do it again.

  When I bring up the timestream around me, the first thing I notice is that some of the strings I’d seen before—the disastrous fates brought on by the officials if they’d found the USB drive—are gone. They’re just . . . gone. Because I hid the drive, I made it impossible for the government officials to use it against us, and any future where they did no longer exists. The Berk’s not safe yet—some of the futures show it being taken over by the government, some show the school closing, one even shows the school on fire—but I push aside those worries, at least for now.

  The strings that tie me to my home—brown and green and blue—are more prevalent now, rising to the surface. I pick up the pale blue string, and images of Phoebe flash through my mind. I follow the string back to its beginning, sixteen years ago, to her birth, and I see the way her life is woven into time. Going into the future, the string fra
ys, splitting off into floss-like, micro-thin threads, each a possible future for my sister.

  Some things feel fairly certain—there are a few offshoots of loose strings floating away, but Phoebe’s graduation is close and clear. I wrap my finger around the moment, and images of her on that day fill my mind, a movie of memories that haven’t happened yet.

  She’s far tanner in the future than she is now, and she looks thinner, almost gaunt. She’s traded her pink lip gloss for something darker, and she’s swapped her contacts for winged cat-eye glasses. Even though Mom and Dad hover near her, Phoebe pretty much ignores them, chatting with her two best friends. Mom insists on taking pictures of the three girls near the fountain at the front of the school, but she doesn’t notice the way Phoebe’s smile doesn’t reach her eyes.

  Once my parents are gone, Phoebe and her friends start goofing off. She pulls them closer for a selfie, but as soon as she takes the picture, she loses her footing and falls into the fountain. Her laughter rings out as she grabs her friends and drags them in with her, completely ignoring the frowning teachers nearby. I take a moment to marvel at this Phoebe. It’s only a year into the future, but I can see changes within her that I never really thought I’d see. A spontaneous Phoebe who lets her life get a little messy? One who doesn’t care about what teachers think? Who would have thought.

  At first, everyone’s laughing and splashing, but then Phoebe pulls her wet hair back, and her hand brushes her ear.

  “Hey. Hey!” Phoebe says, her voice rising when her friends don’t stop playing. “I lost my earring.”

  Normally, Pheebs wouldn’t care. She’s not really much of a jewelry girl. But those earrings were our grandmother’s. The three girls spend the next several minutes searching the fountain, but they don’t find anything. Eventually, Phoebe has to admit defeat. She walks away from the fountain, shoulders slouched, cradling the other earring in her palm, and I know she’s going to remember this day not as the day she finally achieved her dreams and graduated, but the day she lost our grandmother’s earring.