A World Without You

  At Sofía.

  And as I watch, Sofía’s back stiffens. She turns in her seat, and it looks as if she is staring through the screen, directly at me. I have the sound turned low so my parents can’t hear Ryan cursing and shouting, but when Sofía opens her mouth to speak, her words ring out, filling my room.

  “Bo,” she says. “None of this is real.”

  CHAPTER 22

  I stare at the screen.

  It had looked like—no, that’s impossible. Had the Sofía on the screen looked through the camera and given me a message?

  I rewind the video and start it again at the moment Ryan flips out and throws the chair. I keep my eyes on Sofía the whole time.

  She doesn’t turn around. She doesn’t speak to me.

  But I know what I saw.

  What’s going on? The video just keeps playing.

  I watch the next video, my eyes on Sofía, waiting for her to speak to me again. This recording is of the day Gwen opened up about her fire power. Discovering the power was traumatic for her—she was young, and her dad reached over to grab her hand, and a fireball in Gwen’s palm burned his skin. He still has a scar.

  But in the video, Gwen’s story is different. “I got the lighter from Dad’s dresser,” she says. “I was fascinated with flicking it on and off, on and off . . . I didn’t mean to set the mail on fire. I didn’t mean for Dad to touch it and get burned.”

  The Doc leans forward, meeting her eyes. “Gwen, you knew the paper would burn. You intended to set that fire.”

  Gwen’s voice is small. “Yes, but I didn’t mean to hurt him.”

  “That didn’t happen!” I yell at my computer. “That’s not how any of it happened.”

  But the computer doesn’t answer me. Sofía doesn’t answer me. The video just keeps playing, showing me a weird parallel version of reality.

  The next video plays. The Doctor’s talking to me about control, just like he always does. On that day, he asked me to go back in time, to show everyone what it was like. Ryan was making fun of me, calling me worthless, so I went to Times Square on New Year’s Eve of the year he and I were born, and I brought back a pair of those stupid glasses that have the year where the eyeholes are, and I tossed them to him.

  The snide tone of Ryan’s voice. The bitter cold of New York, so freezing that my skin burned. The trashy, shiny confetti that fell from the sky when the ball dropped. The cheap glasses. I remember it. I can see it, smell it, taste it.

  But on the video, the Doctor doesn’t tell me to go back in time, and it’s me, not Ryan, who says I’m worthless. On-screen, I grow very still in my seat. My eyes look dead, and I stare straight ahead. “The spaz is doing it again,” Ryan says.

  “Shut up,” Sofía responds, but no one hears her. The Doctor snaps his fingers in front of my eyes, and I don’t even blink.

  And then I shake my head, and I look at Ryan. “See? I told you I could do it!”

  And then the video cuts into static.

  None of this happened, I think to myself. Not like this.

  But my hands are shaking, and I taste bile in the back of my throat. My head is fuzzy, and there’s a ringing in my ears, and I can’t think.

  There’s nothing to think about. You saw it. The proof is right here, in front of you. It’s you who’s crazy—

  No, I’m not! I’m not. The words echo inside my skull, over and over and over. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not.

  • • •

  I’m. Not.

  • • •

  Everything’s suddenly still and silent.

  I look at the video screen. It had been showing static, black and white lines blurring in and out of each other, but now it’s completely frozen in time.

  I look around me. Everything’s still. I jump up from the bed and sweep aside the curtain blocking my door. The big clock at the end of the hall isn’t ticking. My sister’s bedroom door is cracked open, and I press my face against it. She’s sitting in the middle of the bed, her cell phone screen illuminating her utterly motionless face.

  Time has stopped.

  I walk slowly back to my room, to my bed, and pull my laptop closer, staring at the frozen static.

  I stopped time.

  But . . .

  “Is this real?” I whisper.

  And all around me, time snaps back into place. The static fizzles on the screen, fading to black. I can hear the ticking of the hallway clock. My sister giggles, the sound carrying across the hall and into my room.

  Time still weaves around me, bending to my will, no matter what those videos show now.

  The next video starts playing automatically. Sofía’s face fills the screen as she walks by the camera.

  I slam my laptop shut. I don’t know what’s real or not anymore.

  But Sofía does. And I know just how to reach her.

  CHAPTER 23

  I toss my computer to the foot of my bed and bring up the timestream again. I wish I had my calendar with all my coded markings on it, but it’s at the Berk. I don’t feel safe picking a day to see her when Sofía would be at the school. Berkshire doesn’t feel safe.

  Christmas break, then. I was home, and Sofía was with her father in Austin. There will be no chance of a paradox, no chance of me running into my past self. And I’m not going back to warn her or stop her or do anything to change the past. I just want to confirm that my present is real.

  My hands tremble as I sort through the timestream. The threads of time weave in and out of each other, each of them flowing back to me. I find the red thread, Sofía’s thread. I let my fingers glide over it, relishing in the way it rubs against my skin, reminding myself that this—this is what’s real. Time is real. Sofía is real.

  I follow the string to Austin and see that there are tangles and knots in the patterns there, all mixed in with the loose ends of other colored strings. I touch them, twisting the ends with my fingers, and my mind shoots further back in time and bursts with images of other people—an older woman and three younger girls—and I realize that one of the younger girls is Sofía. This was her family before the car accident. I drop the threads as if they were on fire.

  It feels wrong, peeking this far into Sofía’s past.

  Here is something I’ve learned: You never know all of a person; you only know them in a specific moment of time.

  The Sofía I knew was kind and quiet, but she carried her grief around, hidden by a cloak of invisibility. When she told me about her past, it was nothing more than a story to me. I didn’t live it with her; I didn’t know her during that moment of her life. The Sofía from the past was an entirely different person.

  But then I knew Sofía in a way her mother and sisters never did. They never could. They would never know a Sofía without them. Just like I can never know a Sofía with them.

  This is the most important thing I learned from being a time traveler. You are not one person. You are a different person in each moment of time. Your name means nothing. Go see a person with the same name in a different time, and it’s someone else entirely. I don’t know Sofía. I know Sofía-at-Berkshire. Sofía-before-her-family-died is a stranger, someone I’m not sure I should ever meet.

  I pull back, carefully arranging the timestream so I touch just the strings from after Sofía came to Berkshire. They feel like guitar strings under my fingers, pressing into my skin and rolling under my fingertips with a twang as I try to find the correct one, the one of Sofía on Christmas break. When I do touch it, I feel the rightness of it. I wrap my index finger around the thread, crooking my finger and drawing my hand closer to me. Traveling in the timestream is often like this, a give-and-take as I draw the threads closer to me and they pull me further into time. The thread connecting me to Christmas break bites into the skin on my finger, pulling taut and turning the tip purple as my blood flow stops, but I don’t let go. I relish the p
ain. I revel in the thought that it’s real.

  The thread evaporates, leaving behind the sensation of it having been there, but no visual evidence. I blink in the bright sunlight. It’s December, but Austin is warm, far warmer than a Massachusetts winter. The sky is a cloudless blue, almost matching the bright blue paint of the tiny house before me. All the buildings on the street are made of varying shades of beige stucco, but Sofía’s house is made of wide, flat wooden panels painted a vivid cobalt, with bright yellow shutters by the window and a blood-red door welcoming me from the front porch.

  “My mother liked color,” I remember Sofía telling me. “She said it made her feel alive.” Ironic, I guess, that the colors are all of her that remains.

  There’s no car in the driveway, but I’m confident that Sofía’s in the house. The threads of time led me here. I bound up the steps to Sofía’s front door and knock a few times before I notice the doorbell. Still, I’m not prepared when she answers the door.

  “Bo?” Sofía asks, looking shocked.

  “Hey,” I say. But there’s so much more I try to put behind that one word.

  “What are you . . . ?” She peers past me, out into the street. “What are you doing here? How did you even get here?”

  I cock an eyebrow at her.

  “Oh. Yeah.” She sort of half giggles. “Powers.”

  “I needed to see you,” I say. “So . . .” I hold my hands out flat. “Here I am.”

  Sofía steps inside, motioning for me to follow her. The scent of bleach fills the air. As soon as the front door closes, Sofía grabs me, pulling me closer, and her arms are around me, her fingers weaving through my hair, my name a whispered promise from her lips. She stands up on her tiptoes and kisses me, hesitantly at first, and then deeper, as if she wasn’t sure I was real before but now claims me as her own.

  When she pulls back, she buries her face in my chest. “I needed you too,” she says in a soft voice.

  I tuck her head under my chin, wrapping my arms tightly around her, and we just stand there for several long moments. Sofía’s house is bigger than I thought it would be from the outside, but the inside has none of the bright colors. The walls here are all white, and the slick glossiness of the paint makes me think it’s fresh. There are hardly any pictures or decorations on the walls, no rugs on the tile floor, very little sign of life at all.

  “Come this way,” Sofía says, pulling me deeper into her house. We pass the living room—nothing but a television on a metal stand in front of a nondescript sofa—and the kitchen. There aren’t even magnets on the fridge. Nothing decorates the hallway, and every door is firmly shut.

  Sofía’s bedroom certainly has more personality than the rest of the house, but it still doesn’t have as much color as her room at the Berk. The pink here is softer, more childish, not the bright hot pink of her fuzzy lampshades or the neon of her picture frames in her room at school.

  On her wooden dresser by the door, Sofía’s propped up a Christmas tree made of green construction paper. Once I see that, I realize that the house is missing far more than pictures and color—it’s missing Christmas decorations. Sofía used to tell me about the way her mom and sisters would go all out for the holidays, throwing tinsel all over their living room until their carpet looked silver, stringing lights around not just the tree but the curtain rods and picture frames and over the tops of tables. They’d bake cookies and empanadas and fruit tarts and churros until every dish on the big dining room table overflowed with sugary goodness.

  And now there’s nothing but a green triangular piece of construction paper.

  At the bottom of the handmade tree is a card written in Gwen’s handwriting and a small box. I gave that to Sofía before we left for the holidays—I was too shy to let her open it in front of me—but I hadn’t even bothered to wrap it. I didn’t know that the little silver dolphin necklace was the only gift she’d get that year. I should have wrapped it.

  “So why are you here?” Sofía asks, closing the door. We’re the only ones in the house, but I guess her father could come home at any minute.

  “I—I just wanted to see you,” I say.

  “You saw me yesterday,” she replies, grinning.

  Right. For her, yesterday was the last day of the semester. My dad had picked me up, and the school’s van drove Sofía to the airport. That was her yesterday.

  “I wanted to see you again. Can you blame me?” I say, and before she can ask any more questions, I lean down and kiss her.

  And it is everything I have longed for, and everything that breaks my heart.

  When we pull away, she has a love-drunk look in her eyes, and I almost kiss her again. But I’m not sure how long this will last.

  “When you see me again after break?” I say. “Don’t mention this.”

  If Sofía talks about seeing me when we’re both back at school, then past-me will know that future-me came back, which didn’t happen in my past, and . . . time travel is confusing.

  “I won’t,” she says. “But why did you come back here, then, if we’re going to pretend like it didn’t happen?”

  “Because I need to know it did,” I say before I can stop myself. I feel a lurch in my stomach. Time is warning me. I can’t get too close to the truth.

  Sofía frames my face with her hands. “What’s wrong?”

  “I just . . .” I run my fingers through my hair and step back. I can’t think when she touches me; I can’t think of anything at all but the way she feels.

  “Yes?” she asks. She sits down on her bed, bouncing softly, and I’m distracted again.

  “This is . . . this is real, isn’t it?” I say. I reach her bed in two strides and grab her hand, squeezing it. “This is real. You are real. You’re really here, and I’m really here. I can travel through time, and you . . .”

  Sofía smiles, letting her face disappear. “This is real,” she says while still invisible. Her lips appear in a Cheshire cat grin, and then the rest of her, and she stands up again and kisses me. “And so is this.”

  CHAPTER 24

  I want to tell her everything. But “everything” is too close to the truth I can’t tell her—that I’ve left her in the past, that I think Dr. Franklin’s given up on helping me save her, that the school is under investigation, and it’s all my fault.

  Instead, I tell her that I’ve seen some videos that make it look as if we don’t have powers. That the Doctor has said and done things that make me question whether or not he’s really our friend.

  “The Doctor’s good,” Sofía says immediately.

  “I used to think so,” I say, my voice trailing off.

  She shakes her head. “We can’t start doubting everyone. The Doctor’s good.”

  “But—”

  “It sounds as if someone is altering your perception of reality,” Sofía continues. “Someone’s making you question what’s real and what’s not. They’re putting false images in your head. If that’s the case, the first thing whoever’s doing this is going to want is for people to turn away from the Doctor. Create chaos. Create doubt. Make us question not only reality, but each other.”

  I think of the videos I watched. I know none of that happened. I nod slowly, agreeing with her. But if the Doctor’s not the one altering the videos, then who—

  The officials. When they came, everything started falling apart. One of them—Dr. Rivers or Mr. Minh, or maybe both—they can alter the way we see things. The way we think, what we believe.

  My mind churns with possibilities. Ryan was right to be suspicious. Dr. Rivers and Mr. Minh are trying to confirm our powers so they can use them. In my glimpses of the future in the timestream, I saw experiments and abuse: Gwen chained to a wall and Harold locked in a cell as men in lab coats tried to take them apart and see how they ticked. In those scenarios, I’d thought that the government officials were merely the spies who inf
ormed on us, but if they have powers too, like the ability to alter our perception of reality . . . then it’d be much easier to break down our resolve, to get us to turn on the Doctor and join them, to get us to do things for them.

  “But Bo,” Sofía says, her voice small. “That’s not the only reason why you’re here, is it?”

  I look up at her, and all my questions fall away.

  There’s fear in her eyes. “You’ve never tried to visit me before, on your own. You could have just called me today, but instead, you’re here.”

  “I’m here,” I repeat, as much for my sake as hers.

  “Is something wrong?”

  I want to answer her. But I can feel time tugging at my navel, pulling me back, forcing me into silence. “I’m sorry,” I get out, just before time snaps me back to the present.

  I grip the cloth of my duvet cover. She was right there. I can still smell her shampoo.

  And now she’s gone. Or, rather, I am. I left her in the past, not the other way around.

  My phone buzzes, and I flip it over, reading the text message on the screen.

  You throw that thing away? Ryan asks.

  I look at my computer. The drive is still sticking out of the port.

  Yeah, I text back.

  I wonder how far his powers reach, if he can tell that I’m lying all the way from where he is.

  • • •

  I ask Dad to take me back to Berkshire early, and he agrees to drive up with me instead of going to church. After our fight yesterday, I think he’s glad to get rid of me. Mom doesn’t like it, but she doesn’t protest that much.

  “But Phoebe didn’t get a chance to have a family dinner with you this weekend,” she says in a petulant tone. “Let’s wait until brunch.”

  “I have a lot of work to do,” I say. “And we have next weekend.”

  What neither of us says is that Phoebe doesn’t really care whether or not she has a meal with me. I mean, she’s nice enough for a sister or whatever, but it’s not like we’re close. We just happen to live together and share the same blood type.