A World Without You

  Someone I could pass by without recognizing.

  CHAPTER 9

  I am so sick of memories I don’t really want to have. I don’t want to live in the past. Just give me the future, and Sofía, and a second chance.

  I turn away from the ocean and plod back to the academy. Sand sticks to my feet, and I make a halfhearted effort to wipe it off before going inside the mansion. As I head up the stairs, I pass a group of students from another unit. They look a little younger than me, two guys and a girl. I wonder what their powers are. They stick together, moving to the other banister as I climb up the steps. I try to give them a friendly smile, but they hurry away. So. My reputation has preceded me. Maybe it’s a good thing that the units are so self-contained and we don’t interact with other students. Or maybe, if we did, they would know I’m not a monster. That losing Sofía was an accident.

  I close my bedroom door and sit in the middle of my room, alone.

  I blink, and the timestream stretches out around me, a beautiful mix of opalescent light and strings. It’s a chaotic mess, but it still makes a pattern I think I can almost understand.

  There are the knotted places, tangles I cannot penetrate. The knots are places I’ve been to before. I scrutinize them, trying to see the path of my life in the scheme of time and the universe. Here is where I was born, here is where my sister broke her arm, here is where I got an award for history in middle school, here is where I discovered my powers.

  And here . . . my fingers run over the knotted mess of where Sofía is trapped in the past. Ever since I lost her, I’ve been trying to find a way to reach her again. And then yesterday, I got there as easy as blinking. At least until I tried to warn her.

  Time has a way of keeping itself safe and balanced. Whenever I try to alter something that has to be, whether it’s punching Hitler in the face or changing my own timeline, time has kept me out. It snaps me back. It reminds me that it’s in charge. So . . . maybe the reason I was able to go back to just before the moment Sofía got stuck in the past was because I didn’t really have the intent to try to change anything.

  Intent matters with time.

  The real importance of this dawns on me slowly, but it’s actually starting to make a lot of sense. When I’ve tried to go back lately, I’ve been focused on saving Sofía. But time doesn’t want me to save her. It’s preventing me from saving her. It knows from the start that’s what I want to do.

  Intent matters. If I go to the past not with the intent to change anything, but with the intent of just seeing Sofía . . .

  I could.

  I could do that.

  Holy hell, I could do that.

  I reach for my calendar. It’s the kind that has a different page for each day. Sofía used to make fun of me all the time for using a paper calendar rather than my phone, like a normal person, but when you have the ability to slip through time, it’s important to keep track of the days, and paper is more reliable.

  I’m meticulous about my calendar; every day I make a special mark on it using a code that I developed. I keep track of whether or not I slipped in time that day, whether it was accidental or on purpose, where I went and when.

  Now I flip through the pages, looking at the dates before I left Sofía stuck in the past. I need to find a time when she and I weren’t together so I know there’s no chance I’ll run into my past self. Intent matters. I just want to see her. I just need to find a time where the me from now can go back and see her . . .

  I drop the calendar on my bed, focusing on the timestream, blinking as it flows in front of me like a river of threads floating on the surface of a bubble. Strings of time and place radiate around me, blue and gold and gray and brown, each linking me to a different person, a different place, a different time. But the one tying me to Sofía is bright red and easy to find. I follow the red string with my eyes.

  My hand shakes as I select the moment. A weekend, when I would be at home and Sofía would be stuck at Berkshire. Sometime after our first date, when everything was still new, but it was also starting to be comfortable. When we’d both sort of accepted the reality of the other.

  October 3. A Saturday evening.

  I hesitate. I won’t be able to do this often—maybe not ever again. I can lie and say I decided to stay at the Berk rather than go home, and it’ll work once, but there’s no way she’ll believe it a second time.

  But I need this now. I focus on that moment in time, the moment where I’ve not been before but where I could be now. I reach out with trembling hands, touching the space in the timestream, wrapping my finger around time itself.

  And I’m there.

  • • •

  I’m in my bedroom, the sky just beginning to fade into evening. The plants outside my window are dead or dying rather than how I just left them, starting to show life. I run to my desk and read the date on my calendar.

  October 3.

  It worked. I’m here. She’s here—somewhere in the academy.

  I don’t know how this is going to play out. Maybe the moment I see her, I’ll be snapped back into my own time. But if my theory is right, as long as I don’t try to contact her or leave her a message, a warning . . .

  My stomach churns. It feels weird to spy on my girlfriend, weirder still to wish I could warn her away from me.

  I just need one moment, I think to myself. I just want to see her face. Just once more. It will give me the inspiration I need to figure out how to save her.

  That thought—save her—makes reality stutter. I feel it in my navel, a tugging, like the strings of time tightening around my stomach. My breath jerks in my lungs, and my eyes focus like lasers on a single painted concrete block on my wall. I have to shake the thought away. I can’t think about saving Sofía, not while I’m here in the past. If time thinks I am going to screw with it, it’ll throw me back to where I’m supposed to be.

  Without her.

  I bite my tongue, tasting blood but focusing on the pain. I try to clear my mind. Intent matters. So I won’t intend to do anything other than see her. That’s all. Just one look.

  I sense time easing up on me, the timestream calming and accepting my presence here in the past. I stand up, my legs wobbly, but soon enough I get my bearings.

  A glance at the clock tells me that it’s near dinnertime. Unless we’re having some sort of event, dinners are served in each unit’s common room, and ours is just down the hall from my bedroom.

  I creep down the hallway. I’m not sure what will happen if I’m seen. Just in case, I start thinking of excuses about why I’d be at the academy on a weekend. But I don’t need them—the hallway’s deserted.

  There’s sound and light spilling from the common room. I stand with my back against the wall, listening to the clattering of silverware on plates, the low rumble of voices. A sharp laugh—Ryan’s—pierces the air. I dare to peek around the doors and look inside.

  On weekends, Gwen and I both go home, leaving Harold, Ryan, and Sofía behind. They sit around the main table in the center of the common room now, eating ravioli. The table’s huge even when we’re all there, but it looks like it’s not big enough for the three of them. They’ve spaced themselves out, each taking a different side of the table and sitting as far away from each other as possible.

  The common room is an odd mix of old-school leather and teenaged dishevelment. Big winged chairs litter the edges of the room, interspersed with framed reproductions of famous but somewhat mismatched art—Starry Night beside a Renoir next to one of Picasso’s broken women. But there’s also a giant flat-screen connected to the latest PlayStation in one corner, and a stack of board games on the walnut table in the center of the room.

  Harold sits to the right, staring at the walls and sometimes muttering. As I watch, he pauses with the fork halfway to his mouth, a distant look in his eyes. His power isn’t enviable; seeing and hearing ghosts plag
ues him far more than it helps him. Ryan has his back to me, playing on his phone while he eats. His hulking body slouches over the table lazily.

  So neither of them notice when Sofía looks up. Right at me.

  A lump forms in my throat. I wasn’t ready. Not for this. Not for seeing her again.

  But I can’t look away.

  “Hi,” she mouths.

  “Hi,” I whisper.

  She moves to get up from the table, but I shake my head and raise a finger to my lips. A look of confusion crosses her face, but I can’t explain. I want nothing more than to burst inside, race across the common room, grab her, and never let her go. But I can’t explain why I’m here. I’d have to tell her that I’m visiting her in this past because I lost her in another. I’d have to tell her that I can’t save her.

  “No,” I moan as the strings of time wrap around me again, squeezing, pulling. No, I won’t tell her, I want to say. I just want to see her. Just one more moment. Give me that. Please.

  But how am I supposed to plead with time itself?

  CHAPTER 10

  Intent matters. As soon as I even thought about warning Sofía, about trying to save her, time pulled me back.

  I thump my head against the common room door. The windows outside are dark, far darker than the evening of October 3, and I don’t have to pull out my phone to check that I’m back in the present, but I do anyway.

  At least I got to see her. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  I close my eyes and try to picture her in that moment when she saw me and her eyes lit up. I want to hold on to that image forever.

  This is progress. My control has been weakening, but I wanted to see Sofía, and I did. Figuring out the intent thing brings me one step closer to saving her.

  I turn to go back to my room, but I realize that it would actually be nice to have a distraction from all that’s going on. I push open the common room door. For a moment, I see it the way it was on October 3, with Sofía at the table, and a smile plays at my lips. But I blink, and it’s today, and Sofía’s not here.

  Ryan has the chess set out on the table, and as I step inside the room, a white bishop knocks over a black pawn of its own volition. Ryan picks up the fallen pawn, twisting it in his fingers as he stares at the board, and a black rook slides forward to take the bishop. Gwen cranks up the volume of the television across the room, ignoring everyone but the zombies she’s shooting. Harold must be in bed already.

  As upset as I am, I still like this place. Berkshire is a far cry from the old, rambling farmhouse where I grew up. Maybe that’s why this room wraps around me like a warm blanket. That house, with its two and a half acres and pond and willow trees, is just a little too . . . provincial for me. Provincial. That’s an SAT word my sister would love. But it fits. Even though the house isn’t in the middle of nowhere, it’s far from all my friends and within walking distance of exactly nothing. Somehow, all that space cages me in. Everything in the Berk is wrapped up in brick and contained together. It’s nice.

  As much as I love the academy, though, it’s still a school, and the only place where Sofía and I can really just chill is the common room. It’s where we eat, where we take breaks, where we hang out. Sofía first opened up to me in this room, over by the wing chairs. She was sitting on the floor, behind the chairs, reading a book and sort of fading in and out of visibility. If it hadn’t been for the book, I don’t think I would have noticed her.

  I told her that she was reading my favorite book, but that was a lie. I’d never read it—I just wanted to talk to her. She started to tell me what she liked about it, but I was super distracted by the way she slowly turned visible, her hair illuminating gold then copper then rich brown.

  I think she suspected that I didn’t know the book. I mean, I knew of the book—it had been an option for ninth-grade reading, something about gangs in the ’50s or whatever—but I’d never read it, which didn’t take her long to realize. “It’s about death,” she said. “And it’s about living after someone you love dies. And . . .” She paused, and in that moment she became completely, 100 percent visible. “And it’s about not being afraid of being alone. Because in the end, we’re all alone.”

  “Oh,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.

  Books meant a lot to Sofía, and she was always reading. I didn’t have many books that I liked, and I didn’t really have anything eloquent that I could say to impress her, but I kind of regret not talking to her about the few books I did love. She was showing me a part of her when she told me about what book she was reading. I should have told her about a book that meant something to me the way that book meant something to her, because I can think of no better way to meet a girl than to see her through the eyes of the story she loves best.

  I scowl. I don’t like the way I keep thinking about Sofía, in memories and regrets as if she’s gone for good. I step further into the room, torn between playing a video game with Gwen (I’d likely lose) or chess with Ryan (I’d definitely lose). But then I see Harold in the corner. I guess he didn’t go to bed after all.

  Harold sits as far away from everyone else as possible, his wing chair shifted so it’s almost completely facing the wall. I can still see his mouth moving, though, and I can tell he’s talking to spirits that only he can see.

  When it comes to our powers, no one has it worse than Harold. He sees and speaks to spirits and ghosts, but they tell him what they want to tell him, not anything he wants to hear. He can’t command them. He can’t do anything useful with them. He’s just sort of stuck, forever listening to a bunch of dead people he can’t shut up.

  Maybe it’s just the suckiness of this weekend, but a dark fear rises in my throat. I can’t stop thinking about the black-hole feeling of where Sofía was supposed to be in the timestream. I stride across the room, scattering the chess pieces Ryan had floating beside the board. “Hey!” Ryan says indignantly, waving his hand and bringing all the chess pieces back to his side.

  I start to drag another chair across from Harold, but it’s heavy and loud, so I just plop down on the floor at his feet instead.

  “Hello,” Harold whispers, his eyes at a spot about a foot above my head. I’m not sure if he is talking to me or to a spirit I can’t see. When I don’t answer, Harold’s gaze drifts down to mine, an expectant and curious glint to his eyes.

  “Hi,” I say.

  Harold usually sticks to himself and spends far more time talking to his ghosts than to any of us.

  “So.” I press my lips together, my hands twitching with nervous energy. “I mean, so. Sofía, right? It’s my fault she’s gone, and obviously I need to go back and get her, but . . . I can’t. I mean, I’ve tried. I’ve tried a lot. But for some reason, I can’t save her, no matter what I do. And . . .” I swallow, almost unable to continue. “And I’m worried that maybe the reason why I can’t save Sofía is because she’s already too far gone, that I can’t save her because it’s impossible.”

  Harold looks at me as if I’m crazy.

  “It’s just that, I should be able to go back to exactly where she got stuck in time and pull her out. But . . . I can’t. So maybe the reason why I can’t find her in the timestream anymore is because . . . maybe she’s . . .”

  No. Those words can’t be spoken.

  “You talk to ghosts, right?” I say finally.

  Harold’s eyes shift, unfocused, gazing at something . . . someone . . . only he can see. “The voices speak to me,” he says softly.

  Creepy stuff like that is exactly the reason Harold got beat up so much at his old school.

  He lets silence fall around us.

  “I guess I just wanted to ask . . .”

  Harold stares at me intently. Waiting.

  “Do you see Sofía?”

  There. I said it.

  “I don’t always see,” Harold says, his eyes losing focus.
“Often, I just hear. Whispers. Regrets. Whispers.”

  I lean up on my knees. I want to grab Harold, force him to give me his full attention. “But do you see or hear Sofía?” I ask, my voice rising. “Maybe she’s gone, maybe what I did—” I swallow. “Maybe what I did killed her. And if it did, I know she’d come back. Here. To me. To all of us. Has she . . . do you see her? Do you hear her?”

  Harold cocks his head like a cat about to pounce on a bird rustling in the grass. When he speaks, his voice is almost inaudible. “No. She is silent. She is not in the voices. She is just . . . gone.”

  I sag in relief. Gone—but not so far gone that I can’t still reach her. She’s not dead. She’s okay. She’s stuck in the past behind some sort of block that’s stopping me from saving her, but she’s still alive.

  “Thanks, man,” I say, standing up and smacking Harold on the knee. Harold jerks as if startled out of deep sleep by the touch. I’ll leave him to his ghosts, then. I wander over to the cushions where Gwen is sitting, using a flamethrower on the horde approaching her character on the screen.

  “You should be careful what you say,” Gwen mutters, not taking her eyes off the TV.

  “Huh?”

  Gwen shoots me a look. “The Doctor’s not here, but he is, you know?” Her voice drops an octave. “Watching.” Her eyes flick to the corner where I had just been sitting, talking to Harold.

  “I don’t under—”

  “There.” Gwen’s eyes linger on the ceiling, on the almost invisible black camera lens that points at exactly the spot where I had just been sitting.

  “Why is the Doctor spying on us?” I ask, shifting closer to Gwen. I scan the room and notice at least three more cameras, one in each corner, pointing down on us.

  Gwen shrugs. “Don’t know. But he is.”

  “It’s been like this for two weeks,” Ryan calls from the table in the center of the room, his attention still on the chess game. “They installed them after the last episode.” His eyes flick to Harold.