Time Between Us

  “What happens if you are? In the same place at the same time?”

  “Well, I never let it happen accidentally. But if I do it on purpose, the younger me disappears and I take his place, just like I did at the robbery the other night. Then it’s a do-over.”

  I look down at the books and play with the pages. “You lied to me about your grandmother being sick?”

  “Not exactly. She does have Alzheimer’s, she just…doesn’t have it in 1995.”

  “And why does she think you’re a Northwestern student?” This time I look up at him.

  He sighs. “That’s what I told her when I applied for the room.”

  He’s still pressing my hand to his arm, but I pull it away so I can fidget with a string that’s pulling loose from the carpet while I try not to hyperventilate.

  He can go forward from 1995, because everything from this point on is his future.

  He lives with a woman who has no idea he’s her grandson.

  He’s not supposed to be here in 1995.

  “This is your past,” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “How long have you stayed anywhere in the past?” I close my eyes again. I can’t look at him.

  “Thirty-six days,” I hear him whisper.

  “And when was that?”

  There’s a pause. “Tomorrow will be thirty-seven days.”

  I close my eyes. I don’t think I’m handling this well.

  And I still haven’t heard everything. I don’t know who he was mumbling about in the park that night, or how he got here, or where he came from, or what he’s doing in Evanston, or why he was only supposed to be here for a month but he’s still here.

  I finally open my eyes and take him in.

  I’m sixteen years older than him. But I’m not.

  He’s one year older than me. But he’s not.

  He looks me straight in the eye. “Look. I know this is weird. And even now that you know the rest of the second thing, you still only know two out of the three.” He glances up at the ceiling and it’s quiet for a moment before he looks at me again.

  “The point is that I’m not supposed to be here, Anna. Not in Evanston. Not in 1995. I’m not supposed to know you, or Emma, or Maggie. I’m not supposed to go to this school, or do this homework, or hang out in your coffeehouse.” He takes my hands in his like he’s about to transport me somewhere, but we don’t leave the room—we just move a lot closer to each other. “I don’t stay anywhere. I visit. I observe. I leave. I don’t ever stay.”

  I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with this information. Tell him to leave? Tell him to stay? But I don’t have time to consider any other alternatives, because he scoots in closer and brings his hands to my face, and I fall back into the bookcase as he kisses me with this intensity—like he wants to be here, and if he kisses me just long enough, deeply enough, none of what he just said will actually be true. And as much as I know it’s all true and that it’s incredibly stupid to feel this way about someone who doesn’t belong here—who, when he leaves, will hardly be a plane ride away—my hands leave the Berber carpet, find his back, and pull him toward me until I’m flat against the shelves. Because he’s here now. And because I’m pretty certain I don’t want this to stop. Ever.

  Then he pulls away. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I say as I try to catch my breath.

  “No. It’s not okay. This isn’t how I planned it—I shouldn’t have made it more complicated than it already is.” He stands up and combs his fingers through his hair. “I’ve gotta go. I’m so sorry.”

  “Bennett.” I try to smile at him—try not to look like everything that just happened doesn’t have me slightly freaked out—but he won’t even look at me. “It’s okay. Bennett, please don’t go.”

  But he’s already out the door, leaving me alone with the rest of the second thing and the words he said just before he kissed me: “I don’t ever stay.”

  “Hey, Anna! Wait up!” Courtney slams her locker and starts walking with me. “Did you finish your plan yet?”

  “No, not yet.” We smash in close to each other as we squeeze past a group of kids huddled around a locker and then we spread out again. “I’m working on it. How’s yours coming along?”

  “Good. I was just thinking last night I should probably add some ruins or something, you know—something educational.” She looks at me like she’s waiting for me to agree, so I nod. “But the beaches just look amazing. I swear I could spend the whole time just pancaked on different patches of sand.”

  “Just do beaches, then.”

  “Are you doing beaches?”

  “Some.” I have no idea what I’m doing. Last night, I tried to get beyond the pathetic two-column list I started in the bookstore last Tuesday, but I spent most of the night distracted by a time traveler who visits but never stays. An incredible, beautiful boy with eyes I can never seem to get out of my head, a body I never want to be more than two feet away from, and hands that can take me anywhere I want to go at the speed of thought. The same boy who isn’t supposed to be here in 1995, but sat on the floor of my bookstore last night like there was nowhere else in the world he’d rather be and kissed me like there was no one else in the world he’d rather kiss. The boy with secrets, who still has one more to tell.

  “Where else are you going?” she asks innocently, like we’re not in the same competition to win the same five-hundred-dollar travel voucher.

  I bring myself back to the hallway and try to think of what to say. “I’ve got a bunch of—” I begin, but I lose my train of thought again, because there’s Bennett, leaning against the locker bank in front of Argotta’s room, looking sweet and shaggy and gorgeous and clearly waiting for me. I try to keep pace with Courtney despite the new gear my heart has just leaped into.

  “What? Ruins? I knew it. You’re doing ruins. I should do—” I don’t hear anything else after that, and when we finally reach Bennett, I come to a stop. My heart, on the other hand, speeds up even more.

  “Hi,” he says as he shoots me this incredible smile, and Courtney practically disappears from my side while I try not to look quite so happy to see him.

  “Hi.” Great, and now my hands are shaking.

  Courtney’s still here after all, and I see her look around like she’s trying to figure out where all the electricity is coming from. She looks back and forth between the two of us as a weird little smile forms on her lips. “Oh…interesting,” she says and heads into the classroom with a mocking “Excuse me.”

  “Can we talk?” Bennett asks.

  I peek around the door and into the classroom. “Spanish is about to start.”

  “I know. Come on.” He leads me out the doors toward the side of the building and to a pathway obscured by overgrown plants and shrubs, and I hear the bell ring in the distance. We climb the slope to a clump of trees near the top of the ridge and stop at the base of the largest one. Bennett sits down and pats the ground next to him. Once I’m sitting, I know exactly where we are; the floor-to-ceiling glass wall of the dining hall is hard to miss, and even from here I can clearly see our table.

  “So, I just wanted to say I’m sorry again…about last night.” He reaches down for a pebble and plays with it nervously, rubbing it back and forth between his fingers. Then he looks up at me with a sad expression I’ve never seen on his face. “It’s just—I’ve wanted to kiss you so many times.” I lean in closer, hoping my proximity will help make this another one of those times, but he leans back with a sigh and rests against the tree trunk. “I told myself I had to hold back, because I knew starting something wouldn’t be fair to you. I didn’t want to complicate it. You know? I wanted to tell you everything and let you decide how you felt about it. About me.”

  “I know how I feel,” I say as I close the gap he created between us a moment ago and muster a brave face. “But in that case, I guess you’d better tell me the rest—so I can decide.” I give him an encouraging smile so he knows I’m read
y to hear it. And I am, even though I also know it involves a girl. It was more than a month ago, but that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten how he looked the night I found him in the park, rocking back and forth on the bench and mumbling that he had to find her. How he told me in the coffeehouse that someone disappeared and it was his fault.

  “I lost my sister.” My eyes grow wide. “Brooke and I go to concerts. It’s sort of our thing.”

  Brooke. I hadn’t thought about the little girl with the dark hair and the bangs, holding her baby brother in a picture frame perched on Maggie’s mantel. His sister. Who is two. Or nineteen.

  “It’s become a kind of hobby. I research bands I like and find the earliest shows I can travel to. Well, Brooke’s the one who always travels with me.”

  He’s struggling to talk. Apparently, telling me how he went back in time to save my life and that he didn’t really belong here in 1995 were just ways of warming himself up for the hardest one. Brooke’s a big deal.

  “Remember how I told you I could only travel within my own lifetime?”

  I let out a nervous laugh. “Yeah, I haven’t forgotten that part.”

  “Well, if I try to travel earlier, it doesn’t work. I close my eyes and picture the date, and…well…nothing happens. But Brooke wanted me to take her to this one show, so she convinced me to try it. It was a total experiment. Neither one of us really thought it would work.” He smiles at the memory. “We held hands, closed our eyes, and I pictured the location and a date in 1994. And—”

  “It worked?”

  “Yeah, but only for a few minutes. I was there, and then I wasn’t. I got knocked back to San Francisco.”

  “Knocked back?”

  He shrugs, like it’s a minor inconvenience he has to tolerate. “I usually have total control over where and when I go, but if I push the limits, it’s like time rights everything. I get sent back where I’m supposed to be.”

  “But if you traveled there with Brooke, why did you get knocked back and she didn’t?”

  “I couldn’t stay because I didn’t exist in March 1994.”

  I stare at him, waiting for the rest.

  “Brooke did. She was born in ’93.”

  “Whoa. Seriously?” I ask, and he nods. “Where were you taking her?”

  “March 10, 1994. Chicago Stadium.” He looks me in the eyes and asks, “Does the date sound familiar?”

  I think about it. March tenth. Last year. March tenth. I have no idea what he’s talking about.

  “The ticket stub,” he says. “On your bulletin board. Pearl Jam. It wasn’t a particularly epic show or anything. She just wanted to see them play stuff from Ten and Vs.”

  “No way.” I say the same two words I heard him say when he saw the ticket stub upstairs. “I was there. With Emma. We were there.”

  “Probably a lot longer than I was. I didn’t even have enough time to buy a T-shirt.”

  I think I’m supposed to laugh along with him, but I’m still staring at him in disbelief. “How will you get her back?”

  “I’m not entirely sure yet. At first, I just assumed that if I went back as far as I could—to March 6, 1995—Brooke would have lived out the year and been waiting for me at Maggie’s. But she wasn’t there and clearly hadn’t been. So now I have to wait and see; either she’ll ‘catch up’ to March 1995 and hopefully know I’m here, or time will right itself and she’ll get knocked back home to 2012…or, I guess, somewhere else between now and then.”

  “God, she must be terrified.” I picture her roaming the streets, lost in time and looking for shelter.

  “I know Brooke, and I’m sure she freaked out a little at first, but she’s got plenty of money with her, more than enough to get by. I think she’ll be fine. But my mom’s a mess, and wow, is she pissed at me. Though maybe my screwup proved she’s right and I can’t handle this little gift of mine.”

  I have no idea what to say.

  “Anyway, I returned alone at a total loss and had to break the news that it could take a while. My mom insisted I come back and stay here until I found Brooke. I explained I could be gone for weeks or more, so she made excuses to people at home and had me bring my dad to Evanston to enroll me in her old school.” I can hear the bitterness in his voice. “So, here I am. I go back home every once in a while to check in.”

  The migraines. The rocking. The murmuring: I’ve got to find her. I can’t leave yet. It’s all making sense. “You were coming back from San Francisco.”

  “Yeah. It happened a bunch of times in those first two weeks. I would just disappear from Evanston and reappear in my bedroom back in 2012, so I’d close my eyes and force myself to come back here. In fact, that night you came to Maggie’s, I’d just returned. And that’s why I kicked you out, because I thought I was about to be knocked back. But I wasn’t. It hurt like hell, but I kept myself here, and I haven’t been knocked back since.” I remember my visit, the coffee cups and water bottles strewn across his room, how he stared me down in Maggie’s living room. No wonder he acted so weird when he found me in his house, chatting with his grandmother and staring at a photo of him and his two-year-old sister. No wonder he made me leave.

  “So you’re only here until Brooke comes back.” He nods, and I feel sick. But I’ve known it all along—deep down in a part of me I keep choosing to ignore—that when I learn his secret, I’ll also learn why he can’t stay.

  “We should get back to class.” He grabs my hands, and without even thinking, I close my eyes. But we don’t move. The wind is still cold on my face when he says, “Anna.” I open my eyes again and see him looking at me. “We’re not supposed to know each other. I want us to, but there’s a lot at stake for you in this—more than I think you even understand yet.”

  I think I nod. I’m not sure, but I feel him reach forward and softly brush my eyelids closed. He grabs my hand again, and I feel a twist deep in my gut.

  When I open my eyes, we’re standing on the path lined with overgrown shrubs and my stomach is contorting. He reaches into his backpack, and pulls out a little bag of saltines, and I immediately start nibbling. Then he pulls out a bottle of water, unscrews the cap, and downs it without stopping. He puts the empty water bottle back in his pack and leads me through the doors and into the hallway. He stops at the exact spot we’d been standing in earlier. I peek inside the room and see Courtney taking her seat.

  “Well, you know all my secrets now.”

  I nod and look around the hallway. We’re back.

  “So, promise me you’ll think about it, okay? And ask me more questions.”

  Questions. I have plenty of those. What I need is time alone with him, with nowhere we need to be and no reason to stop talking until I understand what the hell he means when he says I need to think about what’s “at stake” for me.

  He turns to walk into the classroom and I grab his arm. “Hey, when can we talk again?” I’m not about to sit around all weekend wondering when I might bump into him.

  “Soon.” He gives me a smile. Then he walks into the classroom and I follow him, lost in my thoughts but still taking in the details of the room. Argotta’s perched at his usual spot in the front of the room, leaning against his desk. Alex and his too-white teeth are already in the seat across from mine. And Courtney’s in the first seat in the first row, shooting meaningful glances at Bennett and me. Just as the bell rings, she gives me a little wink.

  “Wanna hear the buzz?” Emma asks as she slides her tray onto the table and sits down.

  Danielle tosses her hair and turns to look at her. “There’s buzz?” Her eyes are so wide they look like they might just pop out and roll across the table. “Who’s the buzz about?”

  “Anna…” Emma purrs. “And Bennett…”

  “If you follow that with anything about sitting in a tree, I’m leaving.” I lean back in my chair and bite into my apple. I don’t really want to be the subject of “buzz,” but I’m grateful for something else to think about besides do-overs and getting knoc
ked back and a nineteen-year-old girl who’s trapped in time.

  I turn around in my seat and find Bennett making his way through the lunch line, filling his cup with Coke. Emma follows my gaze and then shoots me a sly grin. “People are talking. Don’t you want to know what they’re saying before he gets here?”

  “Nope.” I look uninterested, because I am. “Not really.”

  “It’s good,” she presses in a high-pitched voice that sounds like she might break into song.

  “Don’t care,” I sing back and take another bite.

  “I hear he lives with his grandmother,” Danielle pipes up, and I stop chewing. Emma and I turn to look at her. Then Emma looks back at me. “He does?” She wrinkles her nose. I can’t tell if she’s put off by this new information or just irked that someone else heard it before she did.

  My head spins toward Danielle. “How do you know that?” I ask, but I stop and force a grin instead, hoping to cover up how defensive I just sounded.

  “Julia Shepherd told me.”

  “Oh. Julia?” My tone is light and casual now, but only because I’m working hard to make it sound that way. I take another bite of my apple to emphasize how little this topic matters to me. “How does Julia know?”

  Danielle touches her palms together in prayer position and bends her head to meet her fingertips. “The Donut keeps no secrets.” She laughs and takes a bite of her sandwich.

  “Clever.”

  “So, does he?” Emma asks.

  I wipe all traces of irritation from my face and say with a voice calm and steady, like it’s no big deal, “Yeah. Her name’s Maggie. He takes care of her.”

  “Oh, that’s sweet,” says Danielle, and I shoot her an appreciative grin.

  “Where are his parents?” Emma whispers as she watches him across the room. “Weren’t they supposed to be back by now?”

  I wish she’d drop this, because I suddenly realize that I don’t know his cover story. He told me his parents were in Europe, but that was before I knew where they really were. I have no idea what he’s told the school about his family, but I’m certain he didn’t leave emergency contact information for people who live in 2012.