Switch

  I was only three years old when my sister, Mibs, decided that our poppa’s ordinary, everyday savvy was the ability to never, ever give up. I understood better now who Poppa had inherited his determination from: Grandma Pat didn’t own any white flags. She may have let her dreams get squashed when she was younger, but she refused to surrender those same dreams now. Even if they were only illusions.

  Maybe Grandma had a savvy after all, in the same way Poppa did. Maybe Grandma Pat’s savvy made her a stubborn daredevil—a strong-willed dynamo of an old lady who was unaffected by my time-stops. Thinking back, I realized I had never paused the clocks when Grandma Pat was within sight. No wonder she’d gotten so far on her own. Every time I’d tripped up Father Time that night, in hopes of stalling my grandmother’s escape, Grandma had kept on skipping.

  There had to be a reason Del and Grandma, and a smattering of other people, didn’t freeze with the rest of the world. What charmed thing could the three of us share in common?

  “How do I get out of this tin can?” Grandma crowed. Turning herself around, she found the door latch and yanked up on it. But stuck-time made the door stick.

  “Frizzle . . . rackin’ . . . fiddlesticks!” Grandma cursed as she pushed her frail weight harder against the door. She leveraged one boot against the back of Nola’s seat and the other boot against the side of Del’s face.

  Del tried to grab Grandma’s ankle. But before he could get a good grip on her, the door swung open, out, and down. My grandmother rolled out and down too.

  “Grandma!” I shrieked as I watched her land with a soft thwump in the snow at the edge of the creek. Grandma Pat lay on her back. As still as death.

  “No!” I cried, sure she was dead, or injured beyond repair, even though she’d only fallen a few feet. A second later Grandma Pat opened her eyes and coughed. I sighed in relief. My relief was short-lived.

  Instead of getting up and brushing the snow from her clothes and hair, Grandma lay in the snow and began to act . . . weird.

  Weirder than usual.

  She moved her arms and legs through the snow, plowing arcs through the white drifts. For a moment, I wondered if Grandma couldn’t control her limbs; she looked like Bambi on ice, an awkward, splay-legged deer, unable to get up.

  In one of Momma’s what-to-expect lectures during the drive to Colorado, she had told my brothers and me how Grandma’s illness would eventually affect more than just her memory. She said other things would become difficult for her soon too. Simple things—sitting up on her own, buttoning her clothes, feeding herself—would someday be impossible.

  Had that day come so soon?

  “Ha! Would you look at that, Specs? Your gran is playing in the snow.”

  “What?”

  I looked again and saw that Del was right. I laughed too. Grandma wasn’t losing control of anything—she was making a snow angel.

  Del and I kept on laughing as we followed Grandma, unbuckling our seat belts and sliding down the open door of the SUV. But our laughter didn’t last long. The car still hung sideways, halfway over the frozen creek, like a three-ton Christmas ornament dangling from an invisible thread—a thread I knew I would eventually have to cut. As soon as I restarted time, Mrs. Kim’s car would plummet the last few feet into the water, at the exact speed it was going before I said stop.

  Somehow, Del and I had to get everyone out.

  While Grandma lay on the ground, acting like it was the first—or maybe the last—snowfall of her life, Del and I went to work. It was a challenge to pull the others out of the car; we were soon sweating from the effort.

  “It’s like you’re Thumbelina and I’m Tom Thumb, and we’re trying to get Ken and Barbie out of Barbie’s plastic Dream Car,” Del said. He panted as we tugged on Samson’s bent form, dragging him down to the ground and depositing him next to Nola, like a cast-off toy. Del stopped to wipe his coat sleeve across his brow, and to undo his bow tie.

  “I s’pose that was kind of a babyish way to describe our crazy situation,” he said, giving me a sheepish smile.

  “Not at all,” I said, grinning back at him. “That’s exactly how this feels.”

  I glanced up at Tucker. My little brother had frozen mid-somersault in the airspace of the cargo area; I silently vowed to never let him ride in a car without a seat belt again. Captain Stormalong Fuzzypants looked like Superkitty flying next to Tucker’s outstretched hand. Her soft paws and teeny-tiny claws were extended in every direction. Her tail was a fuzzy exclamation point.

  Del put his hand on my shoulder as we craned our necks to look up inside the SUV. With the nose of the car pointing down, its rear hatch was high off the ground.

  Del sighed. “So, got any idea how we’re gonna get your brother down?”

  I nodded. “I think we’re going to have to do some climbing.”

  Somehow Del and I found a way to get every kid and cat out of the SUV. We even managed to retrieve the wheelchair and the blanket we’d taken with us from Mercy Medical Center. We were all going to have bumps and bruises in the morning, but we were safe. As safe as we could be, now that we were officially stranded.

  Grandma Pat had picked herself up out of the snow. Now, having built two-thirds of a lopsided snowman, she shuffled away from her creation to stand at a distance. Her tiara was crooked again. Her glasses foggy. Her thistledown curls sparkled with snowflakes.

  Grandma stood with her eyes closed, knee-deep in white. I watched her wave her arms slowly up, then down, not moving her feet. She looked like a swan flapping its wings in slow motion beneath the dull spotlights of the shrouded streetlamps, clearing away the snowflakes that hung in the air around her. I gasped. Whether she knew she was doing it or not, Grandma Pat was making an upright snow angel in the air, just as I’d imagined doing when Del and I first left the bus station.

  I took a step back, forgetting all about time, the car, the clock tower, and being stuck in Denver. As soon as these worries left my mind, the moment became magical. As Grandma continued to make her standing snow angel, I looked around—really looked.

  Breathing in.

  Breathing out.

  The snowflakes hung like poetry over the city. Surrounded by their spacious hush, it was easy to pause. To listen. To bend my ear to try to hear what the heavens had to say, without the timey chatter of the whole wide world muddling the message.

  Not wanting to blink and miss a single whispery stanza of the sky’s cold verse, I drew in another long, deep breath, filling myself with the timeless now of the winter night. Above me, there was only snow. And, to my surprise, the moon. A crack had opened in the white vault of the sky, revealing a treasure of stars laid out on velvet strips of darkness.

  Through the break in the clouds, the moon glowed as round and as bright as a giant clock face shining down from the heavens. The storm was moving on—or it would be, as soon as I was ready for the world to turn again.

  But I wasn’t ready. Not quite yet. Being able to linger inside this exquisite moment was so much better than looking into, and dwelling on, the past and future. Maybe the switch had been an okay thing after all.

  Before I knew it, I was twirling. Twirling, twirling, twirling among the timeless snowflakes, with my arms spread wide and my mouth open to catch ice crystals on my tongue.

  “Uh . . . Specs?” Del’s voice broke into my reverie. “I know the snow is pretty and all, but it’s still cold out here, and we just lost our ride. What do we do next?”

  What were we going to do?

  I stopped twirling and looked at Mrs. Kim’s SUV, now burned and crumpled on the outside, and sticky, stained, and wet with snow on the inside. My magical moment subsided as storms returned to my heart and mind.

  “Once I restart time, Del”—I slowly shook my head—“the whole thing will come crashing down. There’s no way to stop it.”

  “Well, you can’t keep thing
s this way forever, Specs, just to stop bad things from happening.”

  I knew Del was right, but it didn’t make moving forward any easier.

  “You have to let it drop,” Del said, looking at the car. “There’s nothing else you can do. Gravity plus time equals falling.”

  The image of Grandma Pat plummeting from the clock tower swam before my eyes. What if there was nothing I could do for her in the end, either?

  What if gravity + time = Grandma falling?

  “Let’s just take each moment as it comes,” Del said, guessing my thoughts.

  I took one last look at the SUV, at the moon, at the un-falling snow. Then I put an arm around Grandma and settled her into her wheelchair. I tucked her Mercy Medical Center blanket around her and kissed her cheek, not even minding when she pulled her face away, like a little kid; like our roles were reversed yet again. Then I turned back to face the grim fate of Mrs. Kim’s SUV.

  I knew how to do it now. How to restart time. I made myself ready. I quieted my hammering heart. I soothed the fear from my soul, and I kept my eyes open. I spread my arms wide to welcome the future.

  “Come what may,” I said, knowing that the magic wasn’t in the letters and the syllables, but in trusting what they meant.

  There was a pause. A pull. A whoosh. The SUV continued its rolling plummet for a split second. Then it crashed into the creek.

  EVERY ONE OF THE SUV’s windows shattered as the car hit the water and rolled, spraying a thousand ice-like pieces of glass in every direction. Samson threw himself over Tucker to shield him from the flying shrapnel. I wrapped my grandmother in a protective hug, and Del added his arms to mine, sheltering the both of us. Nola sat dumbfounded in the snow, obviously surprised to find herself out of the car. It didn’t take long for the others to put two and two together, to come to the solution that I’d once again stopped time.

  When we borrowed her mother’s car earlier that evening, Nola had warned us not to make a mess. I doubted we could’ve made a worse mess if we had tried. Upside down, with its nose in the creek, the SUV groaned and pinged. It’s tires spun for a few seconds, then stopped. The engine gave one final, death-like rattle.

  I had a cousin who could transform scrap metal into art simply by concentrating really hard. I wished Ledger was with us now; he could’ve used his metal-bending savvy to turn the crumpled car into a stretch limousine. Or a robotic fairy-tale carriage. At the very least, he could’ve fixed some of the dents.

  “I killed Mom’s car!” shrieked Nola.

  Overhead, the clouds continued to part, revealing more and more of the night sky. The snowfall was lighter now, the storm in retreat.

  Samson stood carefully, flinching as he adjusted his sling, then began to brush clumps of snow from his T-shirt and jeans. Now that my brother’s internal furnace had been thoroughly dampened, he probably wished he’d brought his coat. Especially now that we were stranded.

  With his good arm, Samson grabbed Tuck by the scruff of his coat and hauled him upright. Tucker’s rainbow whiskers had smeared in the snow, but you could still tell he was supposed to be a cat. Samson looked Tucker up and down, patting his arms and legs and head, making sure our little brother was in one piece. Then he tweaked Tucker’s painted nose.

  “You good, Tuck?”

  Tucker began to nod but stopped short. His face contorted into a comical, colorful, quizzical expression. He wiggled. He jiggled. Then he reached into his pants and pulled out Cap’n Stormy. The ginger kitten chirruped in distress.

  I turned to look accusingly at Del.

  Del shrugged. “I had to put that cat someplace where it wouldn’t get lost.”

  Finished inspecting Tucker, Samson awkwardly held his good hand out to Nola, hoping to help her up from her cold, wet seat in the snow. But Nola didn’t take Samson’s hand. She didn’t even look at him. She couldn’t turn her eyes away from her mother’s ruined car.

  “Three weeks!” she wailed. “I only had three weeks before I was going to get my driver’s license!” Then she burst into tears. Samson shuffled his feet in the snow, like he didn’t know what to do. There was nothing any of us could do, or say. Everyone was struck dumb over what we’d done to Mrs. Kim’s car.

  “Come on, Nola,” Samson said softly. “We’ve got to get everyone out of the cold. There’s got to be someplace we can go. I’m lost here, but you and Del know the city.”

  With a sniff, Nola let Samson help her to her feet. She swiped at her tears with the back of her wrist, smudging the makeup that was already running in streaks down her face. While Nola dragged her cosmetics case and shopping bags out of the upside-down SUV, I told Samson about Grandma.

  “I don’t know why, Samson, but Grandma Pat is immune to my time-stops too. Just like Del.”

  My brother looked from me to Del to Grandma, then shivered. “That’s spooky. I wonder what connects the three of you.”

  It was far too cold to stand around, dwelling on savvy mysteries. Samson led the group up the sloping walkway that connected the creek path to the street. Too worn out to melt any of the snow, he enlisted Tucker to help him stomp two grooves for us to follow—two grooves just the right width apart to accommodate Grandma’s wheelchair. Even so, it was a difficult, nearly impossible job to push Grandma forward. Del and I did it together, shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip, the same way we’d pushed the grocery cart earlier. Nola lagged behind, weighed down by her shopping bags, and by the guilt of having just destroyed her mother’s car.

  “I’m tired. Where’re we going?” Tucker whined, after we’d traveled a mere three blocks.

  “We’re all tired, Tuck,” Samson said. Without a coat or his savvy to warm him, Samson’s lips were turning blue. “I’d give you a p-piggyback ride, T-T-Tucker,” he said, his teeth chattering. “But with this b-bum shoulder of mine, I can’t.”

  “We’re looking for someplace warm, Tuck,” I explained. “We need to find a hotel lobby or an all-night coffee shop—someplace that’s open, where we’ll be allowed to hang out. Then we’ll try to call Momma again, or Del’s uncle. But our first priority is to get Grandma out of the cold. You only need to walk a little farther, Tuck,” I said. “You can do it. You’re big now, remember?”

  Tucker gave a full-body sigh. “Sometimes I miss being little.”

  I covered my mouth so that Tucker wouldn’t see me smile. I knew something he didn’t, a secret I’d vowed to keep for the next five years. Back in October, on the morning of my thirteenth birthday, my very first official savvy vision had shown me Tucker’s future. One I’d nearly forgotten about after the switch gave my brother a talent early. I didn’t know if the switch would permanently alter the things I’d seen in Tuck’s future. But so far, like it or not, none of my savvy visions had been wrong.

  That was good news for the fun visions. Bad news for the not-fun ones.

  I looked at my watch. It was 9:40. Del had said that the old high school clock tower hadn’t worked in years. That its hands were permanently fixed at two minutes to midnight. Nonetheless, the closer we got to the eleventh hour, the more nervous I became.

  “Look, Nola!” Samson stopped short. “It’s your dream come true.”

  Nola gasped. I followed her gaze up the street. Rubbing the fog from my glasses, I stared forward into the lights of a bright sign that buzzed and flashed a block ahead of us. The sign’s fizzing orange glow stood out like lava against the white snow shrouding the city. Part of the sign appeared to be broken, but even from where I stood, I could clearly read four flashing letters. I saw an N and an O and an L and an A. The sign blinked over and over again:

  NO LA

  NO LA

  NO LA

  “What are you looking at?” Tucker demanded as the rest of us stared up the street with our mouths hanging open.

  “It’s Nola’s name, Tuck,” I told him. “It’s Nola’s name . . . in lights.??
?

  NOLA’S EYES DIDN’T WAVER from the flashing letters of the sign up the block. She stood stock-still in the snow. Overcome by the sight of her name in lights, she looked like she’d forgotten all about her mother’s ruined car, and about how much trouble she was going to be in when she told her parents what had happened. Gripping her cosmetics case and shopping bags in one hand, Nola reached up and removed her hat, like she was about to start singing the national anthem.

  “It’s got to be a sign,” she whispered.

  “It is a sign.” Samson chuckled softly. His eyes reflected the glittering snowflakes gathering in Nola’s hair.

  “A restaurant sign,” Del clarified, breaking the spell the lights had cast over Nola. “That’s the sign for Volcano Laverne’s. But it’s broken.”

  “Oh! I’ve heard of that place.” Nola’s voice rose with excitement. She wiped away the last of her tears, smearing her makeup even more. “Volcano Laverne’s Hawaiian BBQ and Waffle House. They have round-the-clock karaoke.”

  “That’s right,” Del said. “My gran took me there once. The place is legendary. No one but Laverne LaFlamme serves waffles and short ribs all day, every day. You haven’t lived until you’ve had a plate of Laverne’s pineapple waffles. Or her kalua pork. Mm-mm-mm.” Del rubbed his tummy, like he could still taste every bite of the meal he’d shared with his gran.

  “Waffles?” Tuck’s tiredness vanished. Still holding Cap’n Stormy safely inside his coat, he ran in the direction of the restaurant, pushing through the snow like a pint-sized snowplow.

  “Come on, Gypsy! Come on, Grandma! We didn’t have any dinner, but I see a tower of waffles in our future.”

  It wasn’t long before we were all standing beneath the flashing lights of the broken sign, staring at the entrance to Volcano Laverne’s Hawaiian BBQ and Waffle House. Located between two high-rises, the restaurant was a squat, two-story brick building, with a rusted fire escape running down one side. Now that we were directly under it, we could clearly see that the sign’s lightbulbs did indeed spell out: VOLCANO LAVERNE’S. Only, most of the bulbs were burned out, making it look like NOLA from a distance.