Saving Lucas Biggs (11 page)

“We’re in a forest,” I observed, staring at the pines, which were now almost as tall as the ones back in Mississippi. “In the desert.” Pines turned to oaks, and the oaks began to shed their leaves: yellow, red, and orange.

“If somebody shoots at you,” asked Luke philosophically, “shouldn’t you shoot back?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. Maybe, not long before, I’d have said yes without a doubt. But after listening to Aristotle, I wasn’t so sure. “I don’t think—maybe not.”

“But—if somebody kills somebody,” Luke went on, eyeing me sideways, “shouldn’t they have to pay?”

“Yes,” I said, because on this point I was clear.

“Shouldn’t
we
make
them
pay?” continued Luke, stopping to look at me. His eyes were imploring. “Because nobody else is going to.”

“We?” I repeated. “Us?” Luke turned away, and we climbed higher. The air bit. Our lungs burned. The tree branches above us thinned, and through them I spotted a blue so dark, I imagined I could see space behind it.

“We’re
right
!” said Luke, ignoring my questions as he thought about his own. “They’re
wrong
!” Suddenly, we walked right out of the forest onto—bare rock—and then snow—and just like that, it was winter on Mount Hosta.

“Look,” I said. “The peak.” No more surprises. No more mountain hiding behind the mountain. This was it. Snow surrounded the stony summit. We could see sky on the left and the right and above us.

“We’re right,” persisted Luke, “so we’re supposed to
win
!”

“True,” I replied.

“But,” Luke went on, “how can we win if we don’t fight? My dad says no. He always says no.” Luke’s voice trailed off as we realized that, from the top of the mountain, we could see the earth in
every
direction. We stood on an island in the sky in silence.

“It’s all ours!” I finally said. “Our mountain. Our desert. Our forests and our rivers. The whole world.”

“And we’re the kings of it all,” crowed Luke.

“And we can change it,” I continued.

“You and me,” said Luke excitedly. “We really could, Josh. I know it!” Then he looked at me curiously. “But how?”

“Your dad, Luke,” I said. “He knows a lot—maybe he’s trying to show us. I think if we listen to him, he could teach us how.”

And that is where I lost Luke Agrippa.

“He’s not as smart as people think,” muttered Luke, staring at something far away that I couldn’t see. “I don’t even understand what he’s talking about sometimes. How are we supposed to take away the occasion of all wars? What does that mean?”

I fell silent, because I didn’t know. Behind us, over a mountain range so far west it might have been in California, the sun disappeared, leaving only a fading glow above us. “The light is going!” I cried. “We gotta get home!”

“I guess we do,” agreed Luke quietly, disappointed that I couldn’t answer his questions.

I sort of figured going down would be faster than climbing up, and it was. I also figured going down would be easier, and there’s where I was mistaken. Sadly. When you’re pelting down the side of a mountain, those rocks come at you fast. I spent as much time sliding on my face as running, and Luke was bleeding from both knees and both elbows by the time we got back to the tree line. When we dropped out of the forest, the sun had completely set. We grabbed Bridey’s potatoes and kept running. We had only stars to see by.

And before we got back to camp, Aristotle had already sneaked in with Walter Mendenhall and Milton Katz. Milton Katz, eluding the detectives, snapped a photo of the Model T, which people had a hard time believing was real when they saw it in the
Weekly World Worker
. But he also snapped a picture of Preston, standing in front of our tent, blowing taps on his trumpet at dusk. Of course in the photo you couldn’t tell he was playing taps, but then again, you kind of could, and something about Preston standing straight as a soldier holding the dented horn with his ruined hand caught everybody’s eye, because that picture ended up in the
New York Times
, and millions of people saw it.

Margaret

2014

I HALF EXPECTED CHARLIE TO show up at my door a few minutes after I left, asking about the little time-travel bombshell Grandpa Joshua had dropped, but
only
half expected or maybe less than that. Maybe a quarter expected. Charlie would have been as perplexed, curious, and worried as the next guy, but he knew me, knew how I liked being alone for a while after something big and scary happened to me, even back when the biggest, scariest things were a C on a math test or a missed goal in a field hockey game. But even Charlie can’t be patient forever, so that night at midnight, when I heard the pathetically bad mourning dove call outside my window, I was ready for it.

When I got to The Octagon, Charlie was lying on his back, gazing at the sky. I plopped down a few feet away. The stars beamed, calm and faraway and normal, but I felt weirdly shy around them now, like they were a person I couldn’t quite look in the eye. So I rolled sideways to look at Charlie and propped myself up on my elbow. My head felt heavy as a bowling ball, like it was too full of stuff, which of course it was.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” he said, still staring skyward.

“Hey, remember how we watched the Perseid meteor shower last summer?”

“Yeah.”

“Remember how I counted, like, five times as many falling stars as you did?”

“Nope. And they aren’t stars, genius.”

“It’s a figure of speech, genius.”

It was amazing, that night, the points of light sliding down the sky like raindrops down a car window. Even though we knew better, there was no way not to expect them to fall on us in flurries, to get snagged in the tree branches, to clatter onto The Octagon and lie glowing in the long grass of the field; that’s how personal it all seemed, how close and just for us.

I let myself slip back to that night, not like a time traveler, just like a regular girl, remembering. Then I flopped back down on my back, shut my eyes, and started to talk. I gave him everything, the whole spiel, mixed metaphors and all. The garden hose, the flip book, the holes blinking like eyes, and it wasn’t until I was finished that I realized what I’d just done, how big it was, how risky. I’d just given Charlie the unbelievable and asked him to believe it. I’d just told him I had the ability to travel through time.

I sneaked a peek at him. In the dark, I could just see his face as he looked down at the tops of his own knees, his eyebrows lowered in a way that meant he was thinking something through. I lay there, hearing my pulse in my ears, waiting to find out if my best friend thought I was a liar or a lunatic, to find out whether he was still my best friend at all. I’d never felt so lonely in my life.

Finally, Charlie said, “What if you just go back and stop the people who really burned down the lab? I mean, we know the date and more or less the time. Wouldn’t that be simpler than jumping all the way back to 1938?”

For a few seconds, I was too relieved to speak.
Maybe I can do this
, I thought.
If Charlie and I are in it together, I just might be able to pull it off.
If I hadn’t known it would have embarrassed him to death, I would’ve cried or hugged Charlie. Or both.

Instead, I swallowed hard and said, “You can’t travel in your own lifetime. That’s what my dad told me. Two yous can’t be together in a single now.”

“That’s good,” said Charlie with a snort. “One you is plenty.”

I punched him in the shoulder.

He ignored me, scrambled to a sitting position, and went on, getting excited, “So the next question is:
when
should you jump to? Grandpa Joshua seemed to be saying that if we stopped the murder in the hunting lodge, that would do the trick. But what if we stopped the whole Canvasburg massacre? What if we stole the guards’ guns or stopped the kid from throwing the rock, if he really did throw one? We could save a lot of lives that way, right?
Including
Aristotle’s. I mean, I guess that would save Aristotle, right?”

I liked the way he said “we,” but I realized it was time to tell Charlie the next bit of information about time travel, the big, the vague, the spooky, the hard-to-get-your-mind-around-just-take-it-on-faith part (as if all the rest had been so easy to get your mind around). The part about the forces of history.

“I know, Charlie,” I said, and at the sound of his name, he snapped his head up to look at me. Like most people who talked to each other all the time and didn’t live on a movie screen, we only used each other’s names in conversation when something big was coming up.

“It would be great to think big, to try to save everyone we can, to change all the bad stuff,” I went on, gearing up to tell Charlie the spooky part but also wanting to put it off as long as possible, “but here’s the thing, and I know this sounds kind of strange, but everyone says it, my dad, Uncle Joe, all of them, it’s the reason for the forswearing, or, like one of the reasons, the main one probably, I mean there’s also something in there about staying humble, not getting too full of ourselves and treating the quirk like a gift so that we start to think we’re a bunch of superheroes or whatever—”

I stopped for breath.

“Just say it already,” said Charlie, “whatever it is.”

I sat up.

“History resists,” I told him.

“Oh yeah, you said that yesterday. What’s it mean?”

“History doesn’t want to be messed with. It pushes back when you try.”

“Pushes how?”

I sighed.

“Well, that’s where people get a little hazy on the details. I mean, my family’s been forswearing for a really long time, so maybe no one knows for sure, but what everyone’s pretty clear on is that
history resists
.”

“So,” Charlie ventured, quietly, “maybe it’s not going to work, you changing history to save your dad?”

It had to work. It had to, it had to, it had to.

“I don’t know,” I said.

We sat there, deflated. I don’t know what was going on inside Charlie’s head, but what I was doing was searching for a reason, any reason but preferably a good one, to hope. Then it hit me.

“But here’s the thing,” I said. “If it were impossible, why would we be able to travel at all? If history were that strong, wouldn’t it stop us?”

Charlie looked at me, nodding. “Maybe. And ‘resists’ isn’t exactly the same thing as ‘prevents,’ is it?”

“No way!”

“Okay, so it’s worth a try.”

“Definitely! But maybe what we should do is think small, just try to change one thing. I mean, no one really knows what triggered the massacre, so let’s focus on the murder in the hunting lodge. We know the time and place. We can guess what happened.”

Charlie nodded again and said, “It’s small and contained and doesn’t involve that many people—unlike, say, the massacre itself. Maybe if we don’t get too ambitious and just really limit the change you make, history won’t . . .”

“Notice?” I supplied. “Interfere? Get too mad?”

Charlie laughed, and I joined in. The whole thing was so serious and so crazy at the same time.

“Something like that,” said Charlie.

“It’s true. I need to have as small an impact on the past as possible.”

“So you should probably stay out of sight as much as you can, not talk to a lot of people, and be there for as short a time as possible. The bare minimum.”

“Supposedly, you can’t stay that long anyway.”

“How long is ‘that long’?”

“Um, I’m not sure.”

“Oh. Well, what happens if you stay too long?”

“Also not sure. Something not good, I guess?”

“Oh.”

And all the possible “not good” things that could happen were suddenly all around us, creeping, closing in, casting ugly shadows across us. You think thoughts like that, about the unknown “not good” for too long, they can suck you down like quicksand, but it’s also really hard to stop.

“I wish I could go instead of you,” Charlie said in a low, dead-serious voice.

“Thanks,” I said lightly. “I’ll be fine, though. I’m tough.”

The light tone was meant to make things better, relieve the tension, drive the “not good” back to wherever it came from, but like most things that are sort of faked, it backfired.

“You’re
tough
?” said Charlie, angrily. “Seriously? You know what? Just because we aren’t talking about how dangerous this is doesn’t mean it’s not. It’s
insanely
dangerous. You could go through the wrong blinking hole and get lost in some random time. You could get stuck in 1938. And even if the time travel works, you’re headed straight for a very messed-up situation. Guns, armored cars, a guy getting stabbed, another guy getting bashed over the head.”

“Charlie—”

“No!”

He jumped to his feet, started to pace The Octagon.

“Forget it. This is wrong.
Dead
wrong!”

“Calm down,” I said.

He stopped pacing and looked hard at me.

“You can’t do it.”

My jaw tightened the way it always does when someone tells me this.