I was flour going through a sifter; I was grass seed being spread. The atom-sized pieces of me clumped back together and I was sitting on the lawn next to the parking lot of Ambrose Bierce Middle School in Freedom Falls, Ohio.
Frankie and Ishmael were to the right of me. Mr. Ganto was to my left. I leaped to my feet and spun, searching in every direction.
Tom Xui wasn’t with us.
“Tom’s missing!” I exclaimed. “We have to go back for him! Those soldiers could kill him!”
I snatched the Shagbolt from Frankie’s fingers and raised it to my lips. A large, hairy hand wrapped itself around the slide before I could move it. Mr. Ganto gently, but irresistibly, pulled the instrument from my hands.
“No,” he said, in a voice that didn’t invite argument.
I argued anyway.
“We can’t leave him three thousand years in the past! He’s got a math test on Monday! He’s my best friend! We have to go get him!”
“He covered his ears,” Mr. Ganto stated. “He hummed. It was his decision to stay.”
“What if he changes his mind?”
“I am returning this to Shofranka’s father.” Ganto hefted the Shagbolt. “You can petition him. Perhaps he will grant your request. There is no rush. It is, after all, a time machine.” He turned his penetrating gaze on Frankie. “But there can be no further unauthorized trips. It is way too dangerous. We are lucky to have returned to a time and place almost identical to the time and place we first departed from. It would not be wise to imperil success.”
“Almost identical?” asked Frankie suspiciously.
Mr. Ganto inhaled deeply, held it, considered it, let it out. “There are more chrysanthemums in bloom. I would guess it is about a day after our original departure.”
“Is that the only difference?”
“As far as I can smell.”
I looked around. The school was the way I remembered it. No new wings enclosed a prison exercise yard, no razor wire edged the roof. We had returned everything to normal.
“I will take the Shagbolt back to the carnival,” said Mr. Ganto, slipping into a shadowy area beneath some trees. “I will also visit Dr. Lao in the infirmary. I have need of his skills. Perhaps Mr. Dinklehooper would be so good as to accompany me.”
Ishmael was staring wide-eyed at the cars in the parking lot.
“Metal huts?” he asked. “Do people live in those things?”
“Practically,” I said.
A minivan with its headlights blazing pulled into the parking lot’s far end. Ishmael jumped. Ganto reached out and put a reassuring hand on his shoulder.
“Horseless carriage,” I tried to explain, but I could see the phrase didn’t help.
“It will take getting used to,” Ganto acknowledged. “But if I could do it, you can do it. Come. I may need a shoulder to lean on.”
Ishmael, moving like a sleepwalker, turned to follow Ganto. With a rustle of branches, they disappeared into the grove bordering the school property.
“So. No harm done,” Frankie said, more to herself than to me.
“I’ve lost my best friend!” I reminded her.
“He made a choice. He knew what he was doing. We should respect his decision. If you really feel strongly about it, maybe we can convince my father to let us use the Shagbolt to go back and get him. Don’t be surprised, though, if he puts up a fight.”
“Your father?”
“Your friend. I think Tom is exactly where he wants to be.”
“Maybe if we spoke to your mother and father together,” I said. “I mean, it’s your mother who thinks you’re destined to be the Shagbolt’s Keeper.”
Frankie sighed. “We can’t speak to them together. I have a single parent.”
“What? You mean—they’re divorced?”
“No. I mean my mother is dead.”
“DEAD?”
“She died when I was eight months old. In a fortune-telling accident.”
“A fortune-telling accident?”
“She failed to foresee the oncoming bus. Her death totally messed up my dad. He had a nervous breakdown. He got over it quickly, though. I think, deep down, he knew I needed him. And he knew I needed her.” Frankie paused, like she wasn’t sure she should go on. But then she took a deep breath and said, “So he developed a split personality. Not intentionally or anything. He’s not aware that he does it.”
“Does what?” She had lost me.
“The scientific name for it is dissociative identity disorder. DID. He became my mother. I mean, he really… DID. He still becomes her. He spends about half of each day as her. She even has set fortune-telling hours on days when the carnival is open. His glammering ability makes it easy. When he’s her, he believes it so completely, even his face changes. At least, that’s the image he projects. Usually, glammer is all in the clothes.”
“That’s nuts!” I exclaimed.
“That’s what Dr. Lao said. But he got his psychiatry degree many years ago, when they had different words for things.”
“I heard your mother looking for Twizzlers!”
“Yup. You did. He was her at that particular moment. Sometimes he even flickers back and forth, one to the other, like a lightbulb about to burn out. He’s totally unaware he’s doing it. Madam Janus and Orlando Camlo are one and the same person, but they have two distinct personalities, with different knowledge and different opinions. Neither has any memory of what the other one has said or done. They leave notes for each other on the fridge. When they’re having an argument, you can barely see the door.”
“I saw your dad only a few minutes later on the midway.”
“What part of glammering don’t you understand?”
“All of it.”
I tried to imagine missing somebody so badly that you took their place. I wondered if I would start dressing like Tom Xui. Then I remembered we already dressed alike.
Frankie sighed. “And here you are, upset because your dad sometimes wears chain mail. You’d never be able to handle it if you had a parent who was truly different.”
“Actually,” I said slowly, thinking about it, “I think I could handle it fine. Or, at least, a lot better than I used to.” I remembered seeing Frankie’s father in her mother’s crystal ball. I thought maybe this was the reason it had happened. It was the final piece of a puzzle I had been working on for the past three thousand years.
“Hurry up, Mikey!” came a familiar voice. I turned to see our neighbor Mrs. Larrabee getting out of her minivan, pulling her two kids after her. “We have to show our support for Mr. Brody!” She tugged the twins toward the school. Mrs. Larrabee was a single parent, raising her kids all by herself, and she had only the one personality. I couldn’t imagine how she did it.
“Holy cow!” I said. “It’s Thursday night! They’re going to decide whether or not to fire my dad at this meeting! We have to get in there!”
“That would explain why we arrived now, rather than yesterday,” Frankie said breathlessly as she raced to keep up. “This must have been in the back of your mind all along! You affected our time trip!”
We reached the doors and I saw myself reflected in the glass. I skidded to a halt.
“Wait!” I said. “I can’t go in there like this! This isn’t how I want to look!”
“So? Take off the dress.” Frankie sounded disappointed.
“That’s not what I mean,” I said, squaring my shoulders. I had made my decision, and I was sure it was the right one. “I’ve lost my bonnet. Can I borrow yours?”
Frankie’s bedraggled bonnet hung from the tightly knotted string around her neck. She pulled it off, punched it back into shape, and fitted it to my head.
She pursed her lips and thought about it. “Like a hero,” she said.
The auditorium was packed. It looked as though the entire town had gotten wind of the special meeting and had turned out in force.
The seven members of the school board sat on the stage, in the middle of the set for The Crucible. They had moved the Salem witch trial’s judge’s bench forward to the edge of the stage, and Principal McNamara occupied the center position. To his right sat the three board members we had overheard plotting with him the night before—Billy Osborn’s father, Cynthia Moon, and Millicent Mordred. To his left were the other three board members. Their faces were familiar; I had seen them around town, but I wasn’t sure who they were or how they would vote.
Quentin Garlock sat on the floor of the stage with his legs dangling over the edge, a little to one side of McNamara, like pictures I had seen of court jesters at the feet of their kings. My father occupied a folding chair stage left, picked out by a single spotlight that isolated him from the board members, who were sitting in a sea of red.
All the stage illumination came from the lighting designed for The Crucible. Moments after Frankie and I entered, the spotlighted shadow of a dangling hangman’s noose flickered and disappeared from the back wall as somebody in the control booth came to their senses and cut that particular switch.
My father was dressed as a Russian serf from the time of the czars. It was a good look for him. Wringing his peasant cap in his hands made him look humble, but the defiant set of his jaw suggested he might, at any moment, rise up and overthrow the government. I wondered if his decision not to dress as a samurai was because of me.
In the middle of the center aisle was a lectern with a microphone, and people were lined up behind it, awaiting their turn to speak. As we came in, the man at the mike was Bruno Killbreath, Lenny Killbreath’s father, the man who, in the alternate reality we had prevented, had been president of the United States.
“… must be stopped,” he was saying. “We can’t let our kids be led astray! This whatchamacallit, this trans-temple culture—weasel words for cross-time dressers!—is flyin’ in the face of our American way of life!” He waved a tablet over his head, displaying the home page of Out of Time: A Journal for the Trans-Temporal Community, as if this proved there was a trans-temporal community. He pointed the tablet at my father. “This son of a bickwidus—”
McNamara banged a gavel. “Language!” he said sternly, and I got a jolt, realizing our time trip had added a naughty word to the dictionary.
“Sorry,” said Killbreath. “This man’s behavior is NOT somethin’ I want as an example to my kids. It’s a… it’s a—”
“Aberration?” suggested McNamara.
“Yeah! Right. A burration! Showing up in public wearin’ the clothes of George Washington’s day, or… or the woolly mammoth robes of a caveman—that’s a crime against nature! For the sake of society, his suspension has to be permanent!”
“Thank you, Mr. Killbreath,” said McNamara. Garlock nodded enthusiastically.
Killbreath shook his tablet one final time in my dad’s direction and turned away. I cut ahead of the next person in line and grabbed the microphone. The man behind me harrumphed.
I popped the mike from its holder, stepped into the aisle, and froze. Everybody was staring at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Frankie nodding encouragement. I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and said, “Hello! My name… is Ambrose Brody. Most of my friends call me Bro. A few call me Rose. I’m the son of Hannibal Brody—and I am a cross-time dresser!” I pulled the bonnet from my head and waved it in the air like a Fourth of July flag.
My father jumped to his feet the moment he heard my voice. He stood watching me with a look that I was pretty sure was pride. A woman sitting in the front row, in the seat closest to my dad, had also stood and looked my way.
My mom!
She was sitting with my aunt Maya.
“I don’t dress this way often,” I continued, “but over the past day or so I felt I needed to, just as my dad feels the need to, more often than that.” I lifted one corner of my apron. “I think it’s perfectly comfortable. I think it’s perfectly all right! I didn’t always think so, but now that I’ve swallowed an eraser, I know I can correct my mistakes!”
I ran down the aisle to where my mom was standing, turned my back to McNamara and the school board, gripped her hand briefly, and addressed the crowd.
“Yes! My father has a woolly mammoth caveman robe, but it’s not real woolly mammoth fur. It’s not animal fur at all. No woolly mammoths were hurt in the making of that robe. And that’s the thing. What my father does doesn’t hurt anybody, or anything. It just makes some of you uncomfortable. Because it’s different. Because it’s out of the ordinary. There was a time in this country when we enslaved people because they were different. Because they were extraordinary. That’s all the justification we needed. We thought they were different. If we start thinking that way again, if we start fearing people who are different, where will it end? Mr. McNamara”—I spun and faced him—“what if you could be arrested for wearing a kilt?”
“That’s different!” he sputtered. “I only wear it for parades and assemblies!”
“And Angus McOffal’s birthday,” I reminded him. “But if you start persecuting cross-time dressers, don’t be surprised if you’re next! Then it’s anybody who isn’t wearing the newest fashions, and then it’s anybody who isn’t wearing fashions approved by the state. There goes your turban, Mr. Singh; there goes your sari, Ms. Patil.” I pointed out people I knew in the audience. “There goes whatever that is hanging off your earlobe, Mr. Curtis!”
“It’s a small working glockenspiel,” he called back, nodding his head and softly chiming. Mr. Curtis ran Freedom Falls’ only coffeehouse. “My sister designs jewelry. I’m here tonight to support your dad, you know. I think quite a few of us are!”
A chorus of approval erupted, coming from about half the people there. I noticed the kids who were acting in The Crucible were scattered around the auditorium in their seventeenth-century costumes. Billy Osborn was there in his Becky Thatcher getup, the one he had gotten beaten up for wearing. He was sitting defiantly in the front row, his arms crossed, glaring up at his school board father. I found myself thinking his bonnet was nicer than mine.
The cheering gave way to booing from the other half of the crowd, and I realized the town was pretty evenly divided.
“My father has taught in this town for sixteen years,” I reminded them. “He’s a good teacher! There’s no reason he shouldn’t be allowed to keep doing it!”
The microphone cord had stretched as far as it would go. I dropped the mike in Billy Osborn’s lap, jumped up on the stage, and hugged my dad. “He’s my father, and I stand by him!” I shouted.
Half the audience applauded.
“I’m so glad I gave up my spot,” said the man I had cut ahead of, who met Billy halfway to retrieve the mike. “I wasn’t really sure what I was going to ask, but now I know.”
“And you are, sir?” McNamara asked.
“A reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In town to visit my daughter, who convinced me this meeting might be worth attending. I’m thinking a story about a school that fires a teacher for being a”—he looked at me—“what was it, Ambrose? A trans-time—?”
“A trans-temp,” I answered. “Short for trans-temporal. A cross-time dresser.”
“A story about a school that fires a teacher for being a cross-time dresser might be of interest to our readership.”
McNamara digested this.
“And what about a story about a school that doesn’t fire such a teacher?” he asked.
“Not so much. My question being, now that you’ve heard from both sides, and considering young Mr. Ambrose’s quite eloquent plea—how do you expect the vote will go? I only ask now because I have someplace to be at eight thirty.”
McNamara studied his hands, which were clenched together in front of him like he was praying, or strangling a rodent. He raised his head, grimaced, and said, “One way to find out. I declare the discussion part of this meeting at an end.”
He patted the air to calm the angry murmur from those still waiting to speak. Then he banged his gavel again. “We have heard enough! Members of the board. All those in favor of dismissal of Mr. Hannibal Brody from his position with the English department of the Freedom Falls school district, by reason of said Mr. Brody being unfit to teach, please signify by raising your hands.”
Millicent Mordred’s hand shot up immediately, followed less quickly by Cynthia Moon’s. Billy Osborn’s father frowned down at his son. Mr. Osborn shook his head, then also lifted his hand.
“That’s three in favor,” acknowledged McNamara, to applause from a distressingly large part of the crowd. “All those against?”
The three board members to McNamara’s left put up their hands. A different part of the crowd cheered.
“Three to three.” McNamara sighed. “I get to cast the deciding vote.”
“It would be a pity,” said my father, “if we never got to see the heroic McNamara tartan again.”
“That is not what is being decided here,” McNamara shot back.
“It isn’t?”
McNamara ignored him, or appeared to.
“After due consideration,” he said, getting to his feet and glancing at the Plain Dealer reporter, “and as much to avoid some unpleasant publicity as to keep me in the good graces of a venerable clan, I vote against. Mr. Brody can keep his job and dress however he wants!”
Pandemonium broke out in the room, half the people cheering, half booing. My father clasped hands with my mother and hauled her up on the stage, where they hugged. I got the feeling she wouldn’t be visiting her sister again anytime soon, not after a hug like that. I broke into a silly grin.
McNamara banged his gavel and restored something close to order. Quentin Garlock started to scramble to his feet, saying, “We had a deal—” and McNamara smacked him on the head with the gavel and he sat back down, much more quickly than he had gotten up.
“I trust,” said McNamara, continuing to stare at the reporter, “very little of what just happened here was newsworthy.”
“Not much,” the reporter agreed. “Maybe a small article toward the back.”
“Thank you. That is appreciated, Mr.—?”
“Whiffletree. Clarence Whiffletree. Don’t mention it.”