CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Jaya’s Brilliant Idea

When I got to the repository on Tuesday, Ms. Callender sent me and Jaya down to Stack 5. It was a quiet day. I wished I had lots of call slips to run. I didn’t know what to say to Jaya. Why did I feel so awkward? Shouldn’t capturing a time machine and traveling back to 1895 with a girl make you feel more comfortable with her, not less?

A call slip arrived. I took as long as I could to run it. As I was wrapping up a jigsaw to send to the Main Exam Room, the stack door opened and a boy ran in. He looked about seven or eight years old.

“Sister Jaya!” he yelled.

“Brother Dre!” Jaya yelled back. “What are you doing here? Did you come with Marc?”

“Yeah, he’s upstairs with Doc. Read me a story?” He handed her a book.

“I thought you had a sister, not a brother,” I said, puzzled. The kid looked African American, not Indian.

“I don’t have a brother yet, but I will. This is Andre, Anjali’s boyfriend’s baby brother.”

“Baby yourself!” said Andre indignantly. To me, he said, “Hi. Who are you?”

“That’s Leo,” said Jaya. “He’s a new page.”

Andre grinned at me. “Hi, Leo. Can you get Jaya to read to me?”

“Can’t you read to yourself? Or is the book too hard?” asked Jaya.

“Of course I can!” He sounded outraged. “But it’s way more fun when you read it. You make all the stories more exciting.”

I knew what the kid meant.

Jaya looked at the book. “What is this, Poe again? Boy, Andre, you love the scary stuff, don’t you!”

He nodded gleefully. “Read ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.’”

“I’m sick of that one,” said Jaya. “How about ‘The Purloined Letter’?”

A pneum thumped into the basket. I pulled out a sheaf of call slips. “A snarling iron, a cow’s tongue, a beak iron, a riffler, a bastard file, and a burnisher,” I read. “What the quark is all this stuff?”

Jaya laughed. “Those are all silversmiths’ tools. They should all be close together.”

I went off down the stack to look for them. When I got back, Jaya jumped up, calling out, “I’m brilliant! I’m a genius!” She handed me the book. “Here, Leo, finish reading Andre the story. I have to go check something.”

The story was about a detective looking for a missing letter. The villain had hidden it in plain sight—in a rack of other letters. Andre wasn’t impressed. “That wasn’t scary at all. I like ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ way better. Read that one next,” he told me.

“The Pit and the Pendulum” was much more exciting. I’d just gotten to the part where the red-hot walls of the torture chamber were threatening to crush the hero and throw him into the pit when Jaya burst back into the room holding a transparent rod. It looked very familiar.

“Look, Leo! I think this is it!”

“It what?”

“The missing quartz rod! From the full-size Wells time machine!”

“But where did you find it?”

“In the geology collection, with all the other mineral samples. Call number X S&M 549.68 U556,” she said, reading from a call slip.

“That is brilliant! How do you think it got there?”

“Someone must have hidden it in plain sight, like the letter in the Poe story.”

“But who?”

“I don’t know—maybe you or me, in the past or the future. Or both. I’m going to run downstairs and see if it fits.”

“Wait! I’ll come with you!”

“No, somebody has to stay here in case we get call slips,” she said, and ran off. So much for her newly restored patience.

I hadn’t even gotten to the end of the Poe story when she came back. Her hair was a mess and there were circles under her eyes.

“Jaya! What happened to you?” I gasped.

“Nothing—I just went back to the 1880s and had a little chat with Mark Twain about time travel.”

“Without me? How could you do that!”

“I’m sorry. But I was always going to go alone—he never mentioned having met you before. Did you know the ladies wore bustles back then?”

“What are bustles?” asked Andre.

“They’re these cage things ladies wore under their dresses, strapped to the back of their underwear, like fake rear ends. Very uncomfortable.”

Andre laughed. “I bet you look awesome with a fake rear end stuck on your underwear, Jaya!”

“Jaya!” I said. “You can’t go time traveling without me! It’s not safe! And who’s going to save you if Simon tries to shoot you with a death ray?”

“Simon doesn’t exist anymore, remember?” said Jaya. “We need to talk about that. I’ve been feeling terrible about what happened to Simon. I really think we need to fix it.”

But I was only half listening because suddenly I understood what had been nagging at the back of my brain all this time. I was the one who had changed the past and saved Jaya from Simon One. Not Simon Two—he was unable to change the past! It was me. And I knew how I’d done it—or rather, how I was going to do it!

“Your turn to keep an eye on the stack,” I said. “There’s something I need to do.”