I watched the sun rise over a recently plowed cornfield. I’d been so caught up in having jumped back in time that I’d failed to fully process the shift in landscape until this moment. I wasn’t in New York anymore. Sounds of morning birds and distant farm equipment rumbling to life filled the orange dawn. I lay back on the hood of my car as the cool morning air pricked my skin and the loamy scent of earth filled my nostrils. The enormity of open expanse made me feel insignificant and vulnerable, or maybe I’d done that to myself.
I’d let myself believe in the illusion of control, carried on by some mirage of a destiny, but all those fantasies of purpose or universal plans only served as a crutch to my unstable mind. I’d gotten my second chance with Jody. I’d done everything differently and enjoyed the reward of a perfectly beautiful moment, but the aftermath remained unaltered. No, that wasn’t true. Our undeniable rightness had changed us both, but to what point? I remained stranded in my past, and she was still stuck with a future full of uncertainty. In an attempt to make our situations better, I might have actually made them worse. Where could either of us possibly go from here?
The slamming of a screen door drew my attention to a nearby farmhouse. A young woman stepped onto a wooden porch and lifted her hand to shield the sun from her eyes. I sat up to take in this vision of the early morning. She wore sweatpants and a long-sleeve nightshirt but somehow managed to project an image of elegance as she moved to the porch railing and smiled sympathetically. “Stevie Geller?”
“Good morning, Beth.” I felt uncharacteristically calm as I hopped off my car and walked toward the most comfortable presence I’d experienced in over a week. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“Not at all. I don’t sleep past dawn any more, if I even sleep at all.”
“I’m sorry about your parents.”
She swallowed and nodded but couldn’t seem to speak, so she motioned for me to sit on the porch swing while she settled into an old wooden rocking chair. I watched her look out over the land her father had worked faithfully until two weeks ago. Her curls were tousled in the style of the sleepless, her blue eyes sunken with a sadness surpassing exhaustion. She was a shadow of the girl she’d been in high school and held only the barest hints of the woman she’d become. Still, her eyes were kind and her smile genuine, if subdued.
“What brings a high-school senior out to a barren field at sunrise?”
“Honestly,” I said, “I don’t know. I just sort of ended up here.”
“Autopilot.” She sighed. “I know it well.”
“Do you think it leads to anything?”
“I hope so, but I can’t imagine anything beyond this right now.”
I turned back to the empty fields. They wouldn’t be so stark in a few months. The seasons would change, seeds would sprout, rains would come and go, green would supplant brown, life lying dormant would assert itself once again. I turned back to Beth. The same would hold true for her. I didn’t know how she’d survive this time, but she would. She’d blossom and grow. She’d push against the confines of the life she’d previously imagined to become someone she couldn’t conceive of yet. Her story would unfold like the leaves of a cornstalk, rich and vibrant. Even in the darkness of this painful dawn, I could clearly see where she was headed. I envied her that.
“This too shall pass,” I whispered.
“Will it?” Beth asked. “I don’t know how.”
“Neither do I,” I admitted, “but it has to. Time may not be linear, and it may not always move forward, but I can say with relative certainty that it does always move.”
She regarded me quizzically. “What else do you know about time?”
I shrugged. “Maybe nothing. In some ways it feels like I’m learning a lot, but then something happens to make me suspect it’s all a lie. What do you know about time?”
“You can’t store it up, and you can’t get it back.”
“What if you could?” I asked. “What if you could do it over? What would you change?”
Sadness creased her forehead, making her appear much older than she would eleven years from now. “I’d live every minute in present tense instead of always planning for some future I had no guarantee of.”
I opened my mouth to object, to assert my certainty in her future and mine, but the words wouldn’t come. How could I be sure of anything? What she’d said might be true, but then again I didn’t even know if this exchange was really happening. Maybe everything I knew about this moment was a dream, or everything about our futures was pure imagination.
Thankfully I didn’t have to explain myself, as we were both drawn out of our reflections by the sound of tires on her gravel driveway. A black Chevy Malibu pulled to a stop near the front of the porch, and a tall young woman with dark hair and serious eyes got out, balancing two cups of coffee. She eyed me suspiciously while I tried to place her.
“Good morning, Kelly,” Beth said, brightening slightly.
Kelly’s face transformed, all harsh lines fading away to reveal her youth and a sincere affection as she focused on Beth. I suffered a momentary rush of protectiveness on Rory’s behalf and clenched my fist to hold it at bay.
“I woke up early, so I thought I’d come check on you,” Kelly said. “I didn’t know you’d have company.”
“I need to get going.” I wasn’t sure what story was being written between these two, but I had no part in it.
“Are you sure?” Beth seemed torn between inviting me to stay and wanting to be alone with Kelly.
“Yes. I’ll see you again someday. Okay?”
“I hope sooner rather than later.”
She couldn’t understand what she’d just said or how much I shared that desire, so I nodded even though tears filled my eyes. “Me too.”
*
I slept, or rather napped, fitfully until early afternoon. Sleep provided no more solace than it did answers, and even in my dreams, restlessness began to grow inside me. I’d always enjoyed my time alone. Time to think, time to recharge. I ran from conflict and avoided complications, so after a full night of both, why couldn’t I force myself to remain still?
Was it Jody?
Was it me?
Was it time itself?
After tossing and turning in bed, I paced around my room until finally I gave in to the urge to move more freely and found myself standing outside the gas station owned by Kelsey’s parents.
A tan-skinned man greeted me warmly.
“Hello, Mr. Patel. I’m Stevie Geller. I’m friends with Kelsey.”
He raised his bushy eyebrows almost to his receding hairline. “A friend?”
“Yes, sir.” I understood Kelsey probably didn’t get a lot of visitors. “Is she around today?”
“Just a moment.” He seemed skeptical but not unfriendly as he locked the cash register and put the key in the front pocket of his short-sleeve dress shirt.
I wandered around the store while he went into the back room, noticing some displays of chips and dip, a refrigerator full of sodas and sports drinks, and a shelf full of car products, but the bulk of the merchandise consisted of alcohol. Most of the walls held walk-in freezers full of beer and wine coolers, and the stands down the middle of the small store were loaded with liquor of every variety. Well, not every variety. Most of it was low-end and high proof, which said a lot about their average consumer.
“Hey, what are you doing here?” Kelsey asked as she emerged from the storeroom.
“I said I’d stop by.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t think you meant it.”
I sighed because I wasn’t sure I’d been sincere at the time either. “Sorry. I’ve been so focused on other things.”
“No problem,” she said. “You have a pretty good excuse.”
“Yeah, but you’ve got a lot on your plate too.”
She looked at the tile floor. “I don’t want to talk about what happened Friday, so can we just leave it alone?”
I didn’t want to agree. I wanted to tell her I knew how bad things were for her and beg her not to succumb to the pressure of her life, but I remembered her resolve to follow through on whatever I told her about the future. I needed to find a way around her prohibition on talking about her life, but I couldn’t risk pushing her over the edge. Besides, I’d have to be at my best for a conversation like that, and I barely felt functional right now. “Fine. You don’t have to talk about anything…yet.”
She ignored the end of my statement and changed the subject to one I couldn’t resist. “Have you seen Jody this weekend?”
“Actually, yes.” I glanced over my shoulder at her dad.
She nodded and pulled me into a small office with an overcrowded desk and two chairs, then shut the door behind us. The only thing on the walls was a black-and-white TV showing live footage of the store’s security camera. Kelsey glanced up long enough to watch her father return to his post at the front counter, then asked, “What happened?”
“I kissed her.”
“Wow, for a writer you’re not much of a storyteller.”
I rolled my eyes. “What do the details matter? I ran into her in St. Louis. She admitted being attracted to me. When she drove me back to my car, it was exactly like the moment in present day, or the future, or whatever. It was exactly the do-over I thought we were meant to have.”
“And?”
“And I kissed her, like a knock-your-socks-off-and-curl-your-toes kind of kiss. Fireworks, angels singing, but then nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“No transformation, no quantum leap, just a student teacher making out with a time-traveling student in her car. I did everything right this time, and it was perfect, but nothing changed.”
“So now you’re freaking out?”
“Of course I’m freaking out!” I shouted, then realized anyone on the other side of the door could probably hear us and lowered my tone. “What’s not to freak out about? I’ve put us both at risk, and for what? To justify my mental break?”
“Are you back to considering mental illness as a valid possibility?”
“How can I not? I’ve changed everything and changed nothing.” My throat tightened. “I’m not going to wake up from this nightmare no matter how many alternate endings I write.”
“Well, to be fair, you haven’t changed everything. You tried only one option,” Kelsey said in her clinical voice.
“How many more options are there? I mean, do I need a complete personality overhaul? I don’t want that. I did just fine with my life the first time around without putting my neck on the line. All I want to change about my future is Jody’s role in it.”
“Then why are you ready to abandon your plan so easily?”
“Easily? I put Jody’s career in question. I took a knock on the chin from Deelia. I put myself at risk of being institutionalized by even talking to you.”
“Yeah, but did you do anything differently this time that wasn’t an attempt to get out of here?”
“Why would I?” Bile churned in my stomach again. I didn’t like where she was headed with this. “The whole point of this experiment was trying to wake up and get back to where I belong.”
Kelsey shook her head. “What if you belong here?”
“I don’t.”
“Maybe not forever, but you need to consider the fact that for right now, you’re where you need to be. Whether it’s a trick of your own mind or some greater plan, there’s no fairy-tale ending at the moment.”
I flopped into a chair, exhausted. “I guess I don’t have much choice in the matter, but what the hell am I supposed to do now?”
“Just keep trying,” she said.
“Keep trying what? Trying to win Jody? Trying to get her to quit her whole life for a high-school senior? I can’t provide for her. I can’t offer her anything but scandal. I can’t even go to NYU if I don’t finish high school, and what is she supposed to do if she stops student teaching? Just hang around here until summer? We can’t be together. What if we got caught? We’d face the condemnation of the whole town. We’d be big gay symbols of everything they despise. I can’t do that to her. Hell, I can’t do it to me. I don’t do conflict. I’m not that person.” I’m not Rory.
The idea of being outed in Darlington caused a pain to throb right between my eyes and the roar of my own pulse to rush through my ears. I felt like I had on the podium back at the awards assembly, and I feared a similar outcome. “I’ve been deluding myself into thinking I’d find some way out. I don’t see any good way for things to end anymore.”
She hung her head and allowed her dark hair to cover her eyes. “Tell me about it.”
Something twisted painfully in my chest. God, what was wrong with me? I’d given voice to her worse fears. “Kelsey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I don’t want to dump all my problems on you.”
“It’s fine. You’re not saying anything I don’t know.”
“Really, I didn’t mean anything. I just had a bad weekend. I’m sure there’s another way.”
“No, you’re not,” she mumbled. “You don’t even believe you’ve time-traveled.”
I exhaled forcefully. No, I wasn’t sure I believed in time travel. Maybe I didn’t know anything about our futures, but I did believe she was headed for trouble. Even if my mind had only made up a story about her killing herself, it likely did so because of all the evidence in front of me now.
I didn’t know what to say, so I stared at the security monitor, watching a young man in a Cubs hat wander around the store. I enjoyed a mundane distraction, everything in black-and-white, literally, and with no controversy. I wanted to lose myself in the distant simplicity of this soothing play.
Then all of a sudden the tenor of the performance shifted completely when the guy on the screen grabbed a fifth of whiskey and stuffed the bottle under the flap of his denim jacket.
“Hey, Kelsey,” I said.
“What?”
“That guy. He just swiped a bottle of liquor.”
She glanced at the screen to see the man push out the front door.
“Hey, he’s getting away.” I jumped up. “We have to stop him.”
She snorted. “This from the person who doesn’t do conflict.”
“Yeah, well, we can tell your dad.”
“I don’t want him to try to chase the guy down. I’ll tell him in a minute.” Her lack of concern worried me. Had she stopped caring about anything anymore?
“Should we try to get his license-plate number for the police or something?”
“The police won’t do anything. We report stuff like this once a week. We have the video footage and plate numbers. Sometimes we even know their names, but the police act like it’s our fault. They hope we’ll give up and move.”
Anger and frustration burned my skin. “But why?”
“For the same reason I get bullied at school, the same reason Jody can’t come out, the same reason Mr. Phillips protects his rednecks and lets other kids suffer. The cops all grew up here, went to school here, and played sports here. Why would they act any different than the rest of them? Hatred is a learned behavior. It’s passed down, taught.”
I ran my hands through my hair until they got stuck in the tangle of thick curls. I wanted to rip them all out or scream or throw something. “Surely someone out there doesn’t feel that way.”
“Sure, lots of them,” Kelsey said, sounding sadder than ever. She opened the door, then looked back at me before saying, “The good ones probably outnumber the bad, but it’s just, well, they don’t do conflict.”
I followed her out and waited silently while she told her dad about the theft. I quietly watched his resignation as he viewed the tape and called the police station. I waited for an officer to arrive and added what information I could to his report. Helplessness weighed me down, causing my shoulders to sag the way Kelsey’s often did. I stood off to the side, trying not to draw attention to myself. I would’ve slipped out if not for the sickening rock of guilt in my stomach.
I at least owed them the decency not to run away without telling Kelsey’s father how sorry I was that people would steal from his store. He thanked me and said he hoped this incident wouldn’t keep me from coming back to see Kelsey again. I assured him what I’d witnessed hadn’t changed my opinion of them at all, but as I drove home, I feared the incident had lowered my opinion of myself.