Backward Glass Page 3

  Once home, I had time to myself. My mother got off work at five, and my dad after that.

  I dropped off my backpack and squeezed through the hedges. There were no new footprints. The door was still unlocked. I spent my hour and a half of freedom rummaging through the old furniture, but there was nothing there. When I figured I was in danger of Mom getting home, I took some balled-up newspapers from the wall and headed up to my room.

  Nothing interesting. It was amazing how few pictures they had in those old newspapers, and how long they took to say anything. One of them had a variation on the local Prince Harming skipping rhymes scratched in faded pencil in a margin: “Lover sweet, bloody feet, running down the silver street. Leave tomorrow when you’re called, hear the wisdom in the walls. Crack your head, knock you dead, then Prince Harming’s hunger’s fed.” I tore that part of the paper off and stuck it under my mattress. Why did it matter to me? Why did I shiver every time I heard that name? The kids at school had thought it all had something to do with my house, but for them it was just a game. They didn’t have a note signed, Your friend for all time, Kenny Maxwell.

  A call for supper. Interrogation about my day. Merciful escape back to my room. Homework. My dad calling lights out. Tossing. Turning. Sleep.

  Tink. Clatter.

  I looked to the ceiling and rubbed my eyes.

  Something hitting one of my skylight windows and falling down the roof.

  I went to the window and opened it. “Hello? Who’s throwing that?”

  A figure came into sight. “Who do you think, retard? Where’s my hat?”

  My mouth hung open. “You’re a girl.” The hat had hidden a huge mane of curly hair, and she wasn’t trying to disguise her voice now.

  She folded her arms. “And you’re an airhead. Are you going to give me my hat, or what?”

  “Who are you?” I said.

  “I’m Luka.”

  I frowned. “Luka?” It didn’t even sound like a real name.

  Luka threw up her hands in annoyance. “My real name’s Lucy, but my mom took me to Star Wars on my seventh birthday, and I kind of made her change it. It’s not my fault. I was a spazzy kid. Go figure. Are you coming down or what?”

  I had no idea what she was talking about, no idea what half of her words even meant. Airhead. Go figure. Spazzy. Star Wars. But one thing she said stood out. “Lucy?” I said. “Lucy Branson?” She nodded. “I’ll give you your hat if you tell me where you disappeared to,” I said.

  That stopped her. “But—didn’t you say you’re Kenny? Didn’t you—oh, I get it. You didn’t do it yet.”

  “Do what?”

  “Write the note, genius. Okay, fine. Come down. I’ll explain. But you’ll never believe it.”

  Three

  The Rules

  3. Once you’ve gone back, you have to wait until midnight. After that, you can go home again anytime.

  Getting downstairs was easy. If I was careful and stuck to the floorboards my dad had fixed, I could blend in with the creaks and pops of the old house settling down for the night.

  I surrendered the hat as soon as I got outside and Luka put it on.

  It couldn’t have been more than a couple degrees below freezing, and there wasn’t much wind. We stood for a long moment.

  “Who are you?” I said, but before she spoke, I added, “Not just your name. What’s going on?” When I asked that, something stiffened in my spine. I was still scared, not of this kid, but of something out there in the night. But that didn’t matter. That was my name on the note I had found. Someone was asking me for help.

  She dropped her hands to her sides and looked at me directly. “My name is Luka Branson. I was born October 12, 1970. I live at 428 Larkfield Drive. I’m sixteen years old.”

  My heart thudded painfully. “How is that possible?”

  “I don’t know. We’re just starting to figure it out. It goes every ten years. A few days ago I met the girl from 1997, ten years up from my time. She got those rules from you.” I opened my mouth, but she held up her hand. “Come on. There’s something I want to show you.”

  She grabbed the shoulder of my coat and pulled. I let myself be dragged through the hedge.

  “See that?” she said, pointing to the winter-brittle tangle of tall weeds that choked the carriage house’s tiny front yard. “That’s a swimming pool. And right there?” She pointed to the far corner of the hedge. “That’s where Larkfield curves out to Manse Creek Road.”

  “There’s no Larkfield going onto Manse Creek,” I said.

  She looked at me like I was an idiot. “Don’t you get it? Time travel. I’m from 1987.”

  I shook my head.

  She looked into my eyes. “Come on,” she said. “I really thought you’d know more stuff than this.”

  As she dragged me farther from my house, I looked back, worried.

  She must have read my mind. “Look, if you got out okay, you’re not going to get caught now. Even if you do, just say you went out for a walk.”

  I couldn’t imagine just how badly that would go, but I figured she was right about the first part, so I let her take me down to the creek.

  “This used to be a bridge,” she said, pointing to a bend where both banks were about eight feet high. “I mean, it will be. It’s confusing, right? I keep thinking I’m in one of those Mad Max movies, you know? After the world’s been destroyed. I go to these places, and some of the trees look the same. Like that one. Tom Berditti’s dad put a tire swing on it a couple of years ago. But now it’s not there. Yet, I mean.”

  She walked me down the creek, pointing to things I couldn’t see, things that wouldn’t be here for years—a whole subdivision, paths to and from the creek, bus stops for routes I had never heard of, and things she called “super mailboxes.”

  She was entranced with the world of the past. I was more interested in her.

  “How did you get here?” I asked as we walked out onto Lawrence.

  “You know that,” she said. “The mirror.”

  “But how?”

  “That bus stop looks so new! In my time, it’s all beat up. When did they put it in?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care. It was here when we moved in. Look, how did you know about the mirror? Does it just take you back? Does it go forward as well? How does this work? I don’t care about this stuff about the neighborhood. I want to go to the mirror.”

  She threw up her hands, then tapped her watch. “Fine. I was just killing time anyway. I can’t show you anything until midnight.”

  When we got inside the carriage house, there were two minutes to go. Luka took out a flashlight and guided me upstairs through the maze of junk to the low dresser where I found the note. She looked at me and pursed her lips. “Look, I can sit around talking at you all night, or I can show you. What do you want?”

  Blood pounded in my ears. “Show me.”

  With that she grinned, shone her flashlight at the mirror, and touched it with her other hand. For just a moment, her palm lay on the surface, fingers splayed. “It’s hot,” she said. “You have to be ready. Cold when you go down, hot when you go up.” She beckoned. “Take the flashlight in your other hand. You have to hold my hand all the way through. There’s a space in between going in and coming out. Are you coming?”

  “I’ll be able to get back, won’t I?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Real adventurer, aren’t you? Yes, you’ll be able to get back. When you’re in the wrong time, you can always go back. After midnight, I mean. I haven’t figured everything out yet, but I know that. Melissa took me through with her last night.”

  I knew I had to go through. My name on a list. My name on a note. “How is all this connected?” I said, fixing her with my gaze. “Do you know about the dead baby? The one in the wall? Do you know about Prince Harming?”

  She
shrugged. “Kind of. There’s some story in the neighborhood about a guy who kills kids or smashes their heads in or something. But that’s all the past. All I can do right now is take you to my time.” She saw that I was about to ask more questions and held up her hand. “Look, I’m from the future, all right? You’re the one from the past. I came back to get answers from you, not sit around explaining things. Are you coming or not?”

  I had already made my decision when I left my room. I took the flashlight, grasped her hand, and let myself be dragged along as she stepped up onto the low surface of the dresser and, with some effort, pushed through the mirror. I could see her, like a fun-house effect, going from two girls, to one-and-a-half, to one, to just a double arm, shortening as it pulled me in.

  If she hadn’t warned me about the heat, I might have let go. As it was, I flinched. On the skin of my wrist I could feel first the freezing surface of the mirror, then the pore-opening fire of whatever lay beyond. It was like sticking your hand into burning Play-Doh.

  Up to my elbow disappeared. The tugging from the other side grew stronger. I felt Luka’s other hand encircle my wrist, and almost stumbled as I got both my feet onto the surface of the dresser and ducked my head.

  As my eyes moved toward the mirror, I turned my head and closed them. The cold mirror flattened my ear at first, then my head went through a heat that felt like it would burn my eyebrows off. I had taken a breath and closed my mouth, and now I imagined I was in some kind of burning, molten silver. We moved through that hot blindness for just a step—

  Then I was falling—out of the other side of the mirror and into something soft that went “Ow!” and punched me hard in the shoulder.

  I opened my eyes to darkness, then brought the flashlight around to Luka’s face.

  She put a finger to her lips. “Don’t talk loud or you’ll wake my mom up. Welcome to 1987.”

  Four

  The Rules

  4. When you go uptime to your home, you can bring the chosen kid from the past with you.

  My first impression of the future came from a small room that must have been decorated by someone with a great interest in horses and someone called Bon Jovi. I shone my flashlight beam all around. I guess I had been spoiled by the distant walls of my converted attic, because it seemed claustrophobic.

  “This is the future?” I whispered.

  “What did you expect, space ships and flying cars? Come here, I’ll show you.” Luka dragged me to the window. “Does that tree look familiar?”

  “Kind of.” To me, one tree pretty much looked like the next, but there was something in the way its lowest main branch jutted almost straight out, then changed direction and thrust upward. The street itself was just a quiet suburban subdivision. Did the cars look different? In the dark, I couldn’t tell. Maybe that one’s bumper was a little more rounded, and the same with the roof on that other one two doors down.

  It was the weather that convinced me. “You’ve had more snow,” I said.

  “You’re right. It’s been cold since New Year’s.”

  I lingered a moment at the window. I could see now the fascination she had felt just a few minutes ago on my side of the mirror. That whole world out there was the same, but not the same. I was out there somewhere, ten years older. My parents, too. Every problem I knew about in the world had moved and changed into something else. All because I had stepped through with Luka. I pointed my flashlight back at the dresser. “How did you get it?” I said.

  “My dad bought it at a garage sale just before you moved. I was, like, nine. The mirror won’t break, you know. I once threw an ashtray, full force. Not a scratch.”

  “Do you know me?” I said. “I mean—me now?”

  “Like I said, you moved. Just after we moved in. I don’t really remember you.”

  We were by this time sitting in front of her bed, the flashlight between us. “So what’s cool about the future?” I said at last.

  She shook her head. “It’s not the future, dummy, it’s just 1987. What do you expect, jetpacks and flying cars?”

  “No, just—do you have anything cool?”

  Luka gnawed her lower lip, then came to a decision. “Fine. Come with me. But once we get outside this room—no noise. I don’t want to know what would happen if my mom found a boy here at night.”

  She insisted on turning the flashlight off for our journey downstairs, so I had to rely on her to lead me.

  In the basement, Luka turned on a light, then picked up a black plastic rectangle with numbered buttons and pointed it in the direction of a large TV. Without her approaching it, and with a kind of muted thoom, the thing turned on. Then she went to it and touched a grey box on a shelf on the TV stand. She took away two smaller rectangular grey boxes away from it. Each one had a cross and two red buttons on its face.

  She handed one to me. “You’re gonna like this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Nintendo. It’s what’s cool in the future.”

  Two hours later, she practically had to rip the controller from my hand and force me up the stairs. “It’s almost three in the morning back in your time as well. Didn’t you say it was a school night?”

  It was. Sunday here was Tuesday back home.

  I didn’t care. I had been Mario. I had jumped onto turtles and mushrooms, leaped hammers and jets of fire, fallen down pits, and climbed into elevators. The future was cool.

  I told Luka as much. She shrugged. “It’s better than Atari because they have more games. Melissa, in ten years? Has way better stuff. And Keisha has even better than that. Anyway, come on. I still have to show you that drawer.”

  We started up the basement stairs. “How do you know about them? Keisha and Melissa?”

  “Even, odd? Forward, backward? My theory? It was really only for backward. I think it’s kind of cheating when I bring you forward like this. That’s why it’ll let you go back anytime. Kind of putting things right again. Anyway, hush.”

  Luka made me hot chocolate in a microwave and told me to drink up. “You have no idea how cold you’re going to be. Trust me.”

  “So who made it?” I whispered, looking at the mirror when we were back in her room with the door closed.

  She shrugged. “We don’t know. In 1997? They have this thing—it’s like all of the computers in the world connected together. They call it the Internet.”

  “Can you talk to it?”

  Another eye roll. “No. But you can type in things and search for them. Melissa and Keisha think maybe it has something to do with your house.”

  “So you really met them?” I said.

  Her shrug was minimal, cool. “Sure. I guess I almost had a heart attack when Melissa first came through. Eleven o’clock at night, this girl just steps out of my mirror. Keisha came to her a few days later.”

  “What about the one further up from her? Initials C.M.?”

  That stopped her. “How do you know anything about way up in 2017?”

  “So you haven’t met C.M.?” Oh, this was good. I knew something she didn’t.

  “Of course not. Think about how hard that would be. Melissa can only come back to see me on odd-numbered days. I’d have to get her to take me with her to her time, then wait a day until Keisha could pull us up to 2007, and another one for that other kid, whatever his name is, to come back to Keisha’s time. I’d be gone for three days. My mom would kill me.”

  I pursed my lips. “So we can’t ever go far from our own times?”

  “We’re working on it. Sleepovers. Lies to the parents. We’ll think of something. We have a whole year, right? That’s what the note said.”

  I rubbed my neck. “Yeah. But a year for what?”

  Luka looked right at me, and an electric moment of communication passed between us. I had never had that with anyone before, but I knew that I knew what she was thinking, a
nd I knew she knew I was thinking it, too. A year for what? Just for having fun, for doing something no one else on earth could do? A year for seeing the world stuttered ten years back and forth? A year for seeing that there never were any jetpacks or flying cars? Or a year for something more?

  “What are you getting at?” she said.

  “The dead baby,” I said. “The girl that went missing.” From my pocket, I took out the list I had found on my first day in the new house, the paper that had fallen away from the tiny, blackened corpse. I spread it in front of her and aimed my flashlight at it.

  She stared at it long enough to read the words three or four times. Then she ran her forefinger over the writing at the bottom, the message to me. “So it really is about you and me,” she said.

  “What do you mean, you and me?”

  Luka pursed her lips. “I should have shown you before,” she said. “I just—I got so used to keeping it a secret. I never showed anyone. Since we moved in.”

  Without another word, she stood up, walked to the dresser, and pulled out its top drawer. She brought it back and lay it upside down, the beam of my flashlight revealing the rough, scratched letters.

  Luka, help Kenny. Trust John Wald. Kenny says he is the auby one. Save the baby.

  “Okay,” I said after a long, long silence.

  “I found it years ago,” Luka said. “What’s that mean, an auby one? Did they misspell Aubrey? How is that even pronounced? Is it aw-bee or oh-bee? Or oh-bye?”

  “No idea. But that’s our names.”

  “I know.” She grinned and so did I. “This is the coolest thing that’s ever happened in the world. I mean—it’s really you. There’s really a Kenny.”

  “Hey!” came a voice from the hallway. I heard a door open. “You on the phone with your stupid father again? Hell’s the matter with you?”

  Luka’s eyes grew wide, and she snapped off the light. “Go,” she whispered, pushing me to the dresser. “Remember, it’ll be cold.” I was already pressing my hand on the glass. Just as I felt it give, she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. “For luck,” she said, and was gone like a shot to her bedroom door, opening it and charging out to meet her mother. “I’m not talking to anyone,” she said. “You were having some drunk dream.”