At the mention of family and pets, Isabel and Julia burst into tears.
By all rights, this is where the time-traveling adventures of the Flashback Four should come to an end. They’re stuck. There’s no way out.
But obviously, that can’t happen. We’re only at the beginning of the book. You’re only on page 11. If our story ended here, it would be a short story, not a book.
Something, of course, will have to happen. Please be patient.
“It wasn’t supposed to go this way,” Isabel moaned through her tears. “What went wrong? I’m the good kid. I always did everything I was told to do. Why me? What am I going to do now?”
David and Julia just shook their heads.
It’s been said that people who have suffered a traumatic experience go through five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. The Flashback Four were churning through those stages quickly.
“Look on the bright side,” Luke told the others. “Fifteen hundred passengers on the Titanic died. We didn’t. We survived. That’s a good thing, right? We’ll just have to start over again.”
“Luke’s right,” Julia said, getting up off the bench. “Our lives aren’t over. Maybe they’re just beginning.”
Isabel and David were not convinced. They hung their heads forlornly.
“Think of it this way,” Luke told them. “Nothing worse than this will ever happen to us. We’re bulletproof now. If we survived the Titanic, we can survive anything, right, guys?”
“I never thought of it that way,” David said, looking up.
“We need to pull ourselves together and figure out a strategy,” Luke continued. “Let me think this through. People are going to ask us how we got here. We need to get our story straight.”
“Maybe we should just tell them the truth,” Isabel volunteered.
Isabel’s natural inclination was always to tell the truth. Besides the fact that lying is just wrong, it also gets complicated. When you lie, then you have to remember the lie and who you told it to. It’s a lot to remember.
“The truth?!” Julia looked at Isabel and shook her head. “Are you kidding? You want to tell people that we traveled through time and ended up on the deck of the Titanic? They’ll put us in an insane asylum.”
Julia sat back down on the bench.
“We have no birth certificates,” Julia continued. “No paper trail. We have no proof that we existed before today.”
“We already talked about this, remember?” David reminded the others. “We decided to pretend we were orphans. Our parents went down with the Titanic.”
“Oh yeah! That’s good,” said Julia, who knew a good lie when she heard one. “That could work. I don’t know if they kept careful records of who was on the ship.”
“What’s our money situation?” Luke asked Julia, who had been holding their cash.
She pulled out a wad of wet bills that John Jacob Astor—one of the wealthiest men in the world—had given to her before he perished on the Titanic.
“Eight hundred . . . nine hundred . . . a thousand bucks,” Julia said after counting ten hundred-dollar bills.
That was a lot of money in 1912. The average salary in those days was $750 a year.
“That’ll hold us for a while,” Luke said. “But it won’t last forever. We’re gonna have to get jobs.”
“Jobs?” David asked. “How are we gonna get jobs? We’re kids.”
“Kids had jobs in 1912,” Isabel pointed out. “They didn’t have child labor laws yet.”
“I’m not going to work in some sweatshop for two dollars a week,” Julia insisted.
“You won’t have to work in a sweatshop,” Luke assured her. “There are lots of other jobs we can get.”
“Like what?” David asked. “Do you mind if I point out the obvious? I’m black. Do you think anybody’s gonna hire me for a good job in 1912? Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t even born yet. Neither was Rosa Parks, Jackie Robinson, Malcolm X—”
“Look,” Julia said, “none of us have to get jobs. Don’t you guys remember? We talked about this. We’ve got something nobody else here has.”
“What?” asked Isabel.
Julia lowered her voice to a whisper, as if anyone might be listening in to their conversation.
“We know what’s going to happen,” she said. “When you go back in time, naturally you can predict the future.”
David snapped his fingers and stood up excitedly.
“Luke, remember you told that Astor guy that the Red Sox were going to win the World Series?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Well, we could bet our thousand bucks on the Red Sox and make a bundle!”
“Brilliant. Just one problem,” Luke told David. “The World Series isn’t until October. It’s April now. What are we gonna do for the next six months? We’ll need to spend that money for food, a place to live, and other stuff.”
“Oh yeah,” David said, sitting back down on the bench.
Julia jumped off the bench again.
“No, you dopes!” she exclaimed. “You don’t have to bet on the World Series to make money! I can’t believe you all forgot. We talked about this, too. We can invent something that we have in our time but they don’t have here! It will be brand-new to them. Remember?”
The Flashback Four had been through a lot over the last few days. It made sense for them to forget the idea they had discussed when they had been all stressed out and their lives were in danger. In fact, it made sense for them to block some of those memories out.
“The zipper!” shouted Luke, Isabel, and David.
Of course, the zipper. The modern zipper was perfected by a Swedish American engineer named Gideon Sundback in 1913. It took him four years to get a patent. If the Flashback Four could create a simple zipper in 1912 and sell it to a company that would manufacture it, they could make millions. It might not be fair to Gideon Sundback, but this was a matter of survival. And the kids would never have to work a day in their lives.
“How hard could it be?” Julia asked. “We just take some little pieces of metal, and—”
“I can do a schematic drawing,” David volunteered. “My dad
