Jimmy gave me a look that might have had some kind of apology hidden under the fear, then pushed into the mirror and was gone. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Luka squaring her shoulders and straightening her back the way she did before doing something scary. I realized it probably hadn’t even registered with her why Jimmy and I had been hesitating. She didn’t look at me anymore, just faced outward as we heard her mother’s feet on the stairs.
“What’s going on up there? You know my rule. You better not have a boy in your room. Is that it? Being a little tramp? Going to make the whole neighborhood hate me even more?”
“Mother, you’re imagining things,” said Luka. “I’m doing homework.”
How many seconds since Jimmy had gone in? I pushed into the mirror. Still hot. I couldn’t even think about what Jimmy would do once it crashed through to him what he had done. Thirty years uptime. What was taking him so long?
“Don’t you ‘mother’ me. I’ll send you to your father’s whether he likes it or not,” said Luka’s mother. “And whoever that is up there, you better—”
It was too much for me. Hoping desperately that Jimmy was through and the mirror would open in the right direction, I stepped up and pushed my way in. I didn’t care about the cold, didn’t even let it slow me down.
The cold.
Downtime cold.
I was going home.
My T-shirt caught in a splintered bit of the frame for a moment, but I kept pushing. Inside, I paused to check that the rippling image-bits showed my carriage house, then charged out, shivering into the warm spring air.
I was so relieved to be back that I just sat on the dresser and rubbed my arms for warmth, then leaned back against the mirror to breathe a sigh of relief.
And sank back into it.
My back burned with uptime heat. I sprang away and whirled around. This wasn’t supposed to be possible. The mirror shouldn’t open for me again until eleven tonight. Even then, it should take me back, not forward.
I reached out and touched. My fingers sank in, burning as they went, freezing as I withdrew.
It was then that I saw the thread. It led from the sleeve of my T-shirt all the way into the mirror. I gave it a gentle tug and it grew taut. I remembered the tear as I caught it going in.
For want of a better object, I took out my house key and touched it to the mirror, exactly where the thread was. It clinked against the glass. I could move it right next to the thread, even let the thread in a little and pull it back out, then touch the key against the mirror again. Tap, tap. As soon as my finger touched, though, the mirror let it through.
Aside from the thread, this was the way the mirror normally worked. It wouldn’t let through any inanimate object unless part of us went through with it first. If I put the key in my fist, it would go through.
I didn’t move for a few long moments, thinking about what this must mean. Could you hold them open indefinitely like this? Could we have been going backward and forward at will all this time?
I heard my name called outside. My mother. Home for half an hour by this time.
I ripped the thread from my T-shirt. What could I tie it to? I couldn’t pull it too far or it would tear away at the other side, and what if this was the only time this would work? What if I tried to show it to the others and couldn’t make it happen again?
“Kenny!”
The key. I quickly tied the thread around it. Tension pulled it toward the mirror, but though the thread wanted to go through, the key just clinked against the glass and stayed there.
I heard my name again and fled down the stairs.
I was excited enough at my new discovery that, after my yelling-at for not being home and not leaving a note, I still risked staying up past lights out and went back to the carriage house.
Luka was waiting. “Okay,” she said, pointing to the thread, “this is amazing. Why couldn’t we have figured this out before? Do you realize how amazing? When we pass it on to the others, anyone can go as far back or forward as we like.”
I felt the same breathless excitement, but I also had a lot of questions, having had time to think. It was an odd-numbered day, just after eleven at night. Normally, I should be able to go back to 1967, but the mirror heated our hands when we pushed in, telling us it was still connected to Luka’s time.
I wanted to ask how this could work, how it could fit with all the other rules we had discovered, but another question surprised its way out of me first.
“Where’s Jimmy?”
Luka frowned at me. “What? Didn’t he go home?”
I explained what had happened, Jimmy panicking and going uptime. “I figured he’d come back and you’d see him as he passed through. But look.” I pushed my hand in again. “If that takes me forward to your time, and it did the same for Jimmy, then he wouldn’t be able to get back home. He’d be stuck either here or at your place. What?”
Luka’s jaw was hanging open. “If he could even get back to my place.”
“What? You can always go back to your own time.”
She shook her head and pointed to the thread tied to my key at the surface of the mirror. “I don’t think so, Kenny. Not if there’s one of these things in it. Think about it. If this thread keeps the mirror open between your time and mine, how could he even get in on Melissa’s end? We always thought the odd-even day was some kind of safety thing, right? So that someone couldn’t be coming out of a mirror from the past at the same time someone was coming from the future? This must be the same.”
“We have to take it out then,” I said. “Jimmy’ll be going crazy.”
Reluctantly, Luka agreed. She went through to her time, reached out of the mirror and unsnagged the thread, then brought it back with her.
We didn’t have to wait long for Jimmy. Within a couple of minutes, he came shivering out of the mirror. “You guys! I thought I was stuck in the future forever. What happened?”
I held up the thread with my house key still attached. “We made a doorstop, Jimmy. We just changed everything.”
Two
It took us the last two weeks of school to work out the rules covering doorstops. The anchors had to be objects that had spent some time with one of us, stretched between string that hadn’t. We loved the new ways the decades opened up for us. Luka and I could rush home after school and go back and forth between our times depending on whose parents were home, what the weather was like, and what was on TV. She and Melissa were enjoying the same benefits, but Keisha hadn’t been back to visit Melissa in 1997 since leaving the note saying she had something to tell about Prince Harming, so she didn’t know if anybody further in the future knew how to jam a mirror open.
The mirror rules still frustrated us, though. The more I fumbled with the shatterdate book, the more Luka became obsessed with going further into the past, but the logistics of this still escaped us. Unless she wanted to go missing for a week, there was no way to get Luka further back than the fifties, and even that was difficult considering how fearful Jimmy was of the mirror.
On a day late in June, I took Luka back to 1967 so she could share her frustrations with Jimmy and Rick. They had come along with some hockey cards and wanted to convince us of yet another get-rich-quick scheme, selling these much more portable items through the decades. Luka refused even to take off the newspaper Jimmy had wrapped them in until we talked about what she wanted. “I want to go back,” she said. “I have a plan about how to do it, but you need to get Anthony in on it. It’s time for him to start helping us.”
Jimmy and Rick exchanged a look. We were all seated around a “campfire” of flashlights in the junk house eating snacks from the future. “Uh, yeah,” said Jimmy. “We been meaning to talk to you about Anthony.”
Luka and I looked between the two of them questioningly. Rick sighed, pulled up a chair, and motioned for
