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
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, and 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.
“Okay,” I said after a long, long silence.
“I found it years ago,” Luka said. “What’s that mean, an
“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.”
The last thing I heard in 1987, before I shoved my face into iced molasses, sounded like a slap.
Luka wasn’t kidding about the cold. It touched every part of your skin, no matter how much clothing you wore. And it held on. I closed my eyes as I pushed through. The journey didn’t seem so long this time, maybe because I had done it before, maybe just because I was coming home. No matter what reassurances Luka had given me, a part of me had been terrified of being trapped.
I took a large step through the bone-chilling cold of the mirror and felt the air of the carriage house. My
