for the stuff. Twenty bucks. That’s nothing compared to what we could do. Go back ten years, buy up a bunch of cheap stuff, then go up to your time or that girl’s and sell it all for a mint.”
“I don’t think that’s what it’s supposed to be about,” I said, reaching out to warm my hands in the small flame of his Coleman stove.
Rick looked up sharply. “You don’t think what? What’s what supposed to be about, Kenneth?”
I flinched from his anger, but pushed on, pretending it was like the impersonal cold or heat of the mirror. “The mirror,” I said, not even wanting to look up to the second floor, not wanting to let him know how much I just wanted to run back into it. “I don’t think it’s about us getting rich. I got a—there was a note. Left for me. It said my name. Somebody was asking me for help from the past. Something about a baby that got killed.”
Rick greeted these revelations with a long, stony silence. “Well,” he said at last, “nobody here’s asking for your help.”
Fine, I wanted to say, I’ll just be on my way, then. But I didn’t want to let him know just how much I wanted out of here.
“Yeah, that’s right,” said Jimmy. “Things are just fine here. How do we know you’re telling the truth, anyway? Maybe you broke into my folks’ house to go into the mirror. See, Rick, I think we gotta get rid of that thing. There’s no telling who could—”
Rick raised his hand to shut Jimmy up. “So what are you here for? That’s the question, isn’t it? You came here to help somebody, is that it?”
I studied his face for a moment before answering. It wasn’t a bully question, the kind where there’s no right answer and you’re just going to get interrupted or pushed or hit whatever you say. He actually wanted an answer. “How could I not go?” I said. “It’s time travel. And there’s something about a baby. I think I’m supposed to save it. It was—it was hidden in the walls. Like someone killed it and hid it there. With a note asking me for help.”
Jimmy shook his head. “Man, that’s crazy. I mean, you’re lucky it was us here. This old place—technically, my folks rent it from Rick’s dad, but he doesn’t come out here much. All kinds of stuff goes on here. I’m not even allowed to be here. Kids with wild parties. Pete Masterson’s crew gets drunk here sometimes. Like if it was a Friday or a Saturday night, and you came out of there—no way.”
“That’s why he’s got us,” said Rick. His gaze still hadn’t left my face.
Jimmy swallowed. “Sure, Rick, sure. But he should just stay home is all I’m saying. You know? I could even—we could give him back his stuff, too. We could give it back and just push him back through and—that’s it. Too dangerous, you know?”
“Jimmy, shut up a minute, will you?” Rick said it without any inflection. He scratched his chin and kept looking at me. “What about it? Is that what you’re going to do? Never come back?” He waved his hand impatiently when I hesitated. “Not what you think I want you to say. The truth. Are you coming back?”
A long moment stretched between us. Jimmy cleared his throat. “Uh, Rick? My dad? He could wake up any time. He don’t find me in the house, he’ll come looking, you know?”
“Fine.” Rick didn’t even look at him, just kept his gaze fixed on me. I realized I had gotten it wrong. There was still baby fat in his face, still a kid in there. “Get out of here, then. Leave the kid’s stuff here.”
Jimmy hesitated briefly at the door to give me a look that might have been an apology. Then he was gone.
Rick let another long moment of silence follow the click of the carriage house door. “How old are you, kid?” he said at last.
“Fifteen.” He looked at me dubiously, and I amended, “In a couple of months.” Still a lie. My birthday wasn’t for half a year.
“You can take your backpack,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said. Wondering if he might change his mind, I got up and went to pick it up.
“Can you believe it?” he said. “Eight years ago, I found a diary. Most of it makes no sense. But it talked about the mirror. About when the guy was a kid and he went through it and met his own mother before she was his mother. Crazy stuff. He said how the mirror was unbreakable, how it chose one kid every ten years to get to go back in time.”
“And you waited,” I said.
“Not at first. Didn’t believe it. But the idea was cool.” I nodded. I had felt the same way about my list. “Last year Jimmy tells me about this mirror. He’s up here one day fooling around, and he throws a baseball right at it. For kicks. Doesn’t break. He brings me in to see it. Man, I couldn’t lay a scratch on that thing.” Rick scratched his chin and looked at me.
“You’re too old, aren’t you?”
His eyes narrowed. “Is that it? The diary didn’t say anything about age. There’s a rule?”
“I got a note,” I said. “I mean—I sent it, I think. To the girl twenty years later. It says the mirror never takes anyone older than sixteen.”
Rick closed his eyes and shook his head. “Found that goddamn diary when I was nine years old underneath an old floorboard. Too old.”
“But not Jimmy.”
His eyes were still screwed shut. “Jimmy goddamn Hayes,” he said. “Kid’s got the guts of a bed-wetting chipmunk. January second.” He shook his head. “I let him stick around while I was going to go in, right? I didn’t even tell him about the diary. I just wanted to amaze him. Stole some smokes from my dad, brought Jimmy in here, and just casually leaned against the mirror. Nothing. I got so mad, I pushed him into it.” He opened his eyes for the first time in a couple of minutes and looked right at me. “Took him three hours to come back. He ended up in some basement. Thought it was me playing a joke, and started yelling for me. Someone came, and he ran out of there. Spent all that time wandering around, then snuck back in a window. Course, at the time, he didn’t even know what was going on. I had to explain when he got back.” Rick dropped his cigarette and ground it into the floor. “So you think it’s all about this dead baby? Some kind of mission in the past?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean—I think so. The girl from 1987, Luka. She found a message as well. It told her to help me.”
“But how can you save the kid if you’ve already found its body?”
I held up my hands. “I don’t know. I don’t get it. But somebody asked for my help.”
Rick closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath, then let it out through his teeth in a long sigh. “You’re a weird kid, you know that? Okay, H. G. Wells.” He stuck his hand in the inside pocket of his jean jacket and brought out a squat leather-bound book with pages sticking out of it.
“What is it?” I said, looking at his outstretched hand.
“The diary. I can’t make much sense of it. There’s the mirror stuff, and some stuff about jobs he had, but the rest? Guy thinks he’s two different people or something. Take a look anyway.”
“Why are you giving this to me?”
He looked away. The light of the Coleman stove caught a bitter twist in his face. “Comic books. That was my big idea, you know that? I mean, I thought about stock market and crap like that as well, but I figured who wants to figure out how to invest in stocks. I figured I’d get all the other kids who could go into the mirror—we’d pass stuff up and down the line and make some money.” He shook his head. “Christ. Time travel—and I wanted to sell comic books. Go on, H. G. Wells. Take it. Save the baby. Maybe there’s a reason the damn mirror didn’t open up for me.”
Six
The Rules
6. You can’t ever really change anything.
Luka, when she next made it to my time more than a week later, was astonished by my story, which I told her over some microwaved lasagnas she had swiped from her mother’s fridge and “nuked” just before coming through. The cold of backward time travel didn’t affect inanimate objects. Your clothes and your possessions didn’t freeze, just your skin and everything underneath.
She felt sympathetic at Rick’s disappointment. “Can you imagine? He knows all about it, and then he has to
