TIme After Time

disaster. After two beers, all I had to do was think about needing to take a leak and I’d wind up back home in my bathroom.

Anna gives me another squeeze. “Did you get my present?”

I nod. “Thank you. It’s perfect. Exactly what the room needed.” I step back and take a closer look at her. “You look amazing.”

Anna looks down at her outfit and shakes her head. “Emma’s doing, of course.” The shirt is lower cut than anything I’ve ever seen on her, but I don’t want to make her self-conscious, so I don’t say anything.

“How was your trip?” she asks, raising her eyebrows jokingly.

“Very short.”

“No little bags of peanuts on board?”

I run my thumb along her cheek. “Nope. No peanuts.”

She fake-pouts. “Bummer. I liked the peanuts.”

“Can you stop talking now so I can kiss you?” I start to move in closer to her but she pulls away, glancing over my shoulder at the party in full swing behind me, and reaches for my hand.

“Not here.” She gives me a peck on the cheek instead. “I have an idea. Follow me.”

She leads me to the other side of the lawn, past the DJ and to the edge of the garden. We’re not exactly out of sight, but this is a little more private.

I think I’m finally going to kiss her, but then she ducks down low and pulls me into a small grove of fruit trees. We push branches and leaves out of our way and when we’re able to stand up straight again, we’re standing at the edge of a hill. A tall, wrought-iron gate hugs the slope, and Anna feels around in the dark for the opening. She finds the latch and the gate swings toward us with a squeak.

It’s dark back here, but the narrow path is illuminated by a series of lights hidden in the surrounding ferns and grasses. Tiny rocks crunch under our feet as we follow the path to a wooden bridge, and once we’re across, I see a cement bench next to a giant Buddha statue. I can still hear the music, but it’s muffled.

Anna stops in front of the bench and steps in close to me, resting her hands on my waist. “So…you were saying something about peanuts,” she says with a smile.

“No, I was saying something about kissing you.” And before she can say another word, my hands settle on the small of her back and I close what’s left of the distance between us. I feel her hands on the back of my neck, her fingers traveling into my hair, pulling me into her, kissing me.

When we stop, she doesn’t open her eyes or move away. I can feel her breath as she speaks. “I missed you.” She runs her thumb along my jawbone and my pulse races. “Tell me about the last few weeks. I want to know everything.”

Everything. I take a deep breath, preparing to launch in. I’ve been waiting for three weeks to tell Anna everything. How many times did I stare at my cell phone, wishing I could call and tell her about the fire, and two kids that are alive today but shouldn’t be, and the look on my dad’s face when I told him what I’d done? Finally, here she is, staring at me with this sweet, expectant look on her face, and my mind is totally blank.

I’m not ready to go there yet, so I decide to warm up with a few basics. I sit down, straddling the bench, and Anna sits right in front of me. When I talk, she leans in close, as if my class schedule is especially interesting, and when I tell her about my friends and how weird it is to be back with all of them, she scoots forward and takes my hand, lightly tracing the lines in my palm with her fingertip as she listens.

When I’m finished, I ask her about life at Westlake. She tells me about Argotta’s class and how she has a new conversation partner, and that every time she turns around and looks at my old desk, it makes her happy to think that I sat there once but also makes her sad that I no longer do. Last weekend, she got the top time in her cross-country meet.

We’re both quiet for a few minutes and I see my opening. I take a deep breath, preparing to tell her about the fire, but before I can, she squeezes my hand and says, “I have something to tell you.”

I smile at her. “I have something to tell you, too.”

“You first,” she says.

“Yeah? You sure?” I ask, but I’m secretly glad I don’t have to wait any longer. I was nervous at first, but now that we’re all warmed up, I can’t wait to see the look on her face when I tell her what I did.

Anna nods.

I shake my head, looking for the right words to kick off my bizarre story. It’s still kind of hard to believe, let alone say out loud. “I did something really crazy. Or stupid. Or awesome.… I don’t know. It’s sort of hard to categorize.”

She looks at me quizzically.

“My dad and I were watching the news one morning, and there was this story about two kids who were killed in an apartment fire. For the next few days, I—I—” I start stammering, and rake my fingers through my hair as I search for the right words. “I just couldn’t get the image out of my mind.”

I’m careful about what I say next, purposely withholding the future-specific things I can’t tell her about, like the online news article and Google Maps. “It started as pure curiosity. I sat there, scratching equations and time conversions into my notebook, trying to figure out if it would even be possible, but before I knew it, I was combing the house for a fire extinguisher and a smoke detector.”

“No way.…” Her eyes light up and a smile spreads across her face. “You stopped it?”

I shake my head. “I didn’t stop it. I just…readjusted a few things.”

“You…readjusted a few things?”

I tell her how I crept through the dark apartment. I describe the wall of school photos, and I explain how I worked quickly to mount the smoke detector without waking the kids.

“I went back and did nearly three days over again. Until Emma, I’d never gone back more than five or ten minutes, you know? I didn’t even know it was possible. But it worked. When I went into the kitchen that morning, the news story on TV was about a fire that took out an apartment complex, not a fire that killed two kids. And when I told my dad what I did…” My words hang in the air. I look down at a cluster of plants and Anna rests her hands on my hips.

“You changed it.”

I nod slowly. And then I can’t help it. I break into a huge smile. “I don’t know if it was right or not. It doesn’t matter now, it was a one-time thing. Or, I guess, counting Emma, a two-time thing. I just wanted to see if I could do it again.”

“And you did.”

“Yeah.”

Anna brings her hands to my face and kisses me. She pulls away and stares at me for what feels like a really long time, and I assume that she’s trying to think of something to say. Finally I remember that she had something to tell me too.

“Hey, you said you had news too? What did you want to tell me?”

She checks her watch.

“Nothing. It can wait.” She stands up and holds out her hand. “We’ve been gone a long time. Emma is probably starting to look for me.”

I realize that tonight’s supposed to be about Emma, but I’m not ready to go back out there and share Anna with the rest of her friends yet. I wish I knew when we’d get to be alone again.

Before I can say anything, she shrugs and says, “Really. It’s no big deal. I’ll tell you later.”

We wind back up the path and reemerge from the trees. I spot Emma right away, but that’s not saying much. She’s pretty hard to miss, dancing with a big group of girls in her short skirt, tight half-shirt, and a huge fabric hat in the shape of a birthday cake.

When Emma sees us, she bounces over and gives me a big hug. I wish her a happy birthday and she grabs each of us by the arm and leads us back out to the patch of grass that’s become a dance floor. I try not to think about the fact that I’m the only guy out here.

We’ve been dancing for about five minutes, and I’m thinking that’s more than sufficient. I’m just about to leave when Emma throws her arm over my shoulder and pulls me in close to her. “I’ve missed you, Shaggy.” She musses my hair and I can’t help smiling. No one’s called me that in months.