Chapter Eight

August 22

The condo building doesn’t really have a yard, so I pull Mr. Grumpy across the street to the grassy median running down the

middle of Starry Hill Drive. He makes a very lazy attempt to hike his leg against a tree and then wheezes his way over to

a sunny patch and sinks down with a contented grunt.

I sit down next to him in the sliver of shade offered by the skinny new trees planted here and pull out my phone. It’s still

as charged up as it was a few minutes ago, so maybe whatever happened this morning was a fluke.

I turn the phone over and over in my hands, chewing my lip. And then, on an impulse, I google In Between Books . The store has a website, but the only thing on it is in between books in big blue letters against a plain white background, followed by the hours and location. The only option on the menu is

shop now , but when I tap on that, the page just says coming soon!

This is not helpful. I want an image of the inside of the store—something recent. Something to tell me whether it really looks

exactly the same as I remember. If it really hasn’t changed.

But even using Google Image Search, the only picture I find is the storefront, from the online version of the Oak Falls newspaper.

It belongs to a bitty article about In Between Books getting a new front window and ditching the old peeling letters that

I remember. I try zooming in on the image, hoping I’ll be able to see through the window. But there’s too much glare on the

glass, and this zoomed-in, the picture quality is grainy anyway.

Maybe it’s because my thoughts are still stuck in the bookstore, on that kid behind the register who couldn’t possibly have been me, or maybe I’m just desperate for a distraction, but before I even realize what I’m doing, I type Michael Weaver into Google. And this time, finally, I actually hit search.

The first thing that pops up is his LinkedIn page. There’s no picture, but I’m pretty sure it’s him. Graduated from the University

of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Teacher at Plainview High School in Oak Falls. It has to be him.

The second result is from Plainview High School’s website. The page listing all the teachers. The back of my neck tingles

as I scroll past name after name that I recognize. Teachers I had who are still there, like Mr. George (who’s completely bald

now, according to his picture), Mrs. Koracek-Smith (who used to just be Ms. Koracek), and Mrs. Siriani (who either dyes her

hair or hasn’t updated her picture in a decade because she looks exactly the same). But apparently Keegan Turner is the band

director now—he used to paint mugs at my birthday parties and played trombone with Michael in band. Rebecca Voss was part

of Natalie Linsmeier’s crowd, and I mostly remember her constantly chewing gum and looking bored, but now she has glasses

and a sharp bob, and teaches history.

And there, at the bottom of the page, is Michael. He looks quietly professional in his picture—sitting against a blue background,

wearing a checkered button-down a lot like the one he was wearing when I bumped into him. No glasses. A very small, only slightly

crooked smile. His auburn hair is neatly combed—barely any hint of rumpled curls.

I tap on his name, and a short bio appears: he grew up in Oak Falls, he went to Plainview himself, then to college, then got

a teaching degree and now here he is. Professional. Upstanding. Adult. He looks... functional. Like someone who has a 401(k) and probably actually goes to the dentist every year.

“Darby!”

I look up. Mom is standing in front of the condo building, waving at me. I push myself up and tug Mr. Grumpy back across the

street.

“Ready to go?” Mom asks.

“Yeah. Sure. Where’s Cheryl?”

“Oh, she already left. Off to show another house!” Mom shakes her head. “She says the real estate business around here is better than ever, and I’d believe it.”

We get back in the Jeep and the windows go down again. Mom turns the other way on Main Street, muttering something about not going through that traffic again . We loop around behind First Church to West Avenue, the back-roads route that follows the edge of Oak Falls. We drive past

Dr. Nilsen’s big white house, with its four massive columns. It’s one of the oldest houses around—the original farmhouse from

back when a whole lot of Oak Falls was farmland. Now the original farm has been broken up and sold off, turned into subdivisions,

and just the old farmhouse is left, owned by Oak Falls’s only dentist. The houses out here sit on larger lots, and the roads

that wind between them are narrow and don’t resemble any kind of grid.

I’m turning my phone over and over in my hands again. “Hey, where does Michael Weaver live these days?”

I try to sound as casual as I can, but I still see Mom’s eyebrows go up from the corner of my eye. “Right up there,” she says,

pointing through the windshield.

Wait, seriously?

I follow her gaze. She’s pointing at a two-story house with white siding, sitting far back from West Avenue at the end of

a cracked driveway. The expansive front yard is a little overgrown and the mailbox is leaning, but the house is kind of cute,

in an old farmhouse type of way. It’s got a big front porch with several lawn chairs, the overhanging roof held up by white

posts.

It also looks vaguely familiar. “Isn’t that Michael’s grandma’s house?”

Mom looks surprised that I remembered. “Yes, it is. Betty died a number of years ago. Michael lives there now with a couple

roommates. You remember Liz Forrest?”

“Yeah.” And I wish I didn’t. I wish I couldn’t still picture a spindly girl with long, layered dark hair and a penchant for

leather wrist cuffs and a lot of necklaces.

Liz Forrest was my replacement. When I got back from that semester of boarding school, she was Michael’s new best friend.

“She’s one of the roommates,” Mom says. “I wish I could remember the other girl’s name... you wouldn’t know her. She’s not from around here. Indiana, maybe? That reminds me!” Mom reaches over and whacks my arm. “I need to remember to give Michael all those old books from my classroom. Help me remember to write that down, Darby. Give Michael books. ”

“Yeah,” I say, but I’m barely listening.

I really thought Michael and Liz might be dating. By the end of my first week back at Plainview, I was really starting to

wonder. I couldn’t see why else they’d be spending literally every single minute together. Anytime I saw them in class, they

were sitting next to each other. At lunch, the two of them sat at our old table, and based on his hand gestures and the Marvel

comics on the table between them, I was pretty sure Michael was explaining the plot of whatever issue he’d just read—just

like he used to do with me.

In fact, everything they did together was stuff Michael used to do with me. Michael drove Liz to school in his dad’s old pickup

truck. In homeroom, they scribbled notes to each other. I even saw them together at Main Street Video after school one Friday

when Mom and I were picking out a movie to rent. They didn’t notice me, which probably had less to do with them being distracted

by each other and more to do with the fact that as soon as they walked in, I deserted my mom and hid behind the shelf of kids’

movies, where I figured I’d be safe.

But the real kicker was the Saturday they came into the bookstore. I’d been back for two weeks—the longest two weeks of my

life. Michael hadn’t said a word to me. It was like I was invisible. Like he’d forgotten we were ever friends.

I was re-alphabetizing a shelf, with the hood of my sweatshirt pulled up because it was blowing snow everywhere outside and

the store was drafty. The bell over the door jingled, I turned around, and there they were, scuffing snow off their winter

boots.

They were both bundled up in coats and hats and scarves. Liz’s long hair was sticking awkwardly out over the shoulders of

her puffy coat, and Michael’s glasses were completely fogged up.

“Okay, where are these comics,” Liz said, looking around. “I want pizza.”

“Just a sec,” Michael said. “I have to pick them up.”

Liz looked up at him and laughed. “Can you even see where to go?”

“I can see,” Michael said defensively, starting for the counter.

I was pretty sure he couldn’t see, because he hadn’t noticed me at all. Neither had Liz, but she had no reason to notice me.

She wasn’t my friend.

My heart tried to jump halfway up my throat. I’d been hoping Michael would stop by the store. If he was explaining Marvel

comics to Liz at lunch, then I figured he must still be picking them up from In Between, which meant there was a chance he’d

come to the store when I was working. And I thought—or at least I hoped—that if he came to pick up a comic while I was working,

and I was the one who handed it to him, then maybe he’d remember all the other times I handed him the latest Marvel comic...

and things would stop being weird.

I left my shelf reorganizing and slipped back behind the counter just as Michael reached it. Just as his glasses unfogged.

He stared at me. Any lingering hint of his crooked smile vanished. His face was totally blank. He might as well have turned

into a statue.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” said Liz. She sounded awkward, and I suddenly wondered if Michael had told her something. Something about me, about why he was ignoring me.

I swallowed and ducked down behind the counter to the shelf where Hank always put the comics when they arrived at the store.

They were so much slimmer than any book, he was worried they’d get lost in the back room.

I straightened up and set the comic on the counter. “Here you go.”

Michael just kept staring at me. Blankly. He fished some cash out of his coat pocket and laid it down on the counter. Which

meant there was no risk of us touching. I wondered if he’d done that on purpose.

I glanced down at the counter and realized he’d put down exact change. I picked up the bills and the coins, and saw the comic

move from the corner of my eye. When I looked up, Michael was already turning away, tucking it inside his coat, and Liz was

giggling at him. They pushed their way out of the bookstore, letting in an icy blast of air.

He hadn’t said a single word to me.

As soon as we get back to the house, Mom makes a beeline for the basement. “I know I’ve got some boxes down there,” she says. “Better figure out how many, so we can buy some more and get packing!”

I unhook Mr. Grumpy from his leash and head to my room, the bookstore and Michael and Liz still banging around in my brain.

I need a door to close, because I’m about to google something completely ridiculous.

I sit down on my bedroom floor, pull out my phone, and google time travel.

Time travel is the concept of movement between certain points in time , according to Wikipedia.

Clocks on airplanes and satellites travel at a different speed than those on Earth , according to NASA’s website.

Time can’t exist without space, and space can’t exist without time , according to some website called How Stuff Works.

Next Star Trek movie promises to clear up some big time-travel questions! , according to Vulture.

Well, that’s not particularly helpful or relevant.

But actually, none of it is. Most of the results are guys complaining about movie plots on YouTube or incredibly long physics

papers behind paywalls. And the rest are fluffy pop-science pieces in USA Today or National Geographic about Jules Verne or wormholes or singularities. The only real conclusion seems to be that time travel might be possible going forward, theoretically anyway, but certainly not backward. Beyond that... there is no conclusion.

I toss my phone onto the bed.

I didn’t time travel back to 2009. And some teenage version of me didn’t time travel to the present. I hallucinated something

super weird. That’s the only real explanation, because nobody can travel through time. Everything I just read told me that.

I feel like this should be comforting.

It’s not.