A World Without You(10)

Bright, vivid flashes erupt into my mind’s eye, speeding from one image to the next so violently that I cannot retain anything more than fragments: an ear with a diamond earring, a tree with new green leaves, the sound of crashing waves, the taste of vomit, the roofline of a house, the smell of smoke, a horse’s whinnying, the feel of another hand in mine, the fingers slipping from my grasp. I cry out in frustration, groping blindly into the darkness, but the timestream repels my presence, pushing against me.

Time is fighting me, and I pull back before I lose what little control over the timestream I have. My arms flail wildly, and my fingers brush a thick string, red and blue and green and brown all wrapped together, and I see a flash of another moment in time, one I didn’t intend to revisit.

My first lesson with Dr. Franklin.

Even though we all have different powers, the Doctor guides us in the basics of controlling them. The same principles apply. This has always been the point of Berkshire: to give students the control they need to blend with society. He’s not training us to be superheroes or anything like that. We’re not going out into the world to wear capes and masks. The Doctor just wants us to go out into the world without breaking it.

When I travel in time, I physically go into the past, but I didn’t pull myself into this moment, I just brushed against it. Rather than inserting myself into the past, I see it like a movie playing in my mind.

We all sit in blue plastic chairs around the Doc’s desk. Each of us is wearing a nametag, the kind that are stickers that say: HELLO, MY NAME IS . . . Harold has printed his name in such small letters that I can’t read them. Gwen, on the other hand, used a glitter pen to make her name sparkle. Sofía wrote with a Sharpie, careful to add the accent mark over the í. She lifted the pen up with a flourish of her wrist, then looked around guiltily, as if such extravagance was something to be ashamed of.

“Now that we know each other’s names,” the Doctor says, “let’s introduce our powers. Harold?”

Dr. Franklin turns to Harold first. Later, he would learn not to do that, to let others’ voices fill the room before seeking out Harold’s quiet words. Even so, Harold rises to the occasion. “I speak to ghosts.” His voice is almost a whisper.

“And do they speak back?” Ryan says in a mocking voice. The Doctor shoots him a look.

“Yes,” Harold says simply.

“Well, I can do something useful,” Ryan says. He flicks his hand up, and the blue plastic chairs we’re all sitting in start to float. Harold squeaks and grips the sides of his chair to keep from toppling off. Gwen kicks her feet out, swinging around.

“Thank you,” Dr. Franklin says, and from the tone of his voice, it’s clear he means That’s enough. Ryan casually waves his hand, and the chairs crash back down. Sofía’s off balance and almost falls; the past-me grabs her arm and catches her.

She goes completely invisible.

I jerk my arm back, shocked, but the Doc just gives her a nod and a smile. I wait for her to return to visibility, but she doesn’t.

“My turn,” Gwen says, and she lights her hair on fire, shaking the sparks out like glitter.

Everyone turns to look at me.

“I can move through time,” I say lamely. “I mean, back in time. To the past.”

Everyone waits for me to show my power. “Come on,” Ryan says impatiently.

I close my eyes. I try to do something cool.

Nothing happens.

From my vantage point in the timestream, I cringe. I wanted so much to impress everyone else, but I had even less control of my powers then than I do now. So it’s little wonder that when Dr. Franklin says, “We’ll work on it” in that patronizing tone, I flipped from nervous to angry. I saw red—literally, I saw the world as if there were a red film over everything, and it reminded me of the bloody pond. My brain was spinning, and suddenly I was in the past, back at my grandmother’s house in the mountains. It was run-down, with asbestos tiles on the outside walls and threadbare carpet inside that smelled of dust and old cigarette smoke, and it was my most favorite place in the whole world. When I opened my eyes, I was standing in her front yard, under the pecan tree, with snow falling all around. I could hear the crunch of the snow shifting under my feet, and when I stepped forward, I could taste the coldness in the air.

Now, as an observer of this moment, I see what everyone else saw. One moment I was there, the next I was gone. Ryan gets up and waves his hand in the empty space where I had been sitting. “This is cooler than your trick,” he tells Sofía, who had finally returned to visibility.

“Go back to your chair,” Dr. Franklin says. “You don’t know when he’ll—”

I burst back into existence, my arms swinging. “I’m sorry!” I shout as the Doctor steps back. The slip in time was fast and disorientating, and I hadn’t meant to land a punch on Dr. Franklin’s face when I returned.

The Doctor just rubs his cheek, though, and suddenly the redness disappears.

“This is something we’ll all work on,” he says. “Control.”

I can feel the timestream slipping away from me, the moment fading. My eyes shoot to Sofía, and I beg time to let me have one last glimpse of her. Even though I know she can’t see me in this memory, her face tilts just as I turn to her, giving the illusion that she’s looking right at me. Her lips part to say something, and my heart surges; it feels as if she’s speaking to me, impossibly, through time and space.