A World Without You(37)

“That didn’t happen!” I yell at my computer. “That’s not how any of it happened.”

But the computer doesn’t answer me. Sofía doesn’t answer me. The video just keeps playing, showing me a weird parallel version of reality.

The next video plays. The Doctor’s talking to me about control, just like he always does. On that day, he asked me to go back in time, to show everyone what it was like. Ryan was making fun of me, calling me worthless, so I went to Times Square on New Year’s Eve of the year he and I were born, and I brought back a pair of those stupid glasses that have the year where the eyeholes are, and I tossed them to him.

The snide tone of Ryan’s voice. The bitter cold of New York, so freezing that my skin burned. The trashy, shiny confetti that fell from the sky when the ball dropped. The cheap glasses. I remember it. I can see it, smell it, taste it.

But on the video, the Doctor doesn’t tell me to go back in time, and it’s me, not Ryan, who says I’m worthless. On-screen, I grow very still in my seat. My eyes look dead, and I stare straight ahead. “The spaz is doing it again,” Ryan says.

“Shut up,” Sofía responds, but no one hears her. The Doctor snaps his fingers in front of my eyes, and I don’t even blink.

And then I shake my head, and I look at Ryan. “See? I told you I could do it!”

And then the video cuts into static.

None of this happened, I think to myself. Not like this.

But my hands are shaking, and I taste bile in the back of my throat. My head is fuzzy, and there’s a ringing in my ears, and I can’t think.

There’s nothing to think about. You saw it. The proof is right here, in front of you. It’s you who’s crazy—

No, I’m not! I’m not. The words echo inside my skull, over and over and over. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not.

? ? ?

I’m. Not.

? ? ?

Everything’s suddenly still and silent.

I look at the video screen. It had been showing static, black and white lines blurring in and out of each other, but now it’s completely frozen in time.

I look around me. Everything’s still. I jump up from the bed and sweep aside the curtain blocking my door. The big clock at the end of the hall isn’t ticking. My sister’s bedroom door is cracked open, and I press my face against it. She’s sitting in the middle of the bed, her cell phone screen illuminating her utterly motionless face.

Time has stopped.

I walk slowly back to my room, to my bed, and pull my laptop closer, staring at the frozen static.

I stopped time.

But . . .

“Is this real?” I whisper.

And all around me, time snaps back into place. The static fizzles on the screen, fading to black. I can hear the ticking of the hallway clock. My sister giggles, the sound carrying across the hall and into my room.

Time still weaves around me, bending to my will, no matter what those videos show now.

The next video starts playing automatically. Sofía’s face fills the screen as she walks by the camera.

I slam my laptop shut. I don’t know what’s real or not anymore.

But Sofía does. And I know just how to reach her.





CHAPTER 23




I toss my computer to the foot of my bed and bring up the timestream again. I wish I had my calendar with all my coded markings on it, but it’s at the Berk. I don’t feel safe picking a day to see her when Sofía would be at the school. Berkshire doesn’t feel safe.

Christmas break, then. I was home, and Sofía was with her father in Austin. There will be no chance of a paradox, no chance of me running into my past self. And I’m not going back to warn her or stop her or do anything to change the past. I just want to confirm that my present is real.

My hands tremble as I sort through the timestream. The threads of time weave in and out of each other, each of them flowing back to me. I find the red thread, Sofía’s thread. I let my fingers glide over it, relishing in the way it rubs against my skin, reminding myself that this—this is what’s real. Time is real. Sofía is real.

I follow the string to Austin and see that there are tangles and knots in the patterns there, all mixed in with the loose ends of other colored strings. I touch them, twisting the ends with my fingers, and my mind shoots further back in time and bursts with images of other people—an older woman and three younger girls—and I realize that one of the younger girls is Sofía. This was her family before the car accident. I drop the threads as if they were on fire.

It feels wrong, peeking this far into Sofía’s past.

Here is something I’ve learned: You never know all of a person; you only know them in a specific moment of time.

The Sofía I knew was kind and quiet, but she carried her grief around, hidden by a cloak of invisibility. When she told me about her past, it was nothing more than a story to me. I didn’t live it with her; I didn’t know her during that moment of her life. The Sofía from the past was an entirely different person.

But then I knew Sofía in a way her mother and sisters never did. They never could. They would never know a Sofía without them. Just like I can never know a Sofía with them.

This is the most important thing I learned from being a time traveler. You are not one person. You are a different person in each moment of time. Your name means nothing. Go see a person with the same name in a different time, and it’s someone else entirely. I don’t know Sofía. I know Sofía-at-Berkshire. Sofía-before-her-family-died is a stranger, someone I’m not sure I should ever meet.