A World Without You(4)

After that, I was scared, really scared. What if I got stuck in the past? What if I spent the rest of my life bouncing around time, powerless to stop it?

Instead, Dr. Franklin found me. And I came here. Here, where Gwen can wrap fire around her hands like a glove, where Harold whispers to ghosts and they whisper back, where Ryan can move things with his mind and influence people’s thoughts. We all have powers here, except for some of the staff and a few of the tutors. Even Dr. Franklin is one of us. He can heal himself and others, which is ironic because he is literally a doctor, but he’s the kind of academic doctor that teaches, not the medical kind. But even with his degrees and experience, he hasn’t really been able to help me progress all that much.

“What are you thinking about?” Gwen asks, breaking the silence.

I shrug. It’s sort of embarrassing to admit that I don’t have much control over my powers. From the moment I arrived at Berkshire, everyone else seemed to advance so much faster than me. And while the Doc is nice, I can tell that he’s getting frustrated with my lack of progress.

When the Doctor found me and told my parents about the academy, we were all pretty relieved. I was glad that someone finally understood me, and I kind of hated high school anyway, so it was nice to get a change of scenery. I also liked that the Berk was a boarding school. I mean, I love my parents, but I don’t really feel comfortable at home. I never have. To be honest, I think I get along better with my old man now that I’m out of the house. We can tolerate each other when we only have to be in the same building on weekends. Our relationship is built on absence.

It’s little wonder that Berkshire has become my real home.

“I wish I knew what she was thinking,” Gwen says, her eyes still fixed on the fireplace. She glances at me, but looks away again. “You know, before.”

I don’t want to talk about that, about the day Sofía went missing.

Just thinking about it makes my head hurt. Like sharp, shooting pains.

And my tongue. How weird is that? Thinking about the day Sofía got stuck in the past makes my tongue hurt. On the back of my tongue, near my throat, it just aches. It feels like that sort of burning dread rising in your throat when you know you need to cry but you just can’t.

I open my mouth. I don’t know what I’m going to say to Gwen, but it doesn’t matter anyway, because in that moment, she disappears. The cold twilight air is replaced with morning mist and damp dew, and the shadows from the trees suddenly all point away from me.

And I am standing in front of the chimney on the day Sofía disappeared.





CHAPTER 3




My heart thumps, and I feel like I might throw up. I bend over, my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath.

My powers have been more and more erratic since Sofía disappeared, but they’ve never brought me back here, to this moment. And I’ve tried. I’ve tried to get back so many times.

I gather myself, breathing in the crisp morning air. I may not have meant to snap back to this time, but that doesn’t mean I can’t use it.

On the day Sofía disappeared, I had gone for a walk by myself. I went north to the gate on the boardwalk and then turned around and was heading back to the school. But I veered closer to the beach and went past the old camp ruins. They’re state-owned property, and we’re not supposed to hang out there. But that day I ignored the Doctor’s rules.

I look around and then up. You’d be surprised how adept you get at using the sun to tell time when you never know when and where you’re going to end up. Judging from the position of the sun, I figure that the past me, the me on a walk about to meet Sofía and screw up her life, is probably near the polio camp ruins.

The abandoned camp is left over from the days before vaccinations, when the sick had to be quarantined. It was built in the ’50s for people with polio, but it remained open through the ’80s. Now, after years of neglect, it’s just a bunch of rotted wooden buildings that look like a haunted summer camp. Berkshire was built when the camp closed, and no one bothers to maintain the abandoned buildings.

I still don’t know why I went there that day . . . but I did.

And that’s where I saw Sofía.

To be accurate, I saw her shoes first. Bright red, perched on the edge of the remains of a shallow swimming pool at the center of a circle of broken-down buildings. It’s nothing but a concrete depression now, no water or anything, and Ryan keeps talking about how it should be turned into a skate ramp, but Dr. Franklin says that’s disrespectful.

She was just sitting there, her legs dangling over the edge.

“Hey,” I said.

Sofía didn’t respond.

I walked over and sat down next to her, her red shoes between us. It seemed strange that she’d taken her shoes off. The morning was cold, the dew on the blades of grass frozen like crystals. It was no longer quite winter but close enough. I guess Sofía was in denial about the weather.

“What’s up?” I asked.

Still, nothing.

And that’s when I noticed she was crying.

Not, like, loud, sniffling crying that makes your shoulders hunch and your face hurt. Just quiet tears leaking from her eyes, trailing down her cheeks, and dripping from her chin. She was so lost in her sadness that I wasn’t even sure she was aware of my presence until I touched her cold face, wiping away one of the tears with the pad of my thumb.