A World Without You(47)

“Pheebs!” the boy shouts, running over to her.

No. No. No. That’s impossible.

“They look . . . modern,” Sofía whispers to me.

The girl is crying, clutching her arm. The boy drops to his knees in front of her, grabs her good hand— And they disappear.

The shock of it snaps inside me like the timestream pulling me back. It’s violent and harsh and painful, and I’m so glad I already have Sofía wrapped up in my arms. When we open our eyes, we’re on the floor of the common room, breathing deeply, the world spinning around us.

“What just happened?” Sofía says, still wheezing and trying to catch her breath.

“That was me.”

“What?” she gasps. Her eyes are wild, and I wonder if she feels the pain of being snapped back into the normal time as much as I do. I’m just glad time brought me back here, with her in the past, rather than throwing me all the way back to my own present.

“That was me,” I repeat. “That kid. The girl is—was—is my sister, Phoebe.”

“What? How?”

I stand up. I want to pace, but the world is still spinning too much for me to try that. “That was me,” I say once more. “Phoebe was really into the Titanic. We’d play outside and pretend to be on the ship, but I didn’t realize I actually took her there. But I did. I must have had my powers when I was younger and just . . . didn’t realize it? I must have blocked it out? I thought we were pretending . . .”

“That’s some good imagination.”

“Did that ever happen to you?” I ask. “Did you have your powers when you were little too?”

“I was always very good at hide-and-seek.”

I run my fingers through my hair. I don’t remember this happening, but at the same time, I do.

The lights in the common room flicker.

“It’s time to go,” Sofía says, and the way she looks at me makes me realize she isn’t just talking about lights-out. It’s time for me to leave, to go back to my own time. The time without her.

She stands up and walks over to me, wrapping her arms around my waist and burying her face in my chest.

“Something bad happened, didn’t it?” she whispers.

I nod, unable to speak.

She leans up on her tiptoes and kisses me on the lips. Not anything passionate, but a sort of sad, slight pressure on my lips that’s gone too quickly.

“If I could control reality, this would be my life all the time. One magical moment with you after another,” she says, leaning into me.

“Me too,” I say, my voice cracking.

“Whatever happened, this was worth it,” Sofía says. “And remember what I said before.”

The lights flicker again. Last warning.

“What you said before?” I ask.

She kisses me again, quicker this time, already twirling away from me, toward the door. I blink, and I see the threads of time weaving in and out, and I can feel the tether pulling me back to my own timeline, away from here, now, her.

She doesn’t look back as she leaves me behind, alone, as time swallows me up and deposits me where I started.





CHAPTER 30


Phoebe



I try not to look too hard at myself in the mirror. I never really figured out makeup, and I feel most at home in T-shirts and jeans, but I like to look nice. Put together, my grandmother would call it, although she wouldn’t say it about me now. Put together to Grandma was a button-down blouse and a skirt, not a navy blue T-shirt with an elephant on the front and jeans that are ragged at the bottom because my short legs have walked the hem off.

There was always something wrong with me, at least in Grandma’s eyes. It’s not like she hated me. But I would sit with my legs too sprawled, or I talked too much, or my hair was too short. Always something little, some point of contention that proved I wasn’t good enough.

Bo, on the other hand, was her golden child. “He needs more love,” she’d say, as if an extra hug and piles of compliments would make him better. Maybe they did. He was always happy around her.

I turn away from the mirror and open my jewelry box. It’s ancient, something I’ve had forever, made of heavy, paper-covered cardboard in shades of pink and purple. And even though it’s worthless, this box contains all my greatest treasures. When I open it, a little plastic ballerina spins halfheartedly. It’s supposed to play music too, but it’s long since lost its song.

At the bottom of the box, underneath the little silver ring my first boyfriend gave me and the monogrammed necklace I got for my sweet sixteen, is a blue velvet box. The hinges creak when I open it. I remove the folded-up paper that’s on the top without reading it. I know what it says. Given to me by Joseph on our wedding day. Grandma started doing that a year or two before she died, writing down the reason why the things she still had were significant. When she passed away, Mom and I went through her house, and we kept finding little notes like this. Some of them referenced people we didn’t know—Bought this when I went with Lauren to Connecticut—and some of them told us of a past we hadn’t known she’d lived—Mother gave me this when I broke my wrist, 1962. I loved discovering the hidden secrets behind the objects I had thought were junk. A paper fan was a souvenir from her brother when he went to Hawaii; a cheap plastic beaded necklace was the first thing I had ever given her, curled up beside her gold and diamonds. Mom, however, quickly grew tired of the little notes and eventually started throwing away things without reading them.