She walked me down the creek, pointing to things I couldn’t see, things that wouldn’t be here for years—a whole subdivision, paths to and from the creek, bus stops for routes I had never heard of, and things she called “super mailboxes.”
She was entranced with the world of the past. I was more interested in her.
“How did you get here?” I asked as we walked out onto Lawrence.
“You know that,” she said. “The mirror.”
“But how?”
“That bus stop looks so new! In my time, it’s all beat up. When did they put it in?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. It was here when we moved in. Look, how did you know about the mirror? Does it just take you back? Does it go forward as well? How does this work? I don’t care about this stuff about the neighborhood. I want to go to the mirror.”
She threw up her hands, then tapped her watch. “Fine. I was just killing time anyway. I can’t show you anything until midnight.”
When we got inside the carriage house, there were two minutes to go. Luka took out a flashlight and guided me upstairs through the maze of junk to the low dresser where I found the note. She looked at me and pursed her lips. “Look, I can sit around talking at you all night, or I can show you. What do you want?”
Blood pounded in my ears. “Show me.”
With that she grinned, shone her flashlight at the mirror, and touched it with her other hand. For just a moment, her palm lay on the surface, fingers splayed. “It’s hot,” she said. “You have to be ready. Cold when you go down, hot when you go up.” She beckoned. “Take the flashlight in your other hand. You have to hold my hand all the way through. There’s a space in between going in and coming out. Are you coming?”
“I’ll be able to get back, won’t I?”
She rolled her eyes. “Real adventurer, aren’t you? Yes, you’ll be able to get back. When you’re in the wrong time, you can always go back. After midnight, I mean. I haven’t figured everything out yet, but I know that. Melissa took me through with her last night.”
I knew I had to go through. My name on a list. My name on a note. “How is all this connected?” I said, fixing her with my gaze. “Do you know about the dead baby? The one in the wall? Do you know about Prince Harming?”
She shrugged. “Kind of. There’s some story in the neighborhood about a guy who kills kids or smashes their heads in or something. But that’s all the past. All I can do right now is take you to my time.” She saw that I was about to ask more questions and held up her hand. “Look, I’m from the future, all right? You’re the one from the past. I came back to get answers from you, not sit around explaining things. Are you coming or not?”
I had already made my decision when I left my room. I took the flashlight, grasped her hand, and let myself be dragged along as she stepped up onto the low surface of the dresser and, with some effort, pushed through the mirror. I could see her, like a fun-house effect, going from two girls, to one-and-a-half, to one, to just a double arm, shortening as it pulled me in.
If she hadn’t warned me about the heat, I might have let go. As it was, I flinched. On the skin of my wrist I could feel first the freezing surface of the mirror, then the pore-opening fire of whatever lay beyond. It was like sticking your hand into burning Play-Doh.
Up to my elbow disappeared. The tugging from the other side grew stronger. I felt Luka’s other hand encircle my wrist, and almost stumbled as I got both my feet onto the surface of the dresser and ducked my head.
As my eyes moved toward the mirror, I turned my head and closed them. The cold mirror flattened my ear at first, then my head went through a heat that felt like it would burn my eyebrows off. I had taken a breath and closed my mouth, and now I imagined I was in some kind of burning, molten silver. We moved through that hot blindness for just a step—
Then I was falling—out of the other side of the mirror and into something soft that went “Ow!” and punched me hard in the shoulder.
I opened my eyes to darkness, then brought the flashlight around to Luka’s face.
She put a finger to her lips. “Don’t talk loud or you’ll wake my mom up. Welcome to 1987.”
Four
The Rules
4. When you go uptime to your home, you can bring the chosen kid from the past with you.
My first impression of the future came from a small room that must have been decorated by someone with a great interest in horses and someone called Bon Jovi. I shone my flashlight beam all around. I guess I had been spoiled by the distant walls of my converted attic, because it seemed claustrophobic.
“This is the future?” I whispered.
“What did you expect, space ships and flying cars? Come here, I’ll show you.” Luka dragged me to the window. “Does that tree look familiar?”
“Kind of.” To me, one tree pretty much looked like the next, but there was something in the way its lowest main branch jutted almost straight out, then changed direction and thrust upward. The street itself was just a quiet suburban subdivision. Did the cars look different? In the dark, I couldn’t tell. Maybe that one’s bumper was a little more rounded, and the same with the roof on that other one two doors down.
It was the weather that convinced me. “You’ve had more snow,” I said.
“You’re right. It’s been cold since New Year’s.”
I lingered a moment at the window. I could see now the fascination she had felt just a few minutes ago on my side of the mirror. That whole world out there was the same, but not the same. I was out there somewhere, ten years older. My parents, too. Every problem I knew about in the world had moved and changed into something else. All because I had stepped through with Luka. I pointed my flashlight back at the dresser. “How did you get it?” I said.
“My dad bought it at a garage sale just before you moved. I was, like, nine. The mirror won’t break, you know. I once threw an ashtray, full force. Not a scratch.”
“Do you know me?” I said. “I mean—me now?”
“Like I said, you moved. Just after we moved in. I don’t really remember you.”
We were by this time sitting in front of her bed, the flashlight between us. “So what’s cool about the future?” I said at last.
She shook her head. “It’s not the future, dummy, it’s just 1987. What do you expect, jetpacks and flying cars?”
“No, just—do you have anything cool?”
Luka gnawed her lower lip, then came to a decision. “Fine. Come with me. But once we get outside this room—no noise. I don’t want to know what would happen if my mom found a boy here at night.”
She insisted on turning the flashlight off for our journey downstairs, so I had to rely on her to lead me.
In the basement, Luka turned on a light, then picked up a black plastic rectangle with numbered buttons and pointed it in the direction of a large TV. Without her approaching it, and with a kind of muted thoom, the thing turned on. Then she went to it and touched a grey box on a shelf on the TV stand. She took away two smaller rectangular grey boxes away from it. Each one had a cross and two red buttons on its face.
She handed one to me. “You’re gonna like this.”
“What is it?”
“Nintendo. It’s what’s cool in the future.”
Two hours later, she practically had to rip the controller from my hand and force me up the stairs. “It’s almost three in the morning back in your time as well. Didn’t you say it was a school night?”
It was. Sunday here was Tuesday back home.
I didn’t care. I had been Mario. I had jumped onto turtles and mushrooms, leaped hammers and jets of fire, fallen down pits, and climbed into elevators. The future was cool.