“What—”
“A car ran you down,” Eileen said, with evident pleasure.
“Came out of nowhere,” Dad added. “That’s what the driver said. Waltzed right in front of his car without looking. If he’d have hit you at a slightly different angle…”
I frowned at a crack in the ceiling. I had no memory of the accident. What I remembered was murdering Chad. Of the two events, that was the one that felt more real just then, more relevant.
Eileen made an unimpressed motorboat sound with her tongue. “Does Felix have to go to school tomorrow?”
Dad shook his head. “Oh, he’ll be out of school for a while after this.”
“No fair.”
“Something’s happening,” I whispered.
The crack on the ceiling was expanding, new fissures opening and spidering out, as if under intense pressure from above.
Dad looked up, then back down at me, confused.
“Cracks…” I said.
Eileen laughed and bounced in her seat. “Felix is going crazy!”
I shrieked as a dark shape punched through the plaster, the pointed tip of something enormous. Dad put a hand on my chest. “Whoa there! Hey! We need some help in here!” He hammered the call button beside the bed.
I flinched as two more booming impacts came, making a hole the size of a car tire in the ceiling. I tried to get away, but Dad held me down as Eileen looked on with horrified delight.
“What’s happening?” Dad asked a nurse who’d arrived in the room.
A massive black eye appeared in the hole and another scream ripped out of my chest. I clawed at Dad’s arm.
“What’s wrong with him?” he shouted at the nurse, who advanced on me with a syringe. She plunged something into my IV line and I sagged, still terrified but fading.
“Just a bad reaction to the morphine,” the nurse said.
“No,” I moaned, fighting to stay awake. “It’s…”
I surfaced in the dim living room and looked around wildly. This was new—being hammered back and forth in time like a paddleball. Kim was cutting her toenails beside me on the couch. I flinched as one hit me in the face. “Sorry,” she grinned wickedly. “Did I get you?”
On the TV, a couple was French kissing, tongues grappling.
“What day is it?” I asked Kim.
She laughed. “Wow. You really do need to get out more.”
“I—”
Another jump, like one roll of film spliced onto another.
I was back on the playground, surrounded by kids in shorts and T-shirts, the snow turned to grass. Chad leaned against a wall by the basketball courts, but he wasn’t really there. He couldn’t have been. Not after the way I’d attacked him with that bat. I limped over and he walked off in the opposite direction, pretending not to see me. “Chad!” I called to him. “Hey, wait up!” He disappeared into the school, and I followed him into the bathroom, where he wheeled on me, looking almost afraid.
I grinned at him. “You can do it now. I don’t mind.”
“This again?”
I limped closer. “Come on. Do it.”
His jaw flexed. “No.”
“Do it!”
He hauled back and punched me in the mouth.
I smiled, tasting blood. “Do it again.”
He slammed me against the bathroom wall and jerked my arm behind my back. I gasped as something popped in my shoulder.
“There! Happy?” He shoved me to the floor.
I got back up, my hurt arm dangling. I had earned that pain. I enjoyed it. But it wasn’t enough.
“I—” My voice was weak. “I need you to do it again.”
Chad stepped back, teeth bared, tears in his eyes. “What is wrong with you, man?”
“Just one more time.”
“Get away from me!”
“Please…”
“I said, get away!”
“It’s he-re!” Kim sang as she lugged a heavy-looking cardboard box into the living area. I tried to look like I knew what was going on, like I wasn’t expecting to be hauled off again to some random moment from the past. I was shocked that we were still together. I couldn’t have been acting remotely normal. She dropped the box on the coffee table in front of me. “Well? Aren’t you excited?”
“Uh…”
She sighed and tore open the box, scattering Styrofoam popcorn as she pulled out a hardcover book. On the front, between my name and the title, a man and woman in silhouette straddled opposite sides of a stripper’s pole. Kim turned the book over in her hands. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Wow,” I said dutifully, recalling the bizarre strip club scene with the superintendent and the bald man. “Hey, um… have you seen my building manager lately?”
“Nancy? No. Why?”
“No reason,” I muttered, unsettled by the fact that they seemed to be on a first-name basis. Kim hauled out more books, piling them on the table. It was like some dark ritual. The books. The scented candle juddering on a side table. Kim insisted that I hold one and I turned to the first chapter. Pressure filled my head. The opening lines felt as if they’d been written by a stranger. I read on, but none of it was remotely familiar. Not the pace or the cadence or the setting. Even the names of the characters had changed. I closed the book, invisible talons slicing the air in front of my face.
“It’s all different.”
“Uh-huh,” Kim said, distracted by the book in her hands.
My head felt incredibly heavy. I stood up and the claws became wings, bursting into sight and vanishing all around me. I made my way to the bedroom, holding the walls for support, while Kim hummed softly to herself on the sofa. The moment I sat down on the bed, the phone rang. Kim picked up and spoke in a low voice, making plans that somehow involved me. The harder I listened, the less I could hear.
“Where was your head?”
I jerked around. Dad’s exasperated voice had come from right beside me, as if through a hidden speaker in the wall.
“Shut up,” I whispered back. My head was compressing, collapsing on itself until it emitted a thin whine of protest, before abruptly expanding, filling the bedroom with space, widening it into a maze of books—alphabetized stacks spanning out in every direction from the cluster of reading tables I was sitting at. The other tables were empty. My knapsack sat on the floor by my feet. I tried to focus on my statistics textbook, but something pulled my eye to the folded newspaper on the next table. A grainy photograph of Chad Temple in a striped polo shirt and shorts, smiling a big unguarded smile, surrounded by kids with swollen stomachs and tiny arms. I reached over and grabbed the paper, feeling gravity slacken on my body as I read the accompanying article. According to the author, Chad had been working overseas for a Christian aid agency when he’d been murdered in an alley behind a youth hostel. Bludgeoned to death. The motive for the killing wasn’t known, though investigations were underway. Towards the end of the article, a family friend testified to Chad’s excellent character. “He didn’t deserve this,” were the friend’s exact words. “He never hurt anyone in his life.”
A vague pain radiated through my head. I folded the paper and surreptitiously tucked it into my knapsack, along with my statistics book.
As I left the library and crossed the busy campus, my headache swelled to a full-blown migraine. The fact that I’d found the article at all was remarkable. I hadn’t seen Chad since grade school. I never followed the news. If I hadn’t been studying at that exact moment, at that exact table, I’d have never known what had happened to him. Back in my dorm room, I sat on my bed and reread the article, looking for clues, some hidden pattern beneath the words. He never hurt anyone in his life. At those words, my humiliation in the schoolyard returned, fresh as ever, along with everything that had followed—my rage, my guilt. Two possibilities occurred to me, both of them equally insane, both of them strangely plausible. Either I really had murdered Chad in my childhood via some future proxy, or I’d simply foreseen his death, my mind framing the event in terms it could understand.