By screaming and slamming the back of my fist in his face.
“Holy Hell, Susie,” he said, his voice muffled by cupped hands.
But I didn’t look back to see if he was OK. I splashed toward the shore and snagged the closest dress and pair of flats, and disappeared into the trees.
“Jim, are you all right?”
“What’s gotten into her?”
“Hey, Susie! That’s my dress!”
The dress was tight, and it kept getting snagged on a sticker bush, but I managed to squeeze it over my curvy, hourglass hips. The red wool was thick enough to warm my frigid bones, which were chattering just as much as my teeth.
“Susie!” A short girl with a cherub face, blonde and thin, pushed her way through the bushes to find me, clutching a towel around her. “Here’s your dress. Mine’s too small for you.”
“It’s fine,” I said, giving up on the zipper in the back. “I’ll just leave it unzipped. I’ll get it back to you, don’t worry.”
She frowned down at the green drapey thing in her hand that must have been my dress. “What’s wrong with you? Why did you hit Jim?”
I steadied myself against a tree trunk with one hand and pulled the flats on with the other, rivulets of water streaming from my hair down my bare back. I tried to remember what Porter told me about conversation. Be evasive. Don’t pretend you have amnesia like you did in Chicago, just try to end the conversation every chance you get.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I told the blonde, hoping she would drop it. All Porter told me about my life as Susan Summers was that I had two older brothers, Daniel and Bruce; a mom and a dad, Deborah and John; and I came from old money, raised in an affluent circle made up of politicians and land owners. I knew Charles Mitchell’s address, I knew the painting I was looking for, and I knew the address of the bank in Cincinnati where Porter wanted me to secure the Raphael if I found it.
But I knew nothing about my skinny-dipping companions.
“Can you take me home?” I asked the blonde.
“You mean back to Jim’s?” Her brown eyes were wide and round and innocent.
“No, I mean my home. Where I live. With Deborah and John.”
She sputtered a laugh. “But you’ve been planning this night for weeks.”
I struggled with the skirt of my dress, still tangled in a sticker bush. “We’ll do it another time, OK?”
“But this is the only night we have Jim’s place all to ourselves,” she whined, flopping her arms at her side. “His parents get back tomorrow afternoon.”
I stopped cold and stared at her. “We’re staying the night at his house? All by ourselves?”
I peeked through the trees and watched the earlobe nibbler climb out of the water. He was tall and muscular, with broad shoulders and the kind of abs they put on the cover of magazines. His white blond hair was slicked back and dripping wet. His lips were full, his eyes dark and broody. The cocky scowl on his face looked well worn in, like it was his favorite expression. He pressed a collar shirt to his bloody nose, more worried about that than getting dressed it seemed.
Not that I was looking.
Magazine abs or not, he was so not my type.
“I can’t go to his house,” I hissed, ripping the skirt from the persistent sticker bush with one good yank. Ear Nibbler Guy had to be at least nineteen or twenty. There was no way I was going home with him. My dad would kill me. Not that he’d ever find out, but still.
“Since when did you become such a party pooper?”
“Just drive me home, OK?”
“Drive yourself,” she said, heading back to the water. “I’m staying.”
“Wait,” I said, following after her. “You have to drive me. I don’t know how.” I stumbled over roots and rocks, every bush wanting a piece of my skirt.
She wheeled around, her nose wrinkled. “You got smog in the noggin or something? That’s your car.”
She pointed to the one thing that could make my mortifying night bearable – a 1960 Corvette convertible. Bright turquoise. It wasn’t quite a ‘63 Sting Ray, but it was close enough to make my heart flutter. My fingers slid across the glossy chrome as I made my way to the driver’s door. A tiny, hopeful spark ignited within me. If my past self knew how to drive, did that mean I did, too?
I threw open the door and slid across the smooth leather, envisioning myself cruising off into the night and leaving my skinny-dipping friends behind. I ran my hands over the steering wheel, which was just as bright turquoise as the rest of the interior. My fingers found the keys and turned the engine over, then I gave it a good rev to see what she had.
Oh, it was glorious. Pure, throaty thunder.
I didn’t even think about it – I just pressed the clutch and threw her in reverse. I eased it back like a pro, as though I drove a manual every day. I was so impressed with myself that I didn’t notice Ear Nibbler trying to flag me down.
“Susie! Baby! Wait up! My wallet’s in there!”
For a second, I thought about taking off and letting my past self deal with the Ear Nibbler situation after I was long gone, back in Base Life, but I worried about the whole impact thing. Porter wanted me to behave as normal as possible, and tearing off like that would probably cause a fair amount of suspicion.
I hit the brakes and snatched Ear Nibbler’s wallet from the passenger seat. It flopped open, and I scanned the contents as he ran to catch up to me, trying to pull his pants on at the same time. I kept my nose down when he reached my door and zipped his fly right next to my ear.
“What’s got your cage rattled?” he said. “It was your idea to come down here in the first place.”
But I wasn’t listening. I was staring at the name on his driver’s license: James Charles Mitchell.
Porter, you freaking genius. He had said none of my past lives had been coincidences, and I guessed he was right.
“Get in,” I told Ear Nibbler, plowing the car into first. “You and I are going for a drive.”
RUNAROUND SUE
It was like I knew the roads by heart. The Corvette felt like an extension of me, fluid and sublime. We flew across the southern Ohio hills through a flurry of autumn leaves, the wind in our hair. Ear Nibbler had since pulled on a preppy, baby blue sweater and buckled his seat belt, still checking the side mirror every two seconds to see if his beautiful nose was intact.
“Oh, please,” I said. “I didn’t hit you that hard.”
“You clocked me like a prize fighter. Where’d you learn to hit like that?”
1927, I thought to myself. “You scared me. You shouldn’t sneak up on me like that.”
He propped an elbow on the passenger door and rubbed his forehead. “I don’t get you, Susan. You wanted to go steady a year ago, but I wasn’t ready. Now that I am, you get cold feet?”
“They’re cold because that water was eighteen below.”
He sniffed and shook his head. “Real swell. Why don’t you give me my pin back if you’re so indifferent?”
Crap. Wasn’t giving a girl your pin really serious back then? I bit my lip to stop talking before I screwed something up.
Magazine abs or not, Jim Mitchell was way too high maintenance for my taste. What had my past self seen in him? And what kind of girl had I been? Skinny-dipping in October? Sneaking around and spending the night at an older boy’s house? Going steady with a preppy rich boy who whined when I didn’t let him snuggle up to my birthday suit?
I glanced in the rearview mirror at myself for the first time that night. Again, my reflection took me by surprise. It was still me, still my face, but I was a few sizes larger, with all the extra curves. My lips were stained red, and my eyebrows were angled and sharp. My hair was still damp, but I could tell it was chin-length and wavy. And blonde.