A World Without You (5 page)

When I open my eyes,
my whole body is trembling. Living through these memories again is messing with my head.

But it'll be worth it if I am able to reweave time. I stare down at the chaotic, beautiful timestream spreading out in front of me. I can see the three little puckers I've made to the red string. I reach out to try one more time, but even as I watch, the red string of Sofía's past evens out along the weave, smoothing down flat again. Any chance I had of pulling the end of Sofía's string from the vortex disappears before my eyes.

Time has a way of correcting itself, and I won't be able to save Sofía this way.

I stagger, almost falling when I get up from my desk chair. The weight of those memories drags me down and reminds me of just how much I have to lose if I lose Sofía.

And yet, like a drug addict looking for another hit, I want to dive back into the timestream and relive more memories. I almost bring it back up, but I force myself to lie down instead.

It's dangerous to dwell in the past. You don't have to be a time traveler to know that. But more than that, I can't let myself be satisfied with just memories. I need to find a way to save the
real
Sofía, not the image of her I carry around in my head.

Ugh. I need fresh air.

I used to hate Sundays. They always felt too close to Monday and to responsibilities. Since coming to the Berk, though, Sundays have become my favorite day of the week. They're the days I return from my parents' house to the place where I really belong, and to Sofía.

As I head out of my bedroom, I can hear someone, probably Ryan, playing a loud video game in the common room. A stream of curses follows a particularly loud blast on the television—definitely Ryan. I head outside. I want quiet. I need the ocean.

Growing up on the coastal side of Massachusetts, I was never too far from the Atlantic. But I didn't really appreciate being this close to the water until I moved to Berkshire. Until Sofía would take me for walks on the sand.

I arrive at the beach and kick off my shoes. Wind makes my shirt flap around as the sandy soil with stubborn clumps of grass gives way to the sand. I can taste the salt in the air, crisp and pure, and the ocean's waves drown out my dark thoughts.

The last time I was out here, Sofía came with me. It was cold that day, made bitterly so by the wind. Dark storm clouds billowed over the ocean, and although we could see lightning far out across the waves, it wasn't even raining on us. Sofía could stare at the sea for hours, but that day, there weren't any pretty blue waves, and everything was choppy and gray, as if the water was so disgusted by itself it was trying to jump out of the ocean.

We walked as far north as we could, up to the point where the sandy beach gives way to a rocky hill topped by the lighthouse. Then we turned around and walked south, past the academy, to the sharp point at the end of the island.

“My mother loved the beach but hated the sun,” Sofía said, tipping her face up to the cloudy gray sky.

“Then this is the perfect place for her.”

Sofía laughed. But there was a hitch in her voice, and her smile fell from her face almost immediately.

I wanted to ask her what happened to her family. She didn't talk about them often, just that they were dead. When she looked at me, I think she could see the questions I didn't ask.

“Car accident,” she said.

“You don't have to—”

“It's okay. Dr. Franklin says I should talk about it. And it happened a while ago. Almost a year now.”

The tide was rising; cold saltwater splashed over our feet, and Sofía gasped in surprise and pulled me further up the beach.

“Drunk driver,” she added, not looking at me.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“I never know how to feel about it,” she confessed. “The Doctor seems to think that I feel guilty, but I don't. It wasn't my fault. I know some people have survivor's guilt, and I guess I feel that way sometimes, like, why did I live when they didn't? But that's not how I really feel about it.”

“How do you really feel?” I watched her closely, waiting to see if she'd go invisible, hoping she wouldn't.

“Empty,” Sofía said.

The waves were getting higher, the air colder. There was an edge to the wind, as if it wanted to cut us.

“Let's go inside,” Sofía said, rubbing her shoulders.

I checked the time on my phone. “Kitchens are closed,” I groaned. After dinner, the kitchens were always open with snacks until an hour before lights-out. Usually, they were just stocked with fruit or granola, healthy stuff, but Ryan almost always talked his way into chips. He's good at getting what he wants.

“Come on,” Sofía said. “I'll make you something.”

Even though the kitchens weren't off-limits, it felt like we were breaking rules being there just before lights-out. I don't think students were supposed to cook, but no one came to stop us as Sofía pulled out a container of eggs and set a pot of water to boiling, adding a pinch of salt.

“My sisters and I called these ‘ghost eggs,'” Sofía said.

“Harold would like them then,” I replied, trying too hard to be funny.

She grinned anyway. “It's because of how they look when they cook.” The water barely started to bubble, and she moved quickly. She swirled the water with a wooden spoon, making a tiny tornado in the pot, then cracked an egg with one hand. As soon as it hit the hot water, the egg twirled into the center, the clear parts immediately turning white and streaming around. It looked . . . delicate. Beautiful.

“See?” she said. “Ghost eggs.”

And she was right. The poached egg did look like a little ghost floating in the water.

After a minute, she took the egg out of the hot water with a slotted spoon, dropped it on a plate, and handed it to me with salt and pepper.

“My little sister would poke the yellows and scream, ‘I'm making the ghosts bleed!'” she said. “She was kind of macabre.”

“Mmm, ghost blood,” I said, licking my fork.

And she smiled at me, but it was a sad smile. She missed them. Not in the same way that we all missed our families while we were at Berkshire. She missed them in a deeper way, because she knew she'd never see them again. It wasn't that she was gone from them; it was that they were gone from her.

• • •

We talked a lot about family, me and Sofía. Not at first. Sofía kept her family close to her heart, like a secret, but eventually she opened up.

“Carmen was two years older than me,” she told me after we hopped over the gate and were walking on the boardwalk together. A crane watched us from the marsh as we passed. “And Maria was just eleven months younger. People used to tell Mom that Maria and I were Irish twins, but she didn't understand what that phrase meant, so she'd tell them, ‘No, no, we're
Latina
, not Irish.'”

She laughed, and the crane flew off, its long legs dripping water like glittering crystals.

“I miss them,” Sofía said in a small voice. She moved closer to me and touched the back of my hand, as if to remind herself that I wasn't gone. Not like them.

“Carmen would always try to be my mom, even when Mom was around,” she continued. “She pretended like she knew all there was to know about raising babies. And Maria—” Sofía laughed. “Maria would always try to make it harder on her, you know? Like, Carmen would say that she could get Maria to
eat her vegetables, so Maria would load up all her peas in her mouth and then spit them at Carmen one at a time when Mom wasn't looking.”

Sofía's face fell.

“She was only fourteen,” she said, starting to turn invisible around the edges.

I pulled her down onto one of the benches on the edge of the boardwalk. It overlooked a shallow part of the marsh where the ground was dry enough to grow coneflowers and goldenrod. “I'm still here,” I whispered in her ear, and I kept my arm around her until she was fully visible again.

“I just really enjoyed being a sister,” she said. She snuggled deeper into my arm; it was starting to get dark and cold. “It was like being in this exclusive club, and we were the only members.”

“They sound pretty amazing,” I said.

“Tell me about your sister.”

I shrugged, and even though the moment was nice, I got up and started walking back to the academy. “Nothing to say,” I told her.

I was never really able to explain to Sofía what my family was like. For her, family was this unbreakable bond of trust and loyalty and love, and that sounds nice and all, but that's not what it's like in my home. That's not to say we didn't have those things. I'm certain if I needed my family, they'd be there. It's just that they weren't there otherwise.

Take Phoebe. You'd almost think we weren't related. We look nothing alike. We act nothing alike. We share no friends. We are as different as two people can possibly be.

Sofía doesn't really know how to live in a world where she's
not a sister. But Phoebe's the exact opposite. She just doesn't think in terms of us being brother and sister. I'm just a guy who grew up with her, and we happen to share the same parents.

She was always like that, even when we were kids. She did her thing, and I did mine.

By the time I started high school and Phoebe was in middle school, there were cracks in our family. I don't think I noticed it at the time. It's only now, here, away from them, that I can see them.

Mom always talked about going back to work one day, maybe when I got to middle school. But that day came and went, and she never did. Instead, she grew increasingly . . . hover-y. When Pheebs and I were little, Mom didn't really seem to care what we did with our days, as long as we were quiet and let her do her crafts in peace. But the older we got, the nosier she got. She nagged me for details about friends I'd go out with, what I wanted to do with the day, with the weekend, with my whole damn life. After I got my powers, it just got worse.

Dad lived his job. He came home every night at the same time, but he was never really there. “Lots of work is good,” he'd insist, locking the door to his office.

And Phoebe . . . she just sort of . . . she spun around so fast. She's like one of those ballerinas in the cheap music box she got for her seventh birthday. She'd spin from school to clubs to cello lessons to friends' houses, and sometimes she'd spin through the house, but she never seemed to notice anything or anyone.

And I, somehow, never really seemed to notice her.

When Pheebs entered high school, I was a sophomore. One day when I was walking down the hall, preoccupied and not
really paying attention, I bumped into a girl in a bright blue sweater, her hair done up in braids, shiny pink gloss perfectly applied to her lips.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, already moving away when I realized—

It was Phoebe.

She had somehow become a stranger to me. There was a moment there, brief but true, when she had legitimately been a person I did not know or recognize. Somehow while I was retreating to my room and listening to music and taking notes on history, she was spin-spin-spinning away from us all. Somehow in all this time, she had become a different person than the one I had known, a stranger.

Someone I could pass by without recognizing.

I am so sick of memories
I don't really want to have. I don't
want
to live in the past. Just give me the future, and Sofía, and a second chance.

I turn away from the ocean and plod back to the academy. Sand sticks to my feet, and I make a halfhearted effort to wipe it off before going inside the mansion. As I head up the stairs, I pass a group of students from another unit. They look a little younger than me, two guys and a girl. I wonder what their powers are. They stick together, moving to the other banister as I climb up the steps. I try to give them a friendly smile, but they hurry away. So. My reputation has preceded me. Maybe it's a good thing that the units are so self-contained and we don't interact with other students. Or maybe, if we did, they would know I'm not a monster. That losing Sofía was an accident.

I close my bedroom door and sit in the middle of my room, alone.

I blink, and the timestream stretches out around me, a
beautiful mix of opalescent light and strings. It's a chaotic mess, but it still makes a pattern I think I can almost understand.

There are the knotted places, tangles I cannot penetrate. The knots are places I've been to before. I scrutinize them, trying to see the path of my life in the scheme of time and the universe.
Here
is where I was born,
here
is where my sister broke her arm,
here
is where I got an award for history in middle school,
here
is where I discovered my powers.

And
here
 . . . my fingers run over the knotted mess of where Sofía is trapped in the past. Ever since I lost her, I've been trying to find a way to reach her again. And then yesterday, I got there as easy as blinking. At least until I tried to warn her.

Time has a way of keeping itself safe and balanced. Whenever I try to alter something that has to be, whether it's punching Hitler in the face or changing my own timeline, time has kept me out. It snaps me back. It reminds me that it's in charge. So . . . maybe the reason I was able to go back to just before the moment Sofía got stuck in the past was
because
I didn't really have the intent to try to change anything.

Intent matters with time.

The real importance of this dawns on me slowly, but it's actually starting to make a lot of sense. When I've tried to go back lately, I've been focused on saving Sofía. But time doesn't
want
me to save her. It's preventing me from saving her. It knows from the start that's what I want to do.

Intent matters. If I go to the past not with the intent to change anything, but with the intent of just
seeing
Sofía . . .

I could.

I could do that.

Holy hell, I could do that.

I reach for my calendar. It's the kind that has a different page for each day. Sofía used to make fun of me all the time for using a paper calendar rather than my phone, like a normal person, but when you have the ability to slip through time, it's important to keep track of the days, and paper is more reliable.

I'm meticulous about my calendar; every day I make a special mark on it using a code that I developed. I keep track of whether or not I slipped in time that day, whether it was accidental or on purpose, where I went and when.

Now I flip through the pages, looking at the dates before I left Sofía stuck in the past. I need to find a time when she and I weren't together so I know there's no chance I'll run into my past self.
Intent matters.
I just want to see her. I just need to find a time where the me from now can go back and see her . . .

I drop the calendar on my bed, focusing on the timestream, blinking as it flows in front of me like a river of threads floating on the surface of a bubble. Strings of time and place radiate around me, blue and gold and gray and brown, each linking me to a different person, a different place, a different time. But the one tying me to Sofía is bright red and easy to find. I follow the red string with my eyes.

My hand shakes as I select the moment. A weekend, when I would be at home and Sofía would be stuck at Berkshire. Sometime after our first date, when everything was still new, but it was also starting to be comfortable. When we'd both sort of accepted the reality of the other.

October 3. A Saturday evening.

I hesitate. I won't be able to do this often—maybe not ever
again. I can lie and say I decided to stay at the Berk rather than go home, and it'll work once, but there's no way she'll believe it a second time.

But I need this now. I focus on that moment in time, the moment where I've not been before but where I could be now. I reach out with trembling hands, touching the space in the timestream, wrapping my finger around time itself.

And I'm there.

• • •

I'm in my bedroom, the sky just beginning to fade into evening. The plants outside my window are dead or dying rather than how I just left them, starting to show life. I run to my desk and read the date on my calendar.

October 3.

It worked. I'm here. She's here—somewhere in the academy.

I don't know how this is going to play out. Maybe the moment I see her, I'll be snapped back into my own time. But if my theory is right, as long as I don't try to contact her or leave her a message, a warning . . .

My stomach churns. It feels weird to spy on my girlfriend, weirder still to wish I could warn her away from me.

I just need one moment
, I think to myself. I just want to see her face. Just once more. It will give me the inspiration I need to figure out how to save her.

That thought—
save her
—makes reality stutter. I feel it in my navel, a tugging, like the strings of time tightening around my stomach. My breath jerks in my lungs, and my eyes focus like lasers on a single painted concrete block on my wall. I have to shake the thought away. I can't think about saving Sofía, not
while I'm here in the past. If time thinks I am going to screw with it, it'll throw me back to where I'm supposed to be.

Without her.

I bite my tongue, tasting blood but focusing on the pain. I try to clear my mind.
Intent matters.
So I won't intend to do anything other than see her. That's all. Just one look.

I sense time easing up on me, the timestream calming and accepting my presence here in the past. I stand up, my legs wobbly, but soon enough I get my bearings.

A glance at the clock tells me that it's near dinnertime. Unless we're having some sort of event, dinners are served in each unit's common room, and ours is just down the hall from my bedroom.

I creep down the hallway. I'm not sure what will happen if I'm seen. Just in case, I start thinking of excuses about why I'd be at the academy on a weekend. But I don't need them—the hallway's deserted.

There's sound and light spilling from the common room. I stand with my back against the wall, listening to the clattering of silverware on plates, the low rumble of voices. A sharp laugh—Ryan's—pierces the air. I dare to peek around the doors and look inside.

On weekends, Gwen and I both go home, leaving Harold, Ryan, and Sofía behind. They sit around the main table in the center of the common room now, eating ravioli. The table's huge even when we're all there, but it looks like it's not big enough for the three of them. They've spaced themselves out, each taking a different side of the table and sitting as far away from each other as possible.

The common room is an odd mix of old-school leather and teenaged dishevelment. Big winged chairs litter the edges of the room, interspersed with framed reproductions of famous but somewhat mismatched art—
Starry Night
beside a Renoir next to one of Picasso's broken women. But there's also a giant flat-screen connected to the latest PlayStation in one corner, and a stack of board games on the walnut table in the center of the room.

Harold sits to the right, staring at the walls and sometimes muttering. As I watch, he pauses with the fork halfway to his mouth, a distant look in his eyes. His power isn't enviable; seeing and hearing ghosts plagues him far more than it helps him. Ryan has his back to me, playing on his phone while he eats. His hulking body slouches over the table lazily.

So neither of them notice when Sofía looks up. Right at me.

A lump forms in my throat. I wasn't ready. Not for this. Not for seeing her again.

But I can't look away.

“Hi,” she mouths.

“Hi,” I whisper.

She moves to get up from the table, but I shake my head and raise a finger to my lips. A look of confusion crosses her face, but I can't explain. I want nothing more than to burst inside, race across the common room, grab her, and never let her go. But I can't explain why I'm here. I'd have to tell her that I'm visiting her in this past because I lost her in another. I'd have to tell her that I can't save her.

“No,” I moan as the strings of time wrap around me again, squeezing, pulling.
No, I won't tell her
, I want to say.
I just want to see her. Just one more moment. Give me that. Please.

But how am I supposed to plead with time itself?