Once Was a Time (4 page)

Chapter 6

I was vomiting before I even opened my eyes. It hurt worse than anything: worse than the time I got sick from traveling on the train to London, worse than the time a couple of years ago when I ate undercooked meat and spent the next two days in the lavatory. It felt like my intestines were going to come spewing out of my mouth. Dad hadn't warned me about this part of time travel.

Because Dad had never done it. So he hadn't known.

When my retching finally slowed down, I inhaled a deep breath. Air. So I wasn't in the middle of the
Atlantic Ocean.

That was something, at least.

I opened my eyes. I was lying on grass. It was hot.

That was as much as I could get right now.

I reminded myself that I was alive, and that this was a good thing. But it didn't feel like a good thing right then. It felt overwhelming. I curled my legs in toward my stomach and held on to them as tight as I could. I focused on breathing. Nothing more. Just breathing.

I lay still for a while as I waited for energy to seep back into my body. I was reminded of Aunt Matilda's old cat, Spots, who died last year. Spots had had seizures sometimes. They would come out of nowhere, making her thrash and jerk and foam at the mouth. Then she'd lie still. That meant the seizure was over. It would take Spots a long time to regain the ability to stand up and walk around. Aunt Matilda said she was “resolving herself.”

That's what I was doing: resolving myself.

After a long while, I sat up, and immediately I turned to look for Kitty. But of course Kitty wasn't here. For the first time in my life, Kitty was nowhere to be found.

I could not think about that yet.

It was
very
hot. And sunny. Not a single cloud in the sky. A far cry from the dark night that I had left behind, and the rainy day before that. We almost never got sun like this in Bristol, and when we did everyone would run outside to play, because we didn't know how long the good weather would last.

I wondered whether I was still in England. I had never left England before.

The grass on which I sat seemed to belong to a big, blocky house made out of white wood. It didn't look like the buildings in Bristol, almost none of which had large, flat, unlandscaped lawns like this one.

I stood up. I left the house behind and headed for the road, which was wide and empty. I didn't see any auto­mobiles. Had I traveled to a time before they existed? What came before that—hansom cabs? I didn't see any of those, either. I didn't see any signs of life. Though I did hear the chirping of birds. So at least
they
were alive.

All Dad had said about the limitations of time travel was that it wouldn't be possible to travel to a point in your own life that had already occurred. “Wouldn't that be peculiar?” he had said. “To have ten-year-old Lottie and thirty-year-old Lottie walking around at the same time!” So all I knew was that I had to be in a time before October 1930 or after October 1940.

In the grand scheme of the world's history, that didn't narrow it down much.

I looked up the road one way, then the other. They looked the same. So I picked one direction at random and started walking.

My plan was to find the High Street, find a newsagent, and use a newspaper to work out where and when I was. I had read books about time travel before, and that was what the characters always did.

Of course, I might be in a time before newspapers were invented. I didn't think so, though. The houses seemed well-constructed, and there were streetlamps with wires running overhead. This didn't look like a world before newspapers.

Or I could be in China. I wouldn't be able to read a Chinese newspaper.

So, this wasn't a perfect plan. But it was all I had.

I walked for a long time—close to an hour, I reckoned. But I didn't come to a High Street, and the sun just got hotter and hotter. I was sweating through my pretty pajamas that my mum had sewn for me. All the houses were so big and identical and spaced so far apart, I felt like I wasn't making any progress at all. A few cars drove past me, sleek and rounded and small. This must be the future. But none of the futuristic cars stopped for a ten-year-old girl in glasses.

I wanted to cry with frustration, but I hadn't drunk any water in hours, or possibly centuries, and it was so hot—I just didn't have any tears in me. It never happened like this in time-travel books. They always found newspapers immediately.

The next house had a swing in its lawn, and a boy who looked to be around my age was playing on it. He was wearing baggy trousers and a white undershirt with the words just do it printed on the front. I became suddenly self-­conscious about my yellow pajamas. The top had a Peter Pan collar and puffed sleeves, which I thought was the height of fashion when I picked out the pattern, but it now occurred to me that perhaps I looked like a four-year-old. And I had grown in the months since my mum left, so the pajama bottoms reached only as far as my mid-calves. If I were this boy, I would have taken one look at the girl dressed in this outfit and said, “You are
definitely
a time traveler.”

Still, I had to risk that. I didn't have much experience talking to strangers, or to boys, but so far my plan, such as it was, had been an utter failure, and I needed help.

“Hullo,” I said, stepping onto his lawn and praying that he understood English.

“Hey,” he said. He immediately jumped off the swing, his face turning a little bit red when he saw me. “What's
up?”

“You're American,” I blurted out.

The boy raised his eyebrows at me. “Yeah, I know.”

All right. I had a country. The United States.

It was a start.

“Are you . . . British?” he asked, cocking his head to the
side.

“I'm English,” I replied.

“That's so cool,” he said. “Like Harry Potter!”

He said “Harry Potter” in a terrible fake English accent. I looked at him blankly.

“Uh, never mind. My name's Jake.”

“Pleased to meet you. I'm Charlotte Bromley.” I stuck out my hand for him to shake, but he didn't seem to notice. Maybe they didn't shake hands in America in the future. “I was wondering,” I went on. “Can you tell me how to get to the High Street?”

Jake looked puzzled. “I don't know where
High Street is.”

Bother. What a ridiculous country. How could you not have a High Street?

“Where is the nearest newsagent, then?” I asked.

“I dunno.”

Maybe Jake just wasn't very bright. “Is there a place,” I asked slowly, “where there are shops? And you could go buy, oh, let's say, some milk? And a newspaper?”

“Of course,” he said.

Thank you, America. “How do I get there?”

“Um . . .” Jake ran his hand through his dark brown hair, making it spike up in spots. “I could ask my brother to give you a ride?”

“Oh, no,” I said quickly. “I shouldn't want to be a bother. Just tell me which direction to walk.”

“Walk?” He laughed. “No way. That'd take forever.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because . . .” He looked helpless. “It's far away from here. Look, let me just ask Noah. It's no big deal. All he's doing anyway is sitting around and playing Xbox.”

I didn't know what Xbox was, but I also didn't have a lot of options. Jake seemed nice, and he was offering to help. Plus he was my age, and an American, so I trusted him. He didn't seem like he was going to suddenly turn into a Nazi spy.

Probably.

“Where do you live?” Jake called from the door to the
house.

And it occurred to me that I had absolutely no way to answer that question. Nowhere. I lived nowhere.

If I told Jake, “I just time traveled from Bristol, England, in the year 1940,” what would he do? Maybe my dad really
had
uncovered the secrets of time traveling, so maybe that would be a normal thing to say now. Maybe Jake would respond, “Oh, I time traveled to the year 1940 on holiday once. It was quite lovely.” That would be brilliant. Because then I could simply travel home again.

But if time travel now was as much a mystery as it had been in 1940, then what would Jake's response be? I knew what Kitty or I would do if someone showed up on our doorstep and announced she was a time traveler. We would say, “That's super! Come inside and tell us all about it.”

But I also knew that not everybody believed in time travel. And a normal person, a person who read fewer books than I and who had less of an imagination than Kitty—a person like the Film Stars, or like Justine—would laugh and call you mad.

I couldn't tell whether Jake was a normal person, but I did know that I needed his help. So I couldn't risk saying “I'm a time traveler” and having him call the insane asylum.

“I live,” I said, “at Thirty Orchard Close.” Because that was my real address. Which I might never see again.

Jake shrugged. “I don't know where that is. Anyway, let me grab Noah.” He opened the door to his house.

“Could I . . .” I called, blushing with embarrassment. I didn't want to ask this strange boy. But I had to. “Could I also use your toilet?”

“Of course!” He opened the door wider, and I scampered after him. “Noah!” he shouted into the house. “Get your keys. We're going for a drive!”

Chapter 7

Jake's brother, Noah, was nearly seventeen. “He just got his license,” Jake explained to me in a whisper as we piled into the car. “He's a terrible driver. But he probably won't kill us.”

The way I saw it, I had already escaped death once today, so I might as well give it a second chance. Jake and I crowded into the backseat whilst Noah started the car. The driver's seat was on the opposite side from the cars I was accustomed to. Was that an American thing? Or a future thing?

Noah glanced back at us. “Why are you dressed like that?” he asked me.

My face felt hot and my Peter Pan collar scratched at my neck. If Kitty had been with me, I was sure she could have instantly come up with some explanation. But the only answer I could think of was,
Because I don't belong here.

Fortunately, Jake came to my rescue. “Shut up, Noah. It's probably a costume or something.”

I bobbed my head in agreement. Noah shrugged and turned back around to face front.

“I think it looks cool,” Jake added, which I didn't understand, because I definitely felt
warm
in the still air of the car, not cool.

Noah snorted. “You would,” he said to Jake. Then he touched something on his steering wheel, and angry, strange-sounding music started blasting all around us. It was too loud for conversation, which I was glad for. If the brothers asked me any more questions, I didn't know how I would answer them. I needed some sort of alibi, a fake identity. But without knowing more about the world I was in, I couldn't even begin to work out what that fake identity might be. Was the war still on? Had the Germans won? All wars must end at some point. Mustn't they?

Noah was the sort of boy Justine would have called “handsome,” which is to say he was (a) male, and (b) within five years of her age. Had she been here, she would have been mercilessly flirting with him in the front seat.

But Justine wasn't here, and she never would be.

My stomach twisted at that thought. Had there been any­thing left in it, I might have been sick again, all over the seats in Noah's shiny round car. Yes, Justine was careless and judgmental and often lazy.
But right now, I missed her so much.

And that was nothing compared to how I felt when I thought about Kitty. Kitty, holding my hand in her last moments of life. Kitty, promising to always love me. And me, diving through that portal. Leaving Kitty behind.

Why hadn't I at least
tried
to bring her into the future with me?

Because I was worried there wouldn't be enough time, and in our confusion and fear, the portal would close before we both made it there.

But even so, shouldn't I have died beside Kitty, instead of saving myself without her?

Why had I even insisted on going out to the car with that Nazi woman in the first place? Why had I told her that we were sisters? Kitty had sensed something was wrong with the whole situation. She had wanted to stay inside. I was the one who followed the scary woman, like a fool. Kitty had only followed me, like a friend.

And look where that got her.

I could not keep thinking about this. I had to think about the basics: figuring out what year I was in, and finding a safe place to sleep tonight. If I thought about Kitty, I would shatter into a thousand splintered pieces, and I would never be able to put myself together again.

It was a fifteen-minute drive to the High Street, back in the direction that I had first come from. I could see why Jake told me not to walk. The dashboard in the car gave the temperature as 92 degrees Fahrenheit. I didn't think the weather in Bristol had ever been that hot.

Inside the car, though, cool air blew on us from vents in the ceiling. I wanted to ask how they worked, but I kept my mouth shut.

Noah screeched to a stop and turned off the car. I got out and felt the sun immediately beating down on me again.

“Is this what you were looking for?” Jake asked.

I looked around the street. I saw what looked to be a grocery shop, a bank, a post office, a few other shops, and a library.

A library!

For the first time since the Germans showed up at my house, I smiled. “Yes,” I said. “This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks ever so much.”

“Are you guys going to be here for a long time?” Noah asked.

Jake looked at me, so I supposed Noah was speaking to both of us, even though I was obviously not a “guy.”

“I should like to go to the library,” I said.

It took Jake a moment to reply, and it occurred to me that maybe the Film Stars were right, and really nobody did like girls who read books. Maybe in the future, reading all the time was an even worse crime than it had been at Westminster School for Girls.

But then Jake just said, “Cool. Me, too. Meet us there in like half an hour, Noah?”

“Whatever,” Noah said, which I decided must be Future American for “yes.”

Jake and I went into the library, which was strangely chilly, just like the car. But other than that, and a few objects that I didn't recognize, it looked like the Bristol library. Scattered lamps and desks, a few comfortable-looking armchairs, and row after row of books. It even smelled the same as my library, the musty odor of paper that I loved more than any perfume.

I stood in the entryway for a moment, just breathing in. In this strange country, in this strange time, I felt at home.

“I'm going to the children's room,” Jake whispered to me. “See you in a bit?” I nodded, and he took off.

“Excuse me,” I said to the librarian with a short haircut at the front desk, “have you got today's newspaper?”

“Of course,” she said.

Thank you again, America. This is a civilized land after all.

“Which paper do you want?” she asked, adjusting one of her dangling earrings.

I stared at her blankly. “The local newspaper,” I said at last, hoping that was a legitimate answer.

Apparently it was, because she handed me a newspaper attached to a wooden post. “You can't check it out,” she said, “but you're welcome to read it as long as you're in the library.” I started to head to one of the comfortable-looking armchairs, but then she added, “I'm sure you get this all the time, hon, but I have to say, your accent is
adorable
.”

“It is?”

“British, right?”

“It's English,” I corrected her.

“I love British accents. I'm totally addicted to the BBC. It's my favorite television channel.”

“You have the BBC?” I gasped. Last year, the BBC Television Service had stopped broadcasting “for the duration of the conflict.” If the BBC was back on the telly, did that mean that Britain had won the war? And why would they get the British Broadcasting Corporation in America?

“Of course! Anyway, there's something about British accents that's so charming and old-fashioned, you know? Especially yours.”

That's because I
am
old-fashioned.

“And
. . .
what an outfit, too,” the librarian added, looking confusedly at my pajamas.

Thanks to Jake, I was ready for that one. “It's a costume,” I told her. Then I walked away and sat down with my newspaper. It was called the
Sutton Telegraph
. After reading some of the fine print, I deduced that Sutton was a town in the state of Wisconsin. My United States geography was not very good, so I didn't know what that meant.

I found the date on the very first page. August 20, 2013.

Seventy-three years had passed. I was on a different day, in a different month, in a different year, in a different decade, in a different century, in a different
millennium.

Which meant that everyone I knew was probably dead. If my dad had lived through being held captive by the Nazis, he would now be one hundred and eighteen. If my mum had lived through the bombings in London, she would now be one hundred and eight. If Betsy, Margaret, and Jeanine were still alive, they would be old women, ugly and wrinkled and, with any luck, too nearsighted to watch films.

Not that I am vengeful.

Now that I knew where and when I was, I had to work out where and when I was going. I didn't have a plan for that. I was simply exhausted.

I went to find Jake in a side room that was small and cozy, but absolutely jam-packed with books. I had never seen so many books just for children!

“Are you ready to go?” Jake asked, casting aside the color­ful comic he was reading.

“I should like to stay here,” I answered. “But you can go.”

Jake looked dubious. “How will you get home?”

“I'll ring my mum and ask her to get me,” I replied. “I'll be fine.”

“The library closes pretty soon,” Jake said. “Are you sure you don't want a ride? Noah would be happy to drive you pretty much anywhere. Trust me. No distance is too far for
him.”

“I'll be fine,” I repeated, more curtly this time.

“Right. Okay. I get it.” Jake ran his hand through his hair again. “I guess I'll see you around then, Charlotte.”

He left, and it was just me and the books. So many books! I picked one up and flipped to the copyright page. It was published in 1999! I was holding in my hand a book from the future. Or the past, depending on how you looked at it. Either way, I had loads of missed books to make up for, and I had no idea where to begin.

I decided to go alphabetically, just so I wouldn't get overwhelmed. I picked up a book with a picture of a feather on the cover, by an author whose last name was Almond, and I took it to the armchair in the corner of the room. I curled up into the smallest little ball I could manage, and I read about a boy who found in his garage a man who was both bird and angel. I stayed there through announcements about how the library was closing, through the dimming of the overhead lights, through the sound of the librarian clicking the front door locked behind her.

In that armchair, hidden away in the far corner of the children's room, I fell asleep for the first time in seventy-three years. And all night long, I dreamt of Kitty.