Rewrite Redemption (48 page)

 “Slow down. What gives?” Lex asked as we headed across the crowded campus.

“He’s leaving,” I choked out.

“What? Who’s leaving?”

“Constantine! We fix his past and he’s gone.”

“Wait, wait, A.J., stop!” She grabbed my arm, swinging me around. “Hold on a minute. What are you talking about?”

“We rewrite his past, and he’s back in Seattle…doesn’t even know I exist.”

Lex just looked at me, startled, as the truth sank in. “But…”

“Think about it, Lex. If his brother didn’t have the accident, Constantine never would have moved to Boulder. We never would have met or have found out about my strangeness.” 

“Whoa…wait…that can’t be true—”

“No? Well, it just gets worse. Here we are plotting on how to rescue Ipod. But if Constantine never came to Boulder, that wouldn’t even be an option. Sure, we rescue Ipod
now
, but when we rewrite Constantine’s problem, the timeline changes. We go back to not ever knowing him. And if we don’t know Constantine, how the heck are we going to rescue Ipod?”

“No, no…wait…this is confusing.” She walked towards the building, looking at me with grave concern. “That can’t be the way it works out. He wouldn’t do that.”

Then, as if we didn’t have enough shit hitting the fan, we ran into a Bratz-Doll roadblock.

“So, Jones, where have you been hiding out, fashion-disaster rehab? Cure your black hoodie addiction? Too bad a change in clothes doesn’t change your loser status…does it girls?” Sloane Cheney glared at me with heavily glopped eyes and stretched her oil-slicked lips into a fake smile of triumph. The Kicks voiced their agreement and sneered at me as well.

Lex opened her mouth to say something, but I beat her to the punch.

“Seriously?” I asked, getting right up in Bratz Doll’s face. “Bite me! You are such a sad cliché. Don’t you ever go to the movies or read books?
Nobody
likes the mean girl.” I let out a breath and shoved my way through her and the Kicks.

Sloane was so startled at my movement; she stepped backwards onto the grass. Her spike heel sank into the dirt, knocking her off balance. Her heavy book bag swung back, and the next moment, she was on her butt with her legs in the air. She yelled something at me, but I didn’t stop. I didn’t care. I was over being stopped by a Bratz Doll, cheerleader model or not. Bring it on!

Lex was silent as she followed me to the locker bay. I dumped my books and slammed the door. “I can’t do this today,” I said. “Let’s get out of here. Like Constantine said, what does it matter if we skip? It will all be different tomorrow.”

“Yeah, sure, okay.” Lex stuffed her books into her locker and we headed for the door.

We walked in silence to Pearl Street. When we reached the coffee shop, I grabbed a table, and Lex stood in line. While I waited, I stared out the window, watching the clueless walk by as though the world wasn’t ending.

“Okay, we need to figure this out,” Lex said as she handed me a steaming mug. “Why would he have us rescue Ipod, if it was just all going to change as soon as his own story was rewritten? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe he just hasn’t thought it all out, you know, the ramifications of time travel. I mean, it’s really complicated. You touch one thing and fifty others are affected. Isn’t that what got him in this mess in the first place?”

“Yeah, but he’s not an idiot. Surely, he must have considered how this would play out.”

“Why?
We
didn’t! We didn’t think it through to the end result.”

“Yeah, but—”

“We just focused on having Ipod back. And me, I was seeing this stupid love story.” I shut my eyes for a moment, breathing deep to keep the tears from flowing. “I am
such
a loser! Why didn’t you stop me?”

“You’re not a—”

“We thought, fine, he shows us how to bring Ipod back, surely we can do the same thing for him,” I said. “But no one thought about the complexities. Once we change Constantine’s life,
everything
changes. Think about it! We never even meet him. We don’t know that your mom is going to screw everything up with the Hammer. And Ipod is slammed right back to military school which we know will kill him.

“
We
don’t get a rewrite!

“And me, well, I’m a freakin bed warmer for the Gross Brothers…stuck in the past forever, just waiting to die of old age at twenty, all toothless and used up, with five little Gross-brother babies and no disposable diapers. Sam goes completely off the deep end. The house goes to the bank. And you, well, you can fill in the blanks there, Lex, because you’re back with the Chihuahua.”

  I burst into tears, knocking over my mug. It fell to the floor and shattered. The coffee ran all over. Everyone stared at us. Lex just sat there with her mouth open. I jumped up and bolted for the bathroom. What did I care about what people thought? It would just erase anyway.

Some emo girl from school, skipping like we were, was hiding out, smoking a joint. I glared at her, obviously looking insane, because she quickly put it out and left.

I grabbed the first stall and slammed the door. Then I sank to the floor, sobbing. It just wasn’t fair. And it was all so confusing. Everything was falling apart. I didn’t know what to do and I had no good options.

Lex’s painted nails snaked over the top of the door. She gave it a shake. “A.J., open up.”

I didn’t answer. I just sat there, sobbing silently.

“Come on…open the door.”

I caught hold of myself and let out a few ragged breathes.

“Let me in. We’re going to figure this out.”

I knew it was out of Lex’s control this time. But after a minute, I wiped my eyes on my shirt and blew my nose on a piece of toilet paper. Then I stood up and unlatched the door.

She pulled me out of the stall. “We’re going to handle this. Shrink Four…instead of freaking out, assess the situation and make a plan. You know that. What if we rescue Ipod but we don’t rewrite Constantine’s past? Then we have Ipod back. You still know who you are and what you can do. Let Constantine find somebody else to fix his problem.”

I shook my head. “Won’t work,” I choked out. “First of all, I already promised I’d do it. His family’s really messed up. How can I not? Besides no matter
who
fixes it for him, if it’s fixed at all, he never comes to Boulder. Don’t you see? It’s either him or us!”

Lex rubbed my back. “There has to be—”

“Not this time—rock and a hard place. I thought…I thought he liked me. I thought we connected. I thought maybe because I was like him, that maybe we…maybe…it wouldn’t matter if I was…you know…
me.
”

“You aren’t—”

“I thought this was
my
chance…finally. Maybe I could fall in love and have someone love me back…someone who didn’t see me as a freak. This is what happens when you get your hopes up. Having hope is just a straight shot to getting your heart broken.”

Lex put her hands on my shoulders and leaned her forehead against mine. “It’s never wrong to have hope, A.J. All the Shrinks agree on that. I’m as confused as you are, but I know the guy likes you. I see how he looks at you. He wanted to know all about you while we were waiting to bring you back.”

“He just wanted to know if I could help him.”

“No, it was more than that. It was sweet, really. And before you got up this morning, he kissed your hair—”

“You saw that? I thought maybe I was—”

“It was real. He was awake before I left for the shower. He was faking sleep. He could have moved. He just wanted to lie there next to you.”

“He was awake? Are you sure?”

“I lie—I die, A.J. Listen, I know you’re scared. But, we don’t have all the facts yet. There’s been so much to talk about—you know—with who you are and all. He wouldn’t just use you to get his old life back and let ours collapse. There has to be something we don’t know. You’re pre-freaking.”

“You think?” I asked, wanting desperately to believe her. I let out a show, shaky breath.

“I think,” she said, adamantly. She pulled back and looked at me, accessing the damage. “Stay here.”

She left the bathroom and returned a minute later with some crushed ice in a zip lock. She wet a couple of folded paper towels and laid them on top of it. “Here, hold this against your eyes.”

I held the compress against my face. The coolness of it was soothing. She ran her brush through my hair and gave me some lip-gloss.

“Let me see,” she said, when she was done fixing me up.

I pulled the ice away.

“I guess that’s one benefit of not wearing makeup,” she said. “You’d be a mess right now if you did, after crying like that. Your eyes are red, but otherwise you look really good. Your cheeks are all flushed. Let’s find a tree. That will fix your eyes. Bring the ice.”

Her phone buzzed.

“It’s him,” she said, reading the text. “He wants to pick us up early.”

“When?”

“Lunch.”

“Tell him to pick us up at the bus station,” I said. “That’s close enough to school so he doesn’t have to know we blew the morning off. I don’t want him to know I freaked out.”

On the way out, I saw that someone had cleaned my mess. Lex tossed a ten on the table, and we left the coffee shop, ignoring the stares. We had some time to kill till lunch, so we just hung out in the bookstore. We didn’t talk about it anymore—no point.

Rock and a hard place.

All the drama had really taken a toll on me…to say nothing about the lack of tree juice. Exhausted, I dropped back on my bed and fell asleep minutes after texting Lex. Sometime later, my ring tone woke me. Groggy and reeling from a headache, I fumbled for my phone, knocking it off the nightstand. It skidded across the hardwood floor. Holding my aching head, I hauled myself across the room to get it. The text was from Lex. They were at the bus station and not school.

When I saw the time, I was shocked it had gotten so late, but grateful that I’d gotten through the hours without having to spend them thinking. I downed a couple aspirins with a glass of OJ. Then I put on a clean shirt. As I pulled it on, I looked at my chest in my bedroom mirror.

It was hard to believe I’d been shot just—what—yesterday? My chest was smooth. The scar had disappeared. Man, that girl was something else. And I was one lucky son-of-a-bitch that she was around when I got shot. Then it occurred to me, that it was the first time I’d even
thought
about getting shot since we’d talked about it that morning. How bizarre was that? Like getting shot was just an everyday occurrence. With everything going on, it had completely slipped my mind. I couldn’t believe what a rollercoaster my life had become.

The aspirin kicked in and the shower helped a little, but I still felt lousy. Mostly, I had this overwhelming feeling of dread that I couldn’t shake. That, combined with all the drama, was pushing me over the edge. I needed to find a tree and I needed to find it soon.

I went to the back yard to see if I could pull anything off the pathetic little twigs growing there. But no dice—their scrawny roots could barely feed themselves, much less me. This was
not
good. I couldn’t deal with being around the girls this messed up. I needed help if I was going to be able to function and not look like a complete idiot.

A big cottonwood hung over our fence from next door. It seemed the most promising solution. I’d never met the neighbors, but their cars were gone, and I knew they worked. I scanned the place to make sure no one was outside. Then I hopped the fence, dropping quietly into the empty yard.

The tree was ordinary but old enough to have some juice. I wasn’t bonded with it so I wouldn’t get much. But at least it would even me out enough to drive and help me make it through the day. I hugged it tight, full body contact, tapping deep into its vibration.

Just as I had begun to feel a response, an angry German shepherd came charging around from the front, barking holy hell, rabid at me invading his space. I was barely able to shade before he lunged for me.

I jerked to the left. He backed off whining, growling, confused at the disparity between his eyes and his sense of smell. I had no way to hide my scent. He escalated back into full bark mode, going crazy that he couldn’t see me. Hoping once again that no one was home, I quickly pulled hard from the tree. Then I hopped the fence before he could rip my leg off. “Sorry, boy,” I said.