The Power of Un (8 page)

“
Gi-i-i-b
!” came Mom’s voice again, closer this time.

A trickle of sweat ran into my eyes. I blinked hard. What was six times three? I couldn’t remember. Sixty times thirteen, plus fifteen … My stick raised little poofs of dust as I worked. One thousand four hundred twenty-one? Could that be right? I wished I’d had time to check my work, then thought,
Well, it’s not such a huge problem. If I make a mistake, I can just use the unner to do it over again
. So I keyed in 1421, the largest number we’d tried yet.

“Wish me luck,” I said to Ash.

“That looks weird,” he said. “Is the math right?”

But by the time he finished asking, I’d already hit
ORDER
. Just before the world slid away, I glimpsed the mangy mutt watching us from among the trees, its mouth in a crazy grin, its tail slapping the ground.

A
ll right. I admit it. Math isn’t my best subject. Everybody, including my teachers, keeps telling me I’d be great if I’d just be more careful. I understand all the ideas—I even think some of them are fun. It’s like math is the most complicated puzzle ever invented—full of patterns and surprises and strange little things to discover. All the same, my math grades aren’t so hot. I’m always getting the wrong answers because I forget to carry a one, or I get distracted and say eight times seven is forty-two instead of fifty-six. I’m even worse when I’m under pressure. And I was definitely under pressure.

I kept my eyes closed after I punched the red button this time, waiting for the smell of popcorn and the noise of the rides before I opened them again. Imagine my shock when I heard coughs and rustling
papers instead, as a man’s voice intoned, “You may dunk the skins in water, pour ammonia onto them from this bottle, expose them to heat and moving air from the blow-dryer, squeeze lemon juice onto them, or devise an experiment of your own. All right now, let’s get started.”

I opened my eyes and found myself seated in the school science lab, staring at Mr. Maynard. I glanced to my right, and there was Lorraine Frogner at my elbow, scribbling stuff in a notebook as fast as she could. The sun was shining through the windows as bright as could be, and the clock on the wall said 9:34. I had on the T-shirt I’d worn Friday—olive green with a picture of a werewolf—and my watch, which I knew I’d left at home, was on my wrist. My hands were completely empty. The unner was nowhere to be seen.

I patted the pockets of my jeans. Nothing. I scooted my stool back and peered under the lab table. Nothing there except my red backpack and Rainy’s turquoise one. I grabbed mine, tugged open the zipper, and began to rummage through it. I was breathing hard and starting to sweat. Where could the unner be? Something had gone terribly wrong.

“I think we should do the lemon juice,” said Rainy. “I hate the way ammonia smells.” She laid down her pen and gave me a look. “Uh … is everything all right?”

Before I could consider the consequences, I found
myself blurting in an angry voice, “Do I look like everything’s all right?”

Rainy leaned back and curled her lip. “Sheesh, I’m sorry I asked.”

I closed my eyes and tried to make my heart slow down to something resembling normal speed.
Panicking never helped anybody
, I told myself.
Think. What’s going on here
?

If I was back in science class, then I’d unned a lot more time than I’d planned. But how much more?

“What’s one thousand four hundred twenty-one divided by sixty?” I asked. My tongue made sticky noises because my mouth was so dry.

“Oh right, just off the top of my head?” said Rainy.

I opened my eyes, looked hard at her, and said, “I’m serious.”

She frowned, picked up her pen again, and scratched a few figures in the margin of her notebook. “Twenty-three, with a remainder of forty-one.”

So that was it. Somehow I’d messed up the math and ended up unning twenty-three hours and forty-one minutes instead of the twelve or thirteen hours I’d expected. I was back in the middle of Friday morning, about to relive the worst day of my life in its entirety. Which explained why I didn’t have the unner. The moment in which I currently found myself had happened before Rainy would phone to say
she was sick, before I would run into the woods, and before I would meet the old man. I didn’t have the unner because the old man wouldn’t be giving it to me until later that afternoon.

I scratched absently at the tip of my nose, where I expected to feel the fresh scab from the scrape I’d gotten when I tripped and lost the unner in the woods. But my nose was completely smooth. The thought of knowing, among other things, that I was going to fall down and hurt myself later that day made me woozy.

“Cripes,” I muttered, wishing I could lie down someplace. “Cripes!”

“What is
wrong
with you?” asked Rainy.

“Uh …” I said. “Uh …” A new thought had left me completely paralyzed: what if I accidentally said or did something different this time—something that changed the chain of events enough so the old man didn’t show up that afternoon? For all I knew, I’d already messed things up completely just by asking Rainy to do long division for me. I read a story once in which a time traveler accidentally changed the whole future just by killing a butterfly. But I didn’t want to change the whole future. I just wanted to save Roxy. And, if possible, I also wanted to get the unner again.

“Nothing’s wrong,” I said, breathing carefully.

“Huh,” said Rainy, unconvinced. “Whatever. So, shall we put some lemon juice on our potato skins?”

“Lemon juice!” I yelped. “No! No! We can’t!”

Rainy squinched her face up and stared at me as if I’d developed a rash of green spots.

Hastily I added, “I mean, we can, but let’s not.” I strained to remember the exact words I’d used yesterday … or what felt like yesterday. “Everybody’s going to do lemon juice. Let’s do something original like put salt on ours.”

“Salt?” Rainy frowned. “I dunno. Where would we get salt?”

I pointed. “There’s a box on the shelf. I’ll go get it.” I stood up and walked across the room. Somehow I knew I was doing it exactly the way I’d done it the time before. I could feel a faint force, like a wheel wanting to stay in a groove or the pull of a magnet, that made doing the same things over again just a little easier than changing them. Maybe if I stopped thinking so hard and did what felt easiest, I’d be O.K.

Sometimes you get a feeling, like everything that’s happening has happened before. Dad told me one time that there’s a French term for it;
d$eAj$aG vu
, which means “seen before.” Boy, did I ever have
d$eAj$aG vu
now. For the next little while, I let events take place by themselves. I felt almost as if I were hovering somewhere behind my own right shoulder, observing as things I knew would happen actually happened. First I watched myself convince Rainy the salt would be better than the lemon juice. Then I watched myself
convince her we ought to spread the skins out instead of piling them up. Then I listened to myself with growing discomfort as I tried to talk her into salting them heavily instead of lightly.

I knew what was coming. We were about to have a fight, and Rainy would end up pouring the whole box of salt in my lap. Then I thought if I changed one thing just a little bit, I might be able to avoid the anger and frustration of being called selfish in front of everybody—and having to clean up the salty mess from under the table. Would that be so bad?

Part of me said yes, it would be bad. Possibly worse than bad. Immoral. What if there was some kind of Master Plan, and I messed it all up? Did I have the right to do something that might change the future of everybody else in the world? I’d be doing it entirely to make my own life easier, and I wasn’t asking anybody else what they wanted. It didn’t feel right.

But a different part of me—the most persuasive part, as it turned out—thought it was a great idea not to relive this particularly embarrassing scene. So what if Rainy felt a little kinder toward me? I couldn’t see how that would change anything major in the long run. Not in a bad way, at least. After all, wasn’t this exactly the kind of thing the unner was meant for? If I wasn’t supposed to change anything, why had the old man given me the unner in the first place?

So when the time came for me to say, “Come on.
If it gets messy, I’ll clean it up,” I said something else instead. “O.K., no big deal. Put the salt on whatever way you want.”

Rainy smiled and said, “O.K.”

After that, everything was spookily different for a while, and I began to wonder if I’d made a gigantic mistake. True, Rainy and I didn’t fight. But that also meant we did things we hadn’t done before. Instead of crawling around under the table with the whisk broom and the dustpan, we actually finished our experiment and wrote up the results in our notebooks. And those results were boring, just as I’d originally feared—there wasn’t enough salt to draw the water out, so nothing much happened.

Toward the end of the period, things started to get familiar again. The bell rang. We picked up our backpacks and headed down the hall to other classes. I met up with Ash, who had no idea the unner existed. We talked about our carnival plans and tried to make each other bump into walls as we walked to gym.

Things went exactly as they had before. I grinned and felt muscles in my arms and shoulders loosen that I hadn’t even realized were tight. I’d used the Power of Un to rescue myself from one of the worst parts of the day, and still I was in a chain of known events, and everything was going along just fine. Maybe time was like a pool of water: when you disturb it, ripples go out from the place you touched—strong in the center,
but getting fainter and fainter, till finally you can’t see them anymore.

I hoped I was right. But I couldn’t be sure. So I made a pact with myself not to change things carelessly. Making changes felt bad, like cheating. I also didn’t want to get lost and find myself in a future even worse than the one I knew was coming. It seemed strange to think such a thing, because after all, what could be worse than Roxy getting hit by a truck? But I could imagine worse possibilities: both of us getting hit by a truck, or Mom and Dad getting hit by a truck, or an earthquake, or our house burning down with all of us in it.

The trouble is, as the hours passed and things continued to happen just as I remembered, I got kind of overconfident. All those awful scenarios faded into the background until they seemed so overblown and unlikely that I stopped worrying about them. Probably I’d already done a bunch of stuff differently without even realizing it, and so far there were no problems at all. How much could it hurt if I changed a few tiny things on purpose?

When I went through the lunch line, I asked for macaroni and cheese, because I remembered that the potatoes and gravy had tasted putrid. It didn’t make one speck of difference that I could see, except that I liked my lunch better. Feeling pleased with myself, I gave in to temptation and made another small change
later, on the playground. I stepped out of the way instead of getting whapped in the stomach by a stray dodge ball.

Ash said, “Whoa! That was great! How’d you see it coming?”

I grinned and said, “I dunno. Instinct, I guess.”

Then things started to get weird. Instead of bouncing off my middle and scudding back toward the kid who threw it, the dodge ball sped toward an open gate.

“Hey, catch that ball!” the kid yelled.

“Sure thing,” Ash called, and he ran after it. For one awful moment I was sure he would chase that ball into the street and run in front of a truck. But it didn’t happen that way. He caught the ball before it got through the gate and threw it back to the players. Still, the scare left me struggling to keep that macaroni and cheese in my stomach where it belonged.

I tried to get things back on track and insisted we go to the computer lab, even though Ash wanted to stop for a drink of water on the way. The awful possibilities sprang into clear focus again. Who could say what might happen if he stopped for that drink? After a few minutes, events began to happen the way I expected, and I could breathe normally again. But I renewed my vow not to change anything else.

Minute followed minute until the end of the day finally arrived and it was time for Ms. Shripnole’s
math class once more. Ash and I passed notes to each other instead of doing our decimals work sheets, and when I opened my binder for more paper, the soda straw fell out. I gritted my teeth and picked it up, knowing exactly how uncomfortable the next few moments would be. I even started to make the fateful spitball. Then I thought,
This is going to be horrible. Maybe it’s worth it to risk another change. Maybe if I don’t shoot this spitball, Rainy won’t get into trouble. Then she won’t have any reason to get mad at me. She’ll come and baby-sit instead of pretending to be sick, and Roxy will never get near the carnival or the bumper of that horrendous truck. Maybe this is the one small mistake that, if avoided, will make the big things right again. Maybe I’m
supposed
to change this! But am I brave enough to try it? If the spitball incident never happens, everything might go differently. Suppose the new time path I make creates some of those awful situations I’ve imagined? There I might be, and Roxy, too, at fate’s mercy again, maybe without the unner, or any hope of ever getting it
.

I thought it all through at light speed while I held the soda straw in one hand and the spitball in the other. I wanted to do the best thing this time. I should never have shot that dumb spitball. It felt right to avoid it now.

A second passed, then two. I laid the straw down and dropped the spitball on the floor.

Halfway through a smile of relief, I glanced over at
Rainy. The smile froze on my face like a lopsided Popsicle. Rainy had just shot her own spitball. Only she didn’t aim it at me this time. I honestly think she was trying for the blackboard or one of the lights. Who knows what made her do it? She wasn’t angry at me now. Maybe she was just in the mood for a little excitement. Even a girl like Rainy might get bored in math class on a too-warm Friday afternoon. But she hadn’t had much practice with spitballs, or with sneakiness. The wet wad hit Ms. Shripnole in the center of the forehead, right where mine had hit her before. Rainy sat with her mouth half open and the straw in her hand, a sitting duck.