The Time Travel Chronicles (24 page)

Middle school has to be the most Darwinian experience a typical American ever survives. It rewards nothing but social power and crudely perceived sexual status. By that standard, I was a great success. With a kind of puckish charm, blue eyes, and floppy Bieberesque hair, I made my way to the top. I was popular. My rebel without a cause behavior only improved my status with my peers.

So you see, I thought that I had a lot to lose standing there staring down Lexi’s shirt while my posse grinned into their cartons of milk. The truth is I had everything to gain.

I’m not sure how to describe the sensation. You know that moment when you’re extremely tired and you feel like your eyes are a half-second behind your mind? It was something similar to that but much more intense. It felt like I was pulled to the back of my head. One moment I’m looking down Lexi’s shirt, the next someone or something else is in control.

I remember the startled jump as the something else took over. Without any say on my part, my head turned, and my eyes looked up at my friends.

I—or rather, the thing in control—dropped my tray, unceremoniously spilling my lunch into Lexi’s valley and down the front of her shirt. At the time, I chalked it up to shock. Now I know better. It happened on purpose. (Damn, tears come easy when you get old.)

At this point, the part of me that was still thirteen panicked. I tried to stop my hands, to stuff them to my sides, to make them do anything, but I had no control. I was a passenger along for the ride in my own car. Something else was in the driver’s seat.

I watched in mute disbelief as Lexi jumped up, staring at me, eyes wide and eyebrows pulled close. Spaghetti hung in threads from the top of her shirt. She held her hands up, looking down at the red stains. “What the hell, Noah?”

My posse sat frozen in place. Bradley’s mouth opened slightly. Drake set his fork back down on his plate. Then slowly the snickers started, growing until they all laughed. With that final humiliation, Lexi started to cry and sprinted away toward the girls’ bathroom. Carson spewed milk through his nose, adding it to the general mess on the table.

Then to my utmost horror, the whatever it was in my head sat down at the table and began to sob—not some kind of silent shoulder shaking whimper, either. No, this was an oblivious, loud wail of inconsolable grief. Then the thing hijacked my voice. “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!”

The laughter died in a heartbeat and an uncomfortable silence blanketed the room.

Although the thing had cupped my head in my hands, I could still tell that my behavior was attracting a lot of attention.
Shut up! Shut up, you bastard!
I screamed in my head, but no one answered me. The usual lunchtime roar died to a dull, whispered rumble.

“Dude, what’s wrong with him?”

“Go to hell, Benny! Nothing, okay?”

I looked up.

Benny and I had grown up together in the same cul-de-sac. There had been a time when we were six or seven that we had been inseparable, but Benny didn’t have the middle school star power that I did, and so he had been discarded as I climbed over him on my way to the top.

Benny looked at Carson, who had scolded him, and shrugged. The smaller boy had no interest in tangling with an alpha dog.

He was about to walk away when the thing inside me gained momentary control of my emotions and started to speak. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong, Benny. I’m old, and now I know I’d desperately love to do it again. I promised myself for years that it wouldn’t be like this, but now I know that I’d do it all again.”

Benny jerked his head back. “What are you talking about?”

But the thing inside me never answered him. It simply dissolved again into inconsolable sobs.

After ten or twenty seconds, Carson finally spoke in an undertone what must have been on everyone’s mind. “Come on, Noah. Get it together. Stop it, man. Stop crying.”

The thing ignored him.

Mr. Yonkers, my humanities teacher, arrived and put his hand on my shoulder. He leaned down. “Hey, Noah, let’s get you somewhere quiet.” He gently started to guide me out of my seat.

The thing managed to control itself enough to turn and look Yonkers square in the eye. I was mortified. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d looked that directly at a teacher.

Slowly, my head started to nod. The whatever-it-was said, “Yeah, the kid’s going to need your help. Eighty-three, kid. It may not mean anything to you right now, but we’re eighty-three.”

Mr. Yonkers looked at me with lowered brows for a moment, and for a second I could have sworn he was about to respond to my insane ramblings, but he didn’t. Ever so slowly his grip tightened on my arm. “Come on, Noah. Let’s go.” The tone in his voice had lost some of its warmth. He pulled me from the table and frog marched me from the cafeteria. I continued to whimper softly.

As the door to the cafeteria swung shut behind us, the whatever-it-was disappeared, and I snapped back to the front of my head. It was like coming home after your kid threw a party in the house, and you’re left with the repair and cleanup. Instantly, I took a deep breath and gritted my teeth. I had no use for the hot tears on my face. Emotions that a second ago I couldn’t touch were suddenly once again under my control. For my thirteen-year-old self, grief felt like standing on the moon—alien, cold, and unknown. I hadn’t cried like that since before my parents divorced.

I hurriedly wiped my nose on my sleeve and did my best to gain control of my tears.

Yonkers sensed the change and loosened his grip on my arm. “You okay?”

I nodded but didn’t answer. The foreign emotions I now faced down were still so raw I wasn’t sure that I wouldn’t cry if I spoke, and this time it would be my fault.

Yonkers steered me into his classroom and told me to sit, pointing at a desk in the front row while he stepped to the phone.

Shell-shocked, I complied.

He dialed the office, told them what happened, and asked if the counselor would come down to his room.

Yonkers always tried hard with me. He was one of the few teachers left in the building that hadn’t thrown me away as a lost cause.

When he finished the call, he walked around his desk and leaned back against it. “What did you take, Noah?”

The question stung. Still trying to process everything that had just happened, I wasn’t ready to answer. My eyes darted to his face only briefly before staring back down at the floor. My tone was particularly acidic because I was being falsely accused of something which at another time might have been quite correct. “Nothing. I didn’t take nothing.”

Yonkers sighed. “Okay, Noah. You sure? Done any pot recently? You know there are some people who have funny reactions to that stuff. They’re allergic to it. They get all paranoid.”

Involuntarily, the thought of the couple of joints my dad and I had smoked last weekend flowed through my head.
Could that have done this?
I wondered. Before I could stop myself, I looked up.

I saw just the hint of a satisfied smile. “Anything you want to tell me, Noah?”

Instinctively, I shook my head.

Yonkers shifted and folded his arms across his chest. “All right, Noah. Then why don’t you tell me what just happened.”

My palms started to sweat. I shrugged. “I don’t know. I really don’t. It just sort of happened.”

Yonkers scowled. He was about to speak when his phone rang again. “Yonkers…. Yeah, he’s here…. Okay, I’ll send him down.”

He turned around to look at me as he hung up. “Well, Noah, this is out of my hands. You need to report to the vice principal’s office. Alexis says that you dropped a tray of food on her on purpose, and several other students are backing her up.”

He was quiet for a moment, waiting for a response.

I stood and chose not to give him the satisfaction.

He shrugged. “If you won’t talk to me, I can’t help you.”

I merely grabbed my bag and headed for the exit. I’d been in the vice principal’s office enough that it no longer held any fear for me. It just seemed best to go along right now until I could find time to think, to sort through what had happened.

As I got near the door, my curiosity got the better of me, and I turned to look at Yonkers. “So you really think a joint or two could have done that?”

Still leaning on his desk, he nodded his head ever so slightly.

* * *

My second break with reality came when I was seventeen. One May evening, I stood up to present my senior project to an auditorium filled with parents, teachers, and fellow seniors. It was three days before my eighteenth birthday. My mom was there, hidden somewhere behind the glare of the stage lights. My dad didn’t bother to show.

Mr. Yonkers was there as well. That day in the cafeteria had changed our relationship. He’d kept track of me through high school. For the first time, there was a man in my life who expected things from me. From eighth grade forward, I fluttered around Yonkers like a moth craving light.

After all the embarrassment of taking temporary leave of my sanity, I started making changes. For one, I quit smoking pot. I also stopped breaking the rules to get attention and tried to make something of my life.

My friendships changed too. It’s hard to stay king of the hill when you’ve had a psychotic episode. Carson and the gang never let me forget it until the day I graduated. I chalked it up to some bad weed, but inside I worried that somehow I had done this to myself. Either way, I felt responsible, and that weighed me down like a stone. As the years wore on, I spent more time with Benny and less with my old friends. Alexis never spoke to me again.

When I wasn’t blaming myself, I blamed my dad for it all. I was angry, mostly because he hadn’t stopped me smoking pot before something bad happened. I was angry that he had cost me my status with my peers. I was angry because Lexi never forgave me. In truth, I was angry because he wasn’t much of a dad.

My senior project was a short film. No surprise there. I’d been making short films since the second semester of eighth grade, when I took an elective with Yonkers. Something about the camera’s ability to showcase the truth fascinated me. Yonkers said once, “Great movies frame truth in a rectangle without all the distractions of daily living.” I never forgot it.

During one class, he showed us
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest
with Jack Nicholson. I don’t know if anyone else in that class got anything out of that ancient film, but as someone who had experienced something like what these people had, it hit a nerve. From that day forward, I knew I wanted to speak truth in movies.

As I approached the podium, the room simply disappeared, replaced by another, noisier venue. It was dark. Music blared. In my hand I held a glass filled with something clear. A couple of pineapple pieces floated there on a plastic sword. I looked to the left and to the right. I was outside. To my left there was a palm tree. There were tons of people around. The weather seemed warmer than it was at home on most nights. It felt like summer.

Someone reached out and took my arm. “Hey, you all right?”

I turned to the right and looked into the eyes of a goddess. She had her red hair piled up on the top of her head. She wore a green dress so tight it looked painted on. I guess that was a good thing because if it hadn’t been so form fitting, it wouldn’t have held anything in. It wasn’t so much cut low as sliced open. It only came back together somewhere below her navel.

Women were one part of my life I still didn’t have straight at seventeen. What seventeen-year-old boy does? Lexi’s dismissal hadn’t done much for me there. I didn’t trust girls. I believed women to be all the same; you had to be perfect or they threw you away, so I used them to get what I wanted. Since I’d messed around with Alexis, there had been others. Without getting into the regrets of the play-by-play, let’s just say I wasn’t a virgin. I may have been trying to straighten out my other behavior, but I still had hormones, my puckish charm, and nothing in the way of self-understanding. I combined all three into a potent cocktail, which I used to great effect.

As I stood there trying and failing to look the twenty-something woman in the eye, I wondered what you were supposed to say to your own hallucination? How do you answer when your own mind asks you a question? Hell no, I wasn’t okay, but what good would it do to tell that to a delusion of my own making? For a split second I thought about the truth; then the breasts won out.

I put on what I hoped was my most inviting smile and said, “Yeah, just spaced out there for a moment.” The voice was certainly mine, but it sounded a little deeper, maybe older.

The woman gave an almost too appropriate giggle. To hide my surprise at the depth of my voice, I took a sip of what turned out to be a strong drink. I almost choked.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” the vision asked.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m fine,” I said, trying to recover. “Enough about me and my spacey mind. What brings you here tonight?”

“Well, I really wanted to talk with you.” With a flick of her eyes, she let the words float in the space between us.

Now I was one hundred percent convinced that I was walking in a delusion of my own making.

“My agent’s been trying to get ahold of you for weeks, and you won’t take his call. I really want a part in the film you’re casting.”