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  I wrapped my arms around his neck and we deepened the kiss. He coaxed me to open to him, to let the doubts and worries drop off me like leaves in the autumn—revealing me, the real me, underneath all the things I used to shield myself.

  When hands began roaming—and I’m not telling you whose—we pulled back. A long moment passed as we relearned breathing solo. Coming back to Earth reminded me of the first few steps after an hour on a trampoline.

  “I should get you home,” Nate said in a croaky voice that sounded like nobody either of us had ever met.

  He helped me off the rock and put his arms around me, groaned once, and kissed me again as if he had no control in the matter. This time, I dug my hands in his shaggy hair and made sure I wasn’t the only one of us kissed so thoroughly that they felt exposed.

  When we separated that time, I took a little pleasure in the increased intensity shining in his eyes. I did that. Me. I may have been headed for a heartbreak, but I wasn’t traveling alone.

  THE next day, Heather and I were accosted by Kevin in the parking lot.

  “Am I dead, angels? Because this must be heaven.”

  Heather rolled her eyes. “You are a troll, you have always been a troll, and you will always be a troll.” To me, she said, “I’m going to leave you here to ruin your reputation alone. See you at lunch.”

  Kevin called out, “Heather, is your father a baker?” She ignored him, so he got louder, “I only ask because you have such nice buns.”

  I pulled his ear and dragged him across the lot. “What part of she’s my mother are you not understanding?”

  “Ow-ow. Sorry. I forgot. Please let go of my ear.”

  Behind us, I heard, “Can you maim my friends with one hand and drink your coffee with the other?”

  My heart doubled in size, just like the Grinch’s, as soon as I heard Nate’s voice and, well, as soon as I saw the coffee cup he was holding.

  “Hey, you.”

  He smooched my forehead and dosed me with caffeine. No wonder I was gaga for him.

  “So what did you two end up doing last night? Paul and I waited at the Falls until ten,” Kevin said, still rubbing his ear.

  Choking on my coffee, I dribbled onto my chin. Very nice. “You were there?” How much did they see?

  “Yeah, you guys never showed.”

  What the? “But—” Nate shook his head, so I cut myself off.

  He was right. I didn’t need to draw a bunch of attention to our tryst. It was enough that we knew the legend held—the waterfalls really were enchanted because we were there past ten and never saw Kevin and Paul, and they never saw us. Either that, or they played an elaborate charade to make me think so. Which would be dumb.

  And why was it that I could believe that I traveled in time to years before I was born, but scoffed at the idea of enchanted waterfalls?

  Two blondes passed by us, causing Kevin to hyperventilate and run after them to try out some of his corny lines. Leaving me alone to dawdle slowly to class with my very much older man who just happened to be a junior in high school.

  “Don’t you have any books?” Nate asked.

  “I pick them up today.”

  Awkward silence followed by, “How is your coffee?”

  “Good, thanks.”

  Awkward silence filled with sudden insecurity followed by, “Are you sorry…about last night?”

  “Are you?” Oh God. Please say no.

  “I asked you first.”

  “If I say yes, I suppose you’ll pour my coffee all over the pavement again.” Things were not going well. “You know, I really don’t need all this drama.”

  Nate raked his hands through his messy hair and I remembered exactly how silky the locks felt slipping through my fingertips. “Are you really sorry that I kissed you?” he asked.

  I had two choices: follow my heart or protect my pride. “No,” I said.

  “Why are you so hard to communicate with?”

  Me? “If I didn’t want this coffee so damned much, I would pour it over your head. I don’t recall you complaining about my communication skills last night.”

  Swinging his arm around me, we began walking again. “How could I complain? I couldn’t speak. Your tongue was halfway down my throat, remember?”

  “Oh is that why you had your hands on my chest? Gee, I thought you were copping a feel, but you were probably just trying to push me away, right?”

  “Do you really want to talk about getting handsy, Carrington? As I recall…”

  “Okay. Okay. You win.” I’m not saying I was grabby or anything. Not out loud, anyway.

  We were almost to my first-period class, so we stopped and he maneuvered me against the wall. “Do you have plans for Friday night?”

  “Hmmm.” I tapped my chin while I sorted out my busy social calendar. “I was thinking about trying something in the Elizabethan Era or perhaps the twenty-third century. I can never decide.”

  “Friday is D&D night this week.”

  Not really the exciting date invitation I had been hoping for, but pretty cute when you think about it. Okay, not really.

  “Gosh. I think maybe you should keep guys’ night sacred. Paul and Kevin might start to resent me if I take up any more of your time.”

  “Okay, but you’re missing out on some good times. When Paul breaks out the protractor to draw the maps, you know things are a rockin’.”

  I giggled. “Speaking of Paul, did you really tell the guys to meet us last night? Or did the three of you cook that up to convince me the falls were magical?”

  “I swear to God, everything about last night was real,” he said, fingering the ends of my hair. “And magical.”

  Why now? Why this guy? I had to choose the worst time in my life to go boy-crazy. We didn’t even live in the same time zone and we’d never be able to order a pizza we both liked.

  Yet there it was, wasn’t it? I was crazy about him.

  The bell rang, and since it was directly above our heads and very loud, it killed the moment. Not to mention it irreparably damaged my eardrums also.

  Without actually kissing, we managed to stare at each other’s lips long enough to state our intentions to anyone passing by. Staring was a poor substitute but far better than having to describe in detail the lip-locking to my mother at lunch, so we left it at that.

  At least until after school.

  The next couple weeks went a little smoother than one would imagine, if one were to imagine going to high school in the wrong decade. After school each day, I met the guys in the library for research hour. We’d finally concluded that, at best, I was stuck in an alternate universe and nothing that happened here would affect my own timeline. At worst, my family would actually recognize that I am me sometime after my birth. If I was still around, things would get muddled. If I was long gone, there was a chance they would just think I reminded them of me. If you are still following this, you are doing better than I did in the library. No matter how they tried, it usually took half a dozen attempts, with diagrams, for my lightbulb moments.

  After research mode, Nate would bring me back to my Grandma’s following a “quick” stop someplace secluded for a little making out. Dinner with the family preceded homework with Mom, and then we’d watch TV and fight over which of us needed to get off the phone so the other could call her boyfriend. Except Nate hadn’t exactly declared himself as my boyfriend yet, so I just called him “my nerd.”

  Classes were amazingly the same. Except for computer science. The one time in my life when I should have been ahead of the class when it came to technology, but as luck would have it, I didn’t understand a damned thing about that entire hour of the day. There was no mouse, for one thing. I kept reaching for it, too, and the kid next to me probably thought I had motor skill issues. Plus there was no Internet. The cursor was green on a black screen with no other color—and we had to type in lines and lines of code to make shapes of things like turtles when we printed them out on the dot matrix printer. Only mi
ne never worked.

  The other class I struggled with was typing. I can keyboard just fine, and my texting skills are better than average, but the buttons on the typewriter were weird and there was some sort of alien correction tape inside the machine so you couldn’t just backspace over your errors. And you couldn’t see your errors either, because you could only see one line of text at a time on the little screen thing. My fingers were sore for hours after every class.

  All my other classes flowed seamlessly through the decades, my new schedule stopped messing me up, and I was no longer tardy all the time, because I had stopped my between-class visits the bathroom mirror. Which made me realize I wasn’t hankering to get back to the future as much as I should be.

  For one thing, the ‘80s seemed less rushed. I missed my cell phone, but I got used to no longer being at everyone’s beck and call. I found the experience oddly refreshing. Except when I had to wait for Heather to hang up with Tommy before I could talk to Nate. My cell would have been like catnip to Paul. I wish I hadn’t given it to Grady to hold at the dance when I took vomit duty.

  I also really enjoyed just hanging out with Heather. She knew how to have fun with a capital F, and I could really open up with her. Even TV watching was fun. On Thursday night, we watched the famous line-up of The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Cheers, and Night Court. All sarcasm aside, I laughed out loud for two hours. Even during the commercials, because Grandpa and Heather would joke about whatever had just happened in the scene before. I had no idea my mother was so funny.

  That night, when we were supposed to be sleeping, I opened up to her about my mom’s drinking. Which, I admit, is bizarre. But even stranger was that she seemed to understand how it made me feel, even though technically, it was her making me feel that way.

  “When she drinks, I feel like I’m supposed to step up, you know? Like take care of us…I mean the whole family. And I’m not equipped,” I said.

  “I totally get it. It’s like that for me when my parents fight—which is all the time these days.”

  “Really?” Grandma and Grandpa fought? I could hardly wrap my mind around that one. It never came up at family dinners, anyway.

  “They’re going to some marriage counselor once a week. And they don’t fight in front of other people, so I’m really glad you’re here.”

  “I’m glad too. I don’t know what I would do if it wasn’t for your family.”

  “You are so brave, Carrington. I’m sure you would figure something out. Do you think you’ll hear from your parents soon?”

  I sighed. “I so don’t know the answer to that.” And then, there was one thing I could do for her that nobody else could. “Heather, your parents…they have the kind of relationship that sticks. This is just a rough patch; they are totally going to grow old together. I just know it.”

  One Thursday, a flailing and wheezing Paul caught up to Nate and me. We calmed him down enough to find out that Kevin was in the office waiting for the principal to hand down his punishment—for being caught in the girls’ bathroom between classes.

  The three of us ran to the office. When we arrived, Kev was still sitting in the Row of Shame chairs next to Principal Whitney’s door. Kevin was paler than skim milk for a change.

  “I’m in big trouble.”

  Nate rolled his eyes. “What were you doing in the girls’ bathroom, or do I want to know?”

  “Measuring.”

  “For what? Curtains?”

  “Wait a minute,” I began. “Are you telling me this has something to do with me?” I smacked my hand to my forehead. “Whose genius idea was it to send the resident pervert into the ladies’ room? We have one hour left of school—couldn’t you have waited for me to get out of class to take measurements?”

  Paul got twitchy and his glasses fogged up. “I thought I was on to something.”

  Well, that really sucked. I couldn’t let Kevin get in trouble for trying to help me.

  Principal Whitney, decked out in a little too much polyester, rounded the corner and stopped in front of us. “I’m sure you all have perfectly valid reasons for being in the office instead of class right now.”

  I stepped in front of him. “Mr. Whitney, may I talk to you, please?”

  “Miss Morris, this isn’t a good time.”

  “It isn’t Kevin’s fault…about the bathroom. It’s mine.”

  “Did you pull or push him in, Miss Morris?” He leaned against the doorjamb and my eye caught the gold chain around his neck resting in the silver curls of his chest. Can I just say gross and two more buttons, please, Mr. Whitney?

  “Not exactly, sir. But I kind of directed him in.”

  “And how did you kind of do that, exactly?”

  My nerd posse exchanged glances among themselves, probably wondering the same thing. I didn’t even know.

  “I…um…thought I left my purse in the bathroom, and I was afraid I would be late for class, so I asked him to grab it for me?” I’m not so good with the lying, though you’d have thought I’d had enough practice by now. “I didn’t realize there would still be girls in there or I’d never have asked him.”

  “Miss Morris, you are a new student, but Kevin knows the rules even if you don’t.”

  “I’ll take his detention then.” As an afterthought, I added, “Please.”

  I felt the weight of Nate’s stare, but when I looked back at him he averted his eyes. Weird.

  “I can’t let you do that, Carrington,” Kevin told me, his face back to that fetching shade of red I’d come to expect.

  “Yes you can, Kev. It’s my fault you went in there.”

  “I see, Miss Morris.” Mr. Whitney folded his arms in front of his chest. “And did you also direct Kevin to poke his head under the closed stall door and ask Miss Lingvall what her father did for a living?”

  Kevin, covering his perverted face, groaned. “No, sir. She didn’t.”

  “Very well then. Kevin, into my office, please. The rest of you children can return to class. And Miss Morris?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Please endeavor to keep better watch over your personal belongings in the future.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  And yes, I kicked Kevin in the shin on my way out.

  THE next day was Nate-lunch day. Every other day, I had lunch with Heather because I am not the girl who ditches her friends when she gets a boyfriend.

  Even though I didn’t have a boyfriend. Technically.

  Kevin and Paul were debating something about Legos, or maybe it was Legolas, and Nate was being really quiet.

  “Hey.” I set my hand on his shoulder lightly to get his attention, and he stiffened like I just run an ice cube down his spine. “Whoa. Are you okay?”

  He nodded but didn’t relax. I didn’t know what to do with my hand. It sort of felt strange just sitting there—unwelcome. But I mean, it’s not like normally we didn’t hold hands under the table. So I let it sit there for a few more seconds and then eased it off, one finger at a time so he wouldn’t feel me retreating all at once.

  The next few minutes were awkward, and then they got worse.

  I saw Joy from the corner of my eye and prayed she’d just keep walking, but no, she stopped at our table, of course.

  “Nate, do you have a hanger? I locked my keys in the car again.”

  He jumped up. “Sure. I’ll help you.” He took two steps away before he remembered to stop and say goodbye to me. He came back and pressed a kiss to the top of my head. “I’ll see you after school, okay?”

  The balloon animals were back in residence in my gut, but I’d be damned if I’d let Joy see me sweat, so I sent him my sweetest smile.

  Everyone is entitled to bad days, right? I mean, maybe he wasn’t feeling well or something. Or maybe I was making mountains out of mole hills. I’ve been known to be a touch dramatic.

  After school, Nate said he had something to do and couldn’t make our research hour. Since Kevin had detention and Paul was depressed that whatev
er grand plan he thought he was on to didn’t work out, we scrapped the whole session. Which I suppose was fine, because whenever Paul and I were alone together too long, his sinuses whistled.

  I knew the boys had their D&D thing that night, so I made plans to spend time with Heather, Jennifer, and Sissy. Another interesting aspect I noticed about my mother’s secret high school life was there was no Sarah. I’d been around for a couple weeks now and nobody ever even mentioned a Sarah. It made me really angry, and I tried not to take it out on Heather because it wasn’t her fault she was big liar. I mean, it wasn’t her fault yet. Sarah was the number one cautionary tale in my house since I’d turned thirteen, and it turned out she was an urban legend created to scare me from doing anything fun.

  I realize that I’m not one to judge. I did, after all, create Hannah in order to stonewall my mom’s efforts to keep me home. But she created Sarah first.

  And Tracy even before that.

  My mother had an entire population of fictional people living in her head. She could be the next Stephen King or Stephenie Meyer if she wanted.

  Revenge is sweet, though. I got her back. Kind of. I made up a story for Heather about this one kid at my old high school who found a dead frog in a can of peas. Heather was grossed out enough to make me think I’d never be forced to eat canned peas as child again.

  Assuming I still was born, of course.

  Using my business savvy, I sold my two twenty-dollar bills to Kevin and Paul for thirty dollars each, so I had some spending money. For some reason, they thought it would be like a collector’s item or something. Which made no sense to me. I think they just wanted one because nobody else had it.

  The girls and I went to the movies and watched Top Gun. It was a lot better on the big screen than watching it on cable, particularly the volleyball scene. But all I could think about for the rest of the movie was Tom Cruise being a total d-bag on Oprah’s couch.

  Afterward, we hit McDonald’s. French fries are the food of happiness in any decade. I relished mine—comfort food at its best.