ELEVEN
T his is a nightmare. I’m sure of it. There’s no way I time traveled. That’s absurd.
If this truly is a nightmare, I should be able to wake up. Delighted at the prospect, I slap myself hard across the cheek as I book it out of the pharmacy. Ouch. Maybe a measly slap won’t suffice.
Time for more drastic measures. I pedal furiously into a residential area and hurl myself off my bike (into a bush to cushion my fall). A man with gardening shears looks down on me. He’s not overly pleased. I briefly entertain diving in front of an oncoming vehicle. But wouldn’t that be suicide? What if I’m not dreaming?
Resigned—and a bit bruised—I decide that the only logical step is to return to the house for more information. Renner is still there, man-splaying on the front porch, hair disheveled, unsure which way it wants to flop.
“You have a branch in your hair,” he says, voice deep and gravelly—like a thirty-year-old’s ...
I set my bike in the driveway so I can fish the branch out. “Why are you still here?”
“I went home.” There’s a weird look on his face that tells me there’s more to the story.
“And?” I already know what he’s going to say, but I need to hear it.
“It’s 2037,” he tells me, like he’s already accepted this strange fact.
“So I’ve heard.” I finally let out a deep exhale. I park myself on the step next to him and stare out at the street. Another one of those fancy cars drives by. I guess that’s why everyone has one. We’re in the future. “And we’re ... getting married next week.” I hold up my ring finger.
“Yeah. My mom told me.” He runs both hands down either side of his face.
“You saw your parents?”
“I saw my mom,” he says definitively, jaw ticking with unease.
A lump forms in my throat at his expression. “Your dad ... wasn’t home?”
His eyes flick to his shoes. “They’re divorced.”
“Oh my god. How is she?”
“She’s ...” He pauses, flinching. “She’s ... different. Happy.” His eyes widen and he shakes his head regretfully, as though he’s said too much. This Renner, disheveled and slumped over, is a far cry from the cocky, smirking one I’m used to.
“Anyway, my mom thinks I’ve lost it. She tried calling you.” He dangles a phone over my lap.
I blink at him. Renner’s parents’ divorce feels like too big a topic to just gloss over. I want him to elaborate, to ask if he’s okay. I want to assure him he will be okay, even if it doesn’t feel like it now.
But do I really expect him to cry on my shoulder and divulge his family problems to me? If the tables were turned, I’d seek support from a grizzly bear before Renner.
“She tried calling you,” Renner repeats, snapping me back to reality.
I have four missed calls. Two from Dorothy, Renner’s mom, one from my mom, and one from Nori.
“What the hell is happening?”
Renner starts pacing around the porch. He folds his arms over his chest, and my eyes flare at the sight of his biceps. Yup. He definitely didn’t have those at school this morning. “Okay, let’s think about this logically. What’s the last thing you remember?”
“It was Wednesday, June 12, 2024. We were decorating for prom and arguing,” I tell him. “The seaweed fell off the wall and you made me fall off the ladder. What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Exactly that. Mostly your boobs crushing my face,” he says, the faintest smile on his lips. “And for the record, it’s not my fault you fell. You’re not blaming me for this.”
“Good to know you’re still immature.” I shake my head. “Anyways, that’s a good sign. We both remember being seventeen, decorating for prom, and the ladder.”
“But what happened to us? To everyone else? How is it now Friday, June 12, 2037?”
I take in a deep breath. “We know this isn’t a prank. There’s no way the entire town of Maplewood could pull this off. What are our other possibilities?”
“Death. We could be dead. This could be purgatory,” he suggests. “Or maybe we hit our heads and got amnesia? What if we have brain damage? Or what if we somehow fell into an alternate dimension? Into the Upside Down?”
I twist my lips. “Do you realize how that sounds?”
He hands me his phone. “Look. Scroll all the way up.”
I flip through the photos. There are at least a thousand. All of Renner and me throughout the years. The earliest is dated 2029, five years after high school graduation. These photos seem foreign, an in-depth look at someone else’s life, someone else’s memories and travels. Logically, I know it’s me in the photos, but I have no memory of any of it, especially not the trip to Paris and what looks like a tropical vacation on a white sandy beach.
“There’s no way Nori had the time to photoshop all of these,” he says.
“Why would we be engaged? Of all people? Were there really no other options?” I ask. He doesn’t respond.
I scan my recent texts. One from Pain in my ass , and others from Nori, Mom, and a bunch of random names I don’t recognize.
Renner plucks my phone and holds it out of reach. I grab for it, to no avail. I wish I could say I’m taller than my seventeen-year-old self, but apparently not.
He holds his arm out, blocking me from another attempt. “Wait!”
“What?”
“We can’t just go around telling people we’ve jumped into the future. Everyone’s gonna think we’ve lost our minds.”
I inhale a labored breath. He has a point. “You’re right. No one is ever going to believe this.”
He shifts his gaze from his feet to my face, like he’s just had a light bulb moment. “We both know someone who might.”
I nod, a little disturbed I didn’t think of it first. Of course. “Nori.”
Adult Nori is a trip. The first thing she does is grab a piece of licorice from the pantry. “Breakfast of champions,” she calls it, practically dive-bombing the armchair in the living area. She looks quite comfortable here. More so than Renner and me as we awkwardly shift on the couch.
Her previously shoulder-length unicorn hair is now streaked with blue and falls around the waistline of her skinny jeans. They remind me of the ones Mom always wears.
“Being old really is the tits,” she says, tearing off a bite of licorice. “I can’t drink sugary drinks anymore. My body can’t handle it. And I didn’t even drink nearly as much as you two. I’m shocked you’re even awake right now.”
Renner leans forward. “We drank last night?”
She juts her chin forward. “Are you kidding me? You threw up on Mitch’s lawn. It was like grad party all over again. Honestly, I thought you’d need a stomach pump—”
“Mitch? Mitch who?” I cut in.
“Mitch Wong.”
“That little freshman?” I clarify. Mitch is so tiny, he was duct-taped to the cafeteria wall for freshman initiation day.
Nori narrows her gaze, confused. “Uh, well, he’s twenty-six, but yes, I suppose he was small as a freshman.”
I shift to the edge of the couch and look her dead in the eye. “Okay, Nori, we’re about to get weird.”
She leans into the couch and gives Renner a brief glance. “What do you mean by weird ? Should I be frightened? Because you’re doing that wonky eye thing.”
I hold my stare as she frantically chews the last chunk of licorice. “We’re going to tell you something. Something huge. And you need to promise you won’t tell anyone.”
Her jaw hinges open. “Oh my god. You guys are pregnant! No wonder you moved up your wedding date.”
I wretch at the thought of procreating with Renner. “God no. Eww.”
A flash of confusion falls over her face.
“This is going to sound bizarre,” Renner interrupts. “But we woke up not remembering how we got here.”
Strangely, Nori takes this in stride. “That’s because Ollie drove you guys home. He fireman carried you to your bed, J. T. He even sent me a video.”
I shake my head. “No, you don’t understand. We had an accident. In the school gym. I fell off a ladder—”
“She fell on my face,” Renner clarifies.
“We were seventeen,” I continue. “Decorating for prom. Everything went black when I fell off the ladder. And then we woke up ... here. This morning.”
Nori closes her eyes and shakes her head like a wet dog. “Okay, wait, what?”
I lean closer. “We don’t remember anything from the past thirteen years.”
Nori searches my face, trying to gauge whether I’m screwing with her. When I don’t crack, she starts laughing nervously. “You two drank way too much. Honestly. Maybe you just need a hot shower, or a personal day. You should totally skip work.”
“Nori, I’m serious. The last thing I remember is being upset over the Under the Sea theme,” I say.
“The prom theme?” she asks, eyes widening in realization. “Oh my god. Do you remember my dress? That weird one that accentuated all my worst angles? I untagged myself in all of those photos. As if you could forget that. Oh, and that’s the night you two first hooked up. Remember?”
Renner and I simultaneously bust a gut. “Hooked up? We hooked up? As in me and Renner?” I’m not certain I want to know the answer.
She snorts like the answer is obvious. “At least, I think it was prom night.”
“We don’t remember that. Or anything else,” Renner says, a little more forcefully.
She blinks. “You’re being serious? You’re not playing some ridiculous prank?”
“Cross my heart.” I make an X over my chest. “We need to know what’s happened in the past thirteen years.”
Still a little unsure, she gives us the basics. It’s all out of order, as per usual when Nori tells a story. But I manage to get the gist.
Renner and I first hooked up on prom night and dated for the first year of college. I can’t help but laugh because it sounds so outlandish. Renner just rests his head in his hands like his life is over. We broke up in our second year, dated other people, and got back together when we both moved back to Maplewood to work at MHS. We got engaged this winter on a Hawaiian vacation.
Engagement aside, I think about the unlikely reality that both of us would become educators. At the same high school. How could that even happen? Of everyone in our friend group, Renner was the person I was most looking forward to never seeing again after high school.
“Everyone knew you two were meant to be,” Nori tells us, all starry eyed. She explains that Renner moved back to be a PE teacher. He coaches both the rugby and track teams.
“I’m a gym teacher,” Renner notes under his breath.
I can’t help but snort.
“What’s so funny?”
“I just can’t imagine you demonstrating how to put a condom over a banana with a straight face.”
“I dunno why you’re shaming me about teaching kids to stay physically active while educating them about safe sex.” I dry cough when he says sex all deep and authoritative. I feel like I’m in middle school sex ed all over again, chuckling over the word vulva . He continues on when I don’t respond. “Puberty is no joke. Kids need someone to teach them about body odor.”
“You would know,” I sneer, desperately scraping my memory for a time Renner had BO, to no avail.
“You’re just pissed because I’m probably the cool teacher everyone loves, and you’re the terrifying one rumored to lock kids in an underground dungeon as punishment for being a half second late to class.” I wouldn’t be shocked. Renner would still manage to upstage me in a weird alternate universe.
“First, I’d have a candlelit lair. Not a dungeon. It would be sacred. And for the record, I’d rather be terrifying than ridiculous,” I shoot back.
Nori clears her throat. “J. T., you were assistant coaching a college rugby team in Boston for a while. But you wanted to come back home to be with Char.”
He runs both hands down his face, looking disturbed. I am equally concerned for both of us. Renner actually gave up his dream of coaching college rugby for me? What was he thinking?
Apparently, I’m the school counselor at MHS, and Nori’s a freelance graphic designer.
She goes on a tangent about how she couldn’t transfer to Rhode Island School of Design because the world wasn’t ready for her brand of talent. (She still seems bitter.) But it worked out for the best because we went to college together, where she met her girlfriend, Sasha.
“What about everyone else?” I ask. “What happened to Kassie and Ollie? Are they married?”
Nori looks at me in disbelief. “Kassie and Ollie broke up after high school grad. I can’t believe you don’t remember. It was a huge blowout. Ollie is engaged to Lainey now.”
I blink. Kassie and Ollie broke up? How? Why? My brain is fuzzy from information overload, settling on the more digestible tidbit of information. “Ollie is with Lainey Henderson? The curly-haired kid I used to babysit?” I clarify. “She’s ... a ten-year-old.”
“She’s twenty-three. He hired her at the office. He’s a Realtor,” Nori informs us.
“This is ... insane.” My head feels unusually heavy. This is too much new information. “We lost thirteen years. Thirteen. Did I make dean’s list? Was I valedictorian?”
“Relax, girl. You made dean’s list and you were valedictorian and gave a big speech. It was a good one—at least, I think it was. Pete and I got buzzed in the coatroom right before the ceremony so my memory is a little fuzzy but—”
“There’s gotta be an explanation for this,” Renner mutters.
Nori starts tapping on her phone. “Okay, hold up, I’m googling.”
Renner and I crowd the back of her chair, watching as she types, I woke up in the future .
There are thousands of hits. A song by some band called The Intangibles. An old movie called 13 Going on 30 with Jennifer Garner that Mom always loved. And a bunch of news articles about amnesia and severe head trauma.
Nori taps on the screen with her matte-black nails. “Oh, look at this.” It’s a news article about a woman who woke up at thirty-two believing she was a teenager. “It says she was diagnosed with transient global amnesia . Apparently, you remember how to do basic things, but you forget qualitative memories. It says you’ll remember them eventually.”
“Okay, but look. It also says it’s incredibly rare,” I point out. “Why would both Renner and I have it?”
“True.” Nori bites her lip. “Wait, what if you two have been sent to the future to change something? Prevent some sort of disastrous event?”
Renner hangs his head. “Like our apparent marriage next week? I can’t believe we’re getting hitched.”
I nod vigorously. For once, I agree with Renner. “There’s no way we’re actually getting married.”
Nori stands, shaking her head. “Are you guys really doing this again? Your bickering is so high school. You better get a grip before your bachelor/bachelorette party tonight.”
Renner coughs. “What party?”
“My mom’s coworker mentioned it,” I grumble.
“Ollie and Lainey are hosting. Everyone’s going,” Nori says, buzzing with excitement.
“Who’s everyone ?” I ask, hesitant.
“Literally everyone. Even your mom. Trust, I tried to steer you away from a family-oriented party toward the genitals-and-strippers variety. But you two were very insistent on keeping things wholesome to preserve your reputations as educators and community leaders.”
Renner rolls his eyes, resting his hands behind his head. “Sounds like Char.”
Nori ignores him. “Like I said, everyone is going. Including you two, obviously.”
I shake my head and stand up. “No. We’re not going. At least, I’m not going. Tell Ollie we have to cancel.”
She gives me an icy look. “You’re not not going to your own bachelorette.”
“We’re not getting married. We have to call it off.”
She looks at me like I’m a Martian. “After all the hours we spent designing invitations and place cards? No way! Besides, guests are coming from out of town and your parents will be so upset.”
“Let them be upset. We’re not getting married, period,” I say stubbornly.
Renner nods in agreement.
That’s probably the first thing we’ve ever wholeheartedly agreed on.