Backward Glass by David Lomax Read Free Book Online Page B

old lady who ran the convenience store down the street was crazy. The story was that all the stuff she couldn’t sell in her store went into that place, that it had been years since people could even fit in there to live. “It’s even supposed to be haunted and stuff.”
    Luka shook her head. “Nah, nothing like that. I got it right from the old lady herself a couple of years ago when she finally cleared that place out and let them demolish it.” She took my door key and clipped the dyed purple charm onto it. “I found it a few days ago and it got me thinking. Do you know what her real name is?”
    “It’s not Miller?”
    “Uh-uh. Miller was her first husband. But if you go down the side of the house, that’s not the name on the mailbox. And that phone booth outside her house? I ripped this out of its phonebook, just to bring you proof.”
    She thrust a page at me and underscored a name with her fingernail: L. Beech, 38 Moores Road.
    I took a moment under her gaze to make sense of what she was saying. “As in Rick Beech?”
    “Right. As in, his grandmother owns the store and the junk house. Back then in the sixties, his dad even owned your house.” She paused, waiting for me to say something. “You’re having some kind of thought,” she said. “Out with it.”
    “Rick’s twenty-eight now or something,” I said. “Right now, I mean. I wonder if he’s around the neighborhood? What if he could tell us about some mistake he’s going to make in life, and we could tell him to avoid it.”
    Luka raised an eyebrow. “You’re only thinking about this now? Sometimes Kenny, I swear, for a smart kid you’re such a dunce.”
    She went on to explain how she and Melissa and Keisha had tried testing the limits of our time-travel powers and advantages. Melissa thought of it first. She wanted to know who her first boyfriend was going to be, and she wanted Keisha’s help doing it. Keisha found a listing in the phonebook for Melissa’s family, but every time she called to ask future-Melissa about her life something went wrong. Melissa wasn’t home, or the phone was busy, or Keisha’s phone wasn’t working. Nothing seemed to work.
    Melissa asked her to just visit. Again, everything got in the way. The bus broke down. A car accident delayed her for more than an hour. Once, when she actually made it to just across the street from Melissa’s house, and thought she saw older Melissa coming out, a car drove by, hit a puddle, and drenched Keisha with icy slush. By the time she recovered, grown-up Melissa was gone.
    “It’s like you can’t mess up time,” Luka said. “Keisha says it’s God, but I asked her where exactly the time-travel mirrors come into the Bible. Melissa says it’s fate, but I don’t even think it’s that.”
    “Then what?”
    She shrugged. “It just didn’t happen that way. Think about the Melissa’s-first-boyfriend thing. Let’s say his name is Chris. Let’s say she didn’t like him in the end because he cheated on her. So Keisha finds that out and tells her. Is she going to go out with him?”
    “Probably not.” I figured that was the answer she was looking for. Going out with people and cheating were things I had no idea about. I was about a million light years away from a girlfriend. Did Luka have a boy up there in the future? She never talked about anyone. She was two years older. I figured that meant she’d never be interested in me.
    “Exactly,” said Luka. “No way. So she never goes out with that guy. She goes with Joe instead. But doesn’t that mean she would have told Keisha about Joe, not Chris? And if she told us about Joe and how he was no good, doesn’t that put her back to Chris? The point is, it just didn’t happen. If we try to make something happen when it didn’t happen—it doesn’t happen.”
    When I couldn’t wrap my mind around this, Luka insisted on a demonstration. We went back to my place and got out the phonebook. There were four listings for R.