“How’d you get in the middle of the road?”
He shrugged, not pausing his thumping.
“I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me.”
He turned to face her. “You can’t help me anyway.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because you’re not real.”
“Yes I am.”
“That’s just what a not-real person would say.”
“Why don’t you think I’m real?”
He twisted around in his seat, pointing back behind them. “Because the last thing I remember that made sense was driving my car off Wilson Bridge. So, as best I can figure, I’m either in a coma, and you’re a product of my subconscious, or I’m dead, and you’re . . . I don’t know. An afterlife fairy or something.”
“An afterlife fairy?”
He spread his hands. “Or an imaginary being of your choosing, I don’t care.”
“There’s a third possibility, you know.”
“Oh yeah?”
“You’re really here.”
“Here . . . in 1985.”
“Yep.”
He rolled his eyes. “I don’t think so.”
She sighed, repressing an urge to roll her own in return. She wasn’t scared of him anymore, but apparently frustration was a whole other matter. “You know, you are awfully chill for someone who thinks they’re dead.”
“I mean, if I’m dead, there’s not much I can do about it, is there?”
“Even so, you’d think you’d be a little more, I don’t know, freaked out?”
He shrugged. “Maybe I’m in shock.”
“Can dead people go into shock?”
Another shrug. “Apparently so.”
The police car was no longer behind her, so Rose decided to pull into the parking lot of the Food Mart to talk, since she’d realized after she told him to get in the car that she had no idea where to take him, and she didn’t want him to know where she lived until she felt confident he wasn’t going to murder her whole family in their sleep. She didn’t think he was dangerous, but that wasn’t the sort of thing she wanted to risk being wrong about. At least the parking lot was public and well lit, making murder less likely, if not impossible.
But first things first. If he really was from the future—an idea so incredibly bizarre, she couldn’t believe she was even considering it—they needed to figure out what had happened.
“Why’d you drive off the bridge?”
He threw her another sideways look. “I didn’t do it on purpose, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Someone ran in front of my car, and I swerved to keep from hitting him. Or her, I guess. I didn’t get a good look since it was raining.”
“But it’s not raining,” Rose interjected, only to immediately regret it when Justin tossed her a withering look. “It’s not raining here,” she amended.
“No kidding,” he grumbled. “Anyway, my car spun out, and then . . .” He flicked his fingers in front of his face, puffing out his cheeks in a pantomimed explosion.
“Okay. So your car went off the bridge, and then what? Do you remember hitting the water?”
“I remember seeing the water.” He squinted, as if trying to examine his memory more closely, then shook his head. “No, that’s it. I remember the car tipping forward, and seeing the water, and feeling my stomach drop, and thinking I was going to die, and then . . . I woke up on the bridge.”
“Hmm.” That must have been when it happened—when he somehow fell out of his time, and into hers. But of course, she still had no idea how or why, or why she was able to think about any of this as though it made even the slightest bit of sense.
“See?” he said, pointing at her face, which was scrunched up in thought. “I told you, you can’t help me. Even if I actually . . . time traveled”—he snorted, as if he couldn’t believe he’d just uttered those words—“it’s not like you can get me back. Unless you want to drive off the bridge again.”
“Not particularly,” she said, her brain churning. People didn’t just time travel. As far as she knew, this had never happened to anyone else in the history of humanity. She supposed it could’ve happened to someone at some point and she just didn’t know about it, but at the very least, it couldn’t be a very common occurrence.
There had to be a reason he was here.
Unless I’m losing my mind.
“We need to figure out why you’re here,” she said a little too loudly, shoving the persistent thought away. “Maybe it’s fate or something.”
“Fate?”
“You know, like you’re here to fix something that went wrong. Put the universe back on track or something.”
“Like, what, prevent the JFK assassination? I read that book; it doesn’t work.”
“What? That was back in the sixties.”
“Yeah, I know. I was just trying to—never mind, that’s not important.”
“Anyway, I meant something more related to you. Something personal that happens this year?”
“You mean like my grandparents dying in a fire?”
“Oh, right. Yes, like that.” A chill went down her spine as she thought of the fire that had already occurred that summer. “Do they know what caused it?”
“I mean, they know how it was started. But they still don’t know who it was.”
“But you’re saying it was a person? Like, the fire was set intentionally?”
“Seems likely.”
Rose’s mind spun. Mrs. Hanley’s fire had been intentional, too. The police weren’t doing much to figure out who had set it, but they knew it wasn’t accidental. No one had been hurt that time, but if Justin was right, then whoever set the next one would be guilty of murder.
This had to be it. The reason he was here. They’d find the arsonist, stop them from setting the fire, save his grandparents, and—hopefully—send Justin back to where he’d come from.
Gooseflesh rose on her arms. Was this why she couldn’t stop thinking of Mrs. Hanley’s fire? Because it was the key to saving two more people? Noah kept telling her to let it go, but she never could. Maybe some part of her had known that it would be important. That she would be important.
After all, was it a coincidence that she was the one who was here right when Justin showed up, even though nearly everyone else in town had crossed this bridge at some point this evening? Or had their paths crossed because they were meant to?
“When does it happen?” she asked, practically breathless as she realized the implications of what Justin was saying. “The fire at the school.”
He kicked at the floorboards. “October fifth.”
Rose’s stomach did a nervous little flutter. That gave them one week.
One week to change the future.
Interlude
AFTER, AND BEFORE
For a long time, he disappeared.
Not literally, much as he’d hoped he might. And not to himself, although he wished he could.
He climbed on a bus as the smell of smoke still lingered in his nostrils, not caring about the destination, and rode until his money ran out, in a place where nothing and no one was familiar. He gave himself a new name, and every person he met got a new story, each one more sensational than the last, until he got tired of keeping up with all the versions of himself.