Time Travel Tuesday

The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball is now available for preorder! (The preorder is for the ebook; there will be a paperback, but I can’t seem to set that to preorder, unfortunately.) The gorgeous cover was designed by Augusta Scarlett, and it perfectly captures one of the scenes from the book, when Piper and Rosie perch on a roof on Halloween night…

Which, alas, is beyond the scope of this week’s excerpt. Last week I posted chapters one and two; this week, it’s onward to three and four, wherein we meet Rosie! discuss time travel! and eat cake!


Chapter 3

I stepped back so fast that I lost my balance on the slope and fell down on the grass. “How do you know my name?” I asked.

She bounded across the yard and cast herself down on the grass beside me, her skirt puffing up around her. “Is this the first time we’ve met?” she asked.

“Well, yes,” I said.

“Oh, so it is the first time!” She clapped her hands. “I was wondering if we’d ever get there. You’ve always known me before, even when I was four and I didn’t know you. How old are you?”

“I – what?”

She stuck out her legs and wiggled her bare toes in the grass. I pressed my hands against the ground. Somehow I felt dizzy, like I might fall over if I didn’t hold myself up.

And then I realized: the popcorn ball was gone! What if I needed it to get home? “The popcorn ball!” I cried, patting around the grass for it, although the grass had been cut down to two inches tall and couldn’t have hidden anything.

She frowned. “Popcorn ball?”

“It brought me here!” I said. “What if I can’t get home without it?”

“Don’t worry about it,” the girl advised. “You have to get home fine, because I’ve seen you before. How old are you?”

“I’m eleven,” I said. “I – what?”

“I’ve seen you before,” she repeated. “But you’ve never seen me. So the times I’ve seen you haven’t happened for you yet, so you’ve got to get back to your own time, so you’ll be able to visit me. See?”

( Onward )