Time Travel Tuesday

[osprey_archer]

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?”



“No!” I said. “What’s all that got to do with the popcorn ball?”

“Nothing, probably. What popcorn ball? I guess maybe I’ll make the popcorn ball later.”

“But I saw it yesterday,” I objected.

“It’s time travel!” she said impatiently. “Do you expect things to happen in order?”

Maybe I was a little slow to get it, but in my defense, I’d never time-traveled before, and I’d sure never heard of anyone travelling anywhere (or anywhen) by means of popcorn ball. “Where – when am I?” I asked.

And I knew I’d picked the right question, because the girl gave me a grin, like she was pleased I’d gotten it. “July something, 1962,” she said. “I’ve forgotten what day exactly. Days don’t matter till school starts again. Do you know I haven’t seen you all summer till now? Not since my birthday.” She looked at me thoughtfully. But it was like she wasn’t really seeing me: she seemed to be looking past me. “It couldn’t be the last birthday,” she mused. Then suddenly she gave a little jump. “My manners are terrible!” she cried. “I’m Rose. But mostly people call me Rosie.”

“Rosie!” I was so relieved. “You’re Rosie?”

“Yes!” She thrust out her hand to shake, just as if we were grown-ups. I stared at her hand. No one had ever offered to shake my hand before. “Go on!” Rosie cried. But when I put my hand gingerly in hers, she cried, “Not like that! That’s a fish hand. You have to shake firmly. Like this!” And Rosie pumped my hand like she meant to take my arm off.

“Oh yeah?” And I tightened my grip on her hand and pumped her arm up and down like a pump handle.

She let her arm go loose like spaghetti, and laughed. “Don’t people shake hands – gosh, when are you from?”

“2013,” I said. “Rosie. Didn’t I tell you that last time we met?”

“No! I didn’t think to ask. But I was only eleven then,” she said loftily.

“I’m eleven!” I said, stung.

But she just laughed. “I know! You’re always eleven.”

“It’s the best age for nearly everything,” I said.

“I know,” Rosie said, suddenly sober. “I just turned twelve last week and I feel it every minute.” She hopped to her feet. “We still have the last of the cake! Do you want some?”

“Yeah!”

I felt the heat as we stepped out of the shade of the tree into the sunlight, the temperature difference was that clear cut.

“It’s from one of the new Betty Crocker mixes, only don’t tell,” Rosie told me. “Mom doesn’t want anyone to know she uses them. And it’s going a little stale…”

I couldn’t have cared less if it was from a mix, or if it was stale. When had I last had cake? Probably at Brayden’s birthday party. Months ago.

He hadn’t emailed me even once since we’d moved to Ketaugan. Not that I’d emailed him, either.

“What kind of cake?” I asked.

The screen door banged shut behind us as we went inside. “Lemon cake with raspberry filling!” Rosie said, and flashed me a wicked grin.

The house was even hotter inside than out: no air conditioner in the 1960s, at least not in Wisconsin. Well, our apartment in Ketaugan didn’t have air conditioner in 2013, either.

“Rosie?”

Rosie’s mom sat on the couch in front of an electric fan, reading Peyton Place, the curl coming out of her hair in the heat.

“I was telling Piper about the cake,” said Rosie. “Can we have some?”

I smiled and gave Rosie’s mom a little hello wave. But she didn’t smile back. She didn’t even look at me, not even a glance. My smile wavered. I cleared my dry throat, but my voice still came out high. “Hello, Mrs. …”

“I think you and Piper had better share a slice, dear,” Rosie’s mother said.

“Oh, fine,” Rosie sighed, and dashed into the kitchen.

“It’s nice to meet you,” I said, but Rosie’s mom bent over her book again. I stood there, feeling foolish and getting angry and almost ready to cry.

“Piper!” Rosie shouted.

I stormed into the kitchen. “She wouldn’t even say hello!”

Rosie stood by the counter, carefully levering thin slivers of cake onto plates rimmed with red flowers. “Of course not, she can’t see you,” she said. “I’d give you more cake, but Mom doesn’t believe in you, so we’ll just have to share. Want a glass of lemonade?”

I was having trouble keeping up. “Yes, lemonade, okay… She can’t see me? Why can’t she – am I like a ghost?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Rosie said. She filled a couple of juice jars with lemonade. Water beaded on the sides instantly. Suddenly my throat felt parched. “Usually people see ghosts, right? But you’re invisible. I am too when I visit you. Here, have a drink.”

The sweet cold tartness of the lemonade rose out of the glass in coils of cold mist. I almost chugged it down, but I stopped. “Will I get stuck here?” I asked. “Like when you eat fairy food, and get stuck in fairyland?”

“No! Or at least, you never have before, and I don’t when I visit you. Did Angela go trick-or-treating in – oh, of course you don’t know yet. Drat!” She stomped her foot against the linoleum before.

She knew about Angela. She’d visited me! Or would visit me. Or something. My head was beginning to swim with the confusion of times and the heat. And the lemonade smelled so good…

I took a sip. I couldn’t remember the last time anything had tasted that good, and suddenly I felt ravenous. I’d barely eaten at lunch: the school lunchroom was so loud. Everyone else talking and laughing and having fun, while I sat at the end of the table and stabbed my spork into the watery macaroni and cheese. None of them had any idea what to say to someone whose mother had died, anymore than Brayden had back at home.

I decided right then not to tell Rosie about Mom.

“Coming, Piper?” Rosie said. I followed her out of the kitchen into their dining room.

Back in Indianapolis, before we moved, we had a real dining room. But nothing like this. Rosie’s dining room contained a long, shiny dark wood table with high-backed chairs, and a matching china cabinet so full of things that it looked like a curiosity cabinet, which I’d only ever read about in books. A whole tea set, with gilt rims and pink flowers; and a silver sugar bowl with handles shaped like tiny Chinese dragons, and a matching silver creamer; and a great big ostrich egg sitting on a black stand inlaid with mother of pearl…

“We can’t open it while Mom’s here,” whispered Rosie. I jumped at the sound of her voice, and realized I had nearly pressed my nose against the cabinet’s glass-paned door.

“But don’t worry, when I was seven we had – will have – a real tea party,” she continued, still whispering. “My parents were so mad when I said it was your idea! ‘Don’t go blaming things on your imaginary friends, Rosie,’ they said. How does it feel being imaginary?”

“Better than being real!” I said, and took a big swig of lemonade.

“I’ve always felt that way too,” Rosie said. She perched on one of the chairs and took up her cake fork. “Now sit down and eat!”

I flung my jacket over the back of the chair and sat down, digging into the cake too. Rose was right, it was a little stale; but it was sweet and tart and delicious and I didn’t mind a bit. “Let them eat cake,” I said, because Angela always said that when we had cake.

“You know, I bet if Marie Antoinette had just given everyone cake, there wouldn’t have been any French revolution, everyone would have been so happy,” Rosie mused. Suddenly she grinned. “We could give some to the Soviets! World peace through confectionary!”

“Sure!” I said, laughing, but she was suddenly quite serious.

“You don’t know what a relief it is to know you’re from 2013,” she told me. “Because it means we haven’t blown up the world with nukes yet by then. Unless – !” Her eyes suddenly become huge. “Wisconsin is in the middle of nowhere. Maybe no one bothered to bomb it. Has the East Coast been bombed? Is there radiation everywhere? Do you secretly have fifteen toes?” And she made exaggerated crazy eyes at the end, to show she was joking about the toes, but she still looked worried too.

“No, no!” I said, and she collapsed back in her chair with exaggerated relief. “No, I’ve only got twelve toes.”

Her eyes went comically huge.

“On each foot,” I added, and she gave a shriek of laughter. “They’re on their way to becoming flippers. The sea level has risen so much with global warming that I’m adapting into being a mermaid.”

“A mermaid!” She was delighted. “And I’ll be, let’s see. Maybe a witch? Or – ”

But then somewhere in the house, a clock began to strike. Rosie jumped to her feet. “Oh, no. Let’s go!” She grabbed my hand, dragging me from my seat.

“But my cake!” I protested.

“The clock’s a sign,” she said, dragging me away from my half-eaten cake. The clock struck again. Our feet pounded on the hardwood floor as we sprinted down the hall. “You always leave when the clock strikes the hour. I should have stopped it like I did last time! I forgot. You’d better get outside before – ”

She slammed open the screen door. The clock struck again just as we leaped into the air. As the last toll quivered into silence, we tumbled into the grass.

Or at least I did. Because when I rolled to sit up, Rosie wasn’t there.

And it wasn’t the green summer grass anymore, but Mrs. Schroeder’s bare dull backyard, dotted with brown leaves from the neighbor’s trees.

I stood up. A cold wind blasted across the yard. I shivered, twisting my arms around myself, and realized that I’d left my jacket back in 1962.


Chapter 4

My first thought was that I could just pick my jacket up the next time I saw her, just as if I’d left it at Brayden’s house. But that wouldn’t work at all. What if next time I saw Rosie, it was for that tea party when she was seven? She wouldn’t have my jacket yet, because for her, I hadn’t been there with it and wouldn’t be for five more years.

No, I’d have to get a new one. I’d have to tell Dad I lost it. He’d get mad at me for being careless.

Or he’d get sad, because when Mom was alive buying a new jacket wouldn’t have been a problem.

No. I couldn’t tell Dad.

I asked Angela instead. “Of course we can’t tell Dad,” Angela said. “He’ll just throw a fit about it.” She pressed her fist to her cheek, thinking. “Listen, here’s what we’ll do: we’ll get you a jacket out of lost and found.”

“Don’t you think someone will notice? The kid who really owns the jacket might complain.” Even if they didn’t want it while it was lying around lost and found, I bet they’d want it if I started walking around wearing it.

“We’ll get it out of my lost and found, at the junior high,” Angela said. “So they’ll never see you, and it will be fine. Come on, we’ll go tomorrow morning.”

When we left for school the next morning, the sun had only just poked above the horizon. We had plenty of time – Angela’s school was only six blocks from our house – but was so cold, we ran. Halfway there, Angela took off her jacket and thrust it at me.

“You’ll get cold,” I objected through chattering teeth.

“Only if we stand here and argue,” said Angela. “I’m all warmed up, so take it.”

The warm jacket felt wonderful when I zipped it up to my chin. Angela hurried ahead, her hands thrust in the pockets of her cargo pants and her elbows close in at her sides. “It’s really getting a bit small for me,” she said. “Maybe you should just take it.”

“No!” I said. “Unless there’s a really nice coat your size in lost and found.”

But there wasn’t much of anything in lost and found, only one jacket that remotely fit me: an olive green jacket with a broken zipper. “But it’s a boy jacket!” I objected.

“So? Mom always said there’s not boys’ or girls’ clothes or toys or anything – and anyway, we don’t have another choice.”

I held the jacket up. “But won’t Dad notice?” I asked.

Angela snorted. “That’d be a first.”

When I got home that afternoon, Dad’s car was in the drive. Why did he have to be home today of all days?

But it was better to get it over with. I pulled the olive green jacket tight around me and creaked up the stairs to the mudroom.

I hated the mudroom. Dusty old spider webs covered the only window, a tiny pane of stained glass, so that it let in barely any light. When we first moved in, Angela joked that we wouldn’t have to decorate at all for Halloween.

Normally I hurried through the mudroom as fast as possible, but that day I lingered, wondering whether to take the jacket off.

“That you, Piper?” Dad called. He sounded tired.

“Yes, Daddy.” I might as well get it over with, I thought. And anyway, the apartment would be awfully cold without a jacket.

The front room was almost as dark as the mudroom. It was a big, bare, empty room, without any furniture in it, and Daddy kept the heavy curtains closed so the heat wouldn’t leak out the windows.

The kitchen was bright, though, filled up as snug as an egg with three folding chairs and our card table. Daddy leaned on the counter, sipping coffee, with only one earbud in for once.

“I brought back a peanut butter pie for you,” he said. “Yvette dropped it.” Yvette was one of the waitresses at Perkins. “It landed right side up, but it’s not presentable anymore, so I brought it home for you girls. Is Angela with you?”

“She’s got cross-country every day after school, remember?” I said. Angela had started cross-country at the very beginning of school, almost two months ago. Her friend Hannah’s mom picked us up for all the meets. She was awfully nice: she didn’t make me sit by her in the stands but let me wander around, just like Mom used to, and took us all out to McDonalds afterward.

“Right,” Dad said, but not like he really remembered or was even really listening. He poked at his iPod, skipping a song, then pushed a Styrofoam carton over to me. “There’s your pie, honey.”

I sucked in my lower lip, biting it hard. “Daddy?” I said. “Daddy.”

He glanced up briefly. “Piper, honey?”

I hated it when he called me honey. “Are you working again tonight?”

His head drooped again. “Of course. Tell Angela hi for me when she gets back. Where is she again?”

“Cross-country,” I said, but not loud enough for him to hear it over his music. I was already heading into the room Angela and I shared.

Angela and I used to have separate rooms in Indianapolis, but I didn’t mind sharing. If I had nightmares, I just had to look across the room to see Angela there, and know that if anything really scary happened she’d save me.

Plus, the room had a window seat, even though it was hard to get into it without knocking over one of our tottering piles of books. Angela’s books, mostly. I climbed over them carefully.

There was a great big crack in the peanut butter filling, and the piecrust was in splinters. I poked at the pie, then set it aside and drew my knees up to my chest, leaning against the window.

I hadn’t wanted him to notice the jacket, so it was just as well he hadn’t. I pulled it tighter around me, so the unzippable halves overlapped, and curled up even tighter in a ball.

There was a knock at the door. “Dad?” I said.

But the door opened, and it was Rosie, holding onto the doorframe and swinging herself between her arms.

“Hope I’m not a disappointment,” Rosie said.