“All right,” JB said reluctantly. “If Jonah thinks that’s for the best, that’s what we’ll do.”
“What about us—me and Alex?” Chip asked. “Now that we’ve been to the past and back, aren’t you going to erase our memories or something, so it doesn’t mess up our lives now? Like in the Men in Black movies?”
JB looked puzzled.
“Chip, we can’t do that. It’s not possible. Or desirable,” JB said. He appealed to Angela. “Don’t people in your time know the difference between science and science fiction?”
Angela shrugged. “From my perspective a lot of it looks the same,” she said dryly.
“No, listen,” Chip said, a panicky edge to his voice. “I was the king of England, then the prince hiding in exile. I know Latin now. I can sword-fight. I know diplomacy. I can recite The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers almost word for word, by memory. I can’t go back to being who I used to be!”
Hadley looked down at him sympathetically.
“None of us can, kid,” he said. “That’s the point. You get what you get. Life changes you. Time travel or no, you always have to build on what you live through.”
Chip still looked a little upset, but he shut his mouth firmly.
Is that what diplomacy looks like? Jonah wondered. He wasn’t sure he’d ever be capable of it himself.
“So we’re going home?” he asked eagerly.
“Yes,” JB said. “You’re going home.”
Katherine started to stand up, and the leather strap on her armor gave way, one huge metal boot crashing to the ground.
“Oh,” she said, “do we at least get our regular clothes back? That was one of my favorite shirts.”
“Oops,” JB said. “It’s all in the back of the cave. I stashed it there when … well, never mind, it’d take a long time to explain, and it doesn’t really matter. You can take turns changing. And when you’re done, just leave the armor back there. I don’t want anyone asking why kids at an adoption conference were playing with priceless antiques.”
Things happened quickly after that. Jonah and Katherine changed back into modern clothes (blue jeans never felt so good), JB returned the cave to the twenty-first century, and all the kids hiked back to the high school, where their parents were meeting to talk about “identity issues for teen adoptees.”
It was strange to see Mom and Dad again, when Mom and Dad thought they’d only been apart for a matter of hours, and Jonah and Katherine knew they’d traveled half a millennium away and back. It was actually rather hard for Jonah not to run up to his parents and throw his arms around both of them and cry out, “I thought I’d never see you again!”
“Hey,” Jonah grunted in the crowded high school lobby as soon as he spotted Mom’s familiar tan raincoat, Dad’s familiar bald spot.
Mom and Dad rushed toward Jonah and Katherine and Chip, as other kids and parents reunited all around them.
“How was it?” Mom asked cautiously. “Do you feel like you learned a lot?”
“Yeah,” Chip said. “Actually, we did.”
Jonah knew that it would take Mom only a moment to notice that he and Katherine had mud in their hair. He wanted to talk about something that was a lot more important first.
“It was okay, but they didn’t feed us nearly enough,” he said. “Could we please, please, please pick up some pizza on the way home?”
Mom laughed.
“Jonah, I swear, nobody could ever feed you enough. You can’t go five minutes without eating, can you?”
“You’d be surprised,” Jonah said. “You’d really be surprised.”
EPILOGUE
Jonah, Katherine, Chip, and Alex were playing basketball in the Skidmores’ driveway. A week had passed since the so-called adoption conference, and they were proud that they’d managed to convince their parents to let their “new friend,” Alex, come over, even though he lived half an hour away. The basketball game was mostly just a ruse, though, since they were all much more interested in talking about their trip through time.
“I’ve been doing research on medieval history all week, and it’s disgusting—nobody knows much of anything about me and Chip,” Alex complained, bouncing the ball halfheartedly.
“Just about everybody thinks we died in the Tower of London,” Chip agreed. “Just because some Tudor historian told a bunch of lies, just because they found some unidentified bones in the Tower in the 1600s … didn’t anybody who saw us at the Battle of Bosworth say anything? It’s much more honorable to die in battle than to be a silly youth murdered in his own bed.”
Jonah and Katherine exchanged glances, and Chip grimaced.
“I’m talking medieval again, aren’t I?” he asked.
This had been a recurring problem for Chip all week. He’d used the word “doth” in language arts class, and everyone had laughed at him; he’d explained to a bully on the school bus exactly how it was possible to carve out a man’s innards with a sword or battle-ax.
On the bright side, this had made the bully stop bothering anyone on the bus.
“Are you having problems with that, Alex?” Chip asked wistfully. “Forgetting that you’re not an English prince in the 1480s anymore?”
“Some,” Alex said. “But people always thought I was weird anyway, so nobody really cares. I’m just telling Mom it’s all her fault because she’s always quoting Shakespeare at me. I told her it’s finally happened—she’s completely rotted my brain.” He caught the basketball on its next bounce. “Look, this is starting to hurt my hand. I can see the point of archery and swordsmanship—men needed to know how to do that in the fifteenth century to protect themselves and their families and their lords. But basketball—why?”