This is the most important thing I learned from being a time traveler. You are not one person. You are a different person in each moment of time. Your name means nothing. Go see a person with the same name in a different time, and it’s someone else entirely. I don’t know Sofía. I know Sofía-at-Berkshire. Sofía-before-her-family-died is a stranger, someone I’m not sure I should ever meet.
I pull back, carefully arranging the timestream so I touch just the strings from after Sofía came to Berkshire. They feel like guitar strings under my fingers, pressing into my skin and rolling under my fingertips with a twang as I try to find the correct one, the one of Sofía on Christmas break. When I do touch it, I feel the rightness of it. I wrap my index finger around the thread, crooking my finger and drawing my hand closer to me. Traveling in the timestream is often like this, a give-and-take as I draw the threads closer to me and they pull me further into time. The thread connecting me to Christmas break bites into the skin on my finger, pulling taut and turning the tip purple as my blood flow stops, but I don’t let go. I relish the pain. I revel in the thought that it’s real.
The thread evaporates, leaving behind the sensation of it having been there, but no visual evidence. I blink in the bright sunlight. It’s December, but Austin is warm, far warmer than a Massachusetts winter. The sky is a cloudless blue, almost matching the bright blue paint of the tiny house before me. All the buildings on the street are made of varying shades of beige stucco, but Sofía’s house is made of wide, flat wooden panels painted a vivid cobalt, with bright yellow shutters by the window and a blood-red door welcoming me from the front porch.
“My mother liked color,” I remember Sofía telling me. “She said it made her feel alive.” Ironic, I guess, that the colors are all of her that remains.
There’s no car in the driveway, but I’m confident that Sofía’s in the house. The threads of time led me here. I bound up the steps to Sofía’s front door and knock a few times before I notice the doorbell. Still, I’m not prepared when she answers the door.
“Bo?” Sofía asks, looking shocked.
“Hey,” I say. But there’s so much more I try to put behind that one word.
“What are you . . . ?” She peers past me, out into the street. “What are you doing here? How did you even get here?”
I cock an eyebrow at her.
“Oh. Yeah.” She sort of half giggles. “Powers.”
“I needed to see you,” I say. “So . . .” I hold my hands out flat. “Here I am.”
Sofía steps inside, motioning for me to follow her. The scent of bleach fills the air. As soon as the front door closes, Sofía grabs me, pulling me closer, and her arms are around me, her fingers weaving through my hair, my name a whispered promise from her lips. She stands up on her tiptoes and kisses me, hesitantly at first, and then deeper, as if she wasn’t sure I was real before but now claims me as her own.
When she pulls back, she buries her face in my chest. “I needed you too,” she says in a soft voice.
I tuck her head under my chin, wrapping my arms tightly around her, and we just stand there for several long moments. Sofía’s house is bigger than I thought it would be from the outside, but the inside has none of the bright colors. The walls here are all white, and the slick glossiness of the paint makes me think it’s fresh. There are hardly any pictures or decorations on the walls, no rugs on the tile floor, very little sign of life at all.
“Come this way,” Sofía says, pulling me deeper into her house. We pass the living room—nothing but a television on a metal stand in front of a nondescript sofa—and the kitchen. There aren’t even magnets on the fridge. Nothing decorates the hallway, and every door is firmly shut.
Sofía’s bedroom certainly has more personality than the rest of the house, but it still doesn’t have as much color as her room at the Berk. The pink here is softer, more childish, not the bright hot pink of her fuzzy lampshades or the neon of her picture frames in her room at school.
On her wooden dresser by the door, Sofía’s propped up a Christmas tree made of green construction paper. Once I see that, I realize that the house is missing far more than pictures and color—it’s missing Christmas decorations. Sofía used to tell me about the way her mom and sisters would go all out for the holidays, throwing tinsel all over their living room until their carpet looked silver, stringing lights around not just the tree but the curtain rods and picture frames and over the tops of tables. They’d bake cookies and empanadas and fruit tarts and churros until every dish on the big dining room table overflowed with sugary goodness.
And now there’s nothing but a green triangular piece of construction paper.
At the bottom of the handmade tree is a card written in Gwen’s handwriting and a small box. I gave that to Sofía before we left for the holidays—I was too shy to let her open it in front of me—but I hadn’t even bothered to wrap it. I didn’t know that the little silver dolphin necklace was the only gift she’d get that year. I should have wrapped it.
“So why are you here?” Sofía asks, closing the door. We’re the only ones in the house, but I guess her father could come home at any minute.