He looks down at his hands and nods. “It started happening when I was five,” he says. “My mom and Mason would disappear for an hour or so, and then they’d be back, acting like they’d never gone anywhere. It got bigger fast. Sometimes whole buildings changed. There were two different versions of my house. There was the one we lived in, but sometimes while I was outside playing, I’d look back and the place would be all overgrown, the windows busted, that kind of thing. Then it was people. I met a version of Kincaid who didn’t know me.”
“Matt?” I say.
Beau nods. “We’ve lived on his rental property my whole life. Kincaid and I grew up playin’ together, then one day, I went over to his yard, and he introduced himself to me, like we’d never met. He took me into his house, and his dad didn’t know me either. Nicest Raymond Kincaid ever treated me,” he says with the hint of a smile.
“No one lives in Matt’s rental property,” I say.
“Not in your version,” Beau says. I stare blankly at him and he goes on. “When I was ten, my mom sent me to take piano lessons. It never happened while the teacher was watching, but if I played alone, sometimes things would disappear from the room. Little changes, nothing big. When I stopped playing, everything would go back to normal.
“It got worse and worse. My mom would’ve thought I was going crazy if she was around enough. Instead she figured it was just a phase and sent me to live with my dad. It happened less while I was there, but when it did, it was bad. One time my dad didn’t even know who I was, chased me out of the house with a baseball bat in the middle of the night, but when I came back an hour later, he acted totally normal. Anyway, he’d had enough after a year and a half, and when I got back here, it was worse than before.
“I was a freshman when I figured out I could go between them when I wanted. Especially when I was playing piano, or listening to it, or even if I was just thinking about a song. Alcohol makes it easier too. And sometimes, I could go forward.”
“Forward?”
His hazel eyes flash up to mine. “In time.”
“That’s impossible,” I say, breathless.
He laughs. “It’s all impossible, Natalie.”
“Good point,” I say, massaging my forehead. “So are there two futures?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know. When I’m going forward, I can’t slow it down. It’s like . . .” He thinks for a second. “It’s like I’m standing in one place and makin’ the world go past me, but as soon as I try to freeze it, live in it, I fall back into now, either my version or yours.”
“None of this makes any sense.”
“It doesn’t,” he admits. “That’s why I didn’t tell anyone about it. There’s no visible proof. It doesn’t matter if other people are around when time starts moving; when it stops, I return right back into the present. For them it’s like nothing happened, like I just blanked out for a second, no matter how long it felt like to me. I managed to take Mason’s hamster with me once when I was a kid, but that didn’t do me any good, and I could never replicate that with actual people, so I gave up. I’d go to the school at night to play piano, and I’d pass over to your version of the world, and then when the janitor came running in, I’d stop playing and let myself fall back into my version.”
“The Band Room Ghost,” I say.
He shrugs his shoulders. “The night I met you, I tried to go back to my version, but I couldn’t. I thought it was just like it was with everyone else—like I was tuning in to where you were supposed to be, and that was what grounded me in your world. But then, after that night, you kept seeing flickers of my version of things. You saw the church with the extra wing, and you saw me and Rachel at the mall today.”
I stare down at the carpet. “Your version of Rachel, though,” I say, trying to sound natural.
He nods. “Rachel’s pretty much Rachel, no matter where she is.”
“She’s your . . .”
“Nothing,” he says, shaking his head.
“Your ex?” I guess.
He looks at me for a long moment. “Something like that.”
“What about that night on the football field? Was she your ex then?”
His eyes dart sideways toward the window then back down to the ground. “Not quite.” My stomach turns, and I cover my face, massaging my temples. “Natalie,” he says.
I shake my head and let my hands fall. “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “There are more important things to worry about.”
He stares at me, eyes heavy, as if he’s asking me for something, and the inside of my chest feels like tearing paper. “That’s why I didn’t show up,” he says finally. “When we first met I didn’t even know who you were, where you fit in. But when you saw all that stuff—my version of stuff—the way you acted, I didn’t know what to think about it at first. Then your phone number didn’t work in my world, and I started putting it together. So I got this.” He holds up a crappy flip phone.