And then the thresholds close, like scabs over a cut. Days, weeks, even years in the human realm can pass before the scab is picked and the timeline rips open once more, bleeding travelers into the wood until it scabs over again. This continues until the threshold closes for good, the cut finally healing into a scar, although this doesn’t happen as often as Dad would like.
He grabs a book from the shelf and hands it to me. It’s an old book bound in leather with the title and author’s name etched in green. The copyright reads 1936. It is a collection of stories, paranormal events that have taken place around the world that have never been fully explained. He tells me to turn to chapter twenty-three, titled “Time Travel.” In it, there are a dozen stories of people disappearing from their time period only to wind up in another. One story in particular catches my eye, about a traveler wearing medieval clothing, who, according to onlookers, appeared out of nowhere in the middle of a street in downtown Chicago. One witness told police that the man shouted at passersby in Shakespearean English and stared at the buildings surrounding him as if he’d never seen anything like them. In his confusion, the man was run over by an Oldsmobile and died instantly. Some thought he had possibly escaped from an asylum, while others thought he was an actor who’d had too much to drink. Whatever the case, his identity was never discovered, leading some to believe he may not have been from their time at all.
“These people pass through the thresholds unknowingly and end up in our wood,” he explains. “They become disoriented, and it is our job to take them back to their own time, but a few of them have slipped through the cracks in the past thousand years, since the guardians were called. These travelers journeyed through a threshold that was not their own and ended up in another time. This is dangerous for many reasons but, most important, it upsets the natural order of things. We are all supposed to exist only in our own timelines. To be dropped into another could rip apart the very fabric of our world.”
I flip the page. There is a copy of the newspaper article detailing the accident, along with a sienna photograph of the body splayed underneath the car.
“I want you to read that book before we begin your lessons,” he says just as the oven timer dings. He ruffles my hair. “Enough talk for one morning. I believe you have presents to open.”
But I am not as excited about the Barbie dream car or the sticky buns. I hug the book to my chest and keep it on me at all times over the next week, reading whenever the opportunity strikes, making notes in the margins in purple ink under the notes made by my dad and my grandpa and someone else before them.
V
Trevor watches me in fifth-period chemistry from the other side of the room. Meredith notices and nudges me with her elbow. A drop of distilled water sloshes out of the beaker.
I sigh. “You’re lucky that wasn’t hydrochloric acid.”
“You should go out with him,” she says, doodling fat hearts onto her lab packet. “He’s clearly into you.”
“I did go out with him.” For one week in sixth grade. It was enough.
Mr. Craft walks by and Meredith fiddles with the Bunsen burner until he moves on to the next worktable. “But he’s mature now. And he’s a quarterback.”
“Second-string,” I mumble as I watch the solution and jot down my observations.
“Yeah, but those abs ain’t second-string.”
I roll my eyes.
Meredith became boy crazy right around the time Dad started teaching me about the wood. She’d talk to me about her latest crush and I’d nod as if I were listening, when really all I thought about was my next lesson. And then she would notice I wasn’t listening, and I’d spend the next hour apologizing. We had our biggest fight in eighth grade. Meredith called me a freak and I called her immature. We weren’t friends for a week.
It was the longest week of my life. And even though she still calls me a freak sometimes for making it to junior year without having one steady boyfriend and I call her immature for caring more about gossip and boys than our upcoming ACTs, I don’t know what I’d do without her.
She reminds me that there’s a normal life outside the wood. Reminds me that there’s something to protect that goes beyond me and my family, even if it’s something that I’ll never fully be able to enjoy. Meredith hits it on the head every time without meaning to.
I am a freak.
“Yeah, well, I have it on good authority that Trevor’s hoping he’ll see you at the game Friday night.” She bounces in her seat as she says this, the fluorescent lighting making her perfectly straight teeth look even whiter than usual.
“Did he say that?”
“No, Tommy D. did. I think he wants to ask you to homecoming.”
“Tommy?”
She rolls her eyes. “Trevor. Honestly, Win, I don’t know how you function sometimes.”
I don’t know, either. It’s not like I don’t notice boys at all. Not like I don’t wish I could be more like Meredith and actually have time on my hands to go to football games and parties and homecoming dances. But even if I did have the time, there wouldn’t be any point in it. I don’t care how mature he is for his age; I doubt there’s a single high school boy in the country who would believe me when I’d inevitably have to cancel a date to send a time traveler home where he or she belongs.
Frustrated, I huff out a breath. “Well, then why doesn’t he just ask me? Why does he have to get Tommy D’Angelo to tell you to tell me to go to the football game so he can ask me out to a dance that’s still two weeks away?”
“Okay, look. No offense or anything, but … you’re kind of scary, Win.”
I cut my eyes to her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Okay, maybe scary’s not the right word. You’re … intimidating. You never talk to anyone besides me. You’re totally unapproachable.”
My brow furrows. “I talk to people.”
“Teachers don’t count.”
“There’s this girl in my English class who’s always asking for pens. Anna something.”
“Arianna Andrews, and she doesn’t count, either.”
“I talk to people,” I say again, but the bell rings and Mr. Craft is clapping his hands and telling us to turn in our packets, and I don’t think she hears me.
It’s a lie anyway. When it comes to any semblance of a social life, I am as tiny and insignificant as the fly currently slamming its body against the window behind Mr. Craft’s desk. That’s the way it has to be. If I get too involved, make too much noise, people will notice me as more than just the brainy girl who skips class a lot and, apparently, scares people. And since being noticed can only lead to questions I can’t answer, I think I’ll stay in my silent, scary corner, thank you very much.
Meredith takes our packets up while I clean our work area. She isn’t the greatest lab partner. She always skips steps in the instructions and never helps me clean up, but I prefer to do things on my own anyway.
There’s no one you can count on out there to save you, Dad used to say. When the guardianship passes, you’re on your own.
Meredith returns and shuffles her books into the crook of her arm. “You coming over this afternoon?”
“Crap, I forgot. I’m—”