Mixed Times
I stared at my watch, following the second hand with my eyes. My teacher droned on in the distance; well, what seemed distant at the time. My mind was clogged with thoughts of him. Stupid questions to myself like, “What shampoo does he use?” or “What kind of toothpaste does he use?” I also stole continuous glances at him. I think he only saw me one of the many times.
He knew I liked him because my best friend Aradia had just asked him out for me. I was sure if I faced him myself I would say something drastically embarrassing. He had said maybe; but I am an impatient girl! ‘Maybe’ isn’t a good enough answer for me! I needed to know. Did he want me or not?
The bell rang and my head immediately snapped towards the clock. I got up, mumbling about how it was the end of the day, and I should know if I had boyfriend or not.
As I finished zipping up my backpack I realized that I had forgotten my coat somewhere in the school. I jogged up the aisle to the teacher’s desk. “I need to find my coat.” I said.
“You don’t need a pass, just go.” She answered wearily; she obviously had had a long day and didn’t care. Well, neither did I. I nodded to her politely and left the classroom. I went into the auditorium, which was now dark. No one had been in there for hours. The stage was the likeliest place my coat might be, seeing as I had had chorus the period before, so I made my way there. I felt my way around the stage since I couldn’t see. I stood up, not finding anything.
Someone’s arm slid around my waist and pulled me close to him. I knew that he knew exactly who I was and why I was in there, but for the life of me, I couldn’t discern anything about him. I knew he could see me, otherwise how could he have soundlessly come in and pulled me so close to him so effortlessly? It was so dark! Yet somehow, I felt safe when I should be scared; like I belonged there with him.
He put his forehead on the top of my head; I turned my face up to look up at him, but the only thing I could make out of the boy were the most beautiful, big green eyes I had ever seen. He kissed me ever so gently on the lips, but as soon as our lips touched the lights flashed on. I moved to step away from him, but he wasn’t there.
Aradia came trotting down the aisle. I just stood frozen looking around for the boy. She ran up the stage to me and yelled, “He said yes!”
I gave her an odd, bewildered look, “Who said yes to what?”
“Derek! Derek said yes to going out with you! Addie, is something wrong with you?” She put her hand to my forehead. I moved her hand with a small sigh. “Oh him. I changed my mind, I don’t like him anymore.”
“Something is seriously wrong with you! He is the pickiest boy in our grade, and he said yes to you! The least popular girl in the entire school!” (Most people would be hurt or offended by that, but we both knew it was true. We had been best friends forever and were always honest with each other.)
However, I had no patience with this conversation, considering she was having an attitude about it. I glared at her, “Go away!”
“No! Tell me what’s wrong with you!”-
I sighed. “Even if I did tell you, you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Try me.”
I took the next several minutes to explain everything in exact detail. After I finished, she gave me a skeptical look and shook her head.
“I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.” I said, a hint of cockiness and superiority in my voice, even though I felt upset that I couldn’t convince my best friend I was telling the truth—that it really happened.
“No I don’t believe you! You are a horrible person, lying to your best friend’s face! And since you want to drop him for some reason that you won’t tell me, I’m going to take Derek, seeing how he’s on the rebound now!”
I just sighed again and looked at my feet. She stormed out of the auditorium and slammed the door behind her. I just stood there looking at my feet, trying to decide if I imagined the whole thing; did I just make a huge mistake? Suddenly the lights clicked off again. “Adelina,” the boy’s voice called softly.
“Okay, I know I’m not imagining this,” I thought.
I looked around, but I could barely see anything, though I could feel his arms pulling us together again. “Who are you?” I whispered in the darkness.
“Nathaniel.” He answered simply.
“How do you know my name? And where did you go when Aradia was here?”
“I know you, not just your name. And where was I? I guess you could say I was around.”
I stayed quiet in his tight, but gentle grip. I looked up into those green eyes, and he stared back into my dull aqua ones. It was as if my thoughts scrolled across my eyes because he seemed to be reading them.
“I want to tell you everything, but not here, not now.” He said. The thought drifted into my head that my voice boomed loudly against the concrete walls of the auditorium, but his only echoed softly in an eerie public bathroom sort of way.
I closed my eyes and there was suddenly warmth on my face and even through my eyelids I could tell there was light. I opened them and I was in a field with Nathaniel still holding me. I looked up at him and was taken aback. He was dressed in the type of clothes worn by the early American settlers and his sun-bleached hair was in a bowl cut with the bangs pushed to the sides. His light hair looked odd against the farmer’s tan of his skin. He let me go and I stumbled backwards.
“Whe—where are we?” I asked, my voice shaking.
“The future site of the school.”
I stumbled back a few more steps and fell over on my butt. “Future? But-but-but-but how? What year is it?”
“I’ll explain later, but please promise you will help me.” He did his own version of the puppy pout while helping me up.
I didn’t know what to say, so I just blurted out the first thing that came to mind: “How?” (Obviously this was getting a wee bit strange…)
He sighed, with a look of relief on his face. “Trust me, I’ll explain on the way, you will remember and understand everything I’m talking about.”
“On the way where?” I said giving him a skeptical, confused look.
“You’ll know when we get there; but first, about these clothes. They will not do.” He touched my arm gently and I was suddenly wearing clothes of the same time frame as his. Oddly I felt more comfortable in these clothes, but I didn’t understand why.
He took my hand and gently pulled me along, towards what I knew was the town. Every once in a while he looked back at me, recognizing quickly that I now knew exactly where we were heading. His smile lit up his eyes and he fell back so he was instep with me. “No one can see us, so I can do this.” He pulled me close and kissed me passionately. As soon as I kissed him back my head began to hurt and I remembered about a million things at once. He quickly pulled back from the kiss, noticing that I was crying.
“Sh…” He soothed and stroked my cheek.
“Why did you bring me here, Nat?”
“Because we need to fix what happened. This is not how it was meant to be. I promise we’ll make this better, and then we can spend the rest of our lives together.”
I closed my eyes and thought back to that night—the night we died. Nat and I had been fooling around in the loft of his father’s barn one evening after our chores were done and we knocked over a lamp. The hay caught alight and the loft was the first to go. I remember the heat trying to find Nat through the black smoke, my lungs begging for air, and then… nothing.
I reflected on how boring and uneventful my present day life was, remembering that now I was in a fight with my best friend, who thinks I’m a liar and took my almost boyfriend because I didn’t want him. I opened my eyes and looked up at him. “What do we have to do?” I asked.
“We have to do it over again. It’s ten minutes until the fire catches, and we need to return to our bodies and get out this time.”
Remembering the pain and panic of that death, my eyes began to well with tears. “I can’t do it, I can’t.”
“Yes you can. You have to. We don’t have a choice.” He took my hand and half led, half dragged me to his father’s barn. We walked through the partly shut doors of the barn and I climbed up the ladder with him right behind me. I felt a pull coming from inside me and lost all sense of past or future. We were there for the first time. I proceeded around a pile of hay and found myself under Nathaniel as he began kissing my neck. Suddenly, there was a fire spreading quickly behind him. “Nat, we have to go now.” I said urgently.
“Why?” He asked, too “distracted” to notice the smell.
“That!” I pointed behind him and he turned a little and noticed the flames rising upwards into the rafters of the barn.
“Damn it.” He mumbled. “Okay, just trust me and do as I say.”
I recognized the slight English accent he had, but I didn’t have much time to dwell on that. He grabbed my hand, pulled me up, and gently pushed me over the edge of the loft a split second after he told me that we were about to jump. I screamed my way down until I landed painfully on my wrist. Nat landed much more gracefully than I had.
“Addie, we need to get outside, now! I don’t know how much longer the rafters are going to hold.” It was then that I heard a groaning from above. Suddenly the loft collapsed almost on top of us and my skirt was caught underneath a blazing beam.
“Nat!” I cried, trying to pull my skirt from under it. Nathaniel ran back and quickly tore my skirt away from the burning wood. I sprinted out of the barn, Nat close behind me. I ran until I couldn’t taste the smoke anymore. I fell to the ground choking and wheezing. Nat landed beside me doing the same. As soon as I saw Nat’s mother and father running towards us I felt dizzy and everything went black.
I woke up dazed a few hours later on the stage of the school auditorium. Nat was only a few paces away from me, still unconscious. I laid there until I saw some movement from where Nat was. I sat up and the lights clicked on. Nat flinched at the sudden bright light. I crawled over to him, now in the light blue jeans and black polo I had been planning to wear the next morning.
“Nat?” He sat up and hugged me as I got over to him. He was wearing a dark blue and yellow horizontally stripped polo and blue jeans, his pale blonde hair longer and cut at an angle away from his face.
“What happened? Why aren’t we still there?”
“Because we fixed it, everything’s the way it’s meant to be. As you probably noticed, you were reincarnated into this life.”
I nodded.
“Well I wasn’t reincarnated even though I did die. I felt I had unfinished business, or maybe I was just afraid to keep going, but I stayed in this world. I was a specter until I figured out I had to fix it, for both of us. So I came and found you, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, but I was hoping I would look like I did.”
“You did.” I pointed out.
“But since you were from this time, your conscious mind could not redo that life then, you had to return here so I came back with you. I was hoping that it would work out, so I used a little ghosty magic to enroll in the school one night, so Merry Christmas, love, I’m here to stay.”
I smiled at him. “But why didn’t we go straight back to the barn?”
“If I knew, well, nothing would be different if I knew. All I know is you saved me from a fate I shouldn’t have ever had.”
“That and gave you an added bonus of me.” My smile widened and I checked my watch, shocked to find it the time the bus would have dropped me off at school in the morning. “Well then come on, I have a best friend to make up with and some homework to do.” I pulled him up and we walked hand in hand out of the auditorium to the cafeteria.
And that’s how it went; we never spoke about what happened with anyone besides each other. We stayed together throughout high school and were voted cutest couple of the senior class. We were married after we graduated college and had two children. Needless to say, I never did find my coat.
Genevieve Blood
