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Travis Greer can stop time. First two chapters of 85,000 word novel. |
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Chapter 1 First Time Maybe we were both worn down that day. Maybe I persisted in some obnoxious little kid behavior that pushed her over the edge. Maybe I repeated everything she said. She says I used to do that. If that was it, I can’t blame her for wanting to wring my neck. Whatever, by the middle of the afternoon, she blew. She grabbed me by my left arm up by the shoulder, snatched me up off the floor, and hauled me down the hall and into my room while I screamed my head off. We were halfway across the room, headed for my bed where we both expected I would soon land amidst the rumpled covers and stuffed animals and dirty socks. She was probably saying something that involved calling me ‘Mister’. Like “You watch yourself, Mister!” or “I’ve had it, Mister!” She was checking out the landing zone and she stumbled because my weight was no longer in her hand. She looked at her feet and I was gone. She thought she must have dropped me, unlikely as that was given the Ironman grip she had on my arm. She looked back at the hallway. Nothing there. She checked under the bed. Worn out toys and dust bunnies, some more dirty socks. No kid. She searched, increasingly frantic, first the bedroom and the bathroom and the other bedrooms across the hall, then the whole house, yelling, then screaming my name. She thought she must have had a stroke. Or a psychotic episode. She must have done something with me, but she had no memory of it. I was just gone. I can only imagine what she felt as she ran around the house. She found me, eventually, curled into a fetal ball in the bottom of the closet in their room. Before she called the police, or my Dad, or Sally, the neighbor lady who sometimes sat with me. She told us about it thirty years later. It would have been nice to hear it sooner. I didn’t remember it. Not for years. Not until it happened again. Even then, it was mostly vague images. Kids don’t remember much at that age. Their brains aren’t developed enough. Maybe it was the emotion. I don’t have to be emotional to do it now, but the first few times it happened when I was really upset. She was mad and I was mad. Something in my head flipped and everything stopped. I was on my tiptoes, my left arm still in her right hand. Her left foot was planted, her right foot in the air, swinging forward for the leverage to toss me into the bed. But she wasn’t swinging me forward anymore. It was all as still as a photograph. And dead quiet. The radio had been playing, probably some blaring rock and roll because that’s what we listened to in those days. No more. The afternoon sun came in my window and there were dust motes suspended in the light, but they weren’t circling on invisible currents like they do. They were as still as everything else. I looked up at my Mom and I have this image of a dollop of spit that has flown out of her mouth and it was hanging an inch from her lips, caught in the sunlight and shining like a diamond. And not moving. I was terrified. I do remember that. You remember emotion in a more primitive part of your brain. That abject, overwhelming, pee your pants terror has stayed with me, close to the surface, ever since. I was screaming before, but I hit a whole new level, the kind of screaming that parents absolutely have to respond to. She didn’t. The more she didn’t move, the more I put into it. Parents from the neighbor’s houses should have been running to us. I knew I did it. I didn’t know how, but it was my fault. I was clear on that from the very beginning. It’s not like everything turns to stone. Everything is still made of the same stuff. Mom’s hand was tight on my arm, but it was flesh and muscle and bone. Maybe I pried her fingers off one at a time, I don’t know. I remember sitting on the floor and screaming until I couldn’t scream any more. She was right there, and I was as totally alone as if I was the only person left in the world. I was afraid it would never end. I would be the only living boy in a world, frozen in time. Forever. I didn’t speak a word for about a week. To anyone. I’m not sure Mom was much better. What my Dad must have thought! He went to work at the plant and came home to find his wife and son, both totally weird. I wouldn’t tell him what happened. I don’t know what Mom told him, I think at least some things that it wasn’t. Not a deranged psycho murderer, rapist, child abuser scenario, anyway. They took me to the doctor. I guess it is the right thing to do when your kid won’t talk, but I wouldn’t talk to him either. All I did was sit on his high table with the paper sheet and cry and look scared. He had to guess it was some kind of child abuse trauma. What else could it be? It is trauma, all right, but no one abused me. I did it to myself. I don’t know if the doctor reported it to Social Services, or the police, or whoever. I think they’re supposed to. It must have been terrible for Mom. The point of all that is that it scared me so bad that I didn’t do it again until I was eighteen. I blocked it out completely. I totally forget it. I guess not totally. I was an anxious, dysfunctional kid. Now I’m an anxious, dysfunctional adult, but I’m better. Back then, everything scared me. Hypervigilance, they call it. I avoided any confrontation, generally by staying home as much as I could. When I had to go out, I went with great caution and trepidation and watched for people and would cross the street, or reverse and go the other way to avoid them. You may remember me from your own elementary school. I was the skinny, wide-eyed kid that had a big ‘V’ tattooed on his forehead. For ‘victim’. Kids used to sneak up on me and yell “Boo!” in my ear to see the show. Yeah, yeah. Poor me. Everybody relax, that’s not what this…book, story, whatever…is about. I got over it, at least some. I started eating when I got hungry, started talking after a week because I wanted to go and play outside and Mom wouldn’t let me unless I asked for it. I was in the loser’s group in school, but the losers were my friends. I even had a girlfriend by the time I got out of high school. For a little while. I grew up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, as middle American as you can get, with a southwest tone. Las Cruces is forty miles north of El Paso, Texas, which means it’s also forty miles north of Juarez, Mexico. Chapter 2 Juarez The summer I graduated from high school, my father was sent to a training program in Albuquerque, something about how to operate some new machinery at the plant. Since the company was paying, he and Mom decide she would go, too, and they would stay an extra day and have an adventure in the city. Mostly they got away from me for a while. My friend Charlie decided it is the perfect time for us to have our own adventure. An hour after Mom and Dad drove off, Charlie and his girlfriend, Megan, and Patty and I crammed into his ten year old Corolla and headed south on I-25. All you needed to get into Mexico in those days was a driver’s license. The few times I’d been there with my parents, we’d parked on the US side and walked across the bridge to shop the tourist stalls within a few blocks of the border. This time, we drove across. We were going to a resort that Charlie heard about that was supposed to have a football field-sized swimming pool and palm trees and was still cheap enough that we could afford it for one night. Patty and I were snuggled up in the back seat and I was thinking this was going to be the night. We were going to spend a night together in a hotel room. She had to be ready. That’s not relevant to the story I want to tell, but in fact, she was, and it proves even nerds can have sex once in a while. Not necessarily good sex, but is the first time ever really that good? Second time was better. We left the Bella Vista resort late in the afternoon the next day and got lost. Charlie Daniels (yeah, like the country singer) grew up on a ranch north of Cruces. He was blonde and my size, maybe a bit more wiry. He could have turned into a good ol’ cowboy like his Dad, but maybe he figured his two older brothers had the cowboy drill covered. He had to find something else. He was even more of a computer nerd than me and was absolutely convinced that his Dad’s Tom Tom would lead us out. He must have entered something wrong because an hour later, we were headed up towards some hills and I was sure we hadn’t seen anything like them on the way in. “Charlie, turn around and go back. We can ask for directions at the place,” I said. “Are you kidding? We’re an hour away. I’m not going back there.” He looked at his fuel gage, frowning. “I doubt we got enough gas to get back there anyway.” “Char-leee,” Megan said in her whiny voice, dragging the last syllable out. “We have to get back before my parents get home.” “I know, Meg,” he said. “I’ll stop at the first place we see and ask.” Charlie knew about twenty words in Spanish, which made him bilingual in our group. The next place was a walled villa that practically screamed Drug Lord. The walls were ten feet high. There was a massive wrought iron gate and you could see the tops of palm trees and the upper floors of an ornate hacienda above the wall. We drove past slowly, gawking like teenagers. There was no way we were getting in there, or would ever want to try. A quarter mile past the walls, we saw a white stucco building that sat down a slight incline thirty yards off the road. The stucco was dried and cracking, showing mud brown bricks in spots. A sign in hand-painted red letters was above the door, no words we recognized. Charlie said it had to be some kind of a business and he turned down the drive. I was nervous, as I was about every new experience. We knew Juarez was a dangerous place, even in those days, and it was nearly dark. I could see it on Megan’s and Patty’s faces, too. Charlie was trying to act tough, like it was no big deal. “Come on, Poncho,” he said to me as he slid out of the car. That’s not my name. It was a joke. Hey, Cisco! Hey, Poncho! I don’t remember how we got started on them, but I had every Cisco Kid episode ever made on a DVD at home. Charlie had watched most of them with me. My name is Travis Greer. I wanted to be a writer when I was eighteen. Still do, since I’m writing this. Not that it will ever be published. Maybe it’s more like therapy. “Be careful,” Patty advised. I patted her hand confidently and got out of the Corolla and followed Charlie. “It’s quiet,” I said as we approached the door. “Too quiet,” he said in his Poncho voice and we laughed. There were windows on each side of the door, but they were screened with a dust covered mesh that was impossible to see through. The glass behind looked darkened with some kind of tint, although it could have just been the dirt. There was an equally dust coated screen door and a solid wood door with peeling white paint behind that. Charlie pulled the screen open and knocked with his knuckles on the wood. We waited. “Think we should just go in?” he asked. “Hell if I know.” Charlie tried the doorknob. It turned. He looked at me with an I-don’t-know, either look and shrugged. He pushed the door open about a foot. “Hello?” We heard the sound of movement inside; more than one person, furniture scrapping on wood flooring, male voices, excited. Charlie pulled the door closed again and stepped back. He still held the screen door open with his left hand. I was right behind him. The wooden door jerked inward and there were three men, crammed tight together in a narrow hallway. All three had hand guns. Pointing at us. “Oh, shit!” Charlie said. He let go of the screen door and stepped back, right onto my right toe so that when I tried to step back, I tripped and fell on my ass. The screen door swung closed on the men and it must have offended them because there was more yelling in Spanish. I knew about ten words in Spanish and I recognized a cuss word or two. I scrambled to my feet and held my hands up. Charlie was doing the same. I don’t know if they told us to do that, but it seemed a good idea to make sure they knew we weren’t armed. The three men charged out the door, guns out in front. They circled us, all three yelling in Spanish. They were middle aged men, dark skinned, Hispanic, I thought, or maybe Indian. All were in tee shirts, two wore blue jeans, and one wore khaki shorts and sandals. One of the tee shirts had a picture of Jerry Garcia on the front. A Dead Head. “Wait!” I yelled. “Don’t shoot us!” Charlie yelled. I looked back at the car and saw Megan and Patty staring, eyes wide. Megan had her cell phone to her ear. They looked terrified. “Americanos!” Charlie yelled. “We’re lost! We just wanted directions. Direciones.” I didn’t know if that is even a word. The men yelled at us some more. “What are they saying?” I yelled. “I don’t know. I don’t know.” We were cowering, nearly squatting in front of them, our hands up. After what seemed like a very long time, but may have been only a minute, a woman came to the door. She was their age, mid-forties, wearing tight blue jeans and a collared white shirt. She had blonde hair and large, hoop earrings. The screen door screeched on rusty hinges when she pushed it open and stepped out. One of the men turned to her and said something. She answered in Spanish, watching us the whole time. Her face was so expressionless that it occurred to me that she must be stoned. “What the hell you kids doing here?” she finally asked in English. Charlie and I both screamed about how we were lost and just trying to find our way back to Juarez and that we wanted no trouble, just to get back on the road and get away. The woman looked at our car and said something in Spanish. One of the men went to the car and yanked open the front passenger door. Megan shrank away from him and screeched, a sound almost exactly like the sound the screen door hinges made a few seconds earlier. He reached in and grabbed her phone from her hand. He tossed it on the ground and stomped it. I heard the plastic case crack from where we stood. The woman pointed to our car and said we should get in and get the hell away from there. I was all for that. I was halfway across the lot when I heard Charlie ask, “Which way?” I could hardly believe he has the nerve to do anything but run. I don’t know if anyone pointed for him. I didn’t look back. I tried to get in the back with Patty, but Megan jumped out and pushed me aside. She slid in with Patty. “Get in the front,” she said. Charlie was already getting in and starting the car. Without that little diversion of switching car seats, we might have made it. We might have told the story years later and laughed about it. Charlie didn’t even try to turn around in the tiny lot. He backed up the driveway, maybe too fast, too anxious to get the hell away. We were all looking back to make sure they weren’t following, or shooting. Another vehicle, some kind of Jeep-like SUV, pulled into the driveway behind us. He was also going too fast. “Look out!” I yelled, too late. We smashed together with a sickening crunch. Charlie’s rear bumper crumpled, tail lights shattered, his trunk caved in. The other vehicle had a thick metal front bumper that bent slightly in against the fenders and busted a head light. I was looking back over the seat and saw the other driver fly forward against the steering column on impact. He should have been wearing his seatbelt. I looked back toward the building and saw the blonde woman running for the door as though her life depended on it. “Oh, shit,” I heard Charlie mutter. He was opening his door. I wanted to tell him to not get out. Stay in the car. But why? What else could we do? Someone, Megan, I think, was crying in the back seat. “I’m sorry!” Charlie yelled. Megan and Patty climbed out together on the passenger side. They were holding on to each other like children. I didn’t want to, but I climbed out, too. Three more men got out of the other vehicle, one from the front passenger side, one from the back seat, also on the passenger side. The driver was slower. When he sat up, I saw that his face was bloody. Something, probably his upper lip or nose, had hit the steering wheel. Blood ran in rivulets from the corners of his mouth like a vampire, stark red against his dark skin. When he got out of the car, he was screaming. I don’t even know if it was words. Maybe he couldn’t pronounce anything because his lips were swelling. Maybe his teeth were broken off. It sounded like just screams. Not of fear. Of rage. He leaned back into the car and grabbed something. When he turned again, he was holding some kind of automatic rifle. It looked like something the Seals might have used when they went after Osama Bin Laden, short, with a metal stock and a pistol grip and a huge magazine. He was firing before he even turned around. The front of their vehicle dropped six inches with a Whump! and I thought he shot his own front tire. It didn’t matter. He was bringing the barrel up, spraying the air in our direction. I had time to see the flashes of light as cartridges flew away from the chamber with each shot. I knew he was killing us. I was more terrified than I’d ever been. Maybe except for that time when I was five. I jerked back, getting my arms up in front of me, as though that would offer some protection from bullets. I closed my eyes and crouched, and moved my arms over my head. Everything stopped. It was absolutely silent. I had time to wonder if I was dead before I found the courage to open my eyes. My life changed in that instant. First, that’s when I remembered the first time. In my head, I saw the dust motes hanging in the still air, not moving on invisible drafts. I saw my Mom, one foot off the ground and spit hanging an inch from her lips. And I knew it was happening again. Megan and Patty were spinning around, turning their backs toward the shooter, as though he might have been throwing water balloons instead of bullets. Charlie was falling backward, leaning at an impossible forty-five degree angle, one hand coming down but still inches off the dirt. His door was open and window had shattered. The air was filled with particles of glass that were flying away. Except they weren’t flying. They were hanging perfectly still in the air, catching the light like diamonds. More diamonds, like the spit from my mother’s mouth. The two men on the passenger side of their vehicle also had weapons, but they were not pointed at anything. They were staring at the driver with their mouths open, maybe yelling something. I turned to the driver and saw him shooting, eyes open and wild, blood and spit flying from his lips. The muzzle had climbed and was aiming over our heads, but I could still see the flash of light around the rifle bore that somehow persisted beyond the instant, and a puff of smoke stretched in a line towards the sky. I saw a tiny, pointed cylinder of metal hanging motionless a few feet ahead of that line of smoke. A bullet. Again, I knew it was something I did, though I had no idea how I had done it. I didn’t know how long it would last. The alternatives were awful. Maybe it would never stops and I would be trapped here. Or maybe it would stop in a second and the shooting would start again. Of course I was terrified. It was the same, people around me and I was as alone as if I were on another planet. I didn’t need the memories to be terrified. They were icing on the terror cake. I was totally alone, people were shooting at us, and I had somehow frozen the whole world. I stumbled backward so fast I fell on my ass again. My heart was beating like the automatic rifle fire. I don’t think I screamed, only because I didn’t think of it. Sitting on the ground in the dirt, I was stunned. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I looked back toward the building and saw the three men who had been yelling at us a moment ago, still standing on the dirt lot. All three were crouched down, hands up, not firing their weapons, but warding off the shots of the driver. We weren’t directly between them and the shooter, but close enough to scare them. I turned back and I’m on the ground and staring at the dust that had been kicked up as Megan and Patty twisted around. It was a yellow cloud that hung in the air. I moved my toe into it I could feel it. It had mass, more than the air. My toe moved it aside but seemed to have no momentum. When I pulled my toe back, there was a gap that didn’t close. I sat on the ground for a long time, feeling my heart pound and gasping like I’d sprinted a mile. Eventually, I put together that this had happened before and it ended. This will end, too. Maybe any second. That got me up in a hurry. I had to do something. I was not completely sure what, but it was going to involve getting the hell out of there. I moved closer to Megan and Patty and saw the other bullet. Patty was turned half way around, her right arm raised. The bullet was pressed against her breast beneath her arm. The tip of the projectile had pressed a divot into the cloth of her blouse, a dent in her skin as well, like a poke with a pencil eraser. I reached under her arm and grabbed the bullet with my thumb and forefinger. It was hot enough to burn my fingers and I jerked my hand back, and then quickly grabbed again and pulled it away and tossed it to the ground. It came easily enough, it took only a little tug like it was stuck in jelly. It would have killed her. Another fraction of a second… I looked around for other bullets. Megan hasn’t been hit at all. The driver had sprayed from his left to right, first at the ground and into his own front tire, and then at Charlie, then into the car and at the rest of us. I saw the rear and front windshields of Charlie’s Corolla were shattered, bits of glass hanging in the air inside and in front of the car. More diamonds. I ran around to Charlie. He was leaning backward at that impossible angle, one foot off the ground, the other barely touching a heel to the dust. He had twisted toward the car with his left arm extended toward the ground. His door was open and his window was a cloud of glass fragments hanging like a fog in the air above him. I leaned over, looking for the bullet holes, the blood. His eyes were open, his mouth, too. He was screaming something. I squatted and looked beneath him and I saw the tear in his shirt sleeve, up near the shoulder, and a splash of red. I didn’t know what to do. I looked around for anything that give me a clue. There was nothing. Desert and dark mountains beyond, the sun orange on the horizon, not a single car on the road. And if there were, it wouldn’t have helped. I couldn’t think. It was too much. I was crying and gasping for breath and so totally alone it was like a new definition of alone. Finally, I pushed Charlie to the ground. He moved easily enough. His left arm bent when it touched the ground. He was twisted oddly, one foot still in the air, but I pushed it down and it went. I twisted him around until he was lying flat on his back, then pulled up his tee shirt sleeve and saw the gash. It was a red line, deep and ugly, on his shoulder. Bright red blood had swelled up like worms crawling away from it. Now it was as still as everything else. I pulled off my tee shirt and tore it into pieces. I used most of it as a pad to cover the wound, and a few strips to tie it into place. Before I got that done, I realized it’s not what I should have been doing. Not first. I left Charlie on the ground with my tee stuck to his shoulder and ran to the driver. I tugged at his rifle and he turned, coming with it. I screamed then, loud and high-pitched like a girl. I thought he was waking up and going to shoot me. It was just that I was pulling at the gun and his fingers were wrapped around it. I turned him and pulled and pushed until I had him on the ground and then I worked at his fingers one at a time until I could pry the thing away from him. I ran around and got the pistols from the other men by his vehicle, and then ran to the men near the building and got theirs. I squeezed them against my chest and it was too many. Five pistols and a rifle, I’d drop one and bend to get it and another would fall. I stopped half way between the building and the car and let them all drop. I picked them up one at a time and began to throw them as far as I could into the desert. It was not very far, especially the rifle. That landed twenty yards away and seemed to stand out like a sore thumb. I ran to it, picked it up and threw it again. From twenty yards into the desert, I turned and looked back, and my stomach cramped and I bent over and puked up the remains of the enchiladas we had for lunch. And I screamed again, as soon as I could get my breath. It was too strange. I wanted to just lay down by my half-digested lunch and cry like I did when I was five. Not yet, I thought. Please, not yet. They’ll kill us. I ran back and began to get them into the car. Patty first because she was closest to the door. I picked her up around her waist and moved her to where I could tilt her into the rear seat, and then I ran around and got in from the other side and brushed glass chips out of the air, and crawled through and grabbed her. I didn’t get all the glass and when I dragged her across the seat, I knew there would be splinters. Then Megan, who was fortunately smaller. I laid her in the back, too, half on the seat with Patty and half in the foot well. Patty still had her arms up above her head. Both had the same wide-eyed, terrified expressions on their faces, mouths open in silent screams. I ran around again and bent their knees up so I could get the rear doors closed. I grabbed Charlie under his arms and dragged him around to the passenger seat and fought him for a long five minutes to get him into the seat. I was sweaty and out of breath by the time it was done. I went and sat in the driver’s seat and looked at the stillness, but I couldn’t stand it. My stomach heaved again and I got out. It’s going to start again, I thought. It did the last time and it will again. And when it does, we have to get out of here quick. Before they can grab us, or find their guns, or call somebody. I ran out into the desert and grabbed the rifle and one of the pistols, ran back and shoved them into the foot well beneath Charlie’s feet. They crunched against glass gravel from the windows. There were only a few jagged crumbles still stuck at in the front windshield. I found a towel under the seat and use it to scrape them away and off the dash. I stepped out and brushed at the seat again, and then set back down. I was shirtless and I could feel glass splinters sticking in my back. I turned the Corolla’s key off and put the shifter into neutral and felt the car ease forward an inch. It took me a minute to guess what that might mean. I climbed out again and pushed against the door frame. We were on a downhill incline and the car began to roll. I jumped back in and guided us down the incline to the dirt lot and through a half circle before it stopped. I turned the key and tried to start the engine. Nothing happened, no sound at all. I sat there a long time. It seemed like hours. After a while, it occurred to me to go and take the keys from the SUV. I turned it off and tossed them into the desert. I got back to the Corolla and waited some more. I was tired, nearly dozing when it started again. How can you sleep at a time like that? I don’t know. It was quiet and nothing was happening, and suddenly the screaming started. Ten people all finishing the sounds they had started hours ago. Megan and Patty, screaming, high and shrill, Charlie cursing, the shooter screaming in rage, the other men yelling and cursing. It all cut off after a second. “What the fuck!” Charlie said. I had to assume the others are all saying or thinking something similar. Megan and Patty paused for an instant and began to scream again. I turned the key and the Corolla came to life with a whine. I shoved the shifter into Drive and pressed the accelerator to the floor. We careened through the rest of our circle and back up the drive. The driver was on the ground where I left him, sitting up now, looking at his hands, then around at the dirt. Blood dripped from his chin again and he looked at us as we went by. It wasn’t the look of murderous rage of an instant or hours ago. Instead, confusion and fear. I steered the Corolla out into the desert to get around him. I was into the vegetation, cactus and creosote and ocotillo, and the little car bucked and bounced. I heard bodies thudding around in the back seat and the screams changed to pain and panic. They were all bouncing around in the glass shards and there were bound to be cuts. I kept my foot to the floor. Even with that, we slowed in the dirt and vegetation and I heard sand spraying on the undercarriage from the car’s narrow front wheels. We inched forward, slower, slower, and finally the front drive wheel hits the pavement and squalled as it grabbed, and we were accelerating away, back past the fancy hacienda and down the highway. The evening air was roaring in my face and I could barely hear Megan and Patty and Charlie screaming and yelling questions at me. I didn’t even try to answer until we’re miles away. I told them. As much as I could get out while the wind roared through the empty windshield and they cried and screamed more questions. Charlie believed me, maybe, eventually. Patty, maybe, but she didn’t want to. Megan, not at all. They all remembered it, the car crash, the driver stepping out and shooting. And then, in an instant without pause, they were all in the car and I was driving away. Megan insisted she passed out. She insisted we all passed out. But they had no answer about how they ended up in the car. I did something, but it sure as hell wasn’t stopping time. By the time we got to a town and a policeman stops us for having no tail lights, I had decided not to tell anyone else. The cop saw the empty windshield, and then the bullet holes in the vehicle, and got excited. When he saw the guns in the foot well it all went to hell. He had his gun out and he was screaming at us in Spanish and we were all out of the car with our hands up and the girls were crying again. I won’t describe it all. It would take too long and this isn’t about that either. Parents were called, lawyers got involved, and the girls got to go home while Charlie and I stayed in a stinky Mexican jail for a week. I told the story about a million times, to Mexican cops, and then some guys came in from Mexico City, and then some guys from the FBI and the DEA and then the State Department. I was in a near panic state the whole time. Despite that, between interrogations, I slept. I was exhausted. Partly, it was a backlash from the adrenaline, but it was more than that. Something about stopping time drains me. I narrowed the story down to stopping for directions, being shot at, and running. No stopping the world. They kept asking how we got the guns. I made up a story about everyone running and I hid and tripped the driver as he ran by and he fell and dropped the guns and I grabbed them. I was a gullible and dysfunctional nerd and even I wouldn’t have believe it. But I stuck to it. We grabbed some guns, got in the car and ran away. I can’t image anyone believed it completely, but I think they believed we were too young and stupid to be part of any great criminal conspiracy. Charlie went through the same shit. His story was actually the truth, he was shot and passed out and woke up in the car. Good ol’ Charlie. He’s still my friend I never told anyone else about the stopping time stuff, not even my Mom. She looked at me funny, and maybe she wondered, but she could tell I didn’t want to say anymore. She didn’t ask. A week later, I met Patty down by the river. “I’m not going to see you for a while,” she said. She was crying. It was funny. I never thought of Patty as the one. I was eighteen, I had never thought about there even being a ‘one’. I was just trying things out. But I was mad. “Why?” I asked, with more whine in my voice than I wanted. “I saved your life! You would have been shot if I didn’t do it!” “Quit saying that!” she yelled. “I don’t believe you!” |
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