When David had hacked himself into the school database—a laughably easy task; he wondered that half the school wasn’t fiddling with their grades—he had registered as a senior, as per Emma’s estimate, but put himself in 20th Century History, a class for juniors, anyway. His logic, at least on the surface, had been that he didn’t know much about the time in which he’d landed and didn’t want to spend all his free time doing background research on the internet. However, he had to admit to himself that there had been another factor: Emma was in it.
He had felt irrationally, inexplicably happy when the dearth of free tables forced him to sit next to her. She made him feel shy, but also strangely secure. Maybe it was just because she had picked him up while he was still reeling from the vortex, but when she was around, he felt like he was going to be okay and his anxiety about fitting in with his new surroundings vanished.
“What are you listening to?” asked Emma, noticing the ear buds that he had combed his hair over so that Mr. Grady wouldn’t see them.
“Spoon,” he replied.
“Who are they?”
“You don’t know?” He had meant that honestly, since his only reference points for musical popularity were Dash and Lennon, both of whom he realized classified good music as “music no one else listens to,” but it came out sounding incredibly arrogant. He didn’t want to sound arrogant to Emma. The truth was that talking to her made him nervous, a fluttery, tickly feeling in his stomach that set him off balance so that he found himself never quite saying the right thing, and often retreading conversations in his mind later, thinking of things that he should have said instead. He added, “It’s just some band that Lennon introduced me to.”
He tried to pay attention to Mr. Grady, but Emma was a constant distraction. She had one lock of curly hair on the right side of her face. It curled because she would twist it around her pen while she was thinking. She was cute when she was thinking and even cuter when she was laughing, which was frequently. She would have been small by the standards of his time, small and light, but not dainty or delicate, more vivacious. He felt that he could spend hours looking at her and admiring her qualities.
He actually had just forty-five minutes, but that was all right. He would see her again at lunch.
Emma was in much the same mood at the beginning of lunch before she was rudely intercepted by Olivia. Olivia, who was blond, of course. And thin, of course. And the captain of the cheer squad, of course. And who seemed to be under the impression that everyone wanted to be her friend and would always be delighted to talk to her, regardless of the time or subject, and was ignoring Emma’s subtle signals that she was in fact the last person she wanted to see right now.
Especially when the first thing she did was bring up David, who had just appeared on the far side of the cafeteria. “I saw you were eating lunch with that new kid the last couple of days. David, right? I heard he bench pressed like a million pounds in body conditioning and the other boys are like so jealous of him. Do you know him or something?”
“He’s just a new kid. I sit next to him first period,” said Emma. Divulging the absolute minimum amount of truth was often a good strategy with Olivia, and she was particularly averse to the idea of her getting interested in David.
“I have English with him,” said Olivia, as if asserting her equal claim on him based on shared class quantity. “Isn’t he totally cute? I love his hair.”
He had traded the generic getup of a few days ago for skinny jeans, a vintage Coca-Cola tee, a cowrie shell bracelet, and navy blue Converse, no doubt (thought Emma) the influence of the two guys he was currently hanging out with. His hair had gone from combed to carefully tousled. Emma was glad that he was making friends—he seemed so shy and reserved—but thought that she might need to warn him about which guys he should hang out with if he wanted to be taken seriously.
“Do you know where he’s from?” asked Olivia. “Did he just move to town or something?”
“No, he doesn’t really talk much. He likes to be by himself.”
“That’s no good. He’ll never make friends if he always stays by himself.”
“Looks like he’s already made a couple, at least,” Emma observed. “Dashell and Lennon.”
“Yeah, well, he’ll never make real friends.” Olivia flounced across the cafeteria—she was the only person Emma had ever met who could flounce even when she wasn’t wearing a skirt—and began chatting with David, pulling him away from the other two boys.
“I guess I walked into that one,” said Emma ruefully, as she turned to go look for MacKenzie.
If the rules of soccer have changed in the past hundred and fifty years, thought David, I might have some explaining to do. Everyone played soccer in his time, but he had never been any good at it and quit when he was fourteen. It turned out that not very good by his standards was excellent by these people’s standards. He was juggling the ball back and forth absently, looking around at the couple dozen other teenagers, who ranged from skinny, acne-spattered freshmen to the tough-looking seniors who were the team’s stars. The only person he recognized was Greg, whose dark eyes had flicked onto him when he arrived and then away again with an almost imperceptible sneer, and who now stood with his hands on his knees, his wiry arms tanned and golden in the sun, black hair pulled back with a sweat band, a picture of pure focus.
Coach Ramirez, who had very short hair, wraparound sunglasses, and a wide grin, told them, “Okay Coyotes, I’m not going to lie to you: This is going to be a tough year for us. We lost two good midfielders and a great striker. Luckily, we’ve still got our excellent goalie. Greg is also the team captain, so make sure to listen to him.” He slapped Greg on the shoulder. “We’ve got a lot of new students on the team. Glad to have you, but you should know that I push my team hard. We’re not just here to play around. You will be on time for every practice and you will stay focused and do what I say, or you will no longer be a part of this team. It’s a privilege, not a right. Understand?”
There were nods and murmurs of understanding.
“Great, we’re going to start with some warm-ups. We’ve got some cones set up; you’re just going to dribble the ball in and out of the cones, to the end, and then back. Okay?”
What David liked about sports was the tactile aspect. The slick grass. Cleats kicking up clods of dirt. Sun and sweat and August heat. That solid feel when you made contact with the ball. Movement and energy.
They did some warm-ups and some speed drills and then started a keep-away variant where two players try to pass the ball to each other and the others try to intercept it. Two of the freshmen began, but Greg quickly captured the ball from one of them and one of the midfielders, a ginger-haired boy whose name David had not learned, intercepted it from the other. They were both good and several minutes passed, to the increasing frustration of the rest of the team, as they deftly kept the ball away from everyone else. David stayed at the fringe of the group, watching, learning to judge how they moved, before darting in and intercepting a pass to Greg.
The latter gave him an acid glare as he returned the ball to the midfielder. The other players, Greg included, could never be as quick and agile as David could in their unenhanced bodies. He found that he could head them off and avoid their attacks. The midfielder was not bad either; between the two of them, they kept possession of the ball until the coach finally blew his whistle and announced, “Okay, okay, enough of that. Water break.”
The players diffused in various directions, most back towards the bleachers, where they collected their water bottles. Coach Ramirez pulled David aside. “That was some passing.”
“Thanks,” he replied.
“And I noticed that you’re left-footed.”
David nodded. He was left-handed as well, not nearly as much of a rarity in his time, since it was a common request among parents for its novelty value and association with creativity and individuality. It had been his mother’s choice, not that she seemed to care about that or anything else about him anymore.
“Well,” said the coach, “I would say we have our new left shooter.”
“Great!” said David. “I played left shooter back in junior high.”
He went to get some water, just then noticing that there was someone sitting on the top row of the bleachers, watching the practice. It was Olivia. But, he realized, she wasn’t watching the practice. She was watching him.
The suburban side streets were quiet and dark at three in the morning, their occasional streetlights too sparse to really provide much illumination. A lone patrol car far at the end of the street was industriously applying tickets to the cars whose owners had been foolish enough to leave them on the street overnight.
Only an orange tabby, pursuing its own private business, observed the shimmer and flash of light, a flash as if a door to a bright room had been opened in the middle of the air and let a chink of light through. The cat fled to the safety of a hedge as two figures seemed to tumble out of the door and into the middle of the street.
They rose and looked around. They were dressed identically in black jackets, black pants, black gloves, and black helmets with visors, the last of which they now took off. Both were middle-aged and male.
“We made it,” one stated.
“Yes,” observed the other. “Now you have seen for yourself: The anomaly is a portal. It destroys nothing; it only transports it.”
“Through space and time,” said the first wonderingly. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. The ramifications of this...” He shook his head. “First we must find my son. Ramifications can wait until we return.”
The second smiled to himself.
The cop, who had worked his way to their part of the street, spotted the two men and approached them with a condescending swagger. “You two are begging to get hit by a car, standing in the middle of the street dressed like that. And what do you think you’re up to anyway, sneaking around the neighborhood in the middle of the night all dressed in black?”
“We were not sneaking,” said the second.
“We’re sorry,” added the first. “We don’t want any trouble.”
The officer did not seem satisfied, particularly when he noticed the sidearm on the second man’s belt. He pointed to it and asked, “Do you have a license for that?”
“Yes,” the man replied indifferently.
The cop seemed to realize that there was something odd about the weapon. In fact, only its general shape resembled a firearm; otherwise it looked more like a plastic child’s toy. “Wait, hang on. What is that?”
The second man removed it from its holster and held it flat on his palm for inspection. “It’s a T-38 400nm interference ray,” and at the cop’s blank look, he rephrased, “A stun gun, like a taser.”
“That’s the darndest thing I’ve ever seen,” said the police officer, “And it doesn’t look like any taser.”
“Shall I demonstrate it?” asked the man in a carefully measured tone.
“You watch yourself!” the cop replied sharply. “Now put that thing away nice and slow.”
He obliged.
“Do you two have any identification?”
They looked at each other and the first man admitted, “No. Is that required for walking down the street?”
“I think I’d better take you two down to the station until we can get all this sorted out,” the cop said, as though his mind had been chewing through the information and had finally ground out this result. He pulled out a pair of cuffs.
“I don’t think you want to try that,” the second man warned.
“You just take it easy,” the cop advised. “And don’t try anything with that funny weapon of yours.”
The minute he slapped a cuff on one of the first man’s black-gloved wrists, the man snapped it off as if it had been a handcuff-shaped twig. With the back of one hand, he struck the police officer with such force that he fell onto the street, unconscious.
“That may not have put us off to a good start,” the second man suggested.
“He was only going to be trouble.”
“Yes, but threatening him with the stunner was probably a bad idea.”
“No matter. He has no idea who we are and we will be gone again in a day.”
“What about ID? I thought you said we wouldn’t need any.”
“No, I said that we could get the appropriate ID more easily from here. If it worries you, then perhaps we should split up. I can go arrange for some appropriate identification; you can begin searching for the boy. What method were you going to begin with?”
“The energy signature of his arrival. That will give me a good starting location, since this old-fashioned GPS network may not pick up his locator chip very well.”
“And are you picking up the signature?”
The first man pulled a small device with a few antennas and a screen out of his pocket and spent a minute setting its parameters before flipping it on. He said excitedly, “It’s less than three miles away!”
“I believe the landing site is a random location within a certain proximity of the other portal,” said the second man. “However, I don’t expect to gather enough data to ever prove this. Now, what name are you going by?”
“Allan Wright. What about you?”
“Richard Cooper. I’ll have valid ID for both him and Allan Wright in an hour. Now go find that energy signature; I can always find you.” He glanced down at the supine officer. “We should make ourselves scarce.”
The other nodded. They put their helmets back on and then, with an imperceptible shimmer, vanished.