Page 65 of Leaving the Station
“It wasn’t.” I folded my arms over my stomach, and Alden sighed and leaned back against the chipped stucco of his dorm wall.
He nudged my leg with his foot and frowned. “Are you upset about something?”
Other than asking if I was only dating him because I envied his gender, this was the scariest thing he could’ve said.
Because it meant that he noticed me, and correctly at that.
“No,” I told him.
It was the truth. I was upset abouteverything,so I couldn’t narrow it down to any one complaint.
“Is it because I said... ,” Alden began.
“No,” I repeated.
He was speaking, of course, about when he said he was falling for me.
A minute went by. Someone stumbled past his open window, shouting incoherently.
“Then have you thought about it?”
Alden was a smart boy; he knew the answer.
So all I said was, “I’ll deal us in this time.”
It was the worst possible response, and the only one I could give.
We played in silence until his watch beeped a second time.
“Okay, now I get a redo.”
“A what?”
“We get to repeat this hour,” he said, showing me his watch, which once again read two a.m. “Do you know what that means?” I shook my head. “It means we get a second chance.”
He was offering me something very few people ever got, and I wanted to take it. I wanted this one inconvenient form of time travel to change my life, however slightly.
“So what are you going to do?” I asked, knowing full well what the answer would be.
He leaned in and kissed me. Maybe for this second two a.m. I could be the girl who would’ve told him she was falling too.
Wednesday, 4:45 a.m., Approaching Grand Forks, ND
Aya throws her book into her lap. “Oakley, you’re not even awake,” she whines. “And we’re getting to the good part.”
Oakley mutters in her sleep, and Aya rolls her eyes.
“Sorry about her,” I tell Aya. “She’s just tired.”
I wonder why.
“I’ll read more when she’s awake,” she says, yawning.
I tell Aya that it’s time to head back to her room, insisting that she should at least try to get some rest. Then I come back for Oakley.
She leans on me as we walk to the sleeper car.
“Thank you,” she whispers.
