Page 12 of Twice
“Like a diary?”
“No. Diaries are for girls.”
The truth was, I needed data to make my jumps. Otherwise, I might repeat something unintended, which sometimes happened anyway.
One day I was craving chocolate ice cream really badly, so I focused on my last visit to Custard King, which I remembered as two weeks earlier with my father. I pictured the car ride in my head. I mumbledtwice, tapped my leg, and instantly landed in the backseat of our Plymouth. Only then did I see empty cups and discarded spoons onthe floor, and I realized I had remembered it incorrectly. I had actually walked to Custard King with friends, and Dad had picked us up. So not only was there no ice cream that day, but I was stuck reliving the next two weeks all over again.
And yes, I have to go forward in real time. No skipping back to the present. I return to the age I was with each jump and continue on from there.
Which is why I say that nobody knows how long I have been on this earth. If you took all the repeated hours, days, months, and years, I would guess it is many lifetimes. It feels that way, anyhow.
?
My best friend during those years was a kid named Wesley, who was older than me but for some reason didn’t start school until he was seven, so we were in the same grade. We didn’t have a lot of Black families in our neighborhood, and he and his younger sister, London, were constantly getting picked on. Maybe that’s why we took to each other. That, and I had been to Africa, which his parents seemed to like.
Wesley wore horn-rimmed glasses and built model rocket ships in his basement. When America sent Apollo 11 to the moon, he was so excited, he kept a daily scrapbook. He cut up newspaper stories and pasted them on dated pages labeled with colorful penmanship. It was meticulous, and he was rightly proud of it. One day, for science class, he brought that scrapbook to school.
As we walked down the hallway, a couple of older boys surrounded us and demanded to see what Wesley was holding. One of them was Alan Ponto, a loud, stocky kid who was already growing whiskers on his chin. He leafed through the scrapbook and said, “Hey, this page is cool.”
“Thanks,” Wesley said.
“Wanna know what makes it cooler?”
He tore the page out, ripped it in half, then ripped up the pieces. “That’s cooler.”
Wesley burst into tears.
“Aw, did I make the little nerd cry?” Alan mocked.
Poor Wesley. Crying was the worst thing he could have done. A group of students quickly gathered, laughing as he wiped his eyes and hugged his scrapbook to his chest.
I felt so bad for him that I tapped back to when Wesley and I were walking to school. I thought about telling him to hide his scrapbook in his desk. Then I decided on something else. Once inside, I ran to the science teacher, Mr. Timmons, and told him to come quickly, some boys were threatening to destroy Wesley’s project. We arrived just as Alan was tearing the page out.
“Young man, what are you doing?” Mr. Timmons said.
Alan spun around, surprised.
“Huh?”
“You just desecrated another student’s work. Do you think that’s funny?”
“Huh?”
The kids who had previously gathered to mock Wesleywere now poking each other. Many had been victims of Alan’s bullying; they weren’t missing his comeuppance.
“Can you tell me the properties of tape, Alan?”
“Huh?”
“The properties of tape,” Mr. Timmons said. “Polypropylene, for starters. You’re going to learn a lot about them, since you’ll be taping every bit of that page very carefully back into Wesley’s scrapbook.”
“Huh?”
“Young man, do you know any words besidesHuh?”
At that point, even Wesley cracked a smile.
He taught me something that morning. He taught me that this gift I have could actually make things better forotherpeople. You might think, having learned this, that I spent the rest of my life in altruistic endeavors.
