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  Connie’s glasses weren’t exactly the right prescription so he had to tilt his head back to get a clearer angle. There I was—wet cardboard, teeth chattering. He said, “Uh, okay. You need to come inside?”

  “Is your mother awake?”

  “She’s doing her shift at the hospital. Come on.” He turned to head back inside, trusty backpack strapped to him as securely as a parachute, even though it was another hour before we were supposed to leave for school. The backpack was such a Connie fixture that the baffling fact of its being there on his shoulders didn’t hit me until we were halfway up the stairs to his bedroom.

  It should’ve been at my house. Where I left it.

  “Where’d you get this?” I asked, tugging on a dangling nylon strap.

  “Target, I think,” he said.

  “No, I mean—you left it at the Silver Bullet yesterday.”

  “Didn’t go to the Silver Bullet yesterday.”

  “Jeez—you don’t even remember?”

  “Huh?” he said.

  “Never mind.” I didn’t want to push too hard about his panic attack and all that, especially if it was so bad he blocked it from memory. Until fifteen minutes ago, I would’ve thought it was nuts to lose track of time like that.

  In Connie’s room the blinds were drawn, so the only real light was artificial. His TV airing the WCPF morning news, computer paused on Dragon Rage 2, iPad on the bed displaying one of his four alias Facebook profiles. And, of course, the glow-in-the-dark model universe spinning in constant battery-operated orbits along its ceiling tracks.

  I grabbed a pair of jeans from the designated cubby and tugged them over my wet legs. When the fabric touched my scraped-up knee, I hissed from the pain. Connie was half a foot taller and a few inches thicker so I was basically in clown pants.

  “How about underwear?” Connie said.

  “Don’t have any, and I’m not wearing yours,” I told him.

  “Okay,” he said. “So what’s going on? Why were you naked, and a half hour early—which you never are? What the crap happened to your eye? Did somebody hit you?” The heaviness of his own questions made him flop on the bed, pressing both hands against the sides of his skull.

  “I told you already. And it’s Saturday,” I realized aloud. “No school.”

  “It’s Friday. School,” Connie said.

  All right, at this point, I had to accept that a huge factor in this equation was missing or wrong, and my gut said it was me. Connie’s digital clock said it was 7:20 a.m. Lost memory, strange texts and videos, twelve-hour blackouts, public nudity.

  I said, “Listen, the freakiest thing happened last night.”

  “I’m going to go ahead and say it’s still happening,” Connie suggested.

  I glanced through the window overlooking the street, unsure what to expect. Police raid? Prank show camera crew? I was the wacko in the spy flick who nobody believed, but whose paranoia always turned out to be totally justified.

  “Just look at this video I got.” I hunched over Connie’s computer and minimized the dragon game, brought up Firefox so I could access the online records of my text messages.

  Connie said, “Okay, but it’s Friday. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Also claiming it was Friday: the computer calendar and the super in the corner of the TV screen.

  I entered my login and password. The listing of my texts came up, but the video I supposedly sent myself was deleted. The take the leap message was gone, too. So were all the Friday messages from Savannah and Paige and Connie, all the way back to a text from Connie I got on Thursday night, reminding me to set my wakeup alarm to stun.

  Like Friday never happened.

  “What video?” Connie asked over my shoulder.

  “It’s gone.” And then I remembered what I said to myself in that recorded message—what Video Russ said to me, anyway, just before he sent that app, or whatever it was, the thing called The Pastime Project. He said:

  Your one chance to make things right. This is the real leap…

  The Pastime Project app had downloaded itself to my phone at seven p.m. Friday night. Judging from the current time, I had been out-of-order for twelve hours exactly. Half a day, but half a day in the wrong direction. A leap, like Daylight Saving Time, except it only happened to me.

  I was going to have to say it out loud.

  “Connie, man, I’m pretty sure I sent myself backwards in time.”

  “NO WAY,” Connie said.

  “Yes way.”

  “Not possible.”

  “But…”

  Connie was all about empirical evidence. The video message, twelve hours of skipped-over time, the mysterious traveling backpack, the Saturday-that-was-actually-Friday, the radio tower gate that was locked and then not locked. It took another fifteen minutes to even start to convince him, and he was the perfect uber-geek audience for an idea like this. Time travel via a mobile app.

  This was one of those twisted physics scenarios he only ever dreamed of or discussed over endless threads on his sci-fi message boards. I suspected he suspected I was rolling out some elaborate Alternate Reality Game, and it was his job to play out my ridiculous scenario through all its logical bends, never once letting on that this was all a joke.

  Otherwise, I’d have to accept that he actually believed me.

  “Okay, let’s withhold judgment on this,” he told me. “But I have to say, there’s an elegance to what you’re describing,” he said. “You don’t even understand it. That’s what makes it maybe kind of work.”

  “Right,” I said. “Wait—what?”

  He paced a small stretch of his room, cranked on his Deep Thoughts. His head bumped the dangling model planets and set them on cataclysmic orbits. “If something like this could really happen, then of course you’d get sent through the warp without any clothes because it could only reconstitute your biological material. Otherwise, you’d end up with fabric woven into your skin, and buttons where your eyes should be, like in Revenge of the Replicons.”

  “Lovely,” I said, feeling pukey again. My whole body suddenly itched.

  “If you’re making this up, you really thought it through. I’m impressed.”

  “It happened.”

  “Okay, but: the temporal wormhole, or whatever it was, that kind of tech is total fantasy. It’s not logically possible. Man, I wish I could’ve seen that video,” Connie said.

  I was still working on the logistics myself, and admittedly getting nowhere. If it was really half-past-seven on Friday morning, then the video I watched wouldn’t be sent to my phone for another eleven hours and change. It didn’t exist yet, so there was obviously no way to access it.

  “No, no—wait!” Connie said. “We’re talking information paradox here.”

  “We are?”

  “Info-dox, a time-travel impossibility. You act on information supplied by a future self, who learned the information from a future self, and so on and so on. An endless chain that has no beginning. The information has no actual source, you see?”

  I thought about it for a second and realized that Arnold Schwarzenegger could be used to explain everything. “So it’s like how the severed metal arm off the terminator from the future provides the tech that the present-day engineers need to invent SkyNet, which invented the terminator, that went back in time and got its arm cut off.”

  “Exactly!” Connie lunged at me and just about boxed my ears. His manic, magnified eyes darted all over my face. Far as I could remember, he’d never so much as looked straight at me for longer than a second.

  “You’re creeping me out, dude,” I said.

  “Actually, your theory works only if you’re only counting T1 and 2 as canon. It falls apart if you account for the temporal modifications in the reboot, but that wasn’t really…”

  “Connie…”

  He cleared his throat and dropped his arms. “In theory, I mean.”

  “So you don’t believe me?”

  “As a prank, it�
�s a pretty lame one, even if the story weirdly holds together,” he said. “Obviously this is just the kind of thing I’d want to believe, so there’s that.”

  “I swear to—” I started, but Connie was already past the part where I promised to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It was just in his nature to trust me—because why would your best friend screw with your brain like this, right? The way he drifted off in his mind, eyes fixed on spinning plastic Saturn—I could see him thinking time warps and helicopter blades. I saw how his desperate need to believe was drowning out his careful calculations.

  “Nothing came through with you? Not even your phone?” he asked.

  “Came through what?”

  “The theoretical wormhole.”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see a hole. I might’ve just dropped my phone.” All that business with the whistling maintenance man and the fence made me forget to look for the phone on the ground. Even if it was there, it was sure as hell broken from the fall.

  Connie scrambled for his own phone, tucked into a side pocket on his backpack. He was so frantic it slipped through his hands like soap. Down on his knees, he huddled over the phone and pressed the speed dial number assigned to me.

  Calling Russ on the display.

  “What’s that going to do?” I asked.

  Connie shushed me, then tapped a button. The audio switched to speaker, amping the ringtone loud enough to make us both grit our teeth. We both stared at the Nokia like it was a ticking bomb neither of us knew how to defuse.

  It didn’t go straight to voicemail.

  “Hello?” The voice was groggy, disgruntled—you just woke me up.

  At the sound of it, Connie recoiled, hands over his mouth.

  “Hello? Connie? What do you want?” the voice on the phone said.

  It was my dad’s voice, slightly distorted by bad speakers, but Dad for sure.

  I mouthed to Connie so Dad couldn’t hear me: “just my dad—so what?”

  But Connie gave a slow motion headshake. Uh-uh. Not your dad.

  “It’s you,” Connie whispered.

  “WHAT DO you mean it’s me?” the phone voice asked. “Why are you calling so early?”

  Connie stuttered, but I didn’t butt in. It wasn’t like I could take control of the conversation for him. I rolled my hands, signaling him to improvise. He shook his head. I clenched my jaw and glared insistently.

  “Um—uh—hey, uh, Russ,” Connie finally said to the phone. “I’m just, you know, making sure you set your alarm. We don’t want to be late for school.”

  “Yeah, sure. Thanks for the wakeup call.” My patented sarcasm sounded way more bitter when I listened to it from outside my head.

  “Oh—uh—okay,” Connie said, but the call was already dropped.

  We sat on the floor in silence. A fuzzy whiteness was spreading across my mind, like what happens just before you pass out. I kept touching my face to be sure it was still there. All I could think about was the out-of-body dislocation you feel when you stand between two almost-facing mirrors so your reflections curve forever around the double bends.

  But this was a whole other level of mind-warp. Knowing I existed in two places at once, just a little more than a mile apart. I was in Connie’s room, but also half-awake in my own bed, where I was freshly inventing new thoughts that I had already forgot eleven hours ago.

  Except I wasn’t really that other person at all. I had no access to his mind. His thoughts were already branching off in new directions because I bumped him off the track that I took. I was hit with the panic of being locked inside my own shell. My involuntary reflexes, like breathing, were fighting against me. I had no way to feel this situation right, except that it was the most natural thing in the world—me here, and another person there. Two bodies, wholly divided. But how could I be me if I wasn’t who I was anymore?

  “This is phenomenal,” Connie finally said.

  “But why did you tell him to come over here?”

  “Because—because that’s what we do—we walk to school,” he argued. But he wasn’t even convincing himself. I could virtually see the multiple bad outcomes springing in his head.

  Connie leapt to his computer and spread his fingers across the keys. The guy had a certified superpower for speed typing. In a flash, a website came up full of charts and graphs, with a twinkling star background. He scrolled through it all way too fast for a mental mortal like me.

  “Crappity crap,” he said. “There’s also the grandfather paradox to consider.”

  “Like ‘I’m My Own Grandpa?’” I asked.

  “No—well, maybe. I should’ve considered this before I called the other you, but there’s a theory that, if you were to actually travel back in time, then you definitely shouldn’t have any interaction with yourself.”

  “What could it do, cause a nuclear explosion?”

  “Probably not. Hopefully not. But if you alter events from your past, the future you come from won’t exist anymore. The memories in your head won’t be possible. Any little thing can cause a butterfly effect.”

  “Marty McFly disappears from his own family photo.”

  “Yes, like Spaceman from Pluto, except the divergence you’d cause would be way too complex to fix, and every fix would create more compounded divergences…”

  “So I’m screwed already, is what you’re telling me.”

  “You need to lay low, big time,” he explained. “And I have to act just like I did yesterday. I have to pretend like you didn’t show up naked at my house this morning. I mean your yesterday.”

  “Connie, what’s going to happen to me?”

  He bit his lower lip, dropped his eyes. “I don’t know. But listen, tell me everything that happened between us in your yesterday, everything you and I said, and I’ll make sure things all turn out exactly the same. And if the Other Russ doesn’t know, he won’t do anything different, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, unconvinced. And I would’ve rather swallowed tacks than tell Connie the Chronicle of Russ’s Worst Day Ever. Especially the part where my total assholery gave him a panic attack and put him in an ambulance. I couldn’t imagine deliberately shoving him into that blender again. It had to be some kind of international human rights violation.

  “You’re right,” Connie said, even though I hadn’t actually said anything. “I’m already compromised. How can I be natural if my whole frame of reference for reality has been changed? Time travel! Right here, in my world, my life. I’m never going to be the old me again. I mean, unless this is your craziest April Fool’s ever.”

  “I wish.” We were a couple weeks too late for that. I tried to think through what other random chaos butterfly wings I might’ve set in motion. The people who saw me running in the buff down the street? They’d head off to work and talk about the downtown streaker instead of stock prices or whatever, and somebody would drop the ball and get fired and—and what about that maintenance worker? After catching me inside the fence, would he now remember to lock the gate—and, if so, how was the Other Me going to get in, and would Other Me also receive the take the leap text at 6:59?

  This was worse than mentally folding those blueprint boxes on aptitude tests.

  So I said, “Just, um, do what I tell you. I mean do what he tells you. The other one. Russ 2.0. He’ll guide you. Don’t over-think it.”

  “Russ 2.0? He’s not a software application, Russ.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Connie wrenched at his hair so much it styled into an Einstein. Maintaining a sense of control was bad enough for him on a regular day. This could drive him nuts—or maybe, if his obsessive catastrophe-prevention was a coping mechanism, this would be exactly the massive responsibility Connie needed to reach his potential.

  He said, “But you have to stay here in my room. Mom won’t be home until tonight, so you won’t run into anyone. You also can’t call anyone. Or post anything on the Internet.”

  “I won’t even e
at any of your food,” I vowed, meaning it, honestly. My mind was way too blown to think about eating or stepping outside. For the rest of the day, I just wanted to lay back and try my best to understand what was happening.

  “All right. This could work.”

  “But there’s a big hole in your plan,” I said.

  He scrunched his brow for about a nanosecond before it hit him. “Right. Damn it. You can’t stay in my room forever.”

  “Exactly.”

  Connie put a firm hand on my shoulder, something else he never did before. He said, “It’ll work itself out, I think. Yes.” Subtext being: this is a load of crap I’m feeding you, but you’ll totally lose your mind if I don’t offer some lame consolation to get you through the day.

  We could’ve listed concerns for another few hours, but the clock ticked on. A glance through the blinds verified that Russ 2.0 was sauntering down the sidewalk toward Connie’s house. Connie had to be down there, ready to go, as always.

  “Don’t get in any trouble,” he said.

  “You either.”

  I took my post at the window again and there he was, down at the foot of Connie’s steps, my clone, the first recruit in my storm trooper army. There was no sudden mind-blowing infinite regress, no split consciousness or slow fade of my body to transparency and then nothingness. I watched my hand for five seconds to be sure it stayed solid, and it did.

  All the science fiction was wrong, or at least, failed to capture the weird duality. Like imagining my funeral, or what my life would be if I were born to other parents, or if I lived in California in the 1950s, or even something as minor as standing two feet to the left of myself, an out-of-body drift. You are an active mind at an instant in space and time, projecting yourself into another space and time where you are not. It is and it isn’t. Everything totally comprehensible, perfectly normal, but at the same time impossible. A reality just out of reach. Every dream convinces us of something ridiculous until we wake up.

  Watching myself from this angle, I remembered almost exactly what my thoughts had been when I stood down there yesterday—the other yesterday. I’d been thinking how Connie’s father’s death in Afghanistan left this huge house way too empty. But now, in my new, separate self, I stifled a weird urge to leap out the window and pounce onto 2.0 so hard that we’d merge into one body again. It was a wacko idea, but logic had become a lost cause.