Rewrite Redemption

Chapter One     A.J. Jones, Boulder, Colorado, present day.

I killed my mother.

Okay, I didn’t exactly shoot her or stab her in the back or anything. But if I’d never been born, she’d still be here, simple as that.

Guilt by existence.

It wasn’t premeditated mom-slaughter—I’m not some monster. But it was my strangeness that did her in, no doubt about it. If you saw me, you’d never believe one skinny, sixteen-year-old girl could be responsible for so much tragedy.

But you’d be wrong.

An ancient curse says, “May you live in interesting times,” meaning dangerous and turbulent. That pretty much sums up my life. I mean, when your very existence in time is out of control, life can get pretty interesting. Every few months, I get yanked back in time for hours or even days. I don’t know why. I don’t know when. I have absolutely no control over it. I feel a tingle, and seconds later, I just shimmer, fade, and poof, I’m in the past.

Seriously.

My biggest fear was that it would happen at school, and before you could say, “Did you see that?” I’d be the next viral freak on YouTube. It would be a short walk from YouTube to a government laboratory somewhere remote. Yeah, like I wanted that to happen. My strategy was to fade into the woodwork, so if I vanished at school, no one would even notice.

The first time I disappeared, I was six months old. In the beginning, my trips were short, and I was only gone about a minute. Of course I don’t remember this happening, but I’d heard the story a million times. It was the primary topic at my house…until my mom checked out.

I was born in the fall. By spring, I had just learned to sit up and was grabbing everything I could get my hands on. It had been a long, cold winter, and my mom had waited weeks for it to warm up enough to show me the tree house. Built with love by her grandfather, it had always been her special place. Once inside, she lifted me up to touch the trunk that rose right through the middle of the room. And as soon as my tiny hand touched the bark—BAM, I was gone.

She totally freaked—I was in her arms one moment and simply gone the next. But before she could do anything other than just stand there in shock, I morphed back into existence fast asleep with my thumb in my mouth…or so the story goes.

If that had been the end of it, maybe she could have dealt…chalked it up to too much caffeine or something. But it kept happening two or three times a year, just enough to keep her on edge. The problem was that every time I disappeared—which wasn’t all that often, but still—my mom was the only witness.

She told her friends, but they just looked at her funny and began avoiding her. She tried desperately to convince my dad, Sam. But since he never saw it happen, what could he say? Talk about a rock and a hard place. He wanted to believe her but he just couldn’t. Sam was a scientist. He needed evidence.

My mom tried a few times to get me to tell my dad—and I did. But Sam thought I was saying what she wanted me to say—you know, siding with my mom out of loyalty. I mean, I was disappearing, but I was just a kid. What did I know? I was confused and too young to make sense of it then. I just wanted them to not fight about it.

It was a dangerous equation. Scientist/nonbelieving dad + I-swear-it-really-happened mom = seriously-screwed-up-no-win situation.

They argued about it constantly. I’d listen to them late at night, huddled outside their door, wrapped in a blanket. My mom would lay out her argument and Sam would bring in science. She’d say she saw it happen. Sam would say it was impossible. It tore them apart. Finally she gave up talking about it. Sam pretended she’d be fine if she got enough rest. I just hid in the tree house with my friends, Lex and Ipod.