A Fever Dream

CHAPTER 37. The Road Not Taken

I had no idea why he was smiling.

It was not a mocking grin. Not a self-satisfied smirk he usually reserved for me or Alexander.

He was simply smiling at me, the corners of his eyes crinkled and the dimples making his hollow cheeks look healthier.

Unwillingly, I smiled back. 

Piece by piece, the cars, the students, roaming around, the road, the trees, and the towers on the horizon fell into place. The puzzle was slowly filling in, becoming a picture of a human world. But it was not the way that I remembered. Something was wrong.

"You look terrible, you know?" I asked Elliot, and for some reason, stretched my hand and picked up a yellow leave from his hair.

Elliot was the only piece that didn't fit into the puzzle. Next to the overturned garbage bin, and the sewers pipes, in his ruined royal suite, with his hair gossamer silver, he looked extremely out of place. Like a picture in a fairytale book, torn out and pasted into a science magazine.

"I assure you, you look no better." His smile slipped. "My head aches. Where are we? And why does it smell so hideous?"

I nodded at the pipes. We really should have been moving. It's just that I wasn't quite sure that the earth wasn't gonna slip away from our fit if we tried to. I looked at the pipes once again.

And then again.

"Impossible."

"What?" Elliot tried to follow my gaze.

"The pipes are too small. There's no way we could have come from there."

A little stream of dirty water fell into the grid in the ground disappearing.

"Well, we couldn't have just popped up out of thin air?" Elliot's voice sounded amused.

Chills ran over my body, as wind picked my hair.

"Why not?"

Slowly, I made myself get on my feet. The branches creaked under my steps, as I walked up to the overturned garbage pile, and picked up the weathered newspaper, shaking off the worms and bugs from it.

I stared at the day and year on the cover.

I blinked at it, thinking that maybe it would morph into something else. Maybe I was experiencing the aftershocks of the fall. Maybe there was something wrong with my head.

I heard my name being called, snapping back into myself, as my knuckles went white.

"What's there?" Elliot walked up to me, looming over me like an unsteady tower. "You've been standing like that for so long, I thought you might have turned to stone."

I looked into his eyes. They reflected the same foreboding wonder that I felt.

"What's wrong?" he repeated, taking the newspaper out of my hands. I let it go easily, still staring at the place where it's been.

"I...ah," I gulped. "We've come too late."

I shook my head, unable to stand any more, and lowered myself to the leaves.

"What do you mean?"

I held my head between my hands.

The date of the newspaper was not wrong. No.

It was I who was out of place here.

It was I who has been wrong because I have been a fool.

There won't be meeting my parents, and telling them they were right. Nor facing my sister and standing up to her for the first time. No mending things with George Green. No picking up where I've left. The girl, who still could do all of that, stayed in that mirror in the restaurant in London in the spring of 1939, forever. As for me - all I was left with were memories. For, somehow, after the years spent in Summer, I returned back 83 years later.