Roseanne
I land in my upstairs hallway, but it's nighttime, and the bass is so loud downstairs that the floorboards vibrate beneath my feet.
Oh shit.
From where I stand I can hear people outside in the garden. A girl is shouting something about beer I can't quite make out.
I want to be wrong. Please God, let me be wrong. Let me open our bedroom door and find Lisa there, asleep.
She's not. Instead I find a mattress on the floor and two beanbag chairs where our beautiful king-size bed should rest. There are clothes everywhere, as if three suitcases exploded at once.
The air conditioning tells me it's summer. Aside from that I have no idea how far back I've gone, although I hear Rihanna's voice coming through the speakers, a song that's only a few years old, so it couldn't be far.
I've got to get home. What if I can't? My heart pounds in terror at the thought and I force it out of my head. Right now, I'm naked inside a stranger's home. First things first.
I grab a pair of denim shorts and a flannel shirt off the floor and throw them on quickly. Rihanna stops singing and Bruno Mars takes her place, a song I think only came out last summer. If I'm right, it's just 2017.
Which means I could, potentially, save Ella.
I know what I promised Lisa, but this was an accident, and the opportunity to save her has basically fallen into my lap. I can't not try. For most of my life I blindly did what my father told me. When he died, I let Jaehyun assume that role. I love Lisa, and I trust her opinion more than I did either of theirs, but I'm done letting someone else make my most important decisions.
I creep down the stairs, though with the volume of the music, it's not as if anyone could possibly hear me. Avoiding eye contact, I push through a wall of bodies toward the front door. I'm almost there when someone grabs my arm.
I've begun to mount a defense about the stolen clothes when my eyes go to the tatted-up college kid who's grabbed me. I seriously doubt it's his shorts I'm wearing...these things barely cover my ass.
"Hey," he says, as if we're friends. "Where are you going?"
"Home," I reply, pulling my arm from his grip. I take two large strides and get out the front door with him on my heels.
"Slow down," he says. "I just want to chat." I keep walking, fully intending to ignore him and possibly run if he keeps following, when it occurs to me I have no fucking idea where Ella even lives.
I whirl around so fast he's forced to take a step backward. "Can I borrow your phone for a second?" I ask. "I left mine at home. I just need to look something up."
He unlocks his phone and hands it to me.
"It's an iPhone 7?" I ask.
"Yeah," he says, smirking. "Why? Would an iPhone 6 not be fancy enough to borrow?"
I laugh out of relief more than anything else. An iPhone 7 means it's definitely 2017, because the house wasn't occupied in 2018 until we moved in, and the iPhone 7 didn't exist in the summer of 2016.
"I'm not that picky. Just curious."
Christine Whitley, Washington DC, I tap out on the keyboard. Safari returns a gazillion listings for Christine Whitleys who live nowhere around here.
Shit. With a heavy heart I start to return the phone, and then one more possibility occurs to me. Her candle company—I close my eyes to picture the business card she gave me. Heart in Hand Candles, it said. I type the name and an address comes up immediately. Thank God.
