The Time Telephone Read online

  “When?”

  “A few weeks. I’m not sure.”

  I looked through the cracked window pane into the parlor where the old telephone sat, wondering what the hell had just happened to me and whether it was remotely possible that there was such a thing as a time telephone. Nah.

  ~Two~

  Friends

  At lunchtime on Monday I sat alone, as usual. It was my first day back at school since the realignment of my universe. I started at LaVista High in the fall, but still didn’t have any friends. I’d gone to a private school until Mom decided she couldn’t afford it anymore. I knew the real reason, though. She wanted to spend the money on other things – like a facelift.

  My mother said I’d make new friends. But she was wrong because by my junior year in high school A) people have already made friends and B) everyone thought I was stuck-up because I had a famous mom.

  The roar of laughter and voices was just so much background music as I slid the meat off my hamburger bun.

  “Hey, Megan!”

  Rikki Washington sauntered over with her girlfriends in tow. They were laughing and strutting – going for the sexy look – and succeeding. I couldn’t imagine why Rikki, the most popular black girl at LaVista, would condescend to speak to me. Must be some kind of joke and I’d be the butt of it. I gave a tiny wave and then closed my hamburgerless bun.

  “Sorry about your mother,” she said.

  The other girls got quiet.

  “Thanks.”

  She stared at me like she was thinking about saying something more. Her girlfriends tried to pull her away. I took a bite of my bun to have something to do.

  “Ya’ll go ahead,” she told her posse.

  You could see “what’s with?” in their eyes as they hurried off, laying claim to a table four rows over.

  “Oooo-ey!” one of them shrieked.

  They waved at a group of boys slouching into the cafeteria.

  Then Rikki pulled a chair out and sat down across from me. She laid her napkin on her lap, opened her juice carton and stuck her straw in. She could’ve passed for a movie star or a hip hop diva. She wore her hair in perfect braids that fell to her shoulders and swayed with every movement. Her skin was smooth. Not a single imperfection. She had straight white teeth and a smile to die for. And, on top of all that, you could see intelligence in her big brown eyes.

  “My mom lost her mother when she was a little girl,” she finally said. “She says she like to never got over it.”

  Oh, great. Like I wanted to be the object of her pity. I’d rather just sit by myself than have people come over and pour sympathy on me like ketchup on their fries. And I sure as hell didn’t want anyone to see me cry. Is that what she wanted? To see the tears flow? There was a little piece of my brain that wanted to say buzz off. She’d never even acknowledged my existence until this moment, even though she was in two of my classes.

  Maybe she just wanted to hear the gory details. After all, unless they were hermits, everyone knew how Mom died. It had been all over the news. A girl in my history class told me they even mentioned it on the announcements while I was gone.

  “Who you livin’ with?” she asked.

  “My grandmother.”

  “She nice?”

  I thought about that. Would I describe Grandma as nice? Nice would not have been my first choice of adjectives. Efficient, maybe. Dutiful, maybe. Smart, maybe. I mean, I have to admit she did offer to let me go back to Walker now that I would be getting the life insurance money and my mother wasn’t making the decisions anymore. But I don’t know. I just couldn’t picture myself going back. I wasn’t the same person anymore. Probably what Rikki really meant was – does she treat you all right?

  “Yeah, she’s okay,” I said.

  She wolfed down her burger and fries, glancing over her shoulder at her girlfriends several times. I figured she could now say she’d done her good deed for the day. She could even tell her mother how she sat with the orphan white girl at lunch so she wouldn’t have to sit alone.

  I heard her phone ding. She snuck a peak at it and laughed to herself.

  “You a vegetarian?” she asked, tucking the phone back in her purse.

  I hadn’t given it much thought, but it was true – I didn’t like meat very much since Mom died.

  “Yeah.”

  “For moral reasons?”

  I liked the sound of that. I decided I’d think about it. Maybe do some research. Boy, did that sound like my mom or what?

  “I just think of dead squirrels in the road when I see meat on my plate.”

  “Ew! Disgusting,” she said, scrunching up her nose.

  She kept looking around the cafeteria and waving at this friend or calling out to that one. Some boys at the next table were ogling her.

  “Well, listen,” she said, “I gotta mosey along.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Me and my peeps are going to the movies on Saturday. Wanna come?” she asked.

  It was plain to see she probably hadn’t given it more than a split second’s thought. I knew what it was like to engage your mouth without first engaging your brain.

  “I can’t,” I lied, letting her off the hook. “But, thanks anyway.”

  And it was obvious she was relieved, although she tried to hide it.

  “Have a good one,” she said as she hurried to catch up with her group.

  Her girlfriends all made faces at her as they scraped their trays into the trash cans and disappeared into the hallway. A group of boys followed them.

  I had to admit – it took guts to leave your friends and sit down with a nobody at lunch. A nobody with no friends. I pulled my phone out. A cinquain was arriving at my brain station. I typed it before it flitted away into nothingness.

  Lonesome

  Lonely Alone

  Abandoned Solitary Apart

  No one to talk to

  Me

  Actually, I did have a buddy. Not one of my own choosing, but a friend by default. And that afternoon as I walked home from school, I realized I was glad to have him tagging along, as usual – once the condolences were out of the way. But at least he seemed sincere, unlike some people.

  Kieran was an egghead. A nice egghead, but not the kind of boy you’d want to be seen with, if you know what I mean. For one thing, he was in tenth grade. And for another, he was a little goofy. But since he’d begun walking home with me in the afternoon, I’d stopped putting my earbuds in and listening to music and pretending I didn’t want to talk with anyone.

  He was a bit taller than me and had brown eyes, black hair and a deep tan. He wore rolled-up shorts, even in the cold of winter, and had very hairy legs, which probably kept him warm. And then there were the high-top tennis shoes with comic book shoelaces he tied in fancy designs and left loose enough to slip his sneakers on without tying them.

  The first time he walked with me, he gave me his family history, which explained the tan. His father’s family was from India and his mother was half Irish. They’d chosen the name Kieran because it was an Indian name and an Irish name. He told me the Irish name Kieran was from Gaelic and meant “small and dark-skinned.” He laughed when he told me that. But the Indian name Kiran was from Sanskrit and meant “ray of light.” He said he liked the Indian meaning best but was stuck with the Irish spelling.

  I thought it was fascinating, but it must not have impressed a lot of other people. Otherwise why would he be walking home with me?

  I checked for messages on my phone as Kieran ran his mouth non-stop. But it was a waste of time. My old friends couldn’t think of anything to say to me now and the only other people who had my number were Grandma and Mom. And, obviously, I wouldn’t be getting any more funny texts from my mother saying stuff like “old buzzard I just interviewed has more hair in his ears than he has on his head!” Guess I was just checking my phone out of habit. Or maybe I just wanted to make Kieran think I routinely received posts, texts and emails. Actually, I couldn’t
stand going online any more. Everyone else’s lives were still so normal, so mundane. I didn’t want to know who’d been having a Frappuccino with who at Starbucks.

  “Accidents happen all the time that change history,” he was saying. “I mean, take the invention of the telephone. Of course, it would’ve happened eventually, but Alexander Graham Bell was reading this book – a bad translation of a book written in German. And he, like, misunderstood this one part about how the sound of a voice could be transmitted through a wire. He misunderstood! Thought some German physicist had already transmitted sounds over a wire. And that’s what made him think it could be done! Isn’t that too cool?”

  Kieran could get worked up about the weirdest things. And he waved his arms and gestured with his hands so much when he was excited that I had to make sure I kept my distance so I wouldn’t get slapped in the face.

  “So he kept working on finding a way to do it because he misunderstood what this German guy was saying in his book. And – hello – the telephone was invented.”

  He waited for me to respond. But my thought processor was chugging away. It was too strange that he would be talking about telephones on this particular day. Maybe it was a sign.

  “Of course, it took a lot of work. Trial and error, you know,” he added.

  “How do telephones work?”

  “Hm. Let me see if I can explain it in simple terms.”

  I gave him a dirty look and slapped him on the shoulder. The fool fell on the ground, holding his shoulder like he was dying. He groaned and made a spectacle of himself. I tried not to laugh but it made me chuckle – he looked like such an idiot. He finally stopped groaning and grinned up at me, very proud of himself.

  “You know I wasn’t implying anything about your intellectual prowess,” he said, pulling himself up and brushing himself off.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Do you want to know or not?”

  “Tell me already.”

  He jumped in front of me and walked backwards so he could wave his arms in my face.

  “Okay, here’s the gist of it: you make a current of electricity vary in intensity to carry the sound of a human voice… or other sounds.”

  He waited for my reaction.

  “It’s pretty complicated to achieve that. Amazing, really,” he said.

  I locked eyes with him, trying to size him up. I realized then that he’d grown when I wasn’t paying attention. He had to be six feet. When had that happened? I mean I hadn’t seen him in a few weeks but he couldn’t have grown that much that quickly.

  He swiveled around and walked beside me again.

  “Kieran, do you think it’s possible to place a call to another time?”

  He squinted like he was trying to figure out if I was pulling his leg or something.

  “You mean…”

  “I mean, like calling someone in the past.”

  “I’ve read stuff about time travel, but even the scientists who say it might be possible, say it’s only theoretically possible – not actually possible. But a phone call through time?”

  He shook his head slowly. I studied him again. Could he be trusted? I felt like I had to tell someone or I’d bust.

  “Do I have a booger hanging out or something?” he said, rubbing his nose with the back of his hand.

  “I’m trying to decide if I should tell you something.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “About a very old telephone.”

  “What telephone?”

  “Can I trust you?” I asked, stopping in my tracks.

  He nodded his head ultra fast like he was straight out of the cartoons.

  “You won’t blab?”

  “I am the most trustworthy person you’ll ever meet in your complete life,” he said. “My lips are sealed with concrete.”

  “Entire life,” I corrected him.

  “That’s what I said.”

  And he made like he was zipping his mouth shut and pulled his lips in until they disappeared completely. I smiled in spite of myself.

  “Okay, okay,” I said.

  He raised his eyebrows. There was a definite glint in his eyes.

  So I told him how I’d walked into the old house. How the antique phone rang. How I answered it and a voice asked me what year I wanted to call.

  “And I’d just come from my mother’s funeral and I was, I don’t know… I wanted more than anything to talk with my mother. And I told this… this… person and she says, like, ‘this is a time telephone and you can speak with your mother even if she’s dead!’”

  I realized I was babbling and stopped.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Well, I walked out. I mean, I’d have to be a moron to believe a cock and bull story like that. Right?”

  He nodded.

  “I mean, some smart-ass fourteenth cousin of mine probably rigged that old phone up.”

  “That’s one mean practical joke,” he said.

  “Exactly.”

  I started walking again and he kept pace beside me. There were lots of trees leafing out, just like the pecan trees at my great-grandparents’ place. But there had been such a different feeling in that yard – and in that house – from what it felt like here in this neighborhood of cookie-cutter, brick ranch homes on manicured lots. It was like that musty, dusty, dilapidated old farmhouse, and the yard and the trees that surrounded it, were in a space untouched by the modern world. It had felt like I’d really gone back in time, imagining the slower pace of daily life as it used to play out when my mother was a little girl and all the decades before, when my grandmother was growing up there. What if it wasn’t a cruel joke? What if it really was a time telephone? What if I really could call my mother before she died?

  “You wanna see it?” I asked, totally surprising myself.

  “See what?”

  “The old phone.”

  “Definitely!”

  “Saturday. Me and my grandmother are going back to the house. She’s gotta go through it, you know, before it’s torn down. We’ll pick you up.”

  ~Three~

  Katie and Abby

  “So, what classes do you two have together?” Grandma asked.

  We were eating breakfast as we drove out of town. She didn’t object when I told her I’d invited Kieran. She just added it to her calendar, happy I had a friend. But now, as the smell of coffee and sausage biscuits filled the car, I was seriously questioning my sanity. Why had I been so impulsive? Why had I invited him? Like, what was I thinking?

  “None, actually. I’m a sophomore, not a junior,” he explained.

  “But he’s the smartest boy in the school,” I said.

  God, what made me say that? Was I trying to make up for his being younger than me or something? Was I trying to impress “her Honor?” I could feel my cheeks getting warm. I took a sip of my orange juice to try to cool off. I was sitting up front next to my grandmother. Kieran was in the seat behind us. Grandma looked in the rearview mirror at him.

  “Is that right?” she asked.

  “I doubt it,” he said. “We’ve got about fifteen hundred students at LaVista. I’d say the odds are against my being the smartest. Besides, it would depend on how you quantify intelligence. Is it math or science aptitude? Language comprehension? Writing skill? Creativity? And then there are lots of other ways people can be smart.”

  I raised my eyebrows at Grandma and she nodded.

  “So, Mrs. McConnell,” he said, “tell me more about the house. Did you grow up there?”

  Did he sound like an adult or what? He could probably talk with the President about the economy. I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to hang out with someone who was a grown-up at sixteen.

  “Yep, I was born there. My father built it room by room.”

  Grandma and Kieran spent the entire trip talking about the house and her childhood. I was stunned at how lively and cheerful she seemed. She never acted like this at home. This was not the quiet, aloof person I was used to. And Kieran didn’
t seem the slightest bit intimidated. Of course, I didn’t tell him Grandma was a superior court judge either. That made some of my friends uneasy, like they might get sent to jail for having a tattoo or something. She looked pretty harmless on a Saturday, though, wearing khaki jeans and a brown corduroy jacket.

  “They called me Katie when I was a little girl. Daddy called me his Katie-did-it!” she said, chuckling at the memory.

  I found this hard to imagine – my grandmother a fun-loving little girl.

  “Of course, that was because my little sister, Libby, always told on me. She would say: ‘I didn’t do it. Katie did it.’”

  Kieran laughed.

  “What kinds of things did you do?” he asked.

  “Well, let me see,” she said. “There was the time Libby and I ate the apples off the apple tree.”

  Her head bobbed as she talked.

  “You see, Daddy told us not to pick the apples. Said they were too green. He wanted to let ‘em ripen. So I came up with a plan and Libby went along with me.”

  She chuckled again, turning off the freeway.

  “We climbed up into the tree and held onto each other so we wouldn’t fall. And we just ate the apples without picking them. Left the cores hanging right there on the branches!”

  Kieran let out a big guffaw. I couldn’t help giggling. I’d never heard that story.

  “You left the cores?” he asked.

  “Funniest sight you ever saw!” she said.

  She was obviously proud of herself for that one.

  “That is so brilliant!” he said. “You didn’t disobey your dad but you still got to eat the apples! Very cool! Now, that’s intelligence!”

  I could see Grandma was having what you might call a happy moment.

  “More like being mischievous, I think,” she said.

  “What did Pap do when he found out?” I asked.

  “I had a stomach ache that evening at supper but didn’t dare say a word about it. It was two days later before Daddy checked on the tree and I just knew me and Libby would get our legs switched good. At supper that evening he sat down in his chair and fixed his eyes on me. ‘Believe some critter’s been eatin’ on our apples, Mama,’ he said. ‘Oh?’ Mama said. ‘Yup. Apples eat up, cores still hangin’ on the tree. Most peculiar thing I ever did see,’ he said. And he glared at me, but I just took a bite of my mashed potatoes and didn’t say a word. He never punished me. And as he grew older, Daddy would mention the summer the animals ate the apples and left the cores on the tree and give me a wink.”