Chapter 8

Thursday, December 18, 2014, 9:27 a.m. Stumbling away from the gate, she freed the Diet Coke from her pocket and twisted off the lid. The hiss/fizz of escaping carbon dioxide was Iggy Azalea to her ears. Lifting the rim to her lips, she couldn’t drink the soda; her nausea was too great. Cold and disgusted, she capped the bottle and staggered to the nearby patio table, yanked out the closest chair and collapsed onto the seat. Her nausea grew worse every time she returned to 2014 and lasted longer too. Jet-lag from Hell, she thought miserably.

Bending forward, she breathed deeply through her mouth, head on her knees. After a time, the nausea eased. For a moment she considered staggering through the back door into the kitchen for something to eat, and then laughed mirthlessly. The alarm was set. She dug out her iPhone instead, and checked the weather app: 28 degrees, Fahrenheit. Leda couldn’t have scheduled this idiocy in June? Bitch!

Noting the time, she uncapped the bottle again, guzzled half the contents, and burped explosively. She glanced anxiously around, wiped her runny nose and streaming eyes, fervently hoping her time-traveling career was nearly at an end. Damn Leda, anyway.

She stood, and then sat back down again, dismayed, and shocked. Her keys and wallet were inside the house! “No!” she cried, realizing a much worse reality: her keys and wallet were miles away at school with her younger self! She had no transport, and no money to buy supplies!

Shouting “No!” again, she banged the chair arm and furiously cried: “No! No-no-no, dammit! It’s not fair!” She hurled the soda bottle across the back yard, jumped up, and stomped to the gate. How could she be so fucking stupid? She needed Teddy to get to the library and who knows where else to secure the items on Leda’s stupid list—she smacked her right pocket to make sure the book was still there—and she couldn’t do anything without her wallet and keys! What an idiot!

“Wait! Wait, wait, wait,” she muttered angrily. She was stupid, yes, but the situation wasn’t as dire as she thought. Younger-Rebecca had her keys and wallet at school, but Mom had spares to the RAV4 and to the house, also a duplicate of her debit card. She needed only to round them up and be on her way.

Still angry, she stepped through into The Hall of the Gate and staggered to the control panel, clutching her stomach. She had to be smarter about this; she had to start using her head. Advancing the time to 9:50 a.m., she repositioned the gate inside the house, locating it in the kitchen. Forcing herself to calm, she stood before the gate for 30 seconds, took a deep breath, and stepped back though.

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The time was 10:41 a.m. She slid behind Teddy’s wheel and started the engine. Her nausea was intense, so bad that she had suffered dry-heaves in the back yard this time. Diet Coke helped, but only marginally.

She’d encountered surprisingly little difficulty facing the gate against the rear wall. She couldn’t see the line but locating the ¼” wide edge proved easy enough. Before heading out front, she’d marked the gate’s location with a dull penny on the ground.

Time was a different matter. She’d wastefully reset it to 10:30 a.m. her last time through, for no reason other than pique. She’d twisted the white globe just a bit too hard to the right at first, then a correspondingly bit too hard to the left, and then let the readout remain at 10:30 a.m. after the final correction. Kicking the console in anger and nearly screaming “Stupid fucking Leda! Stupid fucking designers!” she ranted over the idiotic design for such a critically important function.

“Where are you going?” she huffed, still angry.

She’d already decided the library, and the closest branch was Gallagher Valley Public Library off Norway Avenue, a mile distant. Considering Leda’s peculiar selection of books, however, Rebecca thought her better bet lay in Cabel County Public Library on 5th Avenue, near the 527 Bridge to Chesapeake. The main branch would more likely offer the likes of, “The Prince,” by Niccolò Machiavelli, “Behind the Ballots,” by James Farley, and “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” by Dale Carnegie, none of which she’d ever heard of. Hillary Clinton’s “It Takes a Village,” sounded vaguely familiar, but the choice of, “Real Estate Broker’s Manual,” “History of Musical Instruments,” “Furniture for the Ages,” and a volume entitled “Evolution of Dress Styles” mystified her. Perhaps Google could shed light.

Swallowing another gulp of Diet Coke, she backed Teddy into the street and took Wiltshire Blvd. west to Holderby Rd. Traveling a block to Washington Blvd., she swung around the Marathon station onto Hal Greer Blvd., and headed north into Huntington.

She couldn’t for the life of her understand what had happened over the past 24 hours. It was 10:50 a.m. of the same morning she’d spent in class, struggling with trigonometry, and American History, waiting on lunch period to connive with Amy about the parties Friday and Saturday nights. Mentally and physically, she was a wreck. She had no idea what to make of the situation with Gunther (though she had some troubling thoughts on the matter) and thinking about Leda and the reality of time-travel only added to her discomfort. She needed to eat, but thoughts of anything but Diet Coke made her stomach roll.

At 5th Avenue, she turned left, and drove eight blocks to Cabel County Public Library at the intersection with 9th St. In the parking lot she finished off the bottle of soda and dropped the empty into the blue container inside the main entrance. Her stomach had settled enough that she’d considered stopping at McDonald’s once she’d collected the books.