Chapter 2

“Wake up, Birthday Boy,” came my mother’s cheerful morning voice through the bedroom door.

I managed to sit up, rubbing the sleep crud from my eyes. Crap, it’s my sixteenth birthday again. Shit that means this crud in my eyes is caused by pink eye. Crap, I thought again. My eyes had hurt for three days, and now I had to do it again.

‘Oh, sorry about that,’ came the voice in my head.

I thought, “Well, can you do something about it?”

‘No.’

“Great, then why did you say you were sorry?”

‘Our target date was supposed to be tomorrow.’

“Oh,” I said. Then I thought, “What went wrong?”

‘Well, apparently, some flatulence during transit altered the gas calculations, and slightly more energy was used than was needed, and we ended up one day farther back than had been planned for.’

“Are you saying my fart did that?”

‘Yes.’

“I will be damned.”

‘It’s not that bad.’

Before I could reply, however, Mom’s voice came through the door once again.

“Get up, Birthday Boy.”

I called out, “I am awake, Mom.”

Well, I needed to say something, didn’t I? If I didn’t, she would walk in on me. Then again, with a case of pink eye, maybe it would be better if she knew about it this morning rather than having to leave work to come and pick me up at school. After all, the pink eye did delay me from taking my driver’s test later that day anyway. In this way, I could get my bearings before returning to school. Invariably, I wouldn’t say I liked the first day anyway. Besides, Friday would be fine for me to take the driving test. Well, that’s when I did it the last time, though. Strange, I should be panicked about all this. Well, back to the matter at hand.

“Mom?” I called out.

“Yes, my birthday boy?”

“I think I have pink eye. I mean, my eyes itch something awful.”

Well, that was no lie. Not that I ever lied. However, I did stretch the truth on an occasion or two. That was all Mom needed to hear to come into my room, and she did just that. She was so fast it made my head spin. Well, maybe that was because she was a blur when she rushed over to the bed. She held my head and examined my eyes before I could focus them on her. She looked at the crust and redness of my eyes and said.

“I think you may be right. Tell you what: Shower and wash your eyes with warm water. I’ll call Doc Underhill and see what we should do.”

Do? I already knew what he would say. Stay home for twenty-four hours, and he would call in a script for eye drops to cure the problem. That’s what happened when Mom picked me up from school, the last time this had happened.

It turns out I was wrong. Mom took me to the doctor’s office, which was the next thing I knew. I guess it was still early enough in the day for the doctor to get paid for an office call. It’s a good thing Mom had insurance. The last time this happened, he must have been in a hurry to get home for the night.

‘Well, this is different than last time.’ I thought to myself, trying to understand why.

‘You changed the way you did something,’ came the thoughts of The Three Thieves.

‘Oh, what was that?’

‘You addressed the problem of your pink eye earlier in the day when you first discovered it.’

“I see,” I said as I climbed into the shower after Mom had disappeared down the stairs.

At least I remembered I slept nude. That was why I had waited for her to leave. I hated how clothing restricted my movements when I slept. It constantly pulled on some part of me when I tossed and turned. Mom knew I slept that way. We tried to be respectful of each other’s privacy. After all, she had the same problem. Sleeping nude was the solution she recommended to me all those years ago. I think I was seven at the time.

After I had cleared the crud from my eyes in the shower and the warm water had soothed them to the point that I didn’t feel the itching anymore, I started with the bar of soap.

I was always a clean person, even in high school. That’s when I discovered that being sixteen again had a significant benefit, which I had lost a few years back: erections! I was so excited I just had to try it out again. Amazingly, it was over quickly in the warm water of the shower. No sooner than I had visualized my first time with my last wife, it was over, just like that.

Oh, God, I didn’t remember it being that powerful. I also didn’t remember it ever being that big. I mean, it was eight to nine inches long now.

Those voices were in my head again, ‘You would have asked for it if we had given you the chance. Instead, we just decided to give it to you. You see, we always give our experiments something to help them.’

‘Well ... thanks. I will try putting it to good use.’

They didn’t respond, but I finished showering and returned to my room to dress.

Mom called upstairs, “We have an appointment in an hour, and I called into work already. I almost have breakfast ready, so get down here while it’s still hot, Honey.”

“What did you make, Mom?”

“Birthday Breakfast, of course.”

Well, that made sense. I remember that she made me a pancake birthday cake every year.

Oh, I must tell you about them. She takes a thin buttermilk pancake and puts strawberry jam on it. Then another pancake with blueberry jam. A third with blackberry, and on top of the fourth, she puts real whipped cream and wipes it on the sides to make it look like a cake. She then places sliced bananas and peaches arranged on the top like a smiley face. Well, anyway, it is delicious. Eventually, she stopped using jam and used natural fruit when she made them. It was my sixteenth birthday, and she did that. Oh, I was going to enjoy my breakfast so much! I was starting to see some real benefits to this time travel thing.

And I did enjoy it! I wanted to hug Mom so bad, but I begged off and told her she didn’t like the pink eye. She smiled at how considerate I was, and I promised to give her a giant love hug when I wasn’t contagious. Well, maybe Mom would also avoid it this time—the pink eye.

We arrived at old Doc Underhill’s office, and I got my next surprise. Other than that, he wasn’t ancient. We were taken right into an examination room when we arrived—no sense in risking giving everyone in the office pink eye as well. Then, I realized that many kids came down with pink eye in school that week. I wondered if I had been the main reason it spread so quickly. I had been rubbing my eyes a lot that day. Thinking about it, maybe rinsing them in the water fountain hadn’t been brilliant.

The old doctor put the first drops in my eyes and gave me some other drops. I didn’t remember the second bottle of drops before. Then I realized my eyes didn’t itch. They were feeling much better, and I was curious.

“Feel better already?” Doc asked me.

“Yes, what did you do anyway?”

“Well, the first sets of drops were a local optical anesthetic to stop the itching. The second is the sulfur compound that will cure pink eye. You only need to stay home for two days and take the drops every six hours. You will be fine in no time.”

He always said, ‘No time,’ and I always thought he was lying. Then again, what was a day or two, anyway? Then I realized he was giving me two days off from school.

“Two days?” I asked in surprise.

“It takes a full day before you’re not contiguous anymore. Since we don’t want this going around the school or anything like that, it’s better to be safe. Okay?”

It was more than okay with me. Then I realized that not only would I miss my first two days of school, but I would also miss the first meeting with Jackie. You see, it was her first year at our high school. She would have been a cheerleader if she had been there the year before. But the team was always picked the year before, and she had been too late to try out.

Did I mention she was a knockout? Well, she was. Too bad her personality never matched her looks. Anyway, by the time I met her this time, she should have hopefully set her sights on some other guy. She always liked football types.

So why me, you ask? I was a pretty-faced boy, even if I didn’t think so then.

‘Well,’ I thought, ‘maybe I won’t have to meet her.’

There was little chance of that; I was sure I would see her in the halls or at lunchtime. Maybe I would get lucky, and she would latch onto another victim this time. Too bad about our two kids. Even though the marriage was so short, the sex was always great, and the two girls were a joy to father. Well, not even for them could I put myself through that again. I mean, it’s not like I had a choice in this little recycling thing, right?

‘We’ve got that covered,’ the voice said.

Now, what in the world did they mean by that? However, they didn’t respond, and as I waited, my mind drifted back to Jackie’s problem. The more I thought about it, the more of a plan formed in my head. I would avoid Jackie at all costs. I mean, what could she do if I ignored her? Nothing was what I decided. I would never take the bait and ask her out. She would never be my girlfriend, that high school sweetheart you bring to the prom and marry after graduation. The only part I would miss was screwing her brains out on our first date.

Hey, that’s right, I am still a virgin at this age. Oh crap, she was my first lay. Too bad she hadn’t valued my virginity a bit more. I was doing the right thing and saving myself for my future wife. Hell, she didn’t wait for me, did she?

One thing was for sure. I was not going to allow her to screw up my life again. Besides, there were other girls. Even if this body was still a virgin, I still had over fifty years of experience under my belt.