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 solid to gases 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? I mean 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 having to go back to school. I always hated the first day anyway. Besides Friday would be just 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 had my head between her hands and was examining my eyes before I could get them focused on her. She looked at the crust and redness of my eyes and said.

“I think you may be right. Tell you what, go take your shower and wash your eyes out with warm water. I’ll give Doc Underhill a call 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.

Turns out I was wrong. The next thing I knew, Mom was taking me to the doctor’s office. I guess it was still early enough in the day for the doc to get paid for an office call. Good thing Mom had insurance. I guess 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 sleep nude. That was why I had waited for her to leave. I hated how clothing restricted my movements when I slept. It would always pull on some part of me when I tossed and turned. Mom knew I slept that way. We really 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 I didn’t feel the itching anymore, I started in with the bar of soap.

I was always a clean person even in my high school days. Anyway, that’s when I discovered that being sixteen again had a big 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 like eight to nine inches long, now.

There were those voices 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 out.’

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

They didn’t respond but I did finish in the shower and went back 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. She had made me a pancake birthday cake, every year I could remember.

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 whip 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 real fruit when she made them. It was for my sixteenth birthday 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 thingy.

And I did enjoy it! I wanted to hug Mom so bad, but I begged off and told her she didn’t want the pink eye. She smiled at how considerate I was being and I promised that I would give her a big love hug when I wasn’t contagious. Well, maybe Mom would avoid it this time as well. The pink eye, that is.

We arrived at old Doc Underhill’s office, and I got my next surprise. Other than he wasn’t really old, that is. 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 it occurred to me that there were a lot of kids that 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 a smart thing to do too.

The old doc put the first drops in my eyes himself. Then he gave me some other drops, as well. I didn’t remember the second bottle of drops before. Then I realized my eyes didn’t itch. In fact, 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. Now all you need to do is 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 to me. 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 fine with me. Then I realized that not only would I miss my first two days of school, but I would also be missing 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 would meet her this time, she should have hopefully set her sights on some other guy. She always liked the football types.

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

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

Not much chance of that, I was sure I would be seeing her in the halls or at lunchtime. Maybe I would get lucky, and she would latch onto some other victim this time around. Too bad about our two kids. I mean 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 into my head.

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