3

Before her eyes could squint against the bright light blinding her, Kendra felt something large, warm and squishy bump her from the front.  The next thing she knew, she’d landed on her butt on a sidewalk.

“Ow!”  She stood up, and rubbed her backside, but stopped immediately.  Her hand stung.  She peered at it, then picked a couple of bits of gravel out of the scrape on her palm.   “Shit, that’s going to hurt.”

“Sorry, miss,” said a fat man dressed in a cheap black suit.  “You came out of nowhere.”

Kendra recognized him immediately, Reverend Smith, pastor of the Methodist church in north Wichita, near her old high school.  She fought an urge to hide before he recognized her, but in the next instant realized that he wouldn’t.  How could he?  She had seen him when he visited the high school on youth group business, but Kendra and her parents didn’t attend any of the many churches in town.  He wouldn't remember her.  “Uh, that’s okay,” she stuttered.  “I’m all right.”

“You’re sure?” he seemed more flustered than she felt.

“Yes, Reverend.  Could you tell me what--” she stopped.  She’d been about to ask him what day it was.  That would provoke a lot of unwelcome questions.  “--where I can buy a newspaper?”  She looked to her left, at a newspaper machine.  “Oh, never mind.  Thanks.  Have a nice day.”  Idiot, she chastised herself.  She must have materialized far earlier than she’d intended.

She fished in her pocket for change, and found only a nickel.  She bent forward to squint through the window of the vending machine at the paper, but the plastic had yellowed and been scratched enough that she couldn’t make out the date.  

“Here.”  Reverend Smith held out a quarter.  “It’s the least I can do.”

“Oh,” Kendra said, surprised, “thank you very much.”  

The good reverend peered at with such suspicion that Kendra felt compelled to offer some story about why she seemed so out of it, but she knew that would only cause complications.  Instead, she smiled in a way that she hoped would seem mysterious--Asian mystique and all that.

It seemed to work.  The reverend blinked and straightened.  “Yes, well, if you’re sure you’re fine--”

“Yes, Reverend.  Thanks again.”  She put the quarter in the slot, and bent over the machine again, intending just to open the door enough to check the date, but the good reverend had turned to watch, so she took a paper from the machine, smiled, and waved at him before she walked in the opposite direction.  God, what a waste of time and ink.  She didn’t even want the paper.  She saw from the top of the paper that she’d arrived on the right day, Friday, October 10^th.  She looked over her shoulder to be sure Reverend Smith was out of sight, then dropped the newspaper into the trash can in front of the bank.

She ducked inside to check the time on the clock high on the wall behind the tellers.  It was not as early as she’d feared, only a few minutes before five.  She had four hours to find the Little Bitch, and try again to divert disaster.  Fortunately, she knew just where to start her search.  The trick was to get there without being recognized.

An hour later, Kendra had managed to cross town on foot while evading every teenager that she saw.  Fortunately, they seemed either self-absorbed or obsessed with each other, and she wasn’t forced far out of her way.  Twits.  She sat on a wooden bench in the little park around the corner from her parents’ house. 

Her old neighborhood was quiet during the dinner hour. Kendra watched a few late tradesmen drive their vans or pick-ups into neatly trimmed driveways, and let her mind be as blank as the perfect patches of green lawn around her.  She had to get rid of her impatience or the Little Bitch would blow her off immediately.  She had talked to LB three times in recent weeks, but those conversations had failed to change anything.  The stupid kid kept drinking herself sick at the party that night. 

Kendra noticed her irritation building, and released it.  She blanked her mind again, then calmly reviewed the facts, searching for ways to improve.  She’d arrived too late during her most recent attempt to talk with LB, and to be honest, the earlier conversations had really been lectures.  She had hated lectures when she was younger.  She still hated them. 

Kendra checked to be sure that she attracted no attention.  She had never arrived this early on October 10^th.  Maybe she’d actually succeed this time.  Her pulse picked up, but where was the Little--all right, better not to insult her.  The girl probably sensed that too, she wasn’t stupid after all.  Kendra looked at the darkening sky.  If not “LB” then perhaps just “L” or even better, “Elle”.  Yeah, she liked that.  It sounded optimistically sophisticated.  Where was Elle, then? 

“Crap!”  Kendra shot to her feet.  Elle had been with her crazy best friend Deb that night, and Deb lived in the opposite direction.  From her current position, Kendra wouldn’t see Elle head for Deb’s house, and, she realized in a flash, if she didn’t reach the girl before the two friends were together, then she’d have wasted the whole trip. 

Kendra did feel weak and shaky then.  Her stomach cramped with hunger.  She ignored it, and hurried around the corner, past her old house, and on to Deb’s place.  She stopped there, studying the house.  How would she know if Elle was already inside?  Kendra certainly couldn’t risk being caught peeping in windows.  She stomped her foot in frustration.  Any minute someone might spot her and call the police, or worse, her parents.  She turned, and walked a couple of blocks until she was halfway back to her parents’ house. 

Her luck turned at last.  She saw Elle swagger up the street toward her, tiny tits, boney elbows, and disproportionately large, curved hips.  Kendra frowned.  She didn’t remember that part.

“What are you looking at?” Elle sneered as she drew level with Kendra.  The Little Bitch didn’t even pause for an answer. 

“You,” Kendra said.  Forgetting her determination not to lecture, the word whipped out of her mouth, and she felt some satisfaction as she saw LB’s head snap with the virtual impact.

The girl stopped and faced her.  “What are you, some kind of lezzy?”

Kendra groaned.  “Will you stop with the bullshit?  I know you’re scared, so just be scared.”

“Yeah, right.”  LB turned toward Deb’s house again.

“I know you and Deb are going to a party out in Grant’s field tonight.  I know you’re going to drink enough alcohol to make you puke for hours.” 

The girl stopped walking, and glanced back toward Kendra.

“I know Deb will call 9-1-1, but she won’t wait with you.  The whole party leaves you there, alone and unconscious at the far side of the cornfield.”

The Little Bitch did look scared then, but that didn’t stop her mouth.  “No way.”

“It takes the EMTs, Pete Townsend and Mike Laseur, an hour to find you because you can’t hear them call your name.  You’ll be in the hospital a day and a half.” 

Kendra walked around the girl, mad.  “The doctor will tell you that you killed a lot of brain cells.” 

The girl seemed to droop a little.  Kendra stopped.  She reminded herself that it wasn’t the first time she’d met the girl, but it was the first time the girl had met her.  Elle stared at the sidewalk.  Kendra tipped the girl’s chin up until their eyes met.  They were the same height.  The girl noticed it too.  The details began to add up.  Kendra could see the truth dawn, but the Little Bitch slapped Kendra’s hand away, rejecting the truth, and bristling like some kind of pouty porcupine.  

Kendra leaned in close, defying the girl’s “Do Not Approach” attitude, and whispered, “You know who I am.  I need those brain cells that you’re planning to kill tonight.”

“You’re crazy!  Leave me alone!”

The girl telegraphed her next move, and Kendra just had time.  As LB launched into a sprint, she grabbed the skinny fuchsia braid the girl had artfully arranged along one side of her long black hair.

“Ouch!  Bitch!”  LB came to a comic book, back-pedaling stop.

Kendra burst out laughing.  The girl smiled a little.  It didn’t last.

“I suppose you’re going to tell me not to drink.”  She sulked.

“Actually, no.  After you get so sick, you never drink again.  That’s a mistake.  It fucks up our future.  We’re…I’m the only PhD candidate in physics with no grant money and no job lined up.  I need to be able to drink at the annual dinners.”

“Physics?” the Little Bitch said as if the subject were something she’d seen floating in a cesspool. 

“Yes.  Physics.  We’re really good at it as you can see.”  Kendra spread her arms.  “I don’t know anyone else who can travel in space and time.  Do you?”

LB cracked her gum, and toyed with her fuchsia braid as she surveyed Kendra.  “The boobs aren’t bad.  Are you having any fun with them?”

Kendra sighed.  “Listen, I’m going to tell you what our parents never would.  This is how you drink safely:  one ounce of liquor, or one beer, or one glass of wine an hour, not more than three in any one night--two would be safer, given our half-Asian liver, but you’re new at it, and your liver is pristine so you have some leeway.” 

The girl looked a little dazed, so Kendra made her repeat the instructions before she went on.  “Drink at least eight ounces of water between every serving of alcohol, and NEVER drive, not even after one drink.”

“All right already,” the girl whined.  Kendra took that as a sign that she had it all. 

“Good.  Have fun, I’ll see you later.”

“You..you will?” the girl asked.  She sounded pleasantly surprised.

Kendra smiled.  “Yeah.  I’ve got some tutoring to do if you’re going to figure out time travel when you’re 17.”

“I am?  I mean…we did?  Yes!”  The girl did a quick fist pump, and Kendra felt her heart swell so unexpectedly that she put her hand on her chest.

“What’s wrong?” her younger self asked, concerned.  “You don’t--we don’t have grandpa’s heart disease, do we?”

“No,” Kendra waved off the girl’s concern, but made a note to get a full physical while she still had student insurance.

“Good.  Okay, bye!”  Elle flounced off, just like that.

Kendra felt let down.  “Hey,” she called after her awkward girl-woman self.

Elle turned halfway.

“Don’t forget to bring water from Deb’s house, eight ounces an hour, and some toilet paper.  You’re going to pee a lot.”

Elle laughed, and waved as she flounced away, frighteningly overconfident, but better informed.  Kendra hoped it would be enough.

2

     Kendra stalked out of the women’s room, and climbed the stairs two at a time, quite a feat for her five-foot, one-inch, slim but sedentary frame.  Her heart still pounded when she reached the door to her lab.  It made her remember the first day that she’d approached it.  Imagine, Kendra Tanagawa, daughter of a restaurateur in Wichita, Kansas, had her own lab--even if it was a glorified broom closet--at Stamford University.  She pushed into her lab, ready to crunch data.  If she’d finally gotten through to the Little Bitch, then she should be able to apply her equation more broadly—big if.  

     Momentarily lost in the contemplation of her own early teenaged psyche, she had halfway seated herself behind 20 terabytes of accumulated data before she noticed the bare, hairy ankles that protruded from a huge pair of narrow topsiders resting, as usual, on top of her ancient digital oscilloscope.  Fortunately it had a thick heavy case, but Kendra was mad.  She had asked Neil dozens of times not to rest any part of his body on her equipment.  In fact, she’d insisted that her fellow PhD candidate not sneak into her lab at all.  Labs were supposed to be sacrosanct.

     “Get off!”  She smacked the feet sideways at the same time as she chopped up against the extended knee of Neil’s lower leg.  The effect was satisfying.

     “Ow!” he yowled as the weight of his legs hurtling toward the floor pulled him upright in her spare chair.  The chair was old and had a the broken spring that dumped any occupant who dared to move too fast.  He landed in an awkward squat, one hand grasping the edge of her lab bench to keep himself from sprawling on the floor.  “What’d you do that for?” he asked incredulously as he stood.

     “I’m tired of you coming in here to spy on me, Neil,” Kendra replied, and bit off the tirade that knocked against her clenched teeth so great was its yearning to follow.

     “I’m not spying--”

     “Remind whoever sent you that I’m the outcast.  You’re not supposed to be interested in me.”

     “But Professor Healy just--”

     Kendra inhaled, determined not to lose control.  She might say too much.  Instead, she summoned the positive image of herself:  a physics rock star.  Elegant in a white silk suit, she gleamed in the spotlight of a darkened auditorium as she wowed an adoring audience at a huge TED conference.  

     “I’m not concerned about the director’s opinion of my work.”  Calm once again, she met Neil’s eager, nosey gaze.  “So why should you be?”  She stared at him until he had no choice but to leave.  

     He deliberately left her door open, another rude gesture in the competitive and compulsively private little world of doctoral candidates in physics.  Kendra waited until he’d slammed the door of his own lab before she got up.  A quick look down the hall of closed doors showed her that her older colleagues had gone back to work.  She closed her own door softly, her mind already turned to work.

     She searched through the heap of books and papers around her computer until she found her wireless keyboard.  She logged in, and opened the equation that had consumed her mind, awake or asleep, for three years.  Kendra peered at the troublesome second page of it.  No, she still didn’t see what limited her travel, but something did.  

     She pushed her chair away from the lab bench, and sighed.  Really, it had been a waste of time to look at the equation.  If she continued to occupy the smallest, crummiest lab in the department, then nothing had changed.  She would have to face the Little Bitch again, and the sooner the better.  “But I don’t want to,” she whined softly, then had to laugh.  She sounded just like LB.  

     “I am tired.”  She glanced at the old analog clock that was part of her Rube Goldberg alarm, the mechanical part of her triple system of reminders, each reduplicated in her apartment.  She’d missed a meeting in her first week at Stamford.  As a result, she was not at the swanky dinner that the university hosted to introduce tomorrow’s innovators to today’s industry giants.  The giants agreed to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars that evening.  Most of the funding for PhD research really happened there, so, though Kendra had filed more grant applications than any of her colleagues, all of her conventional research went unfunded.  The only good thing to come out of it was that she abandoned her unfunded conventional research  to begin her real life’s work, the project that no one knew anything about.

     She realized that she’d been staring at the old alarm clock, and blinked.  It was only five-thirty, still evening.  She was tired enough that it felt like midnight, but of course it wasn’t.  As the department chairman, Professor Healy would never stay late just to chastise a student.  Her stomach rumbled.  Kendra couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten, but she didn’t care.  She wasn’t weak or shaking, so it couldn’t have been too long.

            “Okay, once more into the fray.”  She locked the door to her lab, then surveyed the blinking devices around her.  She reset a digital countdown on each of two machines, adjusted a dial, and stood on a black circle no bigger than a dime that she’d painted on the floor of the lab.  A horizontal beam of light scanned her.  When it finished, she pressed a button on what appeared to be a small key fob, and disappeared.