"I don't think I'm ever going to find Michelle. And I don't think you will either," Liz stated calmly. "Even if I did find her at this point, who knows what she's been through. I think the best option would be to prevent her from traveling back to 1969 with me in the first place."

"Okay, so you want me to go to the night before Thanksgiving in 1993 and make sure you stay home?" This was an idea that had crossed my mind, too. It seemed straightforward enough.

"No, I still want to see the Stones," she insisted. "And I want you to go with me instead of Michelle."

While that prospect gave me little thrill of excitement, it seemed to overcomplicate a task that should have been pretty simple. "Okay, but why? Was it really that great?"

"It was that great." She gazed out the window and a dreamy smile softened her face. "I know it sounds stupid, but my life won't be the same if I don't go. There are things from this part of my life that I'd like to stay the same. I still want to go back in time, but I want to be able to return to my regular life in between, with my family intact. And if it doesn't work out that way, if I don't get to see the things I've seen and do the things I've done, I'll never know the difference, will I? All I know is that I can't spend the rest of my life like this," she gestured from her black and white housekeeping uniform to her rumpled twin bed, "and I can't go back to my real life without Michelle. I'd never be able to face my parents and I'd never be able to live with myself."

"Aren't you afraid you'd mess up the future in some other way if you keep it up? If I were you, I'd stay far, far away from all this time travel stuff."

"You almost were me, and yet here you are again," she pointed out.

"True," I cringed self-consciously. "At least this time I came on purpose. It happened to me twice in two weeks, accidentally. And I've done that reversing time thing that you can do, but I didn't do that on purpose either. At least I don't think so. On top of all that, I have horrible nightmares. My anxiety is through the freaking roof lately. Honestly, I wish it would all go away."

A breath of cold air crept through the failing seals around the window. I shivered and pulled the collar of my coat tighter around my neck. Part of me couldn't believe I had actually come willingly, knowing the risks.

"I guess I'm surprised you want to keep traveling to the past after what happened with Michelle, and what could have happened to me."

And then I had a rare moment of clarity, where I knew exactly what I wanted, even though it was probably impossible.

"I would give just about anything to be normal again and forget that any of this ever happened. And to forget about him, too. I don't want him in my head anymore." I took a staccato breath and exhaled slowly to keep from crying. "It's only fair, right? If he's probably already forgotten about me?"

"That's stupid." Liz rolled her eyes and huffed a short sigh. "I understand why you'd want to forget him, and you're right, it's not fair. But everything else? I don't think you're considering the potential in what we can do."

"That's part of what I hate about it. All of that potential to change things for the better. I feel guilty about everything that's bad in the world, because I have this ability to go back and possibly change things, and I just...haven't. I wouldn't know where to start and I'm too scared to try."

"You can't fix everything. I can't either. And sadly, it's probably not a good idea to try."

"I know. So, I'd be perfectly fine with trying to help you and then never doing this again." I rubbed my bleary eyes. The sky outside was darkening quickly and there was still work to do. I retrieved another caffeine pill and washed it down with lukewarm Ovaltine. "So tell me exactly what you want me to do."

"I want you to make sure everything stays the same that night, so that I make it to the Olympia on November 24th, 1969, except with you instead of Michelle."

"Okay, then give me all the details." I positioned my pen to start taking notes. "You said you were listening to music at the train bridge. What were you listening to?"

"We were listening to a mixtape on my Walkman. There were some Rolling Stones songs on there. Michelle actually said, 'Don't you wish you could see them live back in the sixties?' That's when I told her it might be possible."

She backtracked to when she first arrived home from college for Thanksgiving break earlier in the afternoon on November 24th and recounted everything leading up to the concert while I took notes. She described everything in detail, as if she'd memorized it, from what she was wearing (Nirvana t-shirt, flannel shirt, ripped jeans and combat boots) to what she grabbed out of the refrigerator while she and her mom were arguing (a plastic bottle of Crystal Pepsi). She stressed that I shouldn't change a thing, insisting that we needed to smoke weed at the train bridge, get a running start in order to travel back to 1969, and once we were there, hitchhike with two guys in a Ford Thunderbird named Steve and Glenn.

"What if you lose me this time?" I asked when she was finished.

"Then you can get back on your own. Michelle couldn't."

"Right. But if this works and you and Michelle are back in your regular life when you should be, you won't be hiding out here in 1953 and you won't be able to help me when Rose goes missing. And then I'd never be here right now in the first place and I'd never be able to help you with Michelle and...." I closed my eyes. My tired brain was overwhelmed.

Liz snapped her fingers in front of my face to bring me out of my doom spiral.

"What if you don't need me here? Maybe you could get exactly what you want. The first time you came to 1953, you were thinking of your grandma because you were looking at her class photo in the hallway at school, you were wearing her ring, and it was the anniversary of the day she died."

"It's not the day she died anymore, though." My mind was starting to glitch, the way it did when I tried to reconcile my old memories of Grandma Rose with the newer ones that appeared after the changes to the past I caused that summer. "She died in November, not June."

"Okay, so what if we eliminated the other factors, too? Once I get back to 1993, I'll take the photo out of the hallway at school, and they'll probably never bother to replace it. There are a few other years missing, so what's another one? Bring that ring with you when you come and leave it with me. You never travel to 1953 that day and your problems are solved."

"That seems too easy. There has to be a paradox somewhere there." I flipped through my note pages to the time travel theories.

"There isn't a manual, okay?" Liz slapped her hand down on the page. "There is no Time Traveling for Dummies. We are not physicists theorizing about this, we are living it. All I know is what I've experienced, and I think there's no harm in trying if that's what you really want. Even though I think it would be a complete waste. Lots of people would kill to be able to do what we can do."

Even if somehow it worked, there was one big problem with the plan.

"If I was never here in the summer, would Pete still die?" I asked.

"It's hard to say. It was a freak accident. Maybe not? Or maybe it was meant to happen. He could've left town because he knew somehow that he wasn't supposed to be here anymore."

I believed a twenty-year old was meant to die on the side of the road while he was trying to help someone about as much as I believed that a seventeen-year old girl was meant to vanish seven years before she was born. Then I remembered what Paul had said about Liz wanting to keep me away at first because I was hanging around her family and she didn't want her timeline changed. Maybe she was worried that if Pete lived, her own timeline would have unfolded in some irreversible way.

I replayed the scene of the accident in my mind. A voice yelled, "Not her!" after I'd been hit. Was it supposed to be someone else? Was Liz driving the car that hit me? Did she try to hit Pete to get her family back on the course it had been on before I intervened? Maybe that's why she didn't argue too much when I said I never wanted to be there in the first place.

"Have you? Killed anyone?" I asked, the words tumbling out of my mouth without any thought. "Or tried to?"

She leaned back and peered down her nose at me. "Um, no, have you tried to kill anyone?"

"Were you aiming for Pete? When I got hit by that car. Were you trying to fix what I messed up, in a way?"

"I wasn't aiming for anyone, I wasn't even driving the car. I still can't drive when I'm in the past, it's too unpredictable. Mrs. Barry's nephew was driving me to pick up you and Rose, and he swerved to avoid Pete. We didn't see you or anyone else until it was too late."

Liz stood abruptly and I thought she was about to show me to the door after I may have accused her of attempting vehicular manslaughter. But she opened the closet by the door and pulled out a crinkled brown paper grocery bag and set it on the floor next to me.

"I cleaned out your locker before the pool closed," she said. "And the stuff you left in my room is in there, too."

I hesitantly peeked into the bag. There they were in a swirl of colorful fabric. A red shirtdress, a mint green dress with tiny white polka dots, and a white one with a blue floral print. The clothes I'd worn on rotation that summer when I visited Pete. They were like a time capsule of my time with him. Each one held memories that flashed on a reel in my head. I wanted to gather the dresses in my arms and bury my face in them. To inhale deeply and hope for even the tiniest hint of the scent of him.

But I didn't and I promised myself that I wouldn't. And anyway, how could the smell of Old Spice and laundry soap and him remain on my clothes while the source of it all didn't even know who I was anymore? I put a sharp crease along the top of the bag and folded it down twice.

"Thank you." I tried to clear away any signs of emotion in my voice. "I don't have the clothes I borrowed from you. I think I threw some of them in the river."

She snorted a laugh. "It's okay. I've already replaced them." She crossed the room, pulled one of the journals from the top dresser drawer and tossed it to me. "And here's your autobiography."

I caught it and flipped through the pages that I'd written the night I spent in Liz's room at the boarding house. She'd urged me to write down everything I'd ever want to remember about my life, in case things had not turned out favorably with Rose and I began to forget. I wondered how many of Liz's memories had faded and how much she only remembered because it was written in her journals.

She pulled a small, boxy suitcase out from underneath the bed and began loading her journals into it. When she finished and clicked the buckles shut, I asked, "You going somewhere?"

"I want you to take them," she said as she set the suitcase on the floor next to the grocery bag. "In case I don't end up back here. Can you bring them to me in 1993?"

"Do you think that'll work? Maybe all the writing will disappear or something."

"It can't hurt to try." She shrugged and sat across from me at the table again. "I'd appreciate it if you didn't read them, but I'd understand if your curiosity gets the best of you."

"You would?" That was strangely generous of her.

"I have to admit, I read yours. Riveting stuff," she said with a wry smile.

"You know, if it was so boring, you didn't have to read it."

"No, I mean it. I couldn't put it down. I feel like I know you now."

I didn't think that was necessarily a good thing. There was some really personal stuff written in there.

"So when I show up at your house in 1993 with this suitcase, you're going to believe that I'm from the future? And what happens if you can't see me?"

"I should be able to see you. I'm not alive at your origin. I'm stuck here, remember?"

I yawned and nodded. All that caffeine seemed to have no effect on the time-travel induced fatigue that I was afraid was beginning to muddle my mind. I worried that I was missing something, that too many questions were left unasked. But I had written down instructions to follow, and if everything went as planned it wouldn't matter anymore that I didn't have all the answers.  Because I'd go back to being blissfully unaware of my ability to travel to the past.

When I tucked my own journal into my bag, Liz leaned over and peered inside.

"What's in there?" she asked.

"Just my homework and stuff. I brought it by accident." As I started to quickly zip it up, she pulled the bag across the floor toward her. She took out the laptop, opened it like a book and screwed her face up in confusion.

"Yeah, you probably shouldn't-" I said, pointlessly reaching for it, knowing she wouldn't give up that easily.

"Is this a computer?" she asked. She set it on the table and poked at the keyboard. "It's not working."

The screen was black. "Yeah, it looks like the battery is dead."

"Do you have another battery? Or does it plug in?"

"I don't have a battery or a charger." I did actually have a charger, but I wasn't going to tell her that.

Before I could stop her, she reached in the side pocket and came out with my phone in her hand.

"What's this?" The screen was also black, and Liz tipped it back and forth, watching as the fingerprinted glass reflected the light. She came from 1993, but she seemed as in awe of my futuristic electronics as anyone from 1953 might have been.

"It's a phone."

"Whoa, you have a cell?" she asked, seeming genuinely impressed. "Where are the buttons?"

"It's a touchscreen. And looks like the battery is dead on that, too, so how about we put that back?"

"You're no fun." She grudgingly handed over the phone. "You're gonna have to be more fun when we go to this concert. You'll be dealing with a whole different version of me. Oh, and it's Beth, by the way. I used to go by Beth."

She pressed her palm over her mouth and inhaled deeply through her nose. Her eyes met mine and I could see that she trusted me and actually believed I could pull this off. It gave me the confidence I needed to believe it, too.

"If this works, everything goes back to the way it should be," Liz said, with a hint of sadness. "But it's kind of like a part of me, this me, is dying, you know?"

I nodded. If it worked, this version of me would be gone, too.

"Is there anything else?" I asked.

"When you come, bring the suitcase and that phone and a charger. If we can get that thing to work, I'm sure I'll believe you're from the future, in case the journals don't work out. And bring a note to tell me what I need to do to keep you from traveling to '53 the first time, so I can take care of that once I get back from 1969." She raised her mug and I tapped mine against it with a clunk. "Here goes."