November 24, 1993

The bathroom ended up working that time, and was almost exactly the same in 1993 except for the addition of metal grab bars affixed to nearly every wall. I snuck out of the house without incident, knowing that it was possible the older folks living there would see me, but once I entered the world outside the Rockmore House, few people would notice me. Most of them would probably still be alive in 2016.

Liz's house was in a subdivision at the edge of town. From the front steps, I heard muffled, angry voices coming from inside that quieted once the doorbell chimed. Liz opened the door, with a plastic bottle of Crystal Pepsi in hand. Her hair was cut in blunt bob and dyed a deep shade of burgundy that was almost purple.

I pointed to the pop bottle full of what looked like carbonated water. "You'd better enjoy that now, it's going to be discontinued in a few months."

Her forehead crinkled in confusion and then she stuck her hand out impatiently. "You can just give me the pamphlet."

"Pamphlet?"

"Yeah, for whatever religion you're representing. They really shouldn't send you out to people's houses by yourself, though."

"I'm actually not representing any religion, I'm-"

"Selling something?" she interrupted. "What's in the suitcase?"

"Your journals. From your time in 1953." Her face paled and her mouth fell open, then she snapped it shut and sneered. "And other years, too, probably. I didn't read them."

She reached for the suitcase, but I stepped away and swung it behind my back. "I'm not here just to give you these. Can we talk somewhere?"

Her eyes darted around nervously before she said, "Sure, come in."

I added my sneakers to the pile near the door. Clunky Doc Martens, grass-stained white Reeboks, penny loafers, green Converse with peace signs and smiley faces drawn on them in black marker.

The local news was broadcasting to an empty living room from a boxy television nestled in a yellowish wood cabinet. A woman with blonde hair that seemingly defied gravity at the roots solemnly reported that a prominent U.S. Senator had died.

There was a lot of noise coming from a kitchen somewhere; sizzling, a timer beeping, someone muttering to herself and then yelling, "Who was at the door?"

"Jehovah's Witnesses!" Liz yelled back. "I'll be in my room."

"I'm not done with you yet, Elizabeth!"

"Well, I'm done with you!" Liz snarled.

I followed her up the plush carpeted stairs and peeked beyond the rainbow beaded curtain that hung in the doorway to a bedroom that exploded with color. The turquoise walls were plastered with posters and artwork. A girl that I assumed was Michelle was lying on her stomach on a bedspread with a bold, graphic design in teal, pink, purple and black. Glowing red blobs floated through purple liquid in the lava lamp on her nightstand. She was propped up on her elbows, reading a paperback book while she toyed with the charm hanging from her choker necklace.

Liz's room was more spare, with uncluttered surfaces and a couple of band posters on the walls. There were greasy blue spots on the paint where she must have taken down other posters to move to her dorm room. On the wall across from the bed, there was a huge picture that kind of looked like static on an old TV set, but in color, that I found myself staring at.

"Do you see it?" Liz asked.

As I muttered, "See what?" a three-dimensional image seemed to take shape in front of my eyes.

"Dolphins," I said. "Three dolphins jumping out of the water."

"You're good. Most people don't get it on the first try. It's called a Magic Eye." She turned a knob on the boombox on her dresser and rock music filled the room and quickly faded to static. Liz adjusted the antenna and the music returned. She faced me and crossed her arms over the yellow smiley face outline on her black Nirvana t-shirt. "So, you're from 1953, huh?"

"No, 2016 actually."

She rolled her eyes. "Who put you up to this?"

"You did, actually. You can travel to the past. So can I. We met in 1953. I'm Vanessa." I set the suitcase on her bed and prepared to try to convince her that I was legit. "Crystal Pepsi will be discontinued early next year, Princess Diana is going to make a speech announcing her withdrawal from public life on December 3rd, and Kurt Cobain is going to die on April 5th."

She flinched at the news about Kurt Cobain and then her face quickly went back to appearing unimpressed. "I could've guessed any of those things."

Liz couldn't hide her curiosity as she examined the suitcase on the bed. I dug my phone out of the travel belt and took the charger from my coat pocket. I heard her click open the latches while I searched for an outlet.

"It's full of magazines," Liz said, "from 2016?" Sure enough, she was pulling magazines out of the suitcase instead of black and white speckled composition notebooks. "Better Homes and Gardens, Country Living, Oprah has a magazine?"

She flipped through the pages and I had to look away. That suitcase had been hidden- mostly from myself- deep in my closet at Dad's house for almost two weeks. Someone had taken her notebooks and replaced them. Someone who had to have been looking for them. I didn't know exactly what Liz had written, but it probably wasn't anything she wanted a stranger to read. But whoever had been looking for them probably wasn't a stranger.

I got down on my hands and knees to plug the charger into the outlet underneath her desk.

"What's that?" she asked.

"It's a smartphone." I powered it up and the home screen looked just as it should, but with "No Service" in the corner. When I tapped the icons for Instagram and Snapchat, all that came up was a blank white screen, but the clock and calculator worked. I hoped it was convincing enough.

"Look, it has a touchscreen, and it's all colorful, and I even took screenshots of news stories from  1993. Things that'll happen in the next couple days." I scrolled through the headlines I'd taken screenshots of while Liz inched closer to me and looked on in awe. "So, do you believe me now?"

"Okay, maybe. But what are these journals you were talking about?"

"I don't know what happened." I didn't want to think about the missing journals because it made me so uneasy I felt sick. "You put them in that suitcase in 1953 and asked me to bring them to you in 1993. I never opened the suitcase because you asked me not to read them and, well, honestly I didn't want to screw something up."

"So, someone took them."

"I'm sorry I don't have them, but I don't think we can get hung up on that right now. You told me that it's important that everything happens today in a certain way, so I'm here to make sure it does. We need to go out to the train bridge." I almost told her what she needed to bring with us, but then I decided it might be best to let her lead the way. "What would you bring if you were going to the bridge?"

"My Walkman and a joint," she answered without hesitation.

~~~~~~

Dry, brown leaves crunched under our feet and bare branches clattered in the breeze as we followed the railroad tracks to the bridge. Liz had parked her car at a gas station near the spot where the train tracks disappeared into the woods and gone in to buy some snacks and Tic Tac mints that she stuffed into her khaki shoulder bag covered in patches. With every step, the Tic Tacs rattled in her purse and the snack bags crinkled.

By 2016, the bridge and a long section of the railroad had been turned into a bike and pedestrian trail that I'd heard about but never seen, so when the trail opened up and the railroad tracks stretched ahead over a deep ravine, I was stunned. The entire region was flat farmland, so I assumed the train bridge went over a small creek or something.

"Whoa," I gasped. "There's no railing,"

"No, duh. It's a hundred year-old train bridge."

Liz walked along the railroad ties and I reluctantly followed her. There were gaps between the thick wood beams with a metal lattice running beneath them, with a view straight down to the massive steel structure holding us up, the tops of the trees below and a small river. Rays of light beamed down from a silver-lined cloud overhead and brightened patches of the colorless ravine, all in shades of grey and brown. Liz reached the middle of the bridge way ahead of me and walked back and forth tightrope style on one of the beams until I reached her.

"How am I doing so far?" she asked with a smirk. "At following my own instructions?"

"Just fine," I grumbled. The important part as far as I was concerned, making sure Michelle stayed home, was already done. I was already starting to regret agreeing to the rest of it. But if I backed out, she might go home and convince Michelle to come out with her, and I'd come too far to let that happen all over again.

Liz inched to the edge and held her arms out to her sides. "I wonder if this bridge is high enough to bungee jump off of."

She sat down and pulled a zippered sandwich bag and a lighter from her bag.

"So," she said after she took a couple of hits and passed the joint to me. "What's 2016 like?"

"Probably a lot the same." I considered it further while I grimaced and held the smoke in my lungs. "The hair is less voluminous and less...flammable."

"Hey, not all of us have mall hair."

"Well, you don't. You've got like a young Winona Ryder look going on."

"Why, thank you. I assume you mean Winona Ryder now and not, like, as an infant." She wrapped her flannel shirt tighter around herself and shivered. "So what else? What's the biggest difference between now and then?"

"Honestly, it's kind of boring. The biggest difference is probably that you can do pretty much anything on your phone. You can shop, order food, take pictures and videos, share pictures and videos, listen to music, watch TV, send text messages so you don't even have to talk to people, whatever."

"That is awesome." She took out a portable cassette player and a set of headphones. "We have at least seven different things to do all that." The thin headband part of the headphones was snapped in two, and she dangled one round, foam-covered speaker in front of me from the cord.

I flipped around to sit right next to her, and took the little speaker and awkwardly held it to my ear. "So, I just hold it here?"

"Yeah," she said with a scowl. "I'm sure you're used to something fancier."

The mixtape opened with Janis Joplin singing "Cry Baby." Liz tried to imitate Janis' raspy voice when she repeated a line about the road ending in Detroit and it gave me the chills.

"My parents met at Woodstock," she said when the song was over. She draped her busted half of the headphones around her neck by the wire and I copied her. "You'd never know it, because they're super lame now. I'd love to make it there, to Woodstock. Nineteen sixty-nine is at the top of my list. What's on yours?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"This is it for me." I'd debated on when would be the right time to hand over the note I'd written, but this seemed like it. I pulled the folded envelope from my pocket. "Open this once today is over, okay?"

"Mysterious." She grinned and tore open the envelope at the corner and I impulsively tried to grab it out of her hands. "Take a chill pill," she scolded. "I'll read it later."

The sounds of a harmonica rose out of the headphones and Liz pressed hers to her ear again. It was a Rolling Stones song.

"Don't you wish you could see them live back in the sixties?" I recited the line from memory.

She nodded her head to the music. "That's on the list, too. " She sighed. "My list is long." Then she squinted as she looked over my shoulder.

I turned my head and saw what caught her eye. At the edge of the woods, the figures of four men were walking toward the bridge and toward us.

"Let's bounce," she said, without taking her eyes off of them.

Liz shoved the Walkman in her bag and the headphones dangled behind her as she quickly skipped across the railroad ties toward the other side. The weed was hitting me, my feet seemed to move faster than my head wanted them to, and so I slowly made my way after her. When she saw me struggling, she stopped and reached back for my hand.

The voices of the guys behind us were getting louder. They were calling out to us and we started to run. When I moved my feet in time with hers and stopped thinking about each step, I felt like I was flying. The flight didn't last long before Liz's grip on my hand tightened and we were in freefall. I heard her stupid Tic Tacs crash and scatter.

Maybe it was the running start, but that time it was like a wave crashing over me and propelling me forward. Liz was still holding my hand when the wave retreated. We were sprawled out on the bridge still and there was a shrill whistling sound ringing in my ears.

"They're gone," Liz said breathlessly.

There was a pair of bright lights coming down the trail and the whistle sounded again. We scrambled to our feet and ran. Once we reached the end of the bridge we leapt onto the grassy slope.

The train rumbled past and while I practiced some deep breath, Liz was next to me rolling on the ground laughing. The Liz I'd known before was right when she warned me that I'd be dealing with a different version of her. This version was reckless and immature, and it was possible that I preferred the cold and sarcastic Liz.

Once the train was gone, we walked back to the gas station. Liz's car was gone and there was a different sign over the gas pumps. The yellow sign said "Stuckey's" in a retro orange script with "Pecans- Snack Bar- Candies" underneath.

"What do we do now?" Liz asked.

"What would Liz do?"

"I don't know who Liz is, but Beth would probably try to get the hell out of Palmer tonight."