The next night, I dreamt that I was lost in a maze of windowless hallways in the bathhouse back at the Elmwood Hotel. When I reached the dead end of another corridor, the dim light from the flickering oil lamps on the walls extinguished and water rushed in and flooded the hallway. The current was too strong to walk or swim against and I panicked as the water rose rapidly and violently. Once the water reached my chin, I woke up gasping for air.

My phone dinged and I swatted at the nightstand to turn my alarm off. But it wasn't time to wake up. It was three o'clock in the morning and my phone was flashing with incoming text notifications. I squinted at the screen. There were three messages from Eric.

     I know you won't answer this

     And I know you hate me

     But I want you to know it's not mutual

I responded while my brain was still foggy from sleep, before I could think clearly.

        I don't hate you

        I'm sorry I come off that way

        You might care too much about what people think of you

         If it's keeping you up at night

He responded right away.

     Eric: What's keeping you up?

      Vanessa: I just woke up actually

I typed out Thanks to your texts and then deleted it.

     Vanessa: Nightmare

    Eric: About what?

     Vanessa: Drowning

    Eric: I'm sorry

    Vanessa: Don't be

                        You woke me up from it

                        So thank you

     Eric: Anytime

                Sweet dreams

I fell back into a dreamless sleep for the rest of the night and woke up with the unsettling feeling that I'd done something wrong. It was a feeling I'd become used to, though, after a summer of time traveling and anticipating delayed consequences. I was afraid one day I'd wake up and a change I'd made to the past would have caught up somehow and I'd live a different life in another town or my brother wouldn't exist or the earth would be plunged into a state of nuclear warfare.

Between this particular worry and the nightmares, I rarely woke in a state of rested calm.

The dream where I nearly drowned in the Elmwood bathhouse wasn't the only one that woke me in a panic. In one nightmare, I was sitting fully clothed in a mineral-stained porcelain bathtub in a dark room and scalding sulfurous water poured down on me from the ceiling.

Another night I was treading water in the middle of the river while the bow of a massive ship cut through the waves heading directly toward me. I awoke with the shriek of the boat's steam whistle still ringing in my ears.

Once I was chopping carrots into little coins in a 1950s era kitchen and an old country song was playing on a crackling radio. As the chugging train rhythm of the song sped up I chopped faster and faster until I sliced into my fingertip. I didn't notice everything was in black and white until I held my hand under the faucet in the kitchen sink and I watched bright red blood swirl down the drain. That one was weird.

While the nightmares filled me with dread and fractured my sleep, my daydreams where I relived happy moments with Pete broke my heart over and over. Sometimes I didn't know which was worse.

I read my middle of the night texts with Eric while I ate breakfast. I was relieved that I hadn't said anything terribly mean or embarrassing in my disoriented state, but I wasn't happy that I'd let my guard down and sent more than my usual one word responses. Later that day I regretted responding at all.

When I dozed off in World History class, Eric reached across the aisle and gently shook my shoulder to wake me. He let his hand linger there until I shrugged it off. He brushed his hand against mine when we passed in the hall and playfully ruffled my bangs when he walked by my desk in AP Bio.

After school, I re-read our texts to make sure I hadn't said anything or accidentally thrown in an emoji that could have been interpreted as an invitation for casual physical contact. Nothing. Did he think that I stormed off Saturday night because I was jealous? That would make sense. He was generally wanted and overly confident. He had no idea I left because I'd possibly manipulated time, and in doing so, manipulated him by separating him from Sophie, even if it was for only a few minutes.

It occurred to me that maybe Sophie and Eric had already been together for weeks and I hadn't noticed because Sophie and I weren't talking and I was always lost in my own head. If so, the whole thing would probably be over soon anyway. I'd seen it all play out before between Eric and other girls. The flirting, the hallway hand-holding, then the beyond hand-holding PDA, followed by the swift, yet amicable split. Nobody ever seemed to have anything bad to say about him afterward. It was the same story every time. He was just so busy with sports and volunteering and everything that he didn't have enough time for a 'real relationship', whatever that meant. I'd always assumed Eric was just boring. A great boyfriend in theory, but with little personality behind all the athletic and academic ability and really nice hair and the broad smile with the dimples.

I texted Sophie to ask her to eat lunch outside with me the next day. We had to talk.

~~~~~~

I waited for Sophie at a picnic table under a red maple tree at the edge of the courtyard, where I hoped nobody could overhear us. But I didn't have anything to worry about because it was chilly, with thick gray clouds threatening rain, and a few minutes after the bell rang the courtyard remained mostly empty.

Sophie dropped her lunch bag on the table and sat across from me, looking like she anticipated this conversation about as much as I did. She pulled the hood of her black sweatshirt over her head, flattening her dark curls, and sat on her hands to shield herself from the cold metal bench. Or to restrain herself from initiating physical violence.

"Blink three times if I'm right," she said quietly. "Were you getting an abortion?"

"No, nothing like that."

"Eric said I probably don't want to know where you were. Does he know?"

I pressed my mouth shut and shook my head. I knew if I even tried to say the word "no" it would come out with an unconvincing lilt of a question mark at the end.

"What's happening there? With you and Eric?" I asked hesitantly.

"I don't know." She shrugged. "Nothing yet."

"Do you want it to?"

"I mean, yeah. He was always cute but he got hot this summer. I don't know if it's because he grew his hair out or did all that training for football or what, but something happened there. Add me to the list, I guess," she said with an eye roll and a sheepish grin.

"What about Jason?" I knew it was a stupid, immature thing to say as soon as it came out of my mouth. Sophie's unrequited love for my older brother was something I'd opposed for years.

"What about Jason? Come on, Vanessa. I act like I'm in love with your brother just to get on your nerves. I'm not in love with Jason. He has a girlfriend and he smells like patchouli. You know how I feel about patchouli."

I unexpectedly became defensive of my stupid brother. "He doesn't have a girlfriend actually, they broke up. And the patchouli is not his fault, it's his roommates. Wait, why do you know what Jason smells like?"

When did Sophie and Jason get close enough for her to smell the residual patchouli incense on his clothes from his college house? I never heard why he and his girlfriend, Simone, broke up at the end of the summer. What happened back here while I was gone?

Sophie didn't answer my question. She stared blankly at her untouched lunch bag until she quietly asked, "Oh, they broke up?"

"Sof! Did you and my brother..." My mouth fell open. I couldn't even say the words.

She snapped out of her daze and started nervously pulling at the ends of her hair. "We got into your accounts when you were missing. Your passwords suck by the way, you should probably change them. There weren't even any DMs from predatory guys or cult leaders or...anyone besides me, really, so it didn't help."

"I can't believe you and Jason got together to infringe on my privacy." I was more stunned than angry.

"We were trying to find you."

When I looked at my friend, I saw my snarky, cynical and judgemental equal. I knew that if our roles were reversed and Sophie ever told me what I was considering telling her, I'd absolutely think she was messing with me. She might even end up angrier with me if I told her the truth because she would never believe it.

"I went on a road trip," I blurted. "With the guy from the summer."

Her eyes widened in shock. "A road trip? Where? What happened?"

"Nothing happened. We wanted to go to the ocean so we drove to North Carolina, but there was nowhere to stay because it was so busy. We slept in his car for a couple of nights and then came back."

"What were you thinking?!"

"I don't know. End of summer recklessness? I needed a change of scenery? I don't know."

She threw her hands in the air in exasperation. "If you needed a change of scenery, you could have actually come up north with us. My mom said you have an open invitation."

"Your cabin is so scary."

"Scarier than driving out of state with some guy you barely know, without your phone and without telling anyone where you were going? I could've taken down the taxidermied deer head at the cabin and stuffed it in a closet."

"And the creepy old black and white family pictures? And the ax on the wall?"

"Yes! Whatever was triggering for you, I'd take it and stuff it in the closet. Kitchen knives, mouse traps, musty seventies throw pillows, my stepdad, whatever!"

We both snickered. "Sorry," I said. "I'm just picturing you shoving Jeremy into a spare closet full of sheets that smell like moth balls and boxes of puzzles and crap."

Sophie grinned. "Me too. He's so high all the time he probably wouldn't even notice."

Then her smile flattened as she turned serious again. "So what happened with the guy, Pete, right? Do you still talk?"

My throat tightened at the sound of his name.

"No. He went back to school, so that's over."

"When you were gone, I told people everything you told me about him- which was barely anything- that his name was Pete and he was working at an oil change place for the summer while he was home from college and that turned up nobody, and I felt terrible. I thought maybe I misheard you or forgot some detail you told me. I thought I should have asked you more questions or made you introduce me to him. I felt like some part of all that was my fault because sometimes I told your mom you were at my house when you were with some guy I didn't know."

"Because I asked you to do that for me. I am so sorry, Sof. I took advantage of you and lied to you and if you're mad at me forever, I deserve it."

"You know I'm not gonna be mad at you forever. We'll have to get along when I'm your sister-in-law someday," she said with a wicked grin.

I groaned.

"Why did you think you couldn't tell me where you went?" she asked.

"Because it's stupid! It's like when you came back from camp with your face all busted up and your front tooth chipped and told everyone you got in a fight, but you really just fell out of the bunk bed."

"This is not like that at all. I thought you were dead, and then when you turned up not dead, I imagined all the worst things that could have happened to you that you wouldn't want to tell me about. I was mad at you, but I still wanted to be there for you, and you wouldn't even talk to me." Her voice broke a little and she rolled her eyes. "Sorry. I know we're not, like, friends who hug and talk about feelings all the time. But those few days you were missing were like the scariest time of my life."

"I'm really sorry, Sophie."

"Thanks for telling me the truth." As she leaned toward me with a small smile on her face, guilt burned inside me and I wondered if things between us would ever truly be the same again.

"You're not gonna hug me are you?" I asked, bracing myself.

"God, no." She pulled a sandwich out of her lunch bag. "Aw, look at Josh."

Laura's brother, Josh, was eating lunch with a girl at another table. He was a freshman, and an extremely shy germaphobe who disliked everything to do with the outdoors: extreme temperatures, bugs, rain, allergens, the sun. He must have been taking a big step outside of his comfort zone and I felt a little surge of pride for him. Josh and the girl he was with were sitting side-by-side, looking at something laying flat on the table and talking excitedly in low voices.

Three other freshman boys passing through the courtyard walked by their table, then the one with the most confident swagger stopped and backed up. He picked up the book they were looking at, held it inches from his face as he pretended to read it and then sneezed grotesquely. He set the book back on the table, wiped his nose and swiped his fingers across the pages, crinkling them as he snickered. Josh's ears turned red as he looked on helplessly and the girl frowned but said nothing.

"That little asshole," Sophie muttered.

A protective rage came over me and as I glared at that little jerk and felt my jaw clenching, I noticed a change in the air. It was more than the wind picking up and a few fat raindrops pinging against the metal tables. I felt a bit dizzy and closed my eyes. It was happening again. When I opened my eyes, the three boys were gone. I ran over to the door to the courtyard they'd come through.

When the same kid pushed the door open, I stopped it with my foot. "Go around," I said through the opening.

"Why?" He scowled and tried to step around me.

I blocked his way and widened my eyes as if I'd just seen something shockingly horrific. "You don't want to know. Trust me."

He craned his neck to see into the courtyard, but then gave up easier than I expected. He turned to his friends and shrugged and they followed him down the hallway. Back at our table, Sophie was packing her lunch back into her bag.

"What were you doing?" she asked.

I glanced behind me. "Throwing something away."

Josh and the girl were huddled closer together with their backs against the wind. I may not have prevented that little tyrant from bothering them forever, but I did for a minute. And I liked to think it was a meaningful minute. Maybe I had more control over this thing than I thought.

~~~~~~

Vanessa: Jason. What exactly were you and Sophie up to when I was gone?

Jason: Relax. All I saw was that you and Sophie like to send each other posts of dogs with human hands doing human things and baked goods unintentionally shaped like dicks. You two are weirdos.

I was glad to have my weirdo back. Kind of.

Vanessa: That's it then? Social media account hacking only?

Jason: Don't worry about it.

His reply was about as much of a non-answer as it gets, which obviously made me worry about it.