Emperors of Time Read online

  The other Julie, the one not in the crib, was clearly upset. Tim could see her in the dim light, crying silently as she peered through the small crack between the wardrobe’s doors.

  Tim wished there was something he could do to help her, but he couldn’t talk to her, not with the baby’s mother still in the room. In the meantime, he had an idea for how he might be able to answer a question or two of his own. He pulled out the pen that he still had in his pocket from that day at school and used it to draw a small question mark on his side of the wardrobe.

  If Julie noticed, she didn’t say anything. It took her a full ten seconds to peel her eyes away from the crack in the door. When she did, she grabbed Tim’s hand. For a second, he thought she did this for comfort, and he suddenly felt bad that he hadn’t reached out to her first. Then he saw her other hand balled up into a fist and knew she must be holding the medallion.

  He braced himself for the journey then realized this was pointless. Quicker than changing the channel on a television set, and without any feeling of movement, they were sitting on the floor, not inside, but directly outside the wardrobe, in the exact spot they had been standing when they had left.

  The desk was back, the baby gone, but Julie was still there. She sniffled a little as she wiped a couple of tears away from her eyes.

  Tim was glad they were now alone now, so he could talk to Julie, but he still couldn’t think of anything useful to say. “What’s wrong?” he finally asked, lamely. For a second, she didn’t answer. She seemed to be gathering herself, but Tim couldn’t resist filling the silence by saying, “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  Julie shook her head, smiling sadly. She said, “No, sorry, it’s just… That’s the first time I ever remember seeing my mother.”

  Chapter 3

  The Pink Bicycle

  “Oh, I’m… I’m sorry,” said Tim, just now beginning to realize how little he knew about Julie’s family. She had vaguely mentioned having a stepmother, sure, but plenty of people had stepmothers… Tim had had no idea that Julie’s mother was gone.

  “It’s… well, it’s not as bad as it sounds, maybe… I mean, it’s bad but…” she was stammering, clearly shaken up. “She died when I was about a year old. Can’t have been much later than when we just were… I was an only child, so it was just me and my Dad for a while. My aunt came in to help for a bit, after that, and then my Dad met Stacie. She married my Dad when I was 4, and she’s great, seriously… I mean, I call her Stacie most of the time because she was never comfortable with me calling her ‘Mom’. She didn’t want to try to replace my real Mom… Still, you can tell she loves me… maybe just as much as she loves my brother, Mike, who they had together… He’s 9, by the way, so he gets home at… shoot, what time is it?” she was momentarily snapped out of her reminiscence.

  “It’s, ah…” Tim paused for a moment. He wondered whether his cell-phone time would still be reliable if he had, in fact, just travelled through time. Then, he noticed an alarm clock on Julie’s bedside table. “Oh! Four o’clock. So we were gone for… Just a couple minutes.”

  “Okay, Mike gets home at a quarter after. And we’d better be there to meet him at the bus stop, and then I’ll have to come back here without you. Time traveler or not, you would not believe the amount of tattling I’d be in for if Mikey found out that I had a boy in my bedroom,” Julie laughed lightly.

  Tim smiled. “My little sister’s the same way… Tattles on anything or anybody. Seriously, she tattled to my parents one time because the dog was licking itself.”

  Julie nodded, “I remember Suzie! Cute little girl, but a bit high strung.” In response to Tim’s surprised look, she stammered, “I mean, her name is Suzie, right?”

  “Sure,” Tim said. “But I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned her to you… I mean, she’s twelve, so it’s not like she would have come up to the table when we were talking at lunch.”

  “No!” Julie said. “I met her when I was over at your house a couple months ago! Back when we first started-- You seriously don’t remember all this? Hold on, no way…”

  “What?” asked Tim, starting to worry. Through her brief conversation with herself, Julie had gone from confused to an apparent moment of understanding, and right back to confusion.

  “Okay,” Julie said. “This is going to sound weird, but I’m getting the feeling that you’re not exactly the Tim I know. Or at least… I mean, I guess you are the Tim I know, because my Tim-- I mean the Tim that I think of when I think of you-- would have been able to answer my history questions like you did, and would have played that silly Mars and Venus game when we were walking, and he would have helped me out even if I sounded crazy, but… I think we don’t know each other as well in this… what’d Hopkins call it? In this timeline. But I definitely think you’re the same guy. Just to make sure, I’ll quiz you on a couple things in a little bit. First, do you want to check if whatever you wrote on the side of my wardrobe is still there?”

  “Oh, you saw that?” he asked as he went over to the wardrobe. He pulled a long dress aside to look at the spot where he had drawn his question mark on the wood.

  “Yes. I have tremendous peripheral vision. Comes from being a time-traveler, you know? You’ll get it soon,” she said. “Sorry for crying earlier, I know this isn’t easy on you either, you shouldn’t have to be my shoulder to cry on as well.”

  “No, I don’t mind,” said Tim. “It’s there, by the way. The question mark I drew. It’s faded a little over time, but it’s definitely still there. But seriously, you can cry if you need to. I’m here for you, you know?”

  “I appreciate it,” Julie acknowledged. “But I haven’t got time right now. I’ll be seeing Mikey in like ten minutes, and I wouldn’t want to have to explain it to him… In fact, do I look alright?” She wiped her eyes again, and gave an exaggeratedly sweet smile.

  Tim rolled his eyes at her expression, but then added sincerely, “You look more than alright.”

  Julie smiled sweetly again, but for real this time, and said, “Why thank you. Now let’s head out, shall we? I want to ask a couple more questions, to see how close you are to the Tim I know. Don’t worry, you’ve already proven yourself as cool in my book, at this point it’s mostly for curiosity. I want to know how the timelines are different… Timelines...” She shook her head, “Sorry, this is all still sinking in for me. I imagine it’s even worse for you, since you still thought I was making it up fifteen minutes ago. You holding up okay, buckaroo?”

  Tim laughed, “ I don’t know what your Tim put up with, but nobody has ever called me buckaroo. But yeah, I’m still processing. Every time I think too hard about it, I get kind of dizzy. We can literally travel through time! Or you can, anyway. I get to hitchhike.”

  “Anytime you want, buckaroo,” Julie agreed. The two had made their way back down the hallway and were now on the stairs. “Okay, first things first. Do I at least have your phone number? ‘Cause I think we’re probably going to want to talk or text tonight.”

  “I think so… I mean, we text sometimes…” said Tim.

  Julie pulled out her phone and manipulated a few things on the screen. “You won’t believe this, by the way,” she said as she walked out through the front door that Tim opened for her. “I’ve never seen that desk before, but I had this exact same phone in my timeline.”

  Tim nodded and said with a tone of exaggerated sagacity, “I guess some ideas are just good ideas, whether Lincoln got assassinated or not.”

  “Indeed,” agreed Julie. “Oh, okay, yeah I see some texts we sent each other… ah yes, you were helping me with a history project. Classic you. Well, that meshes. Let me see what else is the same. What do you do for fun?”

  “Read, I guess…” said Tim, a little embarrassed.

  “Yeah? Cool. Read what?” asked Julie.

  “Well, either history or…” Tim trailed off.

  “Hey, come on. Don’t be embarrassed, I really want to know. Besides, there’s nothing wrong w
ith reading fantasy… Witches, dragons, noble heroes… What’s not to like?”

  Tim’s jaw dropped when she said ‘fantasy.’ Just like his sister’s name, they had never talked about him reading fantasy books. “What, you can read my thoughts, now, too?” he accused, only half joking. If she could actually travel through time, who knew what else she could do?

  Julie shook her head. “No, in the other timeline I knew that you read books like that. We must have been a little closer there than we are here. Ah well… we’ve got plenty of time to fix that. For instance… Dog person, or cat person?”

  “Dog person, definitely. I remember you’re a cat person, right?” asked Tim.

  “Hey, yeah! See, we know the important stuff. What about ice cream flavor?” Julie asked.

  “Chocolate. You?” answered Tim.

  “Strawberry. Or sherbet. Or does that not count as ice-cream? Anything fruity and icy, I guess,” Julie responded.

  “Mmhmm, mmhmm…” said Tim, as if he was a journalist writing a big story on Julie. “And if you could be any type of dinosaur, what would it be?”

  Julie laughed. “And you know the answer to that question, in this timeline? How’d that come up?”

  Tim shrugged, “We have some pretty random conversations at lunch, I guess.”

  “Well, we haven’t had that particular conversation in my timeline, and I’m almost embarrassed to say I haven’t thought about it. But… probably a brontosaurus.”

  “Because of the neck, right?” asked Tim. “That’s what you said at lunch a couple weeks back, anyway.”

  “Well, yes, the neck’s cool. And the tail. I mean, the thing was over 60 feet. The tail was twenty feet long, and the neck was ten feet. Can you imagine anything quite so ridiculous? And if it helps, I would be a giraffe if I could be any non-human mammal,” Julie confided. They had now reached the intersection of the cul de sac with the main street of the development. Tim assumed this was where the bus would drop Julie’s brother off.

  Tim grinned. “I actually knew that, too. So, are you happy? Am I the Tim you knew before?”

  “Yeah, more or less,” said Julie, who sounded sincere, but not quite completely satisfied. At this point, though, a big yellow bus came rolling down the road. “Well, you might as well meet Mikey, then.”

  Two girls and a boy who looked a little like Julie came darting off the bus with oversized book bags.

  The boy ran over to Julie. “Who’s this?” he asked at about triple the volume that would have been necessary.

  “A friend of mine,” said Julie patiently. “His name’s Tim.”

  “Ooooh… Tim. Do you like him?!” Mikey asked.

  Julie ignored the question and said, “We were just hanging out, walking around the neighborhood. But he’s got to go home now. My bike should be in the garage, I think, if you didn’t steal it again Mikey.”

  “Never! It’s pink!” Mikey shouted, with much of the same outraged tone of denial that he might have used if he had been accused of passing gas in the middle of class.

  “Oh, no?” asked Julie patiently, in what was clearly a practiced big-sister voice. “You would never steal it?”

  “Come on! I was six!” said Mikey indignantly. “I don’t bring up things you did when you were six!”

  “That’s because you weren’t born at the time. But about the bike,” said Julie, who had to speak over Mikey’s accusations that there were things she’d done last week that she didn’t want Tim knowing about, either. “Tim, if you wanted to borrow it to get home, you can. You live about three miles away, right? That’s pretty far to walk.”

  “Er, yeah… that would be great,” said Tim, without much enthusiasm.

  So, Tim made his three mile journey home on Julie Chapman’s pink bike. He thought about the fact that he had just spent more time alone with Julie than he had ever done before, but was also trying to get his mind to stop reeling over the fact that, speaking of time, he and Julie had just traveled back and forth through it. He had dozens of questions, ranging from what they should do next about the time travelling issue to just what exactly Julie had been doing last week that Mikey thought she wouldn’t want Tim knowing about. But as far as today went, Tim could at least categorically say it hadn’t been dull.

  Later that night, Tim was less than thrilled when he realized that, even with the prospect of time travel on the table, he couldn’t bring himself to initiate a phone call with Julie. It turned out to be a moot point when his phone lit up and showed Julie’s name and number at 7:03. As he reached to pick up the phone, his heart thumped in his chest in a way that wasn’t completely related to the excitement of time travel.

  “Hey,” said Tim.

  “Hello,” said Julie. “So… I’ve been thinking about next steps. Now, I don’t want to sound like a dork, but with something like time travel, I think it’s a good idea to stick to the rules until we know more. So the things I think are on our to-do list-- well, my to-do list… it’s only our to-do list if you agree to help. But the things on my to-do list are finding two more confidantes and digging up whatever’s buried next to the oak tree in my backyard. Hopkins made it sound like there would be some more information in it. Thoughts?”

  “Well, it sounds like you have to be the one to pick the confidantes,” said Tim.

  “I’m asking for your help, though,” said Julie amicably.

  “Yeah, but, Hopkins made it sound like it hinges on you. And you just said we’d follow the time travel guru’s rules,” argued Tim.

  Julie laughed. “The time travel guru? All right, fine, I suppose they can be my confidantes.”

  “Good,” said Tim. “Besides, I’m not even sure I have any confidantes. I mean, my best friend is Sam, from lunch, and I’m not sure I’d trust him to watch my french fries. I mean, he’s a nice guy and all but… I just think he’s more someone to joke around with than the kind of guy I’d have watch my back. You know?”

  “I guess,” said Julie. “Well, I can think of a couple people who I’d want to watch my back, but I’ve got to make sure they’re the same people in this timeline as in mine. For instance: Have I ever mentioned Rose Williams?”

  Tim thought for a minute. “Yeah. You guys are best friends or something. She lives a couple doors down from you but goes to some private school… The Catholic school, I think? I’ve never met her, but you’ve talked about her. You’ve taught me a few card games you play with her, I think. She’s way into card games, from what you’ve said,” Tim remembered.

  “Bingo!” said Julie. “Good, I’m glad Rose won’t look at me like I’m crazy if I try talking to her tomorrow. I swear, that happened to me on the way to lunch today. I was just beginning to think I had been imagining all the time travel stuff, and then I said ‘hi’ to Lucy Peterson, who I was pretty good friends with, like… yesterday… and she looked at me like it was the strangest thing she’d ever heard. So if I looked confused when I came into lunch today, that was why.”

  “Was a lot different?” Tim asked. “Like at school? You didn’t seem to know who Mr. Kauffman was… He’s the history teacher, remember?”

  “Right. No, yeah… he wasn’t in my timeline at all. Um… well, he might have existed, but not at our school. A couple of teachers are the same though. I would have been completely lost if I didn’t still have my schedule from the beginning of the year, although I did forget to look at it at lunch, so I had to check with Bridget about where to go next. So if you’ve ever thought I was silly for carrying it around halfway into the school year, I just found a situation where it still comes in handy to have.”

  “Touche,” granted Tim. “Sounds like you didn’t have too much trouble adjusting, then?”

  “Except for where I was supposed to sit. In most classes I just stood around at the back of the room until someone said, ‘Julie, aren’t you going to sit down?’ and pointed to my seat or something, or I waited until only one seat was open. Only the math teacher had to call me out for sitting in the wrong place,
and I made up for it later by, you know… being a math whiz.”

  Tim chuckled. “Sure. So… back to your checklist, it sounds like Rose would be a good confidante, since she’s your best friend,” he paused. “By the way. Why did you tell me? I mean, I can’t be the only person you know who could tell you who the 17th President was, right?”

  “Yeah, I…” Julie hesitated. “I’m starting to think it didn’t happen in this timeline.”

  “What didn’t?” Tim asked.

  “Doesn’t matter. We’ll talk about it another time, okay? Right now, I need to go watch evening television with my family. Apparently that’s something we do in this timeline. Weird. But tomorrow, you’ve got to meet Rose, okay? I think she’ll be good to help us with this, and also she really does play a mean card game. Maybe you can walk home with me after school again and we can figure out the best way to break all this to her. You in?” she asked.

  Tim decided not to press the topic of why she trusted him. She was right that there were other things to be thinking about at the moment. And while it did seem weird to be focusing on following Hopkins’ instructions so closely, he was the only person Tim had heard of who seemed to understand what this time travel was all about. Tim figured he should try to stop his head from spinning with ideas of other timelines, Julie’s unknown motives, and super powerful microchips that could alter time. For now, he would just focus on the two steps they could understand right now. Get two more confidantes and dig next to the oak tree. All the rest, he hoped, would make sense in due time. “Yeah, sure… I’m in.”

  Chapter 4

  The Old Oak Tree

  Not a lot happened the next day at school. Julie was her normal self and started finding people who talked back to her when she said hi, instead of just looking at her like a weirdo. By the break between third and fourth period, Tim saw her joking with a bunch of the popular kids, including Billy Connell, a senior from the basketball team. Julie waved at Tim as he passed, but Tim just gave a curt nod, not because he was angry or anything, but because some of those kids made him nervous. To be honest, as much as Tim liked talking to Julie, he wasn’t so loquacious around too many other people.