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INTRO
Another Night
In most ways, Gap Bend, Pennsylvania, was just like any other small town. It had grocery stores and parks and an ice cream parlor and a pet shop. Kids were born, kids went to school, kids grew up. Some of those kids, when they became adults, moved off to other places. Many stayed and had kids of their own, and those kids went to school and grew up, and some of them moved, and some of them stayed. Throughout the years, some things about the town—the number of stoplights, the size of the public pool—changed, and other things—the names of the streets, the location of Town Hall—stayed the same.
But there was at least one thing about Gap Bend that wasn’t like anywhere else.
Every second Saturday in June, the Gap Bend Preservation Society transformed the local public school into a wonderland offestivities in order to celebrate a specific year from history. Three years ago, at the 1975 Time Hop, everyone snarfed down Pop Rocks and Peppermint Patties while watchingJaws and playing Wheel of Fortune with actual cash prizes. When they celebrated 1886 last year, the Junior History Club put on an elaborate reenactment of President Cleveland’s White House wedding, and afterward everyone headed outside to sip Coca-Cola and snack on California oranges while making the trek up the half-sized re‑creation of the Statue of Liberty. The Time Hop was a daylong blowout, with everything from a one-act play written and acted by a student volunteer committee to an “Epic Epoch” fashion show, open to anyone who wanted to participate. For just one day at the end of spring, Gap Bend, Pennsylvania, was, without a doubt, the most magical place on the planet.
So when she received the flyer in the mail, twelve-year-old McKinley O’Dair was mostly concerned with the fabulous costume she might create. This would be her first time sewing her very own outfit for the fashion show, so she was delighted to learn that this year’s theme was 1993—a true fashion lover’s gold mine. Oversize flannel shirts, teeny-tiny crop tops, and lots and lots of denim. It also happened to be the year that McKinley’s dad was in sixth grade—the same grade that she attended now, in 2018. But at the time, that didn’t seem to McKinley like anything more than an uncanny coincidence.
What McKinley didn’t know—what almost no one knew, except for those who’d had to learn the hard way—was that much more happened on the day of the Time Hop than a simple party. There was something else that happened, too. Something much bigger. Something almost unbelievable. McKinley wouldn’t’ve believed it if someone had told her about it beforehand.
But that was the thing, of course. No one told her. Those who didn’t know couldn’t. And those who did chose not to.
And so twelve-year-old McKinley O’Dair headed into that June day with absolutely no idea about the ways in which her world was about to change forever.
CHAPTER 1
All I Wanna Do
Later, what would strike McKinley O’Dair most about that Friday afternoon was just how completely normal it was. Her best friend, Meg, was propped upside down on the living room couch, her brown hair brushing the floor and her feet halfway up the wall, studying for the FACTS regional championship. Aunt Connie was pacing across the carpet on her phone, cheering on a new client. And McKinley was seated next to Grandma Bev in the corner of the room, both of them humming away at their side‑by‑side sewing machines as they put the finishing touches on their costumes for tomorrow’s Time Hop.
McKinley had never felt nearly so proud of anything she’d ever sewn as she was of that outfit. The idea had been hers, the design had been hers, and the make had been hers. She was wearing nearly all of it already—a shiny silver spaghetti strap dress over a white baby doll tee, a lace choker necklace, butterfly clips in her red-brown hair, and clunky Doc Martens boots. And althoughtechnically she was smack in the middle of living through 2018, McKinley wouldn’t have been at all out of place in the year 1993. As soon as she finished up the last seam on the denim vest, she’d be ready to walk across the stage in the fashion show tomorrow and let everyone see how hard she’d worked.
“Okay,” McKinley said at last, tugging the vest out from under the needle. She trimmed the threads and held it up. “What do you think?”
“It’s amazing!” Meg declared, flipping herself upright for a better look. “You’re super talented, McKinley, seriously.”
But Grandma Bev, who wasn’t always as quick to offer praise, was carefully inspecting the garment. “Sea—seam,” she said, running the fingers of her good hand over the vest’s raw edges.
“I know,” McKinley replied. Normally she’d never have left any piece unfinished—Grandma Bev had taught her better than that. “But the denim’s so thick. I couldn’t fold it over to . . .” She trailed off when Grandma Bev held up one finger. McKinley knew what that meant: there was a better way. “Ooh, show me.”
McKinley scooched her folding chair closer to watch as Grandma Bev dug through her box of fabric remnants, selecting a nice soft piece of seersucker, then got to work cutting it, inch by inch. Between every cut, Grandma Bev set down her scissors, shifted the book that she’d placed on top of the fabric to weigh it down, and took back up the scissors to cut again. Since she’d had her stroke, long before McKinley was born, Grandma Bev had to do everything with her left hand, and she was not left handed. But that hadn’t kept her from the things she loved—she’d just found new ways to make them happen.
It wasn’t until Grandma Bev began to attach the strip of seersucker along the inner vest seams that McKinley realized what she must be up to. “Oh, I saw this on YouTube!” McKinley said, bouncing a little in her seat. “It’s a Hong Kong seam, right? You fold the seersucker over next? To cover the rough edge?” Grandma Bev nodded, starting up her machine. “Cool.” When she’d finished demonstrating, Grandma Bev handed over the vest so McKinley could try for herself.
Once McKinley had gotten into a good rhythm on the machine, she got back to her other job, too—helping Meg study.
“All right, here’s a good one,” McKinley told Meg, pausing her sewing so she could enlarge the sample question on her phone. “Name the layers of the earth’s atmosphere.”
Meg repositioned herself upside down on the couch. (She said the extra blood flow to her brain helped her concentrate.) “Layer one,” she began, pointing and flexing her toes against the wall. Point, flex, point, flex. “Troposphere. Two: stratosphere.” She glanced at McKinley. “Three . . . metasphere?”
“Mesosphere,” McKinley corrected, squinting at the tough words to make sure she read them right. At the machine beside her, Grandma Bev lifted her foot off her pedal so Meg could hear more clearly. “Then it’s thermosphere, then exosphere, and ionosphere.”
Meg threw her hands over her face. “Gah!” she shouted. “I knew that! I’m just getting so nervous thinking about being up there all by myself for the first time ever and—”
“You are going to rock this,” McKinley assured her. “I was just weighing you down before.”
The truth was, the Federation of American Competitive Trivia for Students had always been more Meg’s thing than McKinley’s. Sure, it had been a blast going to competitions together over the years, silently cheering for each other between rounds onstage. Even all the studying had been pretty fun because they were doing it together. But McKinley was ready to find something new to do together, or, as Aunt Connie would say, to “shake up their routine.” McKinley already had her eye on all sorts of activities they could try out—babysitting, joining the school’s Film Appreciation Club, volunteering at the Gap Bend Animal Shelter . . .
Unfortunately, Meg didn’t seem quite as ready to move on as McKinley was. She’d needed a little push. So McKinley had made Meg a promise: If they got to nationals in DC, they’d stick with FACTS another year. If not, Meg had agreed to give something else a whirl. Which might have been the reason McKinley had had a hard time looking sad after she’d gotten kicked out during round two of the Pennsylvania state meet last month.
“Come on,” McKinley told Meg kindly. If this was Meg’s last year in FACTS, McKinley wanted to make sure she went out with a bang. “Hit me with a memory story.”
Meg stared at her toes, thinking. Point, flex, point, flex. It was McKinley’s dad who’d introduced Meg to the concept of “memory stories”—little tales that strung weird facts together and made them easier to remember. It was just one of the tricks Meg used to help herself with her learning disability. As McKinley’s dad liked to say, “A struggle is simply an opportunity to find a creative solution.”
“Got it!” Meg said finally. “I won a—troposphere—trophy, because of my—stratosphere—strategy for not—mesosphere—messing up my—thermosphere—thermal underwear when I—exosphere—exercise. And now I’ve got my—ionosphere—”
And because they’d been friends since before either of them could say “friends,” McKinley knew exactly where Meg’s brain was headed.
“Eye‑on‑a‑sphere!” McKinley hollered.
Only, of course, Meg said it at the same exact time.
“Pretzel point!” McKinley cried—at exactly the same time as Meg again. “Pretzel point! Pretzel point!” It ended up taking eight tries before Meg finally beat her.
“Muh—Muh—Meg wuh—won,” Grandma Bev declared, with her familiar half smile.
“Shoot!” McKinley shouted, but she was laughing. At the end of the week, whoever had the fewest points had to buy the other friend a soft pretzel during lunch. (Since they always split the pretzel anyway, losing was almost as good as winning.)
For the next half an hour, McKinley sewed and quizzed. Meg flexed and memorized. Grandma Bev pinned and snipped. And Aunt Connie paced and gabbed. Until, at last, McKinley finished the final seam on her vest. She slipped her arms through the armholes and turned a circle to show it off. “Better?” she asked, smoothing her palms over the skirt of her shiny silver dress.
“It’s puh—perfect,” Grandma Bev breathed. Her eyes were shiny, and she was smiling that familiar half smile. “Yuh—You’re perfect.”
McKinley beamed.
Aunt Connie finally ended her phone call. “You look delightful, kid,” she told McKinley. “You know what would really top off the ensemble, though?” And, seemingly from nowhere, she pulled out a crab-shaped hat and plopped it on McKinley’s head. It was red and fuzzy, with two big red claws and giant floppy eyes sprouting from the top. On the back were embroidered the words connie’s c.r.a.b.s.!
“Oh, yes,” McKinley said with a laugh. “Very chic, thank you.”
“Of course,” Aunt Connie replied. “You know I’ve got plenty more where that came from.”
She wasn’t kidding.
When Aunt Connie had started her life coaching business a few years back, she’d leaned hard into the crab theme—crab hats, crab flash drives, crab stress balls. Any promotional item thatcould be shaped like a crab was shaped like a crab. And it seemed to be working for her. Because even though McKinley’s dad liked to refer to life coaching as “bossing people around for money,” Aunt Connie had hundreds of loyal clients who swore by her methods. With only five simple steps, Aunt Connie claimed, anyone could change into the best version of themselves. All you had to do was “get crabby”:
1. count your blessings.
2. right your wrongs.
3. assess your neighbors.
4. better your world.
5. shake up your routine.
Technically, Aunt Connie wasn’t anyone’s aunt, but she’d more than earned the title. She and Grandma Bev had been friends since they’d gone to Gap Bend Public School together. After Grandma Bev’s husband had died when McKinley’s dad was only a baby, Aunt Connie had flown in from the West Coast to help out—and somehow never thought to book a return ticket. Years later, when a stroke took away most of Grandma Bev’s words and half her smile, it was Aunt Connie who made sure McKinley’s dad finished up school and “didn’t become a total no‑goodnik.” McKinley liked to think that this was the kind of friendship she and Meg would have when they were older (only hopefully with fewer terry cloth tracksuits, because no matter what Aunt Connie said, those things were not flattering).
Aunt Connie’s phone rang again. “Sorry!” she mouthed to the rest of them.“Client!” And she took off out the door, waving at McKinley’s father, who was just climbing the front steps on his way home from work.
McKinley’s eyes went wide when she spotted her dad. In all the excitement of finishing her Time Hop costume and helping Meg study, she’d completely forgotten to start prepping dinner. Which may not have been such a huge deal to most parents, but McKinley’s dad did not take his dinner schedule lightly.
Later, McKinley would wonder if it had been the meat loaf’s fault. If she’d just remembered to start dinner, maybe none of what happened next would’ve happened at all. Or maybe it was all that time she’d spent helping Meg. Or the extra attention she’d paid to her Time Hop costume. Maybe, just maybe, it was the little white lie she’d been telling for the past month. But whatever it was that set things into motion, the series of events that would begin to unravel in just a few short hours would change McKinley’s life forever.
They’d change everything, really.
Imported From: United States