Read Parallel: The Secret Life of Jordan McKay Online
Authors: Abra Ebner
A sharp laugh escaped his lips. “Hardly.” He hesitated for a moment before grabbing my hand, and I felt my heart stop. “Just because I look perfect,” he touched his chest, “Doesn’t mean I am, inside.”
I frowned as I wondered what he meant, finding the conversation far too advanced for elementary school kids. Was he sick, perhaps? Was he crazy? A million options as to why he was anything but perfect racked my mind, but I came up with nothing other than the fact that he seemed smart.
Since the accident, I had grown up fast and I always outsmarted the other children at every task, ignoring my childish desires and embracing maturity. I was too damaged to get away with acting clumsy and careless. The fact was, I didn’t fit in no matter what aspect. I was too smart and too ugly, two things kids my age did not typically relate with.
“How did it happen?” He squeezed my hand, and I felt as though he already knew.
I lowered my gaze. “It was a car accident.”
He watched me with steady eyes as the girls across the aisle began to whisper to each other in a way that I knew meant they were talking about me.
“My mother and I…” Tears grew in my eyes but I held them at bay. “My mother and I got rear-ended by a semi-truck in the city, the tanks exploded and I was stuck. My mother made it out and she managed to grab me, but it was too late and my face had been burned. I was in the hospital for months as they worked to graft the skin.” My guard failed as a tear fell from my eye and I was surprised as Jordan wiped it away. “It was never the same.” I pulled up the sleeve of my shirt, “Twenty percent of my body was burned but I would give anything if it were the twenty percent that didn’t include my face. That alone would change everything.”
“When did it happen? What was the date?” He seemed adamant about this question as though it mattered.
I laughed. “Why? You think you can change this? Do you own a time machine, a Delorean?” I continued to laugh, but his face remained straight and my laughter faded. I narrowed my eyes. “Who are you really?”
He laughed then. “I was just curious Kenzie. I just wanted to know you.”
I felt awkward, “Well…” I shrugged, “For what it’s worth, it was in the summer, August 22nd, three years ago.”
He looked toward the ceiling of the bus. “So that was 1991?”
I watched as he repeated the date under his breath, shaking my head and realizing that though he was cute, it was true that he was a little odd.
“So where did it happen?” He was brave to keep pushing for answers like this.
I swallowed, not exactly finding myself excited about this conversation. “It happened where Southampton meets Massachusetts Avenue, where the packing plants are.”
He smiled then and nodded, taking a moment to consider this before changing the subject. “I don’t see why you think so little of yourself; I don’t see why you can’t be the Homecoming Queen and date the cute guys.” He smirked, “No matter what, Kenzie, you will always be the person you are inside. Someone will see that one day.”
He released my hand, and I discreetly wiped the sweat from my palm on my dress.
“Well, I hope so,” I snorted.
As the bus came to a halt outside the school and the noise in the cabin grew loud, I knew our conversation was over. Jordan picked up his bag, and I noticed how out of date and used it was. His clothes and overall style seemed up to date, but the bag threw me off. I gathered my things and slung my backpack over my back, gripping the straps with nervous hands.
Jordan turned to me. “Well, Kenzie, hopefully I will meet you again.”
I gave him another strange look. “Sure…”
And with that, he turned and walked off the bus, cutting through the students and heading through the school as though he knew exactly where he was going. Whoever Jordan was, I found my heart would not slow down. Something about him was far more exhilarating than anything I had ever done, anything that had ever happened to me, and I liked it.
Statement from Dr. Ashcroft,
Vincent Memorial Hospital, Boston
August 4, 2009
01:36 a.m.
Agent Donnery:
Oh, wow, so you really remember that conversation pretty well.
Dr Ashcroft:
Yes, I had dreams about it for years, and then of course, dreams about what really happened, because I had met him again in the same situation on the same bus on the same day, only I was no longer ugly.
Agent Donnery:
What’s next?
Dr. Ashcroft:
Well it continues from there, but this is the part I didn’t know about, so I’ll just read what he said.
Formulated from the journals
of Patient #32185
August 22, 1991
12:54 p.m.
I cursed to myself as I remembered that I hadn’t asked Kenzie what time the accident had happened. I entered the front hall of my old house down the lane, the floor dented and cracked below my feet from the force of my landing, my blood boiling as I waited for it to cool before I pressed forward.
I was still wearing the same clothes from the bus, seeing as I left right away, unable to bear letting her suffer with such unhappiness much longer. My green coat now swam on me and the hat was loose so I took it off my head and shoved it in my bag. I was nine again, my favorite age.
It had taken me a while to get to this specific incident in her life, to save her from her scars. First, I wanted to see what sort of life she had endured on both paths, to make sure I wasn’t making a huge mistake by changing this moment, because God knows it would be impossible, not to mention sadistic, to try and change it back in the future.
Pulling at the belt of my now oversized pants I managed to fasten them enough that they could stay up while I walked out the front door of the green house down the lane. I sighed. By now, the house had been abandoned. At eighteen, the house would officially be mine when the trust is released from the bank, but for now, the house was theirs, and I missed it.
The front yard still held a sense of order, and a few tulips left their petals spread across the ground. The blue flowers that lined the drive had now burned out under the hot summer sun of Boston and lay limp across the barren dirt, overgrown and wild. The path looked better than it had three years in the future, and I marveled at its youth, though it was anything but pretty. There was a stone by the driveway where acrylic paint still clung to the surface, spelling out my last name, McKay.
My mother and I had painted it one day while my father was out working odd jobs and spending hours at the bar with his buddies. We had laughed and made a mess. She had been beautiful in her joy. I only wish she could have had a better life, but there was nothing I could do to change that. I was born after they had been married, so I couldn’t travel back to before, and until I was old enough to talk, there was little I could say to save her. I often visited those days, just to have her there to hold me before she died.
Though I tried, I could not save her from the cancer; it was too advanced and too aggressive to ever stop, but God knows I did all I could. There had at least been the few years after I had managed to get her out and away from my father. He was too proud to allow her a divorce after we had run away, even on her deathbed. I found it was hard for me to resist the urge to kill him, but I had to. Murder was never a path I wanted to travel down, no matter what my talents of evasion were.
My father was a tyrant. A man deeply tormented by what could only be described as the devil himself, and to my relief, he died not too long after her. Because of what I had said the day I had saved Rover, my mother had left him when I was four, and that was why her car had been gone that day in the beginning when I had come home to the green house at the end of the lane that was no longer my home; where my father no longer recognized my face or even cared. When we left, my father took to drinking more than in the life where we had stayed, and his liver did not last.
I was all alone now, from age seven on. Luckily I did have my condition, so at times it felt good to see her, to tell her I loved her, even though it made no difference now. I sometimes wondered if she could see me from Heaven, if there even was a Heaven. If so, I wondered what she thought of me, my skill and my curse. Telling her had never been something that had made sense. She had enough to deal with already.
I dragged my feet across the cement by the painted rock, pressing forward as Rover ran to the fence and wagged his tail. He didn’t bark anymore, he was so used to seeing me at this point that he’d given up. Though the house wasn’t yet mine, that didn’t mean I didn’t still use it as a crash pad of sorts. There was little the bank could do but let it sit, so everything down to the silverware remained inside. They never noticed, and it was in that fact that I knew they didn’t care either. We were twenty busy street blocks away, and too much of an inconvenience to have an agent check in on the house once a month.
As I walked, I pulled my bag from my back. After discovering my talents, I spent a few years figuring it out, traveling through time and visiting my entire life as it had been intended, before I discovered my abilities. It had been a lovely life, full of happiness, sorrow and pain, but no Kenzie. I saw my death at age eighty three, and my birth, all things you’d expect to see. As I traveled, I found my brain expanded, gaining the knowledge of a life spent in college and the fulfillment of great friends, leaving my heart ready for the loneliness I felt now, and the knowledge to keep it all straight.
I took the bag everywhere with me and it was the last thing I had taken when my mother died, the last bit of that life I still owned. Unzipping the worn canvas, I reached in to search for a knife. There were stacks of papers and journals now, each a depiction of what I saw, and a new one depicting our life, Kenzie’s life.
I hadn’t had time to formulate a plan to stop the scars from occurring, so I decided the knife was my best bet. Looking up, I saw Kenzie’s house just ahead, shaded by a large willow. Each yard was well spaced for the city, and each still as perfect as they had been three years in the future, though the trees and bushes were smaller and more manageable. The fact that Kenzie had ended up being my neighbor felt strange, like an omen. It was fate that I had actually met her at age twenty-five, before I ever met her when she was four. God must have decided then that we were important to each other, and that’s why he gave me a second chance at finding her.
I remembered the day in the park, the day I also found out that my father no longer knew who I was, seeing that I’d been handed over into child custody after my mother’s death instead of living with him alone, as I had been before all this. I let out a deep breath, finding life was now too complicated to keep track of.
Looking around the neighborhood, I was relieved to see that no one was around to witness what I was about to do; not that it mattered anyway. I walked up the drive, where I knelt behind Kenzie’s mother’s car. I took a deep breath and peered around the bumper, looking into the front windows, seeing there was no movement. Exhaling, I stood and walked a circle around the car, discreetly piercing the knife through each tire, flattening them as the air squealed through the slits.
The neighborhood dogs began to bark, and I quickly ran around the back of their house toward the kitchen window were I saw her mother look toward the front door, a concerned frown on her face. She wiped her hands with her apron, leaving the pie she was about to place in the oven on the counter. I smiled, finding that though it was wrong, it was also fun to watch.
Kenzie sat at the other end of the counter at age seven with a bowl of cereal, unfazed by her mother’s worries, her face still beautiful and her eyes full of happiness and hope for the future. I heard a yelp from the front of the house and saw Kenzie jump, her eyes lifting from her bowl to the front door, her mouth hanging open.
Kenzie’s mother stormed in then. “These neighborhood hooligans,” she muttered.
“What’s wrong, mommy?” Kenzie dropped her spoon and swallowed a mouthful of Cheerios, placing her doll on the counter and adjusting her doll’s dress.
“Oh, nothing, honey,” She grabbed the phone from the wall and began dialing. After a pause she opened her mouth. “Hi, doctor LeRoy? We need to cancel our appointment. There’s been an incident here. Can we reschedule?”
A smile grew across my face. It had worked. Feeling content, I snuck back out from behind the house and walked down the street toward my own. Walking through the tall weeds and into the backyard, I quickly tried to imagine what the intersection at Southampton and Massachusetts Avenue looked like, getting there just a few moments later as I appeared in the street out of thin air, my arms flailing as they tried to pull through time. I winced as a large semi blew its horn on the street, masking the noise I had made as I crashed through time.
A bum that was resting in the doorway I had ducked into jolted up from his sleep and looked at me with shock, appearing drunk and confused. I gave him a hard stare as the pain in my bones subsided, threatening him in a way that made him shut up and look away. He receded into his grungy sleeping bag, where I heard the clank of glass bottles and tin cans.
I leaned against the building, watching the people pass by. After about an hour, I saw the semi-truck that had caused the accident come down the street, stopping at the light, and then heading on as though nothing had ever happened. I always liked to watch the things I had changed, half out of ego and half to make sure I hadn’t harmed someone else by doing so.
Content, I left the streets and ducked into a dark alleyway, headed out of this time and into another, anxious to see Kenzie again. I had put an end to one path of her life, leaving nothing but the life she now lived. It felt good to purge it away, erase the pain and start over. It was time to concentrate on the future now, and make the shift to a better life.