Rewind Read Free

Looked.
    “Adam, you’re going to be late for school!” his dad’s voice boomed out.
    Adam opened his mouth to reply, but no sound came out.
    My old pajamas…the Monopoly game, with the cover still intact…the radio I threw out last year…
    WHAT IS GOING ON?
    His eye shot down to the bottom of the frame. To the electronic indicators.
    The correct time. The correct month and day.
    But Adam stared at the last numeral. The year.
    He clicked the RESET button. He tried to change the setting.
    Nothing happened.
    The YEAR setting was stuck.
    Four years earlier.

He doesn’t have much time.
Who?
    Adam.
I thought you meant the other one.

5
    A DAM RAN DOWN THE stairs two at a time. He darted past the kitchen.
    Please please please let this be a figment of my imagination.
    His mom and dad looked up curiously from the morning newspaper.
    “Forgot to do some homework,” Adam called out.
    He went into the den, pulled a blank video-cassette from a shelf, and tucked it under his shirt.
    If it’s not a figment, I want proof.
    He bounded back up to his room. Quickly he inserted the tape into the videocamera, pressed RECORD, and looked through the viewfinder.
    Yes.
    The old room filled the frame. The wrong year glowed on the indicator.
    He would have it on tape.
    Evidence.
    “Homework?” his dad’s voice thundered up from the kitchen. “Adam Sarno, I want an explanation now!”
    Adam jumped.
    “Coming!” He lowered the camera and set it on his desk. Then he ran for the door.
    And the room blipped.
    Not a flash of light, exactly. A flash of something. A momentary blur of colors. Along with an odd popping sound.
    Adam stopped. He looked over his shoulder. The videocamera was angled slightly away from him, pointing to the center of the room. Still on.
    Slowly he retraced his steps backward and sideways, closer to the camera’s line of sight.
    Blip.
    The old hockey uniform materialized on the floor. Under his foot.
    He choked back a gasp.
    Slowly he lifted his eyes upward.
    The videocamera had disappeared. Only the lens remained. It floated in the air, a hovering eye.
    Under it was a mess of papers.
    Fifth-grade homework.
    The Monopoly game, Mossflower, the spiral notebook. It was all exactly as he’d seen through the lens.
    But he wasn’t looking through the lens anymore.
    He was in front of it.
    In the room.
    In the past.
    Trapped.
    Panic raced through him. He had to get out.
    The lens. Move away from it.
    Adam darted to the left. Toward his door.
    Blip.
    The flash again. The shift in colors. The popping sound.
    He was back. His room was exactly the way he’d left it. The old stuff was gone.
    The videocamera was intact on his desk. Not just a floating lens.
    And Adam’s mind was racing.
    Can I control this?
    Can I go back and forth?
    Am I nuts?
    Before he could answer that last question, he stepped in front of the camera again.
    Blip.
    The flash and the popping noise no longer scared him.
    As the past reassembled itself, Adam took a long, hard look around.
    He noticed what he’d been too panicked to see before.
    The colors, for instance. They were muted, a little too brown. The sounds—a passing car, the hissing of the upstairs shower—were dull, softened.
    The light through the window was unusually bright. He looked out.
    Snow.
    He thought about what he’d seen through the viewfinder last night, outside of Lianna’s house. The bleached-out street.
    The camera wasn’t broken at all. I was seeing snow.
    He thought back to four years ago. Had it snowed then? He couldn’t remember.
    Adam walked across the room. He ran his fingers over the bedsheets. He reached behind his headboard and felt the hardened lumps of chewed bubble gum he’d always put there.
    Until Mom made me clean it all off. At age ten.
    He turned toward his shelves and saw a book— Time and Again by Jack Finney, which he hadn’t seen since he lent it to Lianna in seventh grade.
    He reached for it.
    His finger made contact. He could feel the texture of