I took a swallow, finding the beer very tasty despite the early hour. "Not bad." I told her, drinking some more.
"Okay," She said. "Enough preliminaries. Let's talk."
I set my bottle down on the coffee table, struck by the strangeness of drinking a beer while still dressed in the clothes I'd slept in, my baggy sweats and a T-shirt. Tracy too was still dressed in her customary long T-shirt, this one with the University's logo on the front. Her legs were crossed Indian style on the couch, her eyes looking expectantly at me. I still had no idea what I was going to tell her, how much I should tell her.
"Why don't we start," I told her. "With what you DO know and what you think is going on here. Tell me that."
"Why do you want to hear that?" She asked.
"I just want to see how this whole thing looks to someone close to me."
She thought for a second and then nodded, taking another sip of beer. "Fair enough." She told me. "Here's what I know. I know that the day you told me about the accident I was scheduled to be in the first time, your personality underwent a radical change. One day you were immature little Billy, the next day you were hugging on me, telling me you loved me, and you weren't sure of the exact date. You got into a fight with a huge bully at school, something completely out of character for you, and you put him in the hospital. You came home that day and caught us smoking pot in the living room and you reamed us for it, the same way an adult would, but also different somehow. You also made Cindy's asshole boyfriend back down, and let me tell you, he doesn't back down too often.
"So I'm forced to conclude that whatever happened to you, happened on that day. Am I right?"
I nodded. "Yes. That was the first day."
"That night you came to my room and told me that creepy-ass story about the car accident. You gave me exact details, exact, about what would happen, who would be in the car, etc. You told me things you had absolutely no right knowing and they turned out to be true.
"About the same time you completely lost all of your shyness. One day I was wondering if my little brother was EVER going to get himself laid and the next day you're suddenly a male slut, bagging everything left and right and apparently, if my information was correct, doing a very good job of it.
"You also developed a sudden interest in the stock market and in finding a job. Your grades improved overnight. And I even heard that you put a few teachers in their places."
"Okay." I nodded, surprised at the amount of information Tracy possessed. Again I was forced to wonder just how much my parents knew or suspected. "So tell me, what do you think all of this means?"
"Well obviously something very strange happened to you on that first day." She offered.
"Such as?"
"I think you had some sort of well, psychic flash. I think you had some sort of Scrooge type experience while you slept that night. Something that showed you what the future was going to be like and was realistic enough that you were unable to simply discount it as a dream. That doesn't explain everything of course, but I think that's something like what happened to you. I don't know how such a thing is possible, or why you were chosen to have this knowledge, but somehow, you were shown the future, including my death, and you were able to stop certain things and start others. Am I close?"
"Kind of." I said, taking another sip, surprised to find that the bottle was now empty. I leaned forward and grabbed another one, opening it up with the bottle opener. "You are somewhat on track here but the truth is actually a little stranger than that."
"So what IS the truth?" She asked, grabbing a fresh beer of her own. "Like I said before Bill, I think I have a right to this information."
"And you do Tracy," I agreed. "You really do and I think that maybe with both of our minds working on some of the problems that have cropped up here, maybe something can be done. But there is one thing."
"What's that?"
"If I tell you what I know, what happened to me, you can never tell anyone else. NEVER. If you were to do that and word about what happened got to the wrong people the consequences could be disastrous. Mostly for me, but also for our family. There are people in the world that would literally kill in order to possess the information that I have. Do you understand that?"
"Yes." She nodded. "I won't tell anyone anything. You did see the future, didn't you? You do know things that are going to happen, don't you?"
"Tracy," I said, "I didn't just SEE the future. I lived through it."
She looked at me confused. "You mean when you had your dream or whatever it was like you'd lived through the future? Like you lived through the years while you were asleep?"
"No." I shook my head. "Like I said, it's even stranger than that. I literally lived through the future in somewhat of an alternate timeline. I'm sitting here before you looking like a sixteen going on seventeen-year-old kid. But that's not what I am Tracy. I've actually lived almost thirty-four years now."
She took a moment to digest that, staring at me the whole while. "I'm not sure I'm following you Bill." She finally said.
"Okay," I started. "You've acknowledged the fact that I know aspects of the future, right?"
"Yes, but…"
"The day I woke up with these startling changes. Think back to that day Tracy. Do you remember how confused I seemed, how glad I was to see you, how I didn't know what day it was? And then later in the day, at school, I had to ask you what my class schedule was? Do you remember all of that?"
"Yes." She nodded, her eyes widening.
I took another sip. "The reason I was so confused and so glad to see you was that, from my perspective, I'd gone to bed the night before as a thirty-two year old man in the year 1999."
"1999?" She said, with disbelief.
"In the year 1999 I was a paramedic working for a private company. My sister Tracy had been killed on her graduation night and was sixteen years in her grave. My parents, after Tracy's death, had become victim's rights advocates. My friend Mike was a total loser, still living with his parents.
That was my life when I went to bed that night. When I woke up the next morning, I was fifteen years old again, back in my parent's house, my sister still with the accident in her future, and I had all of my memories from my previous life still intact."
"That's unbelievable Bill." She told me. "You're saying that you lived until 1999 and then were suddenly put back in 1982?"
"That's exactly what I'm saying." I affirmed. "That's what happened to me. The reason I told you about the accident that night was because, at the time, I wasn't sure if I was suddenly going to wake up back in 1999 the first time I went to sleep. I needed to try and prevent your death if that was the case. And though I did not go back to 1999 the next day, my little speech to you that night was apparently effective. Without any further interference from me you strayed off of the path that would have ended with you dumping into the Spokane River."
She shook her head in denial. "I'm not sure I can believe this." She told me. "You are saying that you lived until 1999. That you went day by day through this life and then suddenly you were put back in 1982? That's not possible."
"I wouldn't have thought so either." I answered. "What we're talking about here is time travel. And though the possibility exists that I simply dreamed this entire life that night, I don't believe that is the case. Too many things have come true. My memories of that previous life are too detailed, too complete. That is what happened Tracy. I am nearly thirty-four years old and I lived seventeen of those years in an alternate life."
She took a huge drink of her beer, finishing half the bottle at a swallow. She then picked up another one. "This is way trippy." She told me. "If you lived until 1999, tell me who the President's will be."