She takes a big sip of coffee and licks the froth from her lips and I take a deep breath. “I saw enough to know that my coming here is a mistake.” There. I’ve said it. “I’m not supposed to be here, Anna. It’s changing your whole life.”
She presses her palms into the table to steady herself. “For the better.”
“I’m not so sure anymore.”
She looks out the window and doesn’t say anything. “What aren’t you telling me, Bennett? What did you see?” She gives me a hard look.
“I saw you and your family with a happy future. And if I tell you any more about it, it might not happen that way.” That’s enough. That’s all she gets to know. Anything else and I might change what I saw, and I can’t do that.
“Well, it’s my future. I want you in it.” Her eyebrows pinch together. “Don’t you want to be in it?”
I nod. “But think about it,” I say, shaking my head. “If you’d been in the car with your dad yesterday you would have known something was wrong. You would have seen the signs and gotten him to a hospital faster. He might not even be here right now.”
“Oh, come on…he had a stroke. That would have happened no matter what. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I was here, Anna. With you. And I shouldn’t have been. If I hadn’t been here you would have been with your dad.”
I didn’t expect to feel this way, but the more I talk to her, the more anger I feel building up inside me. I seem to be livid with everyone right now. With Emma, for telling me about Justin and Anna’s near-kiss, because I didn’t want to know that, especially today. With Anna, for making me think that do-overs were okay, simply because her best friend’s life was at stake. With my dad, for letting me believe I was more powerful than I really am. And with myself, for going forward and opening up a view into a future I never should have seen and certainly don’t want to exist.
And it’s selfish, but I’m angry because it’s starting to seem like every time I do something good for someone else, I’m the one who pays the price.
I take a deep breath and steady myself for my next words, the ones that have been rattling around in my head ever since I returned from her house on Christmas Eve 2005. This is it. If I’m going to guarantee the life I saw for Anna, where she’s happy without me, I have say it.
“I’m not coming back anymore.”
“What?”
I start to reach for her hands but before I can, she pulls them away and stands up. The metal chair tips over behind her and crashes to the floor, and she looks over her shoulder like she’s considering righting it, but she doesn’t. She turns on her heel and heads for the door, out into the cold.
By the time I catch up to her she’s standing at the edge of the curb, waiting for a break in the traffic. “Anna. Please.”
She stops and turns around, arms crossed, tears sliding down her cheeks. “You cannot do this!” she yells as the cars speed past us. “You cannot do this to me. You promised you wouldn’t leave…” Her whole face is bright red and the tears are coming fast now. She tries to wipe her face dry but she can’t keep up.
I grab her by the arm, but she pulls it away. “Go!” she yells. “If that’s what you want, just go!”
I feel something in me snap.
“What I want?” I yell back at her. “What do you mean what I want? When is this ever about what I want? I don’t have anything—not one single thing—that I want. Don’t you get it?” In my mind’s eye I see Anna, standing in her driveway, smiling up at this guy who isn’t me, and I feel the blood coursing hot through my veins.
“See, I get to have this tiny little taste of all these incredible things but I don’t get to keep any of them. I get to meet you and be part of your life, and I get to know your family and your friends, but I don’t get to hold on to any of it. I can’t stay here. This isn’t my home. And every time I have go to back, it kills me. Every. Single. Time. And it always will.”
“Bennett…” Anna steps back onto the sidewalk and pushes me away from the edge.
“No, wait. It gets even better.” I let out a sarcastic laugh and bring my hand to my chest. “I finally find something that makes me feel good about this thing I can do. I figure out how to save people’s lives. I get to give a few deserving people a second chance. And that feels really incredible for, like, twenty minutes…right up until the second it starts beating the shit out of me.”
I let out another laugh. “Oh wait, and here’s the best part. The more good things I do, the more I lose the one thing I promised you I wouldn’t lose—control. It’s like this infinite, totally screwed up loop,” I say, spinning my finger in the air.
Anna takes a deep breath and presses her lips tightly together. She’s crying even harder now, which should make me feel horrible but for some reason doesn’t.
“Check it out,” I say, bringing my hand to my chest. “I don’t get to have what I want. Not ever. Because the one thing I want is a normal life. I don’t want to be special and different, I just want to wake up and go to school and do homework and ride my skateboard in the park with my friends. I want my dad to be proud of me because I got an A on some stupid paper, not because I saved some kids’ lives. I want to stare out a window and think about how cool it would be to be able to travel back in time, but I don’t want to actually be able to do it. And I want to be in love with a girl I can see every day, not every three weeks.”
I’ve been gesturing wildly with my hands but now that I’m done ranting, I don’t know what to do with them. I run my fingers through my hair.
“I have to go. I’m sorry.” I head back toward the coffee shop, but before I can reach the door, I feel Anna’s grasp, tight on my arm.
“Bennett, I’m sorry…I didn’t mean—”
“What? Didn’t mean to talk me into all of this?” The words just slip out, even though I know they’re not true, and I turn around in time to see her face fall. That should be enough to stop me from talking, but it isn’t. “If you hadn’t made me help Emma, I never would have known what I could do. I could have spent the rest of my life going to concerts and climbing rocks in exotic locations, never caring that I was being selfish with my ability, because you know what, it’s mine. Not yours. Not my dad’s. Mine.” I slap my chest.
“I know that…I never meant…”
“I structured my life around a set of rules, and then I broke them for you. And for what? So I could be a better person?” I huff in exasperation. “How is my life better because a stranger never broke his leg and five people are alive who probably shouldn’t be?”
“What you did was really good. And if you were a normal person, we never would have met.”
“Yeah…well I think that’s how it’s supposed to be.”
She pulls away and looks at me. “You don’t really mean that, do you?”
As hard as it is to do, I nod.
Tears are streaming down her face and I can’t look at her. I need to get away from here.
“I need to think, Anna. You need to think.”
“I don’t need to think.”
“Well you should, because this is crazy.” I remember the words Mr. Greene said to me at the meet the other day. This is ridiculous. Do you really think you can keep this up? “Come on, what were we thinking? We can’t do this forever.”