The Power of Un Read online

  I didn’t know the details, but I knew enough. Roxy’s heart might beat for days; it might beat for years. But she’d never talk, never move from her bed, never again be the person she was last night.

  It’s hard to describe how it felt knowing all this. I hadn’t thought I liked her all that much. I’d mainly seen her as a set of problems to get around: keep her out of my bedroom, play games with her when I didn’t want to, let her tag along with me even when I was doing things she was too little to do. Sometimes when she was mad at me, she lied to get me in trouble. “Da-a-a-d, I think Gib’s about to hit me,” she’d say, even when I wasn’t. And when Dad scolded me for it, half the time she’d stick her tongue out just to make me even madder.

  But knowing she’d spend the rest of her life in a coma changed everything. I thought about all the stuff I’d never do again. Never play doggy with her. Never defend her from bullies at school. Never feel big and brave letting her hide her face in my shoulder when we watched a scary movie together. She’d never have another candy apple or plate of Dad’s beef stew. She’d never find out what it felt like to be a grownup. Her dream of having a dog would never come true. It was all my fault.

  I don’t know how much time passed while I thought all this. Probably not more than a minute, though it felt much longer. Suddenly I thought I’d go crazy if I sat on that kitchen chair one more second. I couldn’t stand it. Everything was coming apart. I had to try something, even if it didn’t work, to make things better again.

  The unner.

  I could have used it the previous night if I hadn’t been such an idiot and dropped it in the first place. Then Mom wouldn’t be standing here with tears spilling down her face, and Roxy would be O.K. Take it with you tonight, but watch out, the old man had said. He must have known this was about to happen. I didn’t know how or why, but he’d come to deliver the unner to me, to give me a way of undoing the worst mistake of my life.

  I jumped up and ran for the front door. “I’ll be back really soon, Mom,” I yelled. If she heard me, she didn’t show any sign of it. She seemed to be standing in our kitchen with the phone dangling from her wrist, but she wasn’t really there. The real Mom was someplace far away, down deep inside herself. I’ve never had a nightmare that scared me any worse than seeing her like that.

  I ran down our front walk, angry at myself and angry at everything in general. It should have been stormy, black and rainy. But it wasn’t. Birds chirped, and the sun shone down from a sky as pure as a blue crayon. It was as if the world didn’t care one bit what had happened to Roxy. Where our walkway met Cherrywood Drive, I stopped short. There sat the mangy stray dog looking up at me with its tongue out and its ears up, its tail wagging just a little, as if it thought tail-wagging might get it in trouble.

  It was right.

  My breath came in ragged, shallow gasps. I felt hot and sad and furious. Of all the places in town that stupid dog could have gone to beg for a handout, it had to choose my house.

  “I wish that truck had hit you!” I cried. I picked up a pebble and threw it with all my might. I don’t know exactly what made me aim wide. Maybe it was the way the dog sat, its head tilted, trusting me even though it shouldn’t have. The pebble smacked the sidewalk. The dog flinched, ran a short distance away, and sat down on the sidewalk again. I threw another stone. “Get away! Get away!” I screamed.

  I didn’t wait to see what happened. I sped toward the woods as fast as I could. The wind from my running blew tears back along my face in cold streaks. But I couldn’t afford to cry much. I had to be able to see. If it was the last thing I ever did, I’d find the unner and make it work.

  I ran down the path, my high tops skidding on leaves slick with half-melted frost. At the big flat-topped rock I stood panting while I tried to remember every move I’d made the night before.

  A voice drifted through the red and yellow trees. “Gib, Gib! Wait up!” Ash burst into sight. “Didn’t you hear me?”

  I would have said no, but I couldn’t get my vocal cords to work. They felt locked in ice so cold it burned.

  Ash stood very still, looking at me. “Roxy? …” he said, his voice breaking off in the middle.

  I’d rather have eaten dirt than cried in front of Ash. But it happened anyway. I tried to hold it back and couldn’t.

  Ash stood there scratching a place on his leg that probably didn’t itch as much as it appeared to. It’s simple if somebody’s crying for a reason that’s not very good. You can just shrug and get on with whatever you’re doing until they stop acting like a baby. But I had a good reason, and Ash knew it.

  “Bad news, huh?” he said. He sat down on the big rock, watching me and waiting for me to tell him.

  I went and sat next to him, scrubbing at my eyes while my voice unfroze. “She’s got brain damage. The doctors say she’ll never wake up.”

  He sat silent for a long moment, looking as if he’d been slugged in the stomach. I knew exactly how he felt. After a little while, he picked up a twig and broke it in half. “Jeez,” he said.

  I nodded, feeling completely miserable. “I have to find the unner. It’s my only chance.”

  Ash looked puzzled. “What’s the unner?”

  “Well, it’s like this….” I said, and told him the whole story of the weird old man, his mysterious gift, and what had happened the previous afternoon. “He said it would give me the Power of Un, the power to undo my mistakes, just like on a computer.”

  Ash cocked one eyebrow. “Are you serious? How do you know the old man wasn’t just … you know … some demented weirdo? Or working for Madam Isis, like I said last night?”

  “He smelled like lightning, Ash. Lightning! How could an ordinary demented weirdo smell like lightning? And what about the message he gave Madam Isis? He knew about Roxy’s accident before it ever happened.”

  Ash whistled softly. “You mean, if you find this thing, the unner, and it’s real….” He blinked as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was about to say “You mean you could undo the whole thing? Go back and do it over without mistakes? You could make it so Roxy’s O.K. again?”

  I thought about it a minute, afraid to let myself hope too much. “Well, maybe,” I said. “He told me there were limits, though he didn’t say what they were. He had to leave before he could show me how it worked. And …” I swallowed as the facts came back with unpleasant clarity. “I tried and couldn’t get it to work just before I dropped it.”

  Ash jumped to his feet. “What are we waiting for? Show me where you dropped it, and we can both look. We’ll find it! And maybe between the two of us, we can make it work.”

  I retraced my steps along the path, “Look for a root or a rock—something that might have tripped me,” I said.

  Before long, we spied a patch of disturbed leaves. Not only that. We found a thick root running across the path. It had to be the spot. We both got down on our hands and knees and started searching as fast as we could.

  A few minutes later, Ash whooped and shouted, “Hey, is this it?” I looked over, and there, held aloft like a torch in his hand, was a gunmetal gray box about the size of a paperback book. The unner!

  Ash sat cross-legged on the ground as he brushed away dirt and twigs and shook the unner gently to see if it rattled, which it did. “Jeeminy,” he said. “Are you sure this is it? I mean … well … it kind of looks like a piece of garbage.”

  “Yeah, that’s it! Here. Let me see it.” I reached to take it from his hands.

  Ash shook his head. “Look at this thing. It’s crooked, it’s taped together, and it rattles. I dunno …”

  He was right. In the bright light of day, it looked even more homemade than it had the night before. He peered over my shoulder as I punched the keys again, still without results. “There’s no zero,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know. The old guy was in a really big hurry when he made this thing.” I kept punching keys. Just as before, nothing happened. What was I doing wrong?

  Then it hit me
. If this were a game or a calculator or just about any other kind of electronic device, it would have an on/off button. Trembling all over, I ran my fingers around the sides, then felt a tiny raised switch on the left. I turned the unner and looked closely. It was a sliding switch—very small, shiny black, and unlabeled. I took a deep breath and slid the switch upward.

  The little machine began to hum. I couldn’t hear it, exactly, but I felt it in the palm of my hand, like the beating of a dragonfly’s wings. The display screen glowed dimly in the shade of the trees. Three zeroes appeared on it. And each of the colored buttons in the center lit up, then went dark again, in turn. I jumped as the unner made a brief sound like a miniature silver bell, then returned to humming quietly, as if waiting for instructions.

  “Whoa!” said Ash.

  A wave of excitement rippled up my spine. It was hard to think straight. Ash whipped his baseball cap off and jammed it into the back pocket of his jeans, which is what he always does when he wants to concentrate. He huddled closer to me so he could see the screen and the control buttons.

  “O.K., let’s stay calm,” he said, his voice shaky. I think he was saying it as much for himself as for me. “We have to do this scientifically.”

  This seemed reasonable enough. “O.K., but … what’s our hypothesis?”

  “Hypothesis?” Ash stared blankly at the controls. “I don’t know.”

  I stared for a while, too, trying to slow my mind down enough so I could catch some sensible thought before it slipped away. It was an uphill battle. “I wonder what these crazy words mean,” I said after a few seconds. “HMODE, MMODE, and SMODE.” I looked some more and again noticed the three bold letters beside the screen, one under the other: H, M, and S. “H MODE, M MODE, S MODE?” I punched the small, round, yellow button that said HMODE. It lit up.

  “What are you doing?” cried Ash. He sounded horrified.

  But I was too engrossed to pay much attention. “I’ll bet it’s in H mode now, whatever that means.” Ash gave me a rabbit punch in the arm. “Ow!” I said. “What’d you do that for?”

  “Listen to me! Don’t touch anything else yet. For all you know, you could undo your whole life.”

  I licked my lips. He had a point. On the other hand, I was pretty sure nothing major would happen until I punched the ORDER button, which I didn’t intend to do. Not yet, anyway. “I think it’s O.K.,” I said.

  Ash leaped to his feet. He’s careful with his language. When he says a rude word, you know he’s really upset. He said one now and followed it with, “Don’t be a moron, Gib! This is way too dangerous.”

  But everything he said seemed to float past from very far away. “You’re acting like Rainy Frogner. Sometimes you have to take risks. I know what I’m doing.” I punched the 8 because it was in the middle and it was just as good as any other number. An eight appeared on the display screen, opposite the H. I punched the 4. Now the display said 84. I pressed the blue MMODE light; it went on, and the yellow HMODE light went off. I punched 6. A six appeared on the display under the 84 and just to the left of the bold M. So I was right. H MODE, M MODE, and S MODE. Whoever made the labels just left out the spaces. But what did the numbers mean? What was I programming the unner to do?

  It was Ash who saw it first. “H, M, S. Eighty-four hours, six minutes, no seconds. Stop now. Please!” He sounded desperate.

  I looked up at him. “How can I? There’s no ‘clear’ key.”

  A little vein popped up on the side of Ash’s head. Before I realized what he was doing, he reached down and switched the unner off. “That’s how.”

  A bird in the tree overhead sang a little song. I probably wouldn’t have noticed, except it sounded obnoxiously cheerful and reminded me of the first few notes of “Where, Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone,” which seemed just too ironic.

  I turned the unner back on, then stabbed the SMODE button and the first few numbers my fingers landed on—121, as it happened. Then, before Ash could stop me, I hit the big red ORDER button.

  7

  WORD PROBLEMS

  I closed my eyes, waiting for something major to happen. Maybe unning would feel like skydiving or standing beside the tracks when a fast train passes. Maybe my hair would stand on end and my skin would ripple, or maybe I’d go unconscious and wake up with amnesia.

  But no. I didn’t feel anything except stupid. After a few seconds, I opened one eye. Nothing was different. I was sitting in exactly the same place in the woods with the unner in my hands. Ash was crouched beside me.

  I groaned.

  “O.K., let’s stay calm,” said Ash.

  “Oh right, that’s what you always say,” I retorted. “What a ripoff! This thing’s just a hunk of junk.”

  But Ash was still staring at the unner as if it was the most fascinating object on the planet. “We have to do this scientifically,” he murmured.

  I snapped at him. “You already said that!”

  “Said what?”

  “That we have to do this scientifically.”

  He rolled his eyes. “I did not.”

  I stared at him. “You did, too! You said we have to do this scientifically, but when I asked about a hypothesis, you didn’t have one.”

  I doubt Ash could have looked more skeptical if I’d told him the woods were full of talking purple dinosaurs. Under my sweatshirt, the hair on my arms rose slowly as it came to me that when I’d punched the big red button, Ash had been standing up, not crouching.

  I looked at the unner. It had stopped humming. The word RECHARGING flashed on the display screen, then went out. I’d punched in 121 in S mode. If the unner worked, and if I guessed correctly about the way it worked, I’d just undone the most recent hundred and twenty-one seconds of my life. What exactly had happened during those two minutes and one second the last time? I strained to remember every detail. The same two minutes seemed to be happening all over again, except for a few minor differences, most of which originated with me.

  I looked at Ash, then down at the unner again. As the truth sank in, a prickly feeling started at my toes and traveled upward till it got to my head and made me dizzy. “It worked!” I said.

  “If this is supposed to be funny, it’s not,” said Ash. “How could it work? You haven’t done anything except turn it on.”

  I grabbed his arm. “Listen to me. I punched in a bunch of numbers and hit the red button. It worked. You don’t remember, because …” I swallowed. I felt like I had sand in my throat. “Because it hasn’t happened yet.”

  Ash stared at me for a very long moment. He breathed out shakily, maybe because he understood what I was trying to tell him or maybe because he thought I’d gone completely bonkers. I couldn’t tell which. “That doesn’t make sense. If I can’t remember, then how can you? Come on, Gib. Stop joking around.”

  I felt like screaming. “This isn’t a joke! It must have something to do with the way the unner works. I mean, there must be some theory to explain it. It’s like the unner moved me backward in time—but only me, the person who was holding it. For everybody else, that little chunk of time hasn’t happened yet.”

  Ash squinted at me, his mouth half open. “Gaaaahhh!” I said. “I’ll prove it to you!”

  I slid the power switch and hit the square green SMODE button again.

  Ash leaped to his feet. “Don’t be a moron, Gib! This is way too dangerous,” he cried.

  I laughed, probably a little hysterically. After all, it was like watching an instant replay of life. I remembered what I’d said before, and I liked it, so I said it again: “You’re acting like Rainy Frogner. Sometimes you have to take risks. I know what I’m doing.”

  This time I keyed in 35. Just before I punched the ORDER button, the same bird in the same tree whistled the same four obnoxiously cheerful notes. They still reminded me of “Where, Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone.”

  I kept my eyes open this time, which turned out to be a mistake, because I saw the world jerk like a movie about to be eaten by its pr
ojector. For a second or two, I thought I was going to barf.

  Ash flipped into a crouch beside me with impossible speed, though he didn’t seem to notice.

  “See?” I shouted. “Now do you believe me?”

  But instead of shouting “Yes!” as I hoped he would, he stared at me for a very long moment, exactly the way he had half a minute before. The scene I’d already experienced twice now began to replay itself like a videotape. He breathed out shakily, and I found myself thinking all over again that maybe it was because he finally understood what I was trying to tell him, or maybe it was because he thought I’d gone bonkers.

  “You’re not making any sense,” he said. “Are you O.K.? I mean, seriously, you don’t look so good.”

  “Of course I’m O.K.!” I shouted, which was a lie. I’d never felt so far from O.K. in my whole life. My sister was practically dead, my best friend thought I was nuttier than a Snickers bar, and the unner just seemed to be making things worse. How could I ever get Ash to understand what was happening? Was I going to have to do this entire thing on my own?

  “Maybe we should go home,” he said. He looked scared. Of me.

  I shut my eyes and sucked in a big breath of crisp air. Stay calm, I told myself. There has to be a way. Then I remembered the bird and its stupid repeating song. It was like the moment when you suddenly understand fractions.

  “Are we friends?” I asked. I had to concentrate hard to keep my voice low and steady.

  “Yeah. You know we are.”

  “Then you have to trust me. This is the truth. I swear it on … on Roxy. In a few seconds, a bird right here in this tree is going to whistle four notes that sound like the beginning of ‘Where, Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone.’ Do you know how I know?”

  Ash shook his head.