A Matter of Time

"Who wanna be a scientist anyway?" Ten-year-old LaShaunda Jackson asked her grandmother with the clear and simple reasoning of her age. She stuck her left hand out and enumerated the disadvantages with her right index finger.

"First, they look funny. They all got those white coats and funny hair." The funny hair was certainly within her grasp, but where did those white coats come from? And again, who would want it?

"Second, they all men." Well, all the ones on TV were, and where else was she going to see scientists anyway?

"An’ third, where they come from? Not around here." This encompassed not only their geographic histories, but also whatever processes by which they were produced. And it was true that the Ernestine P. Waterman projects where LaShaunda and her grandmother lived had not produced many scientists. Not one, as a matter of fact.

The disturbing stereotype of funny hair and white coats, and gender issues aside, LaShaunda had hit upon the real problem, the obstacle to her pursuit of a scientific career. Scientists simply did not come from the place where she lived. They came from other places, other worlds, neighborhoods with sidewalks and no gangs, with two-parent families and bathrooms that worked. They came from regular breakfasts.

LaShaunda looked at her grandmother and grinned. "It’s okay," she reassured her. "I be somethin’ else, somethin’ fine."

The trek to Washington School was short, not more than a couple of blocks through hot broken pavement and weed patches littered with cigarette butts and fast food containers. LaShaunda already knew about avoiding strangers and not getting into cars, about refusing drugs and not taking weapons to school, about bad people who hurt little girls and bad-mouthed boys who taunted anyone who walked by.

She knew about making yourself small and insignificant so you wouldn’t be noticed in the wrong way. And she had learned about limitations and opportunity, too.

She stuck her hands out as she walked to school. First, she was a girl. Second, she was poor. And third, she was never going to be magazine pretty. Under those circumstances, how could being smart count?

Her grandmother kept urging her to do stuff that was impossible, stuff that didn’t make any sense.

Science, for example. And math.

It was one thing to do well in class. Mr. Wright wasn’t the best teacher in the world, but he knew a few things and there were lots of films and videos and stuff. But it was another to plan on a future that wasn’t going to be there. There weren’t any good teachers, there was no equipment and classes offered were the minimum required by law. She knew her school graduated gang members, welfare recipients and the occasional postal worker. High school was where you went to have your first baby.

LaShaunda was a smart little girl. She knew what she needed, she just didn’t see a way to get it. She read and did her homework and stayed away from the danger of the streets. But she knew that sooner or later she would be caught by her hormones, the way her older sister had. Her older sister lived across the projects in another apartment with her boyfriend and her baby. Her boyfriend hit her sometimes and spent their money on drugs and liquor. LaShaunda’s older sister was fifteen.

She knew she only had a couple of years before all the smart would disappear to be replaced with cravings that still mystified her. If she was going to be someone, do something, it would have to be soon.

Make your own miracle, girl, she told herself.

The books in the school library were okay if you just had to do book reports for Mrs. Carver’s class, but if you really wanted to know stuff, you had to go to the public library, the big one downtown, not the run-down branch with the bars on the windows. It was an expensive bus ride, but her grandmother gave her a few dollars each month when the check came.

LaShaunda discovered the library and spent Saturdays there. She attacked the place methodically, starting with the Children’s Wing and moving on to adult fiction. In a couple of years, she read enough to let her see that there might be a way out after all.

She turned thirteen and was bussed to Jefferson Middle School. Classes were a little better, but there were older kids there and hormone problems were already starting to exert their influences. LaShaunda continued to read and even write a little. She kept a notebook full of observations about things she read or heard and didn’t want to forget. She worked fast, aware that it could happen any day. Suddenly, out of nowhere, she would lose all of her intelligence and think only about boys. She watched it happen to other girls, and knew it was only a matter of time.

LaShaunda didn’t have many friends. Her schoolmates might as well have come from another planet. Or maybe LaShaunda came from another planet. Already the kids at school thought she was weird. No one made a big deal out of it, she just wasn’t included in social activities. If it bothered her, she remembered that what she was doing was more important and that you couldn’t have your cake and eat it, too. Friends would come later, when she was out of the Ernestine P. Waterman projects and living somewhere nice, maybe with a car.

She got on the bus that Saturday after having spent the whole day at the library, learning to work the computers, listening to a lecture on architecture and then reading some stuff by Ayn Rand, sort of about architecture, only not quite, and as she hurried down the crowded aisle she bumped into an old man.

"Hey, there," he said in a low growly voice, "where you goin’ so fast, huh?"

LaShaunda sat down in the only vacant seat, right across the aisle from the man. He was big, like a bear, and dressed in the oily brown rags of a street person. She braced herself for the stink, but she couldn’t detect any.

"I said, where you goin’ in a hurry?" he growled again.

LaShaunda didn’t speak to strangers. She listened to them, sometimes when they weren’t aware of it, but she never spoke to them.

"Home," she answered, surprised at herself.

"Then you should have enough time. Me, I got lots of time." He grinned showing a couple of teeth still in place.

"What do you mean?" she asked. It seemed to her that when you got older, you should have less time. Babies had lots of time, she reasoned, all the time in the world. But it would run out as you got older until one day it ran completely out and you died. Isn’t that how it worked? Why would an old man still have plenty of time left?

"I mean I’m not in a hurry. I conserve my time. Don’t you know how time works, child?"

LaShaunda shook her head. "It just goes," she said.

He shook his head slowly. "No, it goes alright, but it doesn’t just go. It goes in a very orderly fashion. Haven’t you ever seen it?"

LaShaunda shook her head again. "You can’t see time," she said with an obstinate inflection.

"How do you know that?" the old man asked. "Maybe you just don’t know where to look."

He snapped his fingers and she noticed that her stop was coming up. She got up to go, hanging on to the overhead railing. The trip home seemed so short. It was a forty-five minute ride most days, but it had felt like ten.

"See you another time," he said pleasantly as she got off.

LaShaunda thought about time as she walked from the bus stop to the projects. She had read all the usual fiction, watched Star Trek, Babylon 5 and Time Cop on television, but she had never given the concept of time much thought. What was it, anyway? Was it just a way of measuring something that didn’t really exist? Was it just something people made up because they needed it? Was it just the consequence of events occurring in a linear dimension? Wait, where did she get that idea? And those words?

"Gramma, here’s your books." She gave her grandmother the large-print books she brought back every week and bent down to kiss her. Gramma was not feeling well this week. The ‘flu that went around seemed to just hang on, and her cough was back.

She thought about time a little more, then got started on her homework. She had to read ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ over the weekend, and it was almost time to start dinner.

She closed the book and wiped her eyes. If Charles Dickens wrote today, she thought, he could make it big with made-for TV movies. That was one sad and heroic ending, a far, far better thing.

"What you doin’, LaShaunda, speed readin’?" her grandmother asked.

"What?" She looked up. She had finished the book and it was still only ten minutes to six. She had read it, she could remember everything, Madame DeFarge, Sydney Carton, everything.

She shook her head. Maybe she was coming down with Gramma’s cold or whatever it was. She went into the kitchen and started dinner. It would have to be macaroni. Her sister Keneesha was coming over in an hour, bringing the two kids. The boyfriend had left, but there was another one. There was always another one. Macaroni could stretch.

By the time dinner was served, the kids were screaming, Keneesha was fighting with Gramma again and LaShaunda just needed somewhere quiet to go. But there wasn’t anywhere. Outside, gunshots banged, voices argued loudly and sirens wailed past. She closed her eyes.

When she opened them, it was dark and quiet. The clock said eight-thirty.

Gramma was asleep on the couch and the remains of the dinner were still strewn about. LaShaunda cleaned up and wondered where the last two hours had gone. Maybe, she thought, she had to pay back the time she had borrowed to finish that book. If so, there was more payment due. The thought scared her.

She went to her room and looked through her library books. This week, in addition to the Dickens, she had a picture book of bungalow architecture, two science fiction books by Larry Niven and a slim volume of poetry by Stephen Spender. She flipped through the bungalow book. The houses were beautiful, Mission Style and Craftsman era furnishings of the sort she had never seen in person. What if she could use time to her advantage, be able to go and do things in a sort of time-pocket? Then pay it back during the awful times? Would that work? Is that what the old man on the bus meant? Or were there more things that could be done with it, more things than she had thought about.

Any day now she would start experiencing puberty in all its unattractive glory. If she could just delay it a bit longer until she knew she was strong enough to get through it without damaging her life. If only she could have enough time to anchor herself to something, a rock she could hold onto when the raging hormonal seas slammed her into high school.

She made up her mind. She hadn’t thought about her future, at least not beyond getting into and out of high school, but it was time to start thinking about what she wanted to do with her life. She went to sleep thinking about where she wanted to be in ten years.

On the bus the next Saturday, she looked for the old man, but he wasn’t there. At the library she returned her grandmother’s books and headed toward the computer room for another session with the tutorial. It was fun and time seemed to fly by. She took a break at lunchtime and wandered outside to breathe in the downtown fresh air. There was a row of concrete benches and she sat down. She had enough money for bus fare home but not enough to have lunch, too.

"Hi, girl!" came the cheerful greeting. It was the old man from the bus.

He shuffled over to the bench and sat down a discreet distance from LaShaunda. He carried a paper bag in one hand and two bottles of cranberry juice in the other.

"Hi," LaShaunda replied. She was glad to see him. There was so much to talk about and so little time.

"I brought too much with me today," he said, pushing one of the juice bottles toward LaShaunda.

"Here, you he’p me out."

She took the bottle from him and watched as he opened the bag. He divided a neat stack of cookies into two smaller piles and then pulled out a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It was already cut in half.

"Here," he said, pushing the half sandwich and a small pile of cookies. "I can’t eat all this."

They sat under the trees comfortably munching their lunch. LaShaunda knew she wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers. She knew thirteen-year-old girls were good targets for the freaks and perverts. But she had to talk to the old man. He future, her life was at stake.

"So, about this time travel. . ." she began timidly.

He grinned, a wide grin, the grin of a large teddy bear. "Child, I knew you were the one the moment I saw you on the bus. Now, I am going to explain it all to you, but a little bit at a time, so’s you don’t get all confused. But you tell me first why you want to know."

LaShaunda told him everything - all about how bad her school was, what kind of place she lived in, and most of all, about the dreaded passage to adulthood which would mark the end of her education and the end of her dreams for a better life.

"So when I was able to read that book in no time at all, and then when I missed all the yellin’ and screamin’ when my sister was there, I thought maybe I could use the time better, get as much as I could from the good stuff an’ just get through the bad without noticing too much. You know, get more time to learn and everything so I could be strong once it did happen." Her wide brown eyes looked up at him earnestly.

He was silent for a few minutes. When he finally did speak, it was in his low, serious tone. "Child, you are already stronger than you know. But let’s talk about the time and how it works. You will be able to use it, but just remember that you can’t create time where there is none, so if you borrow, you have to pay it back, every moment."

LaShaunda nodded.

"When you look up at the sky at night, what do you see?" he asked.

"The stars," LaShaunda answered.

"Well, what you really see is the past," the old man said. "The light you see from those stars is old. They are so far away that it takes a long time for the light from them to reach us. If you can see that, you can start to see how time works." He launched into an explanation of the relation of distance to time. "So you see, if there is someone out there across the galaxy, and they see the light shining from our star, from our sun, then they are looking at light that left here a long, long time ago. They are looking at our past. Maybe they can’t even see us because maybe they are so far away that the first light of our sun hasn’t got there yet."

LaShaunda absorbed this idea. "If they’re closer, though, we get the light sooner, so we’re looking at things that happened in the past, only not so long ago, right?"

The old man grinned. "Yeah, child, that’s it."

"What about here? When I look at that guy over there," she pointed to a man in a business suit

talking animatedly on a cell phone, "am I looking at the past? I mean, he’s right here on earth."

The old man nodded. "It’s the past, child. The light from him that comes into your eyes takes a little bit of time just to get there. But it’s the recent past. When you look at him you’re seeing him as he was just a tiny fraction of a second ago. And he sees you the same way. See how time is always right there inside you? No matter where you are, or what you’re lookin’ at, time – for you, for everyone - is right there inside you."

LaShaunda nodded slowly in comprehension. If the time was right there inside her, maybe she could do stuff with it.

"Now, here’s another little bit about time, and then I got to get on home." He looked at her with a kindly expression on his worn features. "What would happen if I drop this little juice bottle on the sidewalk?"

"It would spill," LaShaunda answered.

"Yes, that’s probably what would happen. If it spilled, the juice would come out of the bottle, right?"

LaShaunda nodded.

"If I wait long enough, would the juice go back in the bottle?"

LaShaunda shook her head and laughed. "No!"

"But is it impossible for the juice to go back in the bottle? The juice is still there and the bottle is still there. If I have all the time in the world, all the time in the universe is it impossible? Is there some law of the universe that would keep it from going back in?"

LaShaunda thought. Nothing was really impossible. Things could be very unlikely, but nothing was really impossible. She didn’t know all the laws of the universe, though. That would be physics, she thought suddenly. "N-no . . ." she answered slowly.

"Ah, but it isn’t very likely, is it?" the man asked.

LaShaunda shook her head.

"Well time is sorta like that juice, child. Once we get it started, drop the bottle so to speak, it can only go one way. It’s not exactly impossible for it to go backwards, but it is improbable."

Probability. She had to look up probability. There was so much to know.

The man got up from the bench. "I got to go now, but I’ll see you another time," he said.

LaShaunda went back into the library and picked out some new books for her grandmother. Then she headed to the science and math section and spent some time looking at books. She finally chose a couple of beginning physics and math books and checked them out. It felt as if she had spent the whole day with the old man, but the library’s ornate clock told her she had spent less than half an hour with him.

On the bus, she thought about what the old man had said. It was all so wonderful and interesting and still didn’t really explain what had happened to her.

It happened again, though. This time she was in Mr. Richards’ algebra class. Algebra was sort of interesting, but Mr. Richards was maybe the worst teacher in the world. If LaShaunda hadn’t already taught herself from the textbook, she would never have understood it at all. As it was, only one other person in the whole class seemed to be able to grasp the complexities of simple equations.

Julio Chan was small for his age, with eyes nearly as dark as his blue-black hair. His bony shoulders poked the back of his tattered tee-shirt and he wore the same clothes, day in and day out, always clean but each day a little more worn. LaShaunda wondered if he had just one set of jeans and one tee-shirt to last him through the whole school year. By summer he would be in rags, she thought.

But his clothes didn’t matter. What mattered was that he was smart.

LaShaunda sat in the back of the class and had never once been called upon to answer a question or write anything on the blackboard. This was too bad, as she enjoyed the problems and knew most of the answers. But she was interested in other things, too, and the time she spent in Mr. Richards’ class was a waste.

One day she didn’t waste it. She slipped into her seat as the bell rang and no sooner got her books sorted out in front of her than the bell rang again. She looked up, startled. The Seth Thomas clock on the wall behind Mr. Richards had advanced by forty minutes. Forty minutes of tedium, gone. It had happened again. Every minute you borrow gets paid back.

She caught Julio Chan’s knowing grin as she gathered up her books and started toward the door.

He walked her home after school that day. They talked about algebra and architecture, family and failure, and time.

The next Saturday Julio went with her to the library. She showed him Dickens and Ayn Rand and he introduced her to Robert Heinlein and Stephen Hawking. They read together, interrupting each other to read the really good parts aloud. The day seemed to last forever.

On the bus home, Julio explained that they would have to pay back the good time. All the time you slowed had to be made up with the fast time.

"I know," LaShaunda said, "but maybe we can pay it all back out of Mr. Richards’ class. You know, give back forty minutes a day from the algebra class. It could go by in a second and I wouldn’t mind."

"I think we should give it back out of other times, too. I give a lot of it back out of the times my stepfather is home." He said it matter-of-factly, but LaShaunda got a swift glimpse of the abuse that sometimes fell on top of the neglect Julio suffered. She was once again grateful to her loving grandmother. At least no one had ever hurt her, not that she could remember, anyway.

The rest of the school year went by quickly and easily. LaShaunda kept up her grades, spent Saturdays at the public library with Julio, and took care of her grandmother, whose health had started to slip. She forgot about the old man on the bus as new interests opened up for her. First there was math - algebra was easy next to calculus! - then writing. And LaShaunda saw the world a little differently. It was much bigger than she had ever imagined.

LaShaunda was singing as she cleaned up the tiny kitchen in her grandmother’s apartment. She and Julio had talked about survival strategies for high school and had even talked about college, although neither one of them had a clue about how to get there from the Ernestine P. Waterman projects. But it was good to think about it.

They had the ability to control their time, up to a point, anyway. It was true that every second borrowed in slow time had to be paid back in fast time, but once they had the hang of it, they spent hours immersed in study and talk. Mr. Richards’ class was just a blur, although they vied for the top grade in it. Mr. Richards had a hard time placing the two brightest kids in the room. He never seemed to notice them.

"Girl!" her grandmother called to her, "what you so happy about? You got yourself a boyfriend?"

"Oh, Gramma," she said, "you know better than that. I got to concentrate on my studies. Julio and I won’t have a chance if I just go and get boy-crazy like Keneesha." She had developed physically that year, to her embarrassment. Her breasts and hips had filled out, but she was late in developing her hormonal cycle. Nothing had happened yet and she was worried that any day her hormones would rush through her brain, wiping it clean of all knowledge and substituting mildly pornographic pictures instead.

Keneesha, with three kids now and yet another abusive boyfriend, had put on weight. LaShaunda shuddered. It wouldn’t happen to her.

"Hey, girl!" A familiar growly voice cut through her reverie on the bus to the library. Julio’s stepfather was home and he couldn’t join her for their weekly outing, so she had gone by herself.

The old man hadn’t changed at all, though more than a year had gone by since their last meeting. LaShaunda smiled and slipped across the aisle to sit next to him.

"How’s your time management goin’?" he asked.

"Great!" she answered. "Everything is going great. I learned more about the stuff you taught me," she said eagerly, "and I got a friend now who can do time, too. And we’re going to help each other through high school and maybe we can even get to college."

"Honey," the old man said, "that’s the best news! I knew you had it in you all the time."

The bus stopped in the garment district to let people off and on. The old man got up. "I got some other people I got to he’p now," he said. "You doin’ just fine." LaShaunda stood up to let him out.

"Will I see you again?" she asked. She had a lot on her mind, but she wanted to thank him for, well, everything.

"Oh, sure," he said, smiling. "Maybe some time."

LaShaunda didn’t stay as long at the library as usual. The trip home passed in just a few seconds. She had a nervous feeling about Julio and his stepfather, and she was willing to pay back any amount of time just to get back and know he was okay.

She dropped her books off at home and made sure her grandmother was comfortable. Gramma hardly ever left her bed anymore.

LaShaunda ran across the Ernestine P. Waterman projects, heedless of gang territory and drug dealers, to Julio’s miserable apartment. Julio’s mother, face battered and eyes blackened, leaned against the doorway, the elastic tubing from her last drug hit still dangling from her arm. She made no effort to block LaShaunda’s way.

Inside, the few possessions of the family were thrown about everywhere. Everything was overturned, broken, dirty, unusable. It looked more like a trash dump than an apartment. It was very quiet.

In the bedroom, Julio sprawled on a dirty mattress on the floor, blood caking around his face where his nose had been broken. His eyes were swollen shut, but he was breathing.

The stepfather was not around.

LaShaunda wrapped Julio in a bit of filthy blanket and carried him back to her apartment. He was so light that it scared her.

She put him in the living room on the old couch, then went to the bedroom she shared with her grandmother. "Gramma," she said, "Julio is going to stay with us for a while, okay?" Her grandmother coughed a little and smiled.

LaShaunda went back to Julio and spent the rest of the evening applying cooling compresses to his face. She knew he was making the time go by quickly so he wouldn’t notice the pain, but she didn’t have that luxury. She had to slow time down a bit just to get all the work done. She made some soup for dinner and fed her grandmother, then checked on Julio. He was awake, but unable to speak much. She fed him, too. Then she ate the rest of the soup herself and finally fell into an exhausted sleep.

The last thought in her mind was how much she loved Julio.

Sunday morning in the projects is quieter than the rest, mostly because Saturday night is the big night for drugs, drinking, violence and disputes. In LaShaunda’s household, everyone slept late, awakening only when the streets became sunny, hot and noisy once again. Somewhere a toddler screamed and feral dogs barked. LaShaunda awoke to a new knowledge that frightened her. She crept into the livingroom to observe the sleeping Julio. It was true. No amount of time travel could fix what had happened.

She went into the bathroom to confirm her suspicion. A wail of agony escaped her and she rushed out to fling herself down on the bed beside her grandmother.

"Oh, Gramma," she said. "It’s happened." She tried to remember all the algebra, Dickens, physics and Heinlein. Where was the Ayn Rand? The speed of light? Architecture? Where would college be? The dream future?

"What’s happened, child?" her grandmother asked.

"I think I’m like Keneesha now," she wailed. The prospect was terrifying. And she had tried so hard.

"What are you talkin’ about?" Gramma asked.

"I - I love Julio! And I think I started my period, Gramma. Now everything’s ruined! We’ll never even get through high school now, much less go to college!" She tried to remember things, but her mind was a puddle of Julio and tears. She hated her body, her hormones, her fourteen years. If only she could have stayed ten years old, slowed time more or something, anything.

Gramma laughed, a little chuckle at first, then a full-fledged coughing fit. "Of course you do, child, of course you do. Ain’t nothin’ ruined yet, honey. Things don’t always turn out the same for everyone. I knew you weren’t like your sister from day one. Everyone has their own time, baby." Gramma drew her close and rocked her. "You gonna be fine, honey. I was startin’ to worry about you at your advanced age, but you gonna be fine now."

Their own time. That was it. She and Julio had their own time. They could use it together and even coordinate the speed at which they went through it, but it was their own individual time. LaShaunda’s time belonged only to her. It wasn’t the slave of her body - it was the slave of her mind.

LaShaunda wiped her tears on the ragged sheet. Maybe it would all come back to her. Maybe she was just upset. Maybe that was the hormones, too.

"LaShaunda, honey, you’re a late-bloomer and Julio’s just a boy, but you’ll both be growing up soon enough. You just give yourselves a little time." Gramma smoothed LaShaunda’s rebellious hair.

LaShaunda could wait. She had lots of time. She remembered Sydney Carton at the guillotine, billions of stars, the Pythagorean Theorem, a stranger in a strange land, Gustav Stickley, the ringworld, John Galt and a thousand other things she had learned. It was all still there. It would always be there, and more, much more. And Julio, too.

And she could stop worrying about it now. The scary thing she had dreaded might not be as bad as all that. She didn’t understand exactly how, but maybe you really could turn fourteen and become a young lady and still not lose your mind. She smiled and slowed time just a little, conscious that this was a moment of great importance.

And besides, she could always speed time up later in some boring high school class.

Kate Thornton writes short fiction and has had over thirty stories in print, gleaning much of her inspiration from her Army career, her proximity to Caltech, and her nosy neighbors. She will be delighted to hear from you. e-mail address: kittyf@hotmail.com website url: http://www.sff.net/people/katethornton

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