Saving Lucas Biggs by Marisa de los Santos Page A

my hair and gently tugged it, which was one of his versions of a hug.
    “People would shut down, short out, freak, right? The O’Malleys, too. The good news is that, under ordinary circumstances, our brains block out all but what we need to know in order to function in an ordinary way. On a daily basis, we perceive more or less what everyone else does. But unlike everyone else, we can deliberately put ourselves in extra ordinary circumstances, in exactly the right position and mood and frame of mind to, well, travel .”
    “Travel,” I said, wonderingly, turning over the word in my mind. “Time travel?”
    My dad nodded. “We can see the holes in time, choose the one we want, and slip through, quick as a mongoose, into the past. Possibly also into the future, although no one seems to know about that, which probably means either that we can’t do it, we just don’t see those portals, or that if any O’Malley ever has done it, she or he hasn’t, uh, well . . .”
    “Lived to tell the tale,” I finished, grimly.
    “Anyway, traveling is something we have to choose to do. Or choose not to do.”
    And this is where the forswearing came in, the words generations of O’Malleys promised to live by, even if we knew they weren’t precisely true:
There is one Now: the spot where I stand,
And one way the road goes: onward, onward.
    I forswore for the first time that day, and my dad would have me repeat it from time to time over the years, just for good measure. Everyone takes the vow. Nobody breaks the vow.
    But, after my conversation with Grandpa Joshua about changing the past, saving Aristotle and therefore Luke and therefore (oh please, please) my dad, as I rode home from Charlie’s house, blindly, wildly zigzagging down the road like a bat in sunlight, I began to consider the possibility—and it was a terrifying one—that that “Nobody” might not include me.

Josh
    1938
    BY THE TIME DOC O’MALLEY finally took Preston to the infirmary and told the nurse at the desk, “Just admit him, he’s a little boy, for Pete’s sake, I’ll pay the bill!” food was running low for all of us. I went to ask Luke to hike up the mountain with me for more jam and possibly squash, but he was nowhere to be found.
    So I went by myself. It wasn’t exactly a Sunday school picnic. The Model T tank was long gone, but there was no shortage of alleged detectives lurking around to make sure none of us broke any of the new rules in effect after what Biggs and the company called the “Canvasburg Uprising,” which was their name for the machine-gun attack, rules like no sneaking out of Canvasburg.
    Unbeknownst to the detectives, who weren’t the smartest bunch, Aristotle and sometimes the Kowalski brothers or my dad were still climbing over the mountains at night to mail our letters, and once in a while they brought back boxes packed by kind folks from towns as far away as Arden, Delaware, and Oneida, New York, full of sweaters, canned beans, and notes of encouragement. A church in Philadelphia even mailed us three live chickens. It was nice to realize people across the United States understood our plight.
    The chickens managed to escape from their crate in the middle of camp, and after that they roamed free, laying eggs under random tumbleweeds.
    I bet Biggs would’ve made chickens against the rules if he could’ve. It drove him crazy, the way we crept around and held on and managed to keep ourselves alive.
    So I waited until the detective watching us that morning went off to buy cigarettes, and I ducked into the trees beside Honey Brook and sneaked behind them into Honey Canyon and waded up the stream until I was hidden from Victory, and then I hiked to Aunt Bridey’s.
    The cold had let up that morning, and with the sun beating down on me, I ended up panting by the time I got there. I found Aunt Bridey’s door ajar, so I walked in. I could hear her clattering around in the kitchen, but before I got around to announcing I was there,