Saving Lucas Biggs by Marisa de los Santos Page B

I noticed the picture she’d slammed onto its face the day I’d met her. She’d set it upright again, so I took the opportunity to look it over in detail. While I did, she lurched in, carrying a drink the color of honey, a glazed look in her eye. “I’ve got twenty-five pounds of potatoes you can have, in a basket under the porch,” she said. She stopped short when she found me staring at the photo.
    “I was young once, just like you,” Aunt Bridey said.
    This revelation stretched my imagination farther than just about any concept that’d come up since I’d left Low Ridge, Mississippi, but I managed to keep my trap shut.
    “Don’t look so shocked!” she snapped. “I don’t mean I was just like you. Nobody I knew was in danger, nor was I. Truth is, I’d have envied you. You’re brave and you have challenges to meet—”
    “I wish I didn’t,” I murmured.
    “I know,” said Aunt Bridey as kindly as I ever heard her say anything. “I was a silly girl. I craved excitement. I hankered for adventure. I felt sure I’d been born to bigger things than my life here.”
    “Here?” I asked, pointing at the floor under my feet like some kind of idiot who, from time to time, loses track of where he happens to be standing.
    “This house,” Aunt Bridey continued. “I was raised in it, back when my little vegetable patch was a whole farm. Before the Victory Corporation forced my father’s spread out from under him because there was coal buried in it. I grew up during the quiet years, which I felt were far too quiet.”
    She glanced at the photo of herself and the soldier. No slamming it on its face today.
    “So you went looking for an interesting friend,” I supplied. “You went to a Halloween party with that guy who wore a Confederate costume?”
    “I went looking for an interesting time ,” she corrected, “inhabited by Lieutenant Walker, of the Confederate States Army, whose uniform was anything but a costume.”
    I took a long look at Lieutenant Walker. He had that look in his eyes, the stare, the expression only real soldiers in real pictures from the Civil War ever had, because they had to stand in rows and shoot their own neighbors and sometimes their own brothers.
    “Deserter, visionary, hero. A young man with a dream,” continued Aunt Bridey, “that I thought I was going to help bring to life.”
    “Wait—” I stammered, doing the math. By my calculations, Aunt Bridey couldn’t have been more than forty years old. “How were you going to help him, if he was in the Civil War? I mean, you weren’t born yet.”
    Bridey just stared at me with her fizzing eyes like she was deciding something about me. Then she gazed back at the picture. “I left myself this daguerreotype as a souvenir,” she said. “I couldn’t bring it through time with me, because that’s not allowed, so I hid it in a corner of that cave out back, and it waited for me through the years.”
    “Where’d you stash it—next to the time machine?” I joked. Aunt Bridey was making me nervous. “Does H. G. Wells live across the creek?”
    “Time machine,” she scoffed. “H. G. Wells was an idiot. He didn’t know the first thing about time travel.”
    “Hold on.” I realized I halfway believed her. The photo was so strange—and of course, so was Aunt Bridey. “What are you telling me?”
    “I traveled through time,” she said evenly. “And made a friend who was as brave as anyone in history. But after what you and Luke did in the face of that gunfire, you might be his equal.”
    “Aunt Bridey?” I pleaded, confused and a little scared. “Why are you telling me this?”
    “Because I want you to realize,” she replied, “that I understand time backward, forward, and inside out. And I understand friendship, too.”
    “So—” I began.
    “So I know beyond the shadow of a doubt,” she said, fixing my eyes with hers, “that friendship will stand the test of time.”
    “I see,” I said slowly.
    “I doubt