Opposite of Always Read online

  Dedication

  to k and b,

  with all the love my heart holds

  and for the loves we’ve lost

  So.

  You know that saying “Time is undefeated”?

  This is a story about the time that Time lost.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  How to Save No One

  45 Minutes Earlier

  The Beginning Beginning

  The Experience of Having Zero Experiences

  A Brief History of Strong Like

  The Thing About Stairs Is That They’re Up and Down

  Sunday Funday

  Overthinking Overthinking

  The Thing About Shooting One’s Shot

  Silly Rabbits, Tricks Are for (Big) Kids

  Truth & Consequences

  The Coupon’s A-Coming

  Some Joy for Your Toy

  Compositions

  How Not to Be So Alone in This World

  Status Unclear

  I’ll Build a Mighty Moat Around Your Love

  Mall Talk

  Orchid

  Exits

  How to Get Over Someone (How to Re-Solidify Your Heart When It’s the Bad Kind of Mushy)

  No-Show City Doesn’t Have to Be a Sad Place

  Party of the Year

  As a Time of Day

  So Sequels Usually Suck But . . .

  Do You Believe in Life After Love?

  Remind Me How I Know You

  Cereal Killers

  Close Encounters of the Friend Kind

  High Off Life 2.0

  Way More Than 100%

  I Got Threads on Threads on Threads

  The Irony of Prison Sentences

  Drifting, Drifting

  The Flip Side to Happy

  Quickie Mart Quicksand

  How to Come Home

  Prom-ises

  Life as We Know It

  He’s Got No Game

  Graduates

  Not This Time

  Second Chances Are Still Just Chance

  The Charm of Third Times

  Things Happen in Threes

  The Plan to (Hopefully) Save Kate

  Fresh 2 Death

  We Don’t Accept Coupons at This Establishment

  Selection Sunday

  The Good Doctor

  Wait. What?!

  Mighty Magical

  Mandrake Moolah

  Pants on Fire

  A Cure for Bad Blood

  A Nutshell: What Sickle Cell Is & What Dr. Sowunmi Intends to Do About It

  Operation: Try Not to Make a Total Fool of Yourself

  Makeup Texts

  Caps & Gowns

  Thirtieth

  Four You & Me

  I Can’t Even

  How to Betray Everything You’ve Known

  The Disappointment of Ancestors

  Jack, You Suck, Man

  Why I Already Know

  Doctor, Doctor, Give Me the News

  Dilemmas, Dilemmas

  The Talk

  An Exploding Appendix

  Like This

  Duffel Bag Baggage

  Worst Thing Ever

  Break It Up, Everybody. Party’s Over.

  Five-ever

  What Would Bill Murray Do?

  Some Good Advice Amid Grocery Store Grossness

  All the Things

  The Agony, the Horror

  Almost the End

  Fin, for Real This Time

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Justin A. Reynolds

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  How to Save No One

  My face is mashed sideways against the trunk of a police cruiser when Kate dies for the third time. The box meant to save her life is smushed near my feet.

  I’ve learned a few lessons along the way.

  For instance: don’t waste time on clothes.

  It’s cold out, easily sweater weather. I’m in short sleeves, plaid pajama shorts, and a pair of beat-up Chucks I wear to mow the lawn. The insides are damp, and there’s a clump of grass in my right shoe scratching my toes, but there wasn’t time for socks. Socks, and weather-appropriate attire, are a luxury. They take time. And I can’t waste any.

  Not tonight.

  Not ever.

  Because big lesson number one is this: all the time travel in the world can’t save the people you love.

  45 Minutes Earlier

  The police are already here.

  A marked car, idling beside the emergency room entrance. There’s a chance they’re here for me, but there’s no turning back. Split seconds matter. I grab the small package sitting on the passenger seat and hop out of my car. I rip open the box, jam its contents into my sneaker. I pick up my pace.

  I should’ve left earlier.

  Should’ve done a hundred things differently this time around.

  I push open the door, thinking, Get to the elevator, make it to the fourth floor, and then I run face-first into a concrete wall. Also known as colliding into three hundred pounds of beef and nightstick.

  Ah, this must be the driver.

  I nearly crumple onto the wet floor, except the officer snares me by my T-shirt.

  “I got him,” he mumbles into the walkie holstered on his shoulder. “Back outside,” he orders me, pushing open the door, his other hand hugging his gun grip. “Come on, kid. Let’s go.” All sorts of things run through my mind—acts of valor, courage. I think about pushing past the officer and bolting for the stairs or slipping inside the elevator before it closes. But in the end my legs are spread apart, my hands cuffed behind my back.

  Part of me thinks, wonders, hopes: maybe this is it. This is the solution. I’m not supposed to be there. If I’m not there, she’ll live.

  They rattle off my crimes, and after breaking and entering, I stop listening. I don’t bother trying to explain, because how do you explain you’re from the future?

  “. . . you understand your rights,” they say more than ask.

  I nod, the aluminum trunk cool and sticky against my cheek.

  “You have anything on you? Weapon, drugs, or the like?” the large officer asks.

  “No,” I lie. Because I can’t tell the truth. Not now. Rough hands slide up and down my body. My keys jingle as he fishes them out of my pocket. Then he removes my wallet.

  “Nothing interesting,” the large officer says to his female partner.

  “Have him take off his shoes?” she suggests.

  And my knees nearly buckle.

  “Please,” I plead, “just let me go inside. My girlfriend’s dying. Check with the doctors, her nurses. Please. Just five minutes. Please. A heart, have a heart. Just let me see her for five minutes and then you can haul me away to prison, throw away the key, whatever. Please. Think of your kids. Do you have kids? If they were dying, would you want them to be alone? Please. Please.”

  I try dropping to my knees to beg, but it’s tricky when you’re being physically restrained. The officer who put the cuffs on me looks over to the other one, a dirty-blond-haired woman with bloodshot eyes, and she sighs in that studied way that all mothers must learn on the first day of Mom School. But then she nods her head. And the cuffs come off.

  Which is beyond crazy.

  “Don’t be stupid, kid,” he says in a voice that makes me think he thinks I’m going to do something stupid.

  “Five minutes,” she says. “That’s it.”

  They walk on either side of me, assuring me as we march the greasy linoleum floors and ride the we’re-trying-to-hide-the-piss-smell-with-bleach elevator to the fourth floor that i
f I try anything funny they will not hesitate to lay my stupid ass out. But I’m not going to run. I check my watch again. There’s a chance.

  Except the elevator door hesitates for twenty seconds before finally hiccuping open. And then we’re forced to detour down another hallway because a maintenance man is mopping the floors and apparently takes his floor-mopping very seriously, because he starts shouting and jumping up and down. The officers mumble apologies, but the man just points angrily toward an alternative route, also known as The World’s Longest Possible Way Around.

  I try to explain that we don’t have time for detours, for tired elevators, for wet floor signs. But no one listens. And when we get there it’s nearly too late.

  Kate’s almost gone.

  “Well, look who it is,” she says, her eyes blinking open. In the corner, the chair her mom normally occupies is empty. A crumpled blanket on the floor beside it. A lipsticked Styrofoam cup on the windowsill.

  “Hey,” I say. For a second I’m taken aback at how small she looks. The room is quiet, except for the hiss of oxygen pumping into her nose, the drone of IV fluids chugging into her arm.

  “What time is it?” she asks, squinting. Even at three in the morning, confined to a hospital bed, she’s beautiful.

  “We don’t have a lot of time left.”

  Her face twists in confusion. “What are you talking about?” She leans forward in her bed, glances over my shoulder, wincing. “And this time, you brought the police with you. Interesting move. You really know how to make an entrance, Jack King.”

  I look back at the officers. “I’m sorry about them.”

  “You’re crazy, you know that?”

  “I can see how you’d come to that conclusion, yes,” I say, smiling.

  “Five,” the female officer reminds me.

  Kate shakes her head. “Jack, why are you here? I don’t get it, man. What, you have some morbid fascination with hospitals, is that it? Or do sick girls turn you on?”

  “I came here to tell you . . .” My voice trails off because I haven’t really come to say anything.

  “What, Jack?”

  “I think I know what I’m supposed to do now. I think I’ve figured it out. Finally.”

  “Okaaaay,” she says, her eyebrows sliding up. Clearly, I’m only confusing her. Of course I am. Because none of this makes any sense.

  “You’re going to be okay, Kate. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  She turns away. “Everyone keeps saying that, but they’re lying. Don’t be a liar, Jack. Not like—” She stops when she sees what’s in my hand.

  Because for the last twenty seconds I’ve carefully worked my fingers into my shoe. And now I have it.

  “Jack,” she says, her voice rising. “Jack, what the hell—?”

  But before she can finish I yank back her blankets and fire the syringe into her thigh. She lunges forward, like I’ve hit her with a million electrical bolts.

  The police tackle me to the ground, shouting curses into my ear, into the room. “What the—! What the hell did you just do, kid? What the hell was that?”

  “Someone help,” the lady officer screams, running out in the hall. “We need a doctor in here! We need a doctor!”

  The man officer presses my face so hard against the linoleum it’s a wonder my brain doesn’t rupture out of my eye sockets. Legs and feet come rushing into the room. Lots of shouting and screaming, and people keep shaking me and asking me what I injected her with, what drug was it, and the truth is I wouldn’t know exactly how to explain it even if I wanted to. But I don’t want to. Because this is the only thing that I could do. This is the only way.

  While the doctors scramble to save her life, the officers drag me across the wet floor, across the lobby, back out into the night.

  I know that if I make the tiniest move, if I even breathe too hard, they’ll probably shoot me. Or at least knock me out cold. But it doesn’t matter. Because I got a peek at the clock on my way out of Kate’s room. And if things happen like before, then either Kate lives, or any second now it starts again.

  The male officer has a thing for smushing my face, because now my cheek is back against the cruiser. I’m guessing he intends to search me more thoroughly this time.

  “If that girl dies, I’m going to—”

  But I feel it hit me before he can finish. I close my eyes. The air already peeling, gravity ripping away from me like a pulled parachute. The tremors are nastier this time, too. I can barely stand. My body one long violent vibration.

  “Kid, are you okay?” He barks an order to his partner, tells her to go inside for help, and she darts off at full speed, but it doesn’t matter. She won’t make it in time. If I could talk, I’d tell them not to worry. That I’m not dying. I’m merely buffering. That I was trying to save her. Not that they’d understand. Not that I understand. The first time it happened, I thought I was a goner. But now.

  I don’t know how to describe it except that it’s like my body’s preparing for launch. You know, if my body was a highly evolved space shuttle and space shuttles traveled through time instead of just into space.

  “Kid, listen to me, talk to me! I think he’s having a seizure. Kid! Kid!”

  Oh yeah, lesson number two:

  Time travel hurts.

  The Beginning Beginning

  The Experience of Having Zero Experiences

  People love to say, “There’s someone for everyone.”

  It’s one of those “feel better” things your mom tells you after your relationship has crashed and burned, or your normally noncommunicative dad mumbles as he slaps you between your shoulder blades, then announces “good talk.” But it’s mostly true. If you consider how many people are walking around this planet, there has to be someone you could fit perfectly with, right? The person who makes your heart say super-crazy things like “I’ll love you forever” and “I can’t wait to meet your parents” and “Oh, sure, let’s definitely get each other’s names tattooed on our necks.” The problem is we spend most of our puny lives chasing someone else’s someone, and, if we’re lucky, we end up with only a third of the time we could’ve spent with the person truly meant for us. That is, if we don’t wind up missing them altogether.

  Take me, for instance.

  I’m an expert on just missing out—on the girl of my dreams, on class valedictorian, on making it onto any sort of sports team. (I’ve tried them all. In one desperate moment I auditioned for mascot. Turns out “Hairy” Larry Koviak executes a far superior somersault.) And the extracurricular clubs? Yep, tried those, too, only to narrowly miss the cut. Which is funny because I’d always thought that anyone could just join a school club (add that to the Things Jack Has Been Utterly and Unequivocally Wrong About list). Point is, you name it, I’ve found a way to miss my chance, often by the slimmest of margins. By now I’m an authority on Almost, with nearly eighteen years of working experience on my résumé.

  Need more proof, just walk with me through our attic. It’s a virtual shrine to Nice Try, or as I like to call it, “Jack’s Stupefying Museum of Almost Was but Never Will Be.” There’s a skateboard in mint condition, from the summer that I almost became a semipro skateboarder. There’s a sewing machine that I used to tell everyone was my mom’s but was actually mine from that time I was really into Project Runway for a few seasons. There’s the Frisbee golf set, the antique marble collection, a crate full of tiny unfinished circuits, a box with every Super Nintendo game ever created, a coffin-size container that was my first (and only) attempt at a time machine (don’t ask!), and a never-used set of noncollectible ninja stars (seriously, don’t ask!).

  Almost, almost, almost, almost, almo—

  You get it.

  I joke that my parents were prophets when they named me Jack Ellison King.

  Jack of all. King of none.

  Except my mom’s always reminding me that I was named for Jackie Robinson, who broke through the pro sports color barrier, and Ralph Ellison, writer and scho
lar, best known for his seminal work Invisible Man.

  I’m an only child. My parents had me rather late in life, after trying hard for years, and, well, just as they’d abandoned all hope—I swam along. Mom wanted to name me Miracle, but Dad (not usually the voice of reason, but willing to make an exception here) intervened—is it your dream to have Miracle get his ass kicked every day, honey?

  And so Jackie Ellison it was.

  Which I can’t help but think is a prime example of the Best and Worst of Parenting.

  Because on one hand, it’s awesome knowing that my namesakes were these incredible men. An honor. A privilege.

  But on the flip side, it’s possible that my parents did not comprehend the ridiculous amount of PRESSURE they were placing upon my freakishly narrow shoulders.

  So, yeah, there’s that, too.

  Anyway.

  I’m Jack King. The guy sporting a five o’clock shadow and an old flannel jacket at a party full of people, sitting near the bottom of the living room stairs, holding an empty glass, semiwatching a basketball game playing on the TV, but mostly staring out into the kitchen, looking at—

  It’s always the same girl.

  Jillian.

  When we signed up for this college visit, I pictured Jillian and me finally getting time alone. That we’d spend the weekend together and she’d at long last see just how (sorta) charming and (semi-) cool and (relatively) interesting I was. That I’m more than just Friendship Material Jack, you know?

  But instead, I’ve been sitting here for thirty minutes, alone, although in fairness, I’m not completely alone; there are quite a few people who keep bumping into me walking up and down the stairs. I swear I’m not normally this awkward, this antisocial.

  Let me explain.

  A Brief History of Strong Like

  Jillian and I are best friends. We met freshman year in high school, literally bumping into each other (how horribly cliché, right?), our backpacks spilling their guts all over the hallway. I helped her gather her books and we avoided that whole bumping-heads thing as we stood up, only for idiot me to step on her backpack strap and send her crashing back onto her ass. If there was an embarrassment gun, we’d bypassed Stun and switched right to Kill. A few kids paused to gawk and laugh, and there I was, rapid-firing apology after apology Jillian’s way.