But the real reason I’m so tired is that it’s beginning to hit me that I have no idea when or how or if I’ll get back to my time. I’m a problem solver by nature, and I always get what I want in the end, so I’ve spent the last day in Action Mode. I had three tasks: find Ms. Silverthorn, convince her that I’m from the future, and find a place to stay while I work it out. Done, done, and done—but now what? Am I really going to live with young Mr. Gale and go to school with my parents and watch the train wreck of Chaz’s future unfold? How long is this supposed to last?

This is the part in a time travel story that I like least: when the traveler doesn’t know how long they’re stuck. It’s a real virtue to have a time machine, even one that breaks down and must be repaired (they always break down and always get repaired), so too bad for me. I just have to remind myself that in 99 percent of these stories, it all works out in the end … except for Connecticut Yankee, which makes the guy live, like, a thousand years that way.

I can’t stay still, letting this all race around in my head. I know I’m not supposed to leave campus at all, even for Faculty Row a block away, but I’m hoping my first day and my imagined family tragedy will buy me some latitude. I have to get out of this Brut factory right now. I head for Ms. Silverthorn’s.

As I’m walking up Faculty Row, I see the curtains part at the first house. Right until my freshman year, that was the Buckmans’ house. She taught math, and he taught shop; they were as old-school as that sounds, and they taught at the academy for forty years each. Helen Buckman was a famous gossip who somehow missed the juiciest bit of all: her husband was a perv. Their location at the Faculty Row entrance meant she had a front-row seat to all the comings and goings; it also meant he didn’t have far to go when returning from a campus tryst. I can’t see her (though I’m dying to know what she looks like young), but I know she’s watching me now, so I blow a kiss in the direction of the curtains. They stop moving. Ha.

When I knock on her door, Ms. Silverthorn is cheerful. “Good. You made it. I wasn’t sure Frohmeyer got word to the dean that I was going to pick you up.”