“Oh, nothing, just the same trash day as at my grandmother’s house.” She realized as soon as she said it that they all thought this was mildly weird. But things were about to get weirder, and there would be no explaining why to her only friends—well, her only friends in this world. At Hatfield she had Franny. And Andrew the stable boy seemed nice—she recalled how easily he had lifted her into the strange saddle and placed her just perfectly in the peculiar little seat.

“So,” Myles continued, “is this not a TARDIS?”

“Brilliant!” Anand shouted as Joe high-fived Myles.

“So?” Myles turned to Rose. His magnified dark eyes sparkled behind his thick lenses. He clearly had expected her to cheer.

“Uh . . . what’s a TARDIS?” Rose asked. “I mean, I don’t know all that much about Doctor Who.”

“What’s a TARDIS?” Joe said in disbelief.

Susan stepped forward. “You know Doctor Who, don’t you, Rose?”

“Yeah, but just a bit, not like you guys.”

“The British science fiction show,” Anand said. “Between the four of us we have all the DVDs.”

“Yeah, but who is Doctor Who?”

“He’s a Time Lord,” Joe said. “He battles injustice, but also explores time and space.”

“Time Lord,” Rose said, as her voice cracked a bit.

“Yeah, a Time Lord,” Susan said. “And he travels in a time machine.”

“Time machine?” Rose’s voice was a whisper. The boys were all talking at once trying to explain the machine.

“You see,” Myles said, “it’s called the TARDIS.”

“That stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space. So cool.” Anand was jubilant. “And this box is perfect, because it will fit over Myles’s wheelchair!”

“We measured it!” Joe said.

They all thought time travel was science fiction, but Rose knew it wasn’t. It was REAL. It was nonfiction—and Rose had lived it!

“We have to make it look like a London police box,” Myles said.

“What’s a police box?” Rose asked.

“In England they have these boxes like old-fashioned telephone booths, you know, before cell phones. Except these were just for cops. They were painted blue and the cops could go in and make calls to headquarters or wherever,” Joe explained.

“And what does it do?”

“It transports the Doctor to any time and point in space,” Myles said. “Sometimes it’s kind of unpredictable.”

“But it has this cool thing—called the chameleon circuit—where it can disguise itself and blend in with whatever’s around it.” Anand was so excited he was almost jumping up and down.

“Yeah, cool,” Rose said, somewhat distractedly. Sounds like me, she thought. She had certainly blended in to Hatfield, hadn’t she? “Uh . . . where does it go in time?”

“Nazi Germany, sometimes,” Anand said.

“Oh great,” Rose muttered. “Just where we all want to go.”