I want what was in the box to be real, but I don’t think it is.

But even as I practice saying those things, another voice in my head hisses at me. It’s the voice that I’m finding it harder and harder to ignore. It’s the voice that has me out here looking for Quinn instead of being in the computer lab practicing for Quiz Bowl.

“Cora?”

I stop walking. It’s Quinn. Back when I was younger, I used to think that Quinn and I had the ability to psychically communicate. I’d read a book about best friends who could talk telepathically, and I became convinced that Quinn and I could do that.

That book was fiction, though. Psychic communication is not a phenomenon that checks out under rigorous scientific scrutiny. So I know I didn’t just psychically conjure her, but it feels like I did.

I tug hard on my backpack straps again. It feels good to hold on to something. “I was looking for you.”

Quinn’s face opens like an envelope, a whole letter of feelings spilling out over her face. “You were?”

I turn at the sound of a whistle. The girls’ soccer team stampedes across the field. They’re doing a drill involving plastic orange cones. I glance at the field and then back at Quinn. “What are you doing here?”

She’s looking out at the soccer field, too. “What?”

“Why are you here?” I ask again. “You’re not on the team.”

“Oh,” she says, hanging her head. “I know. I just miss soccer sometimes.”

“You could’ve tried out.”

She looks up. “Wait. You know that I’m not on the team?”

I shrug, a little unsure how to answer that. I guess I do know she’s not on the team. I’m not sure why. I’ve tried my best to ignore everything about Quinn McCauley this year, but my brain has registered pieces of information here and there. “You always said you couldn’t wait for seventh grade.”

“Because that’s when team sports start,” she finishes my thought. I exhale at the familiarity of it, but then I think of Mabel. This isn’t right. I shouldn’t feel like this. I grit my teeth. Now isn’t the time for exhaling.

“You opened the box,” Quinn says.

I nod. I’d planned—I really, really had planned—to open it quickly so I could tell Grams that I did and then toss everything away, leaving it in the garbage to rot. That was before I saw what was in the box, though.

When I’d pulled the first article out of the box and read the headline: “Man in Colorado Claims to Be Time Traveler; Passes Lie Detector Test to Prove It”—my breath got caught in my throat.

I couldn’t throw that away without reading it. So I did. The article described a man named Roger Billows who claimed to have traveled from the year 2034 in an attempt to change his son’s fate. I kept holding my breath. Change his son’s fate. I read the article over and over again. It was short, only a couple of paragraphs. Nowhere in the article did it say exactly what had happened to Roger’s son.