She pauses, and my breath hitches. Not out of fear, but because my parents have never had to punish me. Before cancer, I wasn’t a liar; I wasn’t a problem kid or someone who snuck off. The “Black people need to be ten times as good” talk was given to me early, and it rooted itself, like a watermelon seed in someone’s stomach, and grew. Work hard now, play hard later. I embodied that.

This is new for both of us.

“Just get home,” she says. “I know you’re not at Isobel’s. I called her.”

“You’re checking up on me?”

“Really?” I can hear the eyebrow raise in her voice. “You’re the one who lied, and you’re going to try to accuse me?”

Her voice is begging me to challenge her if I dare, but I keep my mouth shut.

“Be home in twenty minutes,” she orders.

“It takes closer to thirty-five to get home from here.”

“Then you better leave now.”

And then the line goes dead, leaving me to stew in the vague dread of what will follow when I get home.

Twenty

According to my parents, a punishment worthy of lying to them is being grounded for two weeks.

“Library and home, that’s it,” Mom had said the next morning. “You can leave your phone on the kitchen island while you’re working. The laptop must be used in the living room. If your father and I aren’t home? Then I guess you’ll need to get up early the following morning.”

The tension in the house is palpable. We don’t know how to exist among one another. It’s like we’re three different planets, in three different orbits, trying to avoid colliding with one another.

Being grounded is an awkward place to be. Mom and Dad try to keep things as usual. And I do my best to remember that this is my own doing.

I lied.

I broke their trust.

I deserve this.

But that doesn’t keep the disdain from growing like cancer deep within me. If they knew the whole story, maybe they’d understand. If they knew I could time travel, if they knew I had used that ability to meet a boy—a really awesome, smart, kind, funny boy—then maybe they’d get it. Because it’s not like I’m going to talk to the McIntyres anymore. This is just adding insult to injury.

I’d only risk making my parents angrier for someone like Michael.

But they can’t know that.

It’s six o’clock in the evening, about eight days after my initial grounding, when there’s a knock at the door. Mom, Dad, and I are at the dinner table eating Chipotle, the takeout choice of the night, thanks to both of them working late and coming home not in the best of moods.