Never Enough Time

Chapter 1

There’s never enough time.

I hear my mother’s constant complaint and accompanying sigh as I walk in the front door of our dreadful suburban house. Why anyone would choose to live in the suburbs, in Westchester, when they could live in, well, I don’t know, a fucking cave in the mountains, for example, is beyond me.

I’m home, I say as I race up the stairs, hoping to escape the inevitable Question Period that always accompanies my arrival back from anywhere.

Not so fast, young lady, my mother says. We need to talk.

Fuck that, I think, and almost say it out loud. But that kind of language doesn’t go over well here in the Idyllic Land of Niceness and Civilized Verbiage.

I trudge back down the steps and go into the kitchen, where my mother’s assembling the ingredients from the magic food bundle that gets delivered every few days along with cooking instructions—a lifesaver, according to my mother.

I’d be just as happy with a bowl of cereal, and anyway, she’s making shrimp something, I see.

I’m a vegetarian, you know, I say.

You need your protein, my mother says.

Vegetarians have been surviving for centuries without animal flesh, I say for maybe the seven millionth time. Thirty percent of the people in India are vegetarians, and they—

Delaney, she says, did you finish your project?

No, I say. Might as well tell the truth now and get it over with. But I have another week.

You don’t know what could come up, my mother says as she refers to the instruction card and throws something or other on top of the dead shrimp. I’ll be having cereal for dinner.

You’re always waiting until the last minute.

It always works out, I say. Because it does.

You’ll see when you get older, she says. "Look at me. I don’t have time for anything. And it all goes so fast."

Mom, I say, you tell me that, like, every day. I brilliantly stop myself from saying every fucking day, which is what I was thinking. Which is what I was meaning.

Well, it’s true. There’s just no time. No time at all. And what little there is—

"How can there be little if there isn’t any?" I say.

Don’t interrupt me, my mother says. As I was saying—what little there is goes by too quickly. Really. I have no idea how I’m going to get everything done tonight. And with your father tied up in negotiations. And I have a board meeting later.

She must say something else, probably several other something elses, but I’m not listening anymore.

Finish your project, my mother says. Do you want to grow up to be a ditch digger?

They still have ditches? I say. I take a carrot out of the fridge and munch away at it, knowing the crunching sounds will aggravate the shit out of her. Do they still need ditches? For what?

Do you have to chew so loudly? she says. See? I was right.

Yeah, I say, chewing even louder.

Of course they still have ditch diggers, my mother, who’s got a double Ph.D. and a couple of master’s, which maybe don’t count after you’ve got the doctorates, says. Who do you think makes ditches?

I haven’t really thought about it and don’t want to. I don’t want to think about my project either, which will get done, at the last minute, as all projects get done. It’s got something to do with the French Revolution or maybe it’s the American Transcendentalist movement or Useful Ways to Save Energy. A topic, you know. Fucking topics.

Fuck topics.

All the projects I get assigned get done. It might happen at the last possible second, but it happens.

I’m the top student in my class, about to be valedictorian—assuming the end of the goddamn term ever gets here—just like both the parents were, and graduating at seventeen, just like Dad did. Mom, the biggest overachiever of the lot of us, graduated at sixteen, and she never lets Dad forget about that.

Of course, they didn’t know each other then. They didn’t meet until some graduate school thing. Okay, I do know when they met. But I don’t care.

Right now, I just want to get to my room, be left alone, and read. And wait for someone to text me. Maybe tell me something interesting. Maybe invite me somewhere, as if anyone would invite me anywhere.

The book I’m reading’s good though. Some creaky old science fiction paperback I found in the attic in a collapsing box when I went up there a couple of weeks ago on an errand for my mother, who refuses to enter the attic due to her numerous allergies and more numerous fears.

In fact I found an entire collection of creaky old science fiction paperbacks—their covers are gorgeous—and I’ve been racing through all of them. Weird to read an actual book. Usually I just read off my tablet or phone. And the books smell funny, kind of a combination of dampness and mystery. But that’s part of the fun of it. Part of the atmosphere.

The one I’m reading now is about a guy who travels back in time just by sort of thinking about traveling back in time. And I guess he’s going to fall in love with this girl, the one in the past, I mean. Although right now I’m feeling very very bad for the girl he’s got in this time, in his present. Because he’s going to leave her. I can tell. And I feel awful for her.

But not as bad as I feel for me, who’s got no one at all in this time. Although I do have a good book. And plenty of time to do my project, whatever it is.

All the time in the world.

Or so I thought.

Chapter 2

I guess I fell asleep reading. The book was good, but no book is so good that it can keep you awake when you drift off to sleep.

And I must’ve been tired. Because it’s morning now. I slept all night. Teenagers need their sleep, or so I’ve heard. Sometimes I get no sleep, and that seems fine too.

Today’s going to be a long day. I have to get this project started. Hell, I have to figure out what the project is, and I have to go to my tutoring job—the Blake kid doesn’t get math at all and I’d like to stuff it into his dense skull, but that method hasn’t been perfected yet—and Mom made me promise I’d make dinner, since she’s got something or other going on.

It’s going to be vegetarian, I said last night, warning her, and she tsked and gave me the look that says Vegetarians all die of protein starvation.

Odd that she didn’t call me to wake me up like she always does. But maybe it’s early, or earlier than I think it is.

Time’s funny that way, even without thinking your way back into the turn of the twentieth century or complaining about time constantly, like Mom does, or being Einstein or some other theoretician, cooking up esoteric ways to grasp the concept.

I not only don’t understand time, I don’t know what time it is right now. My phone’s gone missing and I can’t find my tablet.

It’s as though my room were rearranged in the middle of the night while I was asleep.

Stranger things have certainly happened. Mom once redecorated my room while I was at math camp, and I came home and didn’t recognize the place—it was all blue, and I threw a fit even though it looked kinda good.

Today, though. Hmmm. I start searching for my phone, look around, and realize this isn’t even my room.

I fell asleep in someone else’s room? Did I leave the house? And whose room is this? This certainly isn’t any room I’ve ever been in before.

I stay in bed. I’m obviously having a hallucination, brought on by reading too much antique science fiction. Or else I’m still asleep.

I blink my eyes, rub my eyes, and sit up. Now I’m panicking. Now I’m looking around and there’s nothing at all familiar to me in this room I’m in.

It’s a nice room, though. Kind of cute, really. Very black and purple, which I love. Nicely decorated and cozy. Feels like home. Feels like the kind of place I’d like to be in.

Well, I actually am in it, aren’t I? That’s the nonsense thought I have. Me, the smartest girl in the class, and even I have nonsense thoughts. I guess everyone does. Well, not Einstein. He never had a nonsense thought. Tesla probably didn’t either. Definitely not Euler. Or Marie Curie. These people thought only Important Relevant Groundbreaking Awesome Thoughts.

I snap out of it. Where am I?

I stumble out of bed. I need a bathroom. Now. Where the hell is the bathroom?

Where the fuck is the bathroom?

It’s certainly not in this cozy black and purple room.

I open the door and look out and am fucking astonished. I’m looking into not the hallway of a house, but the hallway of a building. It’s vast and long and endless. Well, I guess vast covered endless.

And there are lots of doors. One of them must be to a bathroom. It’d better be.

I creep out into the hallway, and for the first time I notice that I’m wearing something that’s just as unfamiliar to me as the room is. I mean, it’s nice and all. It’s something I’d pick out—being black and purple with a touch of turquoise—but it’s not something I possess.

Fuck all this. I need the toilet.

Delaney! What are you doing up so early? Hungover again?

I really must be hallucinating. Hungover? Much less again? I’ve never even had a drink!

The person addressing me by my name, I must emphasize—not just Hey, you or What the fuck? which would be my reaction to a complete stranger stumbling about the hallways of my house or, uh, building—is a good-looking guy in a pair of pajama bottoms and nothing else. And he’s got hair on his chest.

I wave to him, thinking that’ll be sufficient, and continue down the hallway.

"Jeez, Delaney. Turn around. It’s that way," the boy says. What I mean is man. He’s too old to be a boy. Boys don’t have hair on their chests. I don’t think.

Not that I look at the chests of many boys. Too busy keeping up the GPA and ignoring the fact that all the boys in my school are too damned intimidated to even talk to me, much less take their shirts off for me, no matter how much I wish they—or one of they—would.

I turn around. Two doors away is a door with a bathroom symbol on it. Thanks to the good blessed Buddha. I’ve never needed a bathroom so badly in my entire life.

After I use the facilities and wash my hands, I look at myself in the mirror. Should I wash my hair today? And how can I be thinking of that when I don’t know where the holy fuck I am?

But forget where the fuck I am. And as though I don’t have enough problems already—with not having started the project yet and with waking up in a strange place—I have a new problem: I’m someone else.

Let me backtrack here. That’s not exactly right. I’m not someone else. I’m me, Delaney Archer. But I’m not me. Not just in the usual I’m not myself today way. I’m not fucking me.

Not the me I’m used to seeing in the mirror, anyway. That Delaney Archer is five pounds overweight—a tragedy for a sixteen-, nearly seventeen-year-old girl—has a super short haircut, inflicted on herself in a fit of anger and sexual frustration, and her skin is not all it should be.

But that’s not the reflection that’s staring back at me from the mirror in this huge bathroom I’m in. I forgot to mention that. There’re stalls in here and showers at the other end. The other end from where I’m standing, staring at this odd version of Delaney Archer in the mirror over the sink.

This reflection where I look like I’m a few years older than sixteen-year-old Delaney Archer, about to be seventeen, about to be valedictorian and perpetually late to address all Important Papers. This isn’t that Delaney Archer.

I have—the reflection of me has—like, the beginning of some character in my face. And I’ve got this mass of long, swingy nearly black hair, and I’m positively svelte in my black and purple pj’s. My tits are bigger too, I’m pretty sure.

I’d be thrilled if only I knew what the fuck happened. How, overnight, I’ve gone from that Delaney to this Delaney.

Hey, babe, says the same boy—man—who I saw out in the hallway. Must’ve been some night last night.

Yeah, I say. Must’ve been. If only I could remember it.

You’re such a card, Del, he says. He’s calling me Del, as though he always does, as though anyone ever did or would or would fucking dare.

Up for a quickie? he says when he comes over to the sink next to mine. I mean, I don’t even know this guy’s name, and he thinks I want to have a quickie with him? That is colossally forwardly out there.

Sure, I say. Why not?

Chapter 3

But it’s not to be, I’m sorry to say, never having had a quickie before, since just then the nameless guy’s also nameless friend comes into the bathroom and says, Laurence, ferchrissake, we’re supposed to be at the lab in ten minutes. You’re not even dressed.

So now I know his name: Laurence. He looks nothing like a Laurence, who should be a little too tall and kinda spindly and a bit gawky and definitely without hair on his chest, which this tall, built, in-control Laurence impersonator has plenty of.

I wonder what that hair would’ve felt like against my skin. Or if it would have touched my skin during a quickie.

Damn you, man, Del and I were just about to get it on, Laurence says.

Get dressed, you idiot, the still-nameless friend of Laurence’s says. "Morton’ll have a nuclear fit if we’re not there."

Sorry, Del. Take a rain check?

Never, I say, and all three of us laugh, as though we’re the best of friends, even though I don’t know either one of these men, including the one I was all set to have a fucking quickie with.

Did I take some kind of a drug last night? My mother’s got a cabinetful of them, and she’s always trying to get me to swallow one if I’m not feeling exactly completely 182 percent perfect. But of course I never take any. Who even knows if the drugs are vegetarian? They could have hidden properties and ingredients and effects.

As though I need more hidden effects at this point.

It’s not like I went to a party last night, I think as I go back to my room. Well, the room I woke up in, anyway. It’s not my room. My room is back home, and this is here. Although I have no idea where or what here is.

I mean, I never go to a party. Or hardly ever go. Or rarely stay if I do go. Or feel at all comfortable while I’m there.

Was I kidnapped? Yeah, maybe that’s it. I’m a famous kidnap victim! I’ll read about myself on Twitter in a moment, as soon as I find my phone, which I can’t locate. Or my tablet, which has also disappeared. I’ve now looked all over this small room for them. Nowhere. They’re gone.

What am I talking about? These objects didn’t disappear—I disappeared.

I’m somewhere else and I’m not even me. Although I’m sort of me, and that guy, Laurence, my canceled quickie date, called me Del, so he seems to know me.

This is just the kind of thing that would happen in a dream. Oh my fucking transcended Buddha.

Of course! Fuck me! I’m dreaming!

That explains every goddamn thing that’s happened so far this morning.

What I mean is, in the morning I’m dreaming about. That morning. Not the real morning, the one where I’ll wake up, have hacked-away-at short hair, bad skin, and a project that I’ve got to start, like, today, because even last-minute me needs a few days to work on it. Hell, I need a day just to figure out what the fucking hell the project is.

Therefore, I’m going to get back in this bed, get back under the cute black and purple comforter—damn, my dreaming self has extra great taste in home, or should I say fantasy, décor—finish the dream, then get up and do what I always do.

Except for one small problem.

When I get up, like four minutes and thirteen seconds later, since I’m not tired at all and can’t even keep my eyes closed, I’m not back in my real room, my room at home, my actual, accustomed, usual place.

I’m still here in this odd strange stranger’s room.

What would an old-timey science fiction writer do about this? I wonder as I lie in bed with my eyes open and give the covers a couple of kicks, just to convince myself that I am actually awake.

Would they have me go outside now and get the first glimpse at the pods that are going to take over my very existence unless I can miraculously escape their inexorable, grasping advance?

Would they explain what the fuck happened to me so that the reader would know what happened even though I, the actual person (well, the fictional person, if it’s science fiction), wouldn’t have a clue?

Would they send me a wonderful message, maybe slip a note under my door—this door, I mean, because it’s hardly mine—which would help me out? Damn, I’d love a note under the door right about now.

Sadly for me, none of these things is happening. It’s just me, in this room, in these odd but quite nice pj’s, under a head of long, swingy black hair, about to have the mother of all panic attacks.

I mean, I must have left my home and come here, and I don’t remember doing any of it. Forget the part about my hair having grown a foot and a half and my face looking kinda significantly different. I shove all that aside. The important question is How the fuck did I get here?

Believe me, I’ve been racking my hippocampus and temporal lobe and anything else that I can rack, and as far as I know, I fell asleep reading about that bastard who’s leaving his girlfriend in the present because he likes the girl in the past better. And we’re supposed to be on his side! What is that he’s doing? It’s not trading up. I guess it’s trading back.

Me? I’ve traded over. That makes me giggle.

It doesn’t mean a fucking thing, but I’m giggling. I guess that’s part of the panic attack. Hysteria. Named after the uterus, because, fuck knows, a man would never be over-the-top emotional. Or have a uterus, for that matter. Or want one. Or know what to do with it if he did.

But I’ve lost the thread—every spun, measured, and cut portion of it. The whole shebang. The full monty. The a-to-z gamutity of it all.

But there is no thread, I remind myself. Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos are nowhere fucking in sight.

And me? I’m in a different place, I’m in a different me, and I have no idea who, what, where, why, or when.

I’d say that about sums it up.

To make matters worse, Laurence’s lab mate had to barge in on us just when I was about to have my first quickie ever.

Fuck me.

Chapter 4

Okay. I’m going to just admit it here, and you can do with it whatever you want. Criticize me, hate me, tell yourself that grand old you would never stoop to such a low thing and then feel justifiably superior about it, but, the thing is, after the giggling stopped, I sat on the bed and cried.

I know, I know, I know. Girls don’t cry anymore. Women, I guess. I don’t seem to be such the girl anymore, at least not judging by what I saw in the mirror in the bathroom.

We don’t cry. We’re superheroes (superheroines?), we’re strong and tough and in-your-aura, we’re invincible, stolid, resourceful, right-on, right up front, maybe even somewhat mean or possibly incredibly mean, and we don’t cry. We wouldn’t cry. No fucking bloody way.

It’s unbecoming. It’s unstrong. It’s unnecessary. It’s not what anyone wants to emulate or know about or experience themselves.

I mean, you can cry at the climax of the Big Emotional Scene where you find out your superpowers were given to you by the little boy next door, who you always thought was a pest but as it turns out he’s your soul mate or your supertwin or your otherworldly benefactor and he was just playing at being the little boy next door and, well, just finding out about this is hugely overwhelming.

You could cry then. But not now. Not when you’ve just woken up in a strange place and you’ve got to find out who you are, where you are, and what the fucking hell happened to you.

I think all of this while I’m crying, so I’m guessing you’re thinking it too. I cry for quite a while, but since I don’t have my phone or my tablet, I can’t tell you how long it goes on for. And, as far as I know, wherever the hell it is that I’m at might have a completely different system of timekeeping than the one I’m familiar with.

But, you know, despite my lack of audacious superpowers, I do stop crying eventually.

Because I get a brilliant idea. Forget finding out where I am or when I am, if that’s even part of this situation, predicament, and/or circumstance. The important thing, the main thing, is to get back to my home.

Like Dorothy or something. Except, thank you very much, great Buddha, I don’t live in Kansas. Unless this is Kansas. But I don’t live here, and I don’t want to find out that it’s Kansas here. And I don’t want to find a wizard.

The trick is to get home. Back to the Westchester, New York, suburbs, where my home is. Was?

Dorothy was kind of like the guy in that science fiction story. She just thought herself back home. With some help from a killer pair of shoes and some glorious Technicolor. Come to think of it, the guy in the sci-fi book had an entire outfit, which outfit helped him think his way into the past.

From all this, I gather that clothing, or at least accessories, could be a big part of getting back to my actual real home.

But I’m just going to have to wing it, because, after looking through all the clothes here in this room, there’s hardly anything that’s even hemi-demi-semi-reminiscent of my usual wardrobe, yet everything—and I mean everything, because I tried it all on—does fit me as though it’s mine. And some of the stuff looks rather nice.

So I put on the least-different-looking clothes here: a pair of dark gray leggings and a chartreuse sweater. Looks great with my swingy long black hair brushing up against it, I notice in the mirror over my dresser.

Over the