Its the small things you notice. A blink, and youre back three paces. Something flashes in the corner of your eye, and when you move to check it out, its yesterday. Waking up to pee at 3am fifteen times. You get used to it. I get used to it. No one else seems to notice.
But its getting absurd now and I have to do something. Its my birthday. But its my 18th birthday. A moment ago I was 33.
Im back in my childhood bedroom. Everything is exactly how I remember it. The alarm clock near the bed, a constant source of eldritch noise at 7am currently registers a little after 2am. From down the hall I can hear movement and I have to say something. I take a deep breath, remember my wife and kids who are gone now head down to my sisters room to give her a piece of my mind.
“Shut the fuck up,” she says, as the door swings open. She doesnt even look around. She knows its me and she knows what Im going to say. She is rummaging through her hope chest in her pyjamas. Her voice is angry and upset. “Just dont, alright. I fucked up and I need to fix it.”
“What did you do?” I try to keep my voice even. I am supposed to be the calm one of us. The mediator. Thats how our parents view twins. A chaotic one and a calming one. Right now, though, I dont feel calm. “What the fuck did you do?”
“It was Calvin,” she said. Her husband. They had met in the first week of college, over a decade ago in my memory, but now less than a year in our future. They had fallen for each other immediately and started a family before they had both graduated. Their daughter, my niece, was a wonderful child, almost the opposite of her parents. I doted on her as if she was my own. I was close to Calvin, or Cal as most people called him. He was a good dude. A little bit absent minded, but he adored my sister and spoiled their kid. So he was good in my books.
“What do you mean?”
She turned around, a slim exercise book in her hand. She was crying in that silent, hidden way she did when she was truly upset. The look on her face was fear and betrayal, there was no sign of the anger she had greeted me with, but I knew it wasnt deeply hidden. “He hit me,” she said.
“What?” I was angry now. He hit her? That was the last thing I expected. My first instinct was to rush out of the house and find him, but I couldnt. We were 18 again. She hadnt met him yet. “What?” I asked, calmer, looking out the hallway to see if our parents had heard us.
“Charlie,” their daughter, “had been sick. I told you, right?”
“Sure, bad case of covid. What about it?”
“She’s been in and out of hospital for the last month. They dont know whats wrong with her.”
“Im so sorry, you should have said something. Nicky and I could have helped, would have helped, you know that.”
“Shut up,” she said. She always lashed out when someone offered to help her. “Sorry. I know you would have. But,” she slumped to the floor and I rushed to catch her too late. Instead I just held her in my arms. “The doctors dont know whats wrong. They think she has something else, you know like all those people? They get covid and it lets something else get in?”
“Sure, Nickys mother had that, pneumonia.”
“Yeah, this isnt that. Charlie’s been in the ICU for a few days now and Ive been trying to figure out when she got covid originally.”
“So you could rewind?” I asked.
“I havent done it for ages,” she said.
“Ive noticed,” I replied.
“I didnt want to ever do it again. After she was born. I didnt want to lose any of it.”
“So what happened?”
“The doctors said she isnt going to make it. That the stuff theyre doing now is barely enough to keep her alive as it is. They dont know whats wrong and they cant treat it. Shell deteriorate and die.”
“Cass,” I said and stopped. “Im so sorry.”
“Stop it,” she muttered and just buried herself in my arms. “Cal and I were fighting. The stress, you know? Ive been with Charlie the whole time, hes had to pick up extra shifts. It hasnt been great.”
“I feel like youre beating around the bush, dude,” I said. I didnt know a lot, but one of the things I knew better than anyone was how to read my twin sister. “But, again, Nicky and I love Charlie, we love you guys. You gotta reach out and ask, were all family.”
Again I look to the door, to see if our parents are coming. Still nothing and I plead silently for them to wake. For them to come in here so I can see them again.
“I cant anymore,” she says eventually. “We have to live through that again. All of it. I rewind, I dont fast forward.”
The words hit me like a brick. We were back in our 18 year old bodies. We had all of that ahead of us and we were the only two who knew. We would be heading into our adult years with the knowledge of everything that we did. Nearly 15 years of life in our heads. We would meet our partners already knowing everything about them. We would head into our education already knowing what was going to be taught. Theres no way we could ever react or choose the same way we did the first time around. Everything was going to change and that meant-
“Cass,” I said, pushing her and turning so she could face me. “What happened? Finish the story.”
“I told him,” she cried. “I told him what I can do, what I used to do. He didnt believe me. So I made him test me. I told him to tell me something he had never told me, or anyone, before. Something new. I rewound five minutes, and told him what he had told me. He was so angry. He didnt understand. Ive never seen him like that. I tried to calm him down, tried to tell him what my plan was. To go back and make sure we protected Charlie from ever getting covid. He told me I couldnt do that. He wouldnt let me.”
“You told him he couldnt stop you.”
“And then he hit me, tried to knock me out.”
“But you were already doing it,” I said.
“And it flashed into my head,” she said.
“What did?”
“The last time a boyfriend hit me.”
I looked around her room. A room was never allowed into without her express permission. A room full of posters and things that she had collected over her childhood. Almost nothing thrown away, and everything displayed perfectly. This was her place and she made sure she had complete control over it. “Alex,” I muttered.
“He was mostly fine,” she protested.
“He hurt you,” I said.
Cass and I were twins, and we knew each other backwards and forwards. But we werent friends. Not really. Alex was always her friend, from grade school all the way until, well, this year. The year we all went our separate ways.
They dated, as young adults do, secretly testing boundaries – their own, and our respective parents – but he never struck me more than a lovestruck boy who fell for the first woman he saw after puberty. I never thought, although there were times I suspected, that he was violent towards her.
“Leave him,” she said, waving her hand. “We have to find the book.”
“What book?” I asked.
“The book that taught me how to rewind in the first place.”
“There was a book? You never said.”
“I never wanted you to know. You were the only one who remembered. The only one who could ever remember. Now Ive fucked your life up as well as mine and I cant do anything about it.”
I breathed and nodded. I was the calm one. I was the one who needed to keep control over this. Everyone in the world had been rewound 15 years, but my sister and I were the only ones who knew. “Calvin, Nicky, everyone else will go about their lives as they did the first time round,” I said. “Nothing will change for them until they meet us, assuming we do the same.”
“I know, Ive thought of all that,” she said. “Thats why I need the book.”
“Please, elaborate,” I said, sarcastically. “Because unless the book has instructions on how to fast forward back to the future, we’re fucked.”
“I dont know what the book has in it,” she said. “It was magic.”
“Ok,” I said, unsure where she was going with this.
“Each page was blank until I needed it. The first pages were about control. Controlling myself, controlling my area. Once I understood all of that, and I was able to prove it, the next page was revealed.”
“And this was the rewind?”
“No,” she said. “In this year, when we were 18, that was the last of the revealed pages, but there were others that were still blank. The second page was to understand flow. To feel how the worlds energy was used by all of us, and how all of us were used by the flow of time. It was like meditation.”
“I remember you getting big into that.”
“Thats why. I needed something to calm myself. To feel myself and how the flow of everything wrapped around me. It was after I was able to do that that the next page was revealed. That was a combination of both of those things.”
“Controlling this flow?”
“Yeah,” she said. She was back in her hope chest at this point, scattering everything on the floor. I looked back out in the hallway. Still no sound from the other bedroom.
She stopped and looked at me with sad eyes. “You dont remember this night, do you?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Its 2am on our 18th birthday, they arent here.”
A flash of memory took me and I remembered that our parents had spent the night out with their friends, only arriving in the morning with a ton of gifts and family members who had been secretly waiting to surprise us. At the moment, as 18 year olds, we were home alone and neither of us actually knew where our parents were. It was my turn to slump to the ground.
I felt her arms around me and a rare hug. “I know,” she said. “I wanted to see them too. But its ok,” she said.
“How could it be?” I asked.
“We’ll see them when they arrive in a few hours.”
“I dont,” I started to say.
“You do,” she replied, holding up a book she had dug out from the very bottom of her hope chest. “This is the book, and if Im right, then everything will be fine.” She opened up the book and flicked to a page about halfway in.
“Fast forward?” I asked, hopefully.
“No,” she said, and looked at me with those same sad eyes. “I can make us forget.”