Chapter 2

When we arrived at the farmhouse, Willie greeted us and invited us for supper, as if we had only been gone a few hours instead of several weeks. Since we had just eaten lunch an hour ago at the mall, Casey declined. Wille said the cabin was still open and bid us good night as he gathered up his sisters (who had been making snow angels) and headed into the main house.

The cabin was colder than the outside and I headed straight for the fireplace. Although a lighter would have been nice right about now, the matches were sufficient and after a couple of failed attempts, I finally managed to get a decent fire started. I turned back to the main room and noticed that the sheet from last time was still up. Again, it felt as if we had never left. The mall, school, Jessica, it all seemed like a distant memory even though it hadn't even been a day. Too much of this time travel could really mess with a person's sense of reality. I glanced at Casey. She had already snuggled under the covers on her cot and I could just make out her head of curls over the blankets. I sat down on my cot, facing the cotton sheet between us.

"So this is your life Casey," I pondered aloud. She didn't respond, so I kept on talking, more to myself really. "Just one big loop, over and over."

She shifted under her covers and then in a tired voice replied "yeah, something like that."

I flopped down on my mattress with my hands under my head and closed my eyes. Voicing my earlier thoughts aloud I said "Doesn't it drive you crazy? Having your life interrupted all the time. Having to be two different people. Having to survive in a different era." It was already starting to drive me crazy and I had only been here once. She'd been doing this since she was nine! Granted, most of my troubles were complicated by my growing feeling for Casey, but still. Time-travel gets pretty trippy.

"It drives me crazy if I let it, but it's not something I can control" she sighed as she rolled over in her cot to face me. "I guess I view it as like someone living with epilepsy. While the seizures are inevitable, you can't let them rule your life. You just keep on living even though you know the seizures could happen anytime or anyplace." She let out another long sigh then continued, "Yes it's hard to be two people, live two lives. But it's not the worst thing a person could live with."

Wow. Clever, brave, and selfless. Casey just kept impressing me. At those last words, I recalled watching my aunt suffer through months of chemotherapy after being diagnosed with breast cancer, only to be diagnosed with it again two years later. Yep, there were definitely things that were worse to live with than time travel. But my aunt at least had lots of love and support from family and friends during the whole ordeal. Casey's been dealing with this on her own for nearly half her life. And there aren't exactly cures being developed from random fits of time-travel. I felt myself falling even harder for her.

I rolled onto my side and stared at where her eyes would be through the sheet. "I've never met anyone like you Casey. You're the strongest, bravest person I know." And I meant it. But there was still something else I had been wondering. "Aren't you afraid of changing history? I mean, how do you know that you haven't already?" I mean, if the Back to the Future movies were any indication, messing with the space-time continuum is dicey stuff.

As if reading my mind, Casey admitted that she too had been scared about that same thing, but added, "then I realized that I am part of that history. Our future is what it is despite or maybe because of the fact that I'm here."

I kind of understood, but I was eager to hear more of her theory, so I encourage her to continue,

"When I'm in my real time, the past has already happened, with me in it, like now. It's a loop, so when I'm here, I know that whatever happens with me already happens when I go back home. It's already part of the history."

Still curious, I countered, "but are you tempted to change things? Don't you want to do something like save Abraham Lincoln before he gets shot?"

"I used to think that maybe I'm here to fix an injustice, undo an evil, but then I figured maybe I could just end up setting the course for an even greater injustice or a greater evil. I'm not God. It's not my place to mess with something this big."

I paused my question barrage to consider that. I just couldn't shake that there must be some reason for her crazy time-travel life. I mean, it's quite the gift to be born with I guess. But she had a point - trying to hard to make things right might make it worse. But still, why her? As if reading my thoughts, Casey started talking again,

"I do wonder why, though. Why do I travel? Why me? Is it just a weird quirk of nature, or is there some higher purpose?"

Since I had been contemplating the same thing, I didn't have a good answer, so I just kept silent, staring up at the ceiling.

After a few more moments, I continued with a few more questions, something else that had been bugging me,

"What happens if you die here?"

"I don't know. I just assumed that since I'm still there, I couldn't have died here."

That seemed a bit optimistic to me. "Are you sure?"

"No."

I certainly didn't want that theory to have to be put to the test. But I didn't have much more time to ponder the morbid thought of dying in the past because we were interrupted by a loud, frantic banging at the door. I popped out of bed and ran to open it. Willie was there, red-faced and breathing heavy.

"Sorry to bother you, but Cassandra, Sara needs you. Our mother is having the babe."

And with that, the night just got a whole lot more exciting!