Chapter Two
"'Cause I don't wanna lose you now, I'm looking right at the other half of me!" Max happily sings along to Justin Timberlake - Mirrors, a new release that's all over the radio. Her feet kick around beneath the chair and her shoulders sway to the music as she's writing the finishing sentences in her binder of memories, expressing all her excitement for Spring Break that's only a day away. All her plans over the next ten days with her friends Kristen and Fernando have been laid out, and the aspiring photographer couldn't be more ready to enjoy the break from school and pursue her passion.
She places her purple pen back in her desk drawer and casts a giddy smile down at the page, having left a square space in the bottom right corner for a selfie, as she usually does. Her eyes scan around the page edges and she decides to fish a red fine tipped Sharpie from her drawer to color some hearts of various sizes in the open spaces, then caps the marker and places it on the desk as she stands to fetch her camera. Max dances and skips to the tune as she makes her way to her bed, leaping and flopping herself upon the sheets to let her hair naturally splay out.
"Oh, this is going to be so much fun!" She squeals with joy as she raises the camera high in her right hand, flashing a thumbs up with the left in front of her unzipped grey hoodie and yellow t-shirt. "Cheeeeeeese!" She offers her best smile as she twitches her finger to snap the picture.
Suddenly she's standing in front of her desk, more like falling since her legs were relaxed a moment ago while she was lying on the bed. Max lets out a shocked yelp as she scrambles to find purchase with her socks and reaches out to catch the desk with both hands, and what looks like a red Sharpie clatters from her right hand to bounce across the desk.
"What the fuck!? What just…" She stands upright as she pants for breath, her heart pounding as she looks around the room trying to figure out what just happened.
Her bed looks a little disheveled as if she launched off of it in a hurry, while the Polaroid camera she just used rests on the sheets with the picture still hanging out of the feed. Her binder of memories is closed and pushed off to the right, but there's a loose sheet of paper on the middle of her desk. It's covered in red Sharpie ink, written in her own handwriting that she has no recollection of creating.
Hey! Hey brain! Her ears demand attention. The radio was playing Justin Timberlake - Mirrors a couple seconds ago, and now it's well into Bruno Mars – When I Was Your Man. Something WEIRD is going on here.
Yeah, fucking thanks, ears! I already KNOW something weird is going on here.
Max cautiously reaches down for the paper on her desk to hold tentatively before her yellow shirt, eyes scanning the words to see just what sort of trickery is being played here.
Younger Me,
I'm you, from seven months in the future. Yes, I'm cereal. I'll prove it. This is in your handwriting and nobody else could have come in here and written this, and you never told anyone that Chloe was your first crush at 13. That's why you couldn't stay in touch after moving to Seattle, you thought you would never see her again and it hurt too much to think about her. Well, in October you're going to be hurt so much worse!
Chloe is dating a girl named Rachel Amber. Rachel gets kidnapped on April 22 and is later murdered in captivity. Chloe is shot to death on October 7 right in front of you. You'll develop the power to rewind time then, but can't change that event without causing so much more damage. So, do exactly as I say and we can save Rachel and Chloe!
First, glue that selfie you just took into the space you made for it. If you forget to do that then I won't have found it to jump back to you, and you'll break the universe or something.
Second, cancel your Spring Break plans, call Chloe and ask her to go on a road trip to Portland, or Seattle, or both, whatever works. If she doesn't ask to take Rachel, invite her to take someone she's dating. Rachel must be kept safe! Get permission from mom and dad to fly to Arcadia Bay after school tomorrow and sleep over at Chloe's house before the road trip.
While there, write an anonymous note for Chloe's stepfather David Madsen with the following on it: Mark Jefferson and his student Nathan Prescott are criminals that drug, kidnap and rape girls from Blackwell. They bring the girls to the Prescott Barn at Lat: 45.496698 Long: -123.894625. There is a secret room under the barn with all the evidence needed to arrest both of them. The combination to enter the room is 542.
Finally, show this letter to Chloe when the time is right. This will prove to her that it's real: Been to the hideout, saw the elephant on the yellow rug, hella cool. Welcome to 'Hell' poster? I liked that junkyard. Rachel 13, Chloe 4, you need to work on your darts skills. The Max you know has never been there and couldn't know these things. I love you, Chloe. I'll do anything to save you. Please be nice to younger me; she loves you, too.
My brain only retains the original timeline. Everything you do between reading this and 6:25pm on October 15th will be forgotten, replaced by my memories. Please write everything down, take pictures, and make videos, so life won't be as confusing afterward. You can do this. If you still don't believe me, check your left forearm.
Shocked and dismayed by the content of the letter Max throws it as hard as she can, but since it's just a thin sheet it flutters and tumbles off to the left of where she aimed, eventually coming to rest on the floor. She raises her left arm and stares at the grey hoodie sleeve hiding her forearm, her expression horrified and incriminating as if her arm is about to do something awful. Slowly she reaches for the cuff and grips it, then tugs all at once as if peeling a Band-Aid. "It's real. Save Rachel and Chloe!" The words are hastily written on her soft, pale flesh in that blaring red Sharpie marker.
"No! God, no!" Max protests as she rubs at her arm, but that ink isn't going anywhere. "This can't be possible! How is this possible?"
Max backpedals into the far wall near the doorway of her bedroom, gasping for breath and clutching her head with both hands. She wracks her brain to try and make sense of all this as her fingers tangle into her light brown hair, her eyes darting around in a panic at the carpeted floor.
This is so fucked up. I'm only seventeen! I can't go on some mission and save people's lives! I need help. I need to show this to my parents, or call the cops. Wait, no! They'll think I'm crazy, that I just wrote it myself. They won't listen and won't let me go to Chloe, and then I'll fail. Shit… I have to do this alone, don't I?
Max walks across the room to read the note over again, frowning with worry at all the difficult things she's going to need to accomplish. She snorts at the second to last paragraph. "Hella cool? When do I start using the world hella? Who even says that anymore? So lame." With a heavy sigh she submits to the notion that her entire life has officially been turned upside down, and the only person she can blame is herself.
Stupid future self, dropping all her baggage on me… I feel like getting a tattoo on my face or something to get her back, but that feels like it would backfire. I know I crushed hard on Chloe after I developed those kinds of feelings at 13, but this letter is heavy. "I love you Chloe. I'll do anything to save you." What the hell happens in October? I guess Chloe will be the most important thing in the world to me one day, so I have to save her. And if she loves Rachel, then I'll save her, too… it's the right thing to do, even if I don't get to be with Chloe afterward.
Max scans back to the first order of business in the letter, that selfie. That's quite the simple tutorial to following future Max's instructions, and she feels far more accomplished than she should after gluing the selfie in the binder where it belongs. But, when a teenager is about to embark on a mission through time itself to save her true love she should hold onto any measure of success she finds.
Onto step two: Making new Spring Break plans. She reaches for her little contact journal and flips the pages to find the phone number for Joyce Price. Immediately wracked by nerves at the idea of talking to Chloe after all these years Max just stares at the phone number for a good ten minutes pondering all the ways this could go horribly wrong. Finally, she swallows hard and forces herself to be brave. She picks up her cell phone and plugs in the number, then taps the call button.
"Just take a deep breath." She attempts to prepare herself as she nervously picks at the edge of her wooden desk with her free hand. Each ring of the phone in the little speaker just adds more fuel to her nerves, the poor thing practically shivering in her desk chair. She's never made a phone call where lives were on the line before. Then, the ringing sound is interrupted by the clattering of someone answering the phone, and her heart skips a beat. Her eyes drift to the final paragraph of that letter. "You can do this."