Proof of Forever (4 page)

In all of the photos, Joy has her long, flowing, light brown hair down around her arms, her cheeks are flushed pink, and her eyes look big and tearful and happy. Even now, looking back at her former self, Joy feels a flutter of that old happiness in her chest, just a quiver of it really, but fastened down with guilt, like a pinned butterfly.

Tali, Luce, and Zoe huddle together around Joy to get a closer look. If someone were to observe them from afar, they might actually believe the girls were still best friends.

“Why are we doing this?” Zoe asks at the same time Tali says, “Ugh, I look like a freaking idiot.”

Luce touches Joy's arm gently. “I
love
this idea,” she says, her voice soft but firm. Whether or not she actually means it, Joy can't tell, but she's grateful anyway. “It's the perfect way to say good-bye to camp.”

Joy nods. “A way to say good-bye to all of it.”

Luce takes the key from Zoe and steps forward to test it on the lock.

The key sticks. Luce gives it a hard shove, and the whole wall of the shed shudders, but the door doesn't give.

Joy's throat squeezes up. She didn't come all this way to have her plan ruined. She takes her turn trying the lock. Still no luck.

“Maybe we should just pick a different spot,” Tali offers, looking antsy.

“Hold on.” Zoe marches around to the side of the shed, getting the determined look on her face that Joy remembers so well.

A second later, they hear a grunting sound, followed immediately by an alarm.

“Zoe! What the hell did you
do
?” Luce cries.

Joy darts around the side of the shed, with Luce and Tali right behind her, to see Zoe sticking a pin back into her pocket, looking a bit guilty—and also a little amused.

“I thought maybe I could jimmy the lock.” Zoe shrugs. “Cal showed me how . . .”

Joy wants to smile but her whole plan is spinning away, and it makes her almost dizzy with frustration.

Zoe throws her hands up. “Anyway, I didn't think it would be alarmed.”

Tali snorts. “Since when is the Stevens so valuable? What are they keeping in there?”

“Dynamite?” Zoe offers.

“Cocaine?” Tali suggests.

“Guys,” Luce urges. “We need to get
out
of here! I'm so not getting busted for this. Come on!”

Joy has no choice but to follow them. The screaming of the alarm pierces her ears and brain like a bratty tattletale on the playground.
Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah.

It used to be that the four of them were invincible. Between Tali's charm, Luce's practicality, Zoe's cleverness, and Joy's innocence, they could get out of
anything
.

But that was then and this is now.

They cut through a portion of the woods so as not to be caught, hurrying the opposite way around the Wellness Cabin, then skirting the sandy beach and racing back to the Great Lawn, where once again the bubbling sound of laughter and friendly shouting and the jingle of Ferris wheel music drowns out everything, including the sound of the Agro storage shed's fancy new alarm. Including, too, the sound of Joy's racing heartbeat.

Running out of breath, she slows down. It's then that a sharp but familiar voice calls out her name. “Why,
Miss Freeman,
it's so
lovely
to see you here tonight!”

Joy turns. Barreling toward her is the Cruz, aka Bernadette Cruz, in head-to-toe camp director regalia: khaki shorts and a matching tan, collared, short-sleeved shirt with the Okahatchee logo emblazoned over the heart, featuring an image of a green mountain, a blue lake, a yellow sun, and a totally un-PC Native American tomahawk.
Where all the right elements unite
is written in script over it. She is also carrying around her clipboard. Why she needs that thing for reunion night, Joy has no idea, but she
suspects it could be permanently attached to the Cruz's hand.

The Cruz smiles at her. “I'm so glad you came. I know Luciana has thought a lot about you since you both graduated from Okahatchee.” The Cruz always refers to campers who make it all the way to the age cap as “graduates.” Her eyes sweep over the other girls. “And Misses Webber and Albright, too! Looks like the whole gang's back together again. Now, where were you all scurrying off to in such a hurry?”

Luce, Tali, and Zoe hang back guiltily, avoiding eye contact.

“Mom,” Luce begins, obviously trying to help. “We were just, um . . .”

Zoe jumps in: “Heading to the photo booth!” She pulls the old photo strip from Joy's hand—she's been clutching it since they fled the Stevens. “You know, for old times' sake,” Zoe adds.

“That's a fantastic idea.” The Cruz beams. “We could use more images for the memory wall. I'll walk you over there; I was just heading that way.”

Before the girls can protest, the Cruz herds them toward the photo booth, with its steady stream of campers and alums alike filing in and out, their pictures spitting out of a small slot on the outer wall like a long tongue.

“Now go ahead,” she says, giving Joy a slap on the back that actually stings. “Enjoy yourselves.”

Zoe shoves Joy inside the booth and pockets the old photo strip. Luce pilots Tali inside after them with a final awkward smile at her mother, who is hovering there, waiting to see their photos come out.

The curtain swishes shut behind them. Inside the booth it's hot and sticky and as narrow as an upright coffin. It smells like bubble gum and burning rubber. Luce and Tali manage to claim space on the small plastic seat, leaving Zoe and Joy to hover uncomfortably on either side of them, cramped and piled on top of each other.

Joy's back hurts, her heart hurts, and it's all she can do to muster a smile. She notices graffiti all over the inner walls:

Sammy & Gina, '12
.

Dave is da bad ass.
Crossed out to read:
Dave is an ass zit.

Eat me.

Long live the Cruz.

For a good time call Emily Fargo.
(Poor Emily.)

Indigo Perez is a ho
.

But her eyes are searching for something else. There it is:

Z, J, T & L, friends forever.
She feels a pang in her gut.

Luce grabs the remote control tethered to the camera by a long cord. “Ready? Set, go!” she says.

Joy's heart rate peaks.
Ready, set, go.
Just like in the camp relay races they used to run.

“Luce, I wasn't ready!” Tali squeals, frantically readjusting her top and in the process jostling Joy with her arms.

SNAP
. The first flash is blinding, and Joy blinks, trying to clear her vision, which has gone totally white. She can hear Zoe laughing, saying, “Redo! Redo!” It's hot and hard to breathe, but for a miniature second, Joy feels like it's old times again—the four of them goofing off while a line of other
campers builds up outside the booth.

Just then, they hear a whining sound and are thrown into utter darkness.

“What the hell?” Tali says, standing up and jostling the three other girls again. “Zoe, what did you do?”

“It wasn't me,” Zoe says. “Ow, that's my
foot
!”

Suddenly, it's chaos inside the tiny space—a thick blackness tentacled with sixteen sweaty, sticky arms and legs.

“I think we broke it,” Joy says, as someone—Tali?—elbows her in the stomach.

“We are on a streak of destruction!” Luce exclaims. Then: “Ew, what
is
that?”

“My boob,” Zoe says. “You just grabbed it.”

Tali chimes in, “I can't breathe. Let's get
out
of this thing.”

Finally, the four of them manage to push through the curtain one by one. Joy squeezes out last, stumbling out of the confining space, gasping for air.

For a second, she thinks she must still be staring into the flash of the camera. She's hit by near-blinding brightness. She blinks a few times and rubs her eyes, feeling dizzy.

The laughter around her has abruptly died out. All four of her former friends are blinking, silent, stunned.

The sunlight is blazing. It's daytime.

She swivels around and gasps. The photo booth is nowhere to be seen. It has completely
vanished
, like some trick of the light.

“What. The—” Zoe turns a full circle.

“What's going on?” Luce says in a trembling voice.

Joy starts to register that the campers around them are not waiting in line for carnival rides and cotton candy—they're
running
. Someone—a black-haired girl, faintly recognizable—whizzes past her carrying a Hula-Hoop. As Joy watches, the black-haired girl hands off the Hula-Hoop to another camper. She, in turn, starts running, tearing across the Great Lawn, where hundreds of other campers are racing and jumping around, tagging one another and wearing bright-colored T-shirts.

Just like they used to do on relay day, back at camp.

Joy feels like she might puke.

A loud whistle pierces the air. Joy's chest seizes.

Jeremy Farber, counselor and asshole extraordinaire, is marching over to them from around the side of the offices. “Get a move on, girls!” he shouts. “Stop slouching. You're giving the Orange team a bad name!”

“What—what's happening?” Luce's eyes are wide. She looks like she might cry, which is impossible, Joy knows, because Luce
doesn't
cry. Her life is too efficient for tears. “What
is
this?”

Zoe shakes her head, dazed. “Relay races,” she whispers.

It occurs to her that they're all wearing orange T-shirts. Every summer, on the Monday of the final week of camp, they would divide everyone up into five color groups for the relays.

Jeremy blows his whistle again. “I said
move
. This is a race, not gossip hour!”

Just then, a camper named Petra Manger, whom Joy hasn't even thought about in two full years, is in her face. She grabs Joy's shoulders. “Joy! I
said
, Take. The. Baton! We're losing.”

Instinct kicks in. Joy grabs the baton numbly. Her heart beats so hard it threatens to knock her over. Petra gives her a shove toward the center of the field. With no time to process, Joy begins to run; the only thing on her mind is the boy in an orange T-shirt, waving his arms at her, screaming, “Come on, come on, they're beating us!”

Her arms and legs are moving, but her mind is stuck in mud, churning forward at a thousandth of the pace. As she runs, her footsteps pound out a chant in her head:
What. Is. Happening. What. Is. Happening. What. Is. Happening.

She can see now that the boy in the orange shirt is Gene Yung. He's waiting for her to pass the stupid baton.

Her neck is hot and she feels something clinging to her shoulder blades. It takes her a minute to realize what's causing that sensation: her hair . . . at its full, former length, grazing down her back.

Just like she wore it every day when she was fifteen.

“The past is never where you think you left it.”

—Katherine Anne Porter

Farber's whistle must have been perfectly designed to replicate the sound of Satan ushering a person into hell. The instinct to react when Okahatchee's jerkiest counselor blows his lid is immediate.

Zoe's thoughts jostle around in her head with every step, as if they're being dislodged by her pounding feet. What the hell is going on? It's like she had a complete blackout. The last thing she remembers, she was piled into a hot, sticky photo booth at the reunion with Joy, Luce, and Tali.

Did she get drunk last night during the reunion carnival and pass out? But her head doesn't ache, and she doesn't have that pinched feeling in the pit of her stomach that she got when she and Cal drank all of his dad's Jack Daniel's after a Lumineers concert last March.

As she hits the soccer field, she begins to recognize a whole host of other campers, shouting and waving their arms and taking part in the race, some in purple, some in yellow, some in green, some in orange. Samantha Puliver is leaping over the final in a series of hurdles and tagging James Larsing, who takes off in another direction, rolling a tire. Zoe's head is spinning. This is
definitely
the end-of-summer relay course.

It doesn't make any sense. None of it makes any sense.

As Zoe slows down, someone with long hair darts past her, and it takes her a second to realize it's Joy, surpassing her on the field.

Joy with long hair.

At this, Zoe stops completely, floored and confused.

“Move out of the way!” someone shouts behind her. Before she can react, the person rams into her from behind. She goes flying to the ground with Ricky Mandelson on top of her.

A sharp pain shoots through her right knee when it makes contact with the ground, and the wind gets knocked out of her. She rolls Ricky off her, disentangles herself, and sits up. Ricky has hit the ground, and his ankle is now twisted at a funny angle. “Dammit. Shit.” He's gripping his ankle with one hand, his face contorted with pain.

“Are you all right?” Zoe asks—a stupid question, since it's obvious he isn't.

Now more whistles are blowing and everyone is shouting. Campers and counselors start crowding them, babbling, giving Ricky competing instructions—
try to stand up
and
don't move.

Zoe feels like her head will explode. Two years ago, Ricky twisted his ankle during relays. That time, it was because he'd tripped on a hurdle. She remembers because Luce was the one to stop running and help him off the field, and in return she earned the merit badge on the last night of camp. . . .

Wait a minute . . .

As Ricky stands up, leaning heavily on two other campers, Luce, Tali, and Joy heave Zoe off the ground. Her head is spinning.

Am I losing my mind?

“Something's wrong,” she croaks out. She stands up on legs that feel unsteady now. “I'm having the worst déjà vu. But it won't go away. What
happened
last night?”

“It's not just you,” Luce says. She looks over her shoulder to make sure no one's listening, then lowers her voice. “It's happening to me, too.”

“Same,” Tali says. “What the
hell
happened in that photo booth?”

“I don't know,” says Joy, “but I'm pretty sure I know what's happening now.”

The three girls stare at her.

“Isn't it obvious?” Joy says when no one speaks. “We're fifteen again.”

“WHAT?” Tali squeals, and Luce leaps up, trying to clamp her hands over Tali's mouth.

“Just calm down, okay?” Luce instructs her. “Let's all think about this rationally. . . .”

“Rationally?”
Tali screeches as she twists away from Luce. “There's nothing
rational
about this.” She whirls on Joy, eyes blazing. “Is this some kind of prank? Was this your big reason for getting us back together, so you could pull this stunt? Because it's not fucking funny!”

Joy shakes her head, looking stricken. “I'm just as confused as you are.”

“No one thinks it's funny!” Zoe practically hisses at Tali.
Why is it always about Tali and what's inconvenient for her?
“Has anyone stopped to think Joy might be
right
? I mean, look around us!” She can't believe she's saying it. She clears her throat again, trying to keep it together.

Suddenly, Tali screams. “My boobs. They. Are.
Gone
,” Tali says, a sound of real terror in her voice, grabbing her chest like she keeps hoping her Cs will materialize from her shirt. “Oh shit. Oh
shit
.”

“And what about my hair?” Joy says, pulling on her long, light-brown ponytail as though it's a foreign creature that has attached itself to her head.

Zoe stares at Joy. Her old friend Joy, who looks so much more familiar than the Joy of the present. Or the past. Or future. Whatever it is. Was.
This
Joy has all the same old vibrancy she had that last summer at Okahatchee. In fact, they all do.

“So somehow we went . . . back,” Luce blurts. “But how?”

“Okay.” Zoe tries to think it through, doing her best to stay calm, even though she feels like her brain hopped onto a roller coaster and it wasn't properly buckled in first. “This is like this
one
Dr. Who
episode, where the professor travels back in time and—”

“Zoe, this isn't a sci-fi TV show,” Luce says rather harshly. Zoe can see that her whole body is shaking. “This is
real
and it's our
lives
. And we need to figure out how to fix it.”

“We need to get back to reunion night,” Tali says, growing semihysterical. “I had
plans
!”

Another wash of annoyance spreads through her. “Tali, I hate to break it to you, but this isn't all about
you
.”

“Guys, let's not fight,” Luce interjects. “Please! We're in this together, so we need to just figure out what to do next. Okay? And let's move off the field, where we can talk in privacy.”

She leads the way toward the line of trees behind the rec hall.

As they walk, Joy looks around. “Actually,” she says, her face going contemplative. “Maybe this isn't as crazy as we think. . . .”

“What do you mean?” Zoe asks, hoping her input is actually helpful this time. Now that they're hidden in the cool shade of a couple of oaks, she's starting to feel less nauseated.

Tali gives her a slight glare.

Joy goes on. “What I mean
is, haven't there been strange things that have happened on past reunion nights?”

“What, like alums getting drunk and throwing up in front of their own kids?” Zoe says, fully aware that she's babbling, that
she's
the one being unhelpful now. She sits down on the grass, and the other three join her, gathering cross-legged, just like they used to.

“She's right,” Luce chimes in. “There was the time Minna
Spencer's dog came back.”

The memory, though dim, creeps back into Zoe's mind. “That's true—the cocker spaniel?”

“Yeah,” Luce says, nodding thoughtfully. “It ran away when her parents dropped her off in June, and she was devastated that summer. Then it came back two whole months later, on reunion night.”

Zoe sighs. “That's definitely a bit odd, but not quite up there with time travel.”

Tali looks from Zoe to Joy and Luce, then back at Zoe again, as though she has just confirmed that time travel is real.

Which she basically did.

“True,” Tali adds, “but there was also the time Petra fell off the spinning swings and everyone thought she could have broken her neck and died, but she turned out to be miraculously fine.”

Luce nods. “She didn't even have a bruise.”

“So,” Zoe says, tugging a piece of grass out of the dirt and twisting it between her fingers. “What we're agreeing on here is that this is just some awesome reunion night
fluke
?”

“My mom told me once that Okahatchee translates to something like Water of Possibility.”

Now it's Tali's turn to roll her eyes. “Next you're gonna tell me some brochure B.S. about the natives who believed photographs steal your soul.”

“Huh. That gives me an idea,” Joy says. She's doing her best to stay positive, and Zoe feels an instant wave of gratitude. She speaks slowly, as if she's working it out as she talks: “It all comes back to
the photo booth. It
must
. Remember how it short-circuited while we were inside it?”

“I don't get it,” Luce says, looking panicked.

“We need to get back into the photo booth,” Joy says. “Maybe we can somehow undo all this.”

“But the photo booth isn't even
here
.” Luce crosses her arms as if she's freezing, even though it must be mid-eighties. “Mom only brings it in for reunion night. And if today is the relay, then it's a Monday. And we still have five more days before the Friday of reunion night, when we can even
try
.”

Tali gapes at her. “So . . . you're suggesting we hang around in the past for five days and then . . . take a bunch of glam shots in the photo booth and hope it works like a time machine in the other direction? And how do we know we're
really
in the past in the first place, not just some—”

“Alternate reality?” Luce fills in, wide-eyed.

Tali rolls her eyes. “I was going to say drug-induced hallucination.”

“Well, we do look
exactly
like we did two years ago,” Zoe says, fumbling in her pocket to see if the old photo strip—the one Joy had wanted to bury—is still there. “I'll show you.”

She pulls out the photo strip . . . and gasps.

“What?” asks Joy.

“It's . . . it's . . .”

“What?” Luce asks.

Tali grabs the photo strip from Zoe's hands and says it for her. “It's . . . blank.”

“The photo from two summers ago?” Joy asks.

“The photo from
this
summer,” Luce says slowly.

“Right.” Tali nods. “It's totally erased. Gone. Like it never happened.”

Zoe stares at the blank photo strip over Tali's shoulder. It's true. It's like some giant eraser has come and smudged out the images of their smiling faces . . . and with them, the last two years of their lives.

“It's blank because it
hasn't happened yet
,” Zoe says.

“What are you suggesting?” Tali frowns.

Zoe shrugs. “I don't know . . . maybe we have to, like, take it again.”

“Take
that
photo again?” Luce asks.

An idea starts to unfold in Zoe's mind, shining brighter and brighter, like the sun as clouds part to reveal it. “Yeah. Maybe we have to
re-create
the photo. Maybe we have to re-create our pasts in order to get back to the present.” It makes an insane sort of sense as she thinks about it. “The photo booth did this. Instead of taking a
new
photo of us, it caused some sort of glitch in the time-space continuum. It
untook
the old photo of us, thereby reversing time, and—”

“This is absurd,” Tali says, crossing her arms.

“How can we know it would even work?” Luce adds.

“Well.” Joy looks at all of them. “Do we have a better idea? Anyone?”

“True,” Zoe says. “It's as good a plan as we've got. Although . . . if we have to duplicate it exactly”—Zoe realizes
what this actually means and feels sick—“I need that fencing medal from the photo.”

“Oh crap,” Joy adds. “I'll need that stupid talent-show crown! And Tali will need those boxers. . . .”

Luce adjusts her weight. “I was wearing the merit badge, which I earned for helping Ricky—
shit.
Shitshitshit.” She squints back out at the playing field where the counselors are breaking down all the relay equipment. “Someone else
already
helped Ricky. How am I going to get that badge?” Her voice breaks again, and Joy reaches out and squeezes her hand.

“You'll find a way. You have to,” Tali says bluntly.

“But we need to be careful,” Zoe says. Of the four of them, Zoe knows in her gut that she's the one who really
gets
it. She didn't spend most of sixth grade obsessively watching and rewatching all of
Dr. Who
for nothing. If this really is the past—and she still isn't completely convinced of it—then it has become clear that
already
things are not going the way they did that last summer. And changing the past—no matter
which
sci-fi movie you're watching—is never a good idea. “Whatever we do, we've got to be sure not to rewrite history. If this
is
the past and we somehow got thrown back into it, then we need to do everything
just
like we did it before, until we can find a way to fix this. Do you guys understand me? This is important.”

Tali nods. “She's right. We need to get to that photo booth and retake those photos. We've got to try. I mean, what if we end up getting
stuck
back in time? Would we have to relive the last two years all over again?”

Zoe shudders. “Possibly. I'm not promising it'll work, but it's not like we have much of a choice. We have to move forward, and hope this plan works. And like I said, we need to try to follow the past exactly like it happened the first time. Otherwise . . .”

“Otherwise what?” Luce demands.

Zoe wishes she wasn't so afraid. She wishes it didn't feel like the trees were closing in on them, like the world was spinning just a little too fast. Part of her keeps thinking:
This can't be real, this can't be real, this can't be real
. But the words that come out of her mouth make it sound real as hell. “If not, then we could stay trapped in the past forever.”