Jessie stood outside at the bus stop that would take her
from school back home, just as she had done for the past two years. She fiddled
with her phone and thought about what she would make for dinner once she got
home. Another student approached her asking which bus she was waiting for. Jessie
answered. The student moved on and asked another person further down the block.
An older woman approached and asked her how long she had been waiting for the
bus. Jessie was surprised by how unusually inquisitive people were today and
answered "7 minutes" as she kept her gaze toward the intersection
where the bus usually rounded the corner. Hearing no response from the older
woman, she turned her gaze toward where the woman had been, but the older woman
was already gone.
The bus was taking longer than usual. The same student who
had asked about which bus Jessie was waiting for earlier approached her once
again. Had he gone in a circle to approach her again from the same direction?
Again she answered and again he went down the block asking other people the
same question. Jessie had just finished pondering how strange this student was
(some sort of compulsive disorder maybe?) when the older woman approached her
once again. Confronted with the same question, Jessie was flabbergasted. Her
upbringing didn't allow her to ignore the woman, so she answered truthfully, “14
minutes.”
In an instant she was back in her professor's office, where she was just before she left the building to wait at the bus stop.
Something odd was afoot. Her laptop was in her hand as she was putting it away in her backpack. Her
professor was looking at her expectantly and Jessie remembered she had been
asked a question right before she left--what was it? Ah yes, yes, she answered, she did enjoy
her vacation and was ready to go back to lab. The professor seemed
relieved—maybe Jessie wasn’t a completely vacant graduate student after all.
Indeed, at the moment she was the opposite of vacant as all her gears churned.
She had just, most likely, gone back in time, but she had to make sure. To test
her hypothesis, Jessie quickly excused herself from the professor’s office and
made her way down the school steps to the bus stop where she waited as
patiently as possible for the next 10 minutes. The same student walked down the
same path and asked the same question. Unwilling to break the chain of events
that had led to her time-skip, she answered. Then, the old woman approached.
“How long have you been waiting for the bus?” she asked, without a hint in her voice that this
was the third iteration. Jessie took a deep breath and answered, “24 hours.”
She was at dinner with her other graduate school friends,
bemoaning their last day of freedom. She listened carefully to the
conversation. It was, without mistake, the same one they had the day before.
Barely believing what was happening, she took out her phone and checked the
time and date. It was 6pm the day before the school year officially started.
Reeling from her discovery, she excused herself from dinner early and went
home. The possibilities of what she could do with this time-skip ability, or
circumstance, or whatever it could be called, was tremendous. What if, what if
she could go back two years and choose a different life for herself coming out
of college. So long as she made it back to that bus stop on that date at that
time she would be able to try anything she wanted without fear of failure. She
had thought about a career in music or theater—now she could try that for two
years without repercussions. Or maybe spend a year making money and then another
year traveling the world. Or she could even try to invent products that she
knew became successful within that two-year period and go into business. The best
part was that she could try all of those options and choose whichever one she
liked best. She slept fitfully that night and decided not to go to class the
next day—there was no time for that when planning the rest of her life was at stake. She got the bus stop thirty minutes early and awaited her
future.
When the student came around the corner she could hardly
contain her excitement as she quickly answered his question. The older woman
approached her once again. “How long have you been waiting for the bus?” Jessie
tried to still the quaver in her voice as she took the first step toward the
best years of her life, “Two years” she answered, and waited for the time-skip.
“That’s a long time,”
the older woman said, looking at Jessie with sad eyes, “maybe you should stop
waiting" and walked away.
