way, I write back. I grab a crayon from my pencil box and add some blood splatters and a puddle of red underneath to show I’m serious.
He thinks for a moment. I can tell he is thinking because his mouth hangs open, which is the way Kyler always thinks. Then he grins.
AWESOME!!!!!!!!!! He writes exclamation marks across the page until his pencil lead breaks.
At recess, I sit him down at one of the lunch tables, as far as we can get from other kids, and tell him everything while he pulls out his snacks. Kyler’s the smallest, skinniest guy in our grade, but he’s big on snacks.
“You should have seen him, Kyler. He was up on the bed, yelling, fierce as anything, and the look he had in his eyes…”
Kyler groans as if he’s in pain and interrupts with stuff like, “I can’t believe it. Why didn’t Dad take me to the ER with you? This is killing me, Mikey, killing me!” But he doesn’t doubt me, not once.
That’s the great thing about Kyler. He’s seen every time-travel documentary he can find, and he loves books where people are called “Zethos” and “Mildar” and live on planets where you can fall off the edge and every animal has two heads and six rows of teeth. So, a real live Celt in California doesn’t come as too much of a shock.
I’m just getting to the truly amazing part, when Kyler interrupts. “So, he wore a torc and was covered in tattoos?”
“Yep,” I say.
“And he freaked out, like he’d never seen modern stuff before—”
“That’s it! So I took a picture to show you—”
“You got a picture?”
“No, but I tried, and that’s when he pointed right at me. He spoke in a foreign language, and then he said, ‘Not this time!’ He knew he was in the wrong time, Kyler!”
“Wow!” Kyler throws his arms back and splays his legs out, as if he’s just collapsed. “Wow,” he says again.
“I know!” I feel myself break into an emoticon grin. Life doesn’t get any better than this. “So, I guess he’d just traveled here, or got transported or whatever, which is why he was freaking out—”
“But he spoke English,” Kyler says, pulling a chocolate milk from his bag.
“And another language, too.”
“Yeah, but he spoke English and the Celts didn’t.”
I can’t believe Kyler’s worrying about this right now. “So, the guy was speaking English. So what?”
“So…if he’s learned some English…then he must have been here for a long time or maybe it’s not the first time he’s traveled here?”
“Oh man, you’re right, that’s kind of what your mom said.”
“Mom?” Kyler sits bolt upright. “My mom was there? In the room?”
“Yeah, didn’t I say?” I feel kind of sick. I can’t make myself look Kyler in the face, so I look at the ground instead. It feels awkward, but it’s a lot less awkward than telling Kyler I think his mom is part of a conspiracy to hush up time travel. Doesn’t that make her a bad guy? “She was awesome, by the way,” I mumble.
“So? What did she say?”
There’s something about direct questions that I hate. I think it’s that millisecond of thinking I could lie and then knowing I can’t. “She took me aside, Kyler. Told me it was a big secret, but it’s been happening for years.” Just saying it out loud makes my voice crack with the sense of how awesome this is. “They come on certain nights. He’s not the only one, and sometimes the same guys keep coming back.”
“Wow!” Kyler leans forward and shakes his head. “So, you think this guy has been here before and that my mom is…like…in on it?”
“I don’t know,” I say, because I really don’t. “When I called him a Celt, she acted shocked. She tried to laugh it off, but she couldn’t. Then she got real serious and said it was against the rules to tell me about him. That’s what she said. ‘Against the rules.’”
There’s a moment of silence and then Kyler leaps up. “Coooooool!” he shouts, as if I just made his day. I may have been worried about casting his mom as a mad scientist, but he sure isn’t.
He throws his hand up for a high five, does an “oh yeah” dance and, when he spills his chocolate milk, just laughs as it puddles around his feet. That’s how happy he is. “It’s a conspiracy! Just like the documentaries online. The VA is transporting warriors from ancient times as part of a secret defense project, to study them—”
“Or use them as secret weapons,” I say.
“Yeah, and I bet there’s a time travel machine in the basement of the VA and doctors, like Mom, have to look after the warriors because, well, who knows what time travel will do to a guy? So totally cool!”
I knew Kyler would get it. “Cool? It’s not just cool. It’s awesome. It’s unreal!” I say.
“No, Mikey, this is real.” Kyler drops his voice. He looks really serious. “Wood frogs in Alaska freeze themselves solid for seven months of the year. If you pick one up and bend its leg, it’ll break off, but in the summer that frog will thaw out, hop around—”
“Not if you break its leg off,” I say.
He waves my comment away. “That frog will be fine, until next winter when it freezes again. I mean, who would believe that? But it’s true.” I love it when Kyler’s like this. “And dinosaurs, who would believe them, really? Or kissing. Like that’s really weird, but it happens.”
“Gross!”
“Just saying!” He flops back on the bench, rips open a bag of seaweed rice crackers, and offers me one. I crunch down a few times and realize that something doesn’t add up. Something about Kyler’s totally amazing theory, and my conversation with Mariko, doesn’t work.
“But your mom didn’t know who was arriving, or when. She just said certain nights they came. She wasn’t expecting them.” I sit next to him. “Dude, if the VA doctors were in on the project, wouldn’t they be told when to expect these guys?” Kyler doesn’t answer, but his mouth drops open in “Kyler thinking” mode. “And, wouldn’t the Defense Department have a secure facility, miles away from anywhere, so the time-traveled warriors couldn’t escape right away?” I’m thinking of the secret Area 51 base where they built the stealth airplanes. If they did that in the 1970s, wouldn’t they do the same for this, now?
“Maybe he escaped?”
“Then they need to up their security big time, because your mom’s seen men like the Celt before. They can’t all be escaping. The Defense Department wouldn’t set up a project this humongous and then be so bad at protecting it.” I grab for Kyler’s rice crackers and throw a whole handful in
