Free The Power of Un by Nancy Etchemendy Page A

…” A new thought had left me completely paralyzed: what if I accidentally said or did something different this time—something that changed the chain of events enough so the old man didn’t show up that afternoon? For all I knew, I’d already messed things up completely just by asking Rainy to do long division for me. I read a story once in which a time traveler accidentally changed the whole future just by killing a butterfly. But I didn’t want to change the whole future. I just wanted to save Roxy. And, if possible, I also wanted to get the unner again.
    “Nothing’s wrong,” I said, breathing carefully.
    “Huh,” said Rainy, unconvinced. “Whatever. So, shall we put some lemon juice on our potato skins?”
    “Lemon juice!” I yelped. “No! No! We can’t!”
    Rainy squinched her face up and stared at me as if I’d developed a rash of green spots.
    Hastily I added, “I mean, we can, but let’s not.” I strained to remember the exact words I’d used yesterday … or what felt like yesterday. “Everybody’s going to do lemon juice. Let’s do something original like put salt on ours.”
    “Salt?” Rainy frowned. “I dunno. Where would we get salt?”
    I pointed. “There’s a box on the shelf. I’ll go get it.” I stood up and walked across the room. Somehow I knew I was doing it exactly the way I’d done it the time before. I could feel a faint force, like a wheel wanting to stay in a groove or the pull of a magnet, that made doing the same things over again just a little easier than changing them. Maybe if I stopped thinking so hard and did what felt easiest, I’d be O.K.
    Sometimes you get a feeling, like everything that’s happening has happened before. Dad told me one time that there’s a French term for it;
d$eAj$aG vu
, which means “seen before.” Boy, did I ever have
d$eAj$aG vu
now. For the next little while, I let events take place by themselves. I felt almost as if I were hovering somewhere behind my own right shoulder, observing as things I knew would happen actually happened. First I watched myself convince Rainy the salt would be better than the lemon juice. Then I watched myselfconvince her we ought to spread the skins out instead of piling them up. Then I listened to myself with growing discomfort as I tried to talk her into salting them heavily instead of lightly.
    I knew what was coming. We were about to have a fight, and Rainy would end up pouring the whole box of salt in my lap. Then I thought if I changed one thing just a little bit, I might be able to avoid the anger and frustration of being called selfish in front of everybody—and having to clean up the salty mess from under the table. Would that be so bad?
    Part of me said yes, it would be bad. Possibly worse than bad. Immoral. What if there was some kind of Master Plan, and I messed it all up? Did I have the right to do something that might change the future of everybody else in the world? I’d be doing it entirely to make my own life easier, and I wasn’t asking anybody else what they wanted. It didn’t feel right.
    But a different part of me—the most persuasive part, as it turned out—thought it was a great idea not to relive this particularly embarrassing scene. So what if Rainy felt a little kinder toward me? I couldn’t see how that would change anything major in the long run. Not in a bad way, at least. After all, wasn’t this exactly the kind of thing the unner was meant for? If I wasn’t supposed to change anything, why had the old man given me the unner in the first place?
    So when the time came for me to say, “Come on.If it gets messy, I’ll clean it up,” I said something else instead. “O.K., no big deal. Put the salt on whatever way you want.”
    Rainy smiled and said, “O.K.”
    After that, everything was spookily different for a while, and I began to wonder if I’d made a gigantic mistake. True, Rainy and I didn’t fight. But that also meant we did things we hadn’t done before.