Free Once Was a Time by Leila Sales

— 24 hrs . The waiter sat us at a booth with slippery seats and brought over menus that were twelve pages long. Really! There was a whole page just for eggs and a whole page just for sandwiches and another page still for beverages. I didn’t recognize half the names of the foods, but that was all right because some of them had pictures, too.
    â€œOrder whatever you want,” Miss Timms told me.
    â€œNone of this is rationed?” I asked.
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    The last time I’d bought food, everything had been rationed: meat, sugar, eggs. Everything. Dad (or, more often lately, Justine and I) had to go to the shops with our ration books in order to get most foods, and then we were only allowed a little bit of everything. It was hard every week, when we reached the end of our rations and realized we were all out of butter or tea. Everybody got snippy with one another, even though it was Hitler’s fault, not any ofours.
    I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. When the waiter came back to take our order, I pointed to everything I wanted: something called a grilled cheese sandwich, pork sausages, a chocolate milkshake. “And have you really got bananas?” I demanded.
    â€œYeah,” the waiter said. “We really do.”
    â€œOne of those, please. Actually, two, if that’s all right.”
    The last time I’d had a banana was for Kitty’s tenth birthday. She’d saved it especially for me. I don’t know how or where she got it. I held on to it for days, drawing out the excitement.
    By the time I finally could not stand to wait a minute longer, the banana had already gone brown and mushy. I ate it anyway. But it wasn’t very good.
    â€œI love the way you say banana,” Miss Timms commented after the waiter left. “Bah-nah-nah.”
    I smiled. “You say it funny.”
    She shrugged. “You say tom ay to, I say tom ah to.” She took a sip of her water. “So, I guess now I understand why you’ve been spending so much time in the library, hmm? Where did you come from, Charlotte?”
    That was one question I could answer truthfully. “Bristol.”
    Miss Timms tapped a fingernail against her water glass. “I don’t know where that is.”
    â€œSouthwest England,” I said helpfully. “About one hundred and twenty miles west of London.”
    â€œGot it. So how did you get from the southwest of England to middle-of-nowhere Wisconsin, without any parents or guardians, carrying no belongings, and wearing nothing but a flannel pantsuit?”
    â€œIt’s pajamas ,” I said.
    She raised an eyebrow and waited.
    I tried to think of what Kitty would say if she were here with me. Would she be able to find us a home, a way to start a new life? We had spent so much time talking about time travel, imagining all the different places we could explore. Now I realized that we had never discussed the details of how we would actually live when we got to a new place and time, having no money and knowing no one. And maybe that’s why I’d been happy to talk about it—because I’d assumed it would never really happen.
    If Kitty were here with me, everything would be different. Wherever this librarian sent us, at least she would send us there together. And I wouldn’t be carrying around this heavy weight in my stomach, because if Kitty were here, I would not be the girl who jumped time and left her friend behind.
    How stupid we had been. With our innocent, wide-eyed confidence. Oh, of course ! I ’ll just go to a tower that’s four thousand miles and seventy-three years away from here, and there Kitty will be, waiting for me!
    What a rotten plan Kitty and I had come up with. And we’d thought ourselves so brilliant. As if we were any match for war, or happenstance, or time.
    â€œCharlotte?” Miss Timms prompted.
    I gave up. Miss Timms seemed so nice, and I was sick of lying and