Free Death Thieves by Julie Wright Page B

defend myself with. Nothing looked very weaponlike in the tub. Thinking of the dirt I’d thrown in his eyes, I put my hands under the shampoo dispenser and filled them with shampoo—the most pathetic weapon ever.
    His shadow stopped moving. He faced me—I could tell by his silhouette on the curtain. We stood there, facing each other in silence on opposite sides of the curtain for several long moments. “I’m leaving,” he said finally. The door clicked shut again.
    I inhaled sharply, relief flooding over me that there had been no need for me to defend myself. I rinsed my hands off, pulled the towel from the top of the rod, and peeked around the curtain. True to his word, he’d gone. I tied the towel off around my chest and used the pans to fill the tub until the steam rose up in little curls of comfort. I added cold water so as not to scald myself and got in.
    Everything seemed like they did in my time. The way the tub worked, the mirror in the bathroom, the towels. I wasn’t sure what I expected to be different, but nothing really was. Tag’s words came back to me, “If an idea is perfect to begin with, why alter it?” Bathrooms must have been close to perfect before. The only real differences existed in the curves of the ornate handles on the faucets and the palatial size of the room.
    Once settled into the water, my mind calmed enough to consider the implications of my situation. Tag hadn’t looked—hadn’t even tried. Nathan might have tried. Nathan’s dead. What had our funerals been like? Did the whole school attend the teenage tragedy? Had Winter worn black? Did she put white roses on my casket? I loved white roses.
    Winter, Aunt Theresa, Nathan. Winter .
    How would I survive without Winter? How would I make it in a world where she wasn’t there to read my feelings and thoughts? Where she wasn’t there to understand when no one else could or wanted to? Where no one else knew I liked white roses? How would I live in a world where she wasn’t ?
    And how would she survive? Who would get her through college? Who would make her dinner while she studied so she didn’t starve? Who would be there for her?
    I gave in to another bout of misery and sank down in the water. I cried a long time.
    “Summer?” His voice through the door startled me.
    I sat up, the water movement echoing off the cavernous bathroom walls. “What?”
    “Does your head hurt?”
    What a weird question. My head ached. My brain felt like it had been split into a zillion pieces and now those pieces were colliding into one another. “A little.” Even that small confession of weakness bugged me, but my head did hurt. Maybe the headache was a side effect of time travel. Maybe every time we jumped, it scattered our brain cells.
    “Crying usually gives people headaches.”
    So he’d heard me. How long had he been there listening?
    “I have something that will take the headache away.”
    “I don’t do drugs!” The words came harsh and fast—an automatic response to Theresa’s preaching about my mother’s addictions.
    “No, I don’t mean . . . I wouldn’t be allowed to administer them if I had them. Soldiers are never given access to those things. We’re required to build our own defenses against discomfort. When you come out, I’ll show you.”
    Curiosity and the cooling temperature pulled me from the water. I dried off and grimaced at the clothes—dirty, wrinkled, ripped, ruined. I dunked Winter’s shirt in the bath water and rubbed shampoo on it. Carefully, I washed the shirt, working hard to keep it from tearing or fraying further. Much less care was used on the jeans. I hung them both over the shower curtain rod so they could dry, looked at my underwear, and harrumphed. They weren’t as dirty as the jeans, but they’d been through a lot. “Yuck.” I grumbled and then laughed. I’d likely set a world record. I’d worn the same underwear for over eighty years. I washed those, too, unable to bear the idea of putting