Free Tempest by Julie Cross

American?” she interrupted.
    I shook my head. “No … uh … British.”
    Her forehead wrinkled. “I wasn’t aware of any UK foreign exchange students within a twenty-mile radius of your location.”
    Okay, that’s a little weird.
    “He’s not a student … just some dude I met. Actually, I think he got kicked out of his own country. His visa’s probably not even legal.”
    She relaxed back in her chair again. “Sounds like you keep good company.”
    “I try to. Anyway, I offered to test out one of his products. A fake EU pass. So I could go through the EU line at the airport. It’s a lot faster than the other line.” I stared at her stone-cold face and stalled a little before adding on to my story. “An EU passport. That’s just a passport for people in Europe.”
    “I know what an EU pass is,” she snapped. “If you weren’t an American citizen, what were you?”
    “French,” I said.
    She laughed a humorless laugh. “Nobody would have believed you.”
    I smirked at her and recited the French declaration of rights with the best accent I could muster. This was something else I had to learn in high school that I actually put to use.
    Her eyes narrowed at me. “Not bad. Go on.”
    “So, me and my friend, I’ll call him Sam, made it to London with his fake passport. Then we got really wasted in this pub and I told him I could get on a flight home without a U.S. passport. As Pierre, the French exchange student. He bet me ten thousand dollars. I wasn’t sure I could pull off this big of a scam, but luckily I had just met these chicks who worked for Delta. I talked them into giving me a free ticket to New York.”
    “And it worked?” she asked. “You actually came here as a French citizen?”
    “Obviously,” I said, holding out my arms.
    “Where is this French passport?” she asked.
    “I burned it after going through customs.”
    “So, you’re trying to tell me that a straight-A student, with 1970 on his SATs, educated enough to be fluent in two foreign languages, no previous criminal record, not even so much as a traffic ticket, decides to get drunk and not only break a few federal laws, but foreign ones as well. In some countries, you could be hung for something like that.”
    “Bullshit,” I said.
    She leaned forward again. “Wanna bet? I’ll send you a list of every single country that would have your head, literally, for such an infraction. I’ll even include the exact clauses that spell out your imminent death.”
    “Pretty smart for a secretary .” I waited for a second to get some kind of reaction from that, but she didn’t even flinch. “Believe what you want, I don’t really give a shit. I was there and now I’m here. Just like magic.”
    She groaned and stood up before pacing the room in long strides. “Cocky-ass seventeen-year-olds,” she muttered.
    “Aren’t clerical workers supposed to be polite? Good customer service and all that shit.” I grinned at her and it didn’t go over well.
    She glared so hard it was like laser beams shooting at me. “You should consider showering before your father gets back. You stink worse than the bums outside this building.”
    I had no doubt she was right. I’d been rained on several times and was wearing the same clothes for the equivalent of three days. With no shower.
    I got up and walked to my room without looking at her again. As soon as I shut the door, I leaned against it, letting my heart and my brain catch up to the rest of me. I had a feeling I’d be doing this a lot if I stuck around 2007, and I didn’t seem to have a choice.
    And based on the facts from the conversation I’d just had, it seemed like my younger self completely vanished around the time that I landed in 2007. None of it made sense. None of it went along with the data Adam and I had gathered. Knowing the other me was gone made me feel like I was sinking deeper into this year, this home base, like quicksand.
    My room looked nearly the same as it did in