Free Turnabout by Margaret Peterson Haddix Page A

late, that the little girl had died anyway. But that was wrong, because suddenly Amelia’s aunt was there too, hugging Amelia and shrieking, “Thank you! Thank you!”
    Corabelle died the next spring of an unknown fever. But the memory of Corabelle’s near drowning haunted Amelia for years, most of all because of her mother’s reaction. Long after Corabelle had faded in Amelia’s mind to a faint memory of a laughing, dark-haired child, Amelia could still vividly recall the feel of her mother’s alternating slaps and hugs. Only when Amelia was a mother herself did Amelia understand how confused her mother had been, how proud she was of Amelia’s bravery, but how furious at her disobedience, how worried about her life. Thinking back, Amelia realized that that day was the first time that she had doubted either of her parents, that she began to realize that they didn’t know everything, weren’t perfect.
    And now the parents of her second life, Dr. Reedand Dr. Jimson, were confused too, though they were trying much harder than Amelia’s mother had to make her think they were still in control.
    Amelia looked straight at Dr. Reed and said, “You don’t know anything.”

April 24, 2085
    “I always thought the next thing you said should have been, ‘Now leave me to my memories, what few I have left,’” Anny Beth said, laughing.
    “Thanks. You’re more than eighty years late supplying me with a comeback line,” Melly said, but she giggled anyway. “Dr. Reed looked stricken enough as it was.”
    They were reminiscing, something they rarely did. But it was morning now, and they were still in the anonymous hotel in an unknown place, facing an unknown future. Melly thought this was a way to remind themselves who they were and had been. She usually thought she was the only one who needed that reassurance, but Anny Beth had been the one to unleash the flood of memories this time.
    She’d been standing at the window, looking at the unfamiliar scenery outside: a few cacti, a narrow road, and sand as far as the eye could see.
    “Bill always wanted to live in the desert,” she said.
    Bill had been Anny Beth’s husband for a decade, until he was nearly fifty and Anny Beth was barely thirty. They’d been the same age when they got married. She had never told him about Project Turnabout, and he had never guessed. “But he was going to soon,” Anny Beth had explained to Melly the day she left him.
    “You are one tough broad,” Melly had answered. “Can you quit your husband just like that?”
    “Watch me,” Anny Beth said, but her voice held none of its usual buoyancy, and she turned her face so Melly couldn’t see.
    They’d schemed together to get the agency to fake Anny Beth’s death, “so at least he won’t go mooning around wondering where I went,” Anny Beth said. Anny Beth and Melly moved to Minnesota and threw a party the day of her fake funeral. Melly found the “Anny Beth Flick Funeral” Web site on the Internet, but tried to keep Anny Beth away from the computer as long as the Web page was posted.
    For her part, Melly had never married this time around—Anny Beth teased her about being a spinster. Spinster, of course, was a word that no one used anymore. It was fashionable never to marry in the twenty-first century. Melly wondered about herself—in the twentieth century, when most people got married, so did she; in the twenty-first, when marrying was akin to admitting an affinity for horses and buggies instead of electric cars, she’d followed the trend once again. But she’d been bowing to the restrictions of Project Turnabout, not society. She knew she wasn’t strong enough to walk away from a husband she loved, the way Anny Beth had. And what was the alternative?
    Now she sat beside Anny Beth looking out intothe desert, wondering about the alternatives for the rest of her life.
    “So what are we going to do?” Melly asked.
    “Call the agency. We need them to give us fake ID so we can get