By nine o'clock the next morning I'd been taught how to tie up the boats that came into the harbor, which meant that I learned that what you use is not a rope, but a line, and a knot doesn't keep it secured, but a hitch.

"A cleat hitch," Brandon said, "is a fundamental skill. So, think you can handle it?" He narrowed his eyes at me as he squirted some brown juice out the side of his mouth into the water.

"Yeah, I think I've got it," I replied with a hint of sarcasm. I'd been practicing cleat hitches, which involved a couple of loops around a cleat, what I had previously referred to as the "boat tie-up thingie", for twenty minutes.

He lifted his baseball hat by the brim and ran his hand through his prematurely thinning dirty-blonde hair as he sighed. "Okay, I'll show you the gas dock."

Brandon graduated a couple years before and was a former high school baseball star. He went to college on an athletic scholarship, but dropped out when he couldn't play anymore because of an injury. People in Palmer talked about him like he was a hero returning from battle, even though he didn't suffer from a baseball injury; he got wasted and fell off a second-story balcony. It seemed that all that remained from his baseball career was a revolting chewing tobacco habit and probably some fond memories of what were likely to be the best years of his life. He was training me for the week and was obviously not excited about it.

During my lunch break, I sat at a picnic table alone tearing my peanut butter and jelly sandwich into bite size pieces. Since there were only four dock attendants working at a time, we couldn't take lunch together. It didn't bother me at all because I had exhausted my awkward conversation making skills for the day with Brandon and I still had the afternoon to get through. And it gave me some more time to think over what happened only two days before, though it felt like a lifetime ago or even in a completely different life that wasn't mine at all.

Did I travel through time? I cringed with embarrassment just for thinking it. But what else could it have been? A dream or hallucination wouldn't have made me disappear. According to Sophie, I jumped from the diving board and didn't come back up. Though I did come back up, in the same place that I went underwater.

Except almost everything was different:  the people, their clothes, the cars, the stores downtown, my mom's house, my dad's house. And then I came back, at the same spot where I disappeared, one day later. If the Palmer city pool was some kind of time machine or portal to the past, why hadn't I heard of other people disappearing?

The tickle at the edges of my thoughts for the last two days turned into a full-on aggravating itch I had to scratch. I needed to know what had happened, which meant that I had to make it happen again.

A hand holding a walkie-talkie suddenly appeared in front of my face, interrupting my thoughts.

"Time to learn how to use the radio," Brandon said in a dull, monotone voice.

"Great!" I answered enthusiastically. Mostly because I was ready to get through three more hours of training so I could go for a swim.

                                   ~~~~~~

That afternoon the pool was full of kids splashing and yelling. Their moms and babysitters were sitting around with their eyes glued to their phones or napping. It wouldn't be hard to disappear. I sank into one of the lounge chairs and looked up at the blue sky.  Soft white puffs of cottonwood seeds floated lazily through the air like an aimless summer snow. As I worked up the courage to jump in, I had the prickling feeling on the back of my neck of being watched.

When I turned my face towards the hazy afternoon sun hanging directly behind the lifeguard stand, I figured out who was watching me. Because the sun was behind him I only saw his silhouette, but I knew it was Eric Anderson staring at me from behind his sunglasses. I heard Sophie in my head, saying, "He kind of lost it." To make sure I wasn't imagining his eyes on me I tested him by flicking my hand as if to shoo a mosquito away from my face. His head snapped back toward the kids in the shallow end.

Guilt gnawed at me because I didn't want him to freak out if I disappeared again. Eric was a nice enough guy; one of those people who was friendly with almost everyone at school. He was smart, good looking, rich, athletic, and sort of funny. For the same reasons everybody else liked him, I found him kind of annoying: he was too perfect. But like him or not, it would be cruel to put him through that again. Then I considered my parents and how another disappearance could possibly get me grounded for life. But the itch was becoming unbearable, so I decide to go for it anyway. If it actually worked, I knew I could come right back by going underwater again.

I peeled my sticky skin from the vinyl straps of the chair, ascended the ladder to the diving board, jumped, and formed a cannonball. I waited underwater for a few seconds, but everything was still. There was no powerful wave or rush of water, and when I reached the surface I knew that nothing had happened.

I was surprised by how disappointed I felt. Too embarrassed to try again, I swam a few slow laps, dodging wildly kicking kids along the way. Maybe whatever happened before was a one-time deal. Or maybe there was more to it than jumping off the diving board.

I tried to remember everything I could from the last time. The pool was a bit busier than it was now. Sophie jumped first. I was nervous. When I was nervous I would wrap my hair around my finger, or rub the hem of my shirt, or twist my earrings or rings if I was wearing any. On the last day of school I was wearing the ring that had belonged to my grandma.

I thought of the class pictures in the hallway I had looked at while waiting for Sophie and Laura. I'd wondered if my grandparents jumped in the pool on their last day of school. I did show up on their last day of school, however many years ago. Had my grandma and grandpa been there?

I needed to get out.

If I went to Palmer in the 1950s, my grandma would be there and if I saw her it would be like seeing a ghost. If I saw her, would I recognize her? Would she somehow recognize me?

More than anything, I wished I had somebody I could talk to about the time travel situation. Ever since the incident, I felt like I was floating through each day lost in my own head and not fully present. The possibility of seeing my grandma's ghost made me want to forget the whole thing and get back on solid ground again.

                               ~~~~~~~

The next week was the height of fish fly season. At night the fluttering masses of insects swarmed around streetlamps and glowing windows, their illuminated cellophane wings consolidating into flickering clouds. Each morning, thousands of the bugs lay dead, coating sidewalks and docks, some still clinging to buildings, cars and boats, their delicate wings frozen forever.

"These little guys have the best life," Brandon said as we swept piles of fish fly carcasses into the water, "they hatch, have sex and die. They don't even eat."

To me, a life without eating sounded like a life wasted, and I mourned the brief and meaningless existence of the fish flies as I sent them off to their burial at sea. The fishy scent of the dead insects mingled with the usual gasoline smell of the harbor and I lifted my nose to the sky in search of fresh air.

"You should try the morning lap swim," someone called out.

I assumed the suggestion wasn't directed to me, so I ignored it and continued sweeping.

"Vanessa!" Eric Anderson was standing on a docked sailboat waving a scrub brush in the air to get my attention.

I sighed and walked down the dock to his sailboat.

"What can I help you with?" Technically he was a customer, so I tried to convey aloof politeness.

"Nothing. I just wanted to say that it's frustrating to try to swim laps during open swim, with all the kids."

"Oh. Yep."

He was shirtless with navy blue swim shorts on. Eric was so hot that it actually pissed me off for some reason. He had a wide, gleaming smile framed with dimples, perfect muscles and tanned skin. I felt stupid standing there scowling in my light blue harbor polo and khaki shorts.

"You should go between six and eight in the morning, it's quiet and for lap swimmers only." He sloshed the scrub brush around in a soapy bucket of water.

"I'm not really an early riser. Or a big lap swimmer. But thanks for the suggestion."

"Okay, well whenever you decide to come to the pool again, I'm keeping my eye on you."

"That's creepy," I muttered, and then grimaced when I realized that I said it out loud. He started scrubbing the already bright white deck of the boat.

"Your disappearing act on the last day of school really freaked me out."

"I'm sorry." My empty hands felt awkward, I didn't know what to do with them. I dug my thumbs into my pockets and rocked back on my heels.

"So how did you do it? Where did you go?"

"I don't know what everyone was so worked up about. I had to leave, I forgot about my dog. I had to go home to let her out. She gets a lot of UTIs. From being left alone all day..." I trailed off as I looked over my shoulder, hoping Brandon would signal that I was needed for something, anything, but he'd disappeared.

When I turned back to Eric, a mutual suspicion flickered between us.

"What's your dog's name?" he asked.

"Thomas Jefferson."

His lip curled up in a smirk.

God. Why did I have to say her full name? Why couldn't I say something normal and get this over with?

"Wow. That's a big name for a dog."

"We call her Tommy." I smiled, thinking of my dog with her curly white ears that reminded me of a powdered wig, and of how my mom regretted letting me name her years ago when I insisted on naming her Thomas Jefferson. Then we adopted a black cat with a little white puff of fur on her chest that looked like a ruffled cravat, so she became Alexander Hamilton, or Alex. Eric smiled back at me and I frowned again.

"Okay. I'm going to go back to work. I work here." I pointed at the boat logo on my shirt. I needed to walk away immediately before I embarrassed myself any further. So I did. I did a complete one-eighty turn on my heel, winced as my sock tugged the stitches on my foot and walked away without saying another stupid word.

"Okay, see you around," he called after me.

Knowing that Eric was going to be keeping his eye on me made me glad I decided not to try to go back again. But the idea was still nagging me. Maybe it was because it was summer and I was bored, or I didn't want to think any more about college tours and applications, or because I didn't have anyone else to daydream about, but I could not stop thinking about Pete.

Of course I was fully aware that if he was eighteen in the fifties, that would make him a senior citizen.  I tried to picture him as an old man to get my mind off of him, with wiry hair growing out of his ears, grumbling about his sore back or intestinal problems, grey haired and cranky, but I couldn't see it.  In my mind he was forever eighteen.

He was in my head every waking moment, but most of the time I wasn't even exactly sure what I was thinking about him. I only knew that he was there, simmering on a back burner in my mind. Images flashed on a constant reel: his hands on the steering wheel above the chrome spokes glinting in the sunlight, his toe tapping the air while he sat in the deck chair. The defined angle of his jaw. Holding my wrist to check my pulse. Making toast. Pulling that yellow dress over my head.

I replayed our conversations in my head and got frustrated when I couldn't piece together the correct order in which things were said. As if unlocking the real sequence of our conversation would reveal the answer to some unknown but important question. Nothing that we said was remarkable. The way we looked at each other seemed to be. That feeling I had, when Pete looked right into my eyes, what was that? Just thinking of it made my heart race, but it didn't feel it the same as when it actually happened.

The time I spent with him while conscious was about an hour total, but the hours I spent thinking about him were escalating. The more I thought about him, the more I scolded myself for wasting my time. Even if he was a real person and I did actually time travel, it had to have been a freak one-time occurrence and I probably wouldn't be able to do it again. Even if I did, I had no good reason to try to find him.

But eventually I convinced myself that I owed him an apology for the way I ran out after he had helped me so much. But I wasn't going to run into him anywhere, or even see him at school in September. If I wanted to see him I'd have to take the initiative. If I did, I couldn't jump into the pool on some random afternoon again and expect something to happen. I had to have a better strategy.