Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories:

M/M, Multi

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationships:

Scott Hunter/Kip Grady, Scott Hunter/Original Male Character(s), Original Male Character/Original Female Character, Original Female Character/Original Female Character, background Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Scott Hunter, Kip Grady, Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Original Characters

Additional Tags:

Time Travel Fix-It, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Wish-Granting Swan of Enforcement, Wish Fulfillment, Be Careful What You Wish For, Period-Typical Homophobia, Homophobic Slurs, 1990s, Middle School, High School, College, Divorce, Destroying Childhood Memories, No Spoilers for Book 6: The Long Game (Game Changers), Tags May Change, Rating May Change

Language:

English

Series:

Part 1 of Inty's Gay Hockey Boys (Heated Rivalry fics)

Collections:

Time Travel Fics

Stats:

Published: 2026-06-29 Words: 18,983 Chapters: 1/7

I Never Looked Back (Because I Never Had To)

Summary

Scott has an (un?)fortunate encounter with the Wish Granting Swan of Enforcement, and finds himself waking up on the day his parents died. Now if only he could figure out whether or not any of this is real...

Because if other fandoms can invent magical plot-device waterfowl, so can we!

Notes

I owe huge kudos to my beta besties for reviewing this ridiculous behemoth of a chapter, some of them multiple times: Phoenix_Ascended, Superworm, HopelessScribe, Sunless_Garden, and Dragonmuse. Special thanks go to Dragonmuse for letting me use their multiverse hopping OCs!

---

This fic is primarily based on the show, not the book, including using the full orphan/car wreck backstory and attempting to match Scott's apparent age in the show (and according with the hint that he's not far from retirement), rather than making him only a couple years older than the boys. I also aged Kip up to keep their dynamic the same.

Chapter 1: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again

November 25, 2018

Scott wasn’t especially proud of it, but his first thought was fuck, I was right!

The background noise of the blender switched off. “Right about what, babe?” Kip called from the kitchen.

Oh. Apparently Scott had said that out loud. He was doing that more and more these days, as if he’d grown so comfortable around his boyfriend that it felt natural to voice every thought that crossed his brain aloud. He rather liked it. In the moment, however, his lack of a verbal filter had presented him with a bit of a moral dilemma. He fought a quick and dirty battle with his conscience and came out with a victory. After all, no one had ever actually told Scott anything officially. So it wasn’t like he was betraying any actual confidences. 

Decision made, he vaulted himself over the back of the couch and leaned over the kitchen island, waiting patiently for Kip to finish pouring out his breakfast smoothie. 

“Okay, so,” he said, taking a quick chug. Yum. Extra banana this morning. “Almost… Jesus, eight years ago, I’m sitting on the bench at the All Star Skills Competition, bored out of my mind as usual, and I swear to God I think I hear that guy—” he pointed at Rozanov on the flatscreen television across the room, “—give that guy—” then moved his hand incrementally, to indicate Hollander, instead, “—his room number. And then that night, I heard some… pretty suspicious noises coming from the first guy’s room.” 

As Hollander continued to lay out the details of what he and Rozanov were doing—kids’ hockey camps, mental health initiatives, inclusion, it was admittedly all very cool—Kip drifted toward the TV, eyes shifting rapidly back and forth between the two players in quickly hidden panic. Scott prepped some quick words of encouragement. Granted, much though he hated to admit it, Hollander and Rozanov were the most famous players in the League. But trying to identify them all cleaned up and in formal suits when Kip had only previously seen them sweaty and wearing helmets and visors was playing on hard mode. He really couldn’t be blamed for not recognizing them.

“That’s… Hollander, right?” Kip asked, and Scott was suddenly intensely grateful that he hadn’t said any of those thoughts out loud. “And I know Rozanov, of course. And they’re starting a nonprofit together? Aren’t they supposed to hate each other?” 

“Yes!” Scott said immediately. He must not have hid his surprise well enough, because Kip rolled his eyes at him. 

“Babe, I know you despair of me ever memorizing all of the names and faces and backstories that you are literally paid ten million dollars a year to internalize, but I need you to understand that there are hockey players, and then there are hot hockey players. My knowledge of the second category will always be reliably more comprehensive than the first.” 

It took Scott a moment to parse that—Kip had gotten gradually more verbose during grad school, resulting in Scott gradually picking up words like verbose, and gradual, for that matter—but once he did, he put his smoothie down and lunged across the room, catching Kip in a headlock with one arm and applying a gentle noogie with the other.

“I’m your boyfriend!” he said, chortling as Kip struggled ineffectively in his grip. “You’re not supposed to think that any hockey players are hot except for me!”  

“I’m monogamous, babe, not blind,” Kip said, giggling as Scott let up on the noogie and wrestled him up against the back of the couch, instead. He had the most adorable giggle; it made Scott want to eat him. “And those two give you pretty stiff competition.” 

“I’ll give you some stiff competition,” Scott retorted, thrusting said stiffness against Kip’s ass, and they missed the rest of the press conference.

But afterward, relaxing on the couch with his head on Kip’s lap, Scott pulled out his phone. Fortunately, the press conference had already been cross-posted on Vimeo and YouTube, undoubtedly thanks to the infamous Yuna Hollander, for whom Scott had a very healthy respect, despite having only met her a handful of times. 

But then, one of those occasions had involved her giving him a hair-raising lecture for ordering her underage son several shots of tequila—underage by American standards, at least. Really, Scott had to be grateful that Hollander had reappeared from whichever corner he’d gone to puke in about halfway through her telling Scott off, so that he had been able to slink away alive, if not unscathed.

And speaking of mothers—

“Jesus,” Scott muttered, as Rozanov started talking about his mother’s death. The words of it—my mother died when I was twelve; she lost her battle—sent a sharp, shocking pang out from his chest and down to the ends of his fingers. 

Kip hummed out a gentle interrogative. It was the kind of noise Kip made when he was simply inviting Scott to share something, rather than because he desperately wanted to know; but after another few seconds, Scott paused the video, tugged his earbuds out, and leaned farther back against Kip’s thighs, looking up at his boyfriend. 

“I just… Apparently Rozanov’s mother died when he was twelve. By suicide.” 

“Fuck. That must have sucked.” After a beat, Kip put his book down and ran a hand through Scott’s hair. “Twelve. That’s the same age that…” 

“Yeah,” Scott said, his voice coming out rougher than usual. “Eight years spent playing each other every couple of months, plus two playoff series, and he never told me that we lost our mothers at the same age.” 

“I mean, it’s not on his Wikipedia page,” Kip said, having clearly just pulled it up. “Although it looks like someone’s editing it as we speak. But that must mean he hasn’t talked about it with almost anyone before this.” 

“Yeah, but… It’s not like he didn’t know about my parents. Everybody fucking knows. We could have related about it, instead of him just constantly being a giant fucking dick.” The complaint came out in a petulant tone, and Scott had to push down the urge to to apologize or edit his reaction into something more societally acceptable. Kip didn’t want him to be perfect—Kip just wanted him to be himself. 

“Sweetheart,” Kip said sternly, although his hand never paused in its reassuring strokes through Scott’s hair. “Imagine a world where everybody didn’t know about your parents. Where you didn’t have to hear about that tragedy every time someone talked about your achievements, where it wasn’t in the first paragraph of every article about you, where you didn’t have to see people look at you that way every time someone mentions parents or family or Christmas. Would you ever tell another player about it? Even if he had a similar story?”

Scott didn’t even have to think about it. “Absolutely fucking not.” He sighed as he heard the words come out of his mouth. “C’mon, love, you’re not supposed to make me feel bad for Rozanov. The guy is such an enormous asshole!” 

“And here I thought you liked enormous assholes,” Kip said laughing. 

Scott swatted him playfully upside his head. ”You managed to let giant dick go, but enormous asshole was just too much for you, wasn’t it?”  

“Well, once I realized you were asking for it…But you know,” Kip added, more seriously. “You complain about Rozanov being a dick all the time, but wasn’t he the one who came to the Kingfisher that one time?” 

“Yes!” Scott said, waving his hand out to the side to emphasize his point. “And he told you that I was too old for you and he was going to steal you away!” 

“I mean, that was kind of funny, babe.”

“I’m only three years older than you! You’re closer to my age than his!”

“Which is why it’s funny; he obviously doesn’t mean it, he’s just a shitstirrer.” 

“Whatever.” 

“Hmm. You know, I think you’re jealous.”

“I am not jealous of Rozanov! What would there even be to be jealous about? I’m a better player—” Absolutely untrue, but Scott was allowed to lie to himself (occasionally, as a treat, as Maria liked to say), “—on a better team—” That one was debatable, given that the Raiders were on a bit of a tear this season, but on the other hand, Scott had just won the fucking Cup, “—everyone likes me better—” Mostly true, “—and you’re way hotter than Hollander!” That, at least, was an objective fact.

“Girl. C’mon. Cosmo has rated Hollander the sexiest man in the League for like, three years in a row.” 

“Only because you’re not in the League.” Okay, fine, maybe Scott wasn’t objective. 

“You’re impossible.” 

“No, you are. I don’t know what I did to deserve you in my life.” The playful tone had dropped completely out of Scott’s voice, making him sound disgustingly sappy. But after Kip bent himself in half to brush a soft kiss across Scott’s mouth, he couldn’t summon up even a whisper of embarrassment about it. 

“I love you too, baby,” Kip said softly. “But, what I meant is that you’re jealous of Rozanov because he gets to be an asshole.” 

Scott opened his mouth. Closed it. 

“And, like, you’re a really good guy. That’s who you are, and I love it,” Kip pressed on. “But I think that sometimes—especially when every Jack and his mother seems to think they’re entitled to your time—maybe you wouldn’t mind being just a little bit more of an asshole? And you wish sometimes that your public persona didn’t make that so impossible? You know: you’re the All-American All Star, national hero, who puts on his uniform on his off-days and visits kids in hospitals, who only fights to protect his teammates… Your reputation does put you in a box, and even though it’s a great box, I think sometimes you’d like to jump out of it and have some fun. The way that Rozanov does.” 

“That’s very insightful,” Scott said, after a long pause for reflection. “Uncomfortably insightful, even.” 

“I might be sorta paraphrasing something that Elena said to me one time?” Kip admitted, dragging out the long vowel in ‘might’. “I mean, she brought it up in a slightly different context, but… it applies.” 

Scott huffed out a short laugh. “Okay, yeah, that tracks.”  

His and Kip’s relationship had been going, on and off and off and on, for five years. And the fact that it was finally on for good had to be largely attributed to Kip’s best friend Elena (or, well, Scott really hoped that it was on for good, now), even if he hadn’t quite gotten the nerve to pull out the diamond mokume gane engagement ring he had hidden under his bed, yet. Scott knew that he’d never be able to repay Elena for helping him figure out his shit in time to avoid losing Kip forever. But he fully intended to spend the rest of his life trying. 

“But the other thing Elena said,” Kip said, pulling Scott’s attention back, “is that, like… wearing any kind of mask gets old after a while. Even if it’s a mask you chose. I bet that Rozanov gets tired of being an asshole, sometimes, and wishes that he could show people another side of himself. But he’s just as trapped in the narrative as you are.” 

Scott thought of the time that Rozanov had come up to him the night of the MLH Awards. How in the darkness, away from the cameras and the watchful eyes of their teammates and opponents, Scott had seen a vulnerability and seriousness that he’d never thought the League’s big bad wolf was capable of. 

He sighed loudly. “Fine. I will try to give Rozanov the benefit of the doubt.” 

Kip laughed and leaned down to kiss him again. “I appreciate your sacrifice, babe.” As he straightened back up, he added, “Hey, why don’t you put that video up on the TV? We can watch it together.” 

“It’s okay,” Scott tried to demur, “I know you’re not that interested in—” 

“Okay, first off, that’s not even true,” Kip said, cutting him off. “Just because I’m less interested in hockey than you are doesn’t mean I’m not interested at all! Like, I say this with love, but probably ninety percent of the League is less interested in hockey than you. But secondly, I’m very interested in you, babe, and this is an important piece of you. Put it on.” 

“Okay,” Scott said softly, his heart overflowing. 

After they’d watched the rest of the press conference, Scott got up and paced over to his bedroom door. 

“You wanna go for a run?” he asked. “Or even just a walk?” 

“Sure,” Kip agreed, without barely more than a pointed eyebrow raise to indicate that he thought there might be a reason Scott was feeling restless. “Why don’t we jog through the Park and grab lunch at that one little Creole place in East Harlem before we head back down?” 

“The place with the chocolate beignets? Hell, yeah.” 

They pulled on their jackets and headed out. In unspoken accord, they stayed silent and moved with New Yorker quickness for the first leg, weaving vigorously through the Sunday crowds—a chaotic mix of sightseers, families out for a stroll, lovers in horse-drawn carriages, and the ubiquitous autumn roasted chestnut vendors—until they’d gotten far enough uptown that the Thanksgiving tourist jam had thinned out a bit. Once they’d rounded the reservoir, they slowed down and left the main track, walking through the ballfields and up the winding, arbored trails in the North Woods hand in hand. It was a gorgeous late fall day, over fifty degrees and with the trees in all their fiery glory, and Scott felt utterly peaceful for a while, relishing the kind of happiness he’d never thought he’d be able to have. 

“I’m going to miss this part of the park next year,” Kip said quietly. “Is it crazy that I grew up in Long Island, went to NYU, and still barely knew it was here? I know it’s a horrible stereotype, but I don’t think I’d ever been above 99th before you bought the new apartment.”

Scott shrugged nonchalantly, stuffing down his reaction to the mention of next year. “I mean, most stereotypes exist for a reason. I grew up in New York, too—” 

“Five hours away in Rochester, but go off, I guess—” 

Scott scoffed and wrapped his arm around Kip’s shoulder, shaking him playfully. “A hell of a lot closer in my teens and at LIU! Besides, I’ve lived in the city proper for almost twenty years now.”

“Mmm, good point, old man.” 

“Oh, see, now you’re starting to sound like him!” Scott complained, releasing Kip and throwing his arms up in the air, instead.

“What?” Kip said, looking up at Scott concernedly. “Babe, c’mon, you’re only three years older than me. It’s really not that bad a thing.” 

Scott sighed, immediately regretting his outburst. “It is in hockey, okay? I’ve got two, maybe three seasons left in me, and that’s only if I’m lucky. Some players make it to forty, but that’s not gonna be me. My right hip is definitely fucked all to hell, for one; it’s gonna need to be replaced once I call it quits. And every injury takes longer to recover from. The next big one is probably it for me. And you know, I’m really not jealous of Rozanov, but… I don’t know what I want to do with myself after I retire. And that scares me,” he finished quietly, looking up into the quivering, sun-dappled leaves. 

“Oh, babe,” Kip said. They were just emerging out of the woods and back onto the East Drive, but instead of turning left, to leave the park and head toward the restaurant, Kip pulled Scott right, toward the Harlem Meer. “You don’t think I get that? I’m thirty-three and I haven’t even gotten my doctorate, yet. Most academics my age are already counting down the tenure clock. And if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t even have been able to afford taking the Met fellowship without either working shifts at the Kingfisher, or living with my dad and commuting two hours every day—not with Manhattan housing prices.” 

“You know I’d be happy to—” Scott started, despite knowing better.

“Yes, I know, and that’s not the point!” Kip snapped. “I still can’t believe that you bought a second apartment just so I wouldn’t have to commute up from the Lower East Side! For a twelve-month fellowship! It would have been, like, twenty minutes on the subway!” 

Scott groaned. “It’s a good investment,” he said, as he had a hundred times already. “I’ll probably end up making enough when I sell it that I’d come out on top even if I hadn’t sublet my place to Bogdanov.” 

He carefully avoided mentioning that he wasn’t actually charging the Admirals’ new rookie anything for the sublet; the one advantage of them not being married, or even engaged, was that he hadn’t done full disclosure on his financials yet. Anyway, it was traditional for veterans to help the younger players out with housing during their ELCs, and it wasn’t like he actually needed the money. Putting Kip within walking distance of the Met, rather than making him cram himself into a jam-packed sardine can of a subway train twice every day at peak commuting hours, was absolutely worth it.

Although Scott had picked a place on the Upper West Side, rather than the East. Kip didn’t mind walking through the park, and the West Side held a much more tolerable breed of rich snobs. 

“And you know, I think I might stay up here, anyway,” Scott added. “It’s quieter, more peaceful than the old neighborhood, without giving up being in the city. The commute up to the practice arena is even a little bit shorter. And it’s not like it’s any longer of a drive to Princeton, for when you go back next year.”  

Kip stayed silent for a bit—by the time he spoke again, they’d reached the Meer, and he tugged Scott down onto one of the benches with him, holding his hand as they both looked out over the water. It was glinting like broken glass in the midday sun, broken up only by the geese and ducks—and even a few seagulls, although they tended to gravitate down in the lower half of the park, with the pigeons—sunning themselves and diving for tadpoles.  

“You said you weren’t jealous of Rozanov,” Kip said finally. 

Scott felt his heart rate pick up. “For the last time, I am not jealous of that fucking—” 

“No, no, no,” Kip interrupted, chuckling. “I meant, the way you said it… It sounded like you weren’t trying to say that you’re not jealous at all, just that you’re not jealous of Rozanov. So then, who are you jealous of, babe?” 

Scott sat with that for a long moment. He had said it that way, hadn’t he? And the aching, uneasy feeling that had been stirring in his gut all morning did bear an uncomfortable similarity to jealousy, didn’t it? Kip let him think, leaning his head on Scott’s shoulder and running his fingers across his palm. 

“Hollander,” Scott determined finally. He leaned his head backward over the back of the bench, closing his eyes. “I’m jealous of Hollander.” 

Kip made a small noise of surprise. “Because you… have a crush on Rozanov?” 

“Oh my god, no!” Scott said, snapping his head up and glaring down at his boyfriend. “Why the hell does everyone think that?!?” 

“I mean, where there’s smoke, babe…” Kip drawled. 

If Kip had been acting in any way actually threatened or annoyed by Scott’s nonexistent crush on the most annoying pest in the League, Scott would have actually fucking lost it. Since his boyfriend sounded more entertained than anything else, Scott managed to keep it under wraps. 

Barely. 

“I do not have a crush on Ilya Rozanov,” he bit out. 

“Okay,” Kip said, with just a tinge of singsong. “I believe you. But then, why are you jealous of Hollander?”

“Why wouldn’t I be jealous of Hollander?” Scott snapped.“I mean, he has everything, doesn’t he? Looks, money, talent… Two Stanley Cups and plenty of time to win more, not to mention two loving parents to help him hide his relationship, protect and manage his career, welcome his lover as their second son, and put together and run an entire nonprofit for them as cover, apparently…” 

“ … Ah,” Kip said softly, his hand tightening on Scott’s. “That.” 

Scott closed his eyes again. “I’m being a dick. I know I’m being a dick, it’s just… It’s hard not to hate him sometimes. Especially this time of the year. The anniversary of their deaths was two fucking days ago, and… He’s just so fucking perfect. 

“I didn’t get my first sponsorship until my sixth year in the League, did you know that? After I won the Art Ross for the second time. I mean, I love the Admirals, but until last year we hadn’t won the Cup in two and half decades, in a city that has eight other Major League sports teams. Last year, more than half the people who live in this town couldn’t have even told you whether Manhattan had a hockey team, let alone name any of the players. 

“Meanwhile, Hollander gets drafted by Montreal—only the biggest hockey town in the world, with the most successful team in MLH history—and gets signed with Reebok, like, four months after the draft. Before he even played his first Major League game! Do you know how insane that is? How many hockey players—hell, how many athletes—would have given their right eye for that kind of visibility?”

“I mean, visibility wouldn’t do them too much good without their eye—okay, sorry, not the time,” Kip added hastily, as Scott glared at him again. 

“Yuna Hollander is probably the most successful sports manager in all of North America,” Scott said, unable to stop the petty, bitchy words from spilling out now that he’d started. “And he just grew up with her. It gave his career a kickstart no one else will ever be able to match. And then this morning, the way she looked at him and Rozanov, I just… You deserve someone who’d look at you like that. Like you were all they ever wanted for their son.” 

“Scott,” Kip said, a choked, wet quality in his voice. 

“I just wish that my parents could have met you,” Scott whispered. “I wish my mom had gotten the chance to show you embarrassing baby photos and complain about what a terror I was as a kid.” 

“Were you a terror as a kid? I can’t really picture—” 

“No, I was an angel, but I bet she still would have found something to complain about. I wish my dad had gotten to come out with a hockey stick over his shoulder and tell you that if you ever hurt me he’d break your kneecaps—”

“That is a very specific and disturbing image,” Kip said. “Where on earth did you—please tell me you got that from movies, babe. I can’t believe my dad would ever—” 

“No, of course he didn’t,” Scott said, a little disgruntled.

“Of course not.” Kip let out a slightly wet laugh. “My dad loves you. I mean, who wouldn’t?” 

“He could have threatened me a little. I mean, I did toy with your affections.” 

“Babe. You’re a tall, dark, and handsome, talented, brilliant, kind, and rich American sports hero. No dad on earth would give you a shovel speech. Hell, quite a few dads would probably make you some very embarrassing offers themselves.” 

“Oh, ew.” 

“Have you really never—” 

“No! Or, I mean—I’ve probably slept with a few dads, but none who were old enough to be mine.”

“You missed out, honestly. The silver fox period is one of the few experiences of my early twenties that I don’t regret.” 

Scott frowned. “What do you mean by that? I mean, you were already out in your twenties, going to art school—footloose and fancy free, hot as hell, in the greatest city in the world! What do you regret about that?” 

“Oh, you mean apart from everything?” Kip said, a little breathlessly. Scott turned to face him, intending to pull him into his arms, but Kip waved him off. “No, that’s not fair, I know, I just… Babe, you wish your parents could have met me now? I wish I could have met me now! I wish I could tell teenage me so many things… How to know what things were important to learn and what could be ignored, how to navigate being out and queer at a high school where everyone hated my guts, how to keep my friends alive… I spent all of my twenties trying to figure out what the hell I wanted to do with myself. I wasted four years at Steinhardt accumulating student debt—and don’t you dare offer to pay it off again—only to figure out that I don’t actually have enough talent to be an artist—”

“Kip, no—” Scott said, his heart squeezing inside him. 

“I don’t have what it takes, babe, it’s the god’s honest truth. I’ve made my peace with it. I don’t even really want to be a great artist anymore; I just wish I hadn’t wasted so many years trying to be one. Working in a fucking smoothie shop with a BFA, crashing on my friends’ couches and living in my childhood bedroom, while I made a bunch of mediocre multimedia crap that no one even understands, much less likes.” 

“I like your smoothies?” Scott offered, knowing it wouldn’t help, but unable not to try something. “And I bet I would like your art, if you’d show it to me—” 

Kip just shook his head, smiling ruefully. “And what’s even worse is that I lost the joy I had in it. I used to love making art. Now I can’t even think about picking up a soldering iron without all that disappointment and heartbreak coming back. I wish I’d kept making art as something just for me, and gotten a degree focused on the history and business side of things—working my way into working in a museum or a gallery, or serving as a dealer to bring attention to other young queer artists, you know? And now… It’ll take me years to get there, if I ever do.” 

Scott held himself back from pointing out that he had several million dollars of real estate that he could, given a few months, liquidate and turn into an art gallery. He had, unfortunately, learned that making an offer like that was a quick way to absolutely wreck an otherwise beautiful day. Their disparate work schedules, with Kip’s fellowship and Scott’s roadies, were already playing too much havoc in their relationship for him to be willing to add any more stress. 

But Kip saw it on his face, anyway. “Don’t,” he said softly. “Don’t try to fix it; that’s not why I said all of that, babe. I said it because I want you to know that I understand. I get how much it hurts, looking back and seeing exactly where things went wrong—and realizing that it’s something you can never, ever fix. That you just have to live with the horrible things that happened, and make the best of it.”

Scott nodded slowly. “Okay, so… How do you live with it, then? That regret, I mean. Because I thought I knew. It used to be really hard—all those games as a teenager when I was the only kid who didn’t have any family watching, having to figure out how to have a major league career all by myself. But I made it through, somehow, and I told myself it made me stronger. I got to a place of peace with it, even.

“And then I met you. And suddenly it’s harder than it has been in decades. I want to tell my parents that I fell in love. I want to ask them how to navigate a relationship, how to make sure I’m treating you right. I want to take you home and introduce you to them. I just… I wish I could give you the family you deserve.” 

Kip opened his mouth—but whatever he had been about to say, Scott would never get to hear it. 

A giant fucking white bird suddenly charged out of the Meer. It must have initiated its takeoff down at the other end of the small body of water, because it was already five or six feet up into the air when it crossed the rocky shoreline. And it was going at least twenty miles an hour. Before Scott had done more than turn toward the Meer in response to the surprised and awed shouts from other parkgoers—and the cacophonous noise of wings as every other bird in sight took off at once—it was already dive-bombing him. Scott shrieked, loud and high-pitched, as it came for his head, and threw his arms up just in time to protect his face. For a long moment, all he could see was the warm, pink-toned blur of his own skin mixed with the intense white of the bird’s massive wings, thundering away on either side of his face.

“Jesus Christ!” he yelped. 

“Scott!” Kip shouted, from somewhere on the other side of the vibrating canopy of feathers. “Scott, are you okay?” 

All Scott could do was run—and hopefully, lead the crazed bird away from Kip. 

Fuck. Could birds get rabies? Bats definitely had rabies, so birds probably did too, right? Shit. 

Scott cringed away from the bird, shrinking back down against the park bench, and then, in the temporary space that granted him, he vaulted himself over the back of the bench, away from the flapping wings. As soon as his feet touched the ground, he was bolting away, running from the Meer and toward the East Drive, a short stretch of lawn away. But despite the danger of falling over his own feet and breaking something, he couldn’t help but look back over his shoulder as he ran, needing to make sure that he hadn’t simply switched the bird’s target and abandoned Kip to some kind of monstrous waterfowl. 

(Or would it be a fowl monster…? Jesus, why was Scott’s mind generating dad jokes at a time like this?)

Fortunately, the suddenness of his escape appeared to have startled the bird. Even as Scott leapt over the short wooden guardrail and paused at the dubious safety of the East Drive, the huge white bird—it had to be a swan, even though they were usually found closer to the Zoo, and he’d never seen one this big—landed heavily and awkwardly about ten feet in front of him. It tilted its head and then spun its neck around in an inhumanly wide circle, looking almost comically confused, still slowly flapping its wings as it swayed from side to side. 

Scott breathed a premature sigh of relief, looking back over his shoulder at the beckoning shelter of wooded section of park on the other side, where the foliage and underbrush were—hopefully—too dense for the huge bird. Then he looked back and shrieked as the swan regained its composure and charged right at him again, honking threateningly. 

“Run, Scott!” Kip screamed, from somewhere behind the bird.

Scott took off again, Kip’s encouragements growing even more distant behind him. He ignored the trail, scrambling straight into the trees and dense underbrush instead—any injuries inflicted by the clutching branches and sharp thorns would be worth it, if it allowed him to escape the damn swan. But inconceivably, it shadowed his every step, as if the heavy foliage wasn’t presenting a barrier at all. Scott grew more and more panicked as he heard its honks and hisses getting closer and closer, until finally he felt its beak nipping at his calves and hamstrings. 

“Jesus, fuck, leave me alone!” he shouted, turning at bay. 

That was a mistake. Its black bill was gaping wide, its beady black eyes fixed on him, its pink tongue waggling threateningly in the air. It advanced, hissing at him. He took a faltering step back, then another, his hands raised in front of his chest in a useless defensive posture. A final, faltering, fatal step. 

His leading foot found no purchase, and he fell, crashing down through a pile of bracken at the edge of a steep downward slope. He tumbled headlong down the hill, his body bouncing painfully off of broken saplings and sharp rocks, until he reached the narrow creek—barely more than a rivulet, really—at the bottom of the ravine.

Even then, he might have been fine, if severely battered and bruised. But at the end of the fall, as he rolled helplessly into the creek itself with a sick groan, his head hit a boulder right at the edge of the tiny rivulet. 

“Scott!” Kip yelled, his distant voice frantic. “Scott!” 

Blackness. 

November 23, 1994

“Scott!” 

“I’m okay,” Scott muttered. “S’okay, Kip, ‘m fine.” 

The reassurance came automatically to his lips—he didn’t want Kip to worry—but even as the words came out of Scott’s mouth, he realized that they were truer than he’d thought. Not only were the scratches and bruises from his headlong flight and fall through the woods missing entirely; not only were any symptoms of the concussion that must have surely resulted from that last blow to his head strangely absent; but he also couldn’t feel any of the nagging pains that he usually woke up with: the constant stiffness of his hips and knees, the hot soreness of bruises from the week’s games or practices, or the deep aches in his wrists and elbows from every slapshot and backhand he’d taken. Even the grogginess he usually felt after any night he didn’t get a full eight hours was conspicuously missing. 

Entirely and mysteriously free of pain for the first time in decades, Scott started to panic. He couldn’t remember the last time he'd woken up feeling so well-rested and refreshed, and that was wrong. That meant that… Had he been put in some kind of medical coma? Oh god—how long had he been asleep?

“Scott! Wake up, honey, you’re going to be late for school!” 

Scott jerked up as if he’d been struck by lightning, rising so fast that he almost bonked heads with his mother as she leaned over his bed to try and wake him up. He sagged back down against the pillows almost immediately, gaping at her with shock. 

“Mom?” he whispered. 

Rachel Hunter-Wilson shook her head and laughed at him, her short, tousled brown waves bouncing around her face, perfectly offsetting her merrily dancing hazel eyes. “Hey there, sleepyhead. Are you feeling okay, honey? You haven’t overslept like this in a long time.” 

Scott gaped up at her, trying to make sense of what was going on. A second later, he realized that he didn’t care, and he surged up to wrap his arms around her neck, clinging for dear life. 

“Hey there,” she said, her startled voice almost immediately shifting into concerned sympathy. She quickly returned his embrace, one of her hands sneaking up to cradle the back of his head. Scott felt tears pressing behind his eyes, and for once, he didn’t even attempt to stuff them down. “Scotty, sweetheart, did you have a nightmare? It’s okay, baby, I’m here, you’re fine, we’re fine—”   

The tears overflowed, pouring out onto his mom’s work blouse as every tense muscle in Scott’s body relaxed all at once, allowing him to melt into her embrace. He’d had dreams of her before—of course he had—but none of them had been like this: surrounded by the heartbreakingly familiar scent of her warm vanilla body wash, her comforting softness wrapping around him, her contralto voice murmuring in his ears. 

“I missed you so much, Mom,” he wept. 

She pulled back, despite his octopus-like grip around her torso, and cupped his face in both hands, rubbing the tears from his cheeks with her thumbs. “Scotty, what are you talking about? You see me every day.” He closed his eyes and tried to rebury his head in her shoulder, but she refused to let him, tilting his face up to the light. “Sweetheart, you’re worrying me. Look at me. What’s wrong?” 

He shook his head again, pulling in a ragged breath through his mouth, but it became rapidly clear that she wasn’t going to leave him alone long enough to gather his thoughts until he gave her an answer. 

“I… I had a nightmare,” he said, seizing upon the excuse she’d provided earlier. “I dreamed that you and Dad—” He snapped his mouth closed, unwilling to say it out loud.

He didn’t have to; his mom’s fingers tightened her grip in his short locks as she took in his meaning. “Oh, sweetheart. It’s okay. I’m right here, and your dad is fine, okay? I just talked to him on the phone twenty minutes ago. He said he’s looking forward to seeing you at your practice tonight.” 

Scott barely parsed the reassurance; he was far more focused on how good it felt to hide away from the world, cuddled safely in his mother’s arms. 

Unfortunately, he didn’t get to enjoy it for long. Far too soon, his mom pulled away and ruffled his hair with a sympathetic smile. 

“Okay, buckaroo. You’re already too late to make the bus, so I’m going to call Laura and ask if she can drop you off at school on her way to work, okay?” 

Scott shook his head, groaning. This dream would probably stop any minute now—he sure as hell wasn’t wasting it going to school.  “I don’t think I’m up for school today, Mom. My head’s a mess.” 

He scrubbed a hand across his eyes, brutally wiping away the tear residue, and looked up to find his mom looking down at him incredulously. 

“You ‘don’t think you’re up for school today’? Scott, honey…” 

“I… I’m not!” he protested. “I want to spend the day with you—” 

His voice rose involuntarily, into a whining edge that made Scott’s teeth itch. He hadn’t sounded like that, pipsqueaked and annoying, since his voice had dropped…

It clearly had a similar affect on his mom, who was now looking even more unimpressed. “Well, that’s not happening. I don’t get to call out from work because my son had a rough morning. Do you actually feel sick, Scott? And don’t even think about lying to me. Because you’re not staying home because of a nightmare, you know that. If that’s all this is, then it’s time to dig up some Hunter grit.” 

Scott made a face as he tried to remember how this was supposed to go. “Um, I… think I might be sick…?” 

“Mm-hm.” She rested the back of her hand against his forehead for a moment. “You don’t have a fever. What symptoms do you have?” 

“Um. My head hurts. And I feel like I might throw up,” Scott said, entirely truthfully. He had never once been able to lie successfully to his mom. 

“Well,” his mom said, parsing her lips. “If you feel sick, I guess you can’t go to school—” 

Scott nodded, trying to look feeble and in pain instead of just confused all to hell. 

“—and, of course, I’ll have to call your coach and let him know that you can’t make it to practice, either. Too bad; you know, your dad was really looking forward to seeing you on the ice tonight…” 

“No!” Scott said, the word springing to his lips without conscious intervention from his brain. “I’m not—I’m not too sick to go to practice, Mom, please don’t call Coach—” 

“Uh-huh. That’s what I thought.” She grinned at him—it was crazy how well he’d remembered that smile—and ruffled his hair again. “You know the rules—if you’re not too sick for practice, you’re not too sick for school. Up and at ‘em, kiddo; you can sleep in all you want tomorrow, okay?”

Thankfully for Scott’s chances of not bursting into tears again, she bustled out quickly after that, leaving him alone to get dressed and ready for school. He went down the hall and into the bathroom, finding himself running through his childhood morning routine on autopilot: scrubbing himself down, applying deodorant, and brushing his teeth by rote, his mind still fixed on figuring out a way to turn the odd dream he was stuck in to his advantage. It wasn’t until he looked up and caught his own reflection in the mirror that he started wondering exactly whose dream it was. 

If he was a thirty-six-year-old dreaming he was a twelve-year-old, shouldn’t it seem strange to look into a mirror and see a kid looking back? But even though Scott clearly remembered what he’d looked like as an adult, it didn’t seem odd or surreal to see the messy mop of light brown hair in place of his sculpted dark chestnut haircut; nor his smooth skin—the teenage acne hadn’t started becoming a problem yet—instead of the grizzly stubble; nor the round baby softness that would melt away in a few years, revealing his lantern jaw and heavy brows. It didn’t feel weird to look down at the sink and see nothing but the blue Crest paste and his nerdy Superman toothbrush in place of the array of beauty products he found necessary as an adult. He ran his hand over his chin, remembering the electric razor Kip had bought him as a birthday present. 

Was all of this just a dream, brought on by Scott’s desperate wish to see his mother again?  Or was he lying comatose on a creek bed in Central Park with the love of his life weeping over his broken body? Could this be some kind of detailed hallucination, the product of an injured mind after an inexplicable bird attack…?

 Or maybe he was twelve. Maybe he’d just had an incredibly vivid and surreal nightmare, and the adult life he thought he remembered—all of the people he remembered—were nothing but products of a fevered almost-teenage brain… Was Kip even real? Scott shuddered, caught for a moment in the plausibility that the man he remembered, the man he loved, was just a fantasy. After all, wasn’t a gorgeous, brilliant, funny, unthreateningly devoted artist cum academic exactly what Scott would have constructed as a hormonal, hockey-mad youngster, who’d just been starting to fear that he might be gay? 

Hell, maybe he’d died, and this was some really fucked-up version of the afterlife. Like that one Robin Williams movie. 

He wasn’t sure which of those options was more existentially terrifying. 

No, wait, it was definitely the Robin Williams one. 

“Scott!” his mom yelled from downstairs. “You’d best be almost done! Laura’ll be here any minute!” 

Swearing, he turned away from the mirror and ran back into his bedroom. He’d stripped off his pajamas, yanked on underwear and a pair of jeans, and was halfway through pulling a shirt over his head when he stalled out again—this time, from the sight of himself in the cheap, narrow mirror hanging on the wall next to his dresser. But this time, it wasn’t the contrast between his current scrawny, boyish frame and the powerful hockey player’s body he remembered that stopped him in his tracks: instead, it was the sight of the top he’d chosen at random from his dresser, a 1994 Admirals MLH Championship Cup t-shirt. Standing stock still in the middle of his childhood bedroom, he smoothed the shirt down the rest of the way with shaking hands and stared at his reflection, grappling with the impossible dissonance of the memories filling his head. 

One: He had been a toddler, he thought—two, perhaps, or maybe three? Too young to fully understand the chirps flying back and forth over his head as he was slowly swallowed up by the couch cushions, nestled between his parents as they watched the New York–Buffalo game; but old enough to recognize and enjoy the joy and playfulness and love in their voices. He remembered laughing uproariously as his Aunt Laura came in with hot dogs and beers and started jibing at both of them, switching from one side to the other at the drop of a hat. 

Two: his grandfather taking him to his first Admirals game, the year he’d turned seven. It had been the last Christmas they’d spent in White Plains before the stubborn old man had broken his hip shoveling snow out of his driveway and gone into that steep decline; he’d still been tall and hale, then, lifting Scott up to sit on his shoulders and bang against the glass, calling encouragement and insults to the players on both sides. 

Three: at eleven, driving down to Manhattan for the Game Seven showdown between Vancouver and New York in the Stanley Cup Finals; watching with tears streaming down his face as Dirk Duchesne, the Admirals’ legendary captain, lifted the Cup and held it out to the crowd. His father had snatched this shirt out of the air as the Madison Square Gardens merch cannons had shot them out to the crowd, and immediately handed it to Scott. His grandmother’s hands had fussed unnecessarily around his shoulders as she helped him pull it on, all three of them pretending that there weren’t tears in their eyes as his mother took a photo that should have had his grandfather in it. 

And then, like a leaky faucet turning from an occasional drop to a sudden downpour: each and every time he’d tucked this shirt away over the years, pinned in a special bag to the side of his dad’s old army rucksack from Vietnam that had lived through every move, outlasting half a dozen cheap suitcases. Scott had counted, once, and calculated that he’d packed up all or most of his things sixteen separate times between the ages of twelve and twenty-two, when he’d bought his first apartment in Manhattan. It had been a fifth-floor walk up—he hadn’t been able to afford much in the city on a rookie’s salary—but it had been his. Not just a bed and a dresser in someone else’s house, whether it was his grandmother’s place in White Plains, the shared dorms in St. Thomas and LIU, the attic room with his billet family in Quebec, or the short-term apartments he’d gotten during summers in college. An entire apartment that he could furnish and decorate however he wanted, where he wouldn’t have to move out until he was ready, where no one else would come unless he invited them. It had felt a little bit like freedom, and a little bit like mourning his family all over again. 

This shirt both was and wasn’t the one he remembered from the last time he’d pulled it out of the back of his closet in Manhattan: that shirt had been several sizes too small, worn enough to be almost see-through in spots, the light heather cotton stained with half a dozen ghosts of hot dogs and nachos past. This one was stiff and new, still fitting him loosely, and smelled of the bleach and starch his mom washed with. But it had the same blue and red block lettering, outlined in white and shadowed in black; the same shield-shaped escutcheons branding it with both the Admirals and MLH logos; the same Canadian and American flags crossed behind the gold Championship cup.

What memories were real, and which were imagined? There seemed to be no difference between them. 

“What is going on?” Scott whispered.  

If it was all just a dream, then how could he be remembering things that hadn’t happened yet? But if it was real, how could he be standing in his in childhood bedroom, talking to his mother, when she’d died in a car crash twenty-four years ago— 

“Oh, shit,” he breathed. Grabbing his school backpack from his desk, he pelted downstairs. “Mom!” he yelled as he landed on the living room floor, having jumped the last five or so steps. “Mom, what day is it?” 

“Wednesday, of course!” she yelled back from her office. She didn’t start work until nine, and was usually holed up in there in the early morning, answering emails from hockey parents or working up travel and practice schedules for the Junior girls’ team she coached. “You’d better get a move on, Scotty—you know Laura won’t wait if you’re not ready the second she pulls up!” 

“Wednesday. Thanks, Mom, that’s really helpful,” he muttered, only to cringe as he realized how disrespectful that had been, to a woman who might well be dead soon, unless—

He ran into the kitchen, grabbing a banana from the counter and several cereal bars from the bag over the pantry door, then pivoted to check the monthly calendar on the fridge. The black block letters at the top read NOVEMBER 1994, sending a cold shot of dread down his spine. 

Okay. So it was the right month. But which Wednesday was it?

Holy fuck. His mom had said he could sleep in all he wanted tomorrow. But if today was Wednesday, tomorrow was Thursday, and he normally had school on Thursday. Unless… 

Unless tomorrow was Thanksgiving. Which meant that today was the day his parents had died. Would have died. Might still die, in just over fourteen hours, unless—

As a car horn blared from outside, Scott somehow managed to get himself out the door, reflexively grabbing his denim jacket from the hall closet. Aunt Laura was waiting impatiently in her forest green Subaru station wagon, and he let himself slump into the front seat, his mind still spinning in numb, shocked static. 

Was this real? Could it be real?

Did he have any choice but to treat it as if it were?

“Good morning, Laura!” the woman in the driver’s seat next to him said, as they came to a screeching halt at a red light. “Thanks for taking me to school, Laura. I’m feeling great this morning, Laura, thanks for asking—” 

“What?” he asked, jolted out of his spiraling thoughts. 

“Jeez, kiddo,” Laura said, blowing out her cheeks. “Rachel wasn’t kidding about you being a space-cadet this morning, huh? She said you even forgot it was almost Turkey Day? How bad was that nightmare? You know, your dad is gonna kill me for giving you Scary Stories to Read in the Dark on Halloween—” 

Scott turned to look at his honorary aunt—his mom’s best friend, former linemate, and longtime co-coach—with two sets of memories once again warring for supremacy inside his brain. She’d always been one of his favorites, as a kid—effortlessly cool for a suburban spinster, as good with a hockey puck or a screwdriver as his dad, always able to make his mother laugh—and he had a hundred memories of games and laughs and sitting out on her back porch and watching the fireflies, on long summer nights when he’d wander across the alley to her house. 

But now, looking at her, he also remembered the shared heartbreak, the night they’d both stayed up watching the phone with quiet dread. He remembered the tantrums he’d thrown, the way he’d laid on the floor, crying, and begged her to keep him instead of sending him to White Plains to live with his grandmother, and the despair he’d felt when she refused, as if she couldn’t stand to have the irritating memory of her best friends’ deaths around anymore. He remembered the series of knock-down, drag-out screaming fights they’d had when she’d told him that she was selling his parents’ home, robbing him of the last of his memories. 

And he also remembered thinking of her as an adult, as he’d started feeling closer in age to the parents of the fresh young rookies who were coming into the Admirals’ locker room every year than to the rookies themselves. With that perspective, he’d found himself wondering what reasons she might have had to act as she had, and had felt a sort of hopeless regret that they’d fallen too far out of touch for him to reach out and ask. 

“Aunt Laura?” he found himself asking. “Can I ask you a question?” 

She raised her eyebrows, glancing at him briefly before turning her eyes back to the front as they rounded a corner. “Uh-oh. Either something’s wrong or you want something.”

He found himself laughing. “What? Why, cause I asked nicely?” 

“You haven’t called me ‘Aunt Laura’ since you were nine unless you wanted something or something was wrong,” she retorted. “I can see right through you, kiddo.” 

Okay, well… That was probably true. Scott folded his arms across his chest, staring out the window at the houses flashing by. 

“Oh, c’mon, Scotty, I’m just yanking your chain. Don’t sulk. What did you want to ask me?” 

He sighed and capitulated. “If… If something happened to my parents… What would happen to me? I mean… Would I stay with you?” 

There was a short silence. He finally turned away from the window and looked over at her, afraid he’d somehow given himself away—except how could he when he didn’t even know what was happening?—and found her staring out the windshield, her face suspiciously tight. 

“What did you read last night?” she muttered. “Oliver Twist? Jesus, kid.” 

“I—okay, so maybe there was a story about an orphan,” he said, trying to sound sheepish. “But it just got me wondering, you know? I mean… I wouldn’t want to have to leave Rochester, change teams—you know Coach is talking about making me captain next year…” 

She chuckled. “Oof, yeah, we definitely wouldn’t want you to have to deal with a catastrophe like having to fit in with a new hockey team and work your way up to captain again!” 

He rolled his eyes. “I was just asking. You can just say you don’t know.” 

They drove in silence for another couple of blocks, and then—”You’d have to go live with your grandmother,” she said quietly. “I’m number two on the list.” 

“My parents have a list?” he asked, jerking around and gaping at her. He’d never… Had she told him that, in the nightmare of his parents’ death? In all the fights they’d had over the move to his grandmother’s… He remembered her saying it was what his parents would have wanted, that it was important he was with real family—which had just hurt more, that she didn’t think they were real. He didn’t remember any mention of a list.

But those weeks and months just after his parents’ death were a blur of misery and fear: occasional memories popped up bright and unmistakable, like stones in a stream, but most of them were lost in the current. 

“Well, yeah, Scott, your parents are responsible people,” Laura went on. “They’ve got a will, and life insurance, and everything. Not that it’d cover all that much right now, with how much the mortgage is under water,” she added, almost under her breath, then went on, back in a normal tone, “I’m your godmother, Scott—you know that, right?” 

“Yeah,” he agreed, his mind spinning again. “I mean, that’s why I thought—” 

“But when you were born, Hank wanted to make sure you’d stay with real family if anything happened to him and your mom. So they put down your grandparents in White Plains, first— they were still going strong, back then, and your mom’s folks were already in the retirement home in Florida. Then me, if, god forbid, something happened to them, too. Then your uncle Jack—you remember him, your dad’s army buddy?” 

“Oh. Uh. Yeah, Sure.” Scott blinked. Jack was a good guy—he came to the St. Thomas fundraisers every year—but he’d certainly never acted as if he was a surrogate parent. Or as if he thought he should be. 

“So anyway, you’ve got a lot of people in your corner, and you’ll always be taken care of, no matter what, okay? You’re never going to be left out in the streets or end up with someone who doesn’t treat you right, or whatever happened in that horror story you should not have been reading after midnight!” Laura laughed and reached over, messing up his hair. “That make you feel better?” 

Scott ducked away, the mixed morass of guilt and relief and sadness swirling in his gut melting into annoyance at the familiar gesture. Why did adults always have to do that?

“Yeah,” he managed to make himself say, dredging up a smile. “Thanks. That’s good to know.” 

They pulled up at the drop-off zone a couple of minutes later. Laura worked for… some kind of computer technology company, Scott didn’t actually remember the details, but they had a big office downtown, so the middle school was right on her way. 

“Hey, Scott,” Laura said, leaning toward the passenger side as he climbed out of the car.

“Yeah?” he asked, turning and resting an arm on the roof.

“Nothing’s gonna happen to your parents, okay?” she said. “But if anything did, I’d be there for you. I mean, I’d even ask your grandma if you could stay with me, but I know she’d want to carry out your dad’s wishes. But if you ever need me, I’ll be there. Okay? I love you, Scotty.” 

He swallowed hard. “Yeah. Love you too, Aunt Laura.”

Scott leaned his head on his hand and stared hopelessly down at his desk. 

He’d found his way easily to his homeroom, remembered what his locker code was, and even that there was going to be a Spanish test later today.  That had to mean it had all just been a very weird, really intense, and strangely memorable dream, right? Like, there was no way he would have been able to remember all that if he was a time-traveling thirty-six-year-old, right? 

Especially with all the concussions he’d had. 

Except that he also remembered all the concussions he’d had—well, he didn’t exactly remember the concussions themselves, what with short-term memory loss being one of the hallmark symptoms, but he remembered recovering from them, anyway. He knew all his addresses in New York: the old apartments on the Lower East Side, and the new apartment on the Upper West Side, and the house in Tarrytown that he only used for team parties and crashing during heavy practice weeks. He could run over every single moment of his first time with Kip in his mind, and it only made him desperately lonely, not horny and ashamed or even grossed out. None of those memories were fading, either, the way a truly weird dream did. So what the hell did that mean?

Maybe he really was just going crazy. Whichever him he was. 

Jason Segal had started singing “Man or Muppet?” in his head, which felt like fairly prime evidence for the latter theory. 

“Scott?” Mr. Cox said, in a raised tone that suggested it wasn’t the first time he’d said it. 

Scott answered absently, still intent on his notes, “Present!” 

The kids around him tittered, and he finally looked up, unsure what the joke was. 

“Thanks, Scott,” Mr. Cox said drily. “Since I called attendance twenty minutes ago, I was already aware of your physical location. I asked if you had the permission slip for the trip to the ice castle next month. It’s the last day to turn it in.” 

“Oh,” Scott said, flushing. Sure enough, a short hunt through his backpack turned up a crumpled piece of paper signed by his mother. The walk up to the front to turn it in was surprisingly excruciating—or had he just forgotten how mean teenagers could be? 

I’m a muppet, then I’m a very manly muppet, Jason Segal continued harmonizing with himself inside Scott’s brain.  

“Off in our own world today, are we, Scott?” Mr. Cox asked, sneering at him condescendingly. “Do try to remember to touch down on the earth occasionally, hmm?” 

Scott rolled his eyes. “At least I’m in the right century—or did I miss the royal we coming back into style?” 

A second later, as Mr. Cox’s sarcasm-laden eyebrows arched up incredulously, Scott realized three things simultaneously: one, Mr. Cox would never have lasted a day in MLH, and not only because his last name was prime chirping material; two, Scott had spent a few too many years in a professional sport where grown men got paid to insult each other like children to be able to pull off being an actual child; and three, he was definitely not a twelve-year-old waking up from a dream about being a thirty-six-year-old, because if he was, he would never have had the balls to say that. 

“What did you just say?” Mr. Cox sputtered. 

“Uhhh, nothing. I’m going to go sit down now!” Scott announced, beating a hasty retreat. 

If I’m a man, that makes me a muppet of a man, Jason sang sadly. 

The rest of the morning was interminable. 

Which was definitely a word that twelve-year-old Scott wouldn’t have known. On the other hand, shouldn’t thirty-six-year-old Scott be more patient? And be better able to answer math problems?!?

The less said about the Spanish test, the better. 

After PE, he sprang a spontaneous erection during the showers, and then almost had a panic attack that one of the other boys would see. So clearly he couldn’t be a thirty-six-year-old who’d been showering with other men for years.

Except that it had happened because he’d been thinking of a particularly hot trick that Kip had used to do with his tongue, so clearly he couldn’t be an actual twelve-year-old virgin, either. 

And in that Spanish test, he’d frozen up with anxiety in a way he’d completely gotten over after a few years of having teachers wave off crappy grades because he wasn’t going to need that when he was playing hockey, so it didn’t seem likely that he was harboring a fully adult psyche inside his child-sized brain, now did it? 

But then in history, Scott immediately knew the answer to a question about Vincent Van Gogh because of that time Kip had taken him to MoMa and gone off into (completely adorable) raptures over The Starry Night. So he couldn’t rule out the future being real, either. 

By the time lunch period finally came around, he was frustrated and exhausted. And really, whose idea had it been to make children sit through four periods of the most boring shit on the face of the planet before feeding them? When Scott had been mentoring rookies, he’d had better sense. Always food first. 

And the cafeteria didn’t even have any pizza. 

The only thing Scott was certain of at this point was that if this was hell, the devil was both more evil and more creative than he’d realized. 

He’d had every intention of continuing the puzzle through his lunch period, but he’d no sooner gotten his food and picked an out-of-way table than his friends Mitch and Larry, who were both on his peewee hockey team, plopped down next to him. He barely acknowledged them, too grossed out by his lunch: the turkey somehow managed to be slimy and cardboard-like at the same time; the tater tots, while the best part of the meal, were bland and far too greasy; and the green beans were definitely from a can. And not even a good can.

“And I’m telling you, Larry, Crowell’s got to send a message,” Mitch was saying, as Scott stared glumly at his second, untouched slice of turkey. “It’s his first year in office! If he loses now, he’s gonna end up getting fired. Unless the players cave, there’s no way we’re going to have any hockey this year—” 

“It’s crack, Scott,” Larry said, shaking his head sadly. 

“What?” Scott asked, looking up and blinking in confusion. 

“What Mitch is smoking,” Larry explained, grinning at his own joke. “He thinks the big teams are gonna let Crowell get away with canceling hockey completely for the year, if the players don’t let him give them a salary cap—” 

“My dad says it’s not a cap, it’s a tax—” Mitch said heatedly. 

“Your dad’s got his head so far up the commissioner’s ass, his eyes are brown,” Larry shot back. 

Scott laughed, nearly choking on his inedibly dry turkey. He remembered the exact day last year when their coach had taught them that chirp—he’d had to draw a whole diagram before some of the slower boys on the team actually got it, but after that, they’d all used it every chance they got. 

“Yeah, Larry’s right,” he intervened, as Mitch visibly geared up to deliver his retort. “No way they’re going to let the whole season go by. They’ll end the lockout somehow, sometime in January at the latest, so they have time to get in like forty games.” 

Mitch folded his arms across chest. “You wanna bet on that?” 

Scott hit his grin with a nonchalant shrug. “Sure. The usual?” 

Mitch looked at him suspiciously. Scott just grinned back, enjoying the rare opportunity to one-up his friend. He had stayed noncommittal over the dozens of times they—and their teammates, their parents, their coaches, and the Juniors players who practiced at the same rink—had already had this argument in the past several months, ever since it had become clear that the negotiations between the players’ association and the League weren’t going to be resolved in time for the season to start on schedule. As peewee players for a regional hockey powerhouse, they had successfully placed their feet on the bottom rung of a ladder that would, for a lucky few among them, end in becoming major league players. To reach this level, they had to have been playing hockey since they were three or four, which meant that their parents were even more hockey-mad than they were. Larry’s parents had both played in college, like Scott’s; Mitch’s dad was a local sportswriter who’d played in the major juniors, and Mitch liked to think of himself as the local expert on the sport. 

And while he might be surprised at Scott’s sudden willingness to take a strong stance, there wasn’t really much of a possibility that Mitch was going to guess how Scott knew that the 1994–95 MLH lockout would end in January. As far as Scott’s best friend could imagine, this was a crapshoot bet. And since they were only betting over the chance to dare each other to do something dumb and embarassing…

“Fine,” Mitch said finally, and extended his hand across the table. 

Scott shook it, hiding a grin, and went back to his lunch, trying to summon up even the smallest smidgeon of enthusiasm. 

The second half of the school day was even worse than the first. First off, adolescents were, apparently, really fucking gross and annoying en masse. It was like being surrounded by two dozen Ilya Rozanovs at all times, except that instead of at least being hot, muscular Russians, they were scrawny kids with questionable hygiene who picked their noses and sent spit balls at each other. Scott had thought hockey locker rooms were bad—and they were!—but at least the chirping there had a code that kept certain subjects and areas off limits, a line that was rarely crossed between teammates.

Pre-teens, on the other hand, were ruthless. 

But while it was hard watching his friends and classmates being little asshats, Scott’s own popularity, size, and disinclination (today, at least) to join in on the horseplay going on around him meant that no one really went after him, concentrating their efforts on easier targets. His teachers, on the other hand, were a different case—especially as Scott turned from sitting silently in the back of the classroom, trying to unravel the mysteries of the universe on his own, to attempting to use his teachers as resources. He’d thought it made sense: since he couldn’t really look things up on the internet—and fuck but did he miss his smart phone—he might as well use the smartest people around him as resources, right? Teachers were supposed to help answer their students’ questions, right? They should be excited to have a student who was interested in having a complex metaphysical discussion, right? 

Well, it turned out that they weren’t as useful as Google, that was for sure.

“Mmm, no, I’m afraid we don’t have any nonfiction books on time travel, Scott.” Mr. Giles gave him a faux-concerned smile. “It’s just a middle school library, after all. There are a few psychology books, yes, but I’m afraid they’re a bit above the reading level you’ve demonstrated so far. Perhaps I could interest you in some Scott O’Dell?” 

And then I can go back to ignoring you like all the students, Mr. Giles’ mildly annoyed tone said. 

“Um, yeah, but I’m supposed to read something nonfiction?” Scott fabricated wildly. “My parents want me doing something not just, uh, for fun?” 

“I see. Hrm. I didn’t know they were… Oh, but of course, your mom’s an engineer, isn’t she?” 

“Civil engineering in water resources,” Scott said automatically. 

“Yes, of course. You know, we should have her come in for the next career day.” 

“Sure,” Scott agreed. His mom would come in and spend the entire presentation talking about hockey, instead. But then, all the students would probably prefer that. “But going back to time-travel…” 

“I mean, a sock in the fuel tank would definitely do it,” Mrs. Franklin told him in shop, “but that wouldn’t seem like an accident, obviously—hold on. This is for some kind of creative writing assignment?” 

“Uh, yeah,” Scott said. “I’m, uh, writing a detective story.” 

Based on the unimpressed look she shot him, his attempt to look innocent wasn’t very successful. 

“How about you stay away from cars until you can make a bread box with plumb lines, Scott,” Mrs. Franklin said, moving on to the next table. 

“Umm. No, Scott,” Mrs. Taggart said, looking down at him with a suspicious frown. “There aren’t any substances in the lab that would only make you temporarily sick.” 

“Oh.” Scott nodded. “I was just, uh, using it for a story in creative writing class.” 

“Mm-hm. Well, how about you work a bit more on writing down the pHs of these test strips, okay?”

“Right. I just, um. I was also wondering, are there any acids here that would melt through metal?” 

“On second thought, Scott, why don’t you take a step back and let Larry run this one—” 

“No, he didn’t.” Dr. Clark said, his scowl growing deeper. “Go back to your seat, Scott.” 

“But Mr. Giles said—”

“I don’t care what the librarian said, Scott. I’m your physics teacher, and I’m telling you that Einstein did not say that time travel was possible.” 

“Um… Okay… But Mr. Giles showed me a book that—” 

“Was it Gary Zukav again? Or Lyall Watson, that quack—” 

“Uh… Kuhlmann, I think? But anyway, I was just wondering, because he said that Einstein said that time travel to the future was possible, but not the past. But say if you went forward first, —” 

“Einstein didn’t say that, and like I’ve already said twice, we are working on the pendulum experiment today, Scott, so—”

“I already finished it.” 

“Then you can help one of the other students.” 

“Okay, look, forget Einstein. Do you think that time travel is possible?”

Dr. Clark planted his elbow on his desk and rubbed the skin between his brows. “I think, again, that it’s not the subject of today’s lesson, Scott, and you’re testing my patience. Please go back to your seat.” 

“Why?” Scott glanced around the room, but it didn’t seem like any of the other kids needed help. “There’s nothing to do there, and I’m just asking if—” 

“What you’re doing is showing disrespect to your teacher, Scott, and I’m not going to ask again.” 

Scott rolled his eyes again. After what had happened with Mr. Cox that morning, he knew it was a mistake, but he just couldn’t help it. He’d gone through plenty of self-important coaches in his years playing hockey, but come on. “You know, if you don’t know, you can just say so. I just thought, you know, since you have a Ph.D in physics, you might have thought about—” 

“Thirty minutes detention after school today,” Dr. Clark said tightly.  

Scott goggled at him. “Detention? For asking a question? Are you kidding me?” 

“Go back to your seat now, unless you want me to make it an hour,” Dr. Clark said, pulling out the stack of detention slips from his desk drawer. 

Scott stomped back to his seat, conscious of the many eyes following his retreat. His lab partner had scooted his chair as far away from Scott’s as she could without actually leaving the table, eyeing him as if he had the plague. Scott sat down with a thump, suddenly furious—both at the situation, and himself. 

He’d never gotten detention before. His mom was going to kill him.

On the plus side, that might solve the problem of how to get out of practice tonight… Except for how he hadn’t even decided if he should for sure do that. He’d been mostly too focused on trying to figure out what was going on to determine what he should do about it. And he was starting to run out of time. Fuck. 

Once Dr. Clark had returned to the stack of papers he was grading and the background clatter of students thwacking pendulums back and forth and recording the results filled the air again, Mitch leaned over from the neighboring lab table. 

“Hey, that was rad, Scotty,” he whispered. “What were you asking him about, anyway?” 

Scott shrugged. “Just something for this story I’m writing. He was being an ass.” 

Mitch nodded gravely. “Hey, I’ll wait for you after school—my mom doesn’t care if I take the later bus. You can tell your mom that we were hanging out or something.” 

“Doesn’t she have to sign the detention slip?” Scott asked, frowning down at it. 

Mitch rolled his eyes. “You don’t know how to forge her signature?” 

“I… no! I don’t!” 

“Well, I guess you’re shit outa luck, then,” Mitch said, snickering. 

Scott faceplanted into the desk. 

“Alright, listen up,” Ms. Barton announced. “I don’t want to be here. None of you want to be here. So read, do your homework, talk quietly, I don’t care, just so long as it looks like you’re behaving if anyone else pokes a head in here. Capiche?” 

The four other students, all of whom were clearly more experienced in the ways of detention than Scott, all muttered their agreements, and as Ms. Barton speared him with a keen look, he quickly followed suit. 

Detention had been much scarier in his head. He’d known the horror stories of getting hit with a ruler or shoved into a cage of nails didn’t actually happen, but he’d at least envisioned being forced to write the same line over and over again on the chalkboard, like Bart Simpson. This was just like study hall, with a bonus of getting his mom angry at him.

At least it gave him more time to think things over before he had to go home and face the music. 

“Whatcha in for?” a girl’s voice asked. 

Scott jerked upright and found a girl with green-streaked blonde pigtails, paint-streaked overalls, and neon eye makeup—probably an eighth-grader, one year older than him, because he didn’t recognize her at all, and he would have remembered that hair, not to mention the rest of the ensemble—leaning over from the neighboring desk.

“Uh… I don’t really know,” he said.

She grinned. “They didn’t tell you, or you don’t think the reason they gave you was true? I mean, usually it’s written on the slips… I’m Pickle, by the way.” 

“Seriously? Um, I mean, Scott. Sorry.” 

She shrugged. “I wouldn’t let people call me that if I gave a shit about getting teased for it. Scotty-boy.” 

Fortunately, Scott was immured from embarrassment about nicknames after some of the ones he’d picked up over the years in hockey. “And my teacher put down ‘behavioral disruption,’ but, like the only person I was disrupting was him? Basically, I just didn’t stop talking when he wanted me to? God forbid I ask a question about time travel in physics class, I guess.” 

Greenhaired girl—Pickle, apparently—raised her eyebrows, and Scott kicked himself. Jesus, why the fuck had he said that? 

“It was for a creative writing assignment,” he explained, then went on, hurriedly, “What about you?”

“I punched a guy in the nose because he said I was a dyke. Which only I get to call me.” Pickle crossed her arms and stared Scott down—clearly daring him to react badly—but then added, in a slightly less confident voice, “once I decide if I am one.”

“Oh,” Scott said, just a half-second too late. He nodded vigorously to get her to stop glaring at him. “That’s cool. That you punched him, I mean. Not that he called you that. Or that they gave you detention for it. That’s bullshit. Obviously.” 

“Obviously,” she repeated, but she settled back in her chair, appeased. 

“I, uh. Hope you didn’t get into too much trouble for it?” 

 “Ugh. A teacher heard what the other kid said, so he got suspended and I just got detention for the week, but my mom’s probably gonna be pissed.” 

“Oh. Yeah, well. Mine would go off on me about not letting my temper get away from me, too.” 

“Oh, no,” she said quickly, grinning at him so fiercely that it was clear that he’d given her the exact set up line she’d hoped for, “she’s gonna be pissed I didn’t break his nose. I was taught better than that. He was just too tall for me to get good leverage.”  

Scott smiled back. “Next time, try grabbing his shirt to pull him down toward your fist.” 

“Ooh. Good tip. My uncle said I should kick the tall ones, but he made me so mad, I forgot. I still would’ve kicked his ass, but they pulled me back too soon.” 

Scott grinned. “Does he play hockey? I’ll try to probably break something accidentally-on-purpose if we’re ever on the ice together.” 

Pickle burst out laughing, loud enough that the teacher hissed at them to be quiet. Pickle quickly apologized, doing a good enough job of it that Ms. Barton actually smiled graciously at them as before turning back to her AlphaSmart. 

“Okay, so you play hockey, write science fiction, and are willing to kneecap assholes,” Pickle summarized. “I think you’re one of my new best friends.” 

“Well, I’m not sure about kneecaps,” Scott demurred. “That’d be kinda tricky to make look like an accident. Shoulder dislocation, maybe?” 

“Really? Isn’t hockey, like, all about fighting and blood and bruises and stuff like that?”

“Yeah, but they don’t let you get in fights until you’re at least sixteen,” Scott explained. “In the Juniors. Before that, you get suspended for at least a game and maybe, like, the entire season if you get in a fight.” 

“Oh. Probably smart.” 

“Yeah. I mean, I don’t really like the fighting part of it, anyway? Like, sometimes it’s cool to have, like, a line you can’t cross without getting punched about it, even if you know the referee can’t see it. But a lot of time it’s just, like, something that guys feel like they have to do or they’ll be called a coward, or a way to bully the smaller guys.” 

“Huh. Well, he doesn’t actually play hockey, so it doesn’t really matter. Unless you want to switch sports and go into football.”

“Yeah, sorry. I don’t really like my chances for getting a bunch of concussions as it is.” 

Pickle laughed again, quieter this time. “Okay, well, forget Jesse, he’s an idiot. Tell me about your science fiction idea, instead.” 

Scott almost demurred, but then he thought—why not? It wasn’t like him being a time traveler would occur to her (and even if it did, who would believe a thirteen-year-old?), and maybe talking it out would help. 

“Okay, so,” he began. He was able to summarize the situation fairly quickly, finishing with, “But the problem I’m having is, like, how would my character know that he’s traveled in time, since he’s not taking his body with him? That probably wouldn’t be your first thought, if you suddenly woke up and you were a kid and just had all these memories of being an adult, right? You’d probably think that you’d just had a really weird dream.” 

“Huh,” Pickle said. “I mean, I think he’d be able to figure out that it wasn’t a dream pretty quick. I mean, who has a dream like that?” 

“I’ve had some pretty weird dreams,” Scott argued. “Like, that I’m an alien or, like, live under the sea as an octopus mermaid, crazy stuff like that. Is dreaming that you had an awesome life as an adult really that weird?” 

“I mean, I think that remembering every detail would be pretty weird,” Pickle said. “But fine.  What if he asked his friends or family about some secret that they tell him in the future? Like, maybe you could write that the first time around, he found out later that year that one of his friends was afraid of spiders, or—no wait, that wouldn’t be proof cause lots of people are afraid of spiders. Maybe, like, butterflies. Yeah! So he gets a fake butterfly and surprises him with it, and if the friend is really scared, then he knows his memories are real.” 

Scott opened his mouth to object… And then he remembered the conversation he’d had with Aunt Laura that morning. 

Was that proof? Before his parents’ death, his younger self would have had no reason to think that Aunt Laura wouldn’t have been able to keep him when his parents died. He only saw his grandmother two or three times a year. He saw Aunt Laura more times than that a week. Why would he be forced to move, change homes and schools and hockey teams, when he had a parental figure ready and willing to keep him in Rochester? Except if his parents had made other plans when he was born and never changed their will…

Well, and… He’d been clinging to it all being a dream all day, because it was just… easier, without involving any kind of supernatural elements, or him being in a coma, or dead—or, for that matter, his parents having died, even if he was going to get the chance to undo it. But despite his longing for the easier explanation, the whole nightmare theory had been wearing thinner and thinner as the day wore on and his memories of the future didn’t fade or dim, and he kept reacting to things differently than his normal, twelve-year-old self should have. 

“Okay,” he found himself saying out loud. “Yeah. That would probably work.” 

“Yeah. He could still be in a coma in the future, though,” Pickle said. “Or dead, or something. But, I mean, especially if he fell down a cliff and hit his head right before, the coma thing is probably what I’d assume was going on. Maybe you could change that—have the swan just, like, touch him or something?”

“—fucking swan,” Scott muttered. “Uh. Yeah, no, I um… I want my character to be confused, I guess? Like, I want him to figure it out eventually, but…” 

“Right. Well, and I guess it doesn’t really matter, right?” 

“It doesn’t?” 

“Well, if he’s in a coma or dead, it doesn’t really matter what he does, does it? Other than not going toward the light, I guess,” Pickle added, sniggering. “So he should just try to save his parents, and then he’ll figure out that it really was time travel once he wakes up and the timeline has changed.” 

“Rig—wait. What do you mean?” 

Pickle rolled her eyes. “Jeez, did you just start writing this today?” 

“Uh…yes?”

“Oh. Okay, well, I guess you’re not doing bad, then. Anyway, you said this happened because he made a wish, right? So wouldn’t he, like, go back to the future—or the present, whatever—once he’s changed things so the wish can come true? I mean, you’re not just going to have him live his entire life over again, are you? Wouldn’t that be, like, horrible for him? God, can you imagine having to go through middle school again as an adult? Jeez, that would totally suck.” 

Scott didn’t have to imagine—he’d been living it all day, and she was right, it totally sucked. The possibility that he would just snap back to the twenty-first century once he’d saved his parents had never occurred to him; but now that Pickle had suggested it, it did make sense.

If he had actually traveled back in time. 

“Okay, yeah,” he said. “He’s gonna realize it, if that happens, but, like—what if he doesn’t change the timeline? Like, sure, he made the wish, but maybe his life in the future is so good, he doesn’t want to change it.” 

Pickle scoffed. “Even if it means his parents dying? I mean, c’mon. He isn’t Batman, right?” Off of Scott’s confused expression, she added, “I mean, he didn’t save a bunch of other people’s lives because he had a tragic childhood?” 

“Oh—huh. No, I guess… No. But, like… He captained a Stanley Cup-winning team, so lot of people depended on him, you know? And he was gonna get married to his true love!” 

“Okay, but why can’t he do all that with his parents alive? He’s gonna remember everything, right? If he and the guy he loves—I told you I really like the gay love story thing, right?—anyway, if they don’t get together in the new timeline, he can just go find him again.” Pickle grinned. “Actually, it could be a really fun twist if he gets back to the future and his boyfriend is dating somebody else. Maybe somebody he hates! And he has to figure out how to set everything back the way it’s supposed to be.” 

Scott considered the possibility of waking up in his adult body again and finding a reality where Kip was dating Ilya Rozanov. He shuddered.

“But, seriously, Scotty, do you think he’d choose winning a trophy and having a cute boyfriend over saving his parents’ lives? Especially knowing that he might be able to get it all, anyway? Cause that seems, like, really selfish, to me.” 

“I… Yeah,” Scott admitted, feeling defeated. “I guess you’re right.” 

He’d only been in this messed-up situation for about eight hours, and he already missed Kip like a piece of himself; like a severed limb, twitching and aching with phantom pains. He wanted to go back to his real life: with his body that made sense and did what he told it to, even if it hurt; and Benny, Carter, and the rest of his hockey family, and Kip waiting at home for him, smoothie in hand. He wanted that so badly it hurt. But if the price for doing that was letting reality play out again—was waiting and doing nothing until the police came home to find him and Aunt Laura clinging to each other, terrified on the couch… That was a price he couldn’t pay. If there was even a chance that he really had traveled back in time on a swan and a wish, then he had to take that chance. He had to save his parents. 

So now… He just needed to figure out how to save them. 

By the time Scott climbed tiredly up the steps of the school bus, his mind was spinning in dizzy circles, still trying to find some way to be sure that his parents wouldn’t be at that intersection at 9:47 that evening. 

In the months after the crash, he’d gone over the accident report so many times that it felt as if the details were still engraved on the inside of his eyelids. His parents’ sedan had been traveling southeast on High Street, right before it turned into Macedon Center Road, on their way from downtown Fairport to pick Scott up from his practice at the Rochester Ice Center. They’d just entered the intersection with Turk Hill Road on a green light when a drunk driver in a large pickup truck traveling north had run the red light at a high speed and crashed into them, hitting the passenger-side front door and slamming them into a utility pole at the northeast corner of the intersection. The top of the utility pole had broken and fallen down onto the car, sending the crossbeam straight through the already-cracked windshield, crushing the roof and killing both passengers on impact.

The driver of the pickup had walked away with contusions and whiplash. 

And now Scott had only a little under six hours to make sure that none of that happened. There had to be a dozen ways he could do it, but his exhausted brain didn’t seem to be cooperating. He knew for a fact that there was no way he could convince his mom that he was too sick to go to practice, not unless he actually wanted to get hauled off to an emergency room—which was still a possible backup plan, but he’d really prefer not to leave a giant mess behind for his real twelve-year-old self when he left. He wishes he’d realised what day it was earlier — his mom might have let him stay home from both if he hadn’t reflexively complained about missing practice.

Making himself throw up would definitely be a good option, but so far, all the adults he knew had been profoundly unhelpful in telling him what he should drink to make that happen without actually poisoning himself.

If I was a real adult, I’d know what kind of medicine would do it, he thought gloomily. 

Fuck, but he missed the internet. Aunt Laura had dial-up at her home, so that was one option he was keeping in reserve—but she didn’t get home until late, and he had no idea how to actually find anything on the internet, pre-Google. At this point, all he’d done was email and some supervised time on the MLH’s website…  

And he didn’t know enough about cars to be sure that he could sabotage his mom’s Honda without either hurting someone or getting caught and grounded for life. 

He slumped down on one of the back seats sideways and buried his head in the worn out vinyl seat back. It turned out that middle school was hard. Not the academic part, which was whatever, but keeping up the facade of the perfect twelve-year-old boy for his teachers and friends: adventurous, but not too adventurous; obedient, but not too obedient; attentive, but not a teacher’s pet; friendly, but not gay; smart, but not nerdy. Had it been this hard the first time? 

“Hey, Scotty,” Mitch said, tossing his backpack into the seat opposite Scott and collapsing down next to it with a sigh that sounded like Scott’s brain felt. “I swear I almost fell asleep during Mr. Miller’s lecture. I don’t know how I’m going to make it through practice. Gonna sleep till, like, noon tomorrow. ” 

Scott grunted in agreement. 

“You get to sleep in, or do you have to get up early to drive down to New York City to see your grandmother?

“My grandmother doesn’t live in the city, she’s in White Plains.” 

“Uh, you said she took you to watch the Macy’s parade when you were a kid, right? Sounds like the city to me.” 

“Whatever,” Scott said, shrugging. He wasn’t up to the task of explaining a commuter suburb to a twelve-year-old right now. Even if he was a twelve-year-old right now. “And no. Gran’s driving up here this year. Dad didn’t want to go all the way down to her place, what with all the driving he’s already doing for the new job.” 

Mitch nodded. “That’s so freaking cool, though,” he said, in a retread of a conversation they’d had several times over the past few months. “Coaching a CHL team—that’s like, almost the big leagues, you know? Do you think that means they’ll draft you when you’re sixteen?” 

Scott shrugged again, as if it hadn’t been a question he’d badgered his father with since he’d been officially offered the job. As if he and Mitch hadn‘t already discussed this ad nauseum already.

“I mean, Dad’d love that, sure,” he said absently. The bus was finally pulling away, and he half turned, resting his chin on the back of the bench to watch the school slowly recede behind them, “but it’s not like he can play favorites just cause I’m his son. And he’s only the assistant coach right now. Plus, even if I got drafted right at sixteen, I probably wouldn’t get to play until I was eighteen, or even older. And my Mom really doesn’t want me to play for a CHL team, cause it’d mean I couldn’t play in college here, like she and my dad did. She’d rather I play in the USHL, if I even get good enough to be drafted before college.” 

“Sure you’ll get good enough—” Mitch said. “Why wouldn’t you?” 

Scott shrugged. In the “real” world, his early promise hadn’t fully bloomed into reality until his early twenties, when his last growth spurt had finally allowed him to bulk up and be comfortable in his own body. Even with all the training and connections he’d gotten through the benefits of being a St. Thomas student, he’d just barely managed to get a spot with a Junior A team in Quebec as a lanky, relatively uncoordinated teenager; while there, he’d shown “occasional but inconsistent brilliance” according to the scouts. Thankfully, that had still been enough to earn him a full ride through college—if only at a few relatively new, unranked schools. He’d chosen LIU partly for its proximity to his grandmother and partly for the strong business program, figuring that—despite all the coaches and scouts telling him that hockey players didn’t usually fully develop until their early twenties—that he could at least get a useful degree before he was forced to give up on the dream of playing in MLH. No one had been more surprised than him when he’d added two and half inches and fifty pounds of muscle and bone in the next two years, allowing him to sand off most of the rough edges in his play with consistent, aggressive drills to settle him in his new body. 

Would it have been—would it be—different, if his parents had—did—live? If his father had still been—might still be—an assistant coach of the Niagara Icehawks, one of the premier junior clubs in Canada? Or would Scott’s constantly changing body still betray him? 

“Man, I’m telling you,” Mitch was still carrying on, “if my parents were both hockey coaches, I’d be so much better than you by now. You gotta start taking advantage of all that in-house coaching talent you got, Scotty!” 

Scott finally turned away from the window, raising one eyebrow. 

Mitch cracked up. “What is that, Scott? You look like one of those guys from Star Trek! Geez, I hope you aren’t turning into a dweeb on me!” 

Scott rubbed his hand over his face. He’d almost forgotten how nerds had been regarded before the computer age—along with the Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek movie franchises—had turned them into something cool. 

Then it occurred to him: he hadn’t been able to raise one eyebrow when he was twelve. He’d learned how to do it in his first year with the Admirals. The other rookie on the team that year—what had even been his name—had been a Trek fiend, and with hours to fill in the air and in hotels—and without any required reading assignments for the first time in his life—the two of them had practiced it for hours, until they could do it on cue. Which just hammered in his earlier conclusion. This had to be time travel, didn’t it? 

“Scott?” Mitch asked, sounding a little concerned. “You okay?” 

Scott shook off his discombobulation and forced himself to refocus on his friend. “Yeah, sorry, just tired,” he managed. “Look, Mitch, no offense, but I don’t exactly want my parents to be coaching me all the time, you know? I mean, jeez, would you want to spend all your free time training with your parents?” 

“Uhh, yeah?!” Mitch said, looking at him like he was crazy. “If it meant getting to the major leagues? Obviously? I mean, c’mon! You know that Coach has said you’re the best prospect he’s seen in ten years—you don’t think that’s ‘cause your parents have taught you everything they know, because you got to train more than everybody else without having to pay for the extra ice time?”  

Scott shook his head. How had he actually liked this guy in middle school? “You know they limit us to ninety-minute practices because you can practice too hard. If you keep going when you’re too tired, you train in bad habits.”  

“Whatever,” Mitch said, his voice taking on a tinge of annoyance. “I still say the only reason you’re better than me is because of your parents.” 

“Fuck off,” Scott said, shaking his head in disgust. He didn’t remember Mitch ever being quite this belligerent with him; but then, maybe he’d never pushed back against some of the stupid shit that came out of the other boy’s mouth. “I’m better than you because I’m good, and I put in the work. If you want to come over and beg my parents for extra lessons, go ahead—I’ll even say pretty please for you.” 

“Shut up, dickwad,” Mitch shot back. “You know what, I was going to ask you to come over to play MLH 95 tonight after practice, but if you’re gonna be a pussy, I think I’ll just play it by myself!” 

About to retort that he didn’t even want to play video games with such a fucking asshole, Scott got hit by a sudden wash of inspiration. 

“I might come over and beat your ass at MLH 95,” he said, enjoying the way Mitch’s eyes widened with surprise as Scott channeled the Dealing with Asshole Jocks 101 skills he’d originally learned a few years from now. “But only if you manage to actually score a goal during scrimmage today.” 

Just as Scott had remembered, Hank Hunter walked in the front door about five minutes before they’d been supposed to leave for Scott’s hockey practice. With euphoria running through him at the sight of that familiar Magnum PI mustache bristling over a wide grin, Scott flung himself across the living room and into his dad’s arms.

“Hey, kiddo!” his dad crowed. Scott had grown almost three inches since last Christmas, when he’d first hit five feet, but his six-and-a-half-foot father threw him easily up into the air and spun him around as he caught him, almost slamming Scott’s head against the light fixture on the ceiling. 

“Once again, Hank, if you give the boy a concussion, you’re taking him to the ER, and I’m washing my hands of it,” his mom said, half-jokingly, from the archway to the dining room. 

“Nah, no concussions for my tough boy. And here’s my bonny bride, too!” his dad said, putting on a mock-Scottish accent. He flung Scott over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, making him wheeze with laughter, and crossed the room to kiss Scott’s mom. 

She only let him give her a short peck before pulling away. “We need to get out of here,” she said, a barely perceptible tightness in her voice. “I packed a cooler bag with leftovers for you, but you’d better use the bathroom. You know how gross the ones at the rink are.” 

“Actually, Rache,” his dad said, putting Scott down and ruffling his hair. “I was thinking…” 

(Scott ran his own hand through his hair, setting it back to rights. Why did everyone do that?!?!)

Not finishing his sentence, Scott’s dad flopped down on the couch with a groan and began taking off his shoes. “Kiddo, would you grab my sneakers from my closet upstairs? I swear to god, why the CHL insists on coaches wearing suits to practices… These loafers are killing me.” 

Scott obeyed; however, unlike his original memory of this experience, when he’d gone straight upstairs, he lingered at the balustrade, listening to the soft conversation being held below. 

“How about we stay at the practice for ten minutes, cheer the kid on, and then go out for dinner?” his dad said quietly. “I’m starving—practice ran late, and then some tight-ass faggot at the border decided to go off on a power trip—”

Scott’s guts twisted inside him, and he sagged against the balustrade, temporarily winded. 

“Hank. Language,” his mom said, the tightness in her voice growing stronger. 

“Sorry, love,” his dad said. “I’m just pissed that some jerk who couldn’t get a real job decided to make me miss my kid’s practice.” 

“You haven’t missed it yet—” 

“I’m not gonna sit on the fucking bleachers and eat cold leftovers after a week of nothing but fast food rinkside,” his dad said, irritation clear in his voice.

“Half a week—” 

“Especially when we’re going to spend all of tomorrow prepping for Thanksgiving. I want to take my wife out for a nice dinner and relax for a little while without any punk teenagers snapping back at me.” 

“Your son is not a punk teenager—” 

“Course he is! And so are his friends!” Scott’s dad laughed. “Wouldn’t have it any other way. C’mon, Rache. You know I’m proud of the kid, but we haven’t gone out in months—” 

“And you haven’t been to one of Scott’s practices this season—” 

“I’ve made it to all his games, which is what he really cares about, and it’s not like that was easy, with a four-hour round-trip drive and the long hours getting to know everyone at the club—” 

“It’s not all he cares about, and you know it!” 

“Rachel. Baby, come on,” Scott’s father’s voice turned low and coaxing, a rough thrum coming into it, and Scott jerked away from the balustrade, shaking off his emotions like a wet dog as he went to go get the sneakers. 

By the time he came back, his mom was pacing the floor. 

“Scott!” she exclaimed. “Did you go to Narnia for those shoes? You’re going to be late for practice!” 

“Sorry, Mom. They were hiding behind some stuff on the floor.” 

“Well, get a move on and get your stuff!” his mom said, tickling him along the sides and then swatting him playfully on the butt as he handed his dad his shoes. “You know your coach’ll make you do bag skates if you’re late.”

“Hey kiddo,” his dad said, as they merged onto the Inner Loop. “I was really looking forward to watching your practice tonight, but I haven’t had a chance to eat dinner yet. I was wondering if you’d mind if your mom and I left after the warmups and—” 

“Oh, yeah, that’s fine,” Scott interrupted. “You two haven’t had a date in ages, you should go.” 

“You… what?” his mom said, turning around in the passenger seat and staring at him. 

In Scott’s memory, he’d let his dad get the whole speech out before he’d started protesting, keenly disappointed and hurt that his dad cared more about dinner than seeing him skate.  Of course, as soon as he’d raised his voice, the argument had been lost—his mother, who had never tolerated any kind of whining, had immediately stepped in to play the disciplinarian. She’d given him two options: be dropped off at practice, or taken back home. No matter what he chose, his parents would be going out to dinner, and “now that you’ve decided to throw a temper tantrum about it, we definitely won’t be coming in for warmups.” 

After considerable additional tantrumming, he’d chosen the former option, and had a rotten time at practice even before his parents had unaccountably failed to pick him up. It hadn’t been until the cops had finally tracked him down early the next morning to deliver the sad news that he’d realized that “you guys suck, I hate you!” had been the last thing he’d ever say to his parents. 

But none of that was going to happen this time. 

“But, um, I was wondering,” Scott continued, overriding his mother’s confused interjection. “Could I spend the night at Mitch’s house?” 

“What?” his dad said, taken by surprise. 

“He asked if I could, on the bus ride home. He just got the new MLH 95, and he wants me to come over to play it. Please? He said his mom can bring me back tomorrow morning before Gran gets here.” 

“And you think you deserve to—” his mom started.

“Yeah, that’s fine,” his dad said, overlapping her. 

“Hank,” his mom said, her voice low and annoyed. 

“What? It’s not like he has to get up to go to school tomorrow.” 

“No, but he got detention today—” 

“Mmph. That’s not great, kiddo.” 

“Yeah, I know,” Scott admitted, clenching his fists tight enough that his blunt nails pressed painfully into his palms. He’d planned to just keep the detention to himself until after he’d saved his parents, knowing that a sleepover with a friend would be a much harder sell after delivering news like that. But then his mother had found the slip when she started cleaning out his backpack before the long weekend—something he hadn’t remembered, and probably hadn’t even noticed, her doing the first time around—and he’d had to come up with a slightly different plan. He took a deep breath, reminding himself that if waiting to ask his dad didn’t work, he could still fake a seizure or something. “I’m sorry.”

“Well, what for? How much?” his dad demanded, meeting Scott’s eyes briefly in the rearview mirror.  

“Just thirty minutes, the one time, and I swear, Dad, it was for, like, almost no reason! I was just asking the teacher a question and didn’t go back to my seat when he told me to.” 

“Which teacher?” 

“Dr. Clark.” 

His dad snorted softly, drumming his fingers on the wheel. “Okay,” he said finally. “You’re going to be raking leaves with me all weekend, okay, Scott? No complaining.” 

“Totally! No problem!” Scott said eagerly. 

“Fine. You can go to your friend’s tonight, then.” 

“Hank,” his mom said again. 

“C’mon, Rache,” his dad said, lowering his voice. “You know that guy thinks he’s too good to be teaching middle school. He’s had attitude with us every single parent-teacher meeting we’ve had this year.” 

“Scott still shouldn’t be talking back to any of his teachers.” 

“And he’ll learn that through good, old-fashioned physical labor, not by missing a chance to make closer friends on his team, okay?”

His mom sighed. “Fine.” 

Scott grinned widely and slumping down into the backseat, every tense muscle in body relaxing at once. His gamble had paid off! 

“Scotty, you know that we don’t like Dr. Clark either, okay?” his mom added. “But you’ll have bosses—and hockey coaches—all your life who you don’t like. You have to learn how to get along with them.” 

“I know, Mom,” Scott said repentantly. “I’ll be better.” 

“And if you get in trouble with Dr. Clark again this year, you’re getting a double punishment.” 

“Yes, Mom!” Scott said immediately. “I get it. I mean, I won’t. I promise.” 

“Good. I’m not mad at you, sweetheart,” his mom said, twisting around in her seat as they pulled up to the practice rink. “But I don’t want to be disappointed in you like this again. You hear me?” 

“Yes, Mom,” Scott said, rather more subdued. He kept his eyes down as he unbuckled his seatbelt and opened the door, but he couldn’t help but turn back to look at her before closing it—no matter how good his plan was, part of him was positive that it wasn’t going to work, that this would be the last time he’d see either of them. “I love you.” 

“Love you too, sweetheart.”  

“Hey, Scotty,” his dad said, swinging out of his seat to help Scott get his gear out of the trunk. “I really appreciate you being a champ about tonight, huh? How about I come pick you up from your friend’s tomorrow morning, and we’ll go down to IHOP, just the two of us, get some father-son time? That sound good?”

“Really?” Scott asked, flushing with happiness. “Yeah! That’d be amazing!” 

“Good,” his dad said, clapping him on the shoulder. “That’s my boy.” 

“Goddammit,” Scott swore, torquing the gamepad futilely between his hands. 

Mitch cackled. “Eat ice, motherfucker!” 

“Oooh, you said a bad word,” Mitch’s little sister called from the other corner of the comfortable basement. “I’m gonna tell mom!” 

“Snitches get stitches, Tammy,” Mitch retorted. “Nark on me and you’ll wish you’d never been born.”  

Scott couldn’t believe he was losing to an actual twelve-year-old at a game whose cover he had graced—would be gracing?—twenty years from now. He’d played it plenty of times, too; but all his instincts were geared toward the lightning-quick responses of video games in the late aughts, and the delayed reactions and clunky graphics of the 1994 version were really throwing him off. 

His nerves weren’t helping, either. When he’d made this plan, he hadn’t accounted for the fact that he’d have to make it through the entire night without knowing for sure whether it had worked or not. Of course, it should—there was no reason for his parents to be at that intersection if they weren’t coming to pick him up—but his brain kept filling his mind with movies and tv shows where destiny hadn’t been so easy to thwart, and the doomed person’s fate had found them no matter what they’d tried to do to change history. What if the drunk driver just kept on going through the intersection in which he’d originally hit Scott’s parents, and fate directed him toward I-490, or whatever road Scott’s parents decided to take home from their date night, instead—

“Kids!” Mitch’s mom called from upstairs, “brownies are up!” 

“Hell, yeah,” Scott said, hitting the start button to pause the game. His stomach was rumbling just at the thought, even though they’d had fruit and granola bars right after practice. He’d also forgotten how hungry he’d gotten as an adolescent, like a painful, twisting grip around his insides. 

“Aw, come on, I was about to score!” Mitch complained. 

Scott rolled his eyes and slapped Mitch jocularly on the shoulder. “The game’ll start back up right where we left off, dumbass. Brownies!” 

Mitch sneered back at him, but put his gamepad down with an aggrieved sigh and headed up the carpeted basement stairs a step behind Scott, with Tammy trailing them hopefully. 

Scott was halfway through his third brownie when his gaze fell upon the kitchen wall, and a lightbulb went off in his head. “Mrs. Fargo? Could I use your phone to call my parents and say goodnight?” 

“Of course!” she said immediately, her face brightening. “That’s so sweet of you, Scott.” 

“Awww, you need to call your mommy for a wittle bedtime stowy, Scotty?” Mitch jibed, as Scott got up and went over to the phone on the wall between the kitchen and dining room, just under the analog clock whose hands were pointing toward the ten and the four. 

“Mitch,” Wendy scolded, her voice not quite hushed enough that Scott couldn’t hear it clearly. “You know Scott’s dad isn’t around that much anymore. Be supportive of your friend, he’s going through a rough time.” 

“Geezy, Mom, it’s not like his parents got divorced or anything. His dad got, like, the coolest job ever.”

“I’m sure it’s still hard for Scott not to have his dad home,” Wendy said firmly. 

As they continued to bicker, Scott dialed the phone with shaking fingers, his childhood number fresh in his brain in a way that even his own future cell phone number wasn’t. Please pick up, he prayed, as the phone rang. Please pick up, please pick up, please pick—

“Hello, Hunter residence,” his mom’s voice rang through the line, slightly out of breath. 

Scott’s breath whooshed out of him. He’d done it. He’d saved them. He’d wake up tomorrow back in 2018, with Kip and his parents waiting by his side. God, he couldn’t wait to see his mom and Kip, probably holding each other’s hands—

“Hello?” his mom repeated. 

“Hey, Mom,” Scott said, his heart still bouncing in giddy jumps. “I just called to say goodnight. And I love you.”