I sat at a table by myself at lunch. Not that I wanted to be anti-social, it was just that I must have had a glazed-eye look, and it probably freaked people out a bit, so in what probably looked like a variation of the parting of the Red Sea, the student body steered clear of me. I would have wanted to avoid myself as well as I stared blankly at my brown-bagged lunch and the watery ring of where my soda sat just a bit earlier…a soda that was now missing.

“Hey, Jase, what’s up?”

Keith stood on the other side of the table and sat down.

“Ah, no-nothing.”

“Well, I failed my history assignment. You might want to check your answers before sixth period.”

“I’ll do that, I—”

“Forget you lunch ?”

I reached at the bag and saw that it was empty.

“No, I think someone stole it.”

“You feeling okay?” Keith asked as he sat down across the table from me.

“I’m going to say something that sounds crazy.”

“You’re actually going to talk to Tiffany, right? ‘Cause that’s crazy coming from you.”

I glared at him for a moment and then sighed. “Yes, but no, not that.”

“Then this’ll be good. What’cha got?”

“Have you seen anyone who looks like me?”

“Not lately. Does your reflection in a mirror count?”

“No.”

Keith took a sandwich out of his lunch bad and passed half of it to me. “You think you have an evil clone walking around the school? Oh wait, are you the evil one?”

“Seriously,” I replied as I took a bite of the sandwich, it was overly sweet peanut butter. “I mean the guy who knocked me down during PE looked like me.”

“And the same clothes?”

“Yeah, so you can see what I’m talking about that.”

“I have a suggestion.”

“What?” I asked, hoping Keith could shed some light on this mystery.

“Don’t talk to her about that.”

“Maybe I should,” I leaped to my feet, sandwich still in hand. “She might know someone who looks like me. I need to ask her.”

“I believe your evil clone theory more than you actually talking to her about anything.”

“Mr. Dennereck.”

Keith’s eyes went wide as he stared at the source of the voice behind me. I spun around to meet up with the eyes of the vice principal, Mr. Irwin.

“Come with me.”

We walked out of the lunchroom in total silence.

Suspension?

Detention?

I had no idea what was going to become of me. I had never met the principal of the school, and it was written on some form of ancient tablet or fortune cookie that if Mr. Irwin even whispered your name, you were destined to serve detention every day until the end of the school year or until you died, whichever likely came first. We turned a corner in the hallway and stepped into his office.

“Sit down, Mr. Dennereck.”

Mr Irwin’s office was in the eighth-grade hallway, a place I had never stepped foot in. There was a line that started in front of the gym that went all the way up to the front office that I refused to cross. The office door was a simple door with the name “Mr. Erwin” at the top of it, so high I had to jump up to see it clearly. It also at that moment I realized his name was spelled with an “E” and not an “I.”

The inside of the office was kind of empty. There was a large chair behind a desk with a small chair on the other side of the desk. My assumption was so he could tower above a student while passing judgment.

“Mr. Dennereck.”

“Yes sir?”

“I hear you disrupted Mr. Jackson’s class last period.”

“I wasn’t trying to, I—” I stopped short of saying I was speaking to my time-traveling self, my dimension clone, or a being of quantum mechanics. Anything I said would sound like I was trying to make fun of him or Mr. Jackson. I had no choice but to throw myself down onto the mercy of the court. “Well, I was just—”

The intercom on Mr. Erwin’s desk crackled to life. “Mr. Erwin to the lunchroom! We have a severe case of mass vomiting.”

Mr. Erwin’s expression cycled through disgust, dread, and then discipline—he knew he had to handle the issue.

“Stay here, Mr. Dennereck.”

I nodded as Mr Erwin stood up from his desk, opened the door, and walked out.

The door closed behind him, and I turned back, facing the now empty chair. I had, perhaps, five minutes to ponder my fate yet again: Detention? A parent, teacher conference? Forty lashes with a cat-o-nine tails?”

The door opened behind me, and I tensed up, dreading the continuation of the trial.

“We have to go!” My clone stood to my right and grabbed me by the shoulder.

“How did you do that?” I asked as we left the office.

“Again, with the questions,” he said with a sigh. “I still can’t believe I was this difficult to deal with.”

“Can I ask one more question?”

“I’d rather you didn’t, but you’re going to anyway.”

“Where are we going?”

“Can I answer your question with a question?”

“I think you just did,” I replied.

“Touché. On a trip!” He replied as he accelerated his pace. “Keep up and no matter what, keep running!”

I took off running, trying to keep up with him and witnessed him run through the wall! I had three seconds to either slow down and save my nose from a fracture or to keep on running. Considering how the morning had been going so far, I decided to keep on running—I closed my eyes right before the impending impact.

I opened my eyes to a view of trees, cabins, and…lots of mud on my shoes. We stood at the foot of a muddy hill on the far side of a campground.

“No, no, no,” I stammered. “This is just a dream or something.”

“Go with the ‘or something.’ Take a deep breath, Jase. Smell that mist in the air.”

“Day two of Camp Lee, Church youth group trip,” I replied as I looked around to see the pool to the side of us.

“Yep,” the other Jason replied.

“I have a few memories of this place.”

“Good or bad?”

“A little bit of both, actually.”

The other Jason walked ahead of me. “Let’s climb up the hill.”

“Why?”

“Because the group is going to walk down that muddy path any moment now.”

He nodded.

I can’t…We can’t change anything here. This is just a memory.”

“More than that. We are here. There’s three of us here, actually. And two of us have no idea on what to do.”

“And you.”

He nodded again.

“Want to fill me in?”

“There’s a chance that we stop our other self from leaving the cabin, allowing one of us to take his place and say more than ‘hello’ to her. Let’s go.”

I took another deep breath and then felt a rain drop fall onto my face.

“We forget our Bible and had to go back for it,” my out-of-time counterpart said as we fast-tracked up the hill. “We need to find it first and hide it.
That’s where you come in.” He jumped into the woods, and I trailed behind.

The cabins, one for the guys and the other for the girls, were situated on a hill with a steep and muddy path leading up to it. It had multiple bunk beds and reminded me of an army barrack.

He abruptly stopped as a wave of boys left the cabin. “Operation Intrude N313 goes into effect in three…two…one…”

I saw myself step out of the cabin and recalled how new I was to the youth group of First Baptist Church of Prattville. So new I had not integrated into the hierarchy of the seventh grade. We would begin Sunday School with everyone in a main room, eating donuts and getting an overview of the lesson for that day before being separated by genders—something I had never seen in a church beforehand. I found myself at odds with the other boys in the group: their attitudes about others were so two-faced to me. I had been attending that church for two months before school and still felt a disconnect, but I hoped this two-day Bible camp would help me understand myself and find someone who was like me.

My alternate self grabbed my arm and shoved me forward and I ran to the cabin, up onto the porch and inside. I frantically ran through the cabin, trying to remember exactly where my stuff was in the midst of beds. I saw my Bible, a leather-bound-book given to me by my sixth-grade Sunday School teachers. I picked it up and moved it to the bed at the end of the cabin…but then thought about it being trampled on, ripped, or not getting it back. I moved back to my bed, laid it back down and high-tailed it out through the rear entrance before the front door opened again.

I ran as fast as I could from the cabin and then felt my legs giving out on me, as if someone had tripped me. Maybe I had struck a tree root or something. My eyes opened to see a pair of shoes standing in front of my face.

“You didn’t hide it?”

I shook my head as I looked up to see my doppelgänger help me up.

“I’ll take care of our…past self. You, go and talk to her.”

I nodded and continued my run to meet up with the group. They were passing by the pool as were on our way to the camp’s sanctuary building. I didn’t see Tiffany from my vantage point as I could not recall what she wore that day. But if I could get ahead of the group her face, then I could complete the mission.

I ran as fast as I could to meet up and pass the group, in an attempt to lock eyes with her, but I didn’t want to put her on the spot.

“But you know the future beyond this day…” I whispered to myself. “What are you waiting for?”
I took a few steps to get closer to her but then stopped. Instead, I looked up the hill and ran back up the path. I saw my older self standing in the middle of the path looking at the ground.

He whispered something and closed his eyes.

The trees, the path, everything around us melted away to reveal the hallway at Prattville Junior High. I found myself staring at the annoyed face of Mr. Erwin who stood at the other end of the hall.