Backward Glass Read Online Free PDF

had to rely on her to lead me.
    In the basement, Luka turned on a light, then picked up a black plastic rectangle with numbered buttons and pointed it in the direction of a large TV. Without her approaching it, and with a kind of muted thoom, the thing turned on. Then she went to it and touched a grey box on a shelf on the TV stand. She took away two smaller rectangular grey boxes away from it. Each one had a cross and two red buttons on its face.
    She handed one to me. “You’re gonna like this.”
    “What is it?”
    “Nintendo. It’s what’s cool in the future.”
    Two hours later, she practically had to rip the controller from my hand and force me up the stairs. “It’s almost three in the morning back in your time as well. Didn’t you say it was a school night?”
    It was. Sunday here was Tuesday back home.
    I didn’t care. I had been Mario. I had jumped onto turtles and mushrooms, leaped hammers and jets of fire, fallen down pits, and climbed into elevators. The future was cool.
    I told Luka as much. She shrugged. “It’s better than Atari because they have more games. Melissa, in ten years? Has way better stuff. And Keisha has even better than that. Anyway, come on. I still have to show you that drawer.”
    We started up the basement stairs. “How do you know about them? Keisha and Melissa?”
    “Even, odd? Forward, backward? My theory? It was really only for backward. I think it’s kind of cheating when I bring you forward like this. That’s why it’ll let you go back anytime. Kind of putting things right again. Anyway, hush.”
    Luka made me hot chocolate in a microwave and told me to drink up. “You have no idea how cold you’re going to be. Trust me.”
    “So who made it?” I whispered, looking at the mirror when we were back in her room with the door closed.
    She shrugged. “We don’t know. In 1997? They have this thing—it’s like all of the computers in the world connected together. They call it the Internet.”
    “Can you talk to it?”
    Another eye roll. “No. But you can type in things and search for them. Melissa and Keisha think maybe it has something to do with your house.”
    “So you really met them?” I said.
    Her shrug was minimal, cool. “Sure. I guess I almost had a heart attack when Melissa first came through. Eleven o’clock at night, this girl just steps out of my mirror. Keisha came to her a few days later.”
    “What about the one further up from her? Initials C.M.?”
    That stopped her. “How do you know anything about way up in 2017?”
    “So you haven’t met C.M.?” Oh, this was good. I knew something she didn’t.
    “Of course not. Think about how hard that would be. Melissa can only come back to see me on odd-numbered days. I’d have to get her to take me with her to her time, then wait a day until Keisha could pull us up to 2007, and another one for that other kid, whatever his name is, to come back to Keisha’s time. I’d be gone for three days. My mom would kill me.”
    I pursed my lips. “So we can’t ever go far from our own times?”
    “We’re working on it. Sleepovers. Lies to the parents. We’ll think of something. We have a whole year, right? That’s what the note said.”
    I rubbed my neck. “Yeah. But a year for what?”
    Luka looked right at me, and an electric moment of communication passed between us. I had never had that with anyone before, but I knew that I knew what she was thinking, and I knew she knew I was thinking it, too. A year for what? Just for having fun, for doing something no one else on earth could do? A year for seeing the world stuttered ten years back and forth? A year for seeing that there never were any jetpacks or flying cars? Or a year for something more?
    “What are you getting at?” she said.
    “The dead baby,” I said. “The girl that went missing.” From my pocket, I took out the list I had found on my first day in the new house, the paper that had fallen away from the tiny, blackened corpse. I spread