about the modern world, and that had put them at a disadvantage. They had been too sheltered, and now they were like little Rip van Winkles, waking after a long sleep to a world they didn’t understand. They knew about modern things up to a point—electricity, telephones, cars, airplanes, old movies, old music, and other things that were generally known and popular prior to September 3, 1940. After that, their knowledge was spotty and inconsistent. They had spent no more than a few sporadic hours in the present, and those were mostly on Cairnholm, where time had practically stood still even as the calendar changed. Compared to their island, even my small town seemed to move at a million miles per hour, and it occasionally paralyzed them with anxiety.
In the mall’s colossal parking lot, Horace became overwhelmed and refused to get out of the car. “The past is so much less terrifying than the future,” he explained after some coaxing. “Even the most terrible era of the past is at least knowable. It can be studied. The world survived it. But in the present, one never knows when the whole world could come to a terrible, crashing end.”
I tried to reason with him. “The world’s not going to end today. And even if it does, it’ll happen whether or not you go into this mall with us.”
“I know that. But it feels like it will. But perhaps if I just sit here and don’t move, everything will stop moving with me, and nothing bad will happen.”
Just then a car playing loud, bass-heavy music rolled by with its windows down. Horace tensed and squeezed his eyes shut.
“See?” said Claire. “The world goes banging on, even if you just sit. So come inside with us.”
“Oh, bollocks,” he said, and threw the car door open.
As the others applauded his bravery, I made a mental note that Horace might not be the best companion to bring along on our first mission, whatever it was.
Shaker Pines was a classic, as malls went—noisy, antiseptically bright, and layered in baffling cultural references (you try explaining the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. or the As Seen on TV store to someone from the first half of the last century). It was also crowded with teenagers, which was half the point. We weren’t here just to outfit them in modern clothes. I wanted to expose them to normal kids, kids they would be expected to imitate. It was more than a shopping trip; it was an anthropological expedition.
We walked and browsed, the peculiars bunched in a knot around me like explorers in a jungle infamous for tiger attacks. We ate greasy things at the food court and sat watching other teenagers, my friends quietly studying their behavior: their whispers and jokes; their startling bursts of laughter; the way they grouped themselves, tight and clannish, rarely mixing; how they did everything, even ate, without ever letting go of their phones.
“Do they come from very rich families?” Claire asked, leaning into our group over her plastic tray, voice lowered.
“I think they’re just normal teenagers,” I said.
“They don’t work?”
“They might have summer jobs part-time. I don’t know.”
“When I was growing up,” said Hugh, “if you were old enough to lift something heavy, you were old enough to work. There was no sitting around all day, eating and talking.”
“We were old enough to work even before we could lift heavy things,” said Olive. “My father sent me to work at a boot-blacking factory when I was five. It was awful.”
“Mine sent me to a workhouse,” said Hugh. “I spent all day making rope.”
“Good God,” I muttered.
They came from a time before the concept of teenager-hood even existed. That was an invention of the postwar years, before which you had been either a child or an adult. I wondered how they would be able to impersonate modern teenagers if the very concept was foreign to them.
What if this whole thing was a bad idea?
Nervously, I checked my phone.
Nothing from H. Nothing at all.
We went to buy clothes, but along the way we lost Horace, who veered off into a grocery store that occupied one whole wing of the mall. We found him standing awestruck before a massive wall of cheese in the refrigerated foods section.
“Feta, mozzarella, Camembert, Gouda, cheddar!” he said, rapturous. “A gourmand’s fantasyland.”
It was just cheese to me, but to Horace it was a miracle: thirty feet of the stuff, sliced, whipped, in blocks and chunks, separately packaged, available in skim, whole, and