The man grabbed my hair and shoved my face toward it. Now he was just showing off.
“Put the cash in a bag,” he said.
We didn’t have any bags at the register, so I opted for a takeout box. He didn’t seem to mind. I took cash out by the handfuls and stuffed it into the cardboard box. The adrenaline pumping through my body was giving me hot flashes. I felt a line of perspiration along my upper lip and under my eyes. Even more so when I heard sirens in the distance.
Someone had already called the cops, and my first concern was for Mr. V and his family. What if their captors thought the authorities were coming for them? What would they do?
I was only half finished – the big bills were stashed underneath the cash bin – and Lewis was getting closer by the millisecond.
“Keep coming, bitch,” the robber said to him.
The absolute determination in Lewis’s expression made me groan aloud. I sped up, hurrying to get the robber out of the café.
Just as I finished and closed the takeout box, the gun went off with an earsplitting bang, and my life flashed before my eyes.
11
I was dropped as a baby.
Into a pool of awesomeness and badassery.
—T-SHIRT
Or, well, the last month of my life flashed before my eyes. It was full of regrets and bad decisions. For example, I totally should have eaten that York Peppermint Patty that fell on the floor of my apartment. The three-second rule only applied when other people were around. No one would have known it sat there for at least a minute before I noticed.
No. No. I would’ve known. I would’ve had to live with myself and —
I blinked. Squinted. Blinked again. No one was moving. No one was screaming or ducking to get away from the gunfire. In fact, no one was doing much of anything. I scanned the café, the frozen faces that swam around me. Everyone looked like posed manikins in an art exhibit on the American experience. My ears rang, probably from the blast, but it sounded like I was underwater.
Then, in a moment of absolute clarity, my jaw fell to my knees. I’d stopped time.
I really was a time traveler!
I closed my eyes. This rocked so hard.
My lids sprang open again as all the implications of such a gift paraded through my mind. I wondered what time period I was actually from. It couldn’t have been that long ago. I didn’t say things like thee and thou, and I’d known how to use a coffeemaker from Day One as if it were ingrained in my DNA.
But I was most definitely a time traveler. I even knew the lingo. Quantum mechanics. Hyperspace. Flux capacitor.
Hell.
Yes.
That’s why no one knew me. I probably hadn’t been born yet!
I wiggled my way out of the robber’s hold. Finally getting a good look at him, I took note of every aspect of his face that I could. I wanted to be able to describe him to a sketch artist should the need arise.
The tip of the gun had a fiery blast of powder exploding out of it. And a few inches away, a bullet hung in midair. It seemed surreal. Enigmatic. Unfathomable.
I walked around to examine its trajectory. It was headed straight for Lewis’s heart. I doubted his cousin would really shoot him, but the odds of a real robbery taking place on the same day we’d planned a fake one were astronomical. Enigmatic. Unfathomable. Clearly fate was punking us.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t entirely certain what to do about any of it. It wasn’t like I could stop a bullet. But maybe I didn’t have to. I looked beyond Lewis. No one would be hit if the bullet just kept going. It would shatter the window and end up in the alley somewhere, but better that than the alternative.
Okay. This could work. All I needed to do was move Lewis out of the way. I stepped to his side, placed my hands on his beefy arm, and pushed. He didn’t budge. Apparently things were stuck when I stopped time. When I bent it to my will.
I dug in my ankle-booted heels and tried again. He moved. Not far. Maybe an inch. But enough for me to know he could. I pushed again and again, shoving with all my might until I’d turned him and pushed him out of the way of the speeding bullet. He now stood at a forty-five-degree angle to the