Once Was a Time by Leila Sales

Author:Leila Sales
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2016-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

I’d been wrong.

It wasn’t a time travel portal.

There had just been something in the way the late-morning light hit the dust in the air that had made it seem, from my perspective, like something more than it was. But really it was nothing at all.

Of course.

I tried to calm the pounding of my heart and reminded myself that I was just seeing what I wanted to see, and making up magic because I wanted magic to be real. That was all. Because everything I’d tried in the past three years—the séance, the wishes on birthday candles and dandelions and eyelashes, the made-up spells—none of that had made any difference.

The older I got, the more I doubted it all. That I had really lived in England and had a father who was a scientist and had time traveled seventy-three years. I knew what Dakota would say if I told her that story. That’s impossible, and That doesn’t make sense. And the more time passed, the more I wondered if she was right. I had no proof of my old life, after all. Just hand-sewn pajamas with a Peter Pan collar, now too small for me, sitting in a plastic bag on the top shelf of my closet. A sad, silent hobby of rearranging the letters in words for myself. And dreams haunted by a blond girl whom I could not forget.

And was that really so bad, if I never found a way out of here? I’d thought it was, but the more I adjusted to Sutton, the less certain I was of that. I had foster parents who loved me, friends to play with, a boy who maybe had a crush on me—it could be a worse life. Did I really need another portal, too?

“Charlotte?” Melanie interrupted my thoughts. “Do you want to cut the cake for your friends?”

I nodded silently, still trying to steady my breathing after the fake portal sighting. My hands shook as I picked up the knife.

“None for me,” Dakota said sweetly. “I don’t eat ice cream this early in the day.”

I stared down at the cake and tried to remind myself how we used to celebrate my birthday, when I was Lottie. Mum would bake me a cake, and Dad would take me to the bookshop and let me choose out whichever books I wanted. Kitty once wrote a pantomime for me, and she got Justine and Thomas to perform it with her, and I laughed so hard I cried. One year for my birthday, before the war, when petrol wasn’t rationed, Kitty’s mum and dad took us to Burnham-on-Sea and she showed off how fast she could swim and we played mermaids all day long.

I frowned. That wasn’t right. My real birthday had been in October. It would have been too cold to play in the water then. Maybe we had gone to Burnham-on-Sea for Kitty’s birthday? Or just for a random day trip? Or maybe we had never gone at all.

It was impossible to check these memories.

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