[crow]

They wound up going to a Japanese place one block down, and Charlie ordered herself a bowl of ramen straight-up. Cammie took longer in deciding, but she always did. Cammie was the sort to overthink her menu choices, and half the time she wound up defaulting to an old favorite anyway, but this time she was feeling adventurous. She ordered one of those fancy, expensive sushi rolls that looked more like a display piece than food. Charlie made a face.

“What? If you want some, I'll share,” Cammie said.

“Pass,” Charlie deadpanned, and Cammie laughed. Their food arrived, and the joke was on Charlie--- Cammie's sushi roll surprise was amazing. But hey, ramen wasn't half bad either, and cheap-o junk food was her lifeblood. She inhaled that stuff, then leaned back with a sigh of satisfaction. Cammie was still only half-way through her roll.

[crow]

“So,” she said. “The bags under your eyes are darker than usual. Gimme the dirt.” Charlie raised a brow at her too, but she was content and sated on ramen. And sleep deprived, there was no getting around that. Plus it wasn't as if the withering look ever worked on Cammie, so it was more out of habit than anything. Cammie just waited her out, chewing determinedly at her mouthful of sushi.

“Well,” Charlie said, “I had this weird-ass dream.”

“Oooh, I'm hooked already. What was it? A heroic epic? A dashing romance? Oh, tell me you tried to go to work with no pants on,” Cammie said.

“Nah, none of that. I went out to the middle of nowhere, and there was this weirdo.” Putting it into words made it sound stupider already. The worst part is, she wasn't entirely sure it was a dream. In truth, she was pretty sure that it hadn't been, but she was still trying to see if she could convince herself otherwise.

[crow]

Cammie was interested, at any rate. “Was it just some random weirdo?”

“No, some kid I saw playing the park yesterday. He had this electric guitar and he wore vintage, and all his songs were from, what, thirty years ago? Geez.” Charlie shook her head.

Cammie perked right up. “Did he serenade you? Please tell me he serenaded you.” Charlie rolled her eyes.

“In the dream or in real life? Either way, the answer's no,” she said, cutting Cammie off before the latter could specify which. “He didn't even see me at the park, and in the dream he was just some dude standing in a field. Nothing happened.” The first part was a lie, but the truth of it was too bizarre to say, especially to Cammie. She didn't need any more encouragement than she already had to jump to conclusion.

[crow]

Which, of course, she did. Immediately. “It's fate,” she declared with a sharp jab of her chopsticks. “You're star-crossed lovers from a past life or something. Damn, I'm going to have to step up my game. I don't think you've ever dreamt about me.” She did that wistful sighing of hers, complete with the puppy eyes, and Charlie snorted.

“Oh, shut up and eat your sushi,” she said. “There's no such thing as reincarnated lovers.”

“I'm not going to argue with you, just this once, since I don't want to ruin my chances. (We are going on a date one of these days, Charlie. Just you wait.) But this is definitely some serious stuff. The stuff of fiction, Char,” Cammie said. There was an intensity to her gaze that would have been laughable if it wasn't so earnest.

[crow]

That was exactly what Charlie needed though. It was why she told Cammie about what happened, despite the fact that she could have lied. Everything sounded more ridiculous when envisioned through the lens of Cammie St Germaine, film nerd extraordinaire. Still, she didn't want to pick at the topic any more than they'd already done. She reached out and ruffled Cammie's hair. “What, you come bother me at work and now we're eating lunch together. This doesn't count as a date?”

Cammie's grin was incandescent, even with her face stuffed with sushi. Charlie looked away. “Chew your food,” she said. For once, Cammie obeyed, though she kept up that smile the whole entire time.

[crow]

They ordered a couple of California rolls for Dave since neither of them knew what he liked that was Japanese. Most of the time when they went out to eat with Dave, it was Italian. He wasn't, and as far as they knew he ate anything and everything, but it just always happened that way. Cammie made a note to invite him for Asian food next time. They paid for their food, picked up the roll and headed back to the shop. Cammie chattered the whole way about how she had been trying to get her hands on a rare edition of some old movie. Despite the fact that Charlie was the one who worked at the shop, Cammie was the one who knew her movies. She could quote scripts, give you the rundown of the entire career of an actor, or tell you who won the awards each year. She liked the shop because it offered the niche stuff. “You can find blockbuster hits everywhere,” she said. “This place is the real film store experience.” She swore by Rupert's stock religiously, though these days she was beginning to fall under the sway of online shopping too. They all were.

[crow]

By the time they got back, the truck had already arrived, and Dave was unloading the first few boxes while Rupert supervised. He had a bad back, so he couldn't do anything that required heavy lifting anymore. Charlie passed the take-out bag to Cammie and went to help with the unloading. She loved delivery day too, though not for the same reason as Cammie and the regulars. It was the only day where she completely felt necessary, instead of just a charity case Rupert had taken in. He'd never call her that, but Charlie wasn't an idiot. But on delivery day, everyone was busy, and she didn't have to stand around feeling useless.

“We got you sushi,” Cammie said to Dave. He grunted in reply, setting his box down on the floor inside the shop. Charlie stacked hers on top of his, and motioned to the counter with a jerk of her head.

[crow]

“Just leave it there. Let's get all this stuff in first.” The truck driver probably wouldn't like it too much if they broke for lunch before they finished unloading. Cammie shrugged and did just that, then moved to help the two of them with the boxes. Charlie always thought it was funny--- Cammie looked like the kind of kid that she'd never roll with, clean and put-together and sunny as anything. She had that wholesome, pretty look, and Charlie would never have pegged her for being able to lift much, but she soldiered right on with them. Still refused to go rock-climbing with them or play street hockey or basketball, but there was that one summer they went on a hike together. Cammie was no pushover, and nobody had anything on her when it came to sheer force of personality. She might have been the most stubborn person Charlie knew, come to think of it, which was no small feat.

[crow]

Though, as far as lifting boxes went, Cammie had an ulterior motive. The sooner they got all the stuff in, the sooner they could start opening them up. Nobody could beat Cammie when it came to enthusiasm for new stock either, especially since a few of them were special orders she'd made through Rupert herself.

Rupert came out with a knife to cut the tape and they set about, one box each, to sort through the titles and make sure everything was there. Rupert stood with his checklist, crossing off items as the three of them read them out. Technically Cammie wasn't an employee, and she shouldn't have been doing this, but it had been ages since anyone tried to stop her. She'd been a regular for so long that she was part of the family.

[crow]

“Solaris! I've been waiting for this one,” Cammie chirped. “Can I just take it home? I've already paid.”

Rupert laughed. “Go for it! Dave, what've you got?”

“Eight copies of How To Train Your Dragon 2.” Dave held them all up in a fan and made a face. Charlie elbowed him.

“Dude, as if you didn't cry when you went to see it,” she said.

“Shut up, I didn't cry. Besides, you were the one who went to see it three times,” Dave shot back.

“Yeah, with my kid brother. What's your excuse?”

“I bawled my eyes out,” Cammie said brightly. “Also, I went to see it four times, and I think once I cried so loud, the eight-year-old next to me gave me the stink-eye.” They all got a good laugh out of that.

[crow]

Charlie read out the next title from her box. “Miss Granny... Hey, is this foreign?" There was a picture on the cover, two women with perms smiling mischievously at the onlooker. Both were Asian. Charlie flipped it over to read the back.

“Yeah, Korean film. Sort of like 17 Again, only way funnier. We should all watch at my place,” Cammie said, which marked the movie as another of her special orders. Charlie handed it to her, and she put it away inside her bag.

And so it went, with the three of them unpacking and reading out. It went much more slowly than it could have, since they kept pausing to comment or make jokes. They all stopped if a customer came in, with Charlie or Dave running to the register and Rupert offering to help them. Cammie even chimed in with recommendations sometimes.

[crow]

Eventually, however, they wrapped things up, and Cammie went on her way. Charlie's own shift ended not long after, while Dave stayed for the evening to help close up shop. The movies wouldn't be shelved until tomorrow at the earliest. Rupert never rushed his business, and anyone looking for something specific could always check at the counter to see if they had it in the back.

The ride home was a blur. The day had been fun, but by the end of it, she was exhausted. When she got home, she had to fix something for Elliot. She nearly fell asleep trying to think of what she'd make. She was jolted awake when the bus driver braked abruptly. Actually, jolted might not have been giving it enough credit. She was sent careening forward into the person in front of her.

[crow]

“Hey, watch it,” she said, giving Charlie a pointed look, but Charlie was too distracted by what she saw out the front window to listen. All around them, cars had stopped suddenly, as if something had run a light in front of them. But there was nothing there--- no crashed cars, no dead animal, no person, nothing.

“What happened?” someone asked from the front of the bus. Uneasy murmurs spread through the crowd.

“Hell if I know,” the driver said. “I thought I saw some kid walking in the middle of the road, but the next thing I know, he's gone.”

“Don't drive if you're drunk, old man,” someone yelled, but the other cars had stopped too. It couldn't have just been the driver, but people also didn't vanish into thin air either.

[crow]

... Well, not entirely true... She could have, if she wanted. She could have stopped time, walked somewhere else, and let it start again. She didn't, because that was the kind of obvious stunt that would get her busted, and then some uppity labcoat would come to her house and drag her off for research. Or worse, the government could take her into custody. It wasn't her cup of tea regardless, but leaving her brother alone in that house was just not an option.

The incident preoccupied her the whole way home. She had this nagging feeling that it had something to do with her own power. She had thought about it too when she was younger: there must have been others like her with that kind of power. That was what she had believed back then.

[crow]

Years of nothing turning up had convinced her that that either wasn't the case, or they were all hiding out like she was. And to be honest, she stopped caring. There were more immediate things to worry about, like pulling money together or how to get even with someone at school without getting expelled.

Her mind went, again, to the busker boy. He was innocuous enough at the park, but what if it hadn't been a dream that night? And how had he found her anyway? For one heady, dizzying moment, she thought she might have been onto something.

But the moment passed, and she realized that she was thinking like Cammie. There was no magic fellowship of time-travelling kids. There was no street busker who turned up in the middle of nowhere to say cryptic things, only to vanish into thin air. That didn't happen. Sometimes not even Charlie's own abilities seemed real to her. They didn't serve any practical purpose. She couldn't even really use them without the risk of getting caught, except for little escapes from life--- and even then, she always had to come back.