Unhappenings by Edward Aubry Page A

was a different story, many times worse. It took me weeks to work up the courage to go to her, but I never got the chance. One day, to my profound surprise and discomfort, she confessed her feelings for me. Given that our friendship had always seemed entirely platonic from my end of it, my initial assumption was that this was some sort of super awkward unhappening of it. However, the more that story played out, the more details she revealed about events exactly as I recalled them. This crush had always been there, and I missed it. At first I tried to stay friends with her, with the clear understanding that I wanted nothing more. The longer we tried that, the more she began to fall apart. It finally got to the point where she would not leave me alone, her communications with me alternating between desperate pleas for a chance, and threats.
    It is with no great pride that I admit when she ultimately, inevitably, retroactively vanished, I was not sorry to see her go. I hoped her unhappening was not some dire or dreadful fate, but not enough to investigate.
    For the next two years, I settled into a comfortable social life. My friendship with Pete—all of my friendships, in fact—never progressed beyond surface camaraderie. Nothing else seemed worth the bother. I never again shared my tale with another peer. I never allowed anyone to get overly close and learn who and what I really was.
    And I never, ever dated.



he second time—from my perspective—that Future Penelope visited me (or third, counting her mysterious appearance when I was in high school) was about six months after our Cumberland Farms outing. In our previous meeting she looked about thirty. This time I guessed her for mid twenties. Once again, we were to “run a fix.” She gave no indication of awareness that this sort of thing was new to me, and I gave her no reason to believe it was. We traveled back in time about four years, and visited a florist in a small city in New Hampshire. Our objective was to stall a woman who had come there to pick up flowers for a hospitalized friend. We only had to keep her there an additional seven minutes, which proved remarkably easy. We arrived just before she did, and Penelope had prepared a barrage of extensive and picayune questions to occupy the manager. My job was to engage the only other employee there, with an imaginary conflict regarding a previous purchase that never happened. She deferred to her boss, who then became tangled between our two distractions. The woman—the only real customer—patiently waited for us to resolve our issues. When the seven minutes were up, I stormed out, and Penelope bought an orchid that she left in the dumpster behind the store before we returned.
    Our next fix was three months after that, for me, and at least a couple of years earlier for her. We traveled thirty years into the past, to a dog track, where we persuaded a bettor to drop two thousand dollars on a dog that finished fourth. By the time his money was lost, we were long gone.
    She whisked me away a total of fifteen times during my years as an undergrad. There was never any explanation given for our objectives, nor any clear consequence of them. I learned not to ask questions, because it was pointless. The purpose of the device in my arm was not clear, although it certainly did something. On our longer trips, I sometimes thought I could feel it tingling.
    But with or without any sense of what we were really doing, absolutely nothing could beat the thrill.
    All the while this was happening, I was also continuing my association with Young Penelope. She learned not to ask questions as well, which struck me as an extraordinary measure of self control. There were times her future version appeared to me at an age that couldn’t have been more than five years older than she was now. At the time, I imagined that telling her about that would have been hazardous somehow. More to the point, I knew that her career as a time traveler was