Throwback Read online

  Dedication

  For Bobby.

  —P.L.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Now

  Chapter 1

  One Year Ago

  Chapter 2

  The Present

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  About the Author

  Back Ads

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Now

  1

  When Corey Fletcher was five, he saw a woman on the C train take out her teeth and argue with them. At age seven, he ran out of his house on West Ninety-Fifth Street in New York City and nearly collided with a man walking a pig.

  Corey was thirteen now, and already in his life he’d seen a naked wedding by the Hudson River, an elephant lumbering up Amsterdam Avenue, an actor falling off a Broadway stage onto a trombone player, and a singing group that burped entire tunes in harmony.

  Corey didn’t seek out strange things. They just came to him.

  But nothing was stranger than the vision he’d once observed at age seven, outside his window. It disturbed him so much he told no one, not even his grandfather, who lived with Corey’s family.

  And he told his grandfather everything.

  People said Corey had an active imagination, but Corey didn’t think so. He didn’t imagine any more or less than other people. He just kept his eyes open. And he had a good eye. He knew this because way back when he told his grandfather about the woman and her teeth, the old man said, “Corey, you have an Ed Gooey.”

  It took Corey only a few seconds to realize that the letters of “Ed Gooey” spelled out “good eye.” His grandfather liked anagrams. He could mix the letters of words in his head and make up new words on the spot.

  “Both eyes are good, Papou,” Corey replied proudly, which cracked the old man up.

  “Bravo, paithi mou!”

  Papou is Greek for “grandfather.” Which sounds a lot nicer than his real name, Konstantino Vlechos, which no one could pronounce. Or Gus Fletcher, his American name. Or Odd Gus, which is what some people called him. He was a New Yorker through and through, but he liked to use Greek expressions like paithi mou, which means “my child.” And bravo, which means “yay.”

  Of course, Corey loved his mom, dad, and sometimes even his sister, Zenobia. But if you asked him in secret, he’d say he loved Papou best. Odd Gus—I mean, Papou—liked crossword puzzles, word games, and the New York Mets, in that order. But he loved hearing Corey’s stories.

  Well, he did love them, before he disappeared one year ago.

  Which brings us to the story that Corey never told.

  One night when Corey was seven, Papou was reading aloud from A Wrinkle in Time. His voice always put Corey to sleep, even when the book was amazing.

  Corey’s eyes were half-shut when he saw a shadow outside his window. Behind Papou’s shoulder.

  The Fletchers lived in a sunken, ground-floor apartment in a four-story building. So they were used to people passing by the front windows. Not so much the back, where Corey’s bedroom was.

  In the soft drone of Papou’s voice, Corey was seeing tesseracts dancing in his head. He knew those weren’t real, so he didn’t think the shadow was real either.

  Even when it leaned forward and pressed its nose to the glass.

  It was someone Corey had never seen, someone much older than he was. But he knew who it was. He recognized the face.

  It was his own.

  He did not scream, although he wanted to. Instead, he lay in bed silently for hours and finally fell asleep. Papou hadn’t seemed to notice. Which meant, Corey thought, that the whole thing might not have really happened. So he never said a word about it to anyone.

  If he had, this whole story might have been different.

  Or maybe not.

  Corey, like everyone said, had an active imagination.

  One Year Ago

  2

  On the last day Corey saw his grandfather, the old man paid a late-night visit. He chose not to wake the boy. Corey looked like an angel in his sleep. His feet already stuck out from the end of the bed at age twelve. Papou smiled sadly. Twelve years of foot growth and laughter and pizza and hide-and-seek and crazy discussions. Twelve years that his dear wife, Maria, had never known.

  He gritted his teeth. He couldn’t think about her now.

  Over the years he’d pummeled his grief into a lump buried deep in his heart. He’d trained himself not to think about that sunny September day in 2001, when a jet plane that sounded like the end of the world stole those years from Maria.

  And now he was about to lose Corey too.

  As Papou carefully wrote a note, the pen dropped from his hand and clattered to the bedroom floor. He was tired, but his grandson was tireder, if there was such a word. The noise didn’t wake Corey. Not a bit.

  His face etched with sadness, Papou watched the boy as he mumbled in his sleep—garbled words mostly, but Papou could make out one clear sentence: “Is that you, Oliver?”

  Oliver?

  It had been a couple of years since they’d played Oliver and Buster Squires, Gentlemen of the Distant Past from the Town of Twit. They would crack each other up so much that Corey’s mom would scold them both. By now, Papou thought Corey had grown out of that game.

  Not a chance.

  Papou leaned close. “Indeed, Buster,” he whispered, “but we must have a good night’s sleep, in order to retain the quality of our sweet body odor.”

  Corey smiled and let out a giggle. As his lips settled downward, he began to snore. Papou ran his fingers lightly through his grandson’s dense thicket of hair. During the daylight it danced with every shade from amber to chocolate, but in the darkness it was jet-black. He knew that his grandson hated that hair now, but Corey would grow to love it someday.

  Papou did not like thinking about someday. Only today. And today, his time had come.

  People said time stopped for no man. It was an arrow. It marched on. It would always tell. But that was nonsense. None of those things was true.

  Papou had learned this the hard way.

  He kneeled and picked up the pen he’d dropped. His fingers weren’t what they used to be. Before long he wouldn’t be able to write at all. Placing the pen back on Corey’s desk, he glanced at the note he’d written:

  Dear Corey,

  You look so peaceful, I don’t want to wake you. Sorry, but I was called away to Canada—an emergency with one of my close friends from college. I may stay for a while. So sorry I couldn’t say a proper farewell. I left you something to remember me by.

  Wear it every day. Think of me. And time will fly.

  XOXOX,

  Papou

  He carefully folded the letter and placed it into a big padded envelope he’d brought into the room, wedging it next to his genuine Civil Wa
r–era belt, which Corey had always admired. The one with the brass buffalo-head buckle stamped Oct 31, 1862.

  Leaning over his grandson, he brushed the boy’s forehead with a kiss. “S’agapo, paithi mou,” he whispered. I love you, my child.

  He could neither stay anymore nor say any more. If he had to face Corey and tell him directly, if he had to see the look on the boy’s face, it would crush him. Leaving silently was already too painful. He backed away through the door, so as not to let the boy’s sweet face from his sight until the last possible moment.

  Shutting the door behind him, he quietly left.

  Corey turned in his sleep toward the window. In the dim city light, a small tear glistened on his forehead, from where it had dropped.

  By morning the tear would be gone.

  And so would the man who had left it.

  The Present

  3

  As Corey stepped outside on a foggy Halloween morning, he was not surprised to find a horse, a buggy, and a plastic pack full of blood.

  For a week, his whole block had been transformed into a set for the movie Victorian Zombies of Olde Manhattan. The street really did look olde. Gas lamps were installed at the curbs, plastic cobblestones were laid over the blacktop road, and all the neighbors had had to move their cars out of sight. Last night Corey had snuck a peek out his window at a noisy shoot-out scene with horses, carriages, and people in old-timey costumes. Lots of fake blood had sprayed from the actors as they pretended to drop dead. It was beyond awesome.

  Now Corey knew how they did the spurting-blood part—square plastic packs of red goo! Genius.

  He strode to the blood pack, which was lying on the sidewalk. Without any traffic on the block, he could hear his own footsteps. He smelled horse manure. The whole scene made him feel like a kid in the late 1800s. Standing straight, he called out over his shoulder to Zenobia, who was climbing up the steps from their apartment, hunched over her phone: “What a glorious morning, dear sister—but, hark, what lies on yonder pavement? It suggests blood, in color and in thickness!”

  “Ew,” Zenobia grunted. “One of the stunt people must have dropped it. And stop pretending you’re in the past. It’s so nerdy. They didn’t talk like that, anyway.”

  “How dost thou knoweth this?” Corey looked up and down the block and smiled. “Admit it, this whole thing—this movie set—it’s awesome! Doesn’t it change you inside? Make you feel like you’ve stepped into another time?”

  “Pssht,” Zenobia replied, which was her way of saying no, when no wasn’t strong enough. “I auditioned to be an extra. But they took Emma Gruber from Number Thirty-six instead. She even got her SAG card. She’s fakey, and so is this set.”

  “And a SAG card is . . . ?” Corey asked.

  Zenobia rolled her eyes. “It means you’re a professional movie actor.”

  “I sag. Can I get one?” Corey was thirteen and barely one hundred pounds. If you counted his stupendous nest of hair (thanks to his Greek American dad and Puerto Rican mom), he was already more than six feet tall. So in truth, he was in the habit of sagging when he talked to his shorter friends.

  But Zenobia would not dignify his question, so he bent over to pick up the blood pack from a pile of swirling red and yellow leaves. Next to the dropped pack were a dropped fake cigarette, a dropped New York City MetroCard, and a dropped silver-chain necklace with a large oval-shaped locket, all of which (except the cigarette) he slipped into his pocket while Zenobia was looking at her phone.

  Corey held up the fake-blood packet, which was labeled Property of Gotham Cinema Solutions. “How do you think it works—do they just squeeze it and . . . goosh?”

  Zenobia sighed with great drama. For days she had been composing a symphony based on her epic poem, The WestSidiad, mostly during her subway rides to Stuyvesant High School. With her red cat-eye glasses, close-cropped hair, and black-on-black wardrobe, she never seemed exactly cheery, but interruptions by Corey made her downright mad. “Well, duh, the actors can’t be squeezing those things by themselves on camera, right? So the packs must be hooked up to some kind of wireless detonator. When the shot rings out, someone presses a button on a device, and—”

  “Goosh!” Corey exclaimed.

  “You said that already,” Zenobia snapped. “Work on your vocabulary.”

  “Splursh?” Corey offered.

  Zenobia groaned. “Did the hospital switch my real brother with you at birth?”

  “Ha ha. Not funny.”

  “I’m serious. You don’t look like Mom or Dad.”

  “I look exactly like Papou,” Corey said. Which was true. “Plus, he liked to pretend to be in the past. Remember our alter egos?”

  “Otto and Bimbo Something?”

  “Oliver and Buster Squires, Gentlemen of the Distant Past from the Town of Twit.”

  “Right. He made you wear a monocle.” Zenobia smiled faintly. “That was back before you became Nerd on a Stick. When you were cute. And he was alive.”

  “I’m still cute,” Corey said. “And he’s still alive.”

  “Corey, let’s not start this again.”

  “Well, that’s what I believe,” Corey said defiantly.

  “Welcome to the Never-Ending Fantasy World of Corey Fletcher.” Zenobia turned silently and began walking up the street toward the subway. Corey saw only the back of her head, but he could tell she was sneering.

  That was when he had his first really bad idea of the day.

  He examined the blood pack. It seemed pretty clean. He spat on it, rubbed it on his shirt for good measure, then put it in his mouth. Tucking it into his left cheek, he followed Zenobia up the street. “Hey, Zenobe! Hit me. Seriously, just slap me in the face. Lightly.”

  She pulled out one of her earbuds and said over her shoulder, “First, that thing was on the sidewalk, so you probably have a communicable disease. Second, if you think you’re going to bite down and spray me with fake blood, save it for your middle school friends. And, oh, by the way, your school is in the opposite direction.”

  Corey felt himself sag again. He stopped, watching her walk toward Central Park West. Then, in a perfect imitation of Papou’s Greek-accented voice, he said, “Don’t take any wooden neeckels!”

  Zenobia ignored him.

  Traffic whizzed by in both directions on Central Park West, but police barricades blocked the end of Ninety-Fifth Street, so none of the vehicles could turn in to the movie set. As Zenobia veered left toward the subway stop, Corey could hear the soft clopping of a horse behind him.

  He turned.

  A couple of trainers were leading a horse with a lustrous brown coat and tufts of white ankle hair up the block. They had come from the direction of the trailers parked around the corner, and they were giving the horse exercise, brushing it gently. With no cars parked at the curb, the hoof steps echoed crisply against the fronts of the four-story brownstone apartment buildings. Corey smiled. In the morning sun, the buildings glowed and the windows cast deep shadows. Columns, flat fronts, massive stoops or none, brick walls or stone—they were like people shoulder to shoulder, with different faces and personalities. Even though he saw them every day, Corey had never really noticed how unusual and unalike they were.

  His phone chimed, breaking the spell. This would be Leila Sharp, his best friend, who always texted at this time. Fishing out the phone, he quickly answered.

  meet at my house 2 walk 2 school?

  u mean like we do EVERY SINGLE MORNING lol???

  hahaha. b nice.

  nice is my middle name. corey nice fletcher.

  don’t b late. ;)

  Leila liked to be early for everything. But George Washington Carver Middle School didn’t start for another fifteen minutes and it was only on the next block, which meant maybe a four-minute walk.

  So Corey had time. And when he had time, his mind kicked into gear.

  At the moment, his mind was feeling guilty about snatching the MetroCard and the locket from the street. Whoever dropp
ed them would be missing them. So with his extra time he could return the items. The movie people probably had some kind of Lost and Found. And those people were always in big white trailers parked along Central Park West, which was on the way to school. He thought about returning the blood pack, too. But he decided to keep it where it was, parked inside his cheek. No one wanted a drool-covered blood delivery device.

  Walking up the street, he pulled the chain from his pocket. The locket caught, so he had to give it a good yank. It was pretty big and clunky, at least an inch around, and as it popped out, the hasp sprang open.

  Corey was not surprised to see a funky old faded photo inside. But he was surprised by a flash of darkness all around him—a silent, momentary blackness. Like a sudden eclipse, or a spell of blindness as if something had hit him in the head.

  He let out a squeak that would have been embarrassing if anyone had been there to hear him. With his free hand he felt the top of his head. No ache, no bump, no unusual object on the ground.

  Bending his knees, he took a deep breath. Then he glanced upward into a stormy sky, thick and white with fog.

  It was nothing. His stomach felt a little funny, but that would be nerves. Nerves and an overactive imagination.

  He glanced at the open locket in his hand, which showed a badly faded sepia photograph of a woman. She was looking off to the left, but that’s about all Corey could tell. The image was so old and washed-out, she could have been a dolphin with hair.

  Lightning flashed, followed by a clap of thunder. In a nanosecond, his mom would be shouting from the window for him to take an umbrella. Corey hated umbrellas.

  But as he ran toward Central Park West, his hand began to sting. Now the locket was smoking hot. A tiny wisp of smoke rose from the metal.

  With a muffled cry, he moved it from hand to hand until it cooled. If there was lightning, that meant electricity in the air—and maybe it had conducted through the locket. Like the key on Ben Franklin’s kite. Was that possible? Could a person holding a lightning-struck locket survive?

  “What the heck?” he murmured.

  Leila would know. She knew everything. Forget about returning this thing. He’d take it straight to her. This was too weird to let go of.