Time Will Tell Read online

  “Time capsule…” Mr. Hindon, the high school’s long-serving media specialist, had drawn out the words as though remembering the lyrics to a song, then executed a very brief series of eye spasms. He had Tourette syndrome (not Tourette’s, he’d been explaining to generations of students; there was no possessive), and when he focused hard, sometimes his eye muscles did a little involuntary dance.

  “Time capsule,” he’d said again, musing over the yellowing sheet of paper they’d handed him. “Yeah, I remember that now that you mention it. Some kids from the class of eighty-seven buried a time capsule.”

  “But I found this in the yearbook from 1984,” Elayah told him.

  He shrugged almost extravagantly. “Who knows? It’s a mystery!”

  Turned out it wasn’t the only one.

  Liam and Jorja were slick with sweat, their bare arms streaked with dirt, their faces smeared. They’d been in the hole for only ten minutes, trying to wrestle the thing out, but it was proving difficult.

  “This thing feels like a greased pig.”

  “Really, Farmer Brown?” Jorja asked, chuckling. “Have a lot of experience with greased pigs, do you?”

  “You don’t know everything about me,” Liam told her.

  “Oh yeah, you’re large. You contain multitudes.”

  Liam stared blankly. Walt Whitman was not his forte. In fact, anything before, say, the year 2000 might as well be dinosaurs.

  “We’ll explain it later,” Marcie promised him.

  Elayah couldn’t help it—her brain flashed pieces of the poem, whether she wanted it to or not.

  The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them.

  And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

  After some more bickering, Liam and Jorja finally set themselves up in new positions, but to no avail. The thing didn’t budge. “What were they thinking?” Liam demanded.

  “It lasted all this time,” Marcie said. “So I guess they were thinking right.”

  “Let me try this myself,” Liam said.

  “Ooh,” Jorja said, deepening her voice and slackening her jaw. “Me big man. Me lift heavy thing for dainty ladies.”

  “I’m just thinking, y’know, too many cooks—”

  “Can you guys work together for once?” Elayah’s exasperation finally overcame her attraction.

  Jorja and Liam pulled wounded expressions and looked at each other. “Wow, that hurt.”

  “No need to go all Mom on us,” Jorja added. “We’re working through it.”

  “Just… do something!” Elayah erupted. The damn thing was right there!

  “Sheesh.”

  “Who died and made her boss?” Jorja asked.

  Liam shrugged. “I don’t know, but I guess we better get serious before she, like, gives us demerits or something.”

  Jorja crouched and worked her hands under the time capsule. “I’ll try to tilt it toward you,” she said to Liam. “See if you can get it into your arms.”

  “And then what? Use my superpowers to fly out of here?”

  Elayah nudged Marcie with her elbow and gestured. They took up a position just behind Liam at the edge of the hole. “Try to shift it toward us and we’ll roll it out.”

  Liam considered, shrugged, nodded. He whipped off his shirt and dabbed his forehead before tossing the garment a few feet away. Elayah took in his crisp shoulder blades and the hard ridges of muscle in his back. She exchanged a look with Marcie, who mouthed, Keep it in your pants.

  Elayah shot back a death glare. Her lust for Liam was a secret between just the two of them.

  Marcie shrugged as though to say, He’s not even looking this way.

  True. But Jorja was facing them. And Jorja and Liam were tight. Tell-you-everything-I-see tight.

  “Let’s do this shizz,” Liam said. “My dad said we’d never find this thing, and I really want to prove him wrong.”

  He hunched down. Sweat gleamed on his skin. For the moment, Elayah had nothing to do, so she watched the beads meander.

  Jorja groaned with effort. The time capsule was much bigger than they’d expected. The sheet of paper they’d found in the old yearbook was titled Contents of Time Capsule and had listed maybe two dozen things, most of which were small. Elayah had figured that the entire thing would be the size of two or three shoeboxes.

  What they’d unearthed was more like the size of a small filing cabinet. Cylindrical and made of stainless steel, it had the words PRESERVATION INC. stamped in an arc on one end, with STORAGE VAULT rounding out the other arc. It lay diagonal in the dirt, so they’d had to dig a deeper, wider hole than they’d anticipated to reveal the entirety of its length.

  “I hate our parents!” Jorja cried in anguish as she strained with all her might. Miraculously, the thing moved, shifting enough that it collided with Liam, who was ready for it. He backed up against the side of the hole for stability and flexed, managing to lift the capsule by rolling it up his body. Elayah and Marcie leaned over the rim of the hole and stabilized the cylinder until Jorja could come over and help push it out onto the higher ground. Somewhere during all this, Elayah’s hands ended up on Liam’s back and shoulders, but she was too focused to realize it and wasn’t even embarrassed until they had the capsule out of the hole and Liam mock-shouted, “El’s copping a feel!”

  “You should be so lucky.” Marcie always had Elayah’s back.

  Liam climbed out of the hole. “How does it open?” he asked, nudging the time capsule with his toe.

  The cylinder was about three feet long and a foot in diameter. Elayah crouched and wiped dirt away from both ends, figuring one of them would unscrew like a jar lid. Sure enough, there was a seam at one end, with an inset groove where her hand fit perfectly. She twisted and turned, eventually grunting with effort, but the thing wouldn’t budge.

  Liam slid up behind her, put his arms around, and captured her hand with his own. “Let me help,” he said, and winked when she glanced over her shoulder at him.

  Liam knew how she felt. He had to know. And here he was, practically hugging her—

  “On three,” he said, almost softly, into her ear.

  They twisted at the same time. For a too-long moment, nothing happened. Her fingers tightened and strained, and then she felt Liam’s hand press with a near-crushing force on her own and the lid slowly ground to the right.

  There was a slight popping sound, like a Coke bottle that’s been opened too suddenly. Air pressure stabilizing, Elayah knew. Gases finding equilibrium between the hermetically sealed cylinder and the outside world. There were formulas and equations that explained it, but she was too lost in the twin thrills of the opening time capsule and the nearness of Liam, the tang of his sweat in the air, the husk of his breath at her ear.

  “Nice,” he murmured.

  She cleared her throat, suddenly highly aware of his closeness, of Jorja’s and Marcie’s attention. With a shimmy of her shoulders, she shook him off and applied herself to the lid, twisting it farther until it came off entirely in her hand.

  With Marcie, she spread out a blanket they’d brought along, and then—before she could react—Liam upended the canister.

  “Welcome to prehistory,” he joked.

  Elayah suppressed a yelp of horror and outrage. She’d hoped for a little pause, a moment to reflect. It had been more than thirty years since the air in the canister had mingled with the air of the world. Decades since these things had been touched or even seen. She’d wanted to pull each one out, compare it with the list, maybe record the moment.…

  “We were supposed to take it slow!” Jorja admonished him.

  “It’s not an unboxing video,” Liam told her, then began pawing through the spilled contents. “I mean, look at this crap.”

  “It’s the ultimate unboxing video,” Jorja fumed. “Or would have been.”

  There was nothing for it, though. Liam had already dumped everything out, so Elayah settled for shooting some video for Insta as Jorja and Marcie
got down on their knees with him and raked through the stuff.

  “Look at this.” Jorja held up a rectangular plastic box. It was transparent, with a paper insert tucked into the front, on which some words were scribbled in black ink. She opened it and clucked her tongue. “My dad has a box of these in the garage.”

  “It’s a mixtape,” Elayah said. “It’s like a playlist.” In preparation for the dig, she’d done a ton of research on the 1980s. She spied a Walkman in the sprawl of artifacts and picked it up. “We can play it later.”

  Jorja shrugged and moved on. Elayah surrendered her fantasy of doing this in an orderly fashion and instead started looking for one specific item. The one her dad had mentioned when she’d first told him about the time capsule.

  At first, he’d had no reaction at all… and then his eyes lit up, as though remembering a long-forgotten dream. “The time capsule! Oh my God, I forgot all about that!”

  Elayah had been surprised that her father remembered it at all. What were the odds that she and her friends would stumble upon this thing and that her own father would remember it?

  “We came up with it in a social studies class,” he recalled, closing his eyes, straining to revisit the past. “Mr. Ormond? Mr. Almond? I can’t remember his name. There was a project we did where he gave us a bunch of old junk and we were supposed to try to figure out what kind of society had made it.

  “So then one of us had the idea of burying our own time capsule and then digging it up.…” He trailed off, eyes now open, staring up at nothing. “Oh, right…”

  His voice had gone soft.

  “What?” Elayah asked.

  “We buried it in the fall of eighty-six, before the ground got too hard. We figured we’d dig it up fifteen years later,” he told her. “We agreed to meet again on September twelfth.”

  He spoke as through the date had significance. She did the math. “Oh.”

  “Yeah, we had other things on our minds. We all forgot about it, I guess.” He grinned at her. “If you guys are really going to dig it up, make sure you grab something for me, okay?”

  She spied it quickly. Her father’s description had been spot-on. Long time ago or not, he remembered.

  She snatched it up. It was a small rectangle lined with a faded burgundy felt, hinged on one side. When she opened it, it revealed a set of glassed-in photographs, still as bright and crisp as though printed yesterday.

  On the left side were two teen boys, not much older than her. Wisps of mustache. One in Jheri curl, the other a high-top fade. Otherwise identical in their blue-and-green Canterstown High varsity jackets.

  It was the last photo taken of her father and his twin brother. Before Uncle Antoine, whom she’d never met, ran off to Mexico and other points south. He’d sent a few postcards early on, then nothing. Her father’s eyes, usually so wide and joyous, always narrowed when he spoke or thought of his brother. In this photo, they looked both boisterous and radiant, in that way teen boys apparently always had. The smiles killed her. Her father was generally a happy man, but she knew his joy had a corroded center.

  The other photo was the Jheri-curled boy (the twin whom she now knew to be her dad… and he would definitely get some ribbing about that hair) and a beautiful girl about Elayah’s age. She wore a floor-length lavender gown with matching lipstick and heels, her shoulders bare, her hair a slick cap of finger waves. He was decked out in a shiny monstrosity of a tuxedo that looked to have been made out of stamped tin, his tie and cummerbund matching the dress.

  Her parents. At homecoming. Wow.

  She was lost in the moment. Why had her father chosen this item for the time capsule? It was significant to no one but her and her family. It had nothing to do with the state of the world in 1986.

  “Hey, El, is this on the list we found?” Marcie was holding up a raggedy old doll, its fabric a tattered mess. The vinyl head lolled atop the body, which was partly rotted away. “And shouldn’t it have been better preserved?”

  Elayah contemplated. “Maybe it was already in bad shape when it went in,” she said.

  Marcie nodded, looking at the thing quizzically. Elayah called up the contents document again and skimmed it. “Nope. Nothing about a doll.”

  “Huh,” said Marcie.

  Elayah scanned over the cluster of items again. There seemed to be too many.

  She took charge. Liam was goofing around with a couple of action figures he’d found (M.A.S.K. toys, according to the inventory list). She stopped him and had him join her, Jorja, and Marcie in dividing the items into categories—paper, plastic, cloth, metal, other.

  At her direction (and with only minimal “Buzzkill” grumbling from Liam), they started out by identifying the thirty-one items on the inventory. A Time magazine cover sporting a portrait of a reader delving into Stephen King’s It. A vinyl record sleeve that looked like a smear of colors abutting a severe black-and-white portrait. True Colors, it said. Cyndi Lauper.

  More. Another cassette, this one with an insert as blank as the day it’d been bought. Three plastic squares that looked vaguely familiar. She read their labels: 400k floppy diskette. Oh, right—they looked like the Save icon in Word. Floppy disks. They were like old-fashioned USB keys.

  There were more pictures. Newspaper clippings. All of which were on the list.

  But after they separated out the stuff on the list, there was still more. A lot more.

  There were several pins. One read, We’ll get along fine as soon as you realize I’m God. The rest were along the same allegedly humorous lines. There was a US Mint proof set of coins from 1985, the dime, nickel, penny, quarter, half-dollar, and dollar still gleaming. A stack of comic books bound together in a plastic sleeve, titled Camelot 3000. A stapler…

  A stapler! What on earth?

  “This makes no sense,” Jorja said, running a hand over her fuzzy head. “It’s like they used it as a trash can.”

  “What’s the point of the inventory if you’re just gonna throw in a bunch of old junk?” Marcie asked, fanning herself with one of the floppy disks.

  “There might be interesting data on that disk,” Elayah said. Why did she feel so defensive about the contents of the time capsule? Why was she so invested in it? It had been her idea to dig it up, yeah, but only because Liam had…

  Oh.

  Yeah. Because basically Liam had brought it up to his dad and his dad had laughed and said, “That old thing? You’ll never find it.” And then Liam had wanted to prove his dad wrong, so of course Elayah just had to make it happen for him.

  They combed through the remaining items, taking pictures and tapping notes along the way. There was a total of thirty-four additional items, most of them junk (she admitted in the privacy of her own head), some of them quite large. No wonder the capsule had been so much heavier than they’d expected.

  “Is that everything?” she asked.

  “Let’s check!” Liam exclaimed, and then made a show of sticking his face right up against the opening of the cylinder. “Hey, there’s something in here!”

  “Quit goofing around,” Jorja said.

  “I’m serious!” Liam pulled away from the cylinder, his face sweaty and red and impressed with an arc of the circumference of the tube. “It’s not a joke.”

  As if to prove his seriousness, he tilted the time capsule and shook it. “It must be stuck,” he said, and shook harder, banging it against the ground a bit.

  Something clattered down the length of the tube and spilled out onto the ground. It was a length of white cloth, wrapped around something roughly six inches long, fastened with what looked like masking tape.

  “I thought you were kidding,” Marcie said.

  Liam feigned horror. “I’ve never been so offended in my life! Hashtag puh-lease.”

  Elayah picked up the object and hefted it. It wasn’t terribly heavy. The tape came loose easily.

  She unwrapped it and nearly dropped it. They all stared.

  It was a knife.

  Not a b
utter knife or a steak knife. This was a pretty wicked-looking knife knife. Like the kind you used to go hunting. Or to… to…

  She didn’t know what else. The kind of knife you see in action movies, strapped to the belts of tough ex-soldiers with serious PTSD. There were streaks of dark red along the base of it, where the blade met the handle, stuck in the little crevices there.

  “Whoa,” Liam said without a trace of humor or goofiness.

  “What the hell?” Marcie asked.

  That was when Elayah dragged her eyes from the blade in one hand to the fabric in the other. There was a slip of paper tangled up in the cloth. She unwound it.

  There was a murrey blemish in one corner of the paper. And some printed words. It took her a moment to decipher them.

  I’m sorry, it read.

  And then: I didn’t mean to kill anyone.

  THE PRESENT: LIAM

  Liam couldn’t conjure a joke or even a morsel of snark to puncture the uncomfortable silence that followed after El read the note aloud. Like the others, he just stared silently at the knife for a long time. Then Marcie cleared her throat.

  “Looks like we need to call your dad,” she said to Liam.

  Liam blinked a few times. Finally, something he could blow up into a joke.

  “My dad? What’s he gonna do—cook this thing in a béarnaise sauce?”

  Jorja sighed. “Your other dad, you moron.”

  Liam slapped his forehead, pretending to remember who his bio-dad was and what he did. “Duh. Right.”

  His japery had punctured the uncomfortable quiet, but not for long. Now they all stood around in silence again, staring at the knife El held in her hand.

  “We messed up a crime scene,” she said after a moment, and her anguish was so real and so potent that he immediately sought another needle with which to puncture it.

  “I don’t think anyone actually got killed in the time capsule,” he said.

  Jorja shrugged into her plaid overshirt. “Yeah, but still… we should take pictures of everything, just the way it is. To preserve as much of the initial scene as possible.”