“I like him better with a mustache,” she whispered.

  I came home that night feeling older, cooler. I even studied my reflection to see if there was any trace of Robert Redford in my looks. (Sadly, not a bit.)

  Yet, for all the work I put in with Jo Ann Donnigan, the romance didn’t last long. Two weeks later, I walked into school joking around with Wesley and I caught her glaring. Wesley took off as I slid alongside her.

  “Why do you hang out with that guy?” she grumbled.

  “Wes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  Her voice lowered. “He’s Black.”

  “So?”

  “So? You know they’re not the same as us.”

  “Come on. He’s my friend.”

  She shook her head and made an “Uch” sound.

  I watched her walk away, the euphoria over having made out with this beautiful girl evaporating like steam off a forgotten teacup. I felt hollow. Even a little evil. I thought about tapping out of that moment and going back a day to avoid the whole conversation. But what would that change? I knew how she felt deep down. And even if I never heard her say it out loud, it ruined everything.

  I sat in class that morning realizing I had just relived almost a year of my life preparing to love a girl who now repelled me. Good Lord. What a waste.

  ✶

  Still, as useless as that experiment proved, the most puzzling discovery didn’t concern the once unreachable Jo Ann Donnigan but rather the all-­too-­available Lizzie Clark. On my second time around, I again helped with her chemistry test, but I avoided her the day she had run up and kissed me. I never said I liked her. And I never shared that soda when she confessed her crush.

  Months later, after things fell apart with Jo Ann, I ran into Lizzie after school.

  “How are you doing?” I asked.

  “OK, Alfie,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Still going out with Jo Ann?”

  “No. Didn’t work out.”

  “Too bad.”

  I shrugged. “You want to go to Burger King?”

  “Nah,” she said. “I’m not hungry.”

  She looked across the street and waved at some friends.

  “Gotta go,” she said.

  I watched her run off. She had zero interest in me. I couldn’t understand what had happened.

  A few years later, I would.

  Nassau

  “OK, now you got me curious,” LaPorta said. “Why’d the ugly girl turn on you?”

  “She wasn’t ugly.”

  “You said she had acne and an overbite.”

  “She did.”

  “So why’d she change?”

  Alfie shifted in his chair. “I told you I’d gone back to redo my junior year.”

  “Yeah. To try and impress the hot one. Jo Ann.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And?”

  “I discovered my gift has a limit.”

  “What kind of limit?”

  “The kind that changes the equation.”

  “You gonna tell me, or make me guess?”

  Alfie tapped his fingers on the notebook’s open page. LaPorta grimaced.

  “Yeah. I know. It’s all in there. I don’t really care. Just hurry up.”

  The Composition Book

  Now, as I mentioned, Boss, Wesley was older than me. He didn’t tell anyone for a long time, and most kids just assumed he was the same age as the rest of the class. But he had turned eighteen before our senior year started and sometime in early October he stopped coming to school. I went to his house and found him packing a duffel bag.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I joined the Marines.”

  “Why?”

  “They’ll pay for me to go to college. And I want to get it over with.”

  “What about high school?”

  “I already have enough credits to graduate.”

  No surprise. Wesley was always taking extra classes, going over the summer. He was miles ahead of the rest of us.

  “But won’t you have to go to Vietnam?”

  “Nah. They’re not sending guys there anymore. I’ll just get trained somewhere. In two years, I’m done, and college is covered.”

  I looked at him, speechless. Although we’d been best friends since we were kids, there had always been an older-­brother vibe between Wesley and me. He had it so together. I hadn’t given a realistic thought to life after high school. And here he was, packing for the military, having already solved the college tuition issue.

  I asked when he was leaving. He said his parents were taking him to the Thirtieth Street train station that Sunday.

  “Can I come?”

  “Sure. Just don’t be late.”

  I had to work at my part-­time job that Saturday (mopping at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant), but I was there the next morning at the station with Wesley’s parents. I watched his mother tear up when she said goodbye. I watched his father do the firm handshake thing. I thought about trying to change that moment, to somehow keep him from leaving. But it was Wesley’s path. His choice. I gave him an awkward hug before he got on the train, and he grinned and said, “See you in two years.”

  That night I felt so alone that I mumbled twice and traveled back to Saturday morning, called in sick to work, and hung out all day with Wesley. We shot baskets and ate cheese­steaks and listened to The Meters’ “Just Kissed My Baby,” bopping our heads to the funky bass line. We took his dad’s car and drove to the Schuylkill River, where Wesley, proving his readiness for basic training, dropped into the grass and did ninety push-­ups while wearing his winter coat. There was a pack of his dad’s cigarettes in the glove compartment and we smoked a couple, just to feel older. We looked out at the brownish-­blue water as we tried to blow smoke rings. I was really glad I’d gone back for the day.

  “Don’t do anything stupid in the Marines, all right?” I said.

  “Like what?” Wesley said.

  “Like get shot at.”

  “Nah. I told you. I’ll be behind a desk or something.”

  But that’s not what happened.

  ✶

  Wesley, no surprise, excelled at basic training and was already on an officer track three months into his stay. In early 1975, he came home for a weekend. He looked so much older. His hair was shaved, and his body was as thickly muscled as a gymnast’s. We went for some Italian panzerottis, and he told me a story about his drill instructor.

  “They’re not supposed to hit the new guys, right? But this DI, he’s a mean bastard. He didn’t like the way one private was looking at him so he told him to stand up straight—­‘Like this!’ he goes—­and then he bangs him in the face with the butt of his rifle! And he got away with it!”

  Wesley shook his head. “These military guys are crazy.”

  He told me he was up for two positions, one on a ship and one at a training center.

  “More fun to be on a ship,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Wesley said. Then he lowered his voice. “None of it is really fun, you know?”

  He flew to San Diego the next morning. He took the ship job. I didn’t hear from him for months. Then, in May, just a few weeks after the fall of Saigon, there was an incident with an American merchant vessel that was seized in international waters by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge. The Marines were sent to try and rescue it. That night at the supermarket I ran into Wesley’s mother. She looked exhausted. She told me Wesley was in that unit.

  “We’re just praying so hard,” she said. “Please pray for him, Alfie.”

  I said I would, but when I read the news two days later that several helicopters had been destroyed in that incident and dozens of Marines had been killed, I left prayer behind and ran to my bedroom. I flipped back through my notebooks until I found the day when Wesley had come home and, not even thinking about having to relive the last five months, I twiced myself back to our meal at the panzerotti shop, determined to keep him off that ship. I was so happy to see him, it must have shown on my face.

  “What are you all smiles about?” he asked.

  “Listen,” I began. “I want to tell you something. It’s a secret I’ve been keeping.”

  He pushed his glasses back on his nose.

  “What?”

  “I can do something other people can’t.”

  “Drive like an idiot?”

  “No.”

  Then, for the first time in my life, I blurted it out.

  “I get to do things twice.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Just what I said. I get to do things twice. If I don’t like the way it first happened, I can go back and do it again. Like time travel. But only one trip.”

  Wesley grinned, as if trying to unwrap a riddle. “OK, go back and make Pittsburgh lose the Super Bowl. I hate those guys.”

  “It doesn’t work like that. I can’t change things I wasn’t involved in.”

  “Oh, right.” He nodded. “In that case, get Jo Ann Donnigan back as your girlfriend.”

  “Wes.” I exhaled. “That’s how I got her in the first place.”

  I tried explaining. The summer of basketball. The sideburns. The information from Lizzie.

  “Man,” he said, marveling, “you really thought this one out, didn’t you?”

  I dropped my head. I wasn’t selling it, and he wasn’t buying it. I realized this whole thing is a lot harder to explain face-­to-­face than it is to write down.

  “Look, the reason I’m telling you this is to save your life.”

  “Come on, Alf—­”

  “I’m serious. You have a choice coming up between two jobs, a ship or a training center, right?”

  He paused, then grinned.

  “You got that from my mom. Nice try.”

  “Take the training center job.”

  “Alfie, stop screwing around—­”

  “You have a drill sergeant. You hate him. He hit one of your guys in the face with a rifle butt.”

  Wesley’s mouth dropped.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because we’ve been here before, Wes. We’ve sat at this table. We’ve had this talk. When the panzerotti comes, you’re gonna burn the roof of your mouth with the first bite.

  “And about five months from now, if you don’t take the training center job, you’re gonna get sent to rescue an American cargo vessel on the island of Koh Tang and a lot of people are going to die.”

  “Where the hell is Koh Tang?”

  “Cambodia.”

  I saw him swallow. His voice dropped to a whisper.

  “What happens to me?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is it’s really dangerous. I came back to warn you.”

  I looked at Wes’s hands. They were trembling. I leaned in closer.

  “Just take the training center job, OK?”

  ✶

  Now what I didn’t tell Wesley was that even if he did what I said, I couldn’t assure his survival. I learned this from my mother in our last conversation together:

  “Alfie, don’t try to go back and save me,” she said. “I’ll always die when I’m supposed to die. You can’t undo it.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s just how this power is.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I had it, too.”

  “Then why don’t you save yourself, Mom?”

  “I did save myself. That’s why we came to Africa.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I had another life, Alfie, a different life, before this one. It was more selfish. I was losing my heart and my soul. So I went back and changed things. I put other people’s problems ahead of mine. I was a better mother to you. A better wife to your father. And I was happier.”

  She sighed. “I just didn’t know it would be so short.”

  I was lost. I leaned into her and felt her arms drape tightly around me.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes, my angel?”

  “I don’t want you to go.”

  She brushed my face with her fingers. “I want, and you want, and God does what God wants.”

  ✶

  I thought about that conversation after seeing Wesley at the panzerotti shop. Two days later, he went back to his unit and took the training center job. And I lived through the next five months like a convict in a dark cell, not knowing if the executioner was coming.

  When the incident started with the Cambodians overseas, I called Wes every day at his office. He was fine. But on the day they released the names of the dead Marines, I called him again. No answer.

  That night, at our house, the phone rang and my father picked it up. I saw his expression change. My stomach sank. When he held out the receiver, I already knew what was coming.

  “It’s Wesley’s mother,” he said softly. “There’s been an accident.”

  Nassau

  “Whoa, what are you saying?” LaPorta interrupted. “He died anyhow?”

  “Yes.” Alfie looked away. “I never had another friend like him.”

  “How’d it happen?”

  “An explosion at the training center. Wes was in the basement, trying to fix a boiler, and something blew up. A freak accident. No one else was hurt.”

  “And you think that was because of what you did?”

  “Not because of it. Despite it.”

  “Come on. It was a coincidence. The guy was ten thousand miles from Cambodia.”

  Alfie shook his head. “It’s not where, it’s when. Wesley died when he was fated to die. I dug around until I found the exact time of his accident, then researched when the Marines got attacked.”

  “Don’t tell me. They were the same.”

  Alfie nodded.

  “I don’t buy it,” LaPorta scoffed. “Stuff just happens. Especially in the military.”

  “You served?”

  “Army. Late ’90s. Got out just before Iraq. I was lucky.”

  “Luck had nothing to do with it.”

  “Says the guy who cheated a casino.”

  Alfie paused.

  “Suspicion and belief—­”

  “Can’t share the same bed. Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s a load of crap. Read.”

  The Composition Book

  My high school graduation was a few weeks later. It was a hot day and half the kids didn’t wear pants under their gowns. They’d asked me to say a few words about Wesley, who was being given a diploma in absentia, but I didn’t want to be out there in front of everybody and maybe tearing up, so I declined. Instead, the school’s vice principal read a statement. It was really short, and he mispronounced Wesley’s last name. I glanced at Wesley’s parents, who had come at the school’s invitation, and saw his mom look at her feet. It made me so furious that I tapped out in the middle of the ceremony and went back two weeks to the moment they asked me. This time I said yes. The trip backward meant I had to take all my final exams again, which was a pain. But I couldn’t live with the idea that my best friend’s final high school mention was a botched pronunciation.

  “Wesley was a really great guy,” I said at graduation. “He was super smart and super nice and sometimes he seemed a lot older than he was. He took time before he said stuff, but when he finally spoke, you were like, ‘Wow, I never thought of that.’ He was brave to go into the Marines, braver than most of us. Braver than me. Not everybody here in school knew him, but if you had, you would have really liked him . . . You would have loved him . . .”

  I choked up on the word loved and wobbled through my last few lines. But afterward, Wesley’s mother found me and, holding a tissue to her eyes, whispered, “He would have clapped for what you said.” That made me feel better. Even Jo Ann Donnigan came up and told me she was sorry I had lost my friend. Then she kissed me hard on the lips. It was one of those moments that, if you’d offered me a million dollars, I still wouldn’t know what to say. People are so unpredictable.

  ✶

  A year later my father announced we were taking a trip to Florida, to see the new Disney World they had opened up down there. He could tell I wasn’t enjoying life after high school. He had wanted me to go to college, but I was in a funk after Wesley died and never finished the applications, so I took a job with a plumbing company and buried myself in it. I wasn’t very good, but they paired me with a kindly old plumber named Bernie Schneider who’d show me everything I’d done wrong. Then I’d tap back an hour earlier and do it correctly.

  “How come you were so good with sink pipes, but you can’t figure out a toilet?” Bernie would say. Didn’t matter. I’d get the toilet right the second time.

  During this stretch, I often used my second-­chance power to break up my boredom. Sometimes, on the way to work, I would turn the car around, drive to the airport, and use my father’s credit card for a ticket to somewhere cool—­California, Montana, Texas. Once there, I’d search for something dangerous to try. Diving off a cliff. Galloping on a horse. In Austin, I took a skydiving lesson with three other people. While the instructor was checking everyone’s parachutes, I raced past him and jumped out the plane’s open door. I remember the crazy noise of the wind, the floating sensation, and how surprisingly cold it was. I closed my eyes and thought, How many seconds before I die? And then–­whumpf! The instructor (who had jumped out in pursuit) had his arms around me and his helmet pressing into my neck and I heard him screaming “What the hell are you doing?” and I yelled “Twice!” and was back on the highway the day before, driving to my plumbing job. No flight to Texas. No charge on my dad’s credit card. No angry jump instructor. And no one to share the story with.