“Why don’t you give your folks a call and I can tell them where we are, okay?” Too Smooth said.

  “Okay. Hey, can I use the bathroom first?” Omar said.

  “Weren’t you just in there? Nah, I’m just messing with you. Go ahead, man.”

  Omar got up and walked back to the bathroom. Once inside, he typed his address into the phone and pressed send.

  * * *

  “Hey, little man, you all right in there?” Too Smooth asked.

  He knocked on the bathroom door. There was no response.

  “Hey, Omar, you okay?” Too Smooth grabbed the door handle. It was unlocked. He opened the door.

  The bathroom was empty.

  Too Smooth closed the door. He went back to his seat and didn’t say a word.

  “Hey, man, you okay?” the Sultan asked.

  “I think I’m gonna need a break. I think we been on the road a little too long.”

  “WE NEED TO CATCH up with the bus,” Grandpa Sam said. He started his van. Shaka sat up front; Rahim sat in the back seat. The dodos had disappeared, but a man dressed like a Revolutionary War solider had appeared on the sidewalk carrying a musket and looking incredibly confused as they had piled into the van.

  “But what about those birds that came out of that, that—I don’t know what to call it—but those birds been extinct for, like, hundreds of years!” Shaka said.

  “In school they told us they went extinct because they were too trusting of humans, but they’re mean as the geese at your house in Muscle Shoals.” Rahim didn’t see much point in watching what he said anymore. If his grandfather or Shaka heard him, neither one was in the mood to acknowledge it.

  “I can’t worry about none of that. We gotta get your brother. That’s all that matters.” Grandpa Sam started to pull away from the curb.

  Rahim felt a strange sensation. The hairs on his arm stood up like they were charged with static electricity. A bright bluish-white light appeared in front of the van. The light glowed so brightly they all had to shield their eyes as Grandpa Sam slammed on the brakes.

  When the light was gone, Omar was standing in front of the van.

  Grandpa Sam put the van in park and hopped out with surprising agility. Rahim and Shaka followed him.

  “Boy, where were you?! Don’t you ever leave and not tell us where you going!” He grabbed Omar and hugged him tight.

  “I’m sorry, Pops. I—I was, uh, I—I, um—” Omar stammered.

  Rahim stepped up and said, “It’s okay to tell them the truth. We just saw a flock of dodos and Paul Revere. No use trying to hide anything anymore.”

  Omar nodded and pulled the phone out of his pocket. He handed it to Rahim. “I used Ronald’s phone to teleport myself to Four the Hard Way’s tour bus,” Omar said.

  His father stared at him for a few seconds with his mouth open before turning to face Rahim.

  “Shaka, take your brother in the house. Ronald, get back in the van. I’m taking you to social services right now,” he said finally.

  “Pops, no, please listen! There was a guy who called his phone and told me that time is starting to fall apart. We need to help him get back to his own time or time itself might be destroyed!” Omar said.

  “We did see some extinct birds and a guy from the Battle of Bunker Hill,” Shaka said.

  Grandpa Sam shook his head.

  “I’ll take you to the social services building, but that’s all we can do for you. I don’t know who you are or where you’re really from, but you’re dangerous. And I can’t have that around my family,” he said.

  “We can’t just leave him there, Pop,” Omar pleaded. “That’s not right.”

  “Boy, are you giving me back talk?”

  “You always say there are things bigger than us. There are things more important than the feelings of one person. I think this is one of those times,” Omar said.

  “Ronald, Omar gave you back your phone, right?” his grandfather asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then we’ve helped him all we can, Omar. Take your brother in the house, Shaka.”

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, Grandpa Sam pulled up to the curb in front of a large gray granite building. He stopped the van. Rahim opened the sliding door and got out. Grandpa Sam rolled down the passenger window.

  “I wish you luck, son. You seem like a nice boy. But I can’t have this craziness around my sons. You understand that, right?”

  “I get it. My dad would do the same thing,” Rahim said. Grandpa Sam gave him a little nod before raising the window and pulling away.

  Kasia must have used that voice-changing thing on her computer when Omar talked to her, Rahim thought.

  “She must have finally fixed it!” Rahim pulled out the phone and scrolled to the most recent call. His finger was millimeters away from the send button when—as if on cue—he heard Tyrone’s voice behind him.

  “You keep showing up and I keep getting in trouble, you little buster,” Tyrone said.

  Rahim turned slowly. Tyrone was standing ten feet away from him. He didn’t have his sidekicks with him this time.

  “Cops bring you down here, huh?” Rahim asked.

  Tyrone balled up his fist and walked toward Rahim.

  “My mama works here,” Tyrone growled.

  “Oh, my bad,” Rahim said.

  Tyrone balled up his other fist. “I’m gonna smash you!” he said.

  Rahim took off running with Tyrone in pursuit.

  He looked over his shoulder. Tyrone was right on his heels. He could grab Rahim’s T-shirt if he stretched his hand out.

  Well, this is terrible, Rahim thought right before he slammed into a parking meter.

  Rahim fell to the sidewalk. The phone jumped out of his hand and skittered across the concrete, stopping right at Tyrone’s feet.

  “Dropped your fancy phone, dummy,” Tyrone said. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands. “I don’t think a loser like you needs this. I’ll keep it safe for you.”

  “Give it back! You don’t know what it can do!” Rahim gasped, getting to his feet.

  “What, you think I’m stupid? It’s a phone. You talk on it,” Tyrone said. He started smashing the buttons on the touchscreen. Then mockingly held the phone up to his ear.

  “Give it back!” Rahim said.

  “Come and get it so I can knock you to the other side of China,” Tyrone said.

  Both boys turned to look at the green light on the top of the phone as it began to blink.

  “Tyrone, did you hit the speaker on the search bar?” Rahim asked.

  “The what?” Tyrone said.

  A bright and shimmery bluish light surrounded Tyrone.

  Then he was gone.

  Rahim stood there, his mouth wide-open and his eyes bugging out. Tyrone was gone with Rahim’s only way home.

  “This can’t be happening!” he whispered.

  “You better believe it is,” said a homeless man, now wearing a blue Hawaiian shirt, pushing a shopping cart as he walked past him.

  KASIA WAS UP TO her eyeballs in decrypted code when an alert on her computer started ringing like a fire alarm.

  “What in the world?”

  The computer linked to Rahim’s phone, which was also linked to the satellite network she had pretty much cracked, was beeping and whistling like a teakettle. Kasia clicked a few keys and pulled up the program that she had first used to create the phone.

  “That . . . that can’t be right,” she said.

  The phone used a variation of a traditional GPS tracking program. She’d only added it because she was fairly certain Rahim would lose the phone one day and they’d have to track it down. He was always leaving his books in her house. He’d lost his book bag on the train more than once, so she was just being cautious.

  When he’d told her he was in the past, she hadn’t bothered checking the GPS tracker because, well, GPS wasn’t on cell phones in 1997, so she didn’t think it would work.

  Dang, I’m better than I thought, Kasia thought. Somehow, someway GPS was tracking the phone. Which was good. But where the phone was going was . . . very weird.

  “China. Now it’s in Pennsylvania. Now it’s at the North Pole. Now it’s back in Pennsylvania. Now it’s back in China. Now it’s back at the North Pole. Now China again. Rahim, what are you doing?” Kasia said. Iago landed on her shoulder.

  “Yeah, this isn’t good, buddy,” Kasia said as she stared at the monitor. She opened a separate window and called Rahim.

  As the phone rang, a huge roar echoed around her house. She rolled her chair over to the window and took a peek outside.

  She hadn’t studied dinosaurs a lot, but she was fairly sure a triceratops was walking down the street toward the corner.

  “Come on, answer the phone, Rahim. Please.”

  “Where am I??? Help!!!” a voice said. A voice that wasn’t Rahim’s. Kasia rolled her eyes before hitting the voice modulator again.

  “Where is Rahim?” she asked.

  “I don’t know! I don’t know where I am.”

  “What do you see? Where is Rahim?” Kasia asked.

  “I’m standing on this big wall,” the boy said. He started crying.

  “Listen carefully. Stop. Breathe. Look at the phone. Hit the microphone icon and say, ‘Philadelphia 1997 most recent location,’ ” Kasia said.

  “What?”

  “Just do it. And then give the phone back to Rahim,” Kasia said.

  “Who is Rahim?”

  “Do what I tell you and make sure you give phone back to the boy you took it from or you might find yourself in the Middle Ages,” Kasia said.

  “O-o-okay,” he said.

  Her computer beeped once. She clicked on the GPS window. The phone was back in Philadelphia.

  “Is he there?” Kasia asked.

  “Here, take it!” the boy said.

  * * *

  Rahim was still standing by the parking meter with his hands in his pockets. Tyrone suddenly appeared and threw the phone at him. The phone bounced off his chest, but Rahim reached out and juggled it from hand to hand.

  “Oops, dang it, come on!” he said.

  “Rahim! Are you all right?” Kasia yelled.

  Rahim watched helplessly as the phone rotated in the air, missed his fingers by a millimeter, and slammed into the sidewalk. The screen turned into a spiderweb as it cracked. The electric-blue outer casing shattered into pieces. Tyrone took off running.

  Rahim picked up the phone, or what was left of it. The green and red lights were blackened like blown-out light bulbs. He turned it over. Without the protective casing, the internal workings of the phone were exposed. He stared down at the shattered remains.

  This was it. He was never going home. He was never going to see his mom or his dad or his sister or Kasia again.

  In the distance, he heard what sounded like a giant mountain lion growling. He looked up and saw a saber-toothed tiger bounding over the roof of the post office across the street.

  OMAR HEARD SOMEONE KNOCKING at the door, but he wasn’t sure if he should stop writing his essay about “The Truth and How It Affects Our Lives.”

  “Now, who is this?” Uncle Cy said. He got up and went to the door.

  “Long as it ain’t a dodo bird, I think we okay,” Shaka said.

  Rahim was standing on the doorstep. He was holding the pieces of his phone in his hands.

  “Huh, it is a dodo bird,” Shaka said.

  “Ronald!” Omar said. He got up from the couch and ran to the door.

  “What you doing here, boy?” Grandpa Sam said, coming out of the kitchen, holding a cup of coffee.

  “I’m in trouble and I need your help,” Rahim said.

  “Ain’t nothing Omar can do for you, son. Close the door, Cy.”

  “WAIT! Please. It’s not just about me. Those birds you saw. That guy who was dressed like a soldier. The trash can that fell from the sky.”

  “The World War Two tank at the train station,” Shaka offered. His father shot him a look.

  “All of it is because of me. Because I’m here. Because of this phone. I’m not as smart as the person who built this phone. She’s a genius. But I know it’s not a coincidence that all of this is happening at the same time I got here from the future,” Rahim said.

  “The future? Boy, you really is crazy. Close that door, Cy.”

  Cy started to shut the door.

  “When you were sixteen years old, you took your father’s car and went joyriding. You got in a lot of trouble and were heading down the wrong path, but you were able to change. You went to work for a guy who was an electrician and a plumber. I think that’s why you’re so hard on Omar and Shaka,” Rahim said. The old story his grandfather had told him came out in one long sentence. Sitting on his grandparents’ porch in Muscle Shoals, Rahim thought the story had sounded fun and exciting. Now he realized how much it had affected his grandfather and his own father.

  Grandpa Sam almost dropped his coffee cup.

  “How do you know that? Did Cy tell you?”

  “Me? Nuh-uh. I ain’t really been talking to the little fella,” Cy said.

  “I know it because I know you in the future. Kasia told me not to talk about it, but I think we are way past that stage now. It’s like when you gotta sacrifice your queen to get the king out of check,” Rahim said.

  “Pop, you gotta help him. He sacrificed his queen,” Omar said.

  “Who’s the queen?” Cy asked.

  Grandpa Sam walked to the door.

  A single-propeller plane streaked by overhead, just barely missing the tops of the row houses across the street. Rahim craned his neck just in time to see the words spirit of st. louis on the plane’s nose. When he looked back toward his grandfather, he was looking at him with his hands on his hips. His eyes moved from the pieces of plastic in Rahim’s hands to Rahim’s pleading face. He looked at Omar and Shaka and Cy. Finally, his gaze settled on Rahim again.

  “What do you need me to do?” Grandpa Sam asked.

  “Can you fix it?” Rahim said. He placed the pieces of the phone in his grandfather’s wide, callused hands.

  “Shaka, get my soldering kit out of the van,” Grandpa Sam said.

  * * *

  Rahim and Omar sat on the couch as Grandpa Sam and Shaka worked on the phone at the kitchen table. The smell of melted plastic and burning metal filled the house. Cy sat in the recliner and flipped through channels with the television remote.

  “A wagon train just showed up at the Spectrum,” Cy yelled into the kitchen.

  “All right, you gotta tell me. How do you know my pop in the future?” Omar asked.

  Rahim scratched his head. “It’s complicated,” he said.

  “It can’t be more complicated than a super phone that bends time and space,” Omar said.

  “Trust me, it is,” Rahim said.

  “Okay, do we know each other in the future?”

  “Yeah, you could say that,” Rahim said.

  “Man, stop playing. Tell me something cool.”

  Rahim frowned. “Everybody has the internet in their phones. You don’t have to go to the library or your desktop computer to get online. I mean, I still go to the library, but I like real books,” he said.

  “I said tell me something cool.”

  “It’s cooler than you think,” Rahim said.

  “I think it’s fixed,” Grandpa Sam called.

  Rahim and Omar stood up from the couch as he came into the living room. He handed the phone to Rahim.

  “I replaced the screen with tempered glass with a clear coat on it. I reconnected the circuits and put the casing back together. Replaced the bulbs on top too. I did the best I could. I’ve never seen some of the stuff in that phone,” he said.

  Rahim touched the power button.

  Nothing happened.

  No one said anything for a long time.

  Finally, Cy spoke. “Maybe you gotta hold it down.”

  “Yeah,” Rahim said.

  He held the power button down for a few seconds.

  The green and red lights on the top of the casing began to flash. All the icons on the touchscreen blinked a few times as the phone powered up.

  “My pop can fix anything,” Omar said.

  His father smiled at him.

  “Thank you, Mr. Reynolds. I appreciate your help. I’m sorry I caused all this trouble,” Rahim said.

  “No, I’m sorry, Ronald. This situation is way more complicated than I thought. And it wasn’t okay for me to blame you for anything Omar did. I’m hard on my boys and I pride myself on teaching them right from wrong. And it’s wrong to blame somebody else for their actions. Doing the right thing is a choice. And everybody makes that choice for themselves,” he said.

  “I guess there’s nothing left to do but call my friend and see if she’s fixed things so I can go home,” Rahim said. He pressed the call button and held the phone to his ear.

  * * *

  Kasia was taking a nap on the couch next to her mom when she heard the incoming call alert on her computer.

  “That’s Rahim!” Kasia said. She jumped up and made a beeline for the stairs. Just as she put her foot on the bottom step, someone started pounding on their front door.

  “Who in their right mind is on the street now? The governor told everyone to stay home after that cop car got run over by that stagecoach,” her dad said. He got up from the couch and went to the door. When he opened it, Agent Green and Agent Brown were standing there, looking a little worse for wear.