The sense of déjà vu came rushing back so fast and hard I felt like I stepped outside of my body. I was looking down at the back of my head, able to see what was about to happen, except things weren't right. It took me a moment to realize what was going on. I was remembering a different set of events in this room from what was happening now. Cece and I had interacted differently with these people. I had set the events out of order from what I remembered.

That didn't stop the sense of déjà vu, but in my mind, I was remembering us writing prescriptions. Cece had taken photographs of the doctor's shorthand on the prescription pads and of his signature. It took me a while, studying the pictures, to decipher the code that he had written in shorthand. I could now remember doing it. Boy, it had been a headache. But here I was. I hadn't even gotten that far in the conversation, and the roommate had come out pointing a gun.

Why had it changed? Why had we ended up in a worse future? Or was this better? I couldn't remember far enough ahead in time to have any idea.

The sense of déjà vu was causing me to have trouble focusing on my surroundings, but it allowed me to see my past, which was my future? This was really confusing. How old had I been when I had come back? Why couldn't I hang on to the memories?

My swirling senses settled down enough that I was able to see what was going on around me. I realized that I had leaned on a chair near the table, having almost fallen over. Cece had put herself between me and the man with the gun. She had her hands up, not in surrender, but in a placating gesture. She was trying to calm the situation down. The guy with the gun was arguing with Blue Cap Guy.

"Damn it, Billy," he said. "I told you, don't mention me. You couldn't keep to that one simple rule."

Billy looked as shocked as Cece was. "I didn't know you were going to jump out with a gun the second I mentioned that I had a roommate. What the hell is wrong with you?" he shouted back. "Put the gun down, man."

Now steadier on my feet, I stepped up beside Cece so I could get a look at the guy with the gun. He had close-cropped hair and a sharp widow's peak. He had an old face, not from age, but from hard use, like he'd spent time on the streets, or doing things that age you quickly, like hard drugs. It was the sort of face that wore hard looks and dangerous intent with ease because he had already been there, done that, buried the body. I knew who this was. I remembered.

"Charlie Boy," I said, my voice seeming foreign to my own ears. "What are you doing here? This ain't your beat."

As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I knew it had been a mistake. I was speaking from years in the future. Charlie Boy, or whoever he was, reacted, his eyes growing wide. He snapped the pistol to point squarely at my head. The little circle of darkness inside the gun’s muzzle drew my attention, like a black hole, its gravity inescapable.

"Hey," he said, shouting the word. "Who you been talking to? How the hell do you know me? I don't know you."

It wasn't just the man's reaction that caused me to realize this was a mistake. I was mentioning future knowledge. What's more, I spooked the man with the gun. I wasn't thinking clearly. I raised my hands slowly, trying to fix the situation.

"Ah… Lucky guess," I said. It was lame even in my own ears.

Cece looked down at me like she didn't know me at all, then she looked up at the guy with the gun. "Look," she said, trying to salvage things. "You can have my wallet. Take the money. I don't care. We don't want trouble. Nobody has to get hurt."

Charlie Boy scowled at her, keeping the gun trained on her. "Nobody has to get hurt," mocked Charlie Boy. "Doesn't daddy's girl just have the answers to all the problems? Rich-bitch. The hell you got there, huh? You were supposed to bring the drugs. That was the agreement."

Dawning realization spread over Cece's features. "You're user 1342. I thought using your damn street address was a bad idea, but I understand now how you thought it would work. Using a proxy," she jabbed a finger at Blue Cap Guy, who was apparently named Billy.

"The agreement was for ten bumps,” said Charlie Boy.

Cece nodded slowly. "Yeah. I didn't bring anything." She tapped the prescription pad in her hand. "I've got the power to write a scrip. So it's not out of reach. But you shoot us, you're not going to get anything. You know what the police will do if they catch you with this?" She waved the pad at him.

Charlie Boy looked dubious for the first time, seeming to begin to doubt he was in charge of the situation. Cece had clearly wrong-footed him. She didn’t seem bothered in the least that someone had a gun pointed at her.

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My sense of déjà vu was fading, and with it, so too was my access to my future memories. The bright side was, I could think more clearly without the future obscuring everything that I was trying to see and think.

Everything was again fading. All my future memories or knowledge. Slipping through my mental fingers like water.

A sense of intense frustration for a moment broke through, and I felt the frustration of everything I had been trying to do—my older self.

How old was I?

Everything I had worked for and accomplished, all of it for nothing.

For nothing? Why was it for nothing? As quickly as it had come, it slipped away again. It was like I was in an imaginary game of tug-of-war.

I growled in aggravation.

"Come on," I said, shouting the words.

Charlie Boy apparently took this as a challenge, raising the pistol again and pointing it straight at my face. "What's that, kid? You got a death wish?" he said to me.

"Yeah, sure," I quipped back before I could get my mouth under control. “Strong-arm a 12-year-old, that's going to earn you some real good street cred.”

The man's eyes grew wide, unable to believe he was being back-talked by a kid with a gun to his head.

Why wasn't I in control of my own mouth?

"Yeah, big man. You think you're finally going to earn your red? Come on, why don't you off a kid? Maybe it will be the first blood that finally gets you in the door," I sneered at him.

"The fuck you know," Charlie Boy said, taking another step towards me.

"Oh, nice. Do you have to stand so close to hit your targets?" I said.

What was wrong with me? It's like I was trying to get the man to shoot me, but it wasn't me. It was my future self. It was like he was disappearing and clawing at my consciousness, trying to hijack the situation. Why was I trying to get myself shot? I wanted to scream in my own head.

"We're off script," I heard myself say, almost like it was an answer to my own thought, spoken aloud. "You've got to stay close enough to the script that you don't lose hold of me," I heard myself say, "which means that you've got to learn to control your gift."

It's like he reached out and tapped me in the forehead with his finger. The sudden motion caused Charlie Boy to react. I had apparently moved, although it wasn't clear to me, in my muddled state, what exactly it was I had done. His flinch, and poor trigger discipline, caused the gun to go off.

Time slowed.

I was sure this was the slowest I had ever seen time crawl because I was able to watch the flame exit the barrel of the pistol around the emerging slug. No one else in the room had had time to react yet.

I reached for the sense of slow time with everything I was made of. Remembering now, for the first time since I had come back, that feeling of laying hold of a memory as it passed by and holding on past the point of pain, I held on. This time, what I grasped onto was the sense that time needed to stay slow. I needed more time. I had to throw myself out of the way. I had, I realized, to dodge a bullet.

It was creeping towards me, but I was not as fast as my perception of things currently was. I began to order my body to move, and my awareness was sharp enough that I was able to feel my muscles bunch one at a time like a spring being coiled in slow motion. Like one of those stupid online videos where somebody captures an event in hyper slow motion, and then you watch it take place, unfolding one microsecond at a time.

The bullet crept towards me, and my muscles loaded to react. The thoughts, the synapses, the nerve impulses that were going down to my body were fast enough, but my body just wasn't. The bullet had already traveled halfway across the room towards my face, the aim being unfortunately true, as my legs were still preparing to twist me to the side. As cool as it would be to fall backward out of the way like Neo from that old action movie, I could tell already that I didn't stand a chance. The best I could do would be to turn my head just enough that I could pray it would pass me by.

The sense that allowed me to keep time slowed was trying to wrench itself out of my grasp, pulling harder and harder at my awareness, my efforts to keep it in hand becoming more and more painful. But that didn't matter now. If I lost hold of it, I was dead. Plain and simple. This bullet was going to snap forward in real time and cream the inside of my skull.

I tore at the sense, trying to give every ounce of effort that I had at holding it present, at moving my body. My face began to turn. The bullet had already moved three-quarters of the way towards me. Why was my body so slow? With everything that I had, I desperately tugged with the sensation inside my head and somewhere deep inside my chest. The pain was growing worse and worse. It didn't matter. I couldn't focus on that now. I had to dodge a bullet.

My head turned a little more. The bullet was creeping towards me. It was agonizing to be able to see it, death traveling towards me at roughly the speed of a lazy ant.

“Is that an appropriate metaphor for death?” I wondered to myself. “An ant?”

Why was I thinking about metaphors and ants in a situation like this? I had to turn my body.

And then all at once, I realized it wasn't me who had thought. Or at least, it wasn't current me. It was future me. Was this who I was? Or had he hijacked me? I didn't know. I wasn't even sure if we were separate at this point. But here I was, with a strange window of time to speak with him.

"What do you want?" I tried to scream. Of course, I couldn't scream. I was still maintaining slow time. But I hoped that I thought it, and that future me was able to think back or reply to my thoughts. This was very confusing.

“I want to fix things,” I felt future me think. “I want to stop them from dying. I want to prevent the catastrophe. You don't have a lot of time, and I'll lose hold on you. But try to remember: you have to follow the path that I did. You're not going to agree with some of these choices. I don't know why, but we've diverged. Regardless, if you stray too far from the path of events, I'll be unable to reach you. You'll be unable to access me. It's going to happen again—the collapse of everything. Untold and uncounted deaths. It's more important than you could possibly believe. Yes, our friend Cece is only in it for the profit now, but she becomes an ally. You have to trust me. If you move too far away from the path I walked, changing things will become impossible. That's why I interfered, but I won't be able to do this again. Just remember: everything, everyone that you care about depends on you. You cannot fail.”

The timing was perfect. With the word "fail," everything sped up, and a roaring sound invaded my reality and became everything that I knew, right as a horrible pressure snapped my head back. My brain, unable to process what was going on, showed me lights and colors. There was pressure. There was fire. There was pain.

There was nothing.

A complete blankness overwhelmed my every sense until I began to try and feel my way forward. I was somewhere, but I had no senses. And then, like the dawning of light, things began to slowly come. I felt my feet underneath me. I had some sense of weight, some semblance of motion.

I was walking.

Where was the light? Where was the tunnel? I thought I was supposed to be dead.

Why was I walking?

Had I really been shot?

Was this a dream?

My brain tried to spin out answers for what I was experiencing. And then I began to feel other sensations, like there was a great weight or pressure on my shoulders. Was this the sense of burden of responsibility that I had just placed on myself?

And then I was jostled backward as I was bodily shoved aside by a teenager.

***