Once I’d discovered that rusty old Prius in the woods, I thought to check the registration. I sat in the moldy passenger seat and opened the glove compartment. A huge grey mouse startled me as I disturbed his home and he jumped into my lap before racing off into the woods. Underneath his nest, I pulled out the car’s registration. Registered to a George Mulhouse. Go figure. The car seemed like it’d been there for ages though. How long was George here in Elk Valley? From what I gathered it couldn’t have been more than a couple years, so what the fuck happened to his car? Maybe it was a different George?

  I sat in that passenger seat, thinking about George, looking out into the woods as the sun rose higher and the shadows grew shorter. At some point I must have dozed off in that seat, because the next thing I knew the shadows were getting longer again and the sun was on the other side. I lazily wiped the drool from my face and left the Prius, walking back the way I came.

  This was huge, but if anything it raised more questions than it answered. How did that car get there? And then there were all the questions Fritz failed to answer the night before, like who was listening to us, and what secrets did Elk Valley have?

  All in good time, I told myself, for now, we should keep up appearances. I was getting more and more afraid for my safety in Elk Valley, and not just because of Johnny. Although that looming threat wasn’t great either. More importantly, what happened to George? Everyone in this town gets cagey when I ask about him. Plus, Fritz’s paranoia might be turning me into a conspiracy theorist. If all of this wasn’t already bat-shit insane, I’d have brushed it all off long ago. But I’ve already possibly travelled through time, surviving an absolutely fatal car crash in the process. I've seen a man killed with a claw hammer to the eye, and found an ancient Prius in the middle of the woods. It seemed anything was possible now. At least I couldn’t count anything out.

  For the next week, I resumed my regular activities. Luckily, Mrs. Grady didn’t notice I’d snuck out, so there weren’t any issues on that front. I was still saving for that Zenith radio I’d seen the other week, and was getting close to affording it. My free time was spent either at the diner or in my journal. I’d taken to writing down the names of everyone I could remember, once a day. And I mean everyone. The average page in that notebook looks something like this:

  Charlie Liman - friend

  Barack Obama - president?

  Edward Scissorhands - movie guy

  Guy Fieri - food guy (or music guy?)

  Everything felt like it was slipping from my mind, just a little bit at a time. No wonder George kept all those drawings.

  I’d met up with Fritz a couple times that week, but he wouldn’t talk about anything important.“Not here,” he’d say, “they’re listening. When the time is right, we’ll meet at the cabin again.”

  I couldn’t argue with him. Besides, it was nice to finally have a friend I could just talk to about anything.

  Without TV or the internet to occupy my alone time, and until I can afford the Zenith, I’d been spending a lot of time at the library. I’ve gone through about a dozen Raymond Chandler books at this point, plus some Ray Bradbury, then I threw in The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, because, well, you know.

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  As a result of frequenting the library, I’d got to talking with the librarian, Anne. With Elsie virtually out of the question and Valentine’s Day approaching, I started to feel lonely again, but for a different kind of companionship than I had with Fritz. The romantic kind. I don’t know why, I never put much stock into Valentine’s Day before, but it felt like love was in the air in Elk Valley, and I started to feel left out.

  Every time I’d get to the library, Anne would be leaning against her desk, head in a book, playing with her pony tail. Trying to get her attention was a struggle, especially early on. It was like trying to talk to a teen playing Fortnite; she was a million miles away. Eventually, she started to notice when I’d come in and pull herself away from her book long enough to have a short conversation, usually about the weather, or unsurprisingly, books. As time went on, the conversations got longer and more personal, until I felt that we really started to make a connection. It happened that my yearning for romantic companionship came to a head around the same time. So one of those days, I asked her out. Without knowing much about where to go in Elk Valley, I chose Ray’s Malt Shop.

  “Emmett?” Elsie interrupted what had been a perfectly good date so far. She approached our booth, ignoring Anne, who was quietly sitting across from me. “Oh my gosh it’s so good to see you.”

  I cleared my throat. “Hi, Elsie. You know Anne, right?”

  “Oh geez, I didn’t even see you there! Oh my gosh, Emmett, are you on a date with LibrariAnne?” She said it like the words tasted putrid in her mouth.

  “Uh, yeah,” I responded dumbly. Anne blushed at that.

  “Ugh, you’re just like all the rest of them,” Elsie cried as she ran right back out the front door. The bell above the door gave a little jingle to punctuate her exit.

  Anne giggled. “Were you two, like, going together?”

  “What? No! No way! We went on like, one date, if you could call it that. Her boyfriend kept threatening to kill me if I kept talking to her.”

  “Ah, Johnny DuPont, greaser extraordinaire.”

  I laughed. “The very same. Say, you don’t have any exes I need to worry about, do you?”

  Anne took a sip from the blue striped straw in our chocolate malted and looked down, thinking. Suddenly, there was a tension in the air. Her face grew sullen and her expression almost scared. The bright white of the malt shop became dull and grey, the Doo-Wap over the jukebox more staticky and warped. I felt an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  Behind me, Ray hit the jukebox on the side with a closed fist, Fonzie-style. It made a noise and the song changed to Laughing on the Outside by Bernadette Carroll, ringing through the speaker as clear as glass. I turned back around to face Anne, who was smiling and chipper, back to her normal self.

  “Nope! No dangerous former paramours here!” She giggled.

  Something felt off to me about the whole interaction, and I realized we’d never talked much about her past.

  “So, did you grow up here in Elk Valley?” I asked.

  “No way! I got stuck here back in ’53.”

  “Stuck?” The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up. She shrugged and took another sip from that blue striped straw.

  “Figure of speech. How about you, where are you from?”

  “Uh, Los Angeles,” I answered, a little distracted.

  “Ooh, the big city! What’s it like out there?”

  “Oh it’s beautiful. The beaches, palm trees… Wait, you didn’t tell me where you were from.”

  She got a little uncomfortable again.

  “I don’t really like to talk about it.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry, we can talk about something else!”

  “Thanks, sorry,” she said, relieved.

  What did she mean “stuck” and why was she so cagey about where she came from? Was she like me? Was she from a different time? Whatever it was, I could tell the questions were upsetting her, and I thought it better to move on for now. My stomach started to growl.

  “Say,” I started, “you hungry?”

  “Starved!” She said. “I’d kill for some sushi right now.”

  - Emmett Brewer, slightly less alone