Margaret Haddix: Sabotaged

And me? Jonah almost asked, forgetting that he was supposed to be all about protecting Andrea at the moment. Jonah had seen his two friends Chip and Alex learn their original identities in history. And he knew that, ultimately, he would have to return to his original time period, at least briefly-just like all the other missing kids from history. But, as much as he wanted to know his own identity and his own time period… maybe he wasn’t quite ready to know right now?

The moment when he could have asked was past. JB was answering Katherine.

“I thought I’d just show her,” he said.

JB flipped a switch on the wall behind Jonah’s chair, and the wall opposite them instantly turned into what appeared to be an incredibly high-definition TV screen. Waves crashed against a sandy beach, and Jonah had no doubt that, if he looked carefully enough, he’d be able to make out each individual grain of sand.

“Just skip to the part she’s going to be interested in,” JB said.

Jonah wasn’t sure if JB was talking directly to the TV screen (or whatever futuristic invention it actually was) or if there was someone in a control room somewhere who was monitoring their entire conversation. Sometimes Jonah just didn’t want to think too much about the whole time-travel mess. He knew that JB had already pulled them out of the twenty-first century, and the waiting room they were in was a “time hollow,” a place where time didn’t really exist. He knew that JB was probably about to show them some scene from Andrea’s “real” life, before she’d been kidnapped by unethical time travelers, and before she’d crash-landed (with all the other missing kids) at the very end of the twentieth century. But it made Jonah feel better if he told himself he was just watching a TV with really, really good reception.

The scene before him shifted, seeming to fly across the water to a marshy coastline and then inland a bit to a primitive-looking cluster of houses. Some of the houses were encircled by a wooden fence that was maybe eight or nine feet tall. Both the houses and the fence looked a bit ramshackle, with holes in several spots.

The view shifted again, focusing on a woman rushing out of one of the nicer houses. The woman was wearing what Jonah thought of as old-fashioned clothes: a long skirt, long sleeves, and a funny-looking hat covering her head. The skirt wasn’t quite as sweeping as the ones he’d seen in the fifteenth century, but Jonah wasn’t sure if that meant that he was looking at a different time period now, or if he was just watching different people. Poorer ones. Not royalty anymore.

“Mistress Dare’s baby has arrived!” the woman called, joy overtaking the exhaustion in her face. “A wee girl child, strong and fair!”

Other people began rushing out of the other houses, cheering and calling out, “Huzzah, huzzah!” But Jonah got only a brief glimpse of them before the camera-or whatever perspective he was watching-zoomed in tighter. Through the door, across a clay floor, up to a bed… On the bed a woman hugged a tiny baby against her chest.

“My dearest girl,” the woman whispered, her face glowing with love, even in the dim candlelight. “My little Virginia.”

“NO!” someone screamed.

It took Jonah a moment to realize that the screaming hadn’t come from the scene before him. He peered around, annoyed that Katherine would interrupt like that. But Katherine, beside him, was gazing around in befuddlement too.

It was Andrea-quiet, calm, unperturbed Andrea-who had her mouth open, who was even now jumping to her feet, eyes blazing with fury.

“NO!” she screamed again. “That’s not me! That’s not my mother!”

The “TV screen” turned back into a blank wall.

“Andrea,” JB said soothingly. “I know this is hard to comprehend, but you really are Virginia Dare. The first English child born in the so-called New World. Would you like to see the DNA evidence?”

“That’s so great,” Katherine interrupted. “I’d love to be Virginia Dare. You’re, like, one of the most famous mysteries in American history.” She looked up at JB. “So what did happen to Virginia Dare? Or, I mean-what’s supposed to happen?”

Jonah wanted to kick his sister. Maybe, if he knew how to work it right, he could get his chair to do that for him. Couldn’t Katherine see that Andrea was traumatized by the news of who she really was? Didn’t Katherine understand how hard it must be for Andrea, to know that she wasn’t really the person she’d always thought she was?

Of course not. Katherine wasn’t one of the missing kids from history. She wasn’t adopted, like Andrea and Jonah were. She’d always known that Mom and Dad were her parents, in every sense of the word. She’d never had to doubt her own identity.

JB ignored Katherine’s question.

“Andrea?” he said again.

Because Jonah was watching very closely, he saw something like a mask fall over Andrea’s expression. One moment she looked furious, ready to scream some more. Maybe even ready to attack. The next moment her face was smooth and blank, every emotion erased.

“Sorry,” she said softly. She eased back into her chair. “I just-sorry. You can go on.”

“Wait,” JB said. “I know what to show you. The direct link, maybe?”

This must have served as directions for the TV. An image reappeared on the opposite wall, this time focused in even more tightly on the newborn Virginia Dare, a tiny red-faced infant. It took Jonah a moment to realize that the baby was growing up before his eyes, in a weird sort of time-lapse photography. After a minute or so, the screen went dark for a second. When the image reappeared, it was clearly the same baby, but she was wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt now.

The baby grew even more, into a toddler wearing an Elmo sweatshirt, a preschooler carrying a book of fairy tales, a six- or seven-year-old holding a soccer ball… the images flew by, one blurring into another. Jonah couldn’t have said how old the child was before she was clearly recognizable as Andrea-eight? Nine? She kept growing, changing, maturing. In the last seconds of the flashing images, Andrea’s appearance changed again, even more dramatically than the switch from the infant in the old-fashioned nightgown to the baby with the Mickey Mouse T-shirt. In all of the last few images Andrea’s expression was plaintive, guarded.

The final image might as well have been pulled from a mirror held up to Andrea exactly as she was now, dressed in a nondescript gray sweatshirt over a T-shirt and shorts (which was a little odd, Jonah thought, since it had been November back home.) In both the image and reality, her hair fell straight and smooth past her shoulders-and she had her lips pursed, her jaw tight, her eyes narrowed.

“Wow!” Katherine exploded, forgetting herself and bouncing in her chair again. “That is so cool! Can you do that for me? Show what I’ve looked like since birth, I mean?”

“Not right now, Katherine,” JB said. He was watching Andrea. He touched some control on the wall, and the last image of Andrea as Virginia Dare appeared again: a baby in a bonnet and a gown edged with lace. Beside it he pulled up the image of baby Andrea in her Mickey Mouse T-shirt. And then he zoomed out from both images, to show the scene surrounding the different versions of Andrea as a baby. In both, a woman was holding the baby: on the left side, Mistress Dare, thin-faced and haggard now, but still gazing at her daughter adoringly; on the right, a petite muscular, curly-haired woman who was grinning down at the baby cradled in her arms.

In both images, the baby Andrea looked so happy that Jonah could practically hear her gurgling.

“You could have done that with trick photography,” Andrea said in a tight voice. “You could have used Photoshop.”