“Yes, you can go back, but...”
The old witch can barely speak, hacking with laughter. But still the terms of the wish are clear.
You, today, to return to the body and time of your nine year old self, memories intact. A chance to re-right old wrongs, unmake old mistakes. You, twenty two years old, fresh out of college, have nothing of worth for the witch. But the payment, she laughs, can be in the prize.
You can go back, but you will be, will always have been, a girl.
You can feel the heaviness of the price, but the wish calls harder. You agree.
The tip of her wand burns a sickly green. A spark, like an overfed slug, jumps into your chest. There is a moment of blinding panic, fear. What have you agreed to?
The world darkens, and then,
You wake to the sound of your mother’s voice. And everything is fine.
To your nine year old self, it is some random, pointless day, one of thousands you have forgotten. But you jump out of your bed and half-skip half-fall down the stairs and bury yourself in your mother’s skirt. At the kitchen counter she flails to keep you safe from half-made pancakes and oversteeped tea. But to you, at last, a year of grief and guilt later, all things are finally right in the world.
“Woah there,” she says, “careful, tigress.”
Tiger, a little dissonance in your memories whispers.
But for now, it’s not important.
You hug her tighter, and she laughs. Your tears dry into her skirt.
It’s not so bad, you reflect. Turns out you’re a Jessica instead of a Jessie, and while it took a few days for teachers and friends to get caught up to the new “nickname,” things are mostly back to how you remember them. Even prior to your twenty-some-self’s arrival, Jessica-you still wore boy’s clothes and liked power rangers and played baseball. Though that might’ve been weird if your town were big enough for separate girl and boy teams, but you remember that you’re going to give it up by middle school anyways. You have all the same friends, though maybe the attitude of the rest of the kids in class seems a little off.
For the most part, you avoid the usual time-travel pitfalls. You keep your future-memories to yourself. You take care not to show any savant-like knowledge from your additional decade of education. Your child self drives while your adult-self watches on, content. You make only small changes here and there. Maybe hurt a few feelings a little less, actually savor the way time seems to last forever as a kid.
And of course, your mom. Every moment always felt like a sunbeam, but this time you make sure you hold onto it.
The first thing only really comes, one day when you’re eleven again, washing off the mud after eating dirt from a phys ed soccer game. There’s a sort of weird ache in your chest--maybe you fell harder than you thought.
You look down your shirt.
Oh yeah , you think.
It gets harder to ignore, from that point on. Last time you giggled and rolled your eyes the same as the rest of your classmates, but now, sex ed suddenly puts a chill down your spine that doesn’t go away.
"It's not pleasant," your teacher says with sympathy. "But sooner or later it becomes just part of life."
And some days she's right. The pads are itchy and uncomfortable. And the extra underwear you could do without. But they fade into the background of everyday life. You tap into your extra years to coast through school and make time for the friends you know one day you'll lose track of.
But then on the first day of high school, you meet your best friend, the one you'll go the distance with. Only he and you manage to stick together through the cement mixer of college admissions and from that point on you're inseparable.
But this time, when you sit next to each other for the first time, there's something different about the way he looks at you. There's something extra in his eyes, an excited reticence, an awkward eagerness.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, the dissonance screams.
It becomes harder not to notice it. It's like a kind of undertow, always dragging you away from the life you remember. You feel it in the way your people treat you, how sometimes their gazes slip over you, and how other times they catch.
The slipping is easy to deal with. You remember where you're supposed to go, you know you're capable. Sometimes you have to demand they pay attention to you, with an assertiveness you know your fifteen year old self would never possess. You’re always worried that somehow it’ll pull you off the path, but so far it's always worked out.
The catching is harder though. But not impossible. After all you've got an adult's psychological knowledge and a teenagers lack of social tact, which is plenty to deter any amorous attempts. You think you're handling it fine, but one day you're mashing zombies to death, in your head patting yourself on the back for outsmarting the witch, when your mom surprises you with a hug over the couch.
You pause the game to hug her back.
"Just looked like you were a little stressed. Everything okay at school?"
"Yeah, just fine."
"Okay. I'll pick you up a thing from the store anyways. How's ice cream sound?"
"Oh you're the best! Love you, Mom!"
"Love you too, tigress."
She's out the door in a jangle of keys, leaving you alone in the silence of your house.
And you realize that you haven't won. Because the whole reason you're here living out there mundanity of childhood so over again is so that you can fix it, that one time she never said I love you back. The night she died.
Except even if you fix it, it still won't be right.
It'll be, I love you, tigress .
You remember the witch's laugh.
It's prom when it finally gets to you. You get some teasing, some disappointment when you opt for a suit instead of a dress. But by now everyone knows you're "a bit of a tomboy" so no one is surprised. You know exactly what you’re going to wear: the exact same charcoal gray suit with the teal tie you wore to prom the first time around.
But then you look into the mirror and suddenly you realize you’ve made a terrible mistake. It's too similar, it's too much.
You remember the face that should've been in the mirror. But it's not there. This face, it's not yours. It’s too round, too puffy. It’s a child’s face. And it finally hits you, it’s never going to grow up into yours.
You throw up into the toilet, and mom rushes in to take your temperature. You assure her you’re okay, but when she asks if you want to stay home, you gladly accept. At your request, she leaves you alone in your room.
It’s too late for panic, but not for despair. And surrounded by your underclothes and your body, and your eyebrows and your hair, suddenly you feel so weird and warm. You can feel the pull of it, the teetering edge of defeat.
But then you remember, the mad glee in the witch’s eye. The payment--your cursing, your self hate--is the prize. She could have done nothing, left you to heal through your grief in more mundane ways. But she wanted this--wanted to warp your love for your mother into this half-cursed life. Your wish, not just to go back, but to remember: the twist into the knife you plunged into your own chest.
So you decide not to let her win.
You sit your mom down the next day. Your heart pounds, loud enough for two. Not just 16 year old Jessica, but also 22 year old Jesse, feeling smaller and younger than you have ever before in your life. But you tell her.
Maybe not all the details, about the witch and the wish and the night that she’ll die, but everything else. That deep inside you, you’ve always known. That you thought you could live like this, but not anymore. That all you ever wanted was one more chance, for the real you to be seen in her eyes.
You can see her heart breaking, and for a moment you think you’ve really lost everything in the world. Then the tears break, and she throws her arms around you.
“You’ve been so strong for me. You really are my tigre--my tiger.”
Six years later, you see the witch again.
Last time, you were deep in grief, desperate for something you couldn’t name, a wordless pain and a senseless desire to “make things right.”
This time, you’ve thought a lot more about the things you can change, and the things you cannot.
This time around, the birthday you blew off to go to a house party never happened. Your mom and your uncle had a falling out, and birthday parties were out of the question. Instead, you made sure you were home with her, and you watched her like a hawk. The paramedics were there in eight minutes flat.
She lived, long enough for a real goodbye, but not much longer than that.
As the witch approaches, she smiles. Her bloat-blue eyes flicker from your face--not quite the same as the one you had when you made the wish--to your chest--where you’ve got scars that weren’t there before. Her simpering smile broadens, knowing that you no longer walk down the street the same way as when you last met. Her lips split and a worm pink tongue licks them as she waits for you to throw yourself at her feet and beg her to fix all the things, no matter how hard you try, you cannot change.
But you walk past her, not even breaking your stride. The more important things, she can’t change them either.