Now You See It... by Vivian Vande Velde Page A

"Larry!" No answer. Of course, without my glasses I wouldn't be able to see him or—as part of the weirdness of those glasses—to hear him, but that didn't mean he couldn't make his toxic little presence known. "Larry, you better get that little blue butt of yours out here immediately," I said.
    Eleni cleared her throat, making me jump, since I hadn't been aware of her returning, and she sat down beside me. But maybe she hadn't heard me after all, because she didn't comment and only concentrated on my knee. "This
will
need better looking after," she told me sternly as she picked gravel out of the wound.
    It stung like crazy, but I figured that was the least of my worries.
    "Are you sure you didn't strike your head?" she asked me.
    "Positive," I assured her. "If I'm acting a bit like a spaz, it's only because I can't see much without my glasses."
    She glanced up at me, but I couldn't tell what I'd said wrong. "Uh-huh," she said, not sounding at all convinced. Then she said, "Well, so let me introduce myself: My name is Eleni."
    "Eleni," I repeated. I was supposed to call my nana "Eleni"?
    She grinned. "Well, actually it's Helen, but 'Eleni' is the Greek way of saying it."
    "But we're not Greek," I blurted before catching myself.
    Luckily, she must have assumed I meant "we" as a nation rather than "we" as a family, or maybe she
just figured I meant to say "you." She shrugged and said, "Helen is ... well, honestly, it's a grandmother's name."
    I tried not to choke. The one thing it showed was that I was not the only one in my family who would have preferred a sexy name. I wondered if there was a Greek equivalent to "Wendy" and guessed probably not.
    "So," she prompted. "And you are...?"
    We were on dangerous ground. What if I did or said something that changed history?
Hello. I'm Wendy, and I'm your granddaughter, and I accidentally came back to the 1950s, and now I'm looking for a way back.
It might be enough to scare her out of ever having children, and then I'd never be born.
    I'd already hesitated too long to just make something up, and she was looking at my T-shirt, emblazoned with the Nike name and trademark swoosh. "Nick," she misread, then corrected it to "Nike," saying it with only one syllable, to rhyme with "like." "Surely that's not your name?"
    "No," I admitted.
    She waited another moment. "Hit your head and can't remember, or don't want to say?"
    "I'd like to tell you"—I couldn't bring myself to call Nana "Eleni"—"but I can't."
    "Okay," she said agreeably. "A secret is better than not being able to remember. If you couldn't remember, I'd have to get help whether you wanted me to or not. But I can't just call you 'Hey you' or 'Nike.'"
    While I tried to think of something, she suggested, "How about 'Jeannette'?"
    My mother's name. I remembered how that had been the first serious sign of her Alzheimer's—when she couldn't keep me and my mother straight. I tried to keep my voice neutral as I asked, "Why 'Jeannette'?"
    Eleni shrugged. "I've always liked the name. Kind of French, but not too much. I have a stuffed bear named Jeannette. Actually, if I ever get married, I plan to name my first child Jeannette, so I'm really hoping it'll be a daughter and not a son."
    I had to laugh.
    "There, then. It's settled. So, I'm assuming, Jeannette, that you don't want me to contact the police and tell them about the man who almost ran you down?"
    "I'm the dork who fell off the curb," I said.
    I guessed by the long look she gave me that there weren't dorks in the 1950s. Or, more likely, there were, but they were called something else. "Well," she countered, "but he should have stopped."
    "Besides," I said, "all I could say was that it was a big gray car. That's not much to go on, but I don't know cars. I can't even keep straight which is a van and which is an SUV."
    From her somewhat dazed expression, I gathered at least one or the other of those had not yet been invented.
    "Oldsmobile," Eleni finally said. "The hood ornament