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

is quite distinctive. License number M13487."
    To fill in the silence, I said, "I can't see much without my glasses."
    She nodded as if saying,
Okay, well, I'll buy that for now.
    "How can you remember the number?"
    "
M
for Monroe County, then
1
because he was so self-centered and was only thinking of himself;
3
—that's you, me, and Betsy; add all those numbers together to get
4;
add all the numbers so far together to get
8;
but the driver took off, so you subtract the first number from the last number to get
7:
M13487."
    This game with numbers from the grandmother who could no longer remember her own name.
    "You know," I said, "I don't even know what you just said."
    She shrugged.
    "Anyway," I repeated, "it was my own fault."
    "And you don't want to involve the police," she guessed.
    I didn't say anything because there was nothing to say.
    "Are you in trouble," she asked, "or is it your friend, Larry?"
    Being of quick mind and sharp wit, I said, "Huh?"
    "Because I will tell you something," Eleni said, "Betsy was taking a picture of me"—she gave a dismissive wave of her hand, and blushed as she explained all in a rush—"because she wants to send a picture of me to her cousin so that he'll come here for August and stay with her parents rather than going to his other aunt and uncle in Sodus before he enlists in the army..." She hesitated, obviously embarrassed at the thought of using her picture to tempt a young man into summering in Rochester—and meanwhile I tried not to wonder if the young man in question was Papa: What I did
not
need to do was to influence
anything
that had already happened. "Anyway," she continued, "so Betsy was facing me, and I was facing the spot where you..." She hesitated again, this time groping for the right words. "The spot where one second you weren't. And then you were."
    I used that time-honored tradition of taking a moment to scratch my head while I tried to come up with some believable explanation. "You must have blinked," I said.
    Eleni laughed. "No," she said firmly. "Try again."
    "Maybe the flash blinded you?"
    Ignoring my babbling, she told me suddenly, "You look very much like my sister, who died."
    "I am not a ghost," I informed her.
    For a moment she looked annoyed. "I didn't say I thought you were her. Besides,
if
Mathilda came back to Earth, which I don't for a moment think she might, I can't believe the first thing she would do would be to step into the path of an oncoming car. I just meant: There's a strong resemblance." She tipped her head and looked closely at me. "You look like me, too."
    Don't I wish,
I thought.
    She finished, "Almost as though, maybe, we're related..."
    I was willing to go so far as to admit, "I suppose I could be from some very distant branch of your family."
    "Except none of us can pop into existence like something out of a Flash Gordon movie."
    "I don't know Flash Gordon," I said.
    "Don't try to change the subject."
    Once again she tipped her head and scrutinized me. "You dress oddly...," she said, which I guess I did in a world of pastel shirtwaist dresses and white gloves and hats, "and you speak rather oddly, too..."—and here I'd been congratulating myself on avoiding such dated references as manned space flights, Snoop Dogg, or SPAM as anything besides lunch meat. My grandmother asked, "So are you a crazy person who by coincidence just happens to look like a family member...?" Her eyes grew wide as a new thought came to her. "You're not from this time!" she gasped. "You're a time traveler from the future." She gave another gasp. "Are you the daughter I'm going to have?"
    "No," I said, wondering how—in minutes—she had come to the conclusion that I had most needed to keep her from.
    "Granddaughter?" she pressed.
    "No," I said, but perhaps not so passionately as before, for she leaned back with a self-satisfied look on her face.
    "So what have you come back from the future to warn me about?"
    "Nothing," I protested.
    She was sitting there,