Small Change

“You can’t go back in time for $17,” Randall said.

“I can,” Meg insisted.

“It doesn’t make any sense. It costs twenty times that to take the trip unless you do stand-by. Most people want to go back in time to fix something big. You know that. You’ve read the articles, right? You get how this tech works.”

“That’s why I’ve got to go. I need to fix something.” She steeled herself and looked directly into his eyes. She really wanted him to understand. “I didn’t have the money to lose. Losing seventeen bucks changed everything.”

He’d heard the story before. Oh, had he. How this was a pivotal moment. How everything after had been downhill. Except for meeting him.

Randall shrugged and stared out the window at the hard packed dirt in the front yard, and then down at the chipped pink linoleum. He looked back at Meg, disheveled dishwater-blonde hair and messy bangs cut haphazardly one night when she was too angry to talk. There were stains on her jeans and cuts on her knuckles from carelessness. She was wearing sneakers that had seen better years, and he was fairly certain she hadn’t changed her socks in a few days. He loved her, though. He loved her madly, so he said, “Fine. Fine. If you think it will help, then do it.”

On their fridge was a picture from the night they’d met. He had always thought she was a diamond in the rough. But maybe lately she’d just been rough. “I’ll kick in half,” he said, and he took a beer outside to sit on the front stoop under the number spray-painted on the side of the house. He worked nights and slept days and didn’t have time to do the fix-it-up projects he sometimes dreamed about. “One day,” is what he always said. “One day.”

###

She saved up to purchase a ticket to go back to 1985, when she’d bought a present for her best friend, and the change from her $20 had fallen out of her pocket. She’d returned to the drugstore, desperate, searching everywhere, but the money, of course, was long gone. Her loss was someone else’s gain.

What would $17 be in today’s funds? $55. And that still would be too much for her to lose without being sad about it. Too much to lose without feeling the pain in her budget. But with Randall’s help, she scraped the funds for a trip, one of those cheap back-in-time trips. Not the type the billionaires took. But time travel for the low-rent crowd.

You would get close to the time you were shooting for, but the company didn’t promise you exact, and you didn’t get any peanuts. Additionally, the waitstaff who tucked you into your pod could be a bit snarly, and there was a strange smell to the compartment, a combination of body odor, off-market disinfectant, and too-sweet bubble gum.

She told herself on the journey that even if it didn’t work, trying was important. So often in her life, she had given up. This time, she arrived at the back of the 7-11 where she’d once made out with a skate rat whose lips tasted of licorice and who wrote her name on his jeans in black ink. She left through the back door, as she’d been told, and she traced her steps to the spot. As soon as she arrived, she realized she was off a little bit, as she’d been warned might happen. You had to pay a lot for the exactness of science. Instead of entering Woolworths right before she was going to pay, she hit the mark right after, and so she stood off to the side and she saw her younger self leave, and she saw the money on the dull, beige carpet.

Rich people experienced time travel in a way that let them actively interact with their surroundings. The poor person trip let you watch, but you didn’t replace the previous version of you. Still, you were cautioned not to move too much—butterfly effect and everything. Other people could see you, sort of. You weren’t quite human, not a hologram, but more like a shadow. You could push open a door, pick a flower, but you didn’t have a voice, and you moved with a kind of hovering quality, feet not quite on the ground.

The goal for Meg had been to create a kind of distraction so that former her might look down, might pick up the money, and then maybe—just maybe—everything would be different. But she’d messed up. Maybe she had gotten the time wrong, although she’d remembered it was after her shift had ended at the fast-food restaurant, and she’d pin-pointed the date from her diary that she’d kept all these years.

Her crumpled bills were there on the floor. She could see now how they’d fallen and been almost unnoticeable by the rack of magazines. She swore in her head, and wondered what to do next, and that’s when she noticed a woman in a gray trench coat, who was also eying the money. The woman was a little scruffy, fatigue smudging her features. She looked left and right and made sure nobody else seemed to notice, and quickly shoved that money into her pocket, and suddenly Meg didn’t care about $17 bucks anymore. Her curiosity was piqued.

Meg followed the gray trench for a few blocks, and she saw the woman go into a grocery store she recalled from her youth—it was a high-end car dealership now—and walk down the aisles obviously a little excited, elated, not putting anything expensive into the cart, but filling it with bread and cheese and milk. Nodding and humming to herself. Meg was stunned by the cost of food, she had not remembered how much you could get for $20. Last week, she’d had three things to buy at the grocery store, only had a twenty in her pocket, and had been forced to put one item back.

This woman filled a bag.

Meg followed the gray trench coat out of the store and down the block, knowing she had to be back at the travel stand in the not too distant future, ha ha, but that she had a few minutes. And she watched the woman enter a small apartment building, and she stood outside and looked up and a light came on in the second floor, and she could see a child’s artwork in the window. A paper heart for Valentine’s Day trimmed with a white doily. Meg had been buying a Valentine and candy on the day she’d lost her cash.

Something was different inside her now. She couldn’t figure out what. She sat on the sidewalk across the street for a few moments, smelling the town she’d lived in. She had remembered the loss of the money as the start of something she had never shaken. Her aunt had yelled at her and called her irresponsible, saying she didn’t know the value of a buck, and she had thought perhaps she was irresponsible.

But now she wondered if maybe she’d been meant to lose that money. Did that make sense? She’d blown an exam the next day, had started to really feel the weight of other people’s expectations. Had never lived, as the guidance counselor had said, up to her own potential. Whatever that meant.

She breathed in deeper. There was a scent of cooking now—was it coming from the upstairs window? She wondered what the woman was making. Mac and cheese? Fried chicken? The apartment was a bit sad looking on the outside, unkempt with weeds in the yard and cracked paved stones, but the window was happy. With that heart in the center.

Meg heard music. She felt lighter. She took a breath of the 80s again, smelling some blossoming tree she’d forgotten about. She headed back to the kiosk at the rear of the 7-11, and she felt herself emerging. Instead of feeling forlorn about the missing $17, instead of feeling sorry for herself, and not being able to buy her other friends presents, and going home thinking she’d just lost six hours of work because she hadn’t been paying attention, like people often told her she wasn’t paying attention, she felt peaceful.

She forgave herself. That’s what she did. She thought: people make mistakes, she’d made mistakes. In her family’s lore, she was the screw-up, the one who couldn’t remember to smog her car or fill the tank or pay the bill on time. The one who was worried and anxious over small things. Small change.

Small.

Change.

There was something fresh in her, as she climbed into that strange-scented cubicle, as she felt the rattle and whirr of the engine sending her back to where she’d come from, where she was supposed to be.

On arrival, she noticed the color of the light in the sky. A pale pink. She didn’t usually notice the sky. She was wearing different clothes for some reason. Pressed slacks, a pretty blouse, a pair of bright red clogs. There were no cuts on her knuckles, and when she caught her reflection in the window of the store that used to be a Woolworth's, she saw her hair was pulled up in a ponytail, glossy and healthy looking, no jagged bangs from a bad call with a pair of kitchen scissors.

Her heart felt … happy.

She walked down the street towards the house where she lived, towards the house that had been gray and dull with rocks in the window boxes, and dirt in the front yard. And when she reached her home, she started to cry.

The house was painted a robin’s egg blue. The numbers were done in gold. And there wasn’t packed dirt in her front yard anymore. There were flowers.