Series Wednesday: Timetopia page 8

                I wake up in the van. A few days have passed since my mom died or disappeared. I’m still not sure what happened. I haven’t said anything. I haven’t been able to stop thinking long enough to talk or eat. All I want to do is sleep. “Come on Ava you’ve got to eat something.” Rev is shoving food in my face. I push it away. “Fine. Sleep. We have a long ride ahead of us to your grandma’s house anyway.”  I sit up and look around. We are still on our way to my grandma’s? NO. I need to go home to my dad. He needs me now, with my mom gone. I get out of the van and I start walking back to my home. “Where are you going?” I hear Rev yelling from behind me. “I’m going home.” I yell back. “Home?” She grabs me from behind. “Yes home to my dad.” She looks at me and puts her head down. “You can’t go home. We have to keep moving forward. We have to go to your grandma’s house. That’s what your mom wanted.” How dare she talk about what my mom wanted. She didn’t know my mom. She doesn’t know me and I don’t know her. I push her off and keep walking. “Ava Stop!” Fine she wants me to stop, so I’m going to stop and I turn to her, “What do you know? Huh? You don’t know me! You don’t know my mom!”  I shout at her. “I do know your mom. I met her when you were just a baby.”  I look at Rev for a bit. She just doesn’t look that much older than me. “How old are you?” I ask her “I’m 23. Look Ava I’m just here to help you get to your grandma’s house.” There she goes again with my grandma’s house. “Why and who told you to take me to my grandma’s house?” She looks at me with her head tilt. “Who do you think? Your mom did.” I want to cry when I think that my mom has a plan for me. But why is Rev helping us? “Why are you helping us? I’m sorry but you don’t seem like the type to do something out of the kindness of your heart.”  She looks up at me and scrunches her noise. “You’re right, I’m not. There is a guy who did horrible things and he is hiding here in Timetopia. Helping you helps me to find him.” I just look at her because that makes sense. “Richard I’m guessing?” Her face changes, “Yes Richard. That son of a…..” she doesn’t finish her sentence. I’m not sure what he is a son of, but I need to know what he did. “Tell me what happened please.” I walk back toward the van. “Well Richard was my husband. We had been together since high school. I thought he was the love of my life… He was with me the day I graduated the academy, he was there when I was recruited special ops, and he even took my picture on my first day of the CIA. Richard isn’t like anyone you have ever met, he is charming with the most innocent smile. He can get you to tell him anything. He knew all of my secrets and my secrets weren’t just mine. He killed someone very close to me and ran here. Your mother knows how to find him, he is near your grandma’s house. So she asked me to take you to her and then I would get him.”  I have never seen her look sad before. “Was it your mother he killed?” I ask. She sighs, “The only one I ever had.”  I can tell she doesn’t want to talk about it. I hug her, I see I am not the only one who lost my mother here. “Why my grandma’s house?” She shakes her head and reaches into the car and pulls out the metal handle. She puts it in my hand. “Timetopia is a lie. This is a gun. There is a lot you don’t know. Your grandma has the answers. We need to get to her house. She will tell you everything you need to know.”  I am holding this gun in my hand, it’s heavy and cold. This is what made the pop noise and put the hole in Alexis’s head. There are a lot of lies going on here. I’m not sure how I can help, but I have a feeling that going home to get my dad will get him hurt. “Okay lets go.” I hop in the van.

                “Can I ask something?” Rev laughs, “Yes of course.” I sit there trying to be sure to word this correctly. “What is the CIA?”  Rev looks at me. “It’s a company ran by rich powerful men, who make all the decisions for the country. I worked for them.” I look at her. I don’t want to sound dumb. “What does rich mean?”  She laughs. “You know rich… People with a lot of money which in turn means they have a lot of power.” Once again she says things that I don’t understand. “What is money? How does it give someone power?” She looks at me shocked. “OH shit this is why we haven’t had to pay for any of the food! Wait if there is no money, how do you pay for things?” I look around. I still don’t understand what she means. “Well maybe if you explain pay to me I can tell you how you do it.”  She drives silently for a few minutes. “When you guys go to work. How? Wait, I mean what do you get out of it?”  I don’t understand her question, “What do you mean? What do we get out of it? When we go to work, we go to help the community. We go to school to learn how to help the community and then one day when we are old enough they send us to where we would best serve.” She laughs. “So how do you buy your homes?” Buy? I’m not sure what buy is. “We are assigned homes. When you get married you get a home. You get assigned to a neighborhood with other newlyweds.  That’s your house until you die, unless you are barren. If you’re barren then you have to move into a neighborhood with other infertile couples with one bedroom homes.” She laughs again. “So you’re telling me they tell you where to live and if you can’t have kids they kick you out of your house?” That is a very crude way of putting it but yes I guess that is what happens. “Well you can’t have a three bedroom home for just two people. That’s gluttony. You must move into a smaller home.”  She rolls her eyes. “What if you have family or friends who want to visit?” Visit at your house? I don’t know why she would think that. “They would stay at a visiting center. Why would anyone stay at your house that doesn’t live there?” She laughs. I hear motorbikes behind us. She stops laughing and looks back. “Wellness checkers?” I look out the window. It’s definitely wellness checkers and they are catching up to us fast.