Flash

Augusta Wynd had a gift. Rather, if you asked her, she was going to call it a curse, because it made her feel like a freak. Regular girls didn't see visions of another world. Or if they did, they didn't go running to their friends to tell them about it.

Former friends, that was. Once they'd decided she was a freak, they bullied her relentlessly.

"Her parents named her a gust of wind. It's sad, really."

"It's pronounced Wend," she would mutter to the floor, glaring at the scuffs on her saddle shoes.

She had run home that afternoon, splashing mud straight onto her poodle skirt. It stained her sheets as she sat at the edge of her bed, softly crying to herself.

Her mother had tried to convince her that it was a compliment. A gust of wind was short and strong. Her doctor told her she was 4'11. The school nurse gave her an extra inch to hit five foot. Either way, there was no escaping the fact that she was short. As for the strong bit, ha, fat chance. 

The flash came. Suddenly she's in the body of that girl again. Her long curled ponytail had been shorn short into a mop of red. Not a natural shade. It matched the color of her hair ribbon, and for a moment, she had to wipe her eyes and tug at her hair to see if it was a wig.

No, this girl had really done this to herself. Last time she had gorgeous auburn hair.

She noticed that she was still wearing the same torn pair of jeans. The poor girl must have been in financial trouble to dress like this. Could her parents not afford a new pair of pants for their daughter? 

Her eyes drifted to the posters on her walls. A lot of these people were wearing clothes like this. They all looked a bit unkempt to her, and reaching to tighten her ponytail, she remembered it wasn't there.

Gosh, what was that horrific sound? It was circling her in the room, giving her a headache. The bass was far too heavy. She found the noise to be coming from a musical box on a shelf. She kept pushing buttons until one of them opened a drawer, stopping the song to reveal a disc with one word on it.

Dubstep.

Staring at her reflection in the disc, she blinked. 

When her eyes opened, there was a hand mirror with her reflection. The one with the ponytail. She took a moment to tighten it before falling backward onto her bed.

Who was this girl, and why did she keep haunting her every move? And if her brain was vacationing in this girl's body, was that to say that the girl's brain was doing the same? 

She could only imagine the damage she had done.

The rest of the week passed without seeing the girl again. Her mind had finally let go of worrying over what had happened in her absence. Her nose was buried in a book, one of many from her bookshelf.

There was a flash.

Her book disappeared. There was a machine in its place, sitting on her desk. There was keys like her typewriter, but there was a screen in front of her, with words and pictures. Something about the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series. That was a laugh. They were a cursed team ever since she was a little girl. Her older brother had mentioned something about insulting a billy goat. While she was unsure about the cursing ability of goats, she was sure of one thing.

There was no way they had gotten their act together.

Then again, this did seem to be some alternate universe.

She picked up the screen. Studying it to find some sort of answer, a pop up ad startled her.

"Start streaming now," she read. Streaming? She knew streams were like rivers. She also knew that ing made it a verb, so she was rivering? What was that? 

When she went to set the screen down, that's when she noticed the initials carved into the desk. DJB, just like the desk that she had at home. Her brother had carved it into the wood before handing it down to her when he went off to school.

What a coincidence. Just like the coincidence that there was a creaky floor board right in front of window. Pushing the curtain aside, she peered out.

Wait a minute.

This was her house.

She blinked, and her room was back. The walls were blue again. 

Why had that girl painted them over? 

Augusta let the curtain fall back over the window. 

A day hadn't even passed when the next flash came.

This time she had been in the kitchen, tending to a pot of stew when the change happened. There she was, standing in front of a small box with a plate of something in her hand. They were the size of raviolis, but didn't feel like pasta.

There was a box next to her. 

"To heat your pizza rolls, cook on high for 1 minute." She set the box back down, looking back to the box containing the magical light. Then she looked to the oven. 

Could it really only take one minute to make these rolled pizzas? She turned the knob to the highest temperature and put them in for a minute.

Sixty seconds later, they were still frozen.

"Oakley, did you just put a plate in the oven?"

Picking the box back up, she reread the directions. One minute, high. What part had she screwed up on?

"Oakley!" A woman snatched the plate out of her hand, placing it in the microwave. "Don't tell me you got into your grandmother's special brownies again."

Augusta had no idea who Oakley, or this woman, was, or what made these brownies so special. She was too fascinated by the magical box to care.

There was a beeping noise, and everything smelled like pizza.

She blinked, and her nose filled with the scent of stew.

There was salt spilled on the counter. She had been home alone, preparing dinner for her father's arrival. Who had spilled the salt?

Wait, had Oakley been here? She assumed that was the girl's name, just as she assumed that the woman was her mother.

She sighed at the pot of stew. Pizza rolls had sounded delicious. 

A few days later, she had been on the phone with her brother. He was preparing to visit for Christmas, and she was jotting down details when the flash happened. 

There were voices in her ear. Ones coming out of something the size of her palm, reminiscent of that screen in her room. They were talking about a new movie coming out with some guy named the Rock voicing a character in it. So not only did the future have magical food boxes, but rocks could talk?

How far forward had she come?

"We're going on opening day, right? Please, you haven't come out in weeks, and Tyler was totally blushing when I said you might come hold his hand in the popcorn."

"Um...."

"And don't even say we are too old for Disney movies, because I know you cried at Toy Story 3." 

The last Disney movie Augusta had seen was Peter Pan. She had never heard of this Toy Story, nor known there were three of them. But this girl wasn't talking to Augusta. She was talking to Oakley, or at least her body. 

Would it be wrong to make plans for her? She hadn't the foggiest who Tyler was, but maybe this would be a good thing. 

"Okay."

In a blink she was back in her own living room, the rotary phone back on its receiver. There was a note on the pad next to it.

December 23rd, noon. Pick William up at airport.

This girl dotted her i's with x's.

Hold on. 

This girl had left a note for her. They could do that?

When the next flash came, she was ready. 

"Hi, I'm Augusta."

Come next flash, she found a reply. 

"Funny, my great grandmother's name is Augusta. I'm Oakley."

It couldn't be. 

Could it?

She looked into the mirror. 

Maybe it was a gift after all.