Page 45 of Victorious

The clerk sighed even though the store was empty. Ten minutes till close.

Xavi flashed him a grateful smile, and the guy ducked into the back. As soon as he was out of sight, Xavi snapped the tag, and tucked it into the box, strolling toward the exit.

Fifty-fifty odds he’d make it out scot-free, not even need to—

“Hey!” snapped the clerk, sprinting full tilt toward Xavi, clearly expecting him to bolt. He didn’t, even when the clerk’s hand came down hard on his shoulder, grabbing a fistful of windbreaker. He turned back, face crinkled in surprise. The expression must have caught the clerk off guard because he faltered, just for a second, but a second was all Xavi needed to reach up and touch the guy’s hand where it clutched at his coat.

And then the clerk’s mind was zipping backward, the whole brief interaction in the store rewound, unraveled, erased.

The clerk’s hand dropped, his face taking on that dazed expression people wore in the seconds after.

Xavi himself felt a little jumbled—always did—but he recovered faster. The clerk was still blinking, mind stitching back around the altered memories, when Xavi slipped out into the mall, crisp white sneakers on his feet.

A voice in the back of his head warned him about using his powers in such a public place. The voice belonged to Victor Vale.

Xavi’s boss was always telling him to lie low.

Going on about some shadowy organization designed to find and capture people like them. Victor was obviously paranoid. Hell, that was why he’d hired Xavi. And he was definitely grateful for the gig. But the great thing about Xavi’s power was that nobody remembered him. Not unless he wanted them to.

He wove through the evening crowd, a mix of moms pushing strollers with one hand, and scrolling with the other, and teens—some older than Xavi, some younger—clustered round the fountains, the escalators, the kiosks offering samples of hand lotion, or honey.

Xavi made his way to the mall’s south corner, his hands in the pockets of his coat.

The windbreaker was new, too, courtesy of a shop on the bottom level. That one had been trickier. The clerk was a girl who’d known him back in middle school, and he’d ended up rewinding their whole shared history, just to be safe.

And okay, fine, using Victor’s logic, he should have stopped there, but reversing so much had given him a headache, which he’d solved by swiping a bag of pretzel bites from a food court pickup window, which he’d been eating when he saw the sneakers in the display.

But Xavi was careful.

He stuck to crowded places, where it was easy to blend in, didn’t go back to the same stores, and didn’t rewind the same person’s mind more than once, not after the squishiness he’d felt in the chemist’s head.

There was only one exception to the no-return rule.

Xavi looked up at the illuminated archway of his favorite place in Portsmith.

The Fourth Street Mall Arcade.

Unlike the rest of the mall, which was already closing up shop, the arcade was open late. Xavi smiled, and plunged inside, excited to spend the next few hours in neon bliss.

Plus, the pizza didn’t suck, and the games weren’t rigged.

Two slices and a large coke later, his hands flew across an electronic board.

Matching patterns, repeating sequences with record speed as the game ding-ding-dinged and the points racked up. Some people liked the first-person shooters, or the one-v-one battles, but Xavi’s favorite game was Memory. Which might seem—what was the word? Ironic?—but it had been his favorite since way before That Day.

That Day—that was how he thought of it.

The one that started with a group of friends and a dumb idea and ended with Xavi alone, and running. Xavi being chased, and cornered. Xavi being shoved off the top of the building, wishing in those awful, drawn-out seconds between falling and hitting the ground below that he could just go back, rewind, redo the whole day.

That was the reason, according to Victor Vale, that he came back the way he did.

Even though, according to the doctors, he shouldn’t have come back at all.

But Xavi was stubborn like that. Always had been. His dad used to say he’d land on his feet because the Pascals were survivors. His aunt, well, she said that was because they only looked out for themselves. And maybe that was true. After all, his dad did leave a few months after. And his aunt, well, she was a Pascal, too.

As for That Day, everyone said he was lucky.

And he was—even though, by the time he’d been discharged, with steel pins in his shoulder, hip, and spine, there was no one to go home to. His family—what was left of it—was in the wind. At sixteen, he was too old for the system, and too young to get by on his own.