Chapter 8 Back to High School Days
August 2025
The incident involving the Ford E-350 was handled with absolute discretion. The initial news reports were scrubbed from the internet within hours, kept out of the public eye, and quietly sealed in national confidential archives under the classification of “Spacetime Anomaly.”
Years later, quantum physicists would officially theorise that the van had encountered a temporary space-time tunnel while driving through the mountains in 2002.
It was, they explained, a folding of time. Rather than moving along the timeline second by second, the fabric of reality had creased, causing two separate eras to briefly overlap. Under a highly specific alignment of speed, geography, and atmospheric conditions, it was technically possible to fall through the fold.
Similar anomalies would be recorded sporadically over the coming centuries. Every documented case was fiercely studied to unlock the mechanics of time manipulation, eventually paving the way for future technological breakthroughs.
But that, of course, all came later.
And knowing the science behind it brought no comfort to the people who had actually experienced it.
Chloe especially.
She deeply, violently regretted ever stepping foot in that Ford E-350. Because of it, she had lost the person she loved most in the world.
She cried until she was entirely hollowed out, eventually falling into an exhausted sleep on the sofa.
In her dreams, she fell backwards through time.
Back to the days when Nathan was still by her side.
Nathan and Chloe first met in the eighth grade.
Nathan had just skipped yet another year, and his mother, Susan Archer, was frantic with worry. She had brought him personally to the school counselor’s office, practically begging the staff to keep a close eye on him.
Nathan had always been brilliant. This was his third time skipping a grade. But his naturally quiet, introverted personality meant he had almost no friends. He spent all his free time reading, entirely lacking the boisterous energy typical of children his age.
Now, at barely eleven years old, he was about to be thrown into a classroom full of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds. Susan was terrified he would be targeted.
She had reason to be. In primary school, a group of older boys had locked Nathan in an outdoor bathroom during the dead of winter. He hadn’t shouted for help. He hadn’t cried. No one had told the teachers, and it had taken the staff and his panicked parents until midnight to finally find him.
After that incident, Nathan had retreated even further into himself. Whenever he felt alienated in a classroom, he simply tested out of it and moved up a year.
This time, he had skipped straight from the sixth grade.
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Archer. The students in my class are very sensible,” the counselor assured her, visibly eager to secure the district’s top prodigy for his own homeroom. “I’ll keep a very close eye on him. If there are any issues at all, you come straight to me.”
“Alright,” Susan nodded, though her hands were still tightly clasped.
Meanwhile, Nathan stood in the middle of the office, swimming in a school uniform that was a size too big for him. He was bored out of his mind, tuning out the adults’ chatter.
Just then, the office door swung open. A girl in a summer uniform breezed in, carrying a heavy stack of workbooks, which she dropped onto the teacher’s desk with a thud.
As she turned to leave, the counselor called out, “Chloe! Could you show our new student around and take him to the classroom?”
“Oh, sure.” The girl paused, her voice crisp and bright.
Nathan looked up.
The girl standing in the doorway was silhouetted by the brilliant morning sun pouring in from the hallway.
Her fair skin carried a faint, healthy flush from the summer heat. Her eyes were wide and bright, a tiny bead of sweat glistening on the tip of her nose. She had a soft, round face, and her golden-brown hair fell in natural, messy waves around her ears.
She looked exactly like one of the warm, cheerful girls drawn in the margins of fairy-tale books.
She waved at him. “Hey! Come with me.”
Nathan glanced at his mother, who offered a small, encouraging nod. He turned and followed the girl out of the office.
As they walked down the sunlit corridor, she glanced back at him. “What’s your name?”
“Nathan,” he replied softly.
“I’m Chloe.” She turned to face him fully, flashing a brilliant smile. “You look so young. How old are you?” She tilted her head, looking down at him—he was still a full head shorter than her.
“Almost twelve.”
“I’m fourteen!” Chloe declared with a touch of pride. “You can just call me Chloe. That’s what all the kids in my neighbourhood call me.”
“Okay,” Nathan said.
He had never met anyone who spoke with such entirely unbothered cheerfulness.
Nathan settled into Chloe’s class.
As expected, he took first place on the very first exam, instantly becoming the top student in the entire year group.
The teachers adored him, and the other students were far too intimidated by his intellect to bully him. But that also meant no one ever approached him. He was too young to fit in with the teenagers, and his freakish grades only widened the gulf between them.
He remained entirely isolated.
Chloe sat directly behind him. Occasionally, she would tap his chair and exchange a few words, but mostly, the days passed in quiet routine.
Then, the midterm results were posted.
The moment the bell rang, the classroom erupted into chaos as students scrambled out of their seats. Naturally, the space around Nathan’s desk remained an island of quiet.
“The rankings are up!” a boy shouted, sprinting into the room. “They posted the honor roll!”
Students grabbed their friends and bolted into the hallway.
Chloe knew perfectly well that her grades were painfully average, but she loved a spectacle, so she immediately joined the stampede.
She had just reached the student activity board in the main hall when she heard a group of older students murmuring.
“All A-stars again? Are you joking?”
“Nathan Archer. That new kid. It’s insane.”
“He’s barely twelve. I heard he skipped three grades to get here.”
Hearing his name, Chloe shoved her way to the front of the crowd and looked up at the massive board bolted to the wall.
There it was. Right at the very top.
Not only had the tiny transfer student crushed their own class, but he had taken first place on the schoolwide honor roll.
“Wow,” Chloe muttered, genuinely awed.
His scores were printed next to his name—perfect hundreds in almost every subject, with only a marginal deduction in English Literature.
It wasn’t human. It was monstrous.
She felt a sudden, bizarre twinge of intimidation.
She let her eyes trail down the long list, skimming past the top ten, the top twenty, all the way to the very bottom.
And there, clinging to the final spot by the skin of its teeth, was a name.
Chloe Frost.
She gasped, then jumped straight into the air. “I made the board! I’m on the honor roll!”
“Where? Let me see!” Her best friend, Lisa, elbowed her way forward, squinting at the board. “Oh my God, really? You’re literally the last one! That’s amazing! Chloe, you have to treat us today!”
“Done! Let’s go to the tuck shop!”
Chloe and Lisa bolted to the student store, pooling their pocket money to buy a mountain of cheap junk food: crisps, gummy worms, chocolate bars, and sour laces.
Chloe marched back into the classroom with her arms full of loot and started tossing snacks onto her classmates’ desks.
A boy near the front, who was a regular on the honor roll, laughed as he caught a chocolate bar. “Chloe, this is sabotage! If you buy everyone food for coming last, you’re making the rest of us look bad. Now we’re going to have to buy stuff too!”
There were nine eighth-grade classes. Making the top fifty to get on the board was genuinely difficult.
“We’re not the same,” Chloe grinned, tossing him a bag of crisps. “You’re up there every term. This is a once-in-a-lifetime miracle for me. Next time I miraculously scrape the bottom of the list, I won’t be this generous.”
“Why does the person who did the worst get to act like she won?” a girl muttered sourly from the corner. “Nathan got first place and he isn’t parading around treating everyone.”
Chloe paused. She turned and looked the girl dead in the eye.
“It’s my money, I’ll spend it how I want. And I wasn’t offering you any anyway, so shut up.”
The girl flushed and went instantly quiet.
Sitting in the front row, Nathan couldn’t help but glance over his shoulder. He hadn’t expected the cheerful, smiling girl to have such a viciously sharp temper when crossed.
Unbothered, Chloe continued her rounds.
When she reached the front, she picked up a bright orange bag of crisps and held it out over Nathan’s desk. “Here, Nathan. This one’s for you.”
Nathan looked at the bag, then shook his head politely. “Thanks. But I don’t eat junk food.”
Chloe didn’t look embarrassed or offended. Instead, she just gathered the remaining snacks in her arms and held them out like a display tray. “Alright. What do you want, then?”
Nathan’s eyes scanned the colourful pile of sugar and salt. He carefully pinched a small, plain packet of roasted nuts from the very edge.
“I’ll take this one, then. Thank you.”
Chloe beamed, her eyes curving into bright crescents. “No problem!”
Watching her smile so easily at him, Nathan found the corners of his own mouth tipping up in response.