The Time Traveler's Guide to Grammar Read online

November, 2361

  She traveled alone through time for an entire week. She hardly spoke to Caden when she came back. She presented a valid note from her doctor to her teacher, which explained away her absence from class with a bad chest cold. Her teachers did not have to know that the note was from a future time.

  When she finally sat next to Caden he immediately tried apologizing.

  “I’m really sorry that I kissed you. I thought that you liked it…”

  Caden likely knew that she liked it. Quinn had probably told him at some future time how much she had enjoyed being kissed by him. But her enjoyment of the kiss was not the issue. Her problem was that Caden had likely seen into the future where she forgave him. Her problem was that she wanted to be mad at him and she wanted him to say sorry and not know whether she would forgive him.

  She wanted to hate him, everyone at Midgar, and time travelling so that she would be content with her lot in this time.

  She had no clue how to accomplish any of this, and so she merely brooded in silence while Mr. Orders taught the class complicated algorithms. Caden spent the period sending notes sailing onto her desk. Neither Caden nor Quinn had the luxury of inattention when it came to Mr. Walters’ section. Evidently Mr. Walters and Mr. Walters’ future self had conversed, so while the rest of the class was taking a pop quiz on quantum physics, she was handed a sheet that asked her to define a number of grammar terms.

  She was almost grateful for some distraction, and happily plodded through the list.

  Ditransitive verb: this verb specifically takes a subject and two objects.

  She wrote down the example: ‘Mary (subject) gave Paul (first object) the ball (second object).’

  Silently she thought I (subject) am giving Caden (first object) the cold shoulder (second object).

  ‘Modal verb: A special kind of verb that shows what the subject thinks about a situation. This adds hesitance, and perhaps personality and subtlety, to sentences.’

  Caden had already gone over modal verbs with her. She easily wrote down examples for modal verbs: ‘can,’ ‘could,’ ‘may,’ ‘might,’ ‘must,’ ‘have to,’ ‘should,’ ‘will,’ ‘would.’

  In her mind she thought, I might be able to be silent around Caden for a few more days, but realistically, we are going to have to speak to each other sometime.

  Conjunctive adverbs were next. She scribbled down: conjunctive adverbs connect independent clauses together. They show cause and effect, sequence, contrast, comparison.’

  The example on her paper was ‘As a result of the inclement weather, Cindy had to wear her rain boots.’

  The example in her head was just as cloudy. Furthermore, they needed to have a long discussion; namely, on the subject of how Caden was altering her future. Somehow, she had the feeling that he was not content to be an omniscient viewer in Quinn’s future as Quinn had been in Greg’s. Then, a quick discussion on who Caroline is or will be would be nice as well.

  After the quiz the pairs met up to begin the day’s practice on the time machine.

  Caden came and sat warily beside her.

  “Please tell me why you aren’t speaking to me.”

  “Like you don’t already know,” she snapped. “You’ve gone into the future already and know exactly what I am going to say, and with your infinite wisdom you will concoct the perfect thing to say in response. You are just putting on a parody of real remorse to obtain the future that you like. I hate that.”

  Caden blushed. “I know you do. Will it make you feel better if I tell you that I go into the future with the best of intentions for you?”

  “No.”

  “What if I tell you that I do at some point improve?”

  “No.” Quinn picked up the sheet of their practice problems and stared at it without seeing a single word.

  “Caden and Quinn, you’re up.” Mr. Walters called.

  Quinn took the sheet from Mr. Walters and went into the time machine. Caden followed after her.

  Quinn scribbled down the destination and scanned it in. The time machine heated up, and Quinn felt the usual sensation of the world sliding away from them. Then the time machine jolted to a stop. The whispers of the class standing outside immediately seeped in, the wondering hushes gathering into a roar. Caden and Quinn had never messed up before.

  On the computer screen blinked the words “Incorrect Input.” Caden gently removed the paper from the scanner and examined it.

  “You wrote ‘They’re is several time machines that are traveling currently from Midgar to the moon. Bring us too the same location and time as they.’ Please tell me all of the things that are wrong with these two sentences.”

  Quinn snatched back the paper.

  “I used ‘they’re’ instead of ‘there.’ ‘They’re’ is shorthand for ‘they are’ whereas ‘there’ means ‘in or at that place.’ I also misspelled ‘to’ as ‘too.’ Don’t worry, I know ‘to’ is a preposition used before a noun, to say that ‘you are going to a place.’ I also know ‘too’ is an adverb is used to say ‘I have too much of something’ or ‘I am going, too.’”

  “What else?”

  She cursed. “I misspelled two words! That’s all!”

  “Then ‘there is several’ would be correct?”

  Quinn sighed. She hated when Caden pointed out when her grammar was incorrect, but at the same time she was glad that he had. There were only a few ways that a sentence could be understood correctly, but if the time machine was given a sentence that was correct, but which it would interpret incorrectly, there was no telling where or when they would land. “No, no it is not. ‘Several’ implies that there are plural objects that I am speaking about, and so when I am using a form of ‘to be’ I need to use the form that agrees with the subject of the sentence.”

  “And…?”

  “There’s nothing else wrong with the sentence!” Quinn, not knowing any better way to vent her anger, kicked a wall of the time machine. The shock sent a dull echo resounding through the room and back all throughout her body.

  Biting through the stab of pain that followed the shock, Quinn grudgingly continued, “‘They’ is used to refer to the subject of the clause, representing the ‘doers’ of the action described by the verb, and usually refers back to two or more people that were mentioned earlier.”

  “Now why would you not use ‘they’ in the sentence?”

  “’Them’ is used to refer to the object of the clause. It usually represents the group of people that have experienced the action of the verb. In the sentence I was writing, I should have realized that ‘them’ works as an indirect object that is introduced by the preposition ‘to’ and is placed after the direct object ‘location.’”

  “Good. Now, let me get us out of here.” Caden placed a piece of paper onto the scanner. The time machine once more heated up. The sensation of movement came over the both of them.

  Quinn sat down, both because her foot was hurting and because she felt completely defeated. She had managed to make more mistakes than a first grader.

  The sensation of movement picked up. Now she felt the force of their movement as if an invisible presence was rubbing shoulders with her. She had only ever felt a movement of this strength on the first day, when the time machine pushed them a few thousand years into the future. She knew that their assignment for class did not necessitate them travelling this far.

  “Um, where exactly are you taking me?” Quinn asked Caden.

  “You know what? I have no clue.” Caden smiled brightly.

  “How could you have no clue? You were the one that programmed the time machine.”

  Caden shrugged, “I told the time machine to ‘take us farther into the future.’ It seemed to be the simplest way to get us out of Mr. Walters’ hair.”

  Quinn paled. Her hair was beginning to be pushed ever so slightly in one direction as the force of the time machine’s inertia began to be felt within the machine. “You know this is going to work
, right? Like you’ve checked in the future and seen what usage of ‘farther’ the computer understands?”

  Caden did not realize that anything was wrong, instead jesting, “You mean there are times that you want me to go into the future to check what’s going to happen?” Caden waggled his eyebrows, baiting her.

  “Did you? I’m not joking with you right now…” Quinn had no clue whether this was yet another one of Caden’s jokes or if he genuinely had no clue how much danger he was placing them in.

  Caden’s smile slowly sank away as he noticed the worry that washed over her countenance.

  “I had actually been warned by our future selves that this was one place in time that needed to count, that I needed to trust you to know the right answer.”

  Quinn looked at Caden and the openness of his expression. His smile had died away, but there was still no hint of the panic that she felt creeping up over her.

  “So the one place that your future self tells you is important to your entire life, you don’t feel it necessary to prepare yourself? Or warn the other people involved?” All color drained from her face.

  “Shit,” she whispered. “I’m going to die with an idiot.”

  Caden glowered, obviously miffed. “Isn’t it a slight compliment that I trusted to your infinite wisdom?” Caden sat next to her, running his fingers through his hair.

  “Um, could you clue me in to what exactly is the matter?” He smoothed away the hair that was now blowing around her face. His lack of worry was making her even more concerned. Quinn had a bad feeling that they needed to take this situation seriously.

  “I think I know the difference between ‘further’ and ‘farther’ but I really don’t know how to fix this situation…”

  Quinn eyes shifted around the room at the panels and the white walls, searching wildly for an answer.

  Caden now cupped both of his hands around her face. His voice was quiet and soothing as he said, “Hey, hey, look at me.”

  Quinn focused on him. His eyes served as an anchor even as Quinn felt the force press, sharper now, into her chest. “Give me the definition for ‘farther.’ You’ve given me much harder definitions a thousand times before.”

  Outside of the time machine came a dull moaning like wind careening through autumn tree branches. The time machine was supposed to be traveling faster than the speed of sound.

  “The thing is, ‘farther’ and ‘further’ used to be interchangeable. It was only in the twenty-first century that ‘farther’ began to hold the connotation of physical distance. ‘Further’ began to be used solely as ‘more far/distant’ in a figurative and non-physical sense.”

  Caden’s skin grew ashen to mirror her own washed white countenance. The recognition of what the different connotation meant had finally hit him.

  “So you think that the computer is trying to send us through time as if it was a physical distance?”

  Quin nodded. The dull moaning heightened, almost imperceptibly. But Quinn knew now that it was no wind that was ripping around them outside of the time machine. Caden’s suddenly terrified expression had given weight to her theory. It was the fabric of space and time that was tearing.

  “Exactly. Now I would just write down ‘Stop!’ but I really don’t know where we would stop. If we stopped in a place that was half part of time and half of space, I don’t think the result would be good. We also need something that will simultaneously repair the damage that has been done!”

  She knew her voice was shaking, and that it was as high as the wind outside. Somewhere in her pronouncement, tears had sprung into her eyes.

  “This wouldn’t happen to be the time when you said that this was a big joke to get me to forgive you because our lives are in jeopardy?” Quinn tried putting a lighter note into her voice, hoping that Caden would choose now appear with an adjunct, a rabbit out of his lexical hat, something that would save them from this situation.

  They both turned around as they heard a metallic crinkle coming from the wall. The force of breaking through time was going to also tear apart the machine.

  Caden shook his head. The worry filled his eyes like roiling storm clouds. “My future self stopped me at every turn. He said that this was one moment that I would have to experience on my own. He said that there were a few moments in a person’s life that their decisions shaped who they were, and that I could never appreciate the happy future that I could have if I did not trust you as well as myself. I do Quinn, I trust you to get this right.”

  Caden rubbed his thumb across her lips. His voice was still soft, even though it now had to reach her ears through the howling wind.

  The emotion held in his eyes told a different tale. His eyes were vacant, and distant, as if he was retreating inwardly in preparation for the next few moments. The moments where the time machine split open and their innards spilled along the slipstream of moments and molecules, smashed to seconds and empty space.

  “We are currently tearing the divisions of time and space. What sentence can cure that? Is there anything that has meaning outside of time?”

  Quinn bit her lip, hard. The pain jolted her out of the coma that fear had wrapped around her. “We need to keep it simple, with a subject, verb, and object. I think that might jar the computer back into understanding the clear divisions between space and time. But more than that, we need a sentence that has elements that encompass the time that we have torn, as well as…”

  She was now screaming above the howling wind that ripped at her eyes, lungs, and ears alike. Through the wind she saw flashes of Caden’s face, then a wall of the time machine, and then his eyes once more. The sound was overpowering, the force so strong it felt as if every bone in her body was being crushed.

  Then she felt something other than the force snagging at her hand. Painfully, she opened her eyes, and saw that Caden was placing a crumpled piece of paper and pencil into her palm. She wanted to shake her head and tell him to merely hold her hand in the last few minutes of her life. Or seconds.

  But as she was shaking her head slowly to motion to him that his last attempt to save them was useless, she caught his eyes with her own. As she lost herself one last time in those gray depths, she felt not only the care that she had developed for him within the past few weeks, but also the love that she would one day feel for him. The love that had been waiting for her for what seemed all of her life, and maybe even longer.

  And she knew then the words that could save them.

  She just had no clue if she could remember the correct grammar.

  Clutching the paper and pencil, she rolled onto her stomach. In the space between her chest and the wall the air was calm enough for her to scribble down a single sentence.

  “I will / shall always love you.”

  (Please choose correct word)

  Even in the short time that she took to write the words down, the wind had strengthened to a full gale.

  As she rolled back over so her spine pressed against the shivering wall, she found that the wind whipped so hard around her that she could not breathe. Scrunching the paper in one hand, and folding her feet under her body, she positioned herself to jump. An updraft came through a crack in the wall, sending her hurtling towards the scanner.

  Her fingers managed to grasp the scanner just long enough to jam the paper inside of it. The time machine’s screen flashed on, and a handful of buttons feebly echoed in response.

  Either asphyxiation from the wind, debris from the ship, or the total collapse of time and space caught up with her. Either way, she found herself sinking into a cold and impenetrable darkness.