Though Jace appreciated getting to go to a few of the stops along the way, like the Best Buy where his uncle spontaneously bought a new iPad to replace his really old one, most of the twelve places visited over the day bored him out of his mind. There was the bank, where Wes made took a few smaller containers out of his safety deposit box, and then the drug store, where he picked up a bag full of over the counter products along with a bottle of pills for his lone prescription, for his high blood pressure.

They had lunch at the oldest McDonald’s in town as it began to rain, out near the derelict railroad tracks. Wes then made Jace wait in the car as he paid a visit to what must have been an old friend’s house. The last stop was the former candy store near his apartment, where he emerged with a pricey combination lock attaché case.

“Got a good deal on this beauty,” he said and patted its metal exterior before backing out of the roadside parking space. “And with that, we’re all done!”

“So, what was all that?” Jace asked. “Are you robbing a place or something?”

“Ha ha. No. Just making some preparations. For the weekend.”

Jace grumbled. “I don’t want to be a part of whatever illegal junk you’re about to do with, like, your card buddies or whoever.”

Wes laughed. “You got quite an imagination. Or you watch too much TV.”

After returning to the apartment with a locked case full of “supplies” in hand at around five o’clock, Wes took out his cell phone and prepared to dial a number.

“What do you want on your pizza?”

“Like, from Pizza Hut? Mom’s gonna be mad enough already that you fed me McDonald’s today. Even if I did only get a salad.”

“No, no. Don’t get me wrong, I grew up on that stuff and still order from them every blue moon, but I’m talking about the good product. From the fancy pizzeria down the street. And we are not having a movie night without pizza.”

“Fine. Grilled chicken and spinach on my side.”

“Do kids rag on you for being even just a little health conscious?” Wes asked and punched in the digits. “Not that I am. I don’t judge. Unless it’s something really stupid.”

“They make fun of me for a lot of things,” Jace groaned.

Jace then saw the scattered, plastered-over holes in the wall next to the front door frame and ran his hand over them, having never noticed them before.

An hour later, uncle and nephew were scarfing down slices from a box of the Valley’s finest pie as Marty and Doc Brown were reunited in the past. Wes saw it as a miracle that a movie from the previous century had kept Jace’s attention—at least for the most part. Every so often, he’d check his phone or text someone, but for a modern eleven-year-old, he was being fairly diligent on his movie-watching responsibilities.

Wes, however, having watched the franchise dozens of times, kept busy with his new tablet and only looked at the screen intermittently, when he wasn’t tapping away.

“Your wi-fi really sucks,” Jace said following a post-pizza crust belch, his eyes solidly on his phone during a slower moment in the film. “I can’t even connect to this.”

“Sorry, little dude. I happen to be downloading a lot of… things right now. What are you trying to accomplish over there, anyway?”

Jace gave up and leaned back into his side of the couch. “I just wanted to check my profile for one of the social games I’m on.”

“Don’t you have any offline games on that thing? Not that you should be playing it right now. Doc’s about to give Marty another important lesson.”

“No one makes completely ‘offline’ games for phones anymore.”

“Doesn’t surprise me. And I suppose they’re all free, too, until you start putting hundreds on your mom’s credit card for a bunch of virtual chairs or something.”

“Do you complain about everything younger than you? You sound like a fogey.”

Wes laughed off the comment, and the night went on until the trilogy was concluded and it was nearing midnight. Of course, Jace complained that it was “too early.” And while Wes agreed, he added that they also had to get up early. Relatively.

“So, you got any questions about the series? Anything you didn’t get?” he asked Jace, settling into the just-cleaned bed, with his arms all stretched out.

“I ‘got’ all of it, but I have two questions. Why are Marty and the Doc friends?”

“Heh, yeah, no one really knows. Not like it matters to the story.”

“Also, why did 2015 look nothing like that, from the second movie?”

“Wishful thinking. Would’a been a pretty badass future if they had gotten it right though, huh? They didn’t predict smart phones turning us into zombies, either.”

Jace let out his final sigh for the night and rolled over in bed. Taking that as his cue, Wes turned off the light and went back to the living room—to finish preparing.

• •

Jace later woke up to the sound of his uncle moving around the apartment at eight in the morning. After unplugging his charged phone, he got up and looked into the kitchen as he rubbed his eyes, to find Wes finishing off the last two slices of pizza straight from the toaster oven tray and reading something off of his tablet.

“Wow…” Jace yawned. “Mom would never let me have pizza… for breakfast.”

“Food is food,” Wes reasoned. “Besides, I want the taste to linger for as long as possible. I’m gonna miss Mediterro. No one makes pizza quite the same way.”

“Miss it? Is it closing or something? Hey, when are you taking me home?”

“Pretty soon. Just might not seem that way. Jace, get dressed and make sure everything you brought is in your backpack. We got one more thing to do.”

Jace gave Wes a curious look before heading into the bathroom to change.

After reading one last news article and getting caught up with the present, Wes went to the kitchen window and gulped down the rest of his coffee. This was the oddest it had felt to him so far as greeting a new day went, and it had been a long time coming.

After Jace emerged in the same clothes he had on yesterday, Wes went in and cleaned up as best he could. He then found his nephew waiting by the door, ready to go.

“Our next destination isn’t out there, buddy. Come on, follow me.”

Jace did so reluctantly, worried that Wes was about to be weird. It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary, and he had already changed into tacky and outdated clothes.

In the kitchen, Wes held open the pantry’s heavy, dark red wooden door with the hand not carrying his metal case. He had emptied the tiny closet of its food and shelves.

“Whatever you’re trying to make me do, I’m not going in there.”

“You’re just going to have to trust me on this one. This will be really cool.”

“No way.” Jace crossed his arms. “Not gonna happen.”

“Okay, look, I’ll give you fifty bucks if you just stand in this pantry for a second.”

Jace thought about it for another second and then walked right in without a word. Wes closed the door, took a deep breath, and tested something by moving his hand forward. Of course, in complete darkness, his nephew couldn’t see anything.

“All right, it’s still there,” Wes said. “I want you to do exactly what I say. Stick by me, but get ready to run. And also… Say goodbye to 2020.”

“W-wait, what? What the heck are you—”

Wes placed both of his hands on the overstuffed backpack and shoved, pushing the boy straight out of the pantry and back into the light. Unable to keep balance, he launched his arms out to keep himself from hitting the floor.

“Grr…” he growled angrily and looked back, expecting to see his uncle standing above him, laughing like a frat boy. “You jerk, what did… you…”

He had trailed off upon seeing the strangely colored door still shut. Wondering what Wes was playing at, he twisted back around to push himself up, but then noticed the kitchen tile—the checkerboard pattern was a completely different color. He looked up again, to see an unfamiliar living room past the arched entryway. The smell of smoke entered his lungs, along with the blaring sound of the old tube TV a few dozen feet away, blasting out the morning news brought in through the rabbit ears on top.

“Hon, did you hear something?” a woman’s voice suddenly shouted from another room. “Sounded like someone’s in the kitchen.”

A moment later, she emerged, in a bathrobe and with curlers in her hair. She paused, stared at Jace for a second, and let out a shrill scream before running off.

“This is when we run,” Wes said, suddenly behind Jace. “These two are crazy.”

He helped him off the floor, and before Jace could begin to comprehend any of what was happening, the bearded, smelly, tank top-wearing husband emerged, an old and greased up double-barreled shotgun already in his hands.

“Just how in the hail did you two get in her’?”

“C’mon, kid!” Wes grabbed his hand. “I’m sure he isn’t afraid to shoot you, too.”

“W-what’s going on?!” Jace stammered as he was pulled through the secondary kitchen entrance, which led to the hallway for the bedroom and bathroom.

“Don’t talk. We just have to focus on getting out of here.”

“Son of a bitch!” the man yelled. “Babe, we got two robbers in the house, must’a climbed in through the kitchen winda! I think one of ‘em’s a dwarf!”

“A-a dwarf?” Jace said, exasperated as he caught a glimpse of his uncle’s bedroom, now with a bare, stained mattress and a freaked-out screaming woman inside.   

 “Almost there…” Wes said, having gotten himself and Jace up to the front door.

He worked on the chain lock and deadbolt, as Jace felt a panic attack coming.

“Damn lock’s stuck again…” Wes grumbled. “Crap, hold on, I can fix this.”

He began elbowing the doorknob to knock it back into place, his nephew having no idea how to define this chaos, but at least knowing that they had to escape this place.

“He—he’s going to shoot us!” Jace exclaimed.

Wes stopped going at the door, saw that the tenant was taking aim at them with his shotgun, and then noticed where Jace was standing—as did the boy himself. It was right where the plastered holes had been in his uncle’s version of the apartment.

Right as one of the triggers of the shotgun clicked, Wes jolted up and covered Jace’s face with his sturdy metal case. The blast went off, hitting the aluminum shell and knocking it backward, smacking Jace in the forehead. It hurt some, but probably not as much as it could have had the case not been there at all. The gun owner, unprepared for the recoil and already having trouble with his balance, was knocked down to the floor.

Jace could feel his body becoming a statue and stammered, “W-w-wha…”

“Screw it, I’ll never figure this knob out,” Wes said and smashed it with his case.

It nearly broke off completely, and the door swung open. Before Shotgun Guy got himself back up amid his swearing, Wes took Jace under his arm and ran outside, into the hot morning air. After rushing down the concrete stairs and bounding across the shoe-melting parking lot, he stopped to catch his breath on the sidewalk.

“Dang, look at that…” Wes commented, rubbing the fresh impact crater on the case. “He just missed me last time. Forgot you might’a been standing there. Sorry, kid.”

“W-what is going on?!” Jace screamed and pulled at his hair. “Where—”

“When,” Wes immediately corrected. “Take a good look around!”

“T-that guy almost shot my face off, and you’re calm about all this?”

“Oh, no, no. My heart’s beating like a racehorse. I forgot how intense that is!”

“What… I don’t… What is even… Uh…” Jace breathed and slowed down as his senses began to return and his eyes tried to process what they were seeing. “What the?”

The apartment building was bright pink. The people wandering around outside or shouting at others from the second floor were dressed in loud colors and had all manner of hairstyles that Jace had never seen on anyone in real life. He turned around when a convertible with chrome rims passed by, blasting out music about growing up in the ‘hood’, wherever that was. Then he looked down from the hill, at the city below.

His mouth dropped open. This was still Royal Valley, but definitely not 2020.

On a billboard: an ad for a show called Seinfeld. On the skyline under a cloudless sea of blue: three boring office towers instead of four. On the feet and wrists of passing teenagers: giant shoes, and watches with a built-in calculator number pad. On a run-over tabloid in the road next to a bright red streetcar passing by: a sensationalist headline about a man on trial. Someone named Simpson. The city was a big bizarre time capsule.

“Man, I thought I’d be able to get out of there without being shot at if I took the hallway instead,” Wes said, dusting himself off. “Guess not. Oh, and don’t worry about him coming out and chasing us around. We won’t see him again.”

“U-Uncle Wesley… What did you do? W-where did you bring me?”

Wes smiled and whistled the first three notes of the Back to the Future theme.

“Jace…” he put his hand on his shoulder and swept over the cityscape in an aggrandizing way with his other, attaché case-laden hand, “you’re in 1995, bud!”

“This has to be some kind of joke… W-we didn’t… We didn’t just go…”

“Back in time? Yeah, man! We totally did! And it’s all the same, too! This is the exact moment that I arrived the first time. Ah, it’s great to be back. Again.”

“H-how…” Jace rubbed his throbbing forehead. “This is… This is crazy.”

“I know. Yeah, it is. Come on­—I’ll explain everything, but we gotta take care of something important first. There’s a used car lot just down the road. And this time, I brought moooo-lah!” He held up the damaged case and patted it. “C’mon, let’s go.”

His legs shaking and his mind muddled, Jace followed behind, sticking by his guardian like a frightened, confused child—which, to be fair, he was at the moment.