This was Royal Valley, all right. Most of the buildings were still there, but everything was painted in a color of difference. It wasn’t just the giant stereos people carried on their shoulders, or the sassy poses they struck as they chatted with friends on the corners, or that no one was texting. It was also the air; it definitely smelled worse.

“I’d tell you everything right now, but you’re probably so mystified by all this that you wouldn’t take anything in. Let’s start slow like. Your head okay?”

He felt it again, nodded, and breathed out, “That guy fired a shotgun at me…”

“Yeah, I dunno why the portal chose my apartment. Then again, maybe it just picked me, and one of its previous inhabitants happened to be a murderous psycho.”

“Is this really happening…? We went… twenty-five years into the past?”

“You can still do math, after getting a little rattled. That’s a good sign.”

They turned a corner, and a used car lot came into view. It was little more than a dirt plot with cars on top in between two actual buildings. At first, Jace thought he was reading another language as he deciphered the lettering on the fluttering banner.

“Ol’ ‘Onest Odie… Yep,” Wes said. “Dunno about the word in the middle, but he closes fast and takes cash. See that one?” He pointed to a once-green, rusted old 1978 AMC Gremlin. “That’s the car I had last time. Not making that mistake again.”

They walked between some yellow balloons and onto the lot. The small brick shack ahead had large, wall-sized windows that gave them a look inside, where two middle-aged balding men in checkered suits were meeting with other customers.

“Aw, there she is.” Wes stopped in front of a much newer 1987 Honda Accord, its light blue paint job intact. “Came really close to getting it before, but someone else got to it just as I had the money. Good thing Dad taught me how to use a stick.”

Jace took notice of how rectangular all of the cars were, but at the moment, still couldn’t take in too much at once. He followed his uncle up to the entrance under the shady overhang, where he turned to him and then dug into his pockets.

“Here.” He handed him a quarter and a dime. “Get yourself a soda and wait for me. This is just boring adult stuff. Soak in what you see, relax—but don’t go anywhere. Should only take a half-hour or so. Then we’ll head to the mall and I’ll explain all this.”

“Y-yeah…” Jace mouthed. “Okay.”

He took the change and was left alone. He soon waddled up to the Coke machine—one of the ancient ones, from the 1960s. At 25 cents, it was the cheapest he had ever seen a can of sugary beverage. He dropped the coins in and got a Sprite, which rattled around loudly before it hit the slot, and was only a little cold.

He slid down the side of the building and sat on the pavement, where he opened up his drink and began to take sips. He recognized this street corner. The space would later become a Rite Aid, and even that was around since long before he was born.   

Unable to think about the bigger questions like the how and the why, Jace only focused further on his surroundings and those walking by. So much denim. If people weren’t wearing jeans, they at least had it in their vests, many of which had colorful buttons or sewn patterns. Backwards baseball caps were also a common sight.

He became conscious of his own clothes, and how “solid” they looked. His shirt, shorts, and coat were sleek and simple, free of imagery or unneeded puffiness. And his shoes—a pair of white Converses—looked small and tame in comparison to most of the local footwear. He now realized that here, his uncle’s retro outfit made him fit in.

After finishing up his drink and snapping out of his defensive meditative state, he took out his phone and checked for a signal. No service at all. He went into his photo album and looked at the most recent one of him and his mom, at a baseball game.

“Let’s go,” Wes said once he emerged after some more time passed, with a key in one hand. “And be careful with that. It’s probably worth… like, ten billion dollars here. Some company could probably reverse engineer it, advance tech by years, become a monopoly, and all of a sudden the singularity’s happening back in our time. Or worse.”

Jace pocketed it and went with Wes to their new car, which started on the first try. He smiled, felt the dashboard, buckled up, and tossed his case in the back.

“Mom says I’m too young for the front seat…” Jace said as pulled at his seatbelt.

“No worries. Your side doesn’t have an airbag, and I don’t plan on crashing.” The tires squealing, Wes took off down the road and asked, “So, you uh, you starting to acclimatize some? You know, at least kind of accept what’s going on?”

Jace shook his head. “Not really, no…”

“Ah, don’t worry. Took me a while, too. At first.”

“You keep saying you did this before…”

“Yeah, ’cause I did! It was great. Did all sorts of crazy things. I’ll tell you how it went in a bit. Here’s the thing. I had you watch all three of those movies, to give you something of a primer about time travel. I still dunno how differently it works in real life, but the short of it is, we don’t want to mess around too much with the past—you know, change things. Especially when it concerns the young version of me and your mom. We’re altering things just by being here, but a full-blown paradox would probably not be good for either of us. Follow my lead and take it one step at a time for a while.”

“Why… did you bring me with you?”

“Well, gee, maybe I just wanted to spend some time with ya? Most weekend getaway ideas bore the crap out of me, but this is something special, right here. You and the old me—we’re just about the same age right now! It was perfect timing!”

“The same age…”

“Yeah! You get to see the world I saw at ten, while being just past ten yourself! Kind of works out pretty well, doesn’t it? And maybe when we’re all done with this journey, you’ll, uh, you’ll take something away from it. Learn some stuff.”

Jace watched the landscape outside as it transitioned from the taller downtown buildings to the miles of suburbs, and eventually to the strip malls beyond them.

And then the large neon palm tree marquee of the Westfield Royal Valley Mall appeared, although at this point in time, it was simply known as the “Valley Mall”. The exterior and the parking lot and its lights hadn’t changed, though it was all much cleaner.

Once they were inside, Jace felt like he had left a time capsule and entered a place where time didn’t exist. There were different stores, sure, but other than some extinct chains and a skylight of an older design, the mall was identical to the one he knew.

“Didn’t come here a lot on my previous visit,” Wes said as they headed to the food court. “It’s cool seeing old stores that aren’t around anymore, but it isn’t all that much ‘past-y’ otherwise. If you wanna see 90s teens, though, this is where you go.”

“It’s pretty empty right now,” Jace observed.

“Oh, yeah. Forgot to tell you—this is a Tuesday. Even during summer, you’re not gonna find too many people here on a late Tuesday morning. So… let’s get some early lunch and hang out. You… want more pizza? The Sbarro’s still around right now.”

Feeling like he had little appetite, Jace shook his head.

The Grande Court, where the food lived, was even more spacious, as it had yet to get its space-consuming carousel. Like the rest of the mall, it even smelled the same, and so far felt like the most familiar place. Out of the ten restaurant options, only three still existed twenty-five years later. Wes wasn’t hungry either, so he ended up with just a soda and a mall pretzel, while Jace settled for a scoop of ice cream.

“So… Do you want to start asking questions, or should I just start talking?” Wes asked after dipping a pretzel piece into his cup of gooey cheese.

Jace opened his mouth to speak, but couldn’t find the words, so he instead stuck in a tiny amount of ice cream. Wes took a sip of his drink and took a deep breath.

“Man, this mall Pepsi… Some things just never change in taste. Okay. Here’s the rundown. I literally found that portal in my pantry door yesterday morning.”

“You mean, like… On the day you came over?”

“Yep. And technically, I was at your place before I even originally found it.”

“Okay, back up. What did you do? Did you make a way to travel back in time?”

“What? Do I look like Christopher Lloyd, strike you as an eccentric inventor? I have no idea where that thing came from, or why it’s on one side of the door and the exit is on the other. I just happened to drop something while making breakfast and saw it go straight through. I stuck my hand into the wood and watched it disappear. Then I stuck my phone in, took a picture, and brought it back to the present. I saw the old version of my apartment—the one with the maniac. Naturally, the next step of the scientific study was to, ya know, stick my head in and look for myself.

“That guy’s TV? It had a morning news story on, about the NASDAQ hitting a thousand for the first time the previous day—boring stock market stuff you don’t need to worry about. Point is, back in the present, I Googled when that happened and I got to place the date. This is July 18^th, 1995. We come in at 8:08 in the morning.”

“So… You mean it’s always the same time when we come through?”

“Seems that way. The news repeated itself every time I looked in, so there’s that. When I finally stepped through all the way for the first time and just tried to, you know, look around—like in the fridge, on the newspaper on the table, or through the window, the Dick Cheney living there always eventually came running in to shoot at me. I would duck back into my time, right in front of him, and just to make sure he couldn’t follow me, I’d jump back through for just a second to ‘reset’ his, uh, his hourglass.”

“But why does time reset?”

“Why would I know that? I can only tell you what I’ve experienced, bud. All I get is that this thing works like it did in that Stephen King JFK show Hulu put out a few years ago, where a guy goes into the past to save Kennedy, but his ‘save file’ gets erased if he goes back to the past a second time. Wait, do you even know who Kennedy is?”

Jace took a bigger bite of ice cream and answered, “He was the president who got shot in Texas, I think.”

“Yeah…” Wes sighed. “That was his only accomplishment. It’s not like he started our space program or anything.”

Jace shrugged and just looked at his uncle, waiting for more answers.

“When you come back after going all the way in, you also reset the present. I actually reappear before I even discover the portal for the first time, about two hours earlier. I have to reach in first and knock down my pantry shelves, or I’d probably warp into and fuse with them, or something really nasty like that.”

“But what do these times have to do with anything?”

“The one in the present? No idea. But… the one we came in through? When I was here last, I started writing in a journal. You know, to keep track of things, daily events, make notes, that kind of stuff. It took some digging, but after a year, I—”

Jace choked on one of his sprinkles. “A year?! You spent an entire year here?”

“It was great! I did and saw so much, man! After I went to Independence Day the following July—basically the ultimate 90s movie in my opinion—I decided to end things on a high note and head home. And then I wanted to show you all this.

“Things did start crappily, though. When I first realized what year the portal led to and saw my chance to escape the mundane and pointless existence I was living, I was a little too anxious to get started, and didn’t prepare too much. Basically just raided the coin jar and took out all the quarters from 1995 or earlier—so I could actually use them without breaking the universe. Came in with about ten bucks in change. Not nearly enough to survive on. But I got by… somehow, with my charm and charisma.”

“Uh-huh… So, you probably conned people.”

Wes pleaded the fifth and continued, “I wanted my second trip to be more comfortable, so I made my notes and brought a few things. Like some… knowledge of where the stock market will go. Now don’t freak out, okay? I’m not aiming to pull a Biff and get rich. I just want enough to get by, without having to work for it. And I used the ‘technology of the future’ to get us some fake IDs and backgrounds. I also stuck all the cash I earned last time into a box in the bank so I could use properly dated bills.”

Jace thought for a second and raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure that money’s still in your case? I mean, if you reset time to before you earned them, then…”

“You’re a smart kid, but yeah, I checked and they’re still there. Don’t ask me how all this time-space-causality junk works. Maybe they were duplicated. Anyway, I learned that the moment that King Arcade turned its main power on for the first time, was also when the time gate appeared. Park doesn’t officially open until Saturday, though.”

“That’s… weird,” Jace said and finished his ice cream.

“It could just be a coincidence, but I dunno. Whenever the portal on this side came into existence, it also sent one into the future, at exactly 6:14 A.M., right on my pantry door. And I found it soon after. That’s all I know about the hole itself.”

“But what if you’re the reason we’re here, on this exact day? Like, you found this thing, and it sensed your burning desire for this year, so it sent you back to it?”

“I don’t think rips in the fabric of time and space are sentient beings out to fulfill wishes, Jace. I didn’t make the hole in my door or choose its destination. Not that I’m complaining. If I got to go back to just one year in the decade, yes, I’d choose this one.”

“I dunno.” Jace slumped into his chair. It felt like his shorts suddenly became lighter, but he ignored it and asked, “What’s so great about this decade, anyway? I’m kinda tired of seeing Tumblr posts from 90s kids, talking about how awesome it was and how anyone younger than them ‘just doesn’t get it.’ Whatever ‘it’ is.”

“Well, what’s so great about 2020? And we’re not all like that. I’m not some hipster dou—er, d-bag who goes on espousing how this decade was better than any of the other ones, but it was still my childhood. You can’t blame me for wanting to go back. Oh, and be careful with your words. No one knows what ‘social media’ is yet.”

“Who says it’s great? I dunno if it is yet. Not like I chose when to be born.”

“Okay, so look, I’m not crapping all over your generation just ‘cause you first logged in on a specific year. But we were the last one to have a number attached. Like, what are you, a ‘ten’s kid’? Doesn’t work. And you, what, you and your contemporaries will be known for your dedication to spending all day upvoting memes, misspelling the word ‘lose’ online, and making anime character art in Minecraft 2?”

Jace glared at him. Minecraft didn’t even have a sequel, yet.

“I’m kidding. I won’t insult you and everyone your age on this adventure. Much. Come on, let’s check out the mall, and I’ll try to tell you why it’s pretty cool being here."