Spotlight: What Time is it There? By Christine Potter
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Just over a year ago, Bean and Zak headed for colleges two thousand miles apart, promising to write, but to see other people … until Bean fell for the wrong guy and Zak fell off the planet.
Now, Bean’s got two weeks’ worth of Zak’s year-old letters that she still can’t bear to open—and a broken heart. Her new best friend, a guy named Amp, wants her to read the letters and be done with it, but he may have his own reasons for that.
When Sam shows up at Bean’s school unexpectedly and Bean tumbles into the 19th century from the cellar of a ruined church, things start making a bizarre kind of sense. That is, if she can just fit all the pieces together again…let's see--there's a cult...and the Flying Singing Angel With No Feet...and of course, The Grateful Dead...
Excerpt
And then something in the morning light dimmed—a cloud in front of the sun?
No. A shadow. Someone else was in the church with her.
“Bean?” he said. “Hey, Bean. Behind you. Up here!”
That voice was familiar, too—so much that it turned her heart inside-out. Bean spun around and looked up into the heavily carved cherry pulpit where Lucia’s father gave his sermons each Sunday. Grasping its edges was someone with long, silver-blonde hair…wearing a purple and blue tie-dye t-shirt.
Zak.
Bean gasped. This is wrong, she thought. This has to be wrong. But she ran to him anyway.
“Check it out!” he said, leaning over the pulpit’s well-polished edge. He leaned forward, caught her hands, and squeezed them. “Pretty bizarre, huh?”
Bean didn’t even know when she’d started to cry. Zak’s smile and his steel-blue eyes blurred in her tears. Rules! she thought. This is not okay. It isn’t. She remembered Crow…and danger…but, no. This was Zak! Zak, after all this time, right in front of her, touching her, close enough to…close enough to kiss, she thought, and felt the heat rising in her cheeks.
She couldn’t burden him with her worries. She didn’t want to think about them, herself. Gnats buzzed outside and the sun came in golden through the stained glass windows.
“Oh, Zak! Oh, wow!” Bean said. Her voice sounded choked and shaky in the reverberant church.
“Yeah,” said Zak. “Just look at you, woman!”
“You’re not really pissed-off at me because…you know?”
He laughed. “It’s not nearly time for that yet. You have to take the manuscript first.”
“What?”
“Edwina’s manuscript. There on the organ. Go on. Take it, woman. Your job is to keep it safe,” he said. He bent further over the pulpit until his face was next to hers. His lips were warm and dry on Bean’s forehead when he kissed her. “Grab that music.” She raised her face to kiss him back properly…
…and then she was standing in the cellar of a building that wasn’t there anymore, looking up at a bright, cold sky above her. Bean wondered for a minute if she’d fallen, but she hadn’t. No scrapes or bruises. Something that had been dead for a long time was breathing again inside of her. She’d seen Zak!
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About the Author
Christine Potter is a writer and poet who lives in a very old (haunted) house on a creek in Rockland County. She has an organist/choirdirector husband (Ken) and two spoiled tom cats. One of the house's two ghosts lives in the room behind her office.
Christine's newest book is a YA time travel novel, What Time Is It There? (The Bean Books, Book 3), newly released by Evernight Teen. The first book in the series is Time Runs Away With Her, and the second is In Her Own Time.
Her two poetry collections are Zero Degrees at First Light (2006) and Sheltering in Place (2013). She has also had poems published in Rattle, Fugue, The Irish Examiner, HOOT, Eclectica, and The Pedestal, among other magazines. Her third book of poems, Unforgetting, is due out this spring from Kelsay Books.
