I began the short walk back to my house alone while listening to music. It was a sunny but cool day. The breeze rustled the leaves of the old oak trees. I strolled by the familiar houses. Some had big windows and picket fences, some had weathered stone walkways leading to brightly painted doors. I liked that about our neighborhood, every house had something unique. I made it to my house and saw my mom planting petunias in our garden. Our house had flower-filled window boxes and our two cats, Sonny and Cher, were lying sleepily in the yard.

“Hi mom,” I said, as she turned around with a smile on her face and grass stains on her jeans.

“Hi, sweetie! How was school?”

“Good, nothing new,” I replied in typical teenage fashion. “Sounds exciting,” she said with a playful eyeroll. She moved her dark hair out of her face and turned back to the garden, “There are snacks for you in the fridge”. I thanked her and went inside. I had the same dark hair as my mom which I had worn in a ponytail that day, and I let it down the second I walked through the door. I went to my room and shut the door.

I have a small stack of records I’ve collected over the years, many were gifts, and some I bought myself. I decided to listen to Paul Anka’s 21 Golden Hits. The song that began to play was “Diana”. It’s from 1957 and it was one of the songs my grandma loved to listen to. It always brought her back to her teenage days. She would tell me about her friends, boyfriends, and all the things she did as a teenager. I sat on the edge of my bed and reminisced about the stories my grandma told me. I flopped backward expecting to land on my bed, but it wasn’t there. I felt myself tumble backward and I began to fall, fast, so fast that everything around me was a blur of colors. The world was spinning at an incredible speed, and I kept falling faster. The song was still playing, but it was amplified now, it felt like the music was inside of me. Suddenly the spinning stopped and the song slowed down, but I couldn’t move. It was as though I was trying to swim in an ocean of thick mud. This only lasted for a few seconds. Everything sped up again and with “Diana” still playing, I landed on my feet.

I tried to wrap my head around what had just happened, but I couldn’t. I looked around and found that I was in a small bathroom stall. I could hear the song playing and people talking outside of the bathroom I was in. I still had my phone in my pocket with the earbuds plugged in. I frantically pulled it out of my pocket. When I turned it on, it had no service so I couldn’t call anyone. I slowly unlocked the stall door. In front of the stalls were sinks and a large mirror. I walked out of the bathroom and a few girls walked in, each carrying a pair of roller skates by the strings. Some of them were wearing short flowy skirts. Another girl was wearing a pair of high-waisted shorts and a button-down top. They looked as though they had walked out of a movie, set in the 50s. I looked completely out of place in my hoodie and jeans. They were talking very excitedly about something and didn’t notice me. I pretended to fix my hair in the mirror.

“Just go out with him already!”

“Oh I can’t, you know how my parents are.”

“Well, you could just not tell them...”

“Grace, that’s lying.”
“Oh come on Nettie! It’s not a big deal.”

I whipped my head around to look at the girl who was called Nettie. She looked over and made eye contact with me. Nettie? No, that can’t be her, I thought. The other girls paid no attention to me and didn’t seem to notice that their friend Nettie was looking at me. She looked past me into the mirror and twirled a blonde ringlet with her finger.
“I don’t know, I’ll think about it. Just go back out there, ill be there in just a minute,” she said.

The other girls left the bathroom and Nettie stayed. “Do I know you?” she asked. I stared at her blankly for a moment. “What year is it?” I asked. “1957,” she said with her brow furrowed. My jaw dropped. 1957? I must be dreaming. This can’t be possible, I thought. “Is this really happening?!”

She grabbed my arm and pulled me into one of the stalls.

“You’re not from here, are you?”

“No…I’m not from this year! You’re my grandma!”

Without thinking, I threw my arms around her and gave her a squeeze. Reluctantly, she hugged me back.

“In the future, you’re my grandma. I don’t know how I’m here, I didn’t mean to come here, and I need to get back,” I explained.

“Woah… that’s why you seem so familiar. Listen; the same thing happened to me! I was listening to classical music, and this crazy thing happened then before I knew it, I was at a place in the 1700s where classical music was playing,” she said with wide eyes.
“Me too! I was listening to Paul Anka and suddenly, I was here, and “Diana” was the song that was playing. Do you know how I can get back?”

“All you have to do is listen to a song that played during your time, and if you imagine what was going on in that moment, you’ll go back.”

I thought for a moment. It shouldn’t be too hard to get back, maybe I could stay for a little while.

“I don’t think I want to go back yet,” I said.

She held up her skates and asked me with a smile, “Wanna skate?”

We walked out of the bathroom and into the rink. There was a disco ball in the middle of the room, and bright neon lights decorating the ceiling. The classic roller-skating songs were booming through the rink. She led me to a counter where I could rent a pair of skates. I stood at the counter but was completely ignored by the man behind it. “They can’t see you,” Nettie told me. She rented a pair for me. We stepped onto the rink and talked as if we were old friends while we skated. She was quite the expert in skating, she could skate backward, spin around, and skate on one leg; I never knew my grandma was so good at roller skating.

“Nettie, who’s the boy that your friends were telling you to go out with?”
She slowed down to match my speed and pointed to a brown-haired boy with wire-rim glasses. “What’s his name?” I asked. “Stanley,” she said. Stanley? My grandpa’s name. Nettie must be in high school right now. I knew they met when they were young, but not this young.
“Nettie, you have to talk to him. I don’t know if it has to be right now, but you have to end up with him at some point. Just trust me.”

“Oh my, do I still know him in the future?” She asked eagerly.

“Well, I don’t want to spoil it for you,” I joked. She giggled excitedly.
She went over to talk to the boy, Stanley, whom I knew she would end up spending the rest of her life with. I didn’t want the future to be different, and I didn’t want to change the course of my life or worse, hers. I told her as little as possible about what her future would be like. I sat on a bench watching people go by.

Nettie came back and sat on the bench next to me. “I’m really glad I was able to talk to you,” I told her. She smiled at me, and it filled my heart with happiness to be able to see her familiar face. I needed to go back before I accidentally changed the course of time. I pulled out my phone and earbuds. “This is a phone,” I told her, “Just don’t try to invent it or anything, someone else is going to do that,” I said with a smile. I held the button to turn on my phone. The only thing that showed up was a symbol of an empty battery.

“It’s dead.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I can’t listen to the music from my time if it’s dead, I need a charger,” I explained.

“What if we can play the music, like with instruments?”

A light bulb went off in both of our heads. We rushed to the radio room where they controlled the music in the rink, in hopes that they maybe had a guitar or some kind of instrument. The man inside looked bewildered when we crashed through the door. He began to tell us that we couldn’t be in there, but we ignored him. “We need to use a guitar, right now, it’s very important!” Nettie explained. She rushed in and grabbed an acoustic guitar. She thanked him on the way out and didn’t give him a chance to tell us not to use it. We ran to the bathroom and we both went into the largest stall.

“Okay, what song?” She asked.

I thought about the times I had spent with my family while we were listening to music. I had many to choose from so I chose the most recent moment where music was involved. I tried to think of a time I had listened to a song that she might already know. If I teach her a song from my time could it change her life or worse; all of music history?

“Can you play Book of Love?” I asked her, hoping the answer was yes.

“By the Monotones? Duh!”

I gave her a hug and we said our goodbyes. I couldn’t believe that all of this had just happened, but I was so glad it did.

“Maybe I’ll see you again,” she said. “You probably will,” I told her with a big smile.

She began to play the song on the guitar, and I pictured myself and my family around a fire in our backyard. My dad played “The Book of Love” while my mom and I sat around the fire, the night before I accidentally ended up in a different year. Nettie played the song, and I could hear my dad’s voice in my memory.

I felt myself falling again and the world spun into millions of swirling colors. It was much less frightening this time. When I opened my eyes, I was home. I had never been happier to be in my own backyard. I was sitting in front of our fire as if I had been there all along. I thought about my grandma in a new light. Now I knew that she would always be there and that she’s the one I’ll always go through time with.