J Cooper

                By the time first grade started, Jordan Downing was still the loudest kid in the room. First to interrupt the teacher. First to laugh when someone stumbled over a word during reading time. First to challenge other boys to see who could spit the farthest on the playground.

                 But now… I saw something else in him. Something I had missed the first time around: a flicker of uncertainty behind the bravado. A kid trying to figure out who he had to be to survive a world that wasn’t always kind. This time, I was watching.

I wasn’t trying to retaliate—not waiting for the next cruel prank. I just wanted to steer him. Gently. Like redirecting a paper boat in a shallow stream.

                                                                                –

It started with math. We were paired together for a worksheet on counting by twos and fives. Jordan groaned and started tapping his pencil like a drumstick.

                “I hate this stuff,” he whispered.

                I leaned in. “You know it’s kind of like video game levels, right? Each number’s just another step up. You hit a pattern, and you coast.”

                He blinked. “Like cheat codes?”

                I nodded. “Exactly. Multiples are cheat codes.”

                He looked at the worksheet again, then slowly grinned. “Ohhh… so two, four, six is like a power-up chain.”

                From that point on, he didn’t complain as much.

                                                                                –

                Recess came next, a smaller kid—Caleb, with short blond hair—tried to climb the jungle gym and slipped. Jordan laughed. I felt my stomach twist.

                Old Jordan would’ve laughed harder. Might’ve pointed. Might’ve turned it into a thing that haunted Caleb for months.

                I stepped in. “He didn’t fall,” I said quickly. “He just jumped down like a superhero.”

                Caleb blinked at me. Jordan looked confused. “He did?”

                “Yeah,” I said, helping Caleb up. “Total hero landing. You saw it, right?”

                Jordan stared for a second, then nodded. “Yeah. For sure. Superhero landing.”

                Caleb beamed and ran off. Jordan looked at me. “You do that on purpose?”

                I shrugged. “What?”

                “You made it not suck for him.”

                                                                                           –

                By October, we were hanging out more. Building Lego ships during free time. Swapping pudding cups at lunch. He still had rough edges, but I noticed something new—he listened. When I explained things, even small things, he listened. And he even started sticking up for other kids.

                Once, when another boy mocked someone for crying after a scraped knee, Jordan snapped.

                “Leave him alone,” he said. “It’s not weak. It just hurts.”

                I watched in silence, stunned. That moment hadn’t existed in my first life. That version of Jordan would’ve been the one laughing.

                One afternoon, we sat together in the sandbox, legs crisscrossed, trading fruit snacks and talking about how weird it was that grown-ups never let you pick your own bedtime.

                He was quiet for a bit, then said, “Hey, you’re kinda smart.”

                I froze.

                “Not in a nerd way,” he added. “Just… like you see stuff other people don’t.”

                I didn’t answer right away. I just shrugged. “I just pay attention.”

                Jordan nodded and kicked some sand toward his sneaker.

                “You think I’m gonna be bad when I grow up? My family says I’m going to be bad.” That hit me like a punch to the chest.

                I turned to him. “No. I think you’re gonna be a really good person. You just gotta make the right choices.”

                He blinked, eyes wide and serious. “Like what?”

                I smiled and handed him the last red fruit snack. “Start with this: don’t be the kid who eats all the good ones without sharing.”

                He laughed and popped it into his mouth. “Deal.”

                                                                                *

                That night, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling—the same ceiling I’d grown up under before… but now, it felt different. The room was the same, but something had shifted.

                Because now I knew: change wasn’t about rewriting the past. It was about reshaping the future. If I could help Jordan become someone better—maybe I could help others too. One small, sticky graham cracker moment at a time.

                                                                                –

                At recess, Jordan still ran full-speed into everything—kickball, friendships, mud puddles. He didn’t think before he acted, which probably explained the permanent scab on his knee and the dirt under his fingernails.

But he’d started sitting with me more. Not in the awkward “I guess we’re both alone”  way, but like he actually wanted to be there.

“Wanna build a fort?” he asked one day, holding a handful of twigs like they were rare currency.

                “Sure,” I said, and we got to work under the big pine tree at the edge of the playground.

                He talked the whole time—about cartoons, his dad’s weird collection of bobbleheads, the time he stuck gum in his cousin’s hair and blamed it on a ghost. I mostly listened, nudging him now and then. Made suggestions.

                “Maybe don’t lie to your cousin next time. That was probably really scary for her,” I said lightly.

                He paused. “Yeah… she cried a lot. I felt kinda bad.” Progress.

                                                                                –

                At lunch, I dropped stories like breadcrumbs.

                “Yeah, my brother Patrick helped an injured dog once,” I told him. “He didn’t just walk past. He stayed with it. Got help.”

                Jordan chewed his sandwich slower. “That’s cool.”

                It wasn’t true—not exactly. Patrick wasn’t the stay-and-help type. Not then, anyway. Mostly, he was gone.

                Always gone. He was older than me by a three years, but it felt like decades. In this life, just like the last, he was rarely home. He stayed with cousins, friends, our uncle out in Newport—anywhere but with us.

                When he did show up, it was like a storm—loud, chaotic, and gone before you could get your bearings.

                But I remembered the kid he used to be. The late-night snack raids. The games. The night he held me after Mom lost it again. I missed that version of him.

                Now, he barely looked at me. I wasn’t sure if it was because I seemed different, or because he was just… tired of being in a house that never felt like home. But I was keeping notes. Trying to find a way to reach him too. Jordan, though? Jordan was still in front of me. Still moldable. Still mine to save.

                                                                           _

                One day, a kid named Alex tripped on his shoelaces and dropped his lunch. Jordan laughed. The old Jordan—the one from my first life—would’ve pointed, stepped on his lunch Mocked him and gotten everyone in on the joke. This Jordan stepped forward, knelt down, and helped pick up the sandwich.

                “You okay?” he asked.

                Alex nodded.

                I watched from seat, heart beating harder than it should. A small moment. But seismic to me.

                Later, while we stacked building blocks in the corner of the classroom, I leaned over and said, “That was really cool what you did for Alex.”

                He smiled. “I dunno. I just didn’t feel like being mean.”

                “Keep not feeling like it,” I said.

                He nodded, like it actually made sense.

                                                                                –

                That night, Patrick came home. I heard the door slam. The muttered curse. The shuffle of shoes being kicked off.

                He didn’t say hi. Didn’t even look at me. But I still left a soda and a sleeve of Oreos outside the bedroom door.

                In my previous life, I would’ve barged in. Told him it was my room too. Gone out of my way to annoy him while he played Nintendo. But this time, I was older. Wiser. And not really a kid.

                I had work to do. Plans to make. People to help. Small moves. One brother out of reach. One friend within it. I couldn’t change the whole world in first grade. But maybe—just maybe—I could change one kid at a time.

                Later That Night

                The house was quiet in that weird, uneven way it always was when Patrick came home. Not angry. Not loud. Just… heavy. Like the walls were holding their breath.

                I heard him open the fridge, the crinkle of the Oreo wrapper I’d left by his door, the soft hiss of a soda tab popping open. No thank you. No footsteps toward me. Just the door to the our bedroom clicking shut again.

                I stayed sitting on the floor in the hallway, knees pulled up to my chest, my favorite blanket wrapped around me like armor. I hadn’t meant to stay there long—I just wanted to see if he’d say anything. But now I was stuck in my own silence, listening to the buzz of the ceiling light above me and the clock ticking in the kitchen.

                Eventually, the door cracked open. I looked up. Patrick leaned against the frame, can in hand, his eyes tired in a way that didn’t belong on a teenager. But he already wore the world like it owed him something and never paid up.

                “You still do that weird waiting thing,” he muttered.

                I blinked. “What?”

                “You sit in the hallway. Like a puppy. You did that when you were little. Like you were just… waiting for someone to give a damn.”

                The words hit harder than they should have. Not because they were cruel—but because they were true. I had waited. In both lives.

                “Did I?” I asked softly, pretending not to already know the answer.

                He nodded, then looked down the hall, like the weight of being here again was settling over him.                

                “Why’d you leave this time?” I asked.

                He shrugged. “Mom’s on a warpath. And I hate the way Dad pretends not to notice. It’s like… nobody lives here. Not really.”

                I swallowed the lump rising in my throat. “It’s not just you. I feel that too.”

                He didn’t say anything. But he didn’t leave either. That was something. After a moment, I stood and padded over to him in socked feet. I reached out and gently tugged on the sleeve of his shirt.

                “You could stay,” I said. “Just for a little while.”

                Patrick looked down at me like I was a stranger. But maybe not a bad one. Maybe just… a confusing one. Then he let out a tired breath and reached out, mussing up my hair in the way big brothers do when they don’t know how to say they care.

                “I might,” he said. “No promises.”

                He turned to head back into the room, then paused. “You’re different.”

                I froze.

                “Smarter,” he added. “Less annoying. Still weird, though.”

                He shut the door. But it didn’t feel like a goodbye. It felt like a maybe. And for now, maybe was enough.

                He was right about our parents. They’d been fighting more and more lately, even though they were still trying—and failing—to keep it from spilling into the rest of the house.

                In my previous life, Patrick had once told me he hated being at home, called it boring. But this time? It felt like he actually gave me a piece of the truth. It would be another year before Mom cheated on Dad, before the divorce reshaped everything. I’d wrestled with the idea of warning my dad, of preparing him somehow. But I was still just a kid. Grandma knew a little, but not all the details. I had explained as much as it hurts, we have to let it happen.

                And honestly, there was comfort in knowing what was coming. In not changing too much, too fast. I had Jordan to keep an eye on. A brother who needed me—even if he didn’t know it yet.

By the time kindergarten rolled around, I had almost mastered the art of pretending to be a normal kid. Almost. I knew how to lose at Candy Land without flipping the board. I stopped blurting out movie quotes from films that hadn’t come out yet. And I really tried to stop finishing adults’ sentences just because I already knew how they ended.

But school? That was a different battlefield.

At home, I could get away with being “precocious” or “clever.” My parents chalked it up to natural smarts. Grandma called it “a gifted spirit.” But in a classroom full of five-year-olds who thought triangles had four sides and glue was a gourmet snack? I stood out. And standing out was dangerous.
It started innocently enough—a pop quiz on colors. I finished it in seconds. Then numbers. Then came shapes.

Mrs. Janson, who wore enough perfume to stun a rhino, held up a hexagon and asked, “Can anyone tell me what shape this is?”

Before I could stop myself, I said, “Technically, that’s a regular convex polygon with six equal sides and angles.”

The whole class went quiet. Mrs. Janson blinked. “…Hexagon,” she said slowly.

“Right,” I mumbled, slinking down into my seat. “That’s what I meant.”
From that moment on, she watched me differently. Not with Grandma’s curiosity or warmth, but with concern. Like I was a toddler holding a loaded weapon. Surprised. Wary. A little afraid.
Two weeks later, I was pulled into a quiet little room with a woman in a beige pantsuit and an overly friendly voice.

“We’re just going to play some games today, okay, sweetheart?” she said, pulling out a stack of laminated cards.

I’d been in this room before—just not in this life. This was where they sent the “weird” kids. The ones who didn’t fit into the boxes. In my last life, I was labeled as special needs because of a speech impediment, untreated ADHD, and anxiety I didn’t have the words to explain. I remembered the humiliation. Being pulled from class. The stares. The way adults talked about me instead of to me.

But this time? I had four decades of coping skills. I just had to not screw this up.
I deliberately got a few answers wrong so I wouldn’t come off as some kind of genius. I wasn’t—just someone who remembered everything. I played dumb. Pretended I didn’t know how to spell giraffe, even though I’d once written a research paper on their mating patterns.

But then she asked, “Can you count as high as you can for me?”
And I slipped, “Do you want prime numbers or just whole numbers?”
She blinked. “Just… regular counting is fine.”
I froze. “Oh. Uh… one, two, three…”
I counted to a hundred before I got bored.
Her pen scratched across her notepad like a guillotine.
After that, the school psychologist started sitting in on our class. The principal made too many appearances. I overheard teachers whispering about “gifted testing.”

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept wondering: What if they figured me out? Would they move me to a special school? Scan my brain? Lock me away in some research lab? But the tests came and went.
The school handed my parents a glowing report filled with praise and long acronyms. “Highly intelligent,” it read. “Possible signs of asynchronous development.” Even as an adult, I had never heard that phrase.

So, first chance I got, I looked it up.
Asynchronous development means growing at uneven speeds—like a kid whose brain is ten years ahead, but whose emotions are still learning how to share crayons. It was their explanation for why I seemed gifted… but also off.

They recommended enrichment classes, puzzle-based learning, and extra reading time. Mom beamed. Dad high-fived me and told me how proud he was. Grandma just gave me that long, slow look over her glasses—and said nothing. Later that night, I caught her standing in the hallway, holding something in her hands.

It was my drawing—the one I’d made in crayon with big, blocky letters:
“SPACE SHUTTLE CHALLENGER WILL BLOW UP IN 1986. 7 ASTRONAUTS DIE.”

She still had it. And now, she was just staring at it, like she was remembering that I’d written it a whole year before it happened. Remembering how distraught I’d been after the explosion. She didn’t see me at first. She just stood there, brushing her thumb along the edge of the paper like she was trying to feel the truth in it. Then she noticed me, set the drawing down and hugged me tight.

“Be careful,” she whispered. “I don’t think the world is ready for you yet.”
I stared up at her. “What?”
“You know things you shouldn’t. Even things that haven’t happened yet.”
My throat went dry. “Grandma…”

She pulled back and looked down at me with the same warmth I remembered from the last life. She had always stepped in when Mom was too cruel. Had covered for me. Held me during panic attacks. Sat with me through heartbreak and silence. She had been the mother I never had and here she was again.

“I don’t know how or why,” she said softly. “But you were just a little boy one day… and the next, you weren’t.” So I told her everything.

She listened—quiet, still—and when I finished, she didn’t run. She didn’t call anyone. She didn’t panic. She just hugged me again, and let me cry.

Because for all the fantasy this sounds like, reliving your childhood when no one knows you’ve done it before is lonely. Isolating. I was a middle-aged man in the body of a kindergartner. Hanging out with kids felt… weird and parents didn’t understand or would believe anything I said.

“I believe you,” she said. “I don’t know why. But I do.”
I gave her a few small stock tips. Told her what to buy, when to sell. Nothing outrageous—just quiet security. And then I had to have the hard talk.

I told her that in my previous life, she passed away in 2017. Health complications. So I begged her to take care of herself. I offered to go on walks with her, tempted her by saying I’d tell her more stories about how life unfolded the first time. We talked for over an hour and when I finally went to bed, I realized something I hadn’t dared to hope: I wasn’t alone anymore, I had Binx and I had my grandma. I was building my life. Making small corrections where I could.
And maybe—just maybe—I could do more.

                *

He was smaller than I remembered.
Jordan Downing.
In my old life, he was the first person to ever make me feel worthless at school. The kid who mocked my speech issues relentlessly—something that, thankfully, wasn’t a problem this time around. He made me a social pariah in second grade. He pushed me into a trash can in fifth. He made sure everyone saw when he “accidentally” spilled milk all over my Hobbit book in seventh.
He was hell in a red windbreaker and Velcro shoes and now, he was standing in front of me, holding out a sticky graham cracker.

“Trade?” he asked.

My first instinct was to swat it away. To glare at him with all the fury of a man who’d been humiliated in public, left alone at lunch tables, and talked into silence. I wasn’t the same helpless, scared kid I’d been before. A few years after high school, I got into mixed martial arts, which I studied for three years. Then a buddy convinced me to join him in kickboxing, and I spent another four years training. This time around, I knew how to fight. I wasn’t afraid of getting hit.

But then… I looked again.
He was just a kid. His nose was runny. His smile was honest. He was still around my age—it’d be another year before we started first grade together. And that’s when it hit me like a freight train: He didn’t know who he was going to become. He hadn’t done those things to me yet. He hadn’t hurt me. Not yet and maybe—just maybe—he wouldn’t, if someone reached him before the damage took root.
I took the graham cracker and nodded. “Trade.”

We sat in the sandbox, silent and sticky-fingered, while I wrestled with one heavy, impossible thought: If I could change him… what did that make me? A redeemer? A manipulator? Or just a guy trying to stop the next wave of pain?

By the time I turned three, I was growing more accustomed to my diminutive body. Then, on January 28th, the Challenger exploded. The first time this happened, I’d been too young to really understand. This time, I felt it. I was crushed by an overwhelming sense of loss. Angry that I couldn’t do anything to prevent it. Upset with myself—for trying to do something selfless and failing, I knew it wasn’t my fault. But I felt guilty all the same. It was a hard lesson: sometimes knowledge of the future hurts more than it helps.
There’s something strange about knowing too much when no one thinks you know anything at all. For the most part, I kept my head down. I made harmless predictions. Avoided anything that might scare people. And when I did steer things, I kept it subtle. But then… the ice cream truck showed up. It was one of those little summer staples. Tinny jingle looping on repeat.
Rolling down the street at five miles per hour.
All the neighborhood kids came running—sticky fingers, wrinkled dollar bills—laughing and screaming like the world was perfect. But I knew better.
I remembered the story. One of the younger boys had darted into the street that summer.
I’d been three the first time it happened. I remembered the scream, the blood and the way the ice cream truck never came back. How my dad rushed outside and shielded my eyes before I could see too much. I remembered the funeral.
Now sitting barefoot on the porch steps—three years old again, Flintstones Push-Pop in hand—I watched the same moment begin to unfold. The same boy, the red ball. His distracted mother, the same sprint into the road. I had seconds to react, I didn’t think. I just screamed his name.
Loud. Panicked. A toddler’s shriek, but sharp enough to cut through the noise. The boy froze. His mom turned and caught him just before he could continue towards the street.
The driver braked. Eugene missed the bumper by inches.

 The next few days were... weird. The boy’s mother thanked my mom.
 “He must’ve just sensed it,” she said, “Kids are intuitive like that.”
 But my mom started watching me differently too. Less with warmth. More with... unease.
 “How did you even know that boy’s name?” she asked me later.
 I shrugged and said I had played with him one of the days my dad had taken me to the park. But that moment didn’t feel like a victory. It felt like I’d stepped over a tripwire I hadn’t realized I was near.
 That night, across the dinner table, Grandma gave me a look—just for a second—that told me she knew. She still never said a word about it, or me. Just handed me an extra scoop of macaroni and cheese, which was and still is my favorite. But the way she looked at me when she did, it was like I’d passed some secret test.

 The next morning, I woke up early and sat by the window, watching the sun rise over a world I knew too well. Because that was the cost of knowledge, I could stop a tragedy...

But not the suspicion that followed. And if I wasn’t careful, I knew it was only a matter of time