J Cooper

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