Squint is finally settling back into his old life again, trying to pick up where he left off.  His friends notice a change in his personality but none of them can explain it.  He's just glad to be back in his own native era.

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And if you'd like to start from the beginning of the story, then click here.

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Chapter 34 – Return To Paradise Past

Back in the past, Natalie had left town, and I missed her.  May had moved into Natalie's ex-boyfriends apartment.  Mays ex-husband had her kids.  Betty and I still hung out from time to time, and I was even friends with her new boyfriend.  I still didn’t have a car, and I walked almost every day from my uncles house to Mays new place at Teds apartment, to see May and my friends.  May was where the party was at, and that’s where everybody I knew wanted to hang out.

One day, after somebody was talking about birthdays, somebody else pointed out that everyone in the room was a Capricorn, except for May.  There were a lot of people in the room, and I was surprised.  What where the odds of that?  I wondered.  Ever since then my group of friends just referred to themselves as Mays Capricorn Club.

One time when I was hanging out with Betty in her car at a fast food parking lot, we were both just sitting there, eating cheeseburgers, when we both saw a skateboarder fall over on the sidewalk across the street.  Betty said that she thought she may have caused them to fall with her mind powers.  I told Betty that sometimes I thought I could make street lamps turn on and off just by walking under them.  As soon as I said that it became darker outside.

Betty totally freaked out and asked me if I had seen that.  “See what?” I asked not understanding at first why she seemed upset.  She rolled all the windows up in her car and commented about how it got darker all of a sudden right when I said that about the street lights.  But I looked around and didn’t see any street lights, and I tried to calm her down.  But she was panicking really badly, and drove me home in a hurry right then.  She left me there in my uncles drive way.

Later, I realized that there weren’t any street lights on that side of town.  But then I saw it, one lonely little stub of what used to be a street lamp.  It was just sitting there exactly where it always had been.  It looked like somebody had run over it with a large vehicle and broken the main part of it off from the base.  I began to remember having seen more street lamps around, but I couldn’t remember where exactly.  Could it be that Betty had really seen one of the street lamps disappearing?  I hadn’t really been paying attention when it happened, I was just looking at her.  But whatever she saw that night really scared her.

Then one night, Betty’s new boyfriend, Paul, and May’s new roommate, Ted, came over to see me at my uncles house.  It was a little unusual because I was normally the one who went to see them.  But later that night after they left my place, on the way back to Ted’s apartment they were pulled over by a lot of unmarked undercover police cars, and arrested by one of those 3 or 4 letter ‘alphabet agencies’.

It was in the local newspaper the next day, but the article didn’t say anything about why they had been arrested.  My two friends were held for a few hours and then released.  No other information was given.  When I saw them again I asked them what happened and they told me pretty much the same story as what the newspaper had said.  They both swore that they had no idea why they had been arrested.

Eventually May got her own place in a duplex a few blocks down the road from where I lived.  Now she was neighbors with my other ex-girlfriend, Shari, and Shari's sister Darla, who May had been friends with for years.  In fact, May had been the one who introduced me to Shari.

Shari was really sweet to me, we used to sit on her couch watching anime for hours, just the two of us hanging out together.  But the thing was that Shari and I started dating around the same time that I started dating Betty.  It was like a love triangle.  They knew about each other of course, they were even friends.  At first I kept asking both of them, “Are you sure it’s okay that I'm with Both of you?”  And they both always said “Yeah, I don’t care.”

I asked her if she would stop crying if I called Shari and broke up with her over the phone.  Betty said yes, and so I had to decide.  I just couldn’t stand to see Betty cry though, so I picked up the phone and called Shari.  As soon as she answered the phone she said, “You’re breaking up with me aren’t you?”  I was surprised, but she said she could just tell when the phone rang that it would be me breaking up with her.  I apologized to her, but she said she understood.  Betty started smiling as soon as I hung up the phone with Shari.

I asked her if she would stop crying if I called Shari and broke up with her over the phone.  Betty said yes, and so I had to decide.  I just couldn’t stand to see Betty cry though, so I picked up the phone and called Shari.  As soon as she answered the phone she said, “You’re breaking up with me aren’t you?”  I was surprised, but she said she could just tell when the phone rang that it would be me breaking up with her.  I apologized to her, but she said she understood.  Betty started smiling as soon as I hung up the phone with Shari.

I was still friends with Shari, and now that May was living so close to both of us, I started spending even more time with her again.  I felt close to Shari, she was just so nice to me.  One night, I was riding in Shari's car with her to go pick up her son from his grandma.  It was just the two of us in the car, and I thought maybe I could tell her about that trip I had taken.  I still hadn’t really told anybody about the details, only that I had taken a trip to nowhere in particular for a really bad vacation.  Just as soon as I started to talk about the trip, a white limousine cut us off and sped up in front of us.  I was so surprised to see a white limousine again that I stopped talking immediately.  When Shari asked me what happened next I simply said, “Nothing, nevermind, forget about the whole thing.”

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Did you enjoy reading today's chapter?  Then stay tuned for more tomorrow.

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