The Butterfly Manifesto

It was November of 1994, and I stood in our TV room just off the entryway of our split-level house. The room contained our old sectional couch in front of our bulky, rear-projection big screen TV. It was also the location of the fireplace which shared a wall with our garage. I was looking at the portrait which hung above the mantel, and though it was a new addition to our house, it was very familiar to me. After all, it had hung prominently in our house for the better part of a decade in my previous timeline.

In Matthew’s timeline, Mom and Dad had us pose for a family portrait. It was a simple composition with Jane, Tim, and Matthew sitting in a line in front of Mom and Dad. Tim and Matthew had worn red dress shirts and Jane wore a little red dress, and we were positioned in a row looking slightly to our right with big smiles. In my current timeline, my parents recently commissioned the portrait with the same photographer and under practically the same circumstances. Retaking the portrait was surreal, and by some quirk the photographer had us in the positions I remembered from Matthew’s timeline.

What was even more bizarre was seeing the new portrait hanging up in its familiar black frame. There were only four of us now, and instead of Matthew’s nerdy, slightly pudgy figure behind Tim, there was me smiling brightly. My brown hair was spilling over my right shoulder and instead of Tim’s red dress shirt, I was wearing a red dress similar to Mom’s. It was eerily similar to the picture that rattled in my memory, but the empty space where Jane should have been was another reminder of the changes in my new timeline. The same familiar world, but a universe away. A compounding of the microscopic shifts that emerged every day.

The changes in my personal life were the most profound, since I was essentially a different person. I certainly remembered Matthew’s experience in eighth grade being miserable and isolated, but that was not true of my life as Maya. Matthew had been an introverted loner, but Maya was fairly popular as well as active in school. I was actually happy in my life; I didn’t know if my happiness was because I liked being female more than male, or if it had to do with my foreknowledge and my adult mindset. It probably helped that I appreciated the opportunity I had been given; to be able to experience my life all over again from a new perspective.

I occasionally mused that being a girl was the way I was supposed to be. I always brushed that aside; my mere existence proved that destiny was an illusion.

November brought the end of the eighth grade football season, much to my relief. It was getting too chilly to wear my cheerleading outfit in the cold Minnesota evenings. I was tempted to gravitate away from the squad, since I had only originally joined to support Catherine and I had no desire to sit through football games. I decided to keep going, though, for several reasons. First of all, Catherine wouldn’t dare let her best friend leave her behind. And second, I was enjoying the popularity boon that being on the cheerleading squad granted.

There was a third reason, as well. I surmised that cheerleading was a really good way to stay fit. I thought very hard about my biology and my development, as I had the advantage of my adult mind to help me make wise decisions. I was determined to make sure that I would keep in shape for what I knew would be my prime years, and maybe it was vain, but I wanted to be pretty as I got older. I also read somewhere that having a regular athletic schedule was a good way to manage my periods. It was the one aspect of being female that I absolutely hated, so it was worth the experiment.

Speaking of development, over the winter I continued to grow in leaps and bounds. While I wasn’t that much taller, my hips were definitely starting to fill out. I could feel my gait changing with my shifting bone structure and wider waist. My hair had grown out to my shoulder blades, and I actually had the ends trimmed for the first time. I didn’t think I wanted to go much longer than that, but it was thick, brown, and very fun to flip around in the mirror. Of course the most outrageous change was my bust. At times I was self-conscious to the point of trying to wear clothes to hide my chest, but I had to admit I was on my way to being a very attractive young woman.

I may have been blossoming chaotically, but the business world seemed to be progressing in the same fashion as my memories of the future, which boded well for me. The custodial brokerage account was paying off nicely. Dad gave up months ago trying to follow what I was doing, so now he merely signed off on whatever I wanted. He humored me enough to let me do my thing, and wasn’t too patronizing about letting his daughter play around with finance. I was very secretive about my returns, only showing him a small amount of my actual gains. It was no wonder that Santa had delivered a year’s subscription to the Wall Street Journal.

When 1995 finally arrived, my busy life didn’t slow down. There was plenty of activity on the cheer squad, and the attention shifted to the basketball team. There was a general anxiety at school among the students about the winding down of middle school and the preparation for high school. I, on the other hand, wasn’t worried academically in the slightest. Even doubling my portfolio by purchasing call orders for Iomega and liquidating them two months later felt like a hollow victory. My mind was completely consumed by one looming event I had recorded in the Butterfly Manifesto.

The event in question was the Oklahoma City Bombing.

Of all the terrible events I had written into the notebook, this was the first and most infamous of what was coming. The problem was that I knew it happened in April of 1995, but I didn’t know the specific date. What’s worse, I couldn’t remember what building blew up. All I had was a distant memory that it was a federal building, since the bombing had been when Matthew was a kid. I had mostly read about it as an adult.

The larger issue was that I was just a thirteen-year-old; what the hell could I do about a vague disaster hundreds of miles away and weeks ahead in the future? I had been scouring the library system for months, for anything I could find about Oklahoma City. I started by finding an atlas of Oklahoma from the library, but it didn’t have individual buildings labeled. Then I requested a street map from the Oklahoma City library system, which didn’t arrive until early March. I scanned it carefully, and estimated that it had to be the one labeled Murrah. It sounded right, and when I was able to find a picture of the building it looked familiar too.

The problem now was I didn’t know when it was going to happen. Every day I sat in class, agonizingly trying to remember the date but coming up with nothing, not to mention being one day closer to April. I was beginning to despair, especially during my social studies class where we actually discussed other terrible events from recent history. It didn’t help my anguish. During history class, Catherine and I were reading partners and we went over articles about the Challenger disaster and the Waco Siege. It was here that I had a sudden epiphany.

A little fragment of trivia popped into my head. Waco and Oklahoma City were notable because they had occurred on the same day years apart. In fact, it may have been revenge for Waco, or something to that effect. Catching my breath, I scrambled to find the date for the Waco Siege: April 19th. I nearly burst into tears. Catherine thought it was because I was affected by the grimness of the assignment, but she was even more confused when she saw that I was actually happy and relieved.

Now I had a date, but what could I do about it? I couldn’t tell an adult, since I wouldn’t be taken seriously. Email didn’t exist in a usable form, and even if I had a reliable way to use the internet there would be no way it would be of any use. If I wrote a letter to the building, or to the FBI, who knows if it would even get there in time, let alone if someone actually opened it and thought it was real. My only option was a phone call; what’s more, a payphone, since I couldn’t have it traced to me. They still existed in 1995, and I managed to find one near the Tom Thumb convenience store not too far from my house.

I scrambled to find the phone numbers for the various offices in the building after more library research, and even got the number for the Oklahoma City police station a mere week before the bombing. I was anxious for days; terrified of what I was doing and even more worried that it wouldn’t work. I may have knowledge of the future, but I was still just a thirteen-year-old girl who was about to call in a terrorist threat. For all I knew I was breaking federal law.

The day before I had feigned an illness, which considering how stressed I was wasn’t difficult. I convinced my parents to let me stay home alone while they went to work, which also wasn’t hard because I was a model student who wouldn’t dare play hooky from school. I was pensively listening to the radio as my family got ready in the early morning, not knowing exactly what time the bombing happened, and praying they would leave before it was too late. Everyone was out the door at the regular time, and once they were gone I ran out the door and to the payphone several blocks over.

My heart was beating out of my chest as I bolted through the cold April air to the convenience store. With a pocket full of quarters and a quick look around to make sure no one was watching, I dialed the front desk of the federal building first. I changed my voice as much as possible, trying to at least sound like an adult, and practically screamed that I was with the fire department and told them to evacuate the building, as there was a suspicious van in front. The lady asked who I was, but after once again telling her there was no time, I hung up the phone. I called a few other offices for that building, telling them to leave the office through the back immediately.

Once I called the numbers I had, I called the Oklahoma City police station, frantically telling them that there was going to be a van full of explosives in front of the building. I told them I saw some bad-looking men with something suspicious in a truck, and they needed to hurry. The officer angrily asked me to identify myself, and practically sobbing into the phone I just repeated and told them to hurry. I made sure that the phone calls were brief so that they wouldn’t be able to trace a call, but I had no way of knowing if it was enough. Even if they did, there were no cameras around the phone and I was bundled up in my winter clothes.

The tears were practically frozen to my face as I trudged back to my house through the snow. My watch said 8:10; whether or not I was in time or had any effect, I had no way to know. All I knew was that I was a girl who shouldn't be wandering around outside alone on a school day. I climbed back into bed, with the radio still playing the news as I sobbed into my pillow. There was no breaking news as I listened and cried, and eventually the stress was so palpable that I simply passed out from anxiety.

My eyes fluttered open some time later, and with a jolt I stood up, going back to the radio. It said 9:15, and I listened closely as the host discussed the upcoming Timberwolves game and a flurry of storms later in the week. There was nothing yet, and a wave of relief washed over me. Had I done it? Had someone actually listened to me?

I collapsed back onto my pillow, my hand on my forehead as I breathed in relief. Maybe they managed to stop the bomber, or maybe they managed to get everyone out of the building – my god, I had gotten the building right! I was a hero, and no one would know what would have happened. I laughed in spite of myself – I was successful!

The radio continued to buzz. “...expecting sunshine to follow on Saturday. Now for politics; President Clinton announced today that…hold on a moment, folks, we’ve received a breaking story. Sources are reporting that there has been some kind of an accident in front of a federal building in Oklahoma City…”

My heart stopped. I sat up, eyes frozen as I hugged my knees to my chest as the breaking report on the radio chimed on. “It didn’t work,” I muttered to myself, fresh tears rolling down my cheeks. “All that work, all these weeks, and they didn’t listen to me. I didn’t change anything.”

I sat and listened as sporadic reports came in, and eventually I migrated upstairs to the TV room across from the smiling family portrait on our fireplace. I numbly watched CNN as it unfolded, the authorities scrambling to do their job and the anchors at a loss for the tragedy. Eventually I ran out of tears. As I watched the casualties rise, I sat dumbly on the couch feeling guilty. I felt like a failure; what’s worse, I felt like an accomplice. I knew it was going to happen, but I wasn’t able to do a single thing. I knew that all of those people were going to die and I wasn’t able to help them.

Eventually it became too much, and I had to turn off the TV. I wandered the house in my pajamas, the immense grief weighing on me. The bombing had barely registered to me during Matthew’s timeline, since he had been just a kid, but this second time it cut deep, since I knew the ramifications of the tragedy. I wish they had listened to me – but why would they listen to some girl who randomly called? They probably thought it was a prank, until it was too late. If it even registered at all.

I stood at the upstairs sliding glass door which led out to the deck. I could see the snow clinging to the trees in our back yard, under the clear blue sky with no clouds to be seen. I hugged myself closer, still feeling guilty, and trying not to think about what was happening to those poor people in Oklahoma. But before another bout of crying poured out of me, something sparked inside of me. It wasn’t sorrow, or guilt, or powerlessness; it was determination and resolve.

I tried everything in my power to prevent it. Weeks of planning and preparing, but all a kid like me could do was simply hope that an adult would listen. From now on, I had to do more. I had to put myself into a position where I would be the one with power. Maybe I couldn’t at the moment, but I had time to set myself up with resources. I was still working on my investments, and while I had no clue how much I could profit, it would be more than enough. That power could buy influence, somehow. I had to do better next time.

I took a deep breath. Power. Influence. All I had was the Butterfly Manifesto, and time.