Page 10 of Time for You

Brittany stood in front of the TV with her back straight, hands clasped in front of her. “Henry, are you ready?”

Henry nodded from the couch, although he looked uncertain. “Will the images be moving?”

“Not these, no,” Brittany said. “This is just a slideshow.”

“And this will help me?”

“That’s the plan,” Daphne said from the armchair in the corner. She was curled up with a crossword puzzle (in ink, of course) while Brittany took the lead on their new group project.

“Then let’s begin.” Brittany turned the TV on to display the first image, which was a title slide.

Get Henry Acclimated to the 21st Century So He Can Stop Freaking Out All The Time

By Brittany Spiers, MD

Henry had a notebook in his lap and looked for all the world like an earnest schoolboy, his arrogance for once set aside. Or maybe he was only like that with Daphne, since he seemed to challenge her more than anyone else.

The first slide was a picture of a crossover SUV, with the word Car in all caps above it.

“This is a car. It has an engine inside, and it runs on either gasoline or electricity,” Brittany explained, sounding like a college professor even though her topic was “basic facts about contemporary life for someone who doesn’t know anything. ”

Henry wrote something down, nodding. “How does the engine work?”

“No idea, but the gas version is very bad for the environment. And that brings me to my next topic: climate change.” She advanced the slide using the clicker Ellie had bought for their New Year’s Eve party, when everyone had been required to make a PowerPoint deck on the topic of their choice.

(Vibol’s topic of “My Favorite WWE Wrestlers” had been voted Most Unexpected, although they had all been pretty drunk by then.) “The planet is boiling, and we’re all gonna die,” Brittany continued.

The image was of a factory belching smoke and a hazy sky.

“We got addicted to oil back sometime around your time, and now we’re fucked.

” She explained greenhouse gases and the burgeoning climate crisis while Henry’s eyes got wider and he scribbled furiously.

Next were planes (“please don’t ask how they stay in the air—it mostly involves going really fast”) and then phones, which caused Henry not a small amount of confusion.

“But a telephone is to talk to someone at the same time,” Henry said. “You don’t use them for that?”

“I mean, you can if it’s absolutely necessary, but most of us don’t.”

“So you use them to send telegrams.”

Brittany frowned at him, and after a bit of back and forth about what, exactly, a telegram was, she agreed, before diving into the topics of the internet and social media.

Henry seemed delighted by the idea of the internet, although he struggled with social media—not because he found it self-absorbed, but because he couldn’t understand why it made everyone so angry all the time.

“Because that’s what it’s supposed to do,” Brittany explained for the fifth time, before finally moving on.

Henry understood the idea of computers far better than Daphne would have thought, and he didn’t seem to struggle with Brittany’s slide on women (can vote and own property, don’t have to have babies if they don’t want to), and he was unexpectedly delighted by the idea of drag queens.

“We’ll take you to a drag queen brunch, then,” Brittany said.

Henry wrote something down and looked up. “Is the next slide”—he checked his notebook—“brunch?”

Daphne snorted while working on eight down ( a walk, of sorts ), which she filled in with stroll , and Henry looked over at her. “What’s amusing about that?”

“It’s just funny, is all.”

“Glad my ignorance can entertain you,” he said haughtily, and Daphne looked up, ready to snap, but caught Brittany’s warning glance. He’s really not that bad, everyone kept insisting, and Daphne knew that was what Brittany was trying to tell her telepathically.

“It’s not that,” Daphne mumbled, and dived back into her crossword to avoid revealing the blush that was probably now staining her cheeks. Brittany explained she didn’t have a slide about brunch because she hadn’t expected to have to explain that it was just a combination of breakfast and lunch .

“And the drag queens bring you food?”

“Mostly they sing and dance,” Brittany said. “But that’s a good segue into my next topic: Britney Spears.”

Henry grinned crookedly, and Daphne felt an absurd stab of jealousy. “I already know you fairly well, Miss Spiers.”

“No, not me. My namesake.” She advanced to the next slide, and now it was Henry’s turn to blush, averting his eyes quickly from Britney Spears in her iconic schoolgirl outfit.

“She’s, er, rather young?” he said, staring into his notebook like he hoped it would open up and swallow him whole.

“Yeah, she was sixteen or something when this was taken. This was her big break,” Brittany explained.

“And what’s the reason for, ah, her, well, her—”

“Her clothing? To make men want to have sex with her.”

Henry’s ears were bright red at this point, his eyes as wide as dinner plates. “And does that work? On men today?”

“I mean, it doesn’t not work. But mostly I included her because that’s how I knew you were telling the truth about being from the past. Even people living under a rock in the twenty-first century know who she is, because you can’t not.”

“And your parents named you after her? Does she have, er, remarkable qualities other than, er, well ...” Henry stammered.

“Being hot? Yes, she’s a good singer and a really great dancer. And I wasn’t actually named after her. My parents just assumed she would be a one-hit wonder.”

“What’s a—”

“She means they thought she would have one song that got really popular, and then that’s it,” Daphne interjected.

“And that isn’t what happened?”

Brittany sighed. “No, she’s now like, one of the most iconic pop culture figures in the whole country.”

“Do you mind being named after her?”

“I did, and I still do when people make a joke immediately after meeting me, like they’re the first ones to ever make the connection between my name and hers.

That’s annoying as hell, but it’s not Brit-Brit’s fault, you know?

She’s just living her life and I’m living mine.

She’s got way more money, but my family is about 4,000 percent less fucked up, so I probably come out ahead in the end, jokes or no. ”

“Understood,” Henry said seriously. “What’s next?”

“Next up: men.”

“We have those in the nineteenth century, too,” Henry said dryly.

Daphne snorted again, but this time, Henry tossed her a grin. Her stomach felt oddly melty, and she redoubled her efforts to figure out the answer to fifty-one across ( ancient goddess, not Venus ). “What are you working on there, Miss Griffin?” Henry asked.

Daphne could recognize an olive branch when offered one, so she held up her newspaper. “Crossword puzzle.” Henry cocked his head to the side quizzically. “It gives you clues, and then the answers fit together into one another.” She read off the clue she was working on, and Henry frowned.

“Aphrodite, I would think,” he suggested, and Daphne was half delighted, half irritated to discover he was right.

Delighted because it had been a tough one for her, and irritated because Henry was not supposed to be kind and helpful, and also once he said it, the answer was so obvious she couldn’t believe she hadn’t figured it out on her own.

“Thanks,” she muttered, and Henry turned back to Brittany, who was now showing him a stock image of a white man wearing a beanie in front of a podcasting microphone with a giant red no symbol encircling him.

Brittany walked him through the basics of twenty-first-century masculinity, while Henry nodded and frantically took notes. Daphne returned to her puzzle, lifting her head only when Henry started to sound angry.

“You have guns that do what ?” he said. “What use could any civilian have for a gun that powerful? But you said people are allowed to simply own them?”

“Well, yeah, but only here in the United States. Pretty much everywhere else has way better laws about guns.”

“What is wrong with your country?”

“That’s the question,” Brittany replied archly. “It sucks.”

“It really does sound like a lot of the modern world, as you say, sucks .”

“You’re not wrong, but there’s good stuff, too. Like for women, LGBT people, and people of color. You guys don’t have much in the way of colonies anymore either, and that’s good, too. And we can get places a lot faster.”

“With—” Henry flipped back through his notebook. “Aeroplanes. And ... cars?”

“Exactly,” Brittany said.

“ Airplanes. Not aeroplanes ,” Daphne clarified.

Brittany was the one who threw her a dirty look that time, shaking her head when Daphne responded with an innocent who, me? look in return.

“We’re going to move on,” Brittany said pointedly. “Ready, Henry?”

“Ready, Miss Spiers.”