There was once a train, as there have been many before, to be rather specific, the line was the London Northwestern Railway; on this train, there happened to be a thirteen-year-old boy riding alone. He was sporting some worn-down khakis with holes in the pockets and his school’s grey polo uniform shirt. His ratty red-brown hair stretched down to cover his Azul eyes that stared so longingly at the lush hillside outside the window. Other than his student uniform, his most notable attribute was a crescent moon shaped birthmark just under his chin, though even that was hardly noticeable at times.

“Hey kid, mind if I sit here?” A woman’s voice pulled him out of his daydreams. It was strange because it almost sounded like she had a sort of southern United States accent. She gestured to the seat next to him, in which he placed his dusty old schoolbag.

Wordlessly, he pulled the bag into his lap. The woman had flowing auburn hair that stretched halfway down her back. She was wearing a long trench coat, and what the boy could hardly make out as an all-black pantsuit underneath. She had a worn-out leather satchel clutched close to her chest.

“My name’s Anastasia, what’s yours?” She lightened her voice in the way that adults often did when they wanted to sound friendly to kids.

“Tristan.” The boy tightened his arms around his bag. His fingers quietly drummed against the fabric, betraying his anxiety.

“Hmm… Tristan.” She repeated the name, her brow furrowing, the name felt wrong on her tongue. “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Tristan.” She extended a hand.

He didn’t say a word as he looked at her hand and hesitated for a moment. Against his better judgement, he shook it, noting how her hand was practically two times the size of his.

“Not much for talking, are we?”

Tristan shook his head.

“That’s fine. I wasn’t a talkative kid either.” She let go of his hand, then reached to pull a chocolate bar out of her pocket. “I got this at the snack cart, do you want some of it?”

Without waiting for his response, she snapped it in half and set a piece on top of his bag. He stared at it for a moment before he ate it in one decisive chomp.

“Hungry? You can have my half too.”

Tristan wouldn’t usually take food from strangers, his mother had taught him better than that, but he hadn’t eaten in two days, so that logic didn’t matter much to him.

Anastasia wiped her hands on her coat to dust away the chocolate crumbs. “You know, it’s rather inconvenient how expensive this coat is with how easily it gets dirty.”

“Then why do you wear it?” The boy’s quiet question caused a smirk to grow on Anastasia’s face.

“Valid question, though I suppose I don’t have an answer. Perhaps it’s just because I feel good while wearing it? I mean, I could just change all my outfits to be more low maintenance, but I don’t think I’d be as confident. The way I dress now is good enough with me, even if it’s rough at times.”

“That sounds nice.”

“Do you like your clothes?” She tilted her head to the left slightly.

“No, they’re itchy.”

She chuckles at his response. “Those school uniforms always were, weren’t they?”

“You had a uniform like this?” He tilted his head curiously to the left.

“Mhm, if I’m guessing correctly, we might even be alumni from the same school.”

“I go to an all-boys school.” He grew even more confused, which made him look her up and down as if he had missed some key detail.

“Dulwich College, right? I recognize the shield.” She pointed to the intricate shield sewn just over his heart.

“Aren’t you a girl?”

She chuckled, “I think so.”

“You’re not sure?”

“Is anyone sure of anything?”

“I guess not.”

“Well then, I certainly think I’m a woman. Do you think you’re a boy?”
Tristan opened his mouth, but no sound came out, the breath escaped his lungs at the question, and he looked anywhere but at the woman next to him. “I go to an all-boys school.”

“So did I.” She giggled and looked down at him. “Also, it should be went.”

“What?”

“You’re running away, right? Then you went to an all-boys school, past tense.”

He certainly hadn’t put too much thought into the fact that he now qualified as a runaway, he just had always felt out of place there, he always knew he needed to get out. The whole place just felt so suffocating, though he could never exactly explain why.

Maybe it was the fact that they all wanted him to be something he wasn’t? He was never exactly the star student. Then on top of that, he had issues in simple things like gym because he refused to take his shirt off. Or maybe it was because he was the only American in a school full of British boys.

Whatever the reason, he just knew he was glad to be gone.

“You should be an English teacher.” The boy snarked.

“Hm, I agree. Well, agreed, past tense again. I am an English teacher.”

“Cool.” He slumped down in his chair, then he pulled a book out of his backpack and tried to ignore the woman next to him. Even if Tristan was never as good as his peers at subjects like math or science, he always found that reading came easy for him. Recently, he’d been reading H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. It stood out against all the other books at the school’s library, mainly because the idea of time travel always seemed interesting to him. A hot flash of guilt shot across his body as he realized he accidentally stole the book.

“Good book?” Anastasia interrupted his train of thought.

“I don’t know, I’m not done with it.”

“I liked it when I read it. Though if you’re going for time travel books, my personal favorite is This Is How You Lose the Time War.” She shrugged, leaning her head back into the chair.

“Noted.” He drew his knees to his chest and buried himself even more in his book, not making an effort to remember whatever book she mentioned.

This time, Anastasia took the hint to give him some space. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched as she pulled something out of her pocket and started pressing on it sporadically. It was a sort of thin plastic brick with a long rectangular light in the middle of it. It wasn’t like anything he’d seen before. If he really squinted, it looked like the light had an image printed onto it.

It vaguely looked like that of Anastasia with another woman, kissing her on the cheek. The other woman stood out next to Anastasia’s pale complexion, with her black hair and fair skin. Tristan had no idea why, but the image captivated him.

He leaned over ever-so slightly to get a better look, though he still attempted to be discreet. It looked like there was something being held behind the pair; from what he could tell it might have been a flag or some sort of blanket. It looked strange, not relating to any country he could recognize, with a pattern of two parallel blue and pink lines which were separated by a white line down the middle. It looked sort of like toothpaste to him.

She noticed him glancing at it and clicked a button on the side of it, turning off the center light, before she shoved it back in her pocket.

“What was that?”

She didn’t give him a response, instead she pulled a newspaper out of her coat and buried her face the centerfold. The paper was from the day before, dated March 16th, 2000, and the headline was something about the latest news in stocks.

“You know, I have a feeling that this Google company would be a great investment.” She murmured and laughed for seemingly no reason.
Tristan tried to ignore her and go back to his book. As he read on, his mind started to drift to the things he’d change if he had a time machine. First, he’d go back to his parents’ divorce and get his mom to take him in instead of his dad. His dad never really cared for him, not in a way that he could see anyway. Sending him off to an all-boys’ school that he didn’t want to go to, especially one that was in a completely different country, it didn’t exactly give off the idea that his father wanted anything to do with him.

Then, once he’s back with his mom, he’d probably invest in some sort of stocks so they could get rich. Maybe a store would be a good place to invest in, he’d always held a soft spot for bookstores and Blockbusters.

As his mind drifts, he unconsciously started fidgeting with the itchy fabric of his school uniform. The tiny movement somehow caused the older woman to flash him an empathetic look, as if he had just said his dog died or something.

“What?” He let go of the fabric as he spoke, suddenly feeling self-conscious.

“Oh, nothing. I just was remembering how terrible those uniforms were.”

He stared at her for a moment, debating what to say next, if he should even say anything, but she beat him to it.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“About what?”

“Why you’re running away.”

“I-” Why should he even entertain this sort of conversation with a stranger? What if she tries to send him back? “I wasn’t happy.”

“I know the feeling. I hated my school days. I don’t think I really completely understood it back then, but it wasn’t exactly easy being at an all-boy’s school when being a boy made me want to peel my skin off.”

“Jesus.” Tristan cringed, even though some small bit of what she said resonated with him on a level he didn’t quite understand just yet.

“It’s just like, it’s difficult being in a space like that. It’s suffocating.” She sighed; her pale blue eyes darted to the seat in front of her. “So, I guess I’m just trying to say that I get why you’d leave.”

His gaze darted awkwardly to the bag in his lap. “My dad sent me there.”
Anastasia looked at him with kind eyes. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“I tried to run away.” He exhaled deeply. “After the divorce. He won custody because he was more financially stable than my mom. I got all the way to my mom’s house.”

“He found you?”

“She called him, said it was best for me.”

“So, he sent you to boarding school as punishment for running away.”

“Mhm.”

“Now you’re running away again. In a country that you have no knowledge of, this time around.”

“That’s the plan.” He slumped back in his seat. “I couldn’t stay at Dulwich, I just couldn’t.”

“That’s not a great plan. But I suspect we had similar reasons for running away.”

He didn’t care to reject that statement, but Tristan still perked his head up slightly. “You ran away too?”

She nodded.

“Do you ever regret it?” He thought for a moment before adding, “Do you ever wish you could go back and make a different choice?”

“Sometimes, but my life afterwards wasn’t too bad. I moved in with a nearby relative, went to a normal school, came out, then fell in love with the most gorgeous woman I’d ever met.”

“So, it was all good then? It sounds like you did pretty well.”

“Sorta. It’s difficult to explain, kiddo. There were a few months where I was unhappy and alone, but then I just wasn’t. And now I’m here.”

Tristan nodded and considered her words for a moment. He couldn’t tell if there was more than she was letting on, but it felt like there was. “I don’t like being called a kid.”

“You’ll grow out of it.”

“The next station is Birmingham international.” A mechanical voice emitted through the train’s speakers before Tristan could even think of a response. Anastasia had tilted her head slightly to look up at the speaker, which allowed Tristan to notice a slight discoloration on her neck, just below her chin. It looked to be a birthmark that was shaped like a crescent moon, just like his was.

“Welp, that’s me.” She rooted through her pockets, taking a few minutes to pull out what looked to be a business card. “Here, in case you wanted a better plan.”

“What’s that?”

She hands it over to him. “Dorothy Jones, she’s a barrister, which is like fancy British speak for lawyer, there’s her address on the back too. She’s in Liverpool, this train will take you straight there.”

“Why would I need a lawyer?” He turned the card over suspiciously in his hand, examining the address on the back.

“Think for a moment, kid.” She leaned back in her chair; her hands quietly drummed on the satchel in her lap.

“Why?”

Anastasia rolled her eyes. “Just do it.”

“Fine.”
Silence fell between them for a few minutes, only broken by the clanking of the train’s wheels against the tracks. Tristan tried to remember if he knew anybody named Dorothy, but as hard as he tried, he couldn’t come up with anything.

His thoughts ran back to his time in the United States, back when his parents were still together. It’d been two whole years since then, so his memories were growing scarce. What mostly stuck out to him were the fights he had witnessed every other week.

There were only really two times when he remembered hearing a name that started with a D in an argument. The first one was an argument that his mother had started when she found out that his dad had a crush on a coworker with a D name. What was it? Diane, maybe?

That fight took about a week to get resolved, if he remembered correctly, it didn’t change much between them. The next one might’ve been about his aunt, whether she was from his dad’s side or mom’s side, he doesn’t know. It was because she was a- oh, he forgot what they called her. Le-something? Or maybe she was a thespian, from what he can remember, the word they used certainly sounded like that.

Anyway, if there was somebody that this Dorothy person could be, it would maybe be her.

“This is for Aunt Dorothy?” He asked hesitantly.

“Bingo.” She smiled widely.

“How do you—”

He was interrupted by the intercom blaring as the train rolled to a halt. “This station is Birmingham international. This is a Northwestern Line train terminating at Liverpool.”

Anastasia jolted up to her feet, looking back at him for a moment as she scooted out into the aisle. “Well, safe travels kid.” She paused for a moment, holding up a finger as if she still had something caught on her tongue. “Time for me to finally move on, I guess.” Her voice was barely audible yet somehow carried a bittersweet tone as she turned to leave.

“Wait!” He shouted after her and jumped up out of his seat. He glanced down at the now empty space next to him, noticing that she had left her bag in the chair. “You left your bag!”

“It’s yours now!” She yelled back as she stepped off the train.

“And I still don’t know how you know my aunt.” He murmured as he slumped into the stiff chair. His gaze wandered to the bag, eventually he gave into his curiosity as he opened it up.

Inside of the satchel were a plethora of snacks and sandwiches, a note placed on top of all of them. “Don’t go starving. There’s some cash in the front if you need it. -A”

He sifted through the front pocket, only to pull out what must’ve been a total sum of two-hundred pounds. It was a mystery to him how she had known that he would be on this train, that she packed all this, that she knew so much about him. For all he knew, she might have just been some sort of guardian angel.