It did not escape me that I held an enormous amount of responsibility for people’s well-being, able as I was to freeze time on a whim. Physical objects didn’t move unless I moved them myself, reanimating the second I flipped the switch, as it were, in some corner of my mind. Repositioning people and things was tricky business; I tried to steer toward innocuous incidents when I moved something. High school had taught me that strangers find it disconcerting when a random guy is there steadying them exactly at the moment of stepping onto a banana peel that very definitely wasn’t in their path a second ago. (I felt bad doing this one, so in appropriate listen-to-yourconscious fashion, I always ended up trying to remedy my prankster wrong. My friends were not so lucky; I have videos of each of them falling comically to the ground. Slipping on banana peels?! Hilarious!) My wiles almost got me a date last year when I adjusted this girl’s foot to land a little past the last stair in the science building and she “happened” to fall into me. But I could really do much worse. Try, lugging an enemy into oncoming traffic and snapping reality back into being. Enemy no more. Booking plane tickets for oblivious people who look like they need a vacation? The credit cards in their wallets don’t tell me how much money they can spare. The number of critical things I could relocate, I mean hide, from people is endless. No one would think to look for their keys in their neighbor’s mailbox. I could have so many dogs if I wanted.
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