Excerpt:

I opened my eyes. Everything was strangely dark. I noticed there were candles, there were windows. It was definitely not the room we had been in only a moment before. There were stone walls, no cream colored paint. There were strangely shaped windows with blurry glass, no huge picture window looking out into the backyard. Candles were burning on tables and on the walls, no lamps or overhead lighting. The furniture in the mirror was not the furniture in the little-used office: there was a huge bed with big wooden posts, curtains around it, and bright red comforters or sheets or something covering it all. More candles were on the side tables with some books. As I looked around in the dim light I spotted a niche in the room with a desk, a huge cross on it with loads of little candles. The only thing my brain was connecting to was the fact that this wasn’t Mom’s dusty study, this was something else and I couldn’t figure it out. I was too shocked to do much except take in my surroundings.

“Wait. What happened?” My voice came out strangely flat. I was too confused for panic.

Allie was very quiet for a moment, very still as she stood beside me, touching my arm. “We’re not in Kansas anymore.” Her voice rose and fell in an almost sing-songy way.

“We don’t live in Kansas!” I couldn’t help but raise my voice. I wasn’t screaming, but oh, man, did I want to. Things were lining up, very slowly, in my head as my heart began to beat, very fast, which made me think I’d have a heart attack and die right there.

“Then, we’re not in California anymore,” whispered Allie. Her eyes were huge as she took in the room. “Lizzie?”

I found myself whispering just like she was. “What?”

“I think I know where we are.”

She turned to me. She was shaking. “We’ve got to be somewhere else.”

“No shit!” I shrieked. I knew my sister wasn’t dumb, but come on! How could you say something like that? “No shit, Captain Obvious!”

“No, no, Lizzie. Somewhere else, some other time entirely. Look at the walls, the candles, the windows—oh, my God.” The look on her face suddenly changed. You know when you see a light bulb go over someone’s head in a cartoon? It was that kind of look, but to properly understand it, mix it with some fear. That was exactly what Allie looked like. “This is England, Lizzie. It’s the 1520s, 1530s, 1540s, something. This is Tudor England. This is our class.”

Hardly anything stunned me into silence, but the emphasis on the word class, as in our lecture class, stunned me into silence. “You’re kidding me.” My voice rose as I spoke. “You are kidding. Me.”

I didn’t say anything else. I heard footsteps and suddenly it seemed like everything kicked into high gear: I was breathing so hard I thought I had finished running marathon, my heart was still going crazy. I don’t think I had ever felt that sort of fear before mixed with the adrenaline rush of the unknown. The footsteps were coming closer. It sounded like high heels would have, the way the footsteps click-clacked against the floor. I couldn’t help it, I reached out and grabbed my sister’s hand. I was absolutely terrified. When Allie squeezed my hand, I squeezed back. All kinds of crazy questions were going through my mind. Who was coming? What would they do? What would they say? Was this some sick joke God was playing on us so we could write our paper? Did I secretly get really, really drunk at a pre-midterm party? Was this all a dream? I really hoped it was the latter. Nothing had changed with us: we were still in our jeans and t-shirts, me in cute wedge sandals and my sister in her beat-up tennis shoes. We weren’t in crazy gowns and hoods and jewelry. I wondered what on earth this person, whoever it was, would say about that. I had this irrational fear that we would be immediately dragged out and beheaded. They did that to people back then, didn’t they?