Rewind

By Liz Ann Hawkins

Famous YouTuber Izzy White has everything going for her in the 21st century: over five million subscribers on YouTube, an upcoming tour, even a record deal. Until time rewinds and she finds herself the court musician for King Francis I. While her medieval covers of Billboard top 100 tunes endear her to the court, she tries her best to navigate 16th century life in a castle without Starbucks, her friends, social media, or running water. Her heart becomes increasingly torn between the boy back home and the handsome young prince. Meanwhile, there’s to be a royal music competition that’s like a mashup of American Idol and the Bachelor with the prince as the prize. Luckily her friend Leonardo da Vinci is working tirelessly to find a way to get her home, but someone else in the castle wants her dead. Will Izzy get home before her time runs out?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Liz Ann Hawkins
• Release date: Nov 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310101915

Liz Ann Hawkins

Liz Ann Hawkins is an award-winning author, at least, according to her third grade teacher, when she won the poetry contest and was told she'd be a writer one day. Well that day was long in coming. First she became a flautist, and flute teacher; then an artist, and a world traveler. She decided to live in Switzerland and France for ten years. Then, because her life sounded so incredibly boring up to this point, she became a quilt and fabric designer and co-wrote two published craft books under Lizzie B Cre8ive. In her free time she...wait, what the heck is free time? When she's not doing any of the many hobbies listed above, or at the computer writing (hey, it's just another form of art!) she's baking, watching movies or sitting around laughing with her husband and four mostly grown kiddos who make everything she does worth doing.P.S. She also thinks writing about herself in the third person is a bit ridiculousFind out more about her on her website: lizannhawkins.com; twitter, instagram and pinterest @lizannhawkins and facebook.com/lizannhawkins.

Book preview

Prologue

The room was cast in shadows. Tapestries hung on the walls to keep the chill at bay. A rumpled bed, empty of its owner and draped with heavy red and gold velvet, stood off to the side of the room. A candle burned low, spreading an eerie round glow upon the table at which he sat. At a glance, ink-filled paper scattered on the table had the look of haphazard disarray. To the man hunched over it, madly scribbling, sketching, and mumbling to himself, it was the work of over a decade.

Ink stained his fingers, taking up personal residence in every crack of his aging hands. Crumbs of a long forgotten supper were scattered in his trailing white beard. A nightcap kept his colorless hair out of his way. Most people considered him an artist, a painter. Yet, those pursuits only paved the way for him to keep up his real life’s work: the study of science, in every form. So much to learn! So little time.

Visions would awaken him at night and drag him from his bed. The pull was so strong he had to sit and draw them out of his head, put them on paper. Sketches of machines that could fly, machines that could fully submerge in water and still float, machines for weapons of war, machines that were self-propelled. The notebooks and stacks of pages filled the room, along with his studies of anatomy and the science of the human body, just another machine. All these machines intrigued him, fascinated him, kept him up at nights; nights when his hand flew across the page as fast as it could to capture the ideas in his brain. It was a race against the burning of the candle. Could he finish in time?

It was time that filled his mind. Equations filled the page. Finally he sat back, rubbed the sleepiness out of his eyes, concentrated once more to check and double-check his work. Is this it? He wondered. Could it be? He stood and stretched his aching back. I’m getting too old for this, he mumbled to himself. Gently, he rolled up his completed work and put the scrolls of paper carefully under his arm. Taking a sip of the stale wine that stood in the goblet hidden amongst his papers, he then picked up the candle in its holder. He walked to a tapestry depicting the Huntress Diana and pushed it aside, feeling for the familiar grooves within the wall. He could feel a faint gust of cool air blowing on the edge as he felt for the latch, lifted it, and pushed the hidden door open. The air was cool, but certainly not fresh. The tunnel led from the Chateau de Cloux to the king’s secret passageway in the Chateau d’Amboise. It had many twists and turns, and a few fake tunnels that veered off the main passage to confuse anyone who might be after the king.

It was one of these that he turned into and followed the uneven footing, walking slowly so as not to trip. His legs were weary by the time he came upon the place he was looking for. The light from the candle reflected on the pieces of broken looking glass set in the stone. At first glance, the light bounced off the scattered glass here and there. Upon closer look, one would find that the glass had been strategically placed, forming a full circle from one wall, across the ceiling, down the other wall, and across the floor.

From a niche he’d made in the wall, he pulled out a leather roll with various tools encased within. Reaching in again, he found a bundle wrapped in a damp cloth. Unfolding the cloth, he tested the clay nestled inside for pliancy. Nodding his head with satisfaction, he carefully unrolled his drawings on the ground anchoring them with the candle and his tools. Grabbing an awl, he proceeded to make the adjustments he needed to a bit of glass here and a bit there, turning them this way and that, building them up with clay underneath, until they matched the specifications made by his calculations.

He took his candle and found the small pieces of wax previously melted into the crevices of the wall, placed just so. He lit the first one in the corner and a beam of light shot out reflecting on a piece of glass diagonally across from it, holding a steady beam of blue light. He lit another in the opposite corner and watched another blue beam shoot out and hold, making a perfect X. Rapidly now, he lit the others, until there were too many criss-crossing beams to count. He could feel the hum of a power beyond.

Slowly, tentatively, he reached one hand out to touch the center of light; first his ink-stained fingertips, then his palm, eventually reaching all the way to his wrist. There was a pull on the other side, beckoning him forward. He could no longer see his hand within the light, his forearm was rapidly disappearing and the pull was becoming stronger and stronger as if someone stood on the other side, just beyond the light, slowly pulling. Up to his shoulder now, he took a step forward to make the leap. He stopped abruptly as if he had slammed into a wall, his arm dropping to his side. The flames of the candles had fizzled to the ends of their wicks. The beams of light disappeared. He was once again a lone man, standing in a cold, dark, underground tunnel.

Back in his room, a painting sat on an easel in the far corner. It was the face of a woman smiling, whose eyes followed him everywhere.

Chapter 1

The Isabelle White YouTube Channel:

Hi everyone! Izzy here. Thanks for watching my channel and supporting me. Click over here for my new album...and over here...for tour dates. Can you believe it? I’ve been asked to go on tour with other famous YouTubers. So exciting! I hope we’re coming to a city near you, can’t wait to meet you all. Remember to click on the link below to subscribe to my channel so you don’t miss any new posts. See ya around the ‘tube… And cut.

Izzzzzzy?! Where are you? Ack. I pulled my headphones off my ears and that’s the first thing I heard, my mom screeching through the house. Doesn’t she know I’m recording when I don’t answer? You’d think she’d get it by now.

Up here, Mom. Where I usually am, I mumbled under my breath so she couldn’t hear. I got up, set my headphones down, turned off my equipment, and closed the sound room door. I started toward the door to my bedroom to try to head her off, but then mom’s footsteps were on the stairs so I knew she was almost here anyway. I quickly picked up a pile of clothes from my floor and dumped them on an open suitcase that sat on top of my bed.

There you are, she said, on a whoosh of air as if she sucked up all the available oxygen on the way up the stairs and had to let it all out. I saw her eyes travel around my room; taking in the messy floor, the closet doors hanging open with clothes falling off the hangers, the opened, over-stuffed dresser drawers. I can never get those things shut. True, half the contents have been there since the 5th grade, but still.

Then her eyes hit upon my pristine recording studio that took up exactly one half of my room, a room that was basically the whole third floor of our townhouse. The soundproof glass of my studio sparkled. There wasn’t a speck of dust to be found anywhere. Everything was in its proper place. In stark contrast with the rest of my room, but hey, we can’t be perfect in every aspect of our lives, right? Her tour ended with eyes on my bed, quilt thrown to one side, pillows coming out of their cases, and my suitcase piled with who-knows-what on top. She raised one eyebrow. You know that look parents get? How do they do that anyway? The one eyebrow thing? Like you can see the little bubble cloud over their heads with a big fat question mark. I reminded myself to practice not raising the single brow in the mirror. I smiled and gave the ol’ classic teenage shrug in response.

Is this what you call packing? She finally decided to speak. I kept my eye on the eyebrow, wondering how long it could stay up there. Maybe she’d set a world record. Dang, I should remember to set the timer one of these days.

Err, yeah. Suitcase, plus clothing, equals packed. I mentally high-fived myself. I’m so good at math.

Izzy... Uh-oh, not that tone in her voice. You know, the disappointed one. Where they cross their arms and look down their nose at you. We’re going to be in France a whole month. Surely you’d like to look your best? The French are very fashion-minded as you well know.

I mumbled some sort of yeah, yeah, blah, blah, I’ll pack for real, and clean up my room. Whatever she wanted to hear so she’d leave. Because the truth is, no, I didn’t want to look my best. In fact, I didn’t want to go to France at all. I wanted to walk around in my comfy, faded sweats and ratty UGG boots, topped off with a T-shirt sporting a giant waving American flag. But I was being forced. That’s what happened when the fates decided to align against you. Or rather, when your parents were history professors at the U of Penn and had been invited on an ancestry tour of the Loire Valley. And when you’re 16 and still needed parental consent. And lastly, when your YouTube channel hit more than 5,000,000 subscribers and you’d been asked to go on tour, but your parents insisted on holding you hostage for a month in France under the guise of a family trip before giving said consent. Obviously, I knew it for what it was. Blackmail.

----------------

I uploaded my first YouTube video when I was fourteen. To be honest, I didn’t even know what I was doing. I was finally allowed to get my first iPhone, after begging and pleading and babysitting enough times to be able to afford it. Believe me, I had to wipe a lot of snotty noses to get that phone. Anyway, my best friend Anne was hanging out with me in my room and I started strumming a song on my guitar. I’m always playing a musical instrument of some sort. Mom tells people I was playing the piano before I could walk. I’m not so sure about that, but whatever. I seem to have some sort of musical gift that completely baffles my brainiac parents. I can pick up practically any musical instrument and learn how to play it. Whereas my parents, well they’re not musical in the least, and no one in their families are either. My Dad did say that way back when (I’m sure he rattled off a date, but I don’t remember), we had some traveling minstrel in our family line. Minstrels, not to be confused with menstruals, because yeah, I had a weird picture in my head when he first used the word.

So these minstrel people were musicians who would entertain at royal courts all over Europe. I thought that sounded pretty cool, so I looked it up on Wikipedia to get the lowdown. They were basically actors, musicians, storytellers, entertainers, you name it. I also found out, while Googling all over the web, that some were even paid as spies because they traveled from court to court and learned secrets as they went. Sometimes my parents can go on long tangents about our ancestors and where we come from and it can get boring as all get-out. But in this case, I was glad to finally have a musical connection somewhere in my family, even if it was way back in the 16th century (yeah, I looked up the year, or years rather). Until then, I’d been wondering if I’d been switched at birth because I’m nothing at all like my parents. Except, as you see, I can get sidetracked on a stray tangent once in a while myself like a true academic.

So there Anne and I were sitting in my room, me singing a song and she said, Hey, we should do a video of you singing and put it on YouTube. I told her she was crazy, who the heck would want to hear me sing? But then in the end, I thought, why not? So I sat back and lost myself in the music, doing my own cover of one of my favorite Taylor Swift songs. Because what fourteen year-old doesn’t sing Taylor Swift songs? The song was one of her earlier ones called Invisible all about teenage angst and the boy who will never notice you. Yeah, T.S. totally gets us! Anne loaded it up on YouTube, and well, that was that. We forgot about it. Until one day at school my long time doesn’t-even-know-I-exist crush sat across from me at my lunch table and said, Hey, Izzy, isn’t it? Aren’t you the one singing in that YouTube video? I’m pretty sure I had the deer in the headlights look going spot on, as I felt the burning blush creep up my neck to my face.

Wha-what video? I stammered. Seriously, I sounded like an idiot. And why did my throat feel like I’d been wandering for a week in the Sahara without water? Wait, he knows my name? He knows my name!

He shook his chocolate milk back and forth, popped the straw right in and took a long pull of chocolate goodness before answering. I tried not to salivate. Not that I could have...desert dry mouth, remember?

The one that’s all over Facebook of you singing a Taylor Swift song. What’s it called, Invisible or something? It’s got a ton of likes and everyone keeps passing it around. No one knew you could sing. Everyone’s speculating on who you’re singing about. He wags his eyebrows at me. Ugh, if only he knew! Words from the song start to scroll across my brain and I could feel my face getting even hotter.

Oh crap, does he know? Please don’t let him know! I’m pretty sure the blush turned purple at that point. I might have been breaking out in hives even. Thank goodness Anne came upon us at that moment, or I think I might have self-combusted or something. She threw her backpack down and started hugging me and jumping up and down at the same time. Hard to handle when you’re sitting, trying to protect your lunch and look cool for the cute boy in front of you simultaneously.

Did you HEAR? she practically screamed in my ear. You’re like, FAMOUS! Then she threw an Oh hi, Zeke across the table. Like she talked to him every day, which she didn’t. She grabbed my phone, since she was still in the runny-nose-wiping business to earn her own, and clicked on the YouTube channel we had put up for me. Wow, 500 people had watched my video. WHAT! How weird is that? Then she scrolled through all the comments of people asking for more. Zeke took the phone from her hands, Be still my heart, he was holding MY phone, and pulled up Facebook to show me the comments there. Next thing I knew, I was looking into Zeke’s blue eyes and he was smiling at me. I think my heart dropped to my shoes and bounced right back.

Hey, he said, I know a lot about video editing and stuff. How about I help you with your next video? We could choose, like, a cool place to shoot it outside or something. I guess I replied yes, although I think it sounded more like Yoda, and croaked out something like, Me, yes, you.

That was the day I became UN-invisible.

Chapter 2

Zeke. Sigh. What can I say about Zeke? He’s two years older than me. He was a junior at that point. I’d been staring at him for years, writing his name in my notebooks. You know the drill. Little hearts all around it. Coming up with every combination of our two names together. Which never worked well...IzZeke, Zekizzy? Yeah, so embarrassing. Writing pathetic dear diary entries about the boy who will never like me. Zeke was on the soccer team, played Varsity throughout high school. One of the golden boys, everyone loved him, loves him still. I’m sure I wasn’t the only girl in the school with his name scribbled on my pillowcase. OK, ewww, just kidding, I wasn’t that stalkerish. But still, it was a pretty bad infatuation. From that day in the cafeteria forward, he became a fixture at my house. My mom always made sure the kitchen was stocked with boy foods; as in, high caloric crap that she didn’t normally buy. She was an academic, more often than not her face was in a book losing track of time, not exactly a Becky Homecky. We had take-out more than home-cooked any given week. It worked for us, but it didn’t leave much for a growing boy to snack on.

Turned out Zeke didn’t just want to play soccer the rest of his life, contrary to what everyone believed. He wanted to be a film director. He needed experience and a portfolio. So, I became his subject matter. Romantic, right? We’d choose locations all around town to shoot my videos. Anne was my fashion advisor. (Remember? I like my sweats and Uggs. I needed help.) All three of us would pick songs and I’d work on arrangements. I mostly did covers of songs, but had started writing my own music as well. I was too afraid to try them out yet, but it made me happy to write them anyway. The number of hits on my videos continued to rise, and I was bringing in the subscribers too. I was getting emails for advertising and the next thing I knew, my silly little videos were bringing in a paycheck, which we split three ways. Yay for us! No more snotty-nosed babysitting jobs for me. Not that I don’t love kids. I do, just not their runny noses.

One day we were daring and pulled my upright piano outside. Spring was in full bloom, the air was so fresh, and the grass was green. It felt good to be outside again after the long winter of only filming indoors. By this time, we’d been filming over a year, and had close to two hundred videos up. I was more in love with Zeke than ever, but honestly did not know how he felt about me. I was sure we were destined just to be business partners for the rest of our lives, and I was OK with that. He had become one of my best friends, a person I could say anything too. If I needed a shoulder to cry on, he was there. He never talked about any other girls, and people always wondered if we were going out. Anne started questioning his sexual preferences like people were prone to do. But I assured her, there was no way he was batting for the other team. I knew we were drawn to each other. We’d hold hands, and find any excuse to be touching one another somehow. Not weird touching, geez, and nothing sexual so get your mind out of the gutter. More like, feet under the table, or sitting shoulder to shoulder, his arm draped loosely across mine. He had a habit of tucking my wavy auburn hair behind my ear, his fingers taking a slow detour down my cheek and sending shivers, well, everywhere. I think we were afraid of changing what we had and messing up a good thing, so neither of us made a move.

But that day in the grass, with the sky blue above me and perfect fluffy white clouds floating by, I sat down to play Bruno Mars’ Just the Way You Are. I was putting everything I had into it as always, becoming lost in the lyrics, most likely thinking of Zeke just like I did with every other love song I ever sang. I didn’t even notice when he passed the camera off to Anne and motioned her to continue filming. As I started to sing the last repeat of the chorus, I felt Zeke slide onto the bench next to me and then he was looking into my eyes, harmonizing along with me. He took my face in his hands and sang to the end with me. I was stunned. He’d never sung to me before, and by the way did he really think I was amazing? We sat there for what felt like hours as he slowly brought my face to his and kissed me for the first time. My first kiss! Caught on film for all the world to see. Literally! Turned out to be one of