The binoculars were sitting on top of the postbox, balanced perfectly, as if someone had placed them there on purpose.
Lila found them on her walk to school. They were small and silver, with a scratch across the left lens and a strap that looked like it had been chewed by a dog. She picked them up and looked through them, because that is what you do when you find binoculars.
She aimed them down the street at Mrs. Chen, who was walking her terrier past the bakery.
Through the lenses, the street was the same. Mrs. Chen was the same. The terrier was the same. But something was different. Everything was ten minutes ahead of where it should be.
Mrs. Chen was not walking past the bakery. She was sitting on the curb outside the pharmacy, holding her ankle, while the terrier licked her face. A man in a blue jacket was bending down to help her. A woman with a pushchair had stopped to watch.
Lila lowered the binoculars. The street was normal again. Mrs. Chen was walking past the bakery, perfectly fine, the terrier trotting at her heels.
She raised the binoculars again. Mrs. Chen was still on the curb. The man in the blue jacket was still helping. The terrier was still licking.
Lila put the binoculars in her bag and ran to school.
She did not run because she was scared. She ran because she wanted to see what happened next.
When she got to school, she sat on the bench outside the gate and aimed the binoculars at the playground. She could see the climbing frame, the basketball court, the bench where Jamie Okonkwo sat every morning eating a banana.
Through the lenses, Jamie was not eating a banana. He was standing in front of the headteacher, holding his elbow, looking embarrassed. The headteacher was talking to him in the calm voice she used when someone had done something spectacularly silly.
Lila lowered the binoculars. Jamie walked through the gate, banana in hand, perfectly fine.
She raised them again. Jamie was still in front of the headteacher. His elbow was bleeding. The banana was on the ground, squashed.
Lila lowered the binoculars and thought very hard.
She had ten minutes. Ten minutes before Jamie did whatever he was going to do to his elbow. That was plenty of time to stop it.
She found Jamie at the banana bench.
"Be careful today," she said.
Jamie looked at her. "Be careful of what?"
"I don't know yet. But be careful."
Jamie looked at her the way people look at you when you say something strange and they are being polite about it. He peeled his banana and ate it without incident. He walked to class without incident. He sat down without incident.
Then, at morning break, he tried to do a trick on the climbing frame that involved hanging from the top bar by one knee and letting go.
He fell on his elbow.
The headteacher found him holding his elbow, looking embarrassed, with a squashed banana on the ground nearby because he had dropped it when he climbed the frame.
"How did you know?" Jamie asked later, when Lila brought him a plaster.
"I saw it coming," said Lila.
Jamie looked at her like she was strange, which was fair.
That afternoon, Lila sat on the bench outside her house and aimed the binoculars down the road. She saw Mr. Kapoor from number fourteen trip over his own recycling bin. She saw a postman walk into a lamppost. She saw a girl from her class drop her ice cream cone, pick it up, and then drop it again.
Every single thing she saw was someone tripping, falling, dropping, stumbling, or walking into something.
She scanned the street. A jogger tripped over a tree root. A cyclist wobbled into a hedge. A woman carrying groceries dropped a bag of oranges and spent five minutes chasing them across the road.
Lila lowered the binoculars and stared at them.
"What is the point of you?" she said.
The binoculars did not answer, because they were binoculars.
She tried them again the next day. Same thing. A man tripped over a dog. The dog was fine. The man was not. A boy dropped his football into a puddle. A girl stepped on a skateboard that rolled away from her and she sat down hard on the tarmac.
Every future was a person losing a battle with gravity.
Lila began to wonder if the binoculars were broken. Maybe they were supposed to show something more interesting. Maybe they were supposed to show weather or accidents or important things, and instead they had got stuck showing the part of the future where everybody was clumsy.
She almost threw them away. She actually held them over the recycling bin and considered it.
But she could not quite let go, because every now and then, among all the trips and stumbles, she saw something that made her hold her breath. A dog running into the road. A child wandering toward a busy street. A person standing too close to the edge of something.
The binoculars showed the future, all of it. Not just the clumsy parts. The dangerous parts too.
She just had to pay attention.
There was also the problem of what to do with the information. On Friday, she saw Mr. Davies from the chip shop trip over a box of frozen chips in his own kitchen. Through the binoculars, she watched him slide across the floor on a packet of cod and crash into the fridge. The freezer door popped open. Fish fingers rained down on him.
Lila could not exactly warn Mr. Davies about that. He was inside his own shop, ten minutes from now, and she was sitting on a bench across the street. She could not run in and shout "Don't step on the cod!" because then she would have to explain how she knew about the cod, and that was a conversation she was not ready to have.
So she watched. She watched Mr. Davies get up, brush himself off, and carry on as if nothing had happened. He even smiled at the next customer.
That was the thing about the future. It happened whether you warned people or not. Most of the time, people got up and carried on.
On Thursday, she tried to use them for real. She aimed them at the school gate and saw her friend Sofia walking through ten minutes from now, carrying a tray of science fair projects. She saw Sofia trip on the step and send the whole tray sliding across the floor. Glue bottles rolled under desks. A model volcano split in half. Sofia's face crumpled.
Lila waited by the gate. When Sofia appeared, tray in hand, Lila walked beside her.
"I'll get the door," she said.
"You don't have to," said Sofia.
"I want to."
At the step, Lila held the door wide. Sofia walked through without tripping. The tray stayed level. The volcano stayed in one piece.
"See?" said Lila. "Easy."
Sofia looked at her suspiciously. "Why are you being helpful?"
"No reason," said Lila.
"You're never helpful about doors."
"I'm turning over a new leaf."
Sofia narrowed her eyes but said nothing more. She set the tray down on the science table and everything stayed exactly where it should. Lila smiled. She had done something useful. The binoculars had worked.
It felt different from the other times. When she told Jamie to be careful, he had ignored her and fallen anyway. When she told her dad to watch the kerb, he had appreciated it but she was just saving him embarrassment. But this time, Sofia's volcano was in one piece. The glue was in its bottles. The whole project was saved.
Lila decided then that the binoculars were not broken. They were just honest. They showed the future exactly as it was, which was mostly people not looking where they were going.
She was feeling very pleased with herself when she went to the bathroom and aimed the binoculars out the window at the car park. She saw her dad pull up to collect her. She saw him step out of the car. She saw him walk toward the school gate.
She also saw him trip on the kerb, spin his arms like a windmill, and land flat on his front in front of three parents who were trying very hard not to laugh.
Lila lowered the binoculars.
She ran outside.
"Dad!" she shouted. "Watch the kerb!"
Her dad looked up. He saw the kerb. He stepped over it. He smiled at her.
"Good shout," he said. "I almost didn't see that."
Lila smiled back. Inside, she was calculating. She had stopped two trips in one day. A personal record.
That evening, she sat on her bed and looked through the binoculars at her street. A cat knocked over a flowerpot. A teenager tripped on the pavement. A delivery driver walked into a fence.
All trips. All stumbles. All clumsy, ordinary, unimportant things.
But Lila was beginning to understand something. The binoculars did not show the future because the future was important. They showed it because the future was always happening, right now, ten minutes ahead of where she was standing. And most of the future, like most of the present, was just people going about their business, not paying attention, tripping over things that were right in front of them.
The trick was not knowing what was going to happen. The trick was noticing what was happening now.
She looked through the binoculars one last time. Down the street, a boy was walking home from the shop with a bag of sweets. He was looking at the sweets, not at the pavement. There was a crack in the pavement, right in front of him, with weeds growing through it.
Lila took the binoculars away from her eyes. She could see the boy now, in the present, walking toward the crack.
"Watch the crack!" she called.
The boy looked up. He saw the crack. He stepped over it.
He never knew why he stepped over it. He never knew that a girl with a pair of silver binoculars had seen him trip ten minutes before he did, and had called out to him, and had changed the future by exactly one step.
Lila put the binoculars in her pocket and went inside for tea.
She kept them. She still looks through them sometimes, usually on a Tuesday, when she is sitting on the bench outside her house. She sees the future, ten minutes ahead. She sees people tripping. She sees people falling. She sees people walking into things they should have seen coming.
And sometimes, when the future shows her something that matters, she puts the binoculars down and does something about it.
Most of the time, though, she just watches. Because you cannot save everyone from every cracked pavement and every uneven step. People have to find their own way over the obstacles, even the small ones. Especially the small ones.
But if she sees something dangerous, something that could really hurt, she acts. She calls out. She holds doors. She moves bins.
She does what anyone would do, if they could see ten minutes ahead. She just does it a little earlier than most.