Seven years later, while entertaining a girl in his dorm room, Evan discovers that when he reads from his adolescent journals, he can travel back in time and redo parts of his past. His time-traveling episodes account for the frequent blackouts he experienced as a child since those are the moments that his adult self occupied his consciousness, such as the moment his father strangled him when he realized that Evan shared his time-traveling affliction. However, there are consequences to his revised choices that dramatically alter his present life. For example, his time-line leads to alternative futures in which he finds himself, variously, as a college student in a fraternity, an inmate imprisoned for murdering Tommy, and a quadruple amputee. Eventually, he realizes that, even though his intentions to fix the past are good, his actions have unforeseen consequences, in which either he or at least one of his friends suffers horribly. Moreover, the assimilation of dozens of years' worth of new memories from the alternative timelines causes him brain damage and severe nosebleeds. He ultimately reaches the conclusion that he and his friends will never have good futures as long as he keeps altering the past, and he realizes that he is hurting them rather than helping.