Our last article reconstructed the early events of the life of Evan Treborn in the original history of Butterfly Effect. We have been working from the theory that the blackouts are not caused by the time travel, but are caused by the same condition that makes the time travel possible.
Tommy Miller has a lot of anger in his life thanks to his father, and his sister Kayleigh is in pretty bad shape as well. Together with Evan and Lenny, who it seems is there merely because he is Evan's friend, they are becoming thirteen-year-old delinquents. They find an explosive called a "blockbuster" in the Miller's basement, and decide to pull a prank; they agree that Lenny will put the stick, on a cigarette fuse, in someone's mailbox. Then, while awaiting the bang, Evan has another memory gap. The next thing he knows they are all running through the woods dragging Lenny, and he does not know why.
It has been observed that you cannot use a cigarette for a delayed fuse, but that is a more recent development, as chemicals have been added to cigarettes to cause them to extinguish if left unattended. It was not so long ago that this would have worked.
We pick up pieces of it from a session of hypnotherapy, but it is too difficult for the young Evan to face; thus our knowledge comes from his later visit to that moment when he is twenty--the moment he never understood, which changed Lenny forever and no one would explain to him. Someone came home, mother and baby, and walked to the mailbox, both killed in the blast, rather horribly.
It appears no one makes the connection to them, but their foursome is destroyed. Lenny does not want to be around Tommy, so Evan and Kayleigh are sometimes with Lenny and sometimes with Tommy. One day they go to a movie with Tommy (Se7en, which is R rated so they should not have been able to enter), but during the movie Kayleigh goes to the lobby, Evan follows, and the two of them kiss there--which Tommy sees, becoming enraged, but getting diverted into a vicious fight with a bully who made the mistake of picking on him at that moment.
On another afternoon Evan and Kayleigh are are exploring an abandoned junkyard with Lenny, and the threesome run into Tommy, who has captured Evan's dog and is about to set it afire in a burlap sack. There is a fight, but Evan blacks out again. He is no match for Tommy, who stuns him and sets the dog ablaze. He threatens Lenny's mother, then flees the scene leaving Kayleigh, Evan, and Lenny to deal with the grief.
It is at this point that Mrs. Treborn decides her son cannot stay around these friends, and she relocates her family somewhere far enough away that despite his intentions expressed in a note held to the window and kept for years after, Evan did not come back for Kayleigh for quite a while--not, in fact, until things changed in his twentieth year, when he started traveling to the past.
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