Future Imperfect (18 page)

Grabbing a handful of cheese popcorn, I say, “I’m really quitting, Paige. Really. There’s going to be a new me. You’re totally going to be surprised.”

“I believe you.”

“I’m serious. Really, it’s a new day for me.”

“I believe you, Ade.”

I ask, “Just like that?”

Paige mutes the TV, says, “You’ve never wanted to quit before. I’ve begged you for years. Since we first met. You never once said you would. Never once made a false promise. Ade, you love trashing yourself, but if you love this girl more, well, I believe you. But … how much of this is because you don’t want her with Jimi?”

I hold up my thumb and index finger about an inch apart.

Paige shakes her head.

“Fact is,” I say, “if the guy died, I don’t think I’d go to the funeral.”

THREE

Because Mantlo doesn’t have a pool, we swim at Celebrity Sports Center.

It’s the perfect place to make a change. To get away. Celebrity has a massive pool, three water slides, twelve bowling lanes, an arcade and even bumper cars. They say it was originally built as a training center for employees on their way to Disneyland. Once you’re inside, it’s like being in another world. Something vaguely Caribbean without the poor people and the trashed-out beaches. Around the pool and water slides are fake rocks that bristle with fake plants. It’s hot and steamy and the water is suspiciously bright blue.

We’ve been here for like two hours. Everyone swimming lesuirely before things technically get started. I’ve just been doing my thing. Swimming fast and then slowing down and blowing bubbles, kicking too high, kicking too loud. I’m like a kid in here.

And then Coach Ellis blows his whistle and ushers us to the food court.

“We’re gonna reflect,” he says.

Technically it’s meditation. We find a spot between two fake rock ledges and lay our towels down on the Astroturf. Then we stretch. After stretching we lie down, close our eyes, focus on our breathing and imagine we’re not lying on ketchup-stained Astroturf. At first I imagine the Great Barrier Reef from pictures I’ve seen. Bright blue-green water, shot from above, and in it undulate these ribbons of coral and color. I imagine flying over the reef, dipping down every now and then to skim my feet along the warm water. Meditating this way, my mind feels clear for the first time in God knows how long. Here on the Astroturf I’m not anxious or itching to knock myself out at the bottom of the pool or against a telephone pole on the way home. It’s glorious.

I swim in the fourth lane.

It’s clear immediately this is the lane reserved for those of us who need a little extra time. Those of us who need the encouragement. That’s why Beverly Morrison is in lane four with me and the other slowpokes. She’s the carrot. Has this killer body and wears the skimpiest swimsuits imaginable. And usually it works, but I don’t feel like swimming fast to be right behind her. I don’t notice her at all. I swim leisurely and finish after everyone else, languidly splashing down the lane and I can feel Coach’s eyes burning into my back.

Fact is: I don’t care.

I’m obsessing over Vauxhall the way I obsessed over the Buzz. At first, it’s just me reliving the past few weeks. I pore over every word, every glance. It’s like a film I watch in my head. Only better because I cut out all the bad parts, the parts that make me want to curl up in a corner. In my movie, I see Vauxhall smiling and laughing and being ridiculously brilliant. Underwater, mid-stroke, I laugh with sheer pleasure.

Maybe that last knockout shook something loose?

I’m about fifty meters into a two-hundred-meter crawl when I take a deep breath and kick down to the bottom of the pool to touch the bottom. I run my fingers along the black line painted there. It’s slick, seamless. I replay the vision of Vauxhall singing in the lunchroom just the same as I saw it. Her and Jimi walking in and then speeding things up and seeing her on the table singing, cutting to when she’s eye-to-eye with me and the world is revolving around us. I move through it quickly.

When I open my eyes I’m about fifteen inches from the wall and about to eat tile.

I pull back. Blink hard.

I worry my teammates are watching me. That they’re swimming in place, faces puffed out under the water, watching me lose my mind at the bottom of the Celebrity swimming pool in the shadow of a fake rock cliff. In my head I sigh and swim to the surface. Everyone else is at the other end of the pool listening to Coach. He’s yelling. He’s pointing at me as I swim back.

“What’s going on?” Coach has his hands on hips, leaning over with his whistle dangling a few inches from my face.

I shrug, water running into my eyes. “Just not feeling it today.”

“Not feeling it? It’s the first day, Patience.”

“Yeah. Sorry. I dunno. I’m going to try hard, though. Just maybe not—”

Coach’s interrupts. “You sick?”

“No.”

“Why don’t you get out and take the rest of the night off. While I don’t think you’ll be a star or maybe even third tier, we need bodies on the team. So you’re good.” He smiles, but it’s not meant to be a nice smile, this is Coach mocking me. Before turning away he says, “I’m just impressed you bothered to come at all.”

I towel off and sit on one of the many lounge chairs lining the edge of the pool and watch the others swim. I watch them but don’t really see them. I’m zoned out thinking about the line at the bottom of the pool. Seeing Vauxhall’s smile everywhere I look.

In the locker room Garrett Shepard whips me with his towel and makes a crack.

All I hear of it is, “… with this retard.”

Garrett, he’s the type of guy who will be arrested doing something completely inappropriate with a drunk girl. The type of guy to go to college and make as many women as possible very unhappy, very embarrassed. This guy, he is the epitome of everything I hate about jocks.

I finish getting dressed and walk over to him. “You have a problem?”

Garrett laughs. “Yeah. I do.”

“And what’s that?”

“I hear your girl’s always in heat. She’s just craving it all the time and yet she’s hanging around with you. With a fucking retard.”

Sighing, I say, “I don’t feel like fighting you tonight, Garrett.”

“Oh, really? You don’t?” His face almost cracks with overexaggeration. “You don’t like me talking trash about your new girlfriend?”

“Not my girlfriend yet.”

Garrett scans the room, his teeth out and gleaming. “Yet? You hear that? Yet. Oh, right! I forgot she’s riding the joke of that theater homo.”

“Leave it alone, Garrett.”

Garrett steps closer. “From what I hear, all the fights you’ve been in you’ve lost.”

“Most.”

“This going to be another one?”

“No.”

For the first time in my life I get really, truly angry. I’ve been mad before. I’ve kicked holes in walls before. I’ve wanted to smack people silly before. And sure, I’ve had too many fights to count, but I’ve never actually been this angry. I’ve never wanted to kill someone the way I do right now. The way I see it, there’s a volcano exploding inside me, lava spilling just under my skin, and the only way to let it go, to let it flare out, is to do something aggressive.

To do something vicious.

Garrett brushes his hair from his eyes and looks over at Mark Cullman. Mark shrugs. Garrett turns to me, probably with another smartass remark about the mentally handicapped or maybe a jab at Vauxhall, but he’s not able to say it because my fist is in his mouth. His teeth are rocking back in his gums and he stumbles backward and falls.

The thud, I’m sure, can be heard even at the bottom of the pool.

The benefit of having been in as many fights as I have is that I know when a fist is coming. It’s like catching a fly. You watch a fly, see how it darts when your shadow slips over its own. Compared to flies, people are the slowest things on Earth. Fists travel like paint drops. Even if Garrett had been ready. Even if he’d had a fist prepared it would have been no biggie. I’ve tempered away those reflexes that say flinch, that advise my body to duck or swerve or jump or dive. If a car smashed into me right now, I’d be perfectly relaxed.

Hot-tub relaxed.

And, honestly, it disturbs me.

FOUR

Our date is a foreign movie because Vaux only likes art films.

She won’t see “mainstream crud,” so we’re driving to the Chez Artiste on South Colorado Boulevard, a place I’ve seen hundreds of times but never been in. From what I hear, the seats don’t recline and the screen is something just a tad smaller than Roderick Burgundy’s home theater.

This movie we’re seeing, last time it was in theaters we hadn’t been born.

I pick Vauxhall up but don’t go inside of her house or meet her mom because she’s waiting for me on the porch.

The sun’s just setting, the sky still blue but bleeding out fast into night.

There are stars but none of them are twinkling, so I’m guessing they’re really planets. It’s cool and dry with a breeze that’s picking up all sorts of floral smells and lawn scents. The whole scene is everything you imagine a first date might look like.

Vaux is wearing jeans and this crazy, frilly kind of blouse. It’s blue like the disappearing sky and it’s so loose and thin that looks lighter than air. Underneath she’s got on a tank top. Black. Her shoes, they’re open-toed. Her nails, purple. Vauxhall’s hair up and her eyes gleaming under mascara, she’s a combination rock star and vacationing princess.

She gives me a big, long hug and looks me over. “You smell like chlorine.”

“Joined the swim team. Thought it might, you know, do something for me.”

Vaux smiles. “You really scared the shit out of me last weekend. Someone called me in a panic, told me you were dead. That just killed me.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“I was worried we weren’t going out tonight. I kinda showed up here not knowing what to expect. I realize I upset you when we talked last, but really, I was just trying—”

She shushes me with a finger to my lips.

Vauxhall tastes of coconut.

On our way to the theater she fills me in on who we’re meeting.

She tells me I’ll love them, Clyde and Ambrosia, and that they’re from her other school, the one she ran away from. And Vauxhall tells me that Clyde is really into the occult. She says, “You two will really hit it off.”

“Sounds like someone I know.”

Clyde is five inches taller than me and has hair all the way down to his ass, slick like a horse’s tail. He’s super friendly and Vauxhall was right, within minutes the two of us are laughing loudly about palm readers and pyramids. Ambrosia looks like her name, all long curls, narrow Eurasian eyes, and a nose ring. She talks slowly like she’s drugged and touches my elbow or arm or shoulder every time she speaks.

Both of them smile big at me. Clyde even gives me a hug.

He says, “Been a while, dude.”

“—”

“Right?” Clyde screwing up his face.

The way I look at them gives them pause. Clyde shrugs to Ambrosia. Ambrosia shrugs back, this their little private language, and then we head into the theater. I overhear Clyde whispering, “Looks just like that one guy, doesn’t he?”

Before we sit down, Vauxhall tells me she saw this movie the first time with Ambrosia. She tells me they were both really toasted. “Ambrosia was freaking out about it for like a month,” she says.

Clyde says, “First time I saw it I freaked too.”

I ask if I’m the only one who hasn’t seen this more than once and Vauxhall pats my head and tells me that it’s okay. She tells me that it was a rite of passage for them. She says, “You’re lucky to be seeing it for the first time. I wish I could see it over again like that.”

“Hope I’m impressed,” I say, and then the lights go dim. I lean over and ask Vauxhall if I know these two. Like, “Have I ever met them before? They’re acting like I have.”

She says, “I’m guessing they’re just stoned.”

The movie has something to do with a bookstore owner and a gangster. The bookworm is having an affair with the gangster’s bruised wife and there’s a chef. The whole thing is very arty and colorful but gruesome as well and I’m pretty sure one of the main characters is eaten. I don’t really watch the movie because I’m too busy watching Vauxhall watch it.

Every time there is a scene shift and a flash on screen, as the light changes, in that brief moment I watch Vaux smile or frown or look concerned. She’s seen this movie before, but you’d never guess that from her expressions.

Twice she catches me watching her.

Twice she smiles and blinks and grabs my hand and squeezes it hard.

After the movie we sneak up onto the roof of the theater where we can lie down on the pea gravel and watch the moon spin toward the mountains. Vauxhall and Ambrosia talk about the movie (Vauxhall: “If only Gaultier designed costumes for all movies.” And Ambrosia: “Wait until you see his baby movie.”) while Clyde grills me on the whole divination scene.

He lets me know he met my ex once. Says Belle came on to him. Says, “She’s crazy.” And then he props himself up over me like he’s going to try and kiss me and whispers, “She’s kind of hot too, though. In that crazy kind of way, you know?”