Future Imperfect (8 page)

“Why’s that?” I ask. My future voice is deeper. Raspy.

“The storm. The waves. This is totally your thing. Thirty-foot swells like this, you get guys from all over the country, hell, the world, descending on these beaches for a chance to ride one of those monsters. Go down in history.”

“That why you’re here?”

The masked man says, “Nah. I’m here to talk to you.”

“So why the getup? Do I know you?”

“Not really.”

“Well, if you don’t mind, I think I’m going back out there. Can this wait?”

And the dude in the Mexican wrestling mask starts to say something, but the vision starts shaking. The sand is shaking. The world is shaking.

I’m pulled back through the tunnel.

Back through the lights.

Then I realize it’s someone shaking me awake, shaking me out of my future stupor and back into the present. I’m not on the beach anymore, I’m on the floor of Oscar’s bathroom and there is a burly dude with a ball cap pulled low over his eyes standing over me. He says, “I gotta take a piss, freak. Fucking. Move. It.”

I can’t stand from the strength of the Buzz, so the guy with the baseball cap just drags me out of the bathroom and leaves me on a throw rug in the hallway. My bottom lip is busted open, but all I can taste is cider.

Liz Chin finds me and rolls me onto my back. My vision’s all distorted from the high rampaging through my veins and I can barely see her face. But I hear her just fine. She says, “How dare you do that shit at someone’s house? During a party? You’re sick.”

I ask her to get Paige for me. “Please,” I say, drooling.

She rolls her eyes and says, “Think your little dyke bitch is gonna nurse you back to health? You’re pathetic, Ade. And by the way, your new girlfriend is sucking some dude’s dick upstairs.”

I close my eyes and focus on my high.

Everything in me has shattered.

The Buzz is all I’ve got left.

I’m floating in it until Paige shakes me back. She helps me up and takes me outside to the front lawn and then I collapse again.

She sits at my side crying, rubbing her nose on my sleeve.

She tells me that she hates me. She tells me that she wishes I was just dead sometimes. She says, her voice all breaking, “You’re the most selfish person in the world.”

FIVE

The Buzz lasts for about an hour.

It must be the alcohol–concussion combo but I’m pretty much unresponsive the entire time. Except for the twitching. When it wears off and I sit up, rubbing my eyes, Paige tells me that I was shaking like I was seizing. She tells me that a whole bunch of people asked her if they should call an ambulance and a whole other bunch of people told her that she should just put a bullet in my head. Paige says, “They told me I should just put you down.”

“Thanks for defending me,” I say.

“I didn’t defend you,” Paige says. “I just didn’t shoot you.”

I say, “Thanks for not putting me down. What time is it?”

“Two.”

“Party still—”

“Yeah, but the beer’s cashed, so most everyone’s gone. By the way, she was looking for you and then she saw you and went back inside.”

“Vauxhall?”

“She’s over there.”

Paige points over at a huddle of people smoking. Vauxhall’s still got her costume on. She’s a monster in the moonlight. I grimace and Paige notices. She pats me on the head and says, “You’re not any better. You know that, right?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say.

Paige laughs. “I’m going inside. Come in and get me when you want to leave.”

I lie back on the lawn and stare up at the stars. The back of my head is still spinning and it’s like I can feel the planet moving beneath me. The stars stuck and flashing and the soil whirling, me in the middle. I feel so much better. So much stronger.

“What’re you looking at?”

It’s Vauxhall sitting next to me. Her non-face all ghostly.

“Nothing,” I say. “Space.”

Vaux looks up. Shrugs. “You crack your skull open?”

“Heard about that?”

“Saw the blood. I don’t understand why you’re not in a hospital right now.”

“I’m a professional.” I manage to prop myself up on my elbow. I ask, “Any chance you’re going to take off that costume?”

“I wasn’t going to sleep in it.”

“How about now? At least let me see your eyes. Easier to talk.”

Vaux pauses and then takes off the shades. And then she takes off the hat and lets her hair hang down. Lets it breathe in the half-light. “How’s that?”

“Great start.”

And it is. Even with her face wrapped up she’s still striking. And despite the emotional pain, I actually don’t blame her. I’m disappointed but not mad. In my head I’m not ranting and railing about her being a slut. Maybe it’s the head damage, but I’m not wanting to spit in her face. No matter how many dudes she hooks up with tonight or in the next week or month, the two of us will be together and in love and she will be mine. It’s like a sour candy; this is just the bitter outer part. Eventual sweetness this way lies.

“Would you believe me if I told you that I’ve seen you before? That I’ve been thinking about you for years? Like in a dreaming sort of way?”

“Maybe. How many girls do you say this to?”

“Only you. You’re the first. So, why’d you sing to me?”

“I don’t know. You’re cute.”

With that, Vaux slowly unravels the bandages from her face. This is like a striptease but the payoff is so much better. She does it slow and teases something awful and part of me dies and is reborn with each inch of face she reveals. First her eyes. Then her nose and finally her lips and chin. She’s amazing, in the night, under the stars. Her features aren’t flattened by the fluorescent lights. Her skin breathes out here.

She asks, “What have you heard about me, Ade?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, the rumors.”

“I haven’t heard any rumors about you, Vauxhall. Wouldn’t matter, anyway.”

She smiles. It’s a heartbreaking smile.

But then I say, “I did see you with that guy Ryan a few hours ago. And…”

“Does that turn you off?”

I look at Vauxhall as hard as I can, push my eyes to see under her beauty. “I don’t … don’t think I’d be the right person to be judging you. It’s not like I think it’s, well, I just … Are you with Jimi?”

“What did Jimi tell you?”

“Nothing, but other people have said that you were.”

Vauxhall nods. “It’s complicated. A long story, but the short answer is that we have a connection but I don’t think I love him. If that makes sense.”

I swallow and it hurts. “I think it does.”

The last few jags of Buzz go rattling down my nerves and my eyes roll back into my head for a second while I just let the feeling surge through me. The overwhelming peace of it like falling asleep but never sleeping. I don’t know how long I’m like this when Vauxhall says, “Hey. Come on.” And her voice shakes me back into the present. She is so incredibly soft in this light. Then, looking back at Oscar’s house, she asks, “Want to go to the roof?”

“Okay.”

We make our way back upstairs not saying anything.

Of course, I’m thinking maybe she’s going to do with me what she did with Ryan Mar. Whatever exactly that was. Part of me, the lower part, is excited at the thought, has been sleepily dreaming of this. The other part, upper, doesn’t want it to go down like this. Really doesn’t want this.

But just being in Vauxhall’s presence I’m getting goose bumps again.

It’s like she’s radioactive. Like there’s a Geiger counter in my chest that’s pinging violently the closer I am to her. This girl is not only beautiful and deeply funny and clever and complicated and so freaking flawed and hooking up with random assholes, but something tells me she’s also like me. It’s the same thing that tells me that we will be together. It is inevitability. Going upstairs I’m giddy with expectation, the same way I felt when I went into Black Bart’s haunted cave at Casa Bonita for the first time. Scared. Jazzed.

Up the stairs she’s in front and I can’t peel my eyes away. Despite the boxy suit, I catch glimpses of feminine shapes beneath. A calf. Thigh. Ass cheek. It’s intoxicating but over so quickly.

Now the party is just ten loud people. They’re falling over each other. Lying in sleepy piles. Guys are copping feels. Girls are crying and talking too close to each other, face-to-face, like they might kiss or they’re sharing each other’s breath.

“Good view on the roof?” I ask.

“Sure,” Vaux says. “Mountains sometimes.”

“You come up on Oscar’s roof often?”

“—”

Vaux and I make our way to a porch on the second floor and from there to a ladder that rocks back and forth when she climbs up.

“Not sure I’m in the best state to be climbing ladders,” I say, trying to hold the ladder steady as I climb.

Over the roof, Vaux looks down at me and smiles, says, “I’m completely wasted and I made it. You worried you’ll fall? Maybe hit your head?”

SIX

On the roof we can’t see shit.

Just trees and the Christmas lights of distance houses and the haziness of stars. The roof slopes hard and the tiles are loose, but Vaux leads me over to a spot where the roof isn’t nearly as angled and I sit down next to her and lean back on my hands.

She lights a cigarette and offers me a drag.

I take it even though I don’t smoke.

Vaux starts with a story about how when she was little, her father bought her a jumbo-sized copy of Winsor McCay’s comic strip
Little Nemo in Slumberland.
She tells me all about how the drawings just sucked her in, how even then it looked like cinema to her. Forgotten and neglected cinema. She tells me she identified with the princess who was always lonely. “As a kid,” she says, “I’d think of my dad as King Morpheus. Only he was really sweet but just as magical. He’d made this whole thrilling world for me to play in.”

“Sounds nice. That’s a lot like my dad.”

“A dreamer, huh?”

“You could say that.”

Vaux switches gears, asks, “How’d you get it? Your ability?”

I laugh, nervous. Ask, “What are you talking about?”

Vauxhall says, “You know.”

Still being coy I ask, “Did someone tell you some—”

“Hitting your head and walking away from it the way you do. The way your eyes are rolling around in your skull like you’re high as a kite. I can see there’s something more going on with you, Ade,” Vauxhall says. “Besides, your friend Paige told me that you can see the future. And even if you don’t believe me that I believe that, I do. I can see it. I can read it on you. So, please, tell me how it happened.”

This girl, I want to explain everything. I want so much to laugh and cry right now. But I relax and just start talking. “An accident,” I say. “Just a fluke.”

“Typical origin story, huh? Radioactive spider bite, gamma rays, the usual.”

“Not that spectacular.”

I tell Vaux it went back to dissecting toads in eighth grade. I tell her that before we could even get started, before I’d even sat down at the lab bench, scalpel in hand, I accidentally stepped on Kevin Harris’s new shoes and he caught me with a fist on the right side of my face, just below the orbital socket of my eye. I say, “I went spinning into Vanessa Katz and then tumbled over a lab stool and wound up on the linoleum. My forehead hit first and my skull bounced. Went black for only heartbeats, but in that darkness I saw something. Like a short film or a trailer for a movie. A young woman and an older man meeting. It’s hard to recall the details now but what I overheard was that he’d been lost after an accident. Something with amnesia. Or maybe he was in hiding. It was on the news. Anyway, they ran into each other at a food court and hugged and sobbed and sputtered in front of the Chick-fil-A.”

Vaux says, “Classy.”

I tell Vaux about the Buzz. I tell her how, for me, at first, it was like being over-caffeinated but in the best way imaginable. I say, “It was a breaking-the-laws-of-physics high. That first time I was sure I was beaming light. Everyone could see it. Kids in the halls stopping to look at me. Pointing me out across the basketball courts. I was radiating some heavenly light or something. The Buzz lasted until the next morning and then melted away, like how your body melts back into itself after a hard workout.”

Vaux nods, staring off into the non-view. She says, “I know that feeling.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, that so strange?”

“Uh, no. I’m just surprised is—”

Vauxhall does this finger-twirl thing, says, “Come on, don’t leave me in suspense. Tell me the rest of your story.”

“Okay. So, two days after the knockout I was at the mall with my friends and I saw the girl from the vision. I sat down in the middle of a record store and watched the dream come real and the players took the stage and it was acted out exactly as I’d seen it. Every detail. The tears. The intense smiles. I couldn’t breathe. I hurled when I got home.”