The Long Wait for Tomorrow (17 page)

“Uh, Patrick …”

In his mad rush to paint the perfect doomsday scenario, Patrick hadn’t noticed that Jenna was no longer paying attention to him. Her eyes were focused straight ahead. Neck urging her head forward, and that concerned expression he’d been searching for had finally made its appearance. Patrick shifted in his seat, looked through the windshield, and slowly grew to understand why.

He did not immediately recognize Kelly McDermott. A bit of a mind-bender, as what he saw should have been Kelly McDermott at his most recognizable. Freshly showered, blond hair lightly tousled. In place of his father’s suit were a pair of blue jeans and a casual white-collared shirt, topped off with his team’s letter jacket, green and white colors, with the WA badge stitched onto the shoulder.

He stood in front of the car with a wide, confident grin.

Book bag slung over one shoulder, football nestled in his right arm.

It was Kelly, all right.

Perhaps a little
too
Kelly
, Patrick’s angels observed.

“So much for scouring the countryside looking for wormholes,” Jenna added, getting out of the car.

Patrick followed, approaching Kelly with a reserved nod. “Hey, Kelly.”

“What’s up, Pat?” Kelly reached out and playfully smacked Patrick’s shoulder.

“Not much, not much …” Patrick watched Kelly put an arm around his girlfriend’s waist, draw her close with a gruff kiss on the cheek. Jenna smiled nervously and slipped Patrick an urgent look. He couldn’t decipher its meaning, went ahead and asked, “How are you feeling, Kelly?”

“Feeling good,” Kelly said, nodding his head to some invisible beat. “Better than ever.”

“Good.”

Kelly continued to nod, grinning widely.

Jenna let out a breathy laugh, nodded along.

Without realizing it, Patrick had also fallen into their head-bobbing ritual, and he had to make a conscious effort to knock it off. “A little hot for the jacket, isn’t it, Kelly?”

“Huh … I hadn’t really noticed.”

“Oh.” Patrick held off for a moment, then dipped his shoulder playfully. “I guess the earth is probably, like, a hundred degrees warmer in the future, huh? This must be like Anchorage for you, right?”

“Ha!” Kelly held his hands up in mock surrender. “You got me, Pat. Hey, look, I’m sorry I’ve been acting like such a freak, guys.”

“What?”

“Seriously, I’ve just had a lot on my mind. Big game coming up. Gotta beat Wilson tonight, right?” Kelly palmed the football and hoisted it above his head. “STATE CHAMPIONSHIP, BABY!”

A wave of cheers and hollers arose from every which direction. Students en route to class held their fists in the air as they
walked by. In the distance, someone began to chant
Fight, fight, outta sight
, gaining a little momentum from others before the excitement faded into isolated pockets of applause.

“So, babe …” Jenna bumped Kelly with her hip. “You sure you OK?”

“Yeah,” Kelly insisted, giving her another kiss on the cheek. “It’s all good, baby. I’m back in the saddle. You got nothing to worry about.”

“I wasn’t really—”

“KEL-LY!”

Zack trotted up to them, hand held over his eyes, casting a shadow over his pie-pan face. Sweat poured down his neck. An archipelago of damp blobs dotted his UNC jersey, light blue turning gray beneath his armpits. “What up, Kelly?”

“What up!” Kelly hooted. He took Zack’s hand and shared a quick man-hug. Two bumps on the back, before falling to a safe distance. “What’s going on?”

“Ain’t you hot in that jacket, man?”

“Guess I’m just superstitious. Gotta beat Wilson tonight, right?” Kelly looked as though he was about to repeat his previous grandstanding. Instead, he took off his jacket and held it out for Patrick to take.

Patrick stared at the jacket as though Kelly had just offered him a dinosaur bone.

Reaching up slowly, he took it off Kelly’s hands.

“That’s right,” Zack agreed, ignoring Patrick. “Speaking of which, we got some plays we want you to take a look at before class.” He sent a fat thumb over his shoulder. Cody and a few
others were waiting at the edge of the parking lot, enjoying a couple of laughs.

“Yeah, man,” Kelly grinned, giving his book bag a pat. “Got my playbook and everything.”

“All right, man. Let’s do it.”

“Let’s do it!” Kelly turned to Patrick and Jenna. “I’ll see you guys later, cool?”

He sauntered away without waiting for a reply.

The smell of vinyl drifted up from the letter jacket still hanging in Patrick’s arms. He watched Kelly jog over to the football team. All previous acrimony had apparently been laid to rest, high fives and man-hugs all around. The sight left Patrick feeling empty. The last guest to leave the party, wondering where the evening had gone.

“You all right, Patrick?” Jenna asked. Her almond eyes were following the same scene. Hair a stiff mess of gnarled brambles.

“Yeah.”

“It’s kind of like volunteering at a suicide hotline, and having someone call to tell you what’s happening on their favorite show.”

“That’s Kelly for you.”

“A little
too
Kelly, if you ask me.”

Patrick sniffed. “What?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Jenna said dismissively. She kicked at an imaginary rock and watched it skip across the parking lot, all signs of Kelly now gone. “Say goodbye to the New Kelly McDermott.”

“Yeah.”

“Thanks for letting me puke in your wastebasket,” Jenna said, smiling warmly. “I’m going to hit the showers. I’ll see you in class.”

Jenna gave his shoulder a squeeze and headed off for the locker rooms.

Patrick was left standing next to Kelly’s car. Wearing the suit Kelly had bought for him. Holding on to Kelly’s letter jacket, a single sleeve brushing against the ground like an elephant trunk.

is mind kept going back to the jacket.

The jacket and the football.

It was the first day of presentations in their Modern Psychology class. A welcome day for anyone who wasn’t scheduled to present their final project. It was just a matter of showing up and feigning interest. Some doodled, others stared into space. Finishing homework for other classes was a big favorite. It was the homestretch, and everyone was working for the weekend.

From his seat, Patrick watched Kelly slouch in his desk, situated one row down, one row over. Going the extra mile to ignore everything around him. There was the football, resting atop his books. Kelly kept his hand planted on it, scrutinizing the white stitching as though peering into a crystal ball.

And then there was the jacket.

Patrick kept going back to the football and the jacket, unable to shake the eerie settlement reached between Jenna and his angels.

A little
too
Kelly.

It was halfway through the fifth presentation that Kelly sat up in his chair. Cautiously alert, he leaned forward, propped up with both hands on the football.

Patrick glanced up, surprised to find Edmund standing before the class.

Not that Edmund wasn’t supposed to be there. He was the only freshman in the class, given special permission to join as the only freshman in advanced calculus and trigonometry. Still, that wasn’t what accounted for this perplexing reaction. It had only been two days since Kelly had duct-taped Edmund to the flagpole, photographed him naked from the waist down. Seemed like another life—
another Kelly
, his angels whispered—but Patrick
knew
it had only been a couple of days.

In that short period, Edmund had withered. Patrick wasn’t sure if that fully captured what he was seeing. Edmund was no less a skinny little shrimp than he had been two days before. It was more of a fading quality. Not unlike the bleached pastels of old photographs or a barely noticeable scar. His eyes were distant. Staring straight ahead, voice a hollow monotone.

Edmund was
lessening
, somehow.

Patrick could see Kelly straining to hear, now tilting his ear toward the front.

“This is where Carl Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious comes into play …,” Edmund was explaining, unaware that two people up from nobody were now listening. “The simplified notion that our inner thoughts manifest themselves in direct relation to the world outside our minds. Like when you’re thinking of a person and two seconds later they call you …”

Edmund’s voice dropped a little.

For a moment, Patrick was convinced that Edmund was about to vanish right before the entire classroom.

The substitute teacher, a round woman with a frizzy French braid, prompted him to speak up.

“… to the speed of light!” Edmund’s voice rose sharply before regulating itself. “When they shot the cesium photon at the wall, their readings detected residue from the collision appearing a trillionth of a second before the actual collision itself. In essence, it traveled back in time.”

Patrick saw Kelly’s hand twitch, rise slightly from the football.

“Possible, of course, because a cesium photon has no mass.” Edmund’s eyes shifted over to Kelly, and the slow chant of his nowhere voice was disrupted. He began to fidget, rock lightly from side to side. “As do … same as thoughts, which have no mass … and, if thoughts do travel, which there are … have been studies … with little bearing but … if thoughts could travel to light speed … Then maybe they can go backward, too, so … When your friend calls you, the thought could very, might … very well travel back two seconds and occur to you right before your friend …” Edmund swallowed. “Right before your friend actually calls.”

Kelly’s hand shot up.

Edmund tensed, knees pressed together. Nails digging into his palms.

The substitute half stood from her seat, frowning as though she’d forgotten what a raised hand meant. She pointed at Kelly, referring to him as
you.

“So is it possible, then, for a person to travel back through time?” Kelly asked.

The class sprung to life, chuckling derisively at the perceived joke.

Going on the same assumption, the substitute rolled her eyes.

Edmund’s discomfort swelled, grew into a malignant fear.

“No, it …” His voice cracked. “The theory of relativity won’t allow for it.”

“Why?”

Kelly’s question set the classroom on another roar. It wasn’t a question of what the joke actually
was
, only that this simply
had
to be a joke. The few sympathetic souls who kept quiet did it for the same reasons, but their solidarity was lost on Edmund. His petrified degeneration only fed the fire. A warbling kind of noise escaped his lips as he bolted for the door.

Directly on his heels was Kelly McDermott.

The football rolled off the desk, and continued its wobbly journey across the floor.

Looks like Kelly forgot who he was there for a second
, Patrick’s angels said.

Before the football had come to rest at the substitute’s feet, Patrick was already out the door. Heading after Kelly McDermott, who was heading after Edmund.

And all of them, Patrick determined, were going to have to stop meeting like this.

The final stretch took them practically right back to where they had started.

Edmund was a runner, greased lightning. Agile, too, he led
them on a wild chase that spanned half the campus. Rounding buildings, changing direction with nimble irregularity, the scrawny freshman turned the school into an obstacle course for army cadets. He weaved between cars in the parking lot, shot up the stairs to the science building, cut through the science building, out the back doors, wasn’t halfway down the wheelchair ramp when he leaped the railing, landing on his feet and tearing in the opposite direction.

If it weren’t for the lock on the basement door to the main building, he might have even made it. From his distant third place, Patrick saw him dart toward the door, arms outstretched. Planning to cut past the snack machines, no doubt, and beeline through the new music room they’d never finished building, and out the emergency exit.

Patrick didn’t hear the impact. He was too far, and it came off looking like a gag from a silent movie. Edmund had simply bounced off the door upon impact and fallen back. From ninety degrees to zero, the needle on a sound board after the music dies.