The Predicteds (11 page)

January's secrets weren't mine to tell.

—Jesse Kable, quoted in the book,
The Future of the Predicted
, publication forthcoming

Jesse calls me Monday evening, just before Melissa and I sit down to a dinner of frozen vegan pizza, and asks me to go to Tulsa. “I'll pick you up in an hour, okay? If you're feeling up to it. Sorry for the short notice, but this was kind of a last-minute opportunity.”

I absentmindedly rub the spot on my head. The stitches should dissolve soon, but my skull is still sore. For some reason, every time it aches, I think of that day in the supply closet, stuck in that little cupboard. It's like the aching in my skull is a little physical reminder telling me,
Hey, everything is not okay, and it may never be okay again
. “What are we going to do?” I ask, shoving the dark clouds from my brain.

“It's a surprise,” he says, “but I'll give you a hint: it's totally your kind of thing.”

When he arrives, exactly one hour later, I'm waiting on the front steps. I contemplated doing the whole change-clothes-ten-times thing—like a movie montage—but ended up throwing on a short, white cap-sleeved dress made out of lace that Melissa bought for me at the thrift store in Quiet. I added black leggings and my favorite red ballet flats, and I threw on the jean jacket that I've had forever. In the kitchen, I pulled a white daisy from a vase on the table and stuck it gently in my hair with a bobby pin.

“We could be twins!” Melissa screamed when I walked through the living room.

“You're mortifying me,” I'd responded.

“You look…different,” Jesse says when I get into his car.

“Uh, thanks?” I look down at my lace dress, wondering if that was really a compliment or just a statement.

“No, I mean, you look good. I've just never seen you in a dress before. You look really good.” He leans over and kisses my collarbone. Then he rubs his fingers over the area he's just touched with his lips. I get goose bumps. “You're beautiful.”

“Thanks.” I shift uncomfortably in my seat. I'll never get used to these kinds of compliments. Getting them is kind of a recent development—it started happening about a year ago, when I grew into my gangly body and actually got some boobs. I still feel like a gawky little girl most days. “You look good too.”

And he does. He's wearing nice jeans and a baby-blue button-up shirt, which I decide must be his signature color—everything he owns is blue. The first two buttons at the top are undone, but that makes him look cool and relaxed, not like someone's creepy uncle, which is a risk guys run if they leave too many buttons undone.

“So where are we going?” I ask as he pulls onto the four-lane toll road that leads out of town and toward Tulsa.

“It's a surprise.”

“No January?” I ask, half-joking.

He reaches over and takes my hand gently. “Definitely no January. She's at home, and there is absolutely no risk of thunder or rain tonight. It's just you and me—the evening will not end with us sitting underneath the stairs with her mom. As fun as that was.” He grins at me.

He flips on the stereo and hits the CD player. The retro sounds of Peggy Lee soothe me. “What a lovely way to burn,” she croons. My grandma had this record—an actual record. It was one of my favorites. We ride for a long time, enveloped by the sounds of the CD, pausing twice to throw quarters in the giant metal bowls at the toll stops.

“So what happened out there Saturday night? At the abandoned train?” I finally say. I'm unable to get January and our last conversation about her out of my mind, and I haven't talked to Jesse since that night. He called once, but I had Melissa tell him I wasn't home. I'm not the kind of girl who wants to look too eager.

“The usual. January drinks, and then she gets stupid. Does stupid stuff. It's become a pattern for her. Seems like she always needs someone to rescue her these days.”

“Can you rescue her forever?”

He squints out the window and searches the darkening sky. Dead armadillos litter the side of the road—something I don't think I'll ever get used to. It's as if every armadillo in the state eventually ends up shriveled and rotting on the side of the roads here. “I don't know. I'd like to think people can change, but…” He trails off. “Funny how all of our conversations keep coming back to that.”

“Do you believe in PROFILE?”

“Almost there,” he says, more to himself than me as he turns on his right-hand signal and waits to turn toward the tall, gold building that is part of Oral Roberts University. He finally answers my question: “What do
you
think?”

“I think you are evading my question.”

“Does it matter what I think?”

“Yes.”

“I have a proposition,” he says. “Let's not talk about PROFILE. Just for one night.”

“Deal,” I say reluctantly.

***

Jesse doesn't tell me what we are doing tonight, even after we are seated in purple-covered chairs in a large auditorium, staring at the thick, red-curtained stage. It's not until the curtain goes up and I see the lone table, the radio equipment, and Ira Glass, the host of my favorite public radio show,
This American Life
, that I figure it out.

I punch him gently in the shoulder. “How did you know that I love this show?”

“I have my ways,” he whispers, holding his palms together and wiggling his fingers.

“Really, how did you know?”

“Your laptop. That day at school. You had the site bookmarked, and all those NPR podcasts were on your desktop. I had to get you tickets. My dad called in a favor and got these at the very last minute.”

I lean over and give him a spontaneous hug.

Watching a live radio show might be as much fun as going to my grandma's bell-ringing choir at church, but not
this
performance. We listen and watch, riveted by the whole thing. I like that I can close my eyes and still get everything. It's all about listening, which is pretty cool. The theme is criminal acts—an apt topic given our earlier discussion. The first segment is about a judge in Florida who makes shoplifters stand outside the businesses they shoplifted from, holding signs that say,
I stole from this store
. The second segment is a sad one, about an old woman who helped her husband commit suicide when he couldn't remember who she was anymore. The segment is narrated by the couple's grandson, who ends by asking his wife to help him make a similar decision when the time comes. The third segment is a funny one, about a girl who stole a pair of acid-washed jeans from her best friend at summer camp in order to wear them on a date with a guy she really liked. “This is a story about love gone wrong,” Ira tells us.

“As it turned out,” a frumpy woman with glasses says into the table microphone, “Donny refused to go out with me again, because he thought my pants were just that ugly. Can you imagine? Pants so ugly that nobody will date you because of them? That's how ugly these things must have been. Acid washed, pleated at the top, tapered at the bottom.
Awesome,
I thought. Fast-forward a few years. Donny ends up marrying my friend Beth—the girl who owned the pants. God, I hated her for the longest time after that.”

“I bet you did,” Ira says.

“But you want to know what? Here's the big twist: twenty years later, Donny cheated on Beth with a college student. He took off and left Beth with three kids and half a million dollars of debt.”

“Well, there you have it,” Ira Glass says, in his nasal-y voice. “Crime doesn't pay…unless it does.”

The applause is deafening. Among all these public radio nerds, I feel at home.

“Thank you,” I tell Jesse when we walk outside the big double doors of the theater. “I know it's kind of dorky.”

Jesse reaches for my hand. His is warm and soft, big enough to engulf my palm and fingers. “
Dorky
is a good thing,” he says. “I like that about you.”

The car is parked far away, down a dark side street where we found meters to feed when we first arrived. On the way into the theater, the streets were crowded: lots of people were going in and out of restaurants and stores, business people were locking office doors, heading home with briefcases and laptops. Now, it's almost deserted, save for the few people who come and go from the dingy little bars scattered haphazardly along the street.

“So,” Jesse says as we walk quickly, with me trying to keep my ballet flats on my feet, “does crime pay?

“I guess it does. Sometimes. But you never answered my question from before.” So much for our deal not to talk about PROFILE. How could we
not
talk about it? “Do you think people can change? Does being predicted mean your life is predetermined? That everything you do will ultimately lead you back to something—whatever it is—that PROFILE says you'll do?”

We walk past a huddle of homeless men who are sharing a bottle of something in a paper bag. “You got any change you can spare, friend?” one of them asks Jesse. He drops my hand and reaches into his pocket, pulling out a crumpled bill. “Bless you,” the man says.

Jesse puts his arm around my shoulders and leads me toward the car, parked another half-block down the street. “I think everybody does the best they can.”

***

I—the girl who prides herself on having no body image issues—suddenly come down with a case of
oh-my-god-do-my-calves-look-fat-in-this-swimsuit?
So I do something I've never done before: I go for a run. It's after nine on Tuesday night, the first day I feel absolutely one hundred percent healed. My head doesn't even hurt anymore. The run is part of my plan to get in shape for Josh's birthday pool party that Dizzy can't stop talking about, even though it's still a month away. “You'll totally have to get a killer suit,” she told me in school today.

It's after dark. Melissa has warned me not to run after dark. “I know Quiet is a small town, but you can't be too safe.” She's in the garage, working late again. Lacing up my shoes, I decide that I can sneak out and be back before she even notices. I grab her key chain—the one with the tiny flashlight on the end of it.

The air is warm and thick. For the last week, everyone had been saying that spring was definitely here to stay. And just like that, in a matter of a day or so, summer trampled over spring and blanketed everything with humidity, so even when it's not that hot, it feels sticky.

I turn left on Monroe Street and jog toward the small pond on campus. I find my stride after a while, near the Coleman Center, the college gym, feeling nothing but the hard slap of pavement against my Nikes.

When I trip over something, I have exactly a tenth of a millisecond to realize that I'm flying through the air before I land on my knees, skidding across the sidewalk with my palms downward.

“What the heck?” someone says.

“Sam?” I peer up at the hulking Sam Cameron as I struggle to get up. “Where did you come from?”

“Hey,” he says. “Hey, Daphne.” He smiles at me and holds out his fist for a fist-bump. I give him a little pound just to be polite, even though I feel like a jackass doing it, even though my knees are killing me.

“I tripped,” I announce, as if it were not patently obvious.

“I know.” He points behind me at the strong cord across the sidewalk, where construction crews poured fresh cement earlier in the day. It's hardened now—a fact that becomes clear as the stinging of my knees works its way up my legs. “Looks like a trip rope,” he says. “Doesn't seem all that safe.”

“No kidding. I didn't even see the rope.”

“Yeah, well, I think there are supposed to be cones here.” He looks around and then points at the two bright orange cones sitting on top of someone's car. “A joke.” I notice that he's wearing a bright yellow sweatband over his floppy blond curls.

“Ha, ha,” I say sarcastically as I stand up and brush the dust off my knees. “Damn it.” I wonder if I'm cursed or something, destined to injure myself on a weekly basis.

He bends over to peer at my knees and then notices that one is bleeding. A lot. “Gross.” He stumbles backward and looks away. I bend over and try to brush the bits of gravel out of the cut. “I hate blood,” he says.

“I remember,” I mutter, thinking of that night at the diner.

He stands with his back to me, his hands on his hips. By the dim light of approaching headlights, I see that he has pit stains. Still, he is kind of cute. I guess I can maybe see why Brooklyn and all the other girls are gaga over him.

The sound of a bouncing basketball causes me to turn around. We both look. I'm surprised to see that it's Jesse. “Hey,” Sam calls, “I got a patient for you.”

Jesse quickens his pace. “What's up? You okay, Daphne? What are you doing here? What happened?”

I hold my knee up at the same time he bends down to look at it. “Another injury. I feel like I'm always wounded and bleeding lately.”

“Then I guess it's a good thing I'm not a vampire,” he says cheerfully.

“And if I'm not wounded, I'm drowning,” I say.

“It's a good thing for you that I have a hero complex. And it's a good thing that I happened to be here. Small world.”

“Phew.” I wipe imaginary sweat from my brow.

“What are you doing out here anyway?”

“Besides sprawling out face-first on the pavement? Jogging.”

“I didn't know you jogged.”

“I don't, obviously. And apparently, you just hang around and wait for me to have accidents.” I feel like a girl in a Gothic novel. Frankly, I feel a tiny bit like January. I recoil a bit in horror.

“Okay, kids,” Sam says, “enough of this. Let's play b-ball, Kable. Isn't that what you came here to do?” He grabs the ball from under Jesse's arm, dribbles out a few feet, and then turns suddenly and throws it hard at Jesse's chest. Jesse catches it, but not before it knocks the breath out of him. He doubles over slightly.