Where Futures End (2 page)

“It doesn't matter,” Hunter said. “Stop worrying about
it, okay?”

Can't,
Dylan thought, and pictured her eyes again: cracked ice, sunlight reflecting off every facet.
Why do I remember someone who isn't real?
Add it to the list of Impossible Questions.

Hunter pulled a cloth from his back pocket and handed it to Dylan. “Dust instead.”

The girl in the canvas jacket popped out from behind a shelf of junk, a shiny mask strapped over her face. “Hey, Hunter, what do you think?”

Hunter chuckled. “C-3PO.”

“It's not,” the mask-girl said. “It's from—”

“
Metropolis,
” Dylan said. “That robot girl.”

She shoved the mask up over her dark hair. “Have you seen it? The movie—
Metropolis
?”

“Sure,” Dylan said. “Who hasn't?”

She smiled, her brown eyes reflecting the gold of the mask. Her hair was like polished wood, like the black walnut trees behind his house when they were wet with rain.

Hunter set the cash box on the counter, a little too hard.

“Grab whichever DVDs you want, Chess,” Hunter said to the girl. “I'm just gonna put a twenty in here and that'll cover it.”

“There's another bin of them you didn't go through yet,” Dylan told her, pointing.

The girl—Chess—gave him a brief look (curious? interested?) and then disappeared down an aisle. Dylan swiped dust from the glass counter with the cloth, thinking about that look, until he noticed something under the glass: a
wide band of gold etched with vines.

He clamped a hand on the counter, dizzy with confusion.

“Where'd this come from?” he asked Hunter.

Hunter shrugged. “A guy came in yesterday.”

It's a bracelet, just a bracelet,
Dylan told himself.

But in his mind he could see the Girl Queen sliding it onto his arm.

“Dylan?” Hunter said.

“This is mine,” Dylan said.

Hunter snorted. “It's yours if you have three hundred dollars.”

“It's mine. I got it from . . . from . . .”
Where?
He reached for it with a shaking hand and touched cool metal. Instantly, the smell of moldering leaves came back to him, along with a barrage of images: the damp fallen trees in a shaded forest, a girl's porcelain face. A gilded rooftop glimpsed through a puzzle of branches.
She put her hand in mine, her fingers were so cold. Mud all along her hem and spattered on her bare feet. “Where are we going?” She looked at me over her shoulder and then the light was in the branches and in her hair . . .

He remembered. Not only the Girl Queen but . . .

. . . a forest.

Where?

He slid the band onto his wrist.
The cold metal sliding up my arm. Her voice uncertain: “Remember me.”

A prickle went down his neck. He remembered Dad reading from
The Blue Fairy Book,
remembered listening so intently that everything around seemed to vanish.

He remembered the world parting to reveal enchanted
trees, water churning over rocks.

Things no one else could see.

Hunter snatched the gold band off Dylan's wrist. “You got it from the display. And that's where you're going to leave it unless you can pay for it.”

Dylan's hands trembled. He looked again at the gold band.
Was
it just a bracelet?

Of course it was.

And those memories? That place?

A dream,
he told himself.
An image from a storybook
.
A childhood fantasy only a sad loser would still believe in.

Chess returned with a stack of DVDs. “Wow,” she said, coming closer to peer at the gold band Hunter still held. “Looks like something from
Lord of the Rings
.”

“Here, try it on.” Hunter held it out, and she slid the band onto her wrist before Dylan could object.

“Looks good on you,” Hunter told her, spearing Dylan with a glare
.

“Yeah, it's cool.” The girl turned her wrist to admire the band some more.

“So keep it for a few days,” Hunter said.

“What? You can't take stuff from the store,” Dylan said to Hunter, his voice sharp with desperation.

“She's borrowing it,” Hunter said. He passed the DVDs back to Chess. “This all you want?”

Chess nodded. She looked between him and Dylan. “Are you sure it's okay for me to—”

Hunter grabbed her hand and steered her toward the door. “You want bagels?”

The bell over the door chimed again and they were gone.

Dylan heaved plastic file boxes out of Mom's closet and disemboweled them. Papers spilled over the carpet: Dylan's childhood artwork. Paintings of green fish and bulbous insects, of uneven spirals like whorled snail shells.

Shaky drawings of a girl's face.

Another memory rushed to mind:
swimming through dark, frigid water. Around him, tiny fish, drifting insects, crustaceans felt their way along gravel and silt. The water brightened, and Dylan surfaced in a sunlit cave.

A girl with ice-bright eyes pulled him by the hand up a rocky crawl that bit into his bare toes. He felt he was moving through a spell: the clinging mist, the chime of water dripping into shallow pools. The walls of the cave were dimpled with nooks where odd treasures lay like catalogued talismans. The girl picked them up one by one: a pearly snail shell the size of her fist, a yellow-green mushroom gone brown under the cap, a clump of water-logged feathers, a smooth river rock veined with blue and red. Her collection.

Footsteps and then Mom's voice interrupted Dylan's thoughts. “What are you doing?”

Dylan shoved the papers into a folder. “Looking through some old stuff.” He didn't know why he felt embarrassed about it. But it was like being caught sleepwalking, like explaining a dream to someone only to have it come out sounding absurd. Plus, he never went into Mom's closet, not even just to look at old papers. “Did you see that gold bracelet that came into the shop yesterday?”

In the doorway, Mom held her half-open laptop in one hand and squinted at Dylan. “No, and I wish you boys wouldn't offer loans on stuff like that without calling me in to do the appraisal.”

“I think Hunter brought it in. He found it somewhere.”

Mom set the laptop down on her desk and flipped through a stack of bills. “Where would Hunter get something like that?”

“I don't know.”

Mom frowned at Dylan.

“Well, make sure you hold that stuff and wait for me in the future.”

She straightened a framed photo she had knocked over: Hunter and Dylan standing knee-deep in lake water, smiling with the sun behind them. She glanced from the photo to Dylan, then bent to ruffle his hair affectionately.

“Do you remember a girl at the lake?” he asked. “When you took me and Hunter there for Fourth of July? She showed me a cave.”

The lines around Mom's mouth deepened. “I don't know, Dylan. Maybe.” She glanced at Dylan's folder of artwork. “How about spending a little more time in the here and now? When am I going to see a progress report from school?”

Dylan pushed the box back into the closet, but stuck the folder under his shirt. “When's Hunter getting home?” Maybe Hunter remembered the girl, the cave.

Mom's attention was back on her laptop and the bills. “Late.”

“How come when I take the car I have to be home by ten?”

“He didn't take the car, his girlfriend picked him up,” Mom said. “And from now on you're
here
every night doing homework. Until I see a progress report, you won't be so much as
looking
at the car.”

“Mom—”

She waved off his protest. “Enjoy the view from your room, sir.”

“The view from my room is of your car.” Dylan waited to see if she would crack a smile, and she did.

He stole away to his bedroom with the folder of drawings. The pine needles scrabbling against his bedroom window brought back another memory: searching in the yard for his pet rabbit, which had slipped the latch on its cage again. Worrying, absurdly, that it had crossed over into one of the magical lands in the books Dad read aloud to him and Hunter. And then yearning to be there, in that magical land, away from the sound of his parents arguing in the kitchen.

Dylan closed his eyes now, listening to the wind, and imagined himself in a forest. He smelled damp wood, heard a stream rolling over rocks. One step to the side, maybe, and he'd be there again, in the imaginary land he used to call the Other Place.

He opened his eyes to pine needles splayed across ordinary glass.

He'd ask Hunter about the girl and the cave.

He waited in the den, hoping to catch Hunter when he
came home, but later he woke up on the couch with the TV still on, not knowing if he'd only dreamed about the Other Place in the night or if he'd actually gone there. He vaguely remembered chasing his pet rabbit, hearing his parents arguing in the kitchen. So, dream.

Spread across the coffee table were the childhood drawings he'd taken from his mom's closet: lopsided toads and spotted trees and a girl with overlarge eyes.
Does the Girl Queen still wait for me? Does she think I've forgotten?

He gathered the papers up and stumbled into the kitchen.

Hunter came down while Dylan was still eating breakfast. Dylan was wearing one of Hunter's school blazers—it looked good with the Battle of the Bands T-shirt he'd picked out from the pawnshop a couple of weeks ago. Sort of preppy punk. He hunched over his cereal bowl and hoped his brother wouldn't notice.

Hunter stopped short in the middle of the kitchen and narrowed his eyes at Dylan. Annoyed? Dylan tried to use his vorpal to control what Hunter was seeing. It
snicked
and
pinged
all over the place, like some kind of crazy radar—a sound only Dylan could hear. Hunter glared at his own blazer on Dylan's back. He opened his mouth to say something. Dylan kept his vorpal bouncing off the fridge, off his back, off the fridge.

“You got milk on your shirt,” was all Hunter said, and then he went to the fridge.

Dylan smiled. He had pulled it off.

He had a theory about why he could do things like that:
He knew everyone had a vorpal, because he could sense them, but most people's vorpals were weak. Dylan's was strong enough to overpower anyone else's. His vorpal could trick theirs into seeing what he wanted them to—when Dylan could control it.

“Does your girlfriend still have that bracelet?” Dylan asked. Got straight to the point; might as well.

Hunter swigged orange juice from the carton with a disinterested air. “It's not yours. I don't know why you think it is.”

“Where did you get it?” Dylan asked. “Will you just tell me?”
Tell me where you
really
got it.

Hunter fumbled with the carton. “I found it,” he admitted.

Dylan tensed.

“Out in the shed. It must be—” Hunter almost dropped the juice, finally wrestled it back into the overfull fridge. “Something Mom put out there after Dad left, or . . .”

Or
I
put there myself years ago.
“I think it's mine,” Dylan said, his skin going hot. “I think it came from . . .” The words whooshed out before he could stop them: “The Other Place.”

A sound came from Hunter's brain like
whirrrr-crack!
He turned away; Dylan couldn't see his face. “I thought you would give up on that kind of thing after Dad left.” He turned back, smirking. “He used to love that stupid crap.”

Heat spread up into Dylan's head, settled behind his eyes. “Is that why you took it—you're still mad about all that? Because he listened to my stories about the Other Place?”

Hunter scowled. “I don't care about Dad.”

“You won't even talk to him on the phone.”

“Because I don't care.”

“He knew the Other Place was real. He knew I could see things.”

“That's a nice story.” Hunter smirked again. “Just like that story you told me about how Dad asked you to come live with him.”

The heat behind Dylan's eyes exploded. “He
did
. It's not like he'd admit it to you. He didn't want you to feel bad. He only had room for one of us on the houseboat.”

Hunter glowered at him. “Then why didn't you go?”

“I . . . I didn't want Mom to be sad. You know that.”

“Is that also why you got yourself kicked out of Hevlen? You didn't want Mom to be sad? Yeah, you're making life real easy for all of us.”

Mom strode into the kitchen, car keys jangling. “What are you two arguing about this time?”

Dylan kept silent. He couldn't win with Mom against Hunter.

Why can't she see what a jerk Hunter is?
Another Impossible Question.

Mom eyed the rumpled pillows on the couch in the living room. “Dylan, did you fall asleep doing homework last night? How are you going to keep your grades up if you watch TV while you study?”

“Mom—”

“I'm serious about what I told you last week,” she broke in. “If anything goes wrong this semester . . .”

Dylan swallowed. “My homework's right here.” He nodded at the folder full of drawings on the table and hoped she wouldn't look too closely.

Hunter snatched it up.

“Hey!” Dylan grabbed for it, but Hunter's reach was famous.

“This what they teach in public school?” Hunter held up a wobbly drawing of a bird. “They give you the option to write your essays in pictures?”

Dylan stood and tore the paper from Hunter's hand.

“What is all of that?” Mom asked.

“Should we get a first grader to tutor you?” Hunter asked Dylan, snickering.

“Hunter,” Mom said in a low warning tone.