Where Futures End (6 page)

“You didn't pay money for that, did you?” Hunter asked, grimacing at the hat on the counter. “I don't think anyone will buy it.”

“It's not to sell,” Chess said. “And yes, some people would buy it.”

Hunter shrugged. “I'll pretend you're making sense.”

“Is your brother coming by today?” Chess asked as Hunter moved to put the hat on a stand.

“Probably not. I heard my mom saying something about making him go live with my dad.” He walked back over to her. “Don't look so shocked. I told you he's been cutting school like every day.”

Hunter slid his hand over her arm. Chess stepped back, her mouth twisting.

“Were you wearing a different shirt earlier?” she asked.

Hunter looked down, as though he needed to check. “No.”

Dylan glanced down at his own shirt, the one Chess must have been remembering.

Chess chewed her fingernails. Her eyes were cobwebbed with confusion.

“What's wrong?” Hunter asked.

“A minute ago you were . . .” Chess studied Hunter's face. She looked for a moment as though she didn't recognize
him. As though she'd forgotten the difference between him and Dylan. “You seem different. Something's missing.”

Hunter's gaze went to the display under the counter, as if Chess were talking about the inventory.

In between shelves of hat boxes and bicycle parts, Dylan felt a hopeful stir. It was him Chess was missing. He looked at the Narnia book on the counter. A book Chess had asked for because Dylan had mentioned it.

“Do you think Dylan will be okay?” Chess asked Hunter. “Couldn't you talk to your mom, see if she'll let him stay and try again at school?”

Blood roared in Dylan's ears. He thought of the frosted windshield of Chess's car, the heater thawing his cold hands. He had kissed her. She hadn't stopped him. She'd made a joke after he'd made that
Blade Runner
reference, as though kissing were a normal part of any conversation. She seemed to like it. To like
him,
not him-pretending-to-be-Hunter.

Hunter turned away from Chess with a glower. “Doubt I could change my mom's mind,” he grunted. He shoved boxes out of the way and sent others zooming toward the back room with superhuman strength. Dylan realized the boxes were empty.

“Where did these bagels come from?” Hunter asked, glaring at the bag on the counter. Dylan had made Hunter forget all about them.

Dylan's vorpal was strong today. He really could make Hunter walk to the bus station. He could make Chess forget about him, at least for a little while. Dylan might never
get back to the Other Place, but he could still use his vorpal. He could use it to get what he wanted here in the real world.

The wind-chime voice of the Girl Queen came back to him, speaking words he didn't understand. He would never see her again. Chess was all he had of happiness.

Dylan maneuvered through the shelves toward the front of the store. He stopped as Chess spoke again to Hunter: “Here, I've borrowed this way longer than I meant to,” she said.

From behind a stack of DVD players, Dylan saw Chess tug up her jacket sleeve and pull the gold bracelet off her wrist.

Hunter took it from her, turned it over in his hands.

“What's wrong?” Chess asked. “Is it scratched?”

“No, it's just . . .” Hunter shook his head, cleared the foggy look from his eyes. “It reminds me of this place Dylan and I used to visit when we were kids.”

Some invisible hand wrenched the wiring in Dylan's chest.

Chess looked confused. “Not the lake?”

“Somewhere else.” Hunter seemed a million miles away. “It doesn't matter. We haven't been there in a long time.”

Dylan's muscles all went rigid.

“I keep thinking I'll get back there someday, but . . .”

It's real,
Dylan thought.
I was right.

Hunter slid the bracelet onto his wrist. He did it so easily, it was clear he'd done it a million times before.

You found that bracelet ages ago and hid it from me,
Dylan realized
. You thought it could get you back to the Other Place.

But it would never work. Hunter's vorpal wasn't strong enough. It wasn't anywhere near as strong as Dylan's. Dylan could feel Hunter's vorpal even now and it was weak as water.

He'll never get back there.

How often had Hunter gone there when they were kids? Two, three times? Dylan's stomach was a steel clamp. He couldn't count the times he himself had gone.

And every time, he'd come back with a million stories for Dad. Dad would eat it up, would tell him he had a special gift. Hunter could never compete with that, didn't even try.

It seemed so obvious now. All these years Hunter had been trying to make up for what he had missed out on. With basketball, with girls.

With Chess.

Dylan bumped against the tower of DVD players. Chess whirled at the sound, spotted him.

Dylan wielded his vorpal, strong as a sword.
You don't know me.

“Oh, I didn't hear anyone come in,” Chess said. “What are you looking for?” Her gaze was bland, disinterested. She didn't know him.

Dylan opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Hunter had taken off the bracelet and was shoving it into the display. Dylan pointed to it. “How much is that?”

Hunter's gaze slid over Dylan. “I could negotiate. Someone else wanted me to hold it, but—” The smallest line of confusion appeared between his brows.

Dylan's gone,
Dylan thought at Chess.
He's not coming back. You've got Hunter and he's got you and Dylan's long gone.
He thought it with his vorpal—
snick-snick-snick
.

“He left, didn't he?” Chess said. “Went out on the bus. I don't think he's coming back.”

“You can buy it if you want,” Hunter said. “He's not coming back for it.”

Dylan reached for the money in his pocket. He should use it for a bus ticket. He should forget about the bracelet, forget the Other Place. He would go live with Dad, start over. No more fairy tales, no more screwing up.

Hunter was frowning at him. Figuring out who he was? No, just waiting for an answer.

I should tell him about the basketball game,
Dylan thought.
Tell him Dad was there.
But how could he?
Hunter thinks I'm a stranger right now
.

He opened his mouth, trying to figure out what to say. But all that came out was “Yeah, I'll buy it.” He put his cash on the counter.

“You want to look at it first?” Hunter said, holding out the bracelet.

Dylan took it and turned toward the door. He wasn't going to his dad's. He couldn't. The most he could do was take the bracelet away and help Hunter forget about the Other Place. Help him be happy in the real world like Dylan had never managed to be.

“Hey, wait!” Hunter called.

Dylan held his breath as he walked out of the shop. The bell on the door tinkled.

It went on tinkling, like water over rocks.

And on and on—

Dylan looked up. A stream cut across his path, trickling over mossy rocks. A canopy of sun-lit leaves shuffled overhead. His breath whooshed out.

The lattice of branches all but hid a gold-roofed palace. Through a tunnel in the trees—some engineered walkway—Dylan glimpsed a distant city of glass like a gathering of soap bubbles. The cold air pricked his lungs, his eyes.

The Other Place.

“Hello?” came a voice.

Dylan spun. It was her. A bolt of electricity shot through him. She was taller and full of new angles, but with the same pale-water hair and glass-smooth skin. She'd come to meet him. She hadn't forgotten.

“You came through yesterday, didn't you?” she said. “And before that, of course—a long time ago. I remember you.”

The air seemed to bend around her as though she accepted obeisance even from molecules. Her eyes were blue as ice. Dylan wondered briefly if they changed color when she was warm, if there was as much magic to her as he remembered.

She crept closer, as though afraid to scare a skittish animal. “Do you know where you are?”

It was cold out in the wood. Frigid mud seeped into his sneakers. There wasn't the rain-and-salt smell of Seattle. “The Other Place.”
How can it be true? How did I get here?
He had about a million more Impossible Questions, too
many to ask.

Her vorpal was all shifting puzzle pieces. “The . . . ?”

“I'm too old,” Dylan blurted. “I shouldn't have been able to come back. I'm too . . .”

He'd forgiven Hunter. In his own way—by taking the bracelet. That was why he'd been able to come. Some rotten core had lifted out of his heart.

“Will they let me stay?” His voice was plaintive, like a child's.
Can't I come live with you?
An Impossible Question, but she didn't seem to mind.

“No one can make you leave,” she said, and gripped his hand as if to anchor him. Her vorpal was strong, and he felt a ripple of sadness pass from it into his skin when she spoke again: “Do you remember me?”

She thought he'd forgotten. “I've been looking for you, trying to get back here,” he said.

She threw her arms around his shoulders. “And I've looked for you. The same way we once looked for gold in river gravel, for something we never expected to find. But now you've finally come again.”

She'd learned so many new words since he'd last seen her, when he'd taught her his language in bits and pieces.
How did she learn to say all of that?

She stepped back and her vorpal was a wave of brightening air. “Others from here have gone to your world, but they never saw you. I would have gone if I could have. They've been to your world many times.”

“When? I didn't know it worked that way.”

“Before you ever came here,” she explained. “Years
before. We discovered . . . a leak. Where our two worlds press together, energy flows from your world into ours. It led us to you.”

He shook his head, unable to take it all in. “But why would you want to leave a magical kingdom for sidewalks and trash cans?”

She laughed and pulled him by the hand through the trees. “Because we are curious about your world. Like you were about ours when you were a boy.”

She led him along the bank of the stream. A map unfurled in his mind: The stream led to a river, to a sunlit cave where he'd seen treasures stored. It fed other streams that ribboned through the forest, through secret glades where he'd once built forts out of fallen logs. Farther along were the marshes covered with boardwalk mazes intricate enough to leave any adventurer as dizzy as Dylan felt now.

“Do you remember
everything
?” she asked him. “The den we carved in the bank of the stream? Eating berries there until the rain brought our mud ceiling down around us?”

She laughed again, then stopped and turned to him. “You're the first from your world to come here. You're the first to learn how to use such an ability.”

“Ability?”

“That allows you to find another universe.”

“Universe?”

She frowned. “Is it the right word?”

“I—I don't know.” He thought of his conversation with Chess the night before—alternate universes and fairy-tale
lands
.

The Girl Queen had brought him to where he could get a better look at the palace through the trees. It wasn't as big as he remembered. Just a house, really. Tall flashing windows, a rooftop gilded with yellow-gold leaves. A palace to a young boy desperate for fairy tales, but not actually a palace.

Are they real, the things I see?

He turned back to her. “You're . . . real.” A real girl, in a real place. It wasn't his own world. It was some alternate universe.

Her arms were slim and strong around his shoulders again. “I'm as real as you are.”

Dylan's shoes sunk into the muddy bank of the stream. The silt on his sneakers shone like copper. His vorpal glinted like scales on a fish tail. He could see it.

Like a halo of light around him.

WHEN WE WERE TV

(ten years from now)

BRIXNEY

My training at Flavor Foam went something like this: “First you punch the proper button on the machine, which releases the mold—maybe of Robert Pattinson In His Heyday or Cartoon Princess Number Five.” That was my manager speaking. One of two managers, so I tend to think of him as Mr. One. I think of the other as the Other One. Mr. One is skinny as a mendicant and always has his palms pressed together as if he's begging me to do these things. Please,
please
press the button next to the corresponding image. Please don't break the mold, or if you do, please try to land safely on your ass when I give you the boot.

“The mold goes on the souvenir plastic plate,” Mr. One begged, extending his palms toward me and the mold in turn, “and then the nozzle of the injector goes into the top, and then the edible foam goes into the mold. Does the customer want a flavor gel? Most likely the customer does. Use
the gel gun to shoot that in too.”

He gave a very long pause here and squinted at me with concern, like he wasn't sure I could handle all of the instructions at once. The gel gun dripped purple goo on the counter. “It'll be your job to clean this up, by the way,” he whispered to me.

I nodded and wondered if he meant right then. But he plowed on.

“The mold gets removed in
two
pieces,” he said, breaking it apart and tossing said pieces into the return bin, “and then you've got Boisterous-Berry Action Star Turned Family Film Dad or whatever.”

We stood back to admire the Flavor Foam Head's paternal grin. The purple gel glistened in the overhead lights. I secretly think Flavor Foam Heads are the weirdest snack ever invented. They're supposedly made of “plant proteins” and “stabilizing agents,” whatever that means. I suspect they might actually be made of injectable wall insulation, but they're somehow delicious, especially with Fudgsicle flavor gel. Plus, they're low-fat.

And the foam looks good onscreen—shiny and colorful and weird enough to make you look twice. Flavor Foam has cameras jutting from every corner and TV screens mounted on the walls so customers and employees can enjoy a few minutes of manufactured fame. The thought that Flavor Foam's customers can watch me screw up onscreen used to horrify me. But now I'm used to it.

“We have all the FeedBin molds over here.” Mr. One indicated a new machine on the counter. “These are a big
hit with kids obsessed with the videos on FeedBin that've gone viral. They want to eat Flavor Foam Heads of ordinary people who become overnight Internet sensations, like Grumpy Boy Swearing He'll Never Sneeze Again. But don't make the mistake of thinking it's only kids who want this. Adults want it too. They want to get Man Who Makes Millions Selling Comic-Con Costumes Out Of His Basement so they can smash in his Flavor Foam Head as punishment for his undue success.”

And for his weird haircut,
I wanted to add.

I'd actually watched some of that guy's online feed once. He'd installed a camera in his basement so you could see how he carved up styrene sheets for costume armor. But the camera was attached to the ceiling, so mostly you got to see the back of his head as he leaned over his worktable.

People will watch anything halfway interesting on FeedBin, even a video of someone eating weird food like flavor foam. All they want is to get lost in Random Internet Weirdness Land.

These days I'm pretty much stuck in Crippled By Debt Since Sudden Death Of Parents Land. Hence the new job.

“And Brixney?” Mr. One pleaded, palms pressed to his heart. “We like to be camera-ready at all times here. So, the Woe Is Me face? That's not going to work.”

I gave him a sudden, startled smile that probably made me look like Toddler Confronted By Hungry Water Fowl.

“Exactly,” Mr. One said, bowing his head in reverent approval. “That really rounds out the
customer-slash-viewer experience.”

I spend my breaks poking around on my handheld e-frame—a sadly outdated, brick-like model that I rent from the debtors' colony where my older brother and I live because he's so far in debt. For work, I use its recognition software to identify appetizers so that I don't accidentally serve gravy fries to a kid who's ordered cheese fries (trust me, our gravy and our cheese look identical). But during my breaks, I use it to browse FeedBin for top-rated feeds.

I like to watch the feeds from cameras planted in stores and offices and restaurants. Even a lot of security cameras are connected to the Internet these days, although I don't really care to watch someone standing in an elevator. Sometimes I find a real gem of a feed coming in through the built-in camera in someone else's e-frame. People will whip out their e-frames to film just about anything happening around them and they're not shy about sharing it on the Internet. A lot of times that's the best way to catch the weirdest or coolest or most embarrassing stuff. Not everyone likes to be on camera—I get that. But if a big corporation decides your feed is popular enough to advertise on, it means you get a cut of their ad revenue, so at least you get paid for your humiliation.

Lately I prefer to watch streaming video of People Having The Worst Day Ever so I can add sympathetic emoji in the comments section (except my e-frame doesn't support emoji, so I have to transcribe them): Jaycub of Mill Creek gets dumped for a guy wearing a shirt that says
Llamas Love
Me
(
Teary Face
). Middle-aged Darren goes on a series of soul-crushing interviews, during which he realizes his computer skills are hopelessly outdated for today's job market (
Dismayed Face
). Overlarge Allasin weeps on the pioneer costume of a Little-Bitty Prairie ride-operator because her overlarge son can't fit in the safety harness for Wagon Train Chase (
Dismay with Inverted Eyebrows
).

Sometimes I use my e-frame to call up their locations, the Jaycubs and Darrens and Allasins. I think about heading out to Mill Creek Mall or Technology Is Supreme Office Park to watch the events unfold before my own eyes, or even stick out my e-frame to add another feed to the Bin. But then I think of Griffin.

I met Griffin at the MyFuture debtors' colony when my older brother (and legal guardian) was sent there with me in tow. Griffin had been in with his dad for three years already because of a massive amount of credit card debt that had been bought out by a ruthless collection agency. My brother had a messy mortgage that he'd tried to take on after our parents' death, plus medical bills from our parents' last few comatose weeks of life. In hindsight, we should have sold the house right after our parents' car accident and used the money to pay the hospital. But how can you sell the rickety porch your dad built, or your parents' bedroom, or the marks your mom's favorite swivel chair left on the wall? You can't. So you end up giving it to the bank when your mortgage falls into default.

Griffin got me the job at Flavor Foam so I could help my brother chip away at his debt and get out of MyFuture.
As a minor, I can't have any debt attached to me and can come and go as I please. But Brandon's stuck there, can't even go around the corner to get a burger or take a swim in the lake or anything. Not even to, say, get a job with which to pay off his debt. What he
can
do is try to come up with some clever activity that will make his feed popular and attract advertisers. But nothing that involves nudity, or suggesting nudity, or suggesting anything else that typically goes on in a motel, because then the government comes in and confiscates all of MyFuture's cameras and e-frames, and no one makes money, least of all Visa. The government doesn't mind what your average person does with a camera and an Internet connection, but it's pretty intent on preventing debtors' colonies from becoming porn plantations.

Residents in MyFuture are great at pulling together to attract hits on their feeds. Once we did a reinterpretation of
Les Misérables
, with Javert as an obsessive collection agent and Jean Valjean doing everything he could to avoid having his adopted daughter grow up in a debtors' colony. Small-time review sites called it “poignant” and “relevant,” but Rotten Tomatoes never mentioned it, and it didn't catch on at FeedBin.

We also had a good gig going where we charged local schools to bring in kids so they could see firsthand the dangers of high interest rate credit cards. But a couple of credit companies shut that down real fast with some bad press about children being exposed to former addicts and dropouts.

Brandon did everything he could to play up our own hardships for the camera—Isn't It Sad That A Couple Of Orphans Are Stuck In A Mold-Infested Motel With Former Gamblers And Alcoholics? We got a week's worth of advertising by drawing out an argument about me quitting school to get a job.

And people really tuned in to see my relationship with Griffin build.

The first time Griffin saw me, I was crying in the stairwell at MyFuture. It was my first day there and I'd just found out Brandon and I had to share a room with another person and discretion dictated that I sleep on a cot in the bathroom.

Griffin tried to cheer me up by telling me that at least the place had a pool.

But there's no water in it,
I said.

You have to bring your own,
Griffin said.

I wiped my eyes on my sleeve and peered up at him from the dingy carpet of the stairwell landing. I figured this was the best he could do at being funny, so I played along.
No one told me,
I said.

He considered for a moment and then said,
I could let you borrow mine
. He took my hand and pulled me up while I was still trying to figure out if he was joking. Then he led me outside and down into the empty pool, where an entire sloping wall was covered with 3-D chalk art of a whale swimming in sun-lit water. It was so beautiful that the only thing I could think of to say was,
This is better than the water I would have brought from home.
And Griffin shrugged and
said,
It's the only water you can't get wet.

He had tons of ideas, all the time. Once he used his chalk to add a footnote to the slogan MyFuture had painted on a giant sign on the roof:

 

MyFuture

where my future belongs to me*

*once I obtain a release of lien

 

He always told me not to take it all so seriously.
Stop staring at the sidewalk,
he would say at the plaza.
It's not like you're in debt to these specific people
. And I'd try to shake the feeling that tourists were going to walk up to me and demand that I pay them for the toothpaste I'd used that morning.

With Griffin, it was easier not to wallow in self-pity. So I spent all my time with him, at work and at MyFuture. In the mornings when the food truck delivered breakfast, the cost of which was added to our debts, we'd peel the foil off our plates and fashion it into ninja stars. In the evenings, we'd browse FeedBin, watching families watch TV together, and spying on old friends from schools we'd never again attend. On clear nights, when the stars were white on black instead of smoggy gray, we'd lie on the roof together and say cheesy things like,
At least they can't charge us for moonlight
. Although later they did, by way of imposing a curfew and fining those of us who broke it.

Then Griffin started talking about us leaving the colony together and sorry if that meant not helping alleviate our families' debts but didn't I want a future? A real future without a lien on it? Our sobby love story got decent ratings, enough to pull in ad revenue, even. Customers came into Flavor Foam to watch me argue with Griffin in person. Mr. One had our supplier make a mold in the shape of Griffin's head. You can still order Lover Boy With Big Plans To Get Out Of This Town, although nobody does. Nobody except me.

The day Griffin turned eighteen, he took his share of the revenue we'd gotten from companies who had advertised on our feeds and he bought us Tickets To The Big City. But I wouldn't leave Brandon alone in a debtors' colony with no way to get out. So Griffin left and I had to do (terrible, disproportionate) chalk art on my own. And I stopped going on the roof to look at stars. And I stopped watching feeds of happy families in real living rooms. And foil was just foil.

My Tuesday afternoon regular is a guy I think of as Saint Professor, a brand-new English teacher who comes in after school. His cheap suit and cartoon character tie prove he's straddling the line between determined and defeated. He must be finding it hard to meet his classroom objectives, because he likes to lecture me on how to do my job.

“What have you got in the way of historical heroes in government?” he asks.

I use my e-frame to scan his tie. An old
Bad Dad
cartoon episode pops up. “Honestly, I wouldn't count on that being a demand we cater to.”
Bad Dad
always reminds me of junior high—watching episodes after school with Brandon while we ate maple syrup straight from the bottle. We would have
inhaled
flavor foam if it had existed back then. Sometimes I bring it to him from the restaurant, but I can tell he only eats it to humor me.

He's obsessed with staying healthy now that he's all I've got.

Saint Professor gives his patient sigh and slowly unfolds a menu. “When I ask for a certain type of mold, you hold open the menu like this.” He spreads it in front of me and pushes my e-frame out of my eye-line. “See here where the categories are listed? See how they're color-coded?”

I try to decide which pointy objects I'd most like to hide in his flavor foam.

“Want to guess what color historical figures get, or do you already know?” Saint Professor says in his slow, deliberate voice. “Hmm?”

The color of your blood when I stick you in the eye with that
Bad Dad
tie pin?

“It's green,” he says. “Historical figures and aging athletes both get green. Now, if I scan the menu for green stars, I'll find—look here—that's Oprah. She also gets a light blue star for being a religious figure. That's not political, which is what I was looking for, but you know what? Close enough, because actually I believe they made her honorary mayor of a couple towns during that year she was battling colon cancer. So I'll take Oprah Bellowing
Her Generosity.”