Where Futures End (9 page)

Screw that.

“We have until the end of the day,” I tell Brandon. “Put
some sunglasses over those beady eyes of yours and start playing to the camera.” Even as I say it, a Sunglass Shack icon pops up in the corner of my screen. Our drama is increasing the hits on Brandon's feed. But that's not going to last. Pity is entertaining for only so long.

I march out to Saint Professor's table and press my hand over the camera mounted in the napkin dispenser. “You want ice-cream nuggets? You know what
discontinued
means? It means you'll never see those nuggets again. Unless you're willing to pay good.”

Saint Professor goes silent with shock. He fidgets with his cartoon tie the same way my dad fidgeted with his own tie when a salesman came to our door and offered to install cameras in our house so we could explore the exciting world of profitable family drama.

I still wonder what would have happened if Dad had said yes—whether Brandon and I could have saved ourselves from this mess by letting people watch us scramble to keep ourselves out of a debtors' colony.

But Dad would never have said yes. “Sincerity facilitates meaningful connection,” he always said. No, Dad. Financial solvency facilitates meaningful connection.

Also, being alive so you can care for your children instead of saddling them with your debt. That would facilitate a meaningful connection too.

“I've got seven boxes in the back,” I tell Saint Professor. “You think about how much you're willing to pay for those boxes. And it's going to include that notebook in your
pocket. I'll be back in a few minutes.”

I leave him boggle-eyed and swing by the booth of boys from my school. “You ordering or not? Because if you're not, I'm going to give your table to that business type in the lobby over there who looks like she wouldn't mind getting into a screaming match with me if it meant increasing advertising for her company.”

The guy from math class lifts his eyebrows. He seems duly impressed with me. “What're you doing when you get off work?” he asks. “Want to go to the lake?”

I form an image of me dangling my bare feet over the side of a dock, sharing a bag of pretzels with a decent-looking guy who appreciates me less for my taste in tight jeans and more for my ability to win a Math Bowl and chew out obnoxious customers.

But then I come back to reality, assess his scuffed-up sneakers, and decide sharing a nice moment with a middle-class local isn't going to keep Brandon off the bus to Debtors' House.

“Sorry, can't,” I say. I'm aware of a sharp pain centering in my solar plexus.

I suck it up. I cover the nearest camera with my hand and convince his friends to give me double tips for sneaking them beer-injected foam.

Then I go back to Michael's table with another Banana Split. A couple of preteen girls have come in from the expo and are huddled a few feet away, recording Michael with their e-frames.

I take a deep breath, plaster on a perky smile, and slide
into his booth. “So,” I say, “your friend left his notebook behind and your conscience won't let you rest until you return it.”

Michael picks dried foam off the table. “He didn't mean to leave it.” The croak in his voice tells me he's only hoping it's true.

I flip open the faded cover and find a scrawled line of text:
You will find the Other Place when you look for what is lost.
Underneath that is a title written larger:
Stories of the Girl Queen
.

Michael touches the page, runs a finger over the dents left by the pen. “They're all about my sister. She's not really a queen or anything.”

Darn, so he's not foreign royalty. “She's the one your friend Dylan was in love with?” I flip through pages covered in dense handwriting. “How come your sister's not the one trying to return it?” Year after year after year.

“Because I'm the one who wants him to have it back,” he says into the plate of Banana Split. “When he left—well, it was my fault. I thought maybe if I give this back to him . . . I don't know. I just feel like I owe it to him.” His murky-lake eyes go murkier with some particular brand of sadness. Lamenting A Lost Friendship or, more likely, Guilty About How Things Ended.

I feel like brushing his hair back, patting him on the head, telling him it'll be all right. But then a heavy weight drops into my stomach. Because what are the chances this Dylan guy is going to show up after all these years?

My mind goes to Brandon and this funny thing he does.
I'll be God, you be Adam,
he says. We imitate the figures on the Sistine Chapel—I lounge with my hand barely outstretched, like lazy Adam on his hill. Brandon plays God, straining forward, reaching for my hand with an eager index finger. I'd like to tell Michael:
You're God, and this Dylan guy is Adam
.

Michael eyes the girls huddled nearby. “They're filming me.”

“Don't look so surprised. You're a good-looking guy.” I reach across the table and rest my fingertips against his arm.

He looks down at my hand, up at me. His expression darkens. “That's not going to end well,” he says in a low voice.

I pull back, flooded with embarrassment. “I was just . . .” I can't meet his gaze. He's not stupid. He knows when a girl's trying to get into his wallet.

I glance at the girls who are filming us with their e-frames. A few more have joined them. I think of Brandon and his kind, beady eyes that no one wants to see on camera.

“Look, Michael,” I say. “We both need something. I need money to keep my brother and me from being transferred from a rat-hole debtors' colony to an even worse rat-hole debtors' colony. And you need to get your friend's attention so he'll come down here and ease whatever's weighing on your conscience.”

Michael forgets about the second Banana Split.

“You see those girls over there?” I continue. “They might be able to help us both. The more cameras that are
on us, the closer you and I get to what we want.”

He thinks it over. His breath goes fluttery with anxiety. “So what do we do?”

What would Lola do in this situation?

No, I don't think I'm up for what Lola would do. I'm not that desperate.

Well, not yet. I'll see what I can come up with on my own first.

“You could start by unraveling the mystery. Why no profile? Are you a young presidential hopeful trying to keep your reputation unsullied? Or maybe a modern-day vampire—you've got a reflection but no camera presence?”

Michael lowers his head and peers up at me. “Try something weirder.”

“Weirder?” I get a feeling like soda fizzing up through a flavor foam mold.

He glances at the girls tittering nearby with their e-frames held out. “Touch my arm again,” he tells me.

I give him a questioning look but slide my hand over his forearm. His skin has the warm, dry feel of someone who spends his days in the sun and takes his dinner on the veranda.

“No,” Michael says. “I mean
touch
it.”

“I am.” The soft grit of lake silt left over from a morning swim, the tickle of downy hair.

Michael shakes his head. “You're not. You think you are, but you're not.”

I look at my hand on his arm and then glance at the cameras. What exactly is he going for?

“Michael, my hand is right here on your arm.” But even as I say it, I realize he's right. There's my hand and there's his arm underneath it, but now I don't actually feel anything. No silt, no sun-warmed skin. Nothing. It's like my fingers are hovering a millimeter above his arm. I press down, hard. Still nothing. We're magnets with repelling poles.

“What the hell?” I say. “What's going on?”

He pulls his arm away. He huddles in his corner of the booth. “Maybe this isn't such a good idea after all.”

I frown at him, frown at my hand, flex my fingers. What just happened?

As quickly as my confusion spikes, it recedes, like a flame suddenly smothered with a blanket.
His arm is not repellent. That was an illusion. Chalk it up to the power of suggestion
.

He hunches like a wounded animal. I reach to touch him again, to show him there are no hard feelings about his weird trick. He leans away. Boy, he's moody.

“I'll go get some soda,” I say, and slide out of the booth.

The cluster of girls has thickened; I have to elbow my way past them to get to the kitchen. Another flicker of confusion distracts me as I'm filling the cup at the root beer dispenser. Was I touching Michael's arm or wasn't I?

Lola bounds into the kitchen and says, “That guy is gold. Did you tell him to say all those weird things?”

“He came pre-loaded with a script,” I joke.

“Here, take this.” Lola holds up Dylan's notebook—she must have swiped it from Michael's table. “Tell him he can only have it back if he pays you for it and then let him decide
how to pay you.”

“Uh . . .” says the Other One from where he's fixing the jammed dishwasher.

I yank the notebook away from Lola. “Very classy.”

“And find a way to bring me into this,” she says. “Tell him I'm willing to pose as his sister. Tell him I can cry on cue—I'll just stick some hot chili flavor gel in my eye.”

“Uh, that's not a great idea about the hot chili gel,” the Other One says, circling his eyes with an index finger.

I walk out before they can give me any more suggestions. As I head back to Michael's booth, I riffle the pages of the notebook with my free hand. I notice a passage underlined in red ink.

“Here you go.” I hand the root beer to Michael. “More sugar, to calm your nerves.”

He takes a long pull from the straw. I swear he's putting out misery and guilt like radio signals. I open the notebook to the underlined section, then backtrack a bit to figure out the context. It seems a boy has discovered his lost pet rabbit in a magical wood and is pretty unsettled by the changes it's gone through. It had been an ordinary rabbit, but now it can talk and think and appreciate clever riddles and can't very well be a pet anymore.

“I may not be your kind of rabbit anymore, a tame, huddled kind of rabbit. You might not like me as I am, a wild one who knows the smell of leaf litter and the give of pine needle carpets. You cannot understand a rabbit that will not shy from
cold, open, loud
. Who will not be touched by human hands. No, I am not your garden-cage rabbit anymore. Is it
enough to know me from a distance, since that is the only way we can meet? Or will you leave me now and never return?”

Pretty heavy for a story about a magic rabbit. “You underlined this?” I ask Michael.

He nods, twists away so he doesn't have to read the writing.

This is why he wants to return the book. So Dylan will read this part. “What's the deal with the rabbit? He changed, and the boy couldn't handle it?”

“Something like that,” Michael mumbles.

“What does that have to do with Dylan?”

Michael looks down. “I'm not the person he thought I was.”

“Want to tell me what happened between you two?” I ask quietly, but not so quietly the mic can't pick me up.

Michael bends the end of his straw back and forth, sucks in a long breath. “He showed up in the woods behind our house nine years ago and immediately decided he was in love with my older sister. I think she liked him too, really liked him.” His gaze flicks to the girls watching him. He turns away from them but they just shuffle into a better viewing position. “I thought he was fascinating. He could make a fort out of anything. He made up stories I only half understood but could listen to for hours. He said, This
is how brothers should be.
Then it all started falling apart. He started to realize . . .” His voice falters. He clears his throat.

“What?”

The straw's going to break the way he's bending it.
“Do you ever feel like you know things about a person you couldn't possibly know? That you can . . . sense something about them?”

You mean like if a guy's planning his future with you but you get the sense he's really going to leave you to learn how to paint perfect circles around other girls' belly buttons? If only.

“Look at me,” Michael says.

I drag my gaze to Michael's face and see only worry—that I won't understand him, maybe. It makes lines around his eyes in an intricate pattern I'd like to transcribe.

“With me, you see what you
want
to see,” he says. “Attractive, harmless, whatever. But this isn't what I really look like. It's all an illusion.” His voice cracks. “Dylan figured that out and he couldn't get over it.”

I try to follow what he's saying, but I'm flooded with confusion again.

“I can influence the way you see me,” Michael says, and I lift my eyebrows. “I can influence the way you feel.”

I think back to the way I felt a minute ago—utterly confused and then suddenly not. But that wasn't Michael's doing. That was me, sorting things out.

I'm pretty sure that was me sorting things out.

“So you can make me attracted to you even if I'm not?” I ask him with a teasing smirk.

“If you're hoping to have an attractive customer, then that's how you'll see me.”

I lean back and study him, trying to figure out if he's just having fun with me or if he really believes what he's saying. It's true that he's everything I'd expect from a rich
out-of-towner. The golden complexion, the wind-tangled hair. But the eyes are all wrong—not enough boredom, not enough arrogance. Not nearly enough eagerness to look down my low-cut shirt.

I cross my arms. “What do you really look like, then?”

“I could show you, but you wouldn't understand.”

“Why not?” I say with a disbelieving snort.

The cluster of girls has turned into a horde, all hanging on Michael's words. Michael notices. He looks to the door.