Future Imperfect (21 page)

When I see Jimi, as I’m walking over across Colfax, all I can think is: Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if I killed this dude.

I mean, the guy’s a dick. Would anyone other than Vaux really mind?

Vauxhall comes walking over to me, she’s dressed in black, has a sweater on. She hugs me and then looks in my eyes like she can read me. And she can, whatever she sees it makes her bottom lip quiver. That quiver, I’ve got to admit it makes me feel good. She’s scared. She’s worried. She cares.

Vaux asks what happened.

I say, “Something very bad.”

Running her fingers along the bruise on my forehead she asks, “What’d you see?”

“Death.”

Jimi strolls over leisurely. He flicks his cigarette over his shoulder and then takes his sunglasses off and folds them slowly, carefully, and puts them in the front pocket of his jeans. Then he cracks his knuckles, this fucker. He says, “Hey, Ade. I can see you’ve been busy.”

“Jimi,” I say. “I just saw your dad again.”

He isn’t fazed. “Ah, and how’s Poppa Ministry?”

“He seems fine.”

Jimi smiles. “Vauxhall’s told me that you’ve been seeing him. That he’s been way out and close in. He’s spooked, Ade. He’s onto me. To us. I have a feeling that the Ministry family massacre will be going down soon.”

“Sooner than you think,” I say. “I saw you drown.”

“Drown?” Jimi chokes. “Did you say drown?”

“Yes.”

Vauxhall’s mouth is hanging open. She’s shaking her head.

Jimi shrugs. “How?”

“I kill you.”

And Jimi busts out laughing. Taking in deep gulps of the night air. The sound of his laughter is surprisingly loud. It’s what you hear in a theater in surround. I’m surprised there aren’t cars screeching to a standstill. Doubled over in pain, his laughter is nearly violent. And it takes him a long while to regain his composure.

After clearing his throat and snorting back snot, wiping his mouth with his sleeve, Jimi says, “
You
kill me?”

What I feel is anger. Not like any anger I’ve felt before. It comes racing up from my gut like it’s on fire, like I’ve just gargled down battery acid. My skin is buzzing, becoming unfocused on me. I want to gnash my teeth like an animal.

Vauxhall can see it in me. She can read it the way you can read the dangerous movements of a dog or a snake. She says, “When, Ade? When does this happen?”

“A few weeks from now. Maybe sooner.”

“Where?” Jimi asks, hands up.

“Reservoir. Cherry Creek, I’m guessing.”

Wiping his forehead, Jimi says, “And my dad was there, huh?”

“He was.”

“And I’m guessing he didn’t try and stop you?”

“He didn’t.”

Jimi looks at Vauxhall. He says, “Not going to happen.”

“What I see always happens, Jimi. Always,” I say.

Jimi does a farmer blow into the grass at his feet and then puts an arm around Vauxhall’s shoulder, says, “If that were true, Ade, then I doubt I’d have had visions of me banging your girl here for the rest of the year.”

Vauxhall looks appalled, her mouth drops open, and she pushes Jimi away.

I close my eyes tight, the rage is so intense.

My body vibrates like a flame.

It’s so unnatural, like I’ve had plastic surgery or something.

Jimi guffaws hard again. Eyes tear up again. He says, to me, “You, Ade, live in the shadows. You’re so removed from the real world that you wouldn’t even know what it is to really—”

And he stops short because I tackle him. The two of us go crashing into the fountain, the cold, dead-leaf-choked water spilling over the side in sloshing waves. I’m on top of him, pushing my fists into his face, into his stomach. I’m hitting his shoulders, hitting his forehead, his eyes. And I’m kicking. With every molecule of my body I’m trying to beat him into the concrete of the fountain.

I’m not doing this for long. Jimi gets his legs under me and kicks me back, out of the water, out of the fountain, and I fall back hard on the sidewalk, my breath rushing out in one big dying-fish gasp.

Vauxhall’s not at my side immediately. She’s standing there in shock.

Jimi pulls himself up, rancid water and decaying leaves falling off him like he’s some swamp monster stepping out of the bayou. He steps over to me. Breathing hard, his chest rising and falling so heavily, he looks at me and then wipes his nose with the back of his hand. He says, sounding so tired, “You’re exactly what I expected, Ade.”

Then he turns and leaves.

Vauxhall, before she follows him, she comes over to me and leans down and puts her hand on my forehead and asks, “Is this what happens when you quit?”

She doesn’t let me answer. She says, “You need to try. You need to change the future. I know you’ve tried it before and it went bad, but you can’t do this. Not to Jimi. Not to yourself. Change the future, Ade. For me.”

“Everything I’m doing is for you, Vauxhall.”

She is crying when she kisses me. It is very tender like a flower petal.

And Vauxhall’s only there a moment; her beautiful face is the moon just for a blink, so soft and so perfect. And then she’s gone too.

By the time I get up off the sidewalk, my clothes are already starting to dry. On Colfax, there are only a few cars going by and most of them are cop cars or taxicabs. The winos have come out. The hookers as well. By the time I get up off the sidewalk, the sun is only a few hours away from breaking in.

Limping back to my car, my cell rings. The number’s unlisted.

I answer.

The voice on the other end is familiar, sickeningly so. “I was right, wasn’t I?”

It’s the obscene phone caller. The gravel-voiced old man.

“Yeah,” I say. “Who are you?”

“Not one person. There are many of us.”

I’m at my car. Pause before getting in. “What do you mean?”

“You can’t change what you saw, Ade. You know that by now. Surely you know that much. Don’t even try it.”

“My mom set you up to this?”

Gravel voice laughs. “That’s rich, Ade. Average life of a scryer, right?”

And he hangs up.

CHAPTER EIGHT

ONE

Dear Professor Susan Graham—

Thank you again for your replies to my letters. I realize they might come off as a bit nutty. I really appreciate your taking the time to help me.

To throw something new in the mix: How about alternate realities?

Parallel universes?

See, I’m asking because there was a show on television last night, one of the educational cable channels, about how some physicists think that our world is all Swiss-cheesed through and through with alternate realities. The show mentioned something about infinite numbers of parallel universes where anything, and everything, I guess, happens. You agree with that? Also the show said there was no way to prove this idea. Like, ever.

I’m going back to the whole changing-the-future thing and I’m thinking, Hey, this parallel universe idea sounds like it could work just fine. I mean, if you try and change the future here, who’s to say it doesn’t change in another, closely related universe? Or maybe the original vision wasn’t of this universe in the first place? Or maybe I have no clue what I’m talking about.

What do you think?

Again, thanks so much for your time on this. I know that my physics teacher is already super excited about the idea and I’m sure I’ll get an A. Just sure of it. And, who knows, but maybe someday I’ll actually meet someone who can see the future and I’ll have some advice? Kidding, of course.

Thank you,

Ade Patience

TWO

I’m standing in a parking garage.

My jeans are still a bit wet but nothing major. Nothing embarrassing.

I find a leaf, orange, in my hair.

When I left the house after a five-hour nap I told my mom I’d be out even later than usual. I told her that something important came up and it will probably change a lot about the way I do things, about the way I’m living my life. I said, “And by the way, I’ve stopped trying to see the future. I’m going clean for love.”

My mom, she was kind of sleeping at the time. She yawned and mumbled something about me “taking good care” and “being a blessing” and then fell back into her pillow and let loose with a volley of lazy kisses. I know that in the morning, when it’s sunk in, then she’ll freak. The Revelation Book, she won’t give it up easy.

I’ve been in this garage more times than I can count.

It’s next to Paris on the Platte, this old café, and the garage is dark and gnarly and the walls of it are covered in a thick suit of soot like the place had been on fire for a few decades before the snows put it out. Not where I want to be waiting.

Especially since I’m on my knees behind an old Subaru.

Luckily, I’m not waiting long.

Belle shows up in her ride and steps out in a cloud of pot smoke. She’s dressed sexily. The boots, the short skirt, the unbuttoned blouse. Her hair’s all tasseled out. Teased and then sprayed still. Incredibly, she doesn’t see me.

Why I’m in the garage, hunkered down behind a car, is ’cause I realized something last time I spoke with the old man. He used the word “scryer.” I looked it up on my cell, it means a seer or like a fortune-teller.

Fact is: I find it very odd that both Belle and the old dude used the same random word. And why I’m in the garage is to follow Belle and make sure that when she took off at the end of the summer she didn’t actually find more people with abilities like mine. If she did, I need to talk to them pronto.

Belle walks over to a door I never noticed before.

This door, it’s on the back of one of the buildings that sit up right against the parking garage, only it doesn’t look like a door to a warehouse or an office building. It looks like someone’s front door with a little wavy glass window and a knocker on it. The knocker is a skull.

Oh, and there’s a symbol painted on the door in white paint. It’s like a crosshatch sort of thing and kind of looks like a hand if it were painted by a child or someone with very little time and education.

Belle takes the knocker, raps it twice, and then steps back.

Then she lights a smoke.

She’s almost smoked the cigarette down to the filter when the door opens. A hand reaches out and summons her in. It’s connected to an arm in a leather coat and the coat’s wrapped around the skinny body of a guy. Front of the leather coat, in white paint, reads
CHARLIE
. Charlie slaps a tattooed hand down on Belle’s shoulder. Smiles at her big with silver-capped teeth. Says, “Good to see you again.”

They disappear into the lightlessness beyond the door and I run over before the door has time closing Just barely make it, wedge my foot in. And then I open the door real slow and follow them.

Charlie leads Belle down a dark corridor that looks like something on the tenth floor of the most boring hotel on Earth. “How long has it been? Weeks, right?”

I follow them down a flight of stairs by an empty kitchen and then to another flight of stairs under the kitchen where the subbasement and the boilers are. Then follow them left past a line of storage closets and the place is like a horror movie with just one lightbulb drifting down from the ceiling. The place is spray painted with cobwebs.

End of the corridor, after I’ve passed like fifty storage lockers and walked halfway across town, I lose sight of them near a big door that’s rumbling the way low-riders with super bass do. This wooden door is like something you’d see at a fun park on a pirate’s ship. Two doors that swing open wide open in the middle and they’re shaking, jittering, in the frame from the bass doing double time on the other side of them.

I take a deep breath, let myself know that I won’t die here, and pull the doors open wide in one big gesture. Inside, it’s sick.

The walls, they’re purple. The floors, they’re purple too. Shag carpets. The ceilings, they’re tiled with mirrors. It’s like a discotheque imported from somewhere in the Baltic. The furniture is all leather. Black leather with yellow throw pillows. Only lights are thousands of Christmas lights wound up like bird’s nests across the ceiling and over the walls. Video-game consoles line the back wall. Somewhere there’s a DJ spinning. The music is raw, filthy electronics. On a circular couch in the middle of the room three people are sitting, two girls and a guy, and they’re staring hard at me. Other side of the room, two girls, maybe my age, sit on a black leather couch. They’re twins. Hands in their laps. From here they’re like ice sculptures in matching white almost Middle Eastern–looking dresses.

Charlie gets the music turned off and the quiet is nearly as loud.

Belle smiles at me, motions for me to walk over, asks, “Following me again, huh?”