Future Perfect (3 page)

His door squeaks, then shuts, and it's quiet now. Everything is quiet. Soto is curled warm and asleep in the crook of my legs. My laptop is open but my screen is blank. The window is open too and I smell the brine and before-storm air. But unless I concentrate I can't even hear the waves down through the backyard and past the trees, dragging the little sandbar back under the water.

I listen again. That slow, quiet, endless roar finds my ears.

It has always been there and always will be.

It's all I hear.

“I
f you touch my latte one more time,” I tell Hector, “I will end you.”

He lifts the cup to his lips and makes slurping noises while he sips. Laura is rolling her eyes but she doesn't lift her head from her sketchbook.

“Goddammit, Hector,” I say, reaching for the cup. But he's got the longest arms and even though I'm tall, I don't have monkey reach. He is smiling in his sweet and silly way, and I settle back in my chair. I refuse to sulk. I am stronger than caffeine.

“I won't actually end you,” I say comfortingly, if a little grudgingly. His dimples deepen.

“I don't know. You could probably take me,” he says.

I ignore that, and ignore my impulse to glance around and see if anyone heard him. I pick up the printed-out pages I brought to class and then toss them back on the table. I'm scooted back with my calculus book open on my knees because linear
approximations are still pissing me off and now my midterm is tomorrow instead of two days away and I don't want to think about personal essays anymore.

“She was up all night, Hector,” Jolene says, looking up from her own printout.

The rest of us are slouching at the big round table, but Jolene sits as if she's been carefully, gracefully arranged into place. Her hands never stop moving, creasing the corners of her pages. Her small face is serious, but it almost always is.

Hector glances at her, and then back at me, still smiling. He has a gift, and all of it is centered in that dimple on his cheek.

“What were you doing?” he says. Hector's problem is that he smiles a lot. The word
sunny
was invented for him. The word
cheerful
is inscribed across his heart. I feel guilty when he irritates me, as if he is a sweet puppy who should only be loved.

“The essay,” I say. I am speaking so carefully and deliberately. “The assignment that I am very annoyed you forgot about.” I can hear how rough-edged my voice is. It could leave behind abrasions. I close my mouth in case I'm just baring my teeth instead of making an actual smile. He wouldn't notice, though. Or if he did, it wouldn't bother him. I am grateful for that, even when it irritates me.

He reaches out and tucks a curl behind my ear. “You work too hard,” he says. “You don't have to kill yourself all the time, you know. It makes you cranky.”

“Yes, Hector, I am extremely cranky,” I say.

“See, I do learn,” he says. He makes a check mark in the air with his finger. “Gold star for Hector! But you shouldn't have stayed up all night.”

Laura glances up from her sketchbook and squints at him. She says, “Hector. Honey.” He cocks his head at her. “You remember Harvard, I assume, and I have to assume because otherwise I am worried about your brain capacity and your ability to retain and retrieve essential, life-saving information.”

“Well yeah,” he says. He slips his arm around my back. He is so easy and thoughtless in his gestures and I don't understand how that works. I wonder how it would be to not have everything feel like a chess game, planning three moves in advance. Especially when, like me, you are terrible at chess.

“I'm just saying. She doesn't have to work so hard. She's in. She's got this. She's on it. Early admission and a free ride.” He leans over like he's going to kiss the side of my neck.

“Quit,” I say, ducking, but I can't quite keep myself from smiling at him. He grins and kisses my temple instead. He flips his pen a few times, tapping it on the pad of paper in front of him, but stops when Jolene frowns at him.

Everyone is writing again, and the whole guidance class is a low-pitched buzz of typing and pen scratching and whispering. Today we're supposed to be “pausing for a breath.” Writing down all our best qualities, the things that make us unique and interesting
and stand head and shoulders above all the other candidates and other handy guidance-counselor phrases. It's supposed to help us take a fresh look at the draft of the personal essay we've already finished. That I haven't finished. It will help us revise it with clear eyes, Dr. Ellman says.

I am not interested in my best qualities. I am interested in not messing up my calc grade. I look at the textbook in my lap, the wandering numbers across my notebook, and realize I have screwed up this function. I flip to the back of the book because sometimes that's where the answers are.

Hector goes back to drawing interlocking squares all over his paper. Some people have their heads down and are scribbling away furiously, others finished twenty minutes ago and are now comparing their long lists of best qualities with each other. So many of us have nannies and tutors imported from San Francisco or San Diego, who have spent most of their careers telling us that we are unique in hundreds of ways that the world will appreciate and celebrate, so everyone's got plenty to scribble down.

Not me. As I sit here in the hyacinth-colored room in the northwest corner of George Love Academy, I can hear the buzz of the hive. Everyone here is busy, achieving, overachieving. I am not a special snowflake. I know that anyone could overtake me at any moment.

Our school was founded by a disillusioned millionaire oil executive (named George Love, of course) who wanted to drop
out and tune in to intellectual rigor and spiritual growth. There are only 150 of us in this place, but we are all moonflower spirits whose great and beautiful gifts are being massaged here under the hot lights of our high-school incubator into greatness that will transform the world for the goodness of all mankind—or at least that's what the plaque above the door says.

I like to think Mr. George is off in whatever afterlife he imagined, feeling good about his time on earth. But this school is only
partly
what he imagined.

Rich people move to Santa Ansia just to enroll their kids here—that's how my best friend, Laura, ended up here. Her dad is a mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures lawyer; her mom is a charity-gala hostess/bon vivant/drinker of coconut drinks in a wide variety of tropical locations. Super important. Super busy. Easier to toss their kid into a fancy school than to pay attention to her, Laura says. Her parents are pretty standard-issue, for this town.

Our teachers, on the other hand, believe very, very hard in their mission. Our Principle (who would be called
principal
in a normal school) actually says things like, “It's so essentially vital to me to be a Sherpa to my students. To hoist you and convey you onward into your destiny when you can't go on your own—to use the popularized Christian vernacular in which so many take true and welcoming comfort. Such a lyrical metaphor. Such magnanimity.” She really says that. All the time.

Principle Simons has been here from the start. She's the one who wrote the
Humanism Handbook
that is required reading every year—how to respect your body and your spirit, and the bodies and spirits of those around you. She's not wrong, obviously, clearly. But all that sincerity gets overwhelming.

Somehow, simultaneous to all this conveyance and respecting and Sherpa-ing, we get written up in national newspapers for our outstanding innovation in educational theories and practice—our alternative physical education program, a fully equipped physics lab, a vegetarian cafeteria, stringent rhetoric and debate and Latin requirements, and a bank of three personal days.

Which means those parent types come in droves, so that George Love Academy becomes this spicy organic vegetable soup of intense competition, and yoga instead of gym, and discussion of chakras, and a question, at the start of each school year, about what your preferred gender pronoun is.

My mother refused to let my brothers go to GLA when she was still around. I wonder how she feels about me being valedictorian of the place. If she knows. Wherever she is.

I picture my mother back home in San Diego. Or maybe she fled all the way to Bogotá to live with the rest of the extended family we never got to meet. Wherever she is, I picture her relieved to be gone.

Anyway. The thing about going to school with the same people for your entire life is that we all know what everyone
else is writing. Emily, the new head of the volleyball team, is writing down “upper-body strength” and “winner.” Jared, the school treasurer, wrote “go-getter attitude” and “chocolate-chip cookies.” Morgan, the salutatorian to my valedictorian—and oh, does she hate that—is writing down adjectives as if she's been waiting her whole life for this opportunity. Brandon, Laura's twin, should still be writing because he has a ridiculous number of positive qualities, though many of them are external.

Laura and Brandon look so much alike. But where Laura is a bright and bobbing balloon on a windy day, he is currently lounging in his chair like he has all the time in the world, his hand threaded into Morgan's blunt bob and his eyes half closed in a sleepy, sexy way.

Ace, my boyfriend back in seventh grade, is filling his entire page with the word
butts
. Hector isn't writing anything because he's going to Europe or South America or somewhere instead of college, because his parents think he needs time to experience the world before he finds his place in it or something like that. He hasn't decided where he wants to travel yet, but they'll send him anywhere he wants. He is going to write an album about seeing the world, he says. If he remembers his pen.

I know Jolene has written “prevailing” somewhere on her list and she has leaned forward over her paper, a wing of her blond hair curving along her cheek. She's chewing on her lip and tapping on the table and making faces at the paper and shaking
her head at herself because she can never quite be still. Laura has written “arty” and then filled the rest of the page with tiny, intricate sketches that bleed into each other and make the page look like it is a thousand miles deep. She's going to set the Rhode Island School of Design on fire—and then the rest of the world. Right now she's just sitting with her heels up on the chair and her sketchbook propped on her knees and her afro of rough-velvet curls framing her face.

Jolene and Laura—I could take both their lists and add a thousand more entries for them.

As discussed, I haven't written anything.

I write out the next calc equation and frown at it. I dislike approximations. Math should have solid answers with no wiggle room.

Laura looks up from her sketchbook with big eyes. “Ooh!” she says, waving her pencil. “An idea, I have an idea. Okay, what if everyone brought their own food?”

“For what?” I say.

“Your birthday party,” she says.

“A party? I don't have time for that,” I say.

“Liar,” she says. “You've been devising intricate plans and writing lists for three months. I know it because I know you and I have seen how you write endless lists when you're planning and I don't even understand how they don't give you panic attacks.”

“I like to be organized,” I say.

“So, my idea,” she says.

“So what you're saying is everyone brings their own food to eat?” I ask. Jolene laughs.

“
Well
, that would be an incredible cost savings and possibly also net you some easy clean-up with a tradeoff for the environmental damage factor with all the disposable plates and things. But no!” She slaps her sketchbook down on the desk. “We assign everyone a country and they bring a food from it.”

“We're inviting the entire class,” I say. “Are there that many countries?”

Laura rolls her eyes at me.

“And are we that organized?” I say.

“I know you are,” Laura says.

“The real question is, do I want to be?” I counter.

Jolene says to Laura, “I would rather not organize a global buffet.” She glances up as Dr. Ellman strolls by. “Organizing buffets is not my strongest skill,” Jolene says innocently.

Dr. Ellman stops at my chair. “Psst,” she says, leaning over my shoulder. “One of your best qualities is
conviction.
” She winks at me and then strolls away with her hands behind her back. Her oxfords are very shiny.

“I don't even know what that means,” I say. “Why is she telling me this?” I throw my pen down and it bounces across the table and then slides onto the floor.

“I think your best quality is self-assuredness,” Jolene says.

“I think it's your eyebrows,” Laura says.

“I think it's your chili,” Hector says. He is not wrong.

“Also,” Laura says, “feather boas and tiaras! And beads and scarves and masks and dancing.”

I blink. “What?” Those don't sound like qualities.

“For the party?” she says. Sometimes it is hard to follow in her wake. Everything looks easy and effortless for her and Brandon. And they both seem to understand how the world works. They know how to survive outside of this little hothouse of a town. I suspect the rest of us are going to find out the hard way.

“Yes of course for the party,” she says.

“Will there
really
be tiaras?” I say suspiciously.

“You do love tiaras,” Jolene says to me. She's smiling. Her eyes are the frostiest blue and her skin is pale and freckled, so she always looks like she is dappled with sunlight. Her bob is a bright knife-edge along the line of her jaw. Laura always says someday she'll be someone's yuppie dream mom, in tailored shirts and cuffed shorts and perfect, unscuffed flats.

“I don't mind tiaras,” I say. “They're kind of whimsical.” I pause. “My best quality is whimsy.”

Hector raises his eyebrows at me. “I don't think you should write that one down.”

“What do you mean? I am filled with humor and light!” I argue.

Jolene is laughing because she knows when I'm joking. Laura
frowns at me because she worries when I joke.

“What about pizza?” Hector says.

“No,” I say.

“You never listen to me,” he says.