The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four (65 page)

Then I said, "That's OK" and stuffed my mouth with fries.

"I don't care if your papergirl already needs Midol," my mother told Donna, "Hannah's still too young. We shouldn't be trying to hurry her, we ought to let her enjoy being a kid while she can. Kids grow up too fast these days."

The conversation turned to safe, boring things like where we should go next and what if anything I should try on again. But Donna kept sneaking little glances at me and I knew the subject wasn't really closed, just as I knew it hadn't really been about menstruation.

No matter when I came into my own, I decided as I bent over my lunch, I was going to hide it for as long as possible. It might be hard but I had already managed to hide the fact that I knew about my trait.

Besides, hiding things was a way of life with us. It was something we were all raised to do.

We all know something and no matter what it is, we virtually never tell anyone outside the family.

"It's like being in the Mafia," my cousin Ambrose said once at a barbecue in Donna's back yard. "We could even start calling it 'this thing of ours' like on TV."

"Nah, we're not ethnic enough," said his father, my Uncle Scott.

"Speak for yourself," my cousin Sunny piped up and everyone laughed. Sunny was Korean.

"You know what I mean," Scott said, also laughing. "You're the wrong ethnic group anyway."

"Maybe we should marry into the Mafia," Sunny suggested. "Between what we know and what they can do, we could take over the world."

"Never happen," said my mother. "They'd rub us out for knowing too much." More laughter.

"Ridiculous," said someone else—I don't remember who. "Knowledge is power."

Knowledge is power.
I've heard it so often I think if you cracked my head open, you'd find it spray-painted like graffiti on the inside of my skull. But it's not the whole story.

Sometimes what power it has is over you.

And it's always incomplete.
Always.

My cousin Ambrose knows what you've forgotten—the capital of Venezuela, the name of the Beatles' original drummer, or the complete lyrics to Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire" (Caracas, Pete Best, and don't go there, he can't sing worth a damn). When he came into his own at fourteen, Donna threw him a party and he told everyone where they'd left their keys or when they were supposed to go to the dentist. Apparently reminding people to buy milk or answer their email wasn't interfering with the world, at least not in the way that got tricky.

We all knew the real reason for the party, Ambrose included: he was Loomis's younger brother. Just about all the local relatives showed up and they all behaved themselves, probably under threat of death or worse from Donna. Even so, I overheard whispers about what a chance she had taken, what with Loomis being the elephant in the room. It was hard to have a good time after that, watching my own younger brothers giggling as they asked Ambrose to remember things they'd done as babies.

There were other mutterings suggesting that Ambrose had come into his own earlier than he had let on. He was a straight-A student and who wouldn't be with a trait like his? Just jealousy, I knew; Ambrose had always been brainy, especially in math. He was three years older than I was and I had been going to him for help with my homework since third grade.

Still, I was tempted to ask. If he really had hidden his trait, maybe I could pick up some pointers.

I came into my own in the school library on a Thursday afternoon in early April, when I was thirteen.

After knowing for so long in advance, I had expected to feel different on the day it finally happened, something physical or emotional or even just a thought popping into my head, like all those years ago under my aunt's table. But I didn't. As I sat at a table in the nearly-empty library after the last class of the day, the only thing on my mind was the make-up assignment my math teacher Ms. Chang had given me. I had just been out a week with strep throat so I was behind with everything anyway but this was the worst. X's and y's and a's and b's, pluses and minuses, parentheses with tiny twos floating up high—my eyes were crossing.

I looked up and saw Mr. Bodette, the head librarian, standing at the front desk. Our eyes met and I knew, as matter-of-factly as anything else I knew just by looking at him—there was a spot on his tie, he wore his wedding ring on his right hand, his hair was starting to thin—that in a little over twenty-eight years, he was going to fracture his skull and die.

Mr. Bodette gave me a little smile. I looked down quickly, waiting to get a splitting headache or have to run to the bathroom or just feel like crying. But nothing happened.

I must be an awful person.
I stared at the equations without seeing them. A nice man was going to die of a fractured skull and I didn't feel sick about it.

I curled my index finger around the mechanical pencil I was holding and squeezed until my hand cramped. Was it because twenty-eight years was such a long, long time away? For me, anyway. It was twice as long as I had been alive—

"Takes a little extra thought."

I jumped, startled; Mr. Bodette was standing over me, smiling.

"Algebra was a killer for me, too." He took the pencil out of my hand and wrote busily on a sheet of scrap paper. "See? Here, I'll do another one."

I sat like a lump; he might have been writing hieroglyphics.

"There." He drew a circle around something that equaled something else. "See? Never do anything to one side of the equation without doing the exact same thing to the other. That's good algebra. Got it?"

I didn't but I nodded and took my pencil back from him anyway.

"If you need more help, just ask," he said. "I needed plenty myself. Fortunately my mother was a statistician."

I stared after him as he went back to the front desk. Twenty-eight years; if I hadn't been so hopeless in math, I'd have known if that was equal to x in his equation.

A student volunteer came in and went to work re-shelving books. She had red hair and freckles and she was going to live for another seventy-nine years until a blood vessel broke in her brain. I had to force myself not to keep staring at her. I didn't know her name or what grade she was in or anything about her as a person. Only how and when she was going to die.

Perversely, the equations began to make sense. I worked slowly, hoping the building would be empty by the time I finished. Then I could slip out and hope that I didn't meet anyone I knew on my way home—

—where my mother and Benny and Tim would be waiting for me.

A cold, hard lump formed in my stomach. OK, then I'd go hide somewhere and try to figure out how I was supposed to look at my mother and my brothers every day knowing what I knew.

Is that really worse than knowing the same thing about yourself?
asked a small voice in my mind.

That was an easy one: Yes. Absolutely.

Knowing about myself wasn't a horrific blaze of realization, more like remembering something commonplace. In ninety years, two months, seven weeks, and three days, my body would quit and my life would go out like a candle. If twenty-eight years seemed like a long time, ninety was unimaginable.

I slipped out of the library unnoticed and got all the way up to Ms. Chang's classroom on the third floor without meeting anyone. I left the worksheet on her desk, started to leave and then froze, struck by the sight of the rows of empty seats staring at me. Today they had been filled with kids. Tomorrow they'd be filled with heart attacks, cancers, strokes . . . what else?

More fractured skulls? Drownings? Accidents?

Murders?

My skin tried to crawl off my body. Would I be able to tell if people were going to be murdered by the way they were going to die? Was Mr. Bodette's fractured skull going to be an accident or—

What if someone close to me was going to be murdered?

What if it was going to happen the next day?

I would have to try to stop it. Wouldn't I? Wasn't that why I knew?

It had to be. My mother knew what was wrong with a machine so she could fix it; I knew about someone's death so I could prevent it. Right?

No. Close, but not quite. Even
I
could see that was bad algebra.

Just as I went back out into the shadowy hallway, I heard a metallic squeak and rattle. Down at the far end of the corridor, one of the janitors was pushing a wheeled bucket with a mop handle. I braced myself, waiting as he ran the mop-head through the rollers on the side of the bucket to squeeze out excess water.

Nothing.

He started washing the floor; still I felt nothing. Because, I realized, he was too far away.

I dashed down the nearest staircase before he got any closer and ran out the front door.

Now that was very interesting, I thought as I stood outside on Prince Street looking back at the school: people had to be within a certain distance before I picked anything up from them. So the news wasn't all bad. I could have a career as a forest ranger or a lighthouse keeper. Did they still have lighthouse keepers?

Should've walked
toward
the janitor, you wuss,
said a little voice in my mind;
then you'd know how close you had to be to pick up something.
No, only a very general idea; I wasn't good with distances—math strikes again. Too bad Ambrose's sister Rita hadn't been there. She knew space. All she had to do was look at something: a building, a room, a box, and she could give you the dimensions. Rita had capitalized on this and become an interior decorator. Sadly, she didn't have very good taste so she worked in partnership with a designer who, Ambrose said, probably had to tell her several times a week that knotty pine paneling wasn't the Next Big Thing.

I crossed the mercifully empty street but just as I reached the other side, I knew that eleven years and two months from now, a woman was going to die of cancer.

There was no one near me, not on the sidewalk nor in any of the cars parked at the curb. Up at the corner where Prince met Summer there was plenty of traffic but that was farther away from me than the janitor had been.

I didn't get it until the curtains in the front window of the nearest house parted and a woman's face looked out at me. She glanced left and right, and disappeared again. Another useful thing to know, I thought, walking quickly—people had to be within a certain distance but they didn't have to be visible to me.

In the house next door, there was a head injury, forty years; a stroke, thirty-eight years in the one after that. Nothing in the next two—no one home. Internal bleeding, twenty-six years in the next one. A car passed me going the other way: AIDS, ten years behind the wheel and heart failure, twenty-two years in the passenger seat. More AIDS, six years in the house on the corner.

Waiting for a break in the traffic so I could cross, I learned another useful fact—most of the cars on Summer Street passed too quickly for me to pick up on anything about the people in them. Only if one had to slow down or stop to make a turn would something come to me.

Eventually the traffic thinned out enough to let me cross. But by the time I reached the middle of the road, cars had accumulated on every side. My head filled with cancers, heart attacks, infections, organ failures, bleeding brains, diseases, conditions I didn't know the names of. I hefted my backpack, put my head down and watched my feet until I reached the other side.

Baron's Food and Drug was just ahead. I spotted an old payphone at the edge of the parking lot and hurried toward it, digging in my pockets for change (I was the last thirteen-year-old on the planet without a cell phone). It was stupid to hide that I'd come into my own. I would call my mother right now and come clean about everything, how I'd known for years and how I was afraid to tell anyone because I didn't want to end up like Loomis, leaving home with nobody begging me to stay.

I was in the middle of dialing when a great big football player type materialized next to the phone.

"Hey, girlie," he said with all the authority of a bully who'd been running his part of the world since kindergarten. "Who said you could use this phone?"

I glanced at the coin slot. "New England Bell?"

"'Zat so? Funny, Nobody told
me.
Hey, you guys!" he called over his shoulder to his friends who were just coming out of Baron's with cans of soda. "Any a you remember anything saying little girlie here could use our phone?"

My mouth went dry. I had to get the hell out of there, go home, and tell my mother why I now needed a cell. Instead, I heard myself say, "Should've checked your email."

He threw back his head and laughed as three of his pals came over and surrounded me. They were big guys, too, but he was the biggest—wide, fleshy face, neck like a bull, shoulders so massive he probably could have played without pads.

"Sorry, little girlie. You got no phone privileges here."

His friends agreed, sniggering. I tried to see them as bad back-up singers or clowns, anything to keep from thinking about what I knew.

"Come on, what are you, deaf?" The mean playfulness in his face took on a lot more mean than playful. "Step away from the phone and there won't be any trouble."

More sniggering from the back-up chorus; someone yanked hard on my backpack, trying to pull me off-balance. "I need to call home—"

"No, you need to
go
home." He pushed his face closer to mine. "Hear me? Go. The fuck.
Home.
"

I should have been a block away already, running as fast as I could. But the devil had gotten into me, along with the knowledge that three days from now on Sunday night, the steering column of a car was going to go through his chest.

"If you'd let me alone," I said, "I'd be done already. Nobody's using this phone—"

"I'm waitin' on an important call," he said loudly. "Right, guys?"

The guys all agreed he sure was, fuckin' A.

"From who?" said the devil in me. "Your parole officer or your mommy?"

Now his pals were all going
Woo woo!
and
She gotcha!
He grabbed the receiver out of my hand and slammed it into the cradle. My change rattled into the coin return; I reached for it and he slapped my hand away, hard enough to leave a mark.