The Future of Us (12 page)

As I hold the phone against my ear, I actually feel sad. In the future, Jordan and I were supposed to meet at college and get married. Now, we’ll probably never even know each other.

We say goodbye. When the line disconnects, I continue listening to the silence in the receiver. An automated voice eventually comes on, saying I have ninety-three cents remaining on my card. I hang up and walk over to my dresser.

In my top drawer, beneath my socks and underwear, I keep a journal. I don’t write in it a lot, maybe a few times a year. I flip to an entry I wrote back in March. It’s a list I made after a college counselor talked to us about the application process.

I grab a black marker from my desk and draw a line through “Tampa State.” If I don’t go to college there, I won’t meet Jordan. And if I don’t meet Jordan—

There’s a knock on the door. I bury my journal back in my drawer. “Who is it?”

The handle turns, but the door is locked.

“Emma,” Josh says. “I need to talk to you.”

When I open the door, Josh’s hair is sweaty, with several strands matted to his forehead. He’s holding the Scooby-Doo keychain in one hand, and a folded-up sheet of paper in the other.

“Everything okay?” I ask.

He wipes his brow. “I skated here from the public library.”

I glance nervously at the paper in his hand. “I guess we just missed each other.”

Josh frowns as he unfolds his paper. It’s the first photocopy I made from the phone book. It came out too dark and I tossed it in the recycling bin.

“I know what you’re about to do,” Josh says, “but you can’t unmarry your future husband.”

The way he says “unmarry your future husband” makes my stomach lurch.

“You can’t go around changing what’s supposed to happen,” he says. “I know you’re upset because you’re married to this jerk, but according to Facebook,
we’re
still friends. I promise I’ll be there for you. If you end up going through a divorce, maybe I can loan you money for a lawyer, or I can let you move into my guest room for a while.”

Loan me money?
Anger pulses through me.
Right, because he and Sydney are so rich!

Josh notices my phone card on the desk, with the silver scratched off the back to reveal the activation code.

His voice is hushed. “You did it?”

I nod slowly.

“You talked to Jordan?”

“It’s over,” I say. “We’re never going to meet.”

The color drains from Josh’s face.

JUST LIKE THAT, the future is changed forever.

Fifteen years of history—
future
history—is changed because Emma didn’t like the guy she married. But she only had a few sentences from fifteen years in the future to work with. That’s not nearly enough information to make such a drastic decision about her life. And
his
life! Come to think of it, any person who was impacted by their relationship, even in the slightest way, will be twisted in countless new directions.

I want to both scream
and
laugh hysterically. Instead, I crumple the photocopy in my hand and throw it across the room. The paper barely makes a sound when it hits the wall.

“You can’t do that!” I shout.

“Actually,” Emma says, crossing her arms, “it was easy. He goes to Tampa State, so I’m not applying there. North Carolina is now my top choice.”

I collapse onto her bed and press my hands over my eyes. She doesn’t get it! She knows that even the smallest change to our present will ripple into the future. On that first day, Emma was unemployed. The next day she had a job, but we have no idea what she changed to make that happen. One time we looked, Jordan had gone fishing. But later, he mysteriously hadn’t come home for three days. Then macaroni and cheese became lasagna. Maybe Emma doesn’t think it’s important that her dinner was different, but what if next time she cooks, something causes her to make meatloaf and she gets mad cow disease and dies because one little ripple changes her dinner plans in fifteen years?

But to change her future husband? On
purpose
? Those consequences are immeasurable!

“Admit it,” Emma says. “You would’ve done the same thing if your life looked as bad as mine.”

“No.” I sit up. “I wouldn’t have. You have no idea what else you’ve changed. This is dangerous stuff, Emma.”

“Look who’s talking,” Emma says. “You made a face at Sydney yesterday. Would you have done that if you didn’t know you were going to marry her?”

“I’m talking about changing the
future
,” I say.

Emma laughs. “Well, what do you think happens when you do something different in the present? It changes the future! You did the same thing as me.”

“It’s not the same, and you know it,” I say. “Mine was a reaction, but you intentionally made a humongous change. You really wanted to go to Tampa State. I saw you and Kellan researching it in that college-ranking book, and you were saying how close it was to where your dad lives. But now you won’t go there? We need to do things exactly as we would’ve done them before Facebook.”

“Why?” Emma says, and I can see she’s on the verge of crying. “So I can end up unemployed at thirty-one like the first time we checked? Or angry that my husband spends all my money when I do have a job?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” I say. “What if, when you were unemployed, you were just one day away from finding your perfect job? Or maybe, when your husband realized you were angry about him buying that iPad thing, he returned it the next day. Emma, all you saw were
tiny
snippets of the future.”

“I don’t care,” she says. “I know I wasn’t happy, and that needed to change.”

This is making me nervous. The future seems so fragile. For instance, I already saw that I’m going to the University of Washington like my brother. And I definitely want that to happen, but what if knowing I’ll get in makes me slack on the application, and then I get rejected?

“You’re making that face,” Emma says as she types in her email address.

“What face?”

“Like you’re judging me.”

Emma types her password to get into Facebook, and then turns to me with deliberate slowness. “I’m going to speak as calmly as I can,” she says. “The way you’re judging me means you’re not even trying to understand what that life felt like for me.”

“It’s not that I’m not trying. I’m just—”

“You’re being extremely selfish and cruel.”

“How am I being cruel?”

“You know why you don’t care?” Emma’s getting more pissed by the second. “Because you’ve got your perfect wife. You’ve got your beautiful children. And you’ve got
me
living in your guest room! Do I even have a window in there?”

When Emma says that, I force myself to keep a straight face. “I get it,” I say.

“You
don’t
get it! You’re acting superior, but what if the roles were reversed?” Emma raises an eyebrow. “That’s right. What if I married Cody and got everything I wanted, and
you
didn’t get shit? Actually, no, what if you
did
get shit? Because that’s what I got with Junior!”

“I get it,” I say, quieter this time. “I do.”

“Good.” Emma turns back to her computer and clicks on the tiny picture in the corner.

“Wait!” I jump off the bed and spin Emma around. “Before you look, we need to set some ground rules. This is getting way too big to figure out as we go along.”

Over her shoulder, Emma’s page has mostly loaded. The picture in the corner is different than yesterday. Grown-up Emma’s eyes are closed. Her face is snuggled close to a baby wearing a floppy pink hat.

“What kind of rules?” she asks.

“We can’t be overly picky,” I say. The baby has a small spit bubble between her lips. “If your new life appears relatively happy, we leave it alone.”

Emma turns her head slightly. “You see something on the screen, I can tell.”

“Before you look,” I say, holding tight to her chair, “you have to promise not to tweak the future unless it’s absolutely terrible. Even then, we need to discuss it first.”

“Fine. Now will you let me see if I got rid of him? That’s all I care about.”

I turn her chair around.

Emma squeals. “A baby! I have a baby!” She touches the girl’s face, and then moves her finger across the screen.

Emma slowly lowers her hand into her lap.

“You did it,” I say. “You threw Junior to the curb.” I look again at the name of her new husband.
Kevin Storm
. It sounds like the alias of a superhero.

“I just wanted to be happy,” she says quietly. “But I also want Jordan Jones to be happy. Is that weird?”

“Think of it this way,” I say. “Now that you’ve taken yourself out of the picture, you’re letting him find the person he was meant to be with.”

“Like that bitch he’s been sleeping with the past three nights?” Emma leans in close to the monitor, and then taps the screen with her finger. “Look! I’m a marine biologist now!”

“That’s random,” I say.

“No it’s not,” she says. “I love the ocean. Remember when I visited my dad in Florida over Christmas? We took a scuba diving class together.”

“It takes more than loving the ocean to become a marine biologist,” I say. Also, I don’t want to crush her excitement, but I bet a lot of people work at that lab who aren’t biologists.

Emma looks at me dismissively. “I’ll have you know, I’m going to take advanced biology at the college with Kellan next year.”

“Since when?”

Emma walks to her papasan chair and folds her legs in front of her. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know I had to tell you everything.”

I take Emma’s place at the computer. “Well, now that you’re happy, I’m going to make sure your bliss didn’t screw things up with Sydney.”

I’m about to look through Emma’s list of friends to find myself when I notice my name and something I wrote right there on Emma’s page.

“Listen to this,” I say, and then I read it aloud.

“See?” Emma says. “I make my new man
ecstatic
!”

The photo yesterday had me with a bunch of balloons. Now it’s just a close-up of an eyeball. I click on the eye, and while my page slowly loads I drum my fingers against the desk.

“Yes!” I jump up and bat excitedly at one of her paper lanterns.

“Easy on the décor,” Emma says, but she’s smiling.

As she should! Our futures are looking awesome. Even with Emma changing husbands, Sydney couldn’t stay away from me. This relationship is meant to be and
nothing
can stop it.

Settling back in the chair, I read my entries out loud. The first one is dull.

The next isn’t much better.

I swivel to face Emma. “I have no idea what I’m talking about.”

Emma shrugs as she bites the nail of her pinky finger.

I turn back to the computer and scroll down, scanning through more entries. “Promise me if I ever get this boring you’ll—”

And then I freeze.

Emma catapults out of the chair. “What is it?”

We both stare at a photo near the bottom of the page. It’s a picture of Sydney standing sideways. She’s holding her stomach, and it’s huge!

“That’s cheesy,” Emma says, but then she gets it. “Wait, your
first
baby?”

I stand up so fast I nearly pass out. I told her.
I told her!
This future stuff is dangerous. We can’t tinker with things, plucking out details we don’t like. I sit on the edge of Emma’s bed and stare vacantly at the mirror hanging on her door. If changing her husband also changes my children, the future’s even more fragile than I thought. The repercussions are impossible to predict.

“If what I did caused this, I’m so sorry,” Emma says. Three of my future children have been erased from existence before they had a chance to exist at all. I’ll never build a model solar system with that boy, or take those twin girls to have their birthday party at GoodTimez.

Emma sits behind me on the bed. She rubs her hands together to warm them up. My mind tells me to pull away, but I can’t.

“I don’t understand,” I say.

She presses her fingers along the muscles at the back of my neck. “I think we need to realize there’s no way to control these particular types of changes.”

“What do you mean, ‘these particular types’?”

“Your children. My children,” she says. “When you took health last semester, how much do you remember about sperm?”

I turn and glare at Emma. “What does that have to do with anything?”

Emma squeezes both of my shoulders. “No matter how small the ripple, the most vulnerable part of the future is going to be our children. If we keep looking at Facebook, we shouldn’t get too attached to—”

“It altered my
sperm
?” I say. “What are you talking about?”