by Lauren Sabel
At first, my mind flits from thought to thought, unable to focus on anything specific, but then I just listen to the numbers, and I’m in before Indigo gets to one.
Immediately everything starts spinning, and it’s hard to focus my eyes with my feet constantly swapping places with my head. The suction yanking my body downward is stronger now than it was in my last vision. Dizziness is coming on fast, and I know I won’t be able to hang on long, so I quickly try to take in what I can.
I’m perched on a big piece of metal with two wings. I focus on the object I’m standing on, and I notice that there’s something etched into the metal between my feet.
“What do you see?” Indigo asks above my vision.
“I’m standing on a metal beam, and there’s something written on it, but it’s too dark to see much,” I say.
“Can you tell me more?” Indigo asks.
The spinning slows to a crawl, and I more clearly see the etching beneath my feet. I’m pretty sure it’s the infinity sign logo I saw on the building, where that person was trapped under the red smoke. I force myself to stop analyzing and focus on what I’m actually seeing. Below me, beyond vast amounts of blackness, there’s a spot of color in the distance.
“What do you see now?” Indigo asks me, but I can’t speak or look away from the blue and green patch of color. As it revolves slowly in one direction, becoming a colorful, rotating ball in the blackness, I realize where I am, and a thrill jolts through me.
“I’m above Earth,” I say aloud. I can hardly believe it. I’ve heard it’s possible, but I’ve never been out this far, and I’m nearly trembling with excitement.
“How far above?” Indigo asks casually.
I try to keep my voice steady. “I think I’m on a satellite,” I say. In frickin’ outer space.
“Go closer,” he instructs.
I gladly swoop closer to the earth, marveling as I coast through the thick whiteness of a cloud, and then pass through it into the clear sky. The ocean spreads out in blue waves as far as I can see, but then below me, in the middle of all that blue, there’s an explosion.
A giant wall of water rises up, and starts to roll across the ocean. I can’t tell how big the wave is until I see the tiny tip of land protruding into the sea, and on it, the little boy I’ve seen before. He’s standing in the center of a group of people, and they are all looking up at the wave with terrified faces. The boy cries out one sheer, desperate wail, and then he’s cut off abruptly as the wall of water crashes over them.
In the blink of an eye, everything is gone. The boy, the people around him, the piece of land jutting out into the sea. Washed away.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I walk out of the building and cut across the quad, dodging the college students’ Frisbees. Even though it’s been a few hours, I’m still turning over the four events that I carefully detailed in my post-session report. First, I was standing on the satellite etched with what I think was the infinity logo, and then I saw the explosion in the ocean, and the tidal wave that resulted from it, and then all those people being washed away. But what caused the explosion?
The little boy’s cry shatters through me again, and the wretched sound of it makes me desperate to make sure the boy is somewhere else when this tidal wave happens, somewhere safe. But I’m not sure what I can do. The only thing I know is that the logo I saw on the building surrounded by red smoke may be the same logo as on the satellite. If Indigo knew I was analyzing this, he’d be upset with me, but I can’t stop thinking about it, and now I’m determined to find out if I’m remembering accurately where I’ve seen the logo before.
During our after-session, when I told Indigo about the satellite I was standing on, an image flashed through my mind. It was from when I was on the highway headed to Charlie’s house yesterday. I glanced out the bus window, and I saw a group of warehouses to the north of the salt flats—in the dangerous part of town that Charlie has warned me never to go—and I think I saw what looked like an infinity sign on the top of one of the buildings. I’m not sure, because the image was gone almost as quickly as it came, but it’s enough for me to go on.
I glance both ways before slicing through a residential alley toward the Berkeley train station. In my mind, I keep trying to remember the exact symbol I saw from the bus window, but I can’t quite pin it down.
I’m walking through the alley, surveying the windows stuffed with Bob Marley posters and neon beer signs, when a car with four guys in it starts trailing me. I’ve never had a problem in this neighborhood before, so at first I think they’re just students returning home, but on closer look I can tell that they are drunk frat boys. I pick up the pace, but the car keeps getting closer, so I turn out of the alley and out onto the street.
The street is small, with pastel pink houses that look like old people should be swinging on wooden porch swings, but there’s nobody on the porches, or anywhere in sight. The car pulls up alongside me, and a guy leans out the passenger side window. He’s wearing a collared shirt and a baseball cap with SIGMA CHI written across it—the name of one of the wildest fraternities on campus. He’s smoking a cigarette, the smoke so thick it tickles my throat, and from inside the car, I hear the other guys whooping and whistling at me.
“Hey sexy. You want a ride?” he slurs.
“Like I want a root canal,” I say, keeping my eyes straight ahead. My heart is pounding, and my hands are getting sticky with sweat, but I try not to show it.
“C’mon, baby, don’t be like that,” the guy says, and the driver slows the car down so that the wheels are rolling beside my moving feet.
“Go away,” I say, my heart pounding faster.
Then the guy pushes the passenger door opens a few inches and sticks his arm through the gap. “I won’t let you miss the biggest kegger of the year,” he says, and I feel his moist fingers skim my arm. “Whether you like it or—” The metal door suddenly slams back onto his arm. “Ow!” he yells. The guy yanks his arm back inside, and I quickly move away from the car. “Bitch,” he curses as he slams the door and speeds away.
I stare after him, unsure what just happened, but then I see Jasper sitting on his motorcycle at the end of the street.
I can bend metal within a hundred feet, I remember Jasper saying.
“Want a ride home?” Jasper asks when I get close to him.
“That was you?” I ask, and he nods. “Indigo would kill you if he knew.”
He shrugs. “Then don’t tell him.”
I watch sunlight twinkle off the bike’s chrome mirrors, trying to decide what to say. “Thanks for that,” I finally say.
“For what?”
“The whole knight-in-shining-armor thing.”
“I left my armor at home,” he says. “So, are you getting on?”
“On your donor-cycle?” I ask. Mom says that the most likely way to end up paralyzed is to ride on a motorcycle. I suddenly wonder if she’s ever ridden one, or she just learned that from a scholarly article about the top ten most likely ways for her daughter to die.
“I’ll go slow,” Jasper promises. “And it’s a half hour until the next train to the city.”
“I’m not going to the city.”
“Very mysterious,” Jasper says, and nods appreciatively. “Now you get this flirting thing.”
“I’m not flirting,” I protest. “But I am glad you showed up. How’d you know where to find me?”
“I know things.” Jasper climbs off his motorcycle and kicks the kickstand. He leans against his bike and crosses his arms over his chest. “So where are you going anyway?”
“If I tell you, you can’t tell Indigo.”
“I’m in.” Jasper unlocks a plastic box behind the seat and takes out a black helmet. “Wear this,” he says. Before I can say no, the helmet is on my head. It feels too loose on my skull, and it flops back and forth as Jasper tightens the buckle under my chin.
“Just this once,” I say as I get on the bike. My body rocks when Jasper gets on i
n front of me, and the revving engine sends buzzing through my head.
“Go on,” he says, turning around so he can see me. “You were saying?”
It’s hard not to touch him sitting so closely on the bike. My inner thighs are pressed against his butt, and as much as I try to lean back, I’m still almost on top of him. “I saw a symbol in my session today,” I say, feeling heat rising in my cheeks. “I think I know where I’ve seen it before, but I want to make sure.”
“Why?” he asks.
How do I explain that the terror I saw in the kid’s eyes will haunt me eternally if I don’t do everything I can to stop this from happening? “There was this little boy . . . ,” I start, and then shake my head. “I saw him get killed. And I don’t know, it just affected me in a deep way, you know what I mean?”
Jasper nods, and I realize that he is one of the only people in the world who could know what I mean.
“I only have one lead,” I continue. “Do you know where the salt flats are?”
Jasper turns back around and revs the engine. “Hold on,” he says, and I clamp my legs tighter around the bike. He glances back at me. “Hold on to me.”
When I wrap my arms around him, I want to pinch my skin to convince myself I’m not dreaming. This is really happening. I’m trying not to move my hands at all, so I just freeze, my arms cramping around his waist.
The ride is exhilarating. It flashes by like a vision: bridge, water, building, street, building, hill, all of it accompanied by sweating nerves, so that my hands are sticky and cold.
“Are you having fun?” he yells over the roar of the engine.
“Not a bit,” I call into his back, but I am. I’m thrilled by every minute of it, when I’m not thinking about my guts being splayed across the pavement.
As Jasper zooms up the steep ramp to the highway, I imagine Charlie seeing me right now, and I duck my head into Jasper’s back. I know I could explain this to Charlie—I missed the train and needed a ride, this is the Bernsteins’ nephew who just moved to town—but it feels like I’m cheating on Charlie, when nothing has happened at all, and probably never will. But part of me wishes it would, and that’s the part that ducks and hides against Jasper’s back.
Thirty thrilling minutes later, the smell of salt hits my nose at the same moment I see the infinity symbol from the highway. “Take this exit,” I yell at Jasper. He doesn’t hear me, so I tap him on the shoulder and point to the right, and he flies across three lanes and onto the exit. We coast down the ramp to a stop sign. If we turn right, we head into Charlie’s neighborhood, where mothers like Grace are working two jobs to make enough money to send their kids to private schools in the city, and still getting home in time to bake whole wheat cookies and put them to bed.
I’ve never turned left.
“Left,” I say.
Jasper turns onto the bumpy road that leads to the salt flats, and we’re suddenly in the part of town that looks like someone is going to be killed, and soon. Along the torn-up street are several run-down warehouses, a vacated gas station with the G missing in the neon GAS sign, and a square block of concrete that looks like someone had the intention to build something but ran out of money. At the end of the road, the bright pink salt flats shimmer in the afternoon sun.
“Remind me never to turn left,” I mutter.
“It looks like the place where dreams go to die,” Jasper says.
Near the end of the row of warehouses, closest to the barbed wire fence closing the salt flats off from the road, is a giant redbrick warehouse. There’s a chain lock hanging from the front door, and the windows are so grimy I can’t see in, but more importantly, across the top floor of the warehouse is the logo I was looking for: the infinity sign made of two interlocking earths.
I point up at the symbol. “That’s the logo I saw,” I say. It’s strange seeing something in real life that I saw in a session. It’s like looking at a photograph that I haven’t seen for years: it’s the same place, but somehow it’s also totally different.
“And in such a romantic location,” Jasper says, driving right up onto the sidewalk. The motorcycle jumps under my butt as it crosses over the curb, and I clamp my legs down around the bike rather than cling to Jasper again.
“Do you see the name of a company anywhere?” I ask.
“Nope.”
“Go around the side, please.”
Jasper revs the engine, and the roar echoes off the warehouse, sending shivers down my arms.
“Maybe quietly?”
Jasper laughs at me, but he drives the bike slowly around the rest of the warehouse.
“I don’t see a company name,” I say, after searching every outside wall. “Someone must own it.”
“Can’t we google this?” Jasper complains. “We have this thing called the internet. Ever heard of it? We use it to look up things.”
“Thanks for the tip,” I say sarcastically. I reach into my back pocket and pull out my phone. “Can you stop here?”
Jasper stops the bike but leaves the engine running. “Why don’t you want me to tell Indigo about this?” His hands are still wrapped tightly around the gas, ready to bolt away at any minute. I don’t blame him: this place is as attractive as a slaughterhouse.
“You know the rules. No taking work outside of work. But I had to see this in person.”
“We came, we saw,” Jasper says. “Can we go now?”
“Just a sec.” I climb off the motorcycle. Stepping back a few feet, I angle my phone up so I can take a shot of the logo. “Okay, we can go.”
I climb back onto the motorcycle and wrap my arms around Jasper’s waist. He revs the engine and does a sharp U-turn back onto the street. As we pull away, I glance back at the warehouse, getting farther away by the second. I can still see the explosion of red smoke from my vision, which I’m growing increasingly sure will happen here sometime in the future. But what is this place? And why do I feel so driven to see it?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The sun is hovering on the horizon as I run across Fell Street, barely dodging a speeding car, and leap up onto the curb of the Panhandle. I can’t seem to pay attention tonight: my body is still reeling from my magnetic attraction to Jasper. Holding on to his waist on the back of his motorcycle, I felt like quicksand was drawing me deeper and deeper into him. It wasn’t a warm, joyful feeling, like it is with Charlie, more like an intense desire to be with him, split into equal parts exciting and frightening.
Across the Panhandle, Charlie’s already here, kicking up leaves under our favorite tree, his hair sticking up in every direction. Adorable.
Charlie looks up and grins his goofy grin at me. He holds out his hand, and when I take it, he says, “Carousel horse.”
“Oh,” the word slips out as if buried beneath a rug. “Um . . . .” I look up at the tree, trying to think of an answer to our daily game. “Eucalyptus tree.”
He looks at me strangely. “Okay,” he says slowly, as if I’ve recently acquired brain damage. “You okay?”
“There’s just a lot on my mind.” Like the wall of water I saw crush those people, but I don’t know when or why, and a million other things I can’t tell you, and will never be able to tell you. But a little voice says deep inside me, but I can tell Jasper.
“Well, if you want to talk . . . ,” Charlie says, smiling like a puppy just patted on the head. I know in that moment that finding out about my attraction to Jasper would crush him beyond repair, and my chest aches just thinking about it. I smash the leaves beneath my feet, listening to the crunch-crunch-crunch of their cracking skins.
“Look, the sun is setting,” I say, changing the subject by pointing to the pink clouds hovering above the ocean. That grabs Charlie’s attention, and we watch the sun set quickly over the horizon, our hands linked. That’s the funny thing about the sunset: it only takes two minutes to go down. It seems like it’s a long process, transitioning from day to night, but the truth is, in less than one hundred twenty seconds it goes from bei
ng here, lighting up our world, to being completely gone, darkness.
“Where’s Colin tonight?” I ask, after the sun slips behind the sea, and the night comes plunging in.
“He’s home with Mom. She’s been working a lot, and I can tell he’s been missing her,” Charlie responds. “And I’ve been so busy lately between school, work, and taking care of Colin that I’ve barely had time to get ready,” he adds, peering at me in the fading light.
I look at him blankly. “For what?”
“For Saturday,” he says. “My photo show, remember?”
It’s just the biggest thing that’s ever happened to Charlie, and I’m so consumed with Jasper and my frightening visions that I can’t seem to remember. “Of course I remember,” I say. “Time is just going by so fast I can’t seem to keep my head screwed on. But I promise I’ll be there. I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”
We lean against our tree, the one with the skewed branch and a perfect sitting spot. I let my head drop back against the bark that I cut our initials into almost three years ago: C + C. Then Charlie kisses me, a deep kiss that tingles down to my toes.
“I love you, too,” I murmur against his lips.
He smiles. “You read my mind.”
On the street, a car honks at us as it drives by. We quickly pull away from each other, embarrassed about the whole world watching us kiss.
“I’ll see you Saturday night,” I say, kicking the tip of his tennis shoe with mine. “At your show.”
“Two p.m. Noodles first,” he reminds me.
“You and me,” I say, crooking my pinky finger out toward him. He wraps his pinkie around mine and kisses it.
“Forever,” he says, letting go of our pinkies and smiling at me. “You’ll be my lucky charm.”
Some lucky charm, I think as I turn and walk away across the Panhandle. “Charlie!” I call after him. Tell him you love him. Tell him that these have been the best three years of your life. Tell him a eucalyptus tree doesn’t begin to describe it.
Charlie turns around, and his beautiful face shines with anticipation. I see the slight upturn of his mouth, his copper eyes fringed with long black lashes. But then I remember the dizzying blue of Jasper’s eyes, and the way I can’t stop myself from falling into them.
