I understood what he was trying to tell me—the farmhand was from the Other Place.
I had already guessed it. I knew about vorpals, and that so many people from the Other Place had especially strong ones. They could make you do things they wanted you to do. But they never used that ability. They only ever watched us.
“Why doesn’t he wear the tag?” I asked. I had seen some of his kind on TV before, always with a red tag around their wrist that recorded their location and whether they came into physical contact with anyone. I never thought I’d meet one in person, not in a small town in the middle of the country. I couldn’t guess how Grandpop had gotten one to come here.
Grandpop reached into the nearest junker and popped open the glove compartment. Inside lay a red metal bracelet twisted out of shape. I gaped at it. “Maybe the government doesn’t need to know that a person like him is interfering with a sly fox like me,” Grandpop said.
“No interference, only observation,” I said automatically.
Grandpop’s eyebrows lifted at my conviction.
“I mean—they never do interfere with anything, do they?” I said. “It’s a rule. It’s why they have to wear the bracelets that tell the government what they’re up to. They only watch us, they only want to learn.”
“Oh, I suspect they’ve got bigger hopes than that, Epony,” Grandpop said, gazing out over the blond heads of cornstalks, endless and identical.
I saw something in his faraway gaze, the way it lighted on the distant row of trees that marked the creek where he and everyone else had first learned to swim. I saw his throat move as he swallowed the emotion that tree line brought up: equal parts pain and possessive joy.
That was the first time I got a hint it would all be gone someday.
“You’ve got bigger hopes too, don’t you, Pop?” I said. “You think the people from the Other Place can help us somehow?”
“They can. They have ways of making people see things differently, making people agree. They could help us fix this country.” He shut the glove compartment, hiding the red bracelet from sight. “We live how we want to—use up resources like they’ll last forever. But there’s a price for everything. We’ll have to pay it, one way or another. Maybe they can help us agree on how.”
The farmhand used the name Hayden, which was really just my mother’s maiden name. They never gave their real names—I guess because we’d have a hard time pronouncing them. His accent was subtle enough to prove our language didn’t give him too much trouble, although I wondered if his vorpal helped him understand what people meant even when he didn’t understand their words.
He stayed in the spare room, where a shelf held paper copies of the Girl Queen stories that my little sisters had gotten before the movie adaptation came out. Afternoons, I’d sit on the sacred bed where Hayden slept and I’d pull down volumes to read. I pretended if I read them enough times I could find a way there. Hayden would go too. In the Other Place, there would be no worry about interfering. No government fines, no stares or whispers. He could interfere with me all he wanted.
Once at dinner I watched in awe as he shoveled down creamed corn. Was it only an illusion or could aliens really eat solid food?
The newsfeed blared from the wall monitor, coverage on the latest climate conference. Dad was ready for the usual argument over carbon taxes.
“We make good money from corn, shipping it around the world,” he said. “But who’s going to buy it with a carbon tax attached?”
I waited for Grandpop’s usual response. My little sisters were pressed into the back of their chairs like they wished they could escape through the wooden slats. Mom passed around the bowl of blackberries like a peace offering.
“There’s enough demand for corn right here in the U.S.,” Grandpop said, so that he and Dad sounded just like the politicians who always popped on the nightly newsfeeds. “We can’t keep shipping it. How much farmland will be left in this country in twenty years when it’s too hot to grow anything? Taxing carbon’s the only way to restrict people from using corn to ruin our country.”
“No point in arguing with you on this one.” Dad pointed his fork at the newsfeed playing on the screen. “They’ll never agree on anything—carbon taxes included.”
But to everyone’s surprise, the newsfeed wasn’t going to address carbon taxes at all. The feed cut to an image of the delegates at the climate conference. “The World Meteorological Organization has confirmed that allowing the Other Place to funnel energy from our sun’s solar activity would stabilize global temperatures . . .”
“What does it mean?” I asked Grandpop while everyone else sat in stunned silence.
“It means the people from the Other Place are going to help us cool down this planet after all,” Grandpop said, and turned to Hayden as if waiting for him to confirm it.
On-screen, the report continued. “Scientists say a small amount of energy has been passing from our universe to the Other Place for decades, but world leaders will now work to find a way to increase that flow.”
I listened in awe. My little sisters tried to explain it to each other: “They’re going to fix everything!”
But I noticed concern creeping into Grandpop’s eyes.
“It’ll take years to reverse the damage that’s already been done to the planet,” he said. “Decades, maybe.”
“But it means no carbon taxes,” I said. “That’s better for the country, right? For everyone.”
Grandpop looked to Hayden, who met Grandpop’s gaze with steely stoicism. “They seem to have the delegates at the conference convinced, anyway,” Grandpop said. I knew, then, what was really going on: The aliens had finally used their vorpals to make us all agree on how to fix our problems.
During the next week, we kept the newsfeed on at all hours. The Energy Transfer Deal, as they were calling it, made everyone happy—world leaders, senators in slick suits, hosts of talk shows. There was only the matter of finding a way to open the floodgates and let the Other Place swallow the heat we’d been baking in for too long.
And then the answer came: We’d have to cross over into the Other Place. The more of us who did, the more channels would open to let solar energy slide through.
But that seemed impossible. You had to have a strong vorpal to cross over, and that was all a matter of genetics.
“How will we manage it?” I asked Grandpop one day while we watched the newsfeeds together. “How will people cross over into the Other Place?”
“I don’t know if we will.” He kept his eyes glued on the screen, but his gaze was unfocused. “Or if we should.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “You think it might be bad for us to go there?”
“Everything has its price.”
And he was lost again in thought.
“What will it be like for us, if we cross into the Other Place?” I asked Hayden later, when I found him alone in the kitchen marveling over a loaf of walnut cranberry bread. “Will it be like it was for Dylan? Forests and rivers and palaces?”
He shoved the loaf of bread back onto the cutting board like he’d been caught stealing. “You will find what he found.”
I leaned on the counter and tried to read what was in his gaze. He was always so cryptic. He almost never said anything about the place he’d come from. He just referred us to Dylan’s stories, as though a child’s understanding was all we needed. Maybe he thought he couldn’t explain it any better.
“And if we don’t want to go in the end, will you make us?” I asked.
“We will only do what you want us to do.”
“But you can change what we want, can’t you?”
He looked away. “No—we can’t change you. Only influence you.”
The dim twilight made him beautiful in a blown-glass way that my seventeen-year-old self now knows could never rival Cole’s rugged charm. I leaned c
loser, glad he didn’t have a tag and I didn’t have a flexi-screen, that no record would show if I reached out and touched him. But he still seemed impossibly far away. I had seen the old video of Brixney and Michael—I knew I could as easy as not put my hand right through him. It wasn’t fair for him to be so beautiful and not beautiful at the same time.
I nudged the bread back toward him. “Is there anything solid in your world?”
“Much of it is solid. We just interact with things a little differently than you do.” And as he was talking, I saw in his mouth a single star, resting in the entry to his throat. But it was not a star. It was a tiny globe of light he had drawn in with his breath, and now he pushed it out so that it floated away like a bubble.
I touched his shoulder. “This isn’t who you really are.”
“A person can be many things.”
The Microsoft-Verizon rep found us after the competition, while Cole was still holed up in the sound booth because he hadn’t placed and wasn’t going to get any scholarship. I was camped outside the door, silently willing him to get over it—silent because there was nothing to say. The rep had another line for us, which Cole had to hear through the sound booth door: “Those levees can go to hell. How’d you like to live in a premier township?” It was followed by the click of the door unlocking.
She was going to make me and Cole high-concept. Our families and ten others in the floodplain would move into the best township in the country and wouldn’t pay a cent for anything. She talked about our energy, about this tension she sensed between us. But I knew it wasn’t really about energy or tension—it was about the coffee shop and how girls were drawn to Cole like moths to a flame.
Cole kept smirking at me on the drive home and asking, “What do you think she has in mind?” like he wasn’t sure yet he wanted to do it, even though his eyes gleamed with triumph. At first, I cared only that he was happy again, that he leaned close to talk to me, put his chin on my shoulder as though he did it every day. But then I thought about that new band that refused to leave Disneyworld and showed up at random places in the park to play impromptu concerts. It was dumb because everyone knew Disney had to be in on it or else the band would have gotten kicked out forever ago. I hoped Microsoft-Verizon had better ideas than that for our concept.
It turned out they did.
The rep stood in my kitchen the next day and told our parents she was going to take advantage of the fact that I’d hardly ever been on camera and would be relatively easy to scrub from the web. “Teen love is about wanting what you can’t have,” she said. “What you shouldn’t have.”
My dad adopted Grandpop’s rumbling drawl. “Just what are you proposing?”
“Cole’s a small-town charmer—any girl would want him,” the rep said, and Cole pressed himself into the kitchen wall so that I half expected he’d leave a dent. “But the only girl he wants is the one he can’t have. His cousin.”
“But I’m not his cousin,” I said stupidly.
She had a stage smile to match all those lines. Broad and disarming. “Which is why there’s no reason for you to object, Epony.”
It took a moment to sink in, and then the air went heavy as lead. I would pretend to be Cole’s cousin and he would pretend to be in love with me. It seemed more gross than sexy. But she was right about forbidden love—the girls I knew couldn’t get enough of it. That’s why they all had those Warehouse Burn pyromaniacs plastered on their arms and T-shirts.
My parents exchanged grimaces across the table. Cole’s parents started sputtering about small-town stereotypes while Cole himself looked like he’d just swallowed the world’s bitterest medicine.
In the next room, my sisters had the wall monitor set to CelebriFeed. The male lead in the latest Girl Queen movie—the tenth movie in the series—was taking a ribbing from the host, who kept insisting he must be from the Other Place. “How else can one boy be every girl’s dream? You’re some kind of illusion—you’re on another plane of existence.”
The star played at being bashful and laughed the question off. “No, no, I’m solid through and through.”
I suddenly had an image of Grandpop in his cracked leather chair, narrowing his eyes at the far end of his pipe. “Exactly when did the existence of an alternate universe become a mundane thought? It doesn’t seem normal not to put up a fuss.” And then moving his narrowed gaze to me as if he suspected I had the answer.
I did have the answer later, after years of thinking about it. The aliens had a special ability to influence the way we felt about them, to manipulate our emotions. Those vorpals. It was why they inspired only fascination and not fear. Hundreds of them had positioned themselves in the most concentrated parts of our country, thousands had gotten themselves into the most important areas of the world. They were courting governments and the public alike. Their vorpals made everyone love them, even while they remained mysterious to us.
Or did we love them because they remained mysterious?
I turned back to the kitchen and said over the escalating noise, “We’re not going to do it.”
Cole’s head snapped up and he hit me with a glare as cold as creek water. It went straight to my heart. At least now I knew his true feelings on the subject—he was in, no matter what he had to pretend about. And he wouldn’t take to me screwing it all up.
The silence pressed in on me. I let my own silence press back. Then I said, “We’ll do it like this: Cole’s in love with me . . .” I gave him a searching look. He dropped his gaze to the scuffed floorboards. “And I want him too. But the reason we can’t have each other is that I’m from the Other Place.”
The rep had a real smile after all, a smug sort of smirk that left something gnawing at my stomach.
We packed up the house in a week. My sisters said good-bye to every shelf, window, and baseboard, as if they believed the new town house in Chicago wouldn’t have such things. I cared more about Grandpop’s junkers and spent a couple days mourning with each one in turn. Friday, my parents went off to auction animals and furniture, and to trade information with the other families who were moving too. I couldn’t take one more snicker from Willer or any of my other friends about my upcoming metamorphosis, so I stayed home. I sat in the empty room where Hayden had slept the summer I was fourteen, the summer before Grandpop had gotten cancer. I thought of the time Hayden had come in to find me reading on his bed.
“Is the Other Place really like this?” I’d showed him the book cover of Dylan’s stories: two boys running through the forest toward a palace in a clearing, on the verge of discovery. The stories within told of strange creatures that grew and shrank at will, of a Girl Queen who glowed with magic, of trees that formed doorways into secret spaces. “Is it so like a fairy tale?”
Hayden’s face darkened. The little bedroom was full of his presence, and I thought I might be sensing his vorpal, the way you sense rather than hear the sound of a cat’s tail brushing over floorboards. I wished he would sit on the bed next to me and then he did. “You’ve become enamored with us,” he said. “But what you know of us is only what you’ve invented. Only an illusion.”
I leaned against him, and this time I knew my own vorpal was there too, right alongside his. “The illusion is the part we like best.”
They scrubbed me from the web, every last image of me, my entire online profile. It depressed me that it was so easy to do. I’d never had a solo in any choir competition, never been named queen at the county fair. I was the one turning away from the camera while everyone showed off blue ribbons at the poultry show, the girl huddled under a sweatshirt at the Friday night bonfire. It was easy to convince people to crop me from their online photos, to delete me from their social media pages. Afterward it felt like not existing. I couldn’t even walk into a store and buy a pop. Cole would have to come in with me so the system could scan his image and charge the Coke to his online account.
They m
essed with Cole’s profile too, changing his name from Colburn and adding photos of him as a doting older brother and protector of small animals. His new outfits were a farce of a farm boy’s wardrobe—white T-shirts and blue jeans thin enough you could almost see through them. Soft boots that laced halfway to the knee and were good only for padding through coffeehouses and carpeted lofts.
I wore black, always black, a ghost in negative.
We drove out to Chicago to meet our producer, who came packaged with a songwriter barely older than me and Cole. The songwriter had played the bass in a high-concept band that had fizzled out a year ago when it was revealed that the members weren’t actually dying of a solar allergy.
“His concept’s dead,” the producer told us by way of introduction, “but his songs are hot. Melodic as heck.”
The songwriter seemed self-conscious only about not having been the front man. “The bass is the gateway that links the guitar with the drums,” he said in his defense.
The producer was in his forties and too well-fed and a little bit manic. He took us down to his basement studio, which was papered with burger ads featuring supermodels. I was hungry the whole time we were down there. It’d been months since I’d tasted beef. I mean real beef, not the substitute.
He played some different beats for me and Cole and asked for our opinion and then told us which one he’d already picked out. “I want it to be effing ethereal,” he said, smoothing his paper-thin shirt over his paunch. “Dreamy synths like fireflies on helium.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. Could music even sound like that? He must have thought it was his euphemism that had unsettled me, because he explained, “I’m trying to cut down on swearing. For the kids,” and gestured vaguely at the models in the posters.
Where Futures End Page 10
