by Bella Thorne
“You sure about that?” Mr. Winthrop asks.
He nods to the dance floor. Despite Amalita’s scene, the music never stopped, and now people are back out like nothing ever happened. A slow dance plays, and the first couple I notice is Zander and Corbin, though I can’t imagine why Mr. Winthrop’s pointing them out. Reenzie and Sean are dancing, too, but that’s irrelevant to our conversation.
Then I see it. Carrie and Keith Hamilton sway in each other’s arms. They’re just under one of the green-gelled lights, so they’re not hard to see. They’re pressed tightly together. Keith is taller than J.J., and Carrie has to stretch her arms long to wrap them around his neck. Her head tilts back to gaze up at him, and as they talk and laugh I can’t help but notice that his eyes constantly move from her face to the cleavage bursting from the sweetheart neckline of her dress.
“Is this the Scare Pair song?” I ask Mr. Winthrop, and he shakes his head.
“That was a half hour ago,” he says. “They’ve been at it ever since.”
I scan the dance floor for J.J. and Mariah, but I don’t see them. “Where’s J.J.?”
Mr. Winthrop nods toward the wall next to the dance floor. It’s too dark for me to see anything but shadows…until a strobe light blinks on and I see J.J. in its fractured glow. He leans against the wall, arms folded, his face a wooden mask.
I’m completely torn. It’s awful to see J.J. so obviously hurt and angry, but at the same time this is exactly what I wanted to happen. And not just selfishly so J.J. can be free. Breaking them up will save them both from a horrible, dead-end, unhappy future. It’s like with Sean—yes, I’m making J.J. miserable now, but in the long run I’m saving his life!
As they dance, Keith leans down and kisses Carrie high on her neck, right by her ear. Carrie doesn’t pull away. She smiles and tilts her head to the side, giving Keith more room to play. Just before the strobe stops flashing, I see J.J. stalk out of the gym.
Mr. Winthrop nudges me. “If I were up in the air with a boy and I saw him run out all upset like that, I’d go after him.”
I’m completely grossed out by getting love advice from a teacher…but he’s right. I run out of the gym and see J.J. pacing back and forth, taking deep breaths as he runs his fingers through his hair and clenches them tight.
“J.J….hey.”
He looks at me with unfocused eyes, then takes a deep, determined breath. “I need to walk,” he says. “You want to go for a walk?”
I feel a thrill and do my best not to sound inappropriately excited. “Sure.”
He walks us down the hall and out the door. Neither of us says anything, and I let J.J. lead the way. It’s warm out, but there’s a light breeze blowing, and I think about how nice it would feel to have J.J.’s arm around me. He keeps his hands in his pockets, though, and his head down. I stay by his side as we walk the path past the lawn where we all eat lunch, then down to the track. There are no lights, but the moon is full enough that I see J.J. in a shimmery glow.
“You okay?” I finally ask.
He shakes his head.
“The sick part is she told me she had a crush on him,” he finally says, looking down at his shoes. “She told me that back in freshman year, when we dated the first time. And now she fixes herself up with him, like it gives her an excuse to do whatever she wants, like it doesn’t even matter….”
He shakes his head and keeps walking.
I shouldn’t try to make this better. I want him upset with Carrie, for a million reasons. But I can’t help it.
“It was the computer,” I say. “She didn’t fix herself up with him at all.”
Okay, it’s a half-truth, but maybe it’ll help.
“Whatever,” J.J. says. We’re at the bleachers now, and he leans against them. “The computer fixed me up with someone I used to have a crush on too. And you know what I did? Spent one dance with her, then went looking for Carrie. Because she’s my girlfriend. Did you even see her in there with him?”
I nod, but I’m not really listening. I’m staring at the way the moonlight hits his face. He looks so sad and broken. I’m dying to reach out and touch him. Comfort him. Maybe put my hand on his cheek, or—
“I don’t get it, Autumn,” he says. “She knew I was there. Who would do that right in front of me?”
I know exactly what I want to reply, but every brain cell screams at me not to do it.
Brain cells are overrated.
“I wouldn’t,” I say. And before my annoying brain can weigh in again, I wrap my arms around his neck and lean in to kiss him. He’s surprised at first; then he kisses me back. His arms pull me closer and I hear the sound of the ocean in my ears because everything else is gone. There’s nothing in the world but J.J., me, and this kiss. I never want it to end, and I can tell—I can feel—that he doesn’t either. He’s in love with me just like I’m in love with him, and he has been forever, just like he told me in the future.
Suddenly he pushes me away. He holds my shoulders at arm’s length and stares at me like I’m a demon trying to possess his soul. “What are you doing?”
“I want to be with you,” I blurt. “I was stupid last year. I never should have broken up with you, and—”
“I broke up with you,” he reminds me, “ ’cause you didn’t have the guts to tell me how you really felt.”
The words hurt, but they’re true. “I know,” I admit. “But I was wrong. And hanging out with you again…I know this is real. And I know you feel the same way. And—”
“Stop,” he says sharply. “You don’t get to say that. You don’t get to say any of this. Do you have any idea how long it took me to get over you? I was in love with you. I begged you not to go out with me unless you knew it was what you wanted, and you didn’t care.”
“I did care. It’s just—”
“Don’t. Whatever you’re going to say, I don’t want to hear it. I can’t trust it. I will never be able to trust anything you say again.”
“That’s not true!” I say, but of course I can’t explain how I know that, so I just gaze up at him, begging him with my eyes not to be mad and to give us another chance.
Instead of coming closer, he backs away, like he’s repulsed. He shakes his head.
“I’m going home,” he says. “Don’t follow me.”
He walks away. I stare after him until he disappears into the night.
I shouldn’t have kissed him. I pushed him too fast. Just like I pushed Jack and Amalita.
I flop down onto the bleachers and pull the locket out of my dress. The zemi glows in the moonlight.
“Please tell me I didn’t ruin everything,” I say to it. Then I open it. I close my eyes while I move the dials, trusting the spirit inside to tell me where I need to go. When I open them, I see the dials are set for November 28, ten years from now.
Okay.
I snap the locket shut, close my eyes again, and think hard about the future I want to see.
I’m in a dark room.
Not totally dark. There’s a screen in front of me with a picture projected on it. It’s a picture of a bunch of people in caps and gowns, throwing their caps into the air. As I peer closer, I recognize Reenzie and Sean, right in the middle of the front row.
So the picture’s from my graduation.
The picture fades as the lights flick on and people applaud. I look around and see the room’s full of round tables where people eat and drink.
“Wasn’t that great? Thanks to everyone for sending in your pictures for that slideshow.”
The voice comes from the front of the room, where Carrie now stands at a podium in front of the projector. She’s clearly older than I know her now, but she looks even better—more confident and together. She wears her hair in a short pixie cut that accentuates her cheekbones, and her sleeveless black cocktail dress is simple and sophisticated. She’s also in great shape. Her stomach is flat, and I can see the muscles in her arms as she applauds with the group. If she had a baby while she was in col
lege, there’s no sign of it now.
When the applause dies down, Carrie speaks again into the mic. “As reunion chair, I’m so thankful you all could make it. Have a great evening, enjoy the food and the music, and I hope I get the chance to personally catch up with each and every one of you.”
Everyone claps again, and as Carrie prances off the stage, she nods to a DJ in the back corner who cranks up the tunes. It’s a Kyler Leeds hit from our junior year—one off his As You Wish album, the title track of which Kyler actually wrote about J.J. and me.
I take it as a sign. J.J. has to be here, right? I follow Carrie, figuring she’ll lead me to him, but she beelines to a table with Gus and the Senior Social Committee girls, all of whom get up and hug her, congratulating her on the great speech and presentation.
“This is great!” I gush to Carrie. “You don’t hang out with us in the future anymore! I mean, no offense, but look at you—this is a way better deal for you than J.J. and dropping out of college and babies, right?” I pull out the locket and keep gushing to the zemi, “So I didn’t screw everything up at all! This is excellent! What happened to everyone else?”
Carrie, of course, doesn’t answer, so I go hunting on my own. I walk around the banquet room, peeking at tables. Most of the people look like slightly tweaked versions of the ones I know now. Maybe they’re a tiny bit fatter or thinner, maybe their hair’s a little longer or shorter or a different color, maybe they dress with more personal style…but they’re easy to pick out as their high school selves.
Then there’s the handful of people who look seriously old. As if they’re in their forties, even though almost everyone in the room is under thirty. Like Michael Watley, the super-hot basketball player I gave Ames as her Scare Pair. He has a paunch, wears old-man glasses, and only has hair on the back and sides of his head. If he weren’t wearing a name tag, I’d have no clue who he is. Same with Denise O’Bryan, who I swear must have spent every single day between high school graduation and now baking in the sun with baby oil slathered over her. Her naturally light-colored skin is mahogany, and she’s so wrinkled she looks like a shar-pei.
Then there’s one guy who looks like no one I know but who is also weirdly familiar. I see him coming through the main doors—maybe from the restroom? He’s quite heavy and looks even more so because his blond hair is so short and his hairline is so far back on his head. What hair exists is gelled and combed into manicured rows. The guy is stuffed into a conservative blue suit, and his tie and tightly buttoned shirt push the fat of his neck up into his chin. He wears round wire-rimmed glasses. Honestly, he looks more like someone political I’d see interviewed on the news than anyone from my class.
No name tag. Is he someone’s guest? Maybe, but I can’t shake that feeling that I should know him, so I follow him to his table.
“Jack, honey, what took you so long?” a female voice calls as he gets closer. “You missed the slide show.”
“JACK?!” I roar incredulously.
Jack smiles and plops down onto his seat. “I don’t need to see it, dear,” he says. “I lived it. Am I right?”
“Dear? Jack honey?!” I wheel to the seat next to Jack and point. “She’s a woman!”
I move closer to her just to be sure. Yup, she’s a woman. A really mousy-looking woman with no makeup, limp brown curls, and a super-conservative Laura Ashley dress with a lace-trimmed Peter Pan collar.
“You’re always right, sweetheart,” she says, patting his hand. Then she looks to everyone else at the table. “I wish we’d brought little Tommy. He’d have loved to see those pictures of his daddy all young and sprightly.”
“Little Tommy?” I gape at Jack. “Tell me you didn’t name your child after Tom Watson. Tell me you don’t have a child! You’re supposed to be dating a hot guy named Nathan!”
I hear sniffing and I look around the table at Taylor. She wears a frumpy black dress and no makeup. Her head is down and she looks like she’s trying not to cry out loud. I bend down next to her.
“Tee? Are you okay?”
“Sorry,” she says to everyone at the table but me. She takes some Kleenex from her purse and dabs her eyes. “It’s just…Drew and I wanted to have kids. We even picked out names….”
She can’t continue and sobs for real, burying her face in her hands. Next to her, a woman with jet-black hair and heavy black eyeliner leans back in her seat and stares at Taylor. “Car crash in the night…Your true love is now no more….Death comes to us all.” She intones the words dramatically, with a slight French accent, then takes a pause before she adds, “It’s a haiku. I wrote it because I knew I’d see you.”
“Wow,” says a guy across the table with a super-dark tan and teeth so white they have to be veneers. I’m so distracted by the color contrast that it takes me a second to realize it’s Sean. He sits next to a woman who looks like a living Bratz doll. “Depressing much?”
The Bratz doll giggles and hugs Sean’s arm, while the black-haired woman fixes him with a glare. “Life is depressing. You Americans fool yourselves into thinking otherwise.”
“You are American,” Jack says. “And life is not depressing. Look at me. Great little wife, great kid and another on the way, great job. We’re even thinking of getting a Disney vacation home.”
He says all this like it’s a dream come true, but his smile doesn’t meet his eyes. He also doesn’t make eye contact with his wife at all when he talks about their great life. He just pats her hand. She smiles and looks at him adoringly, but he doesn’t even seem to notice.
“Let’s not argue, okay?” Taylor asks between sniffs. “I only came here because I thought seeing you guys would make me feel better.”
“There is no feeling better,” the black-haired woman says. “Life is unfair. My father died when I was fifteen. My grandmother died two years later, remember that? She was running to give me a hug on Thanksgiving when she slipped and fell and broke her hip. Two weeks later, she was dead. You think that’s fair?”
As she speaks, I feel something icy fill my chest, and I walk through the table so I can get closer to the black-haired woman and stare at her face. It’s gaunt and overly pale and half hidden by her extreme eye makeup…but it’s also like looking in a mirror. “Are you…me?”
“Okay, I think Taylor losing her boyfriend three months ago in a car crash is a little more tragic than you losing your grandmother ten years ago,” Jack snaps to Future-Dark-Maiden-Me.
“I lose my grandmother senior year?” I ask, horrified. “Eddy dies this Thanksgiving?”
“Can we just stop talking about it?” Taylor asks.
“Why?” Future Me snaps. “It’s life, and it’s tragic, and Americans don’t know how to cope with it. Why do you think I went to school in Paris? Why do you think I dropped out and stayed there instead of coming back here?”
“Because you couldn’t hack the real world?” Sean suggests. “So you just stayed away and did the misunderstood starving artist thing?”
“At least I’m not all fake tan with fake teeth and building my life on fakeness!” Future Me shoots back, though I’d probably have a stronger argument without the fake black hair.
“Sean’s not fake!” the Bratz doll squeaks. “He’s doing his residency in plastic surgery! He’s going to change people’s lives! And I’m going to be his first patient. I’ve made a list of all the things I want him to do to me.”
She bounces in her seat as she runs down the list of surgical enhancements she wants to have done, while Future Me and Sean keep arguing, Taylor cries, and Jack sneaks furtive looks at the dance floor, where Tom Watson and his boyfriend or husband dance and smile and laugh and clearly have the time of their lives.
I can’t hang at this table anymore. Instead I walk around the room, hoping for any kind of good news about anyone I love, but it all bites. According to the gossip I hear, J.J.’s now a hermit who lives in Seattle and talks to no one but his dog. Reenzie’s a White House page, which sounds good…but she’s cut off all h
er friends because she doesn’t have time for them anymore. And Amalita…no one knows what happened to Amalita. Every time her name comes up people just frown and shake their heads.
“I don’t get it,” I say. “All I’ve done is try to make things better, but everything’s a total disaster. How did this happen?”
The next thing I know I’m back on the bleachers, the night breeze cooling my face. The Scare Pair dance is still going on, and as a member of the Senior Social Committee I’m required to stay for it all, but I can’t deal. I stop at my locker to grab my bag, then walk home, my head throbbing from everything I just saw.
My future with J.J.? His amazing proposal and our road trip around the U.S. and our forever happiness? Never gonna happen. Jack will never come out of the closet. I am going to be a pretentious, depressing disaster. Taylor won’t get to spend her life with Drew. And all because I was working so hard to make the future right.
I’m plagued by a tangle of bad dreams all night, but in the morning I jump out of bed, completely energized. Yes, the future I saw last night was awful, but it’s completely within my power to make sure it never happens. I just have to be smart about it. I tug on the chain to pull out the locket, open it, and look at the top window. It shows the number 5. I’ve jumped five times, and I have five jumps left.
Next I pull out my old journal—the one that had the zemi symbol on it two years ago but is now just a mostly filled lined notebook with a sliced-open cover. I flip to an empty page in the back and make a list of everything I need to change before those five jumps are done:
J.J. hermit in Seattle, not with me.
Eddy dies this Thanksgiving.
Ames still alcoholic?
Drew dies in car crash.
Jack stays in closet.
Sean kind of a tool.
I’m a pretentious, bad-poetry jerk.
I finish off the list with numbers for my mom/Glen and Erick but follow them with question marks since I don’t know where their futures are at the moment. Then I look at the list. What should I tackle first?
