Future Imperfect

by K Ryer Breese

I’m floating in it until Paige shakes me back. She helps me up and takes me outside to the front lawn and then I collapse again.

  She sits at my side crying, rubbing her nose on my sleeve.

  She tells me that she hates me. She tells me that she wishes I was just dead sometimes. She says, her voice all breaking, “You’re the most selfish person in the world.”

  FIVE

  The Buzz lasts for about an hour.

  It must be the alcohol-concussion combo but I’m pretty much unresponsive the entire time. Except for the twitching. When it wears off and I sit up, rubbing my eyes, Paige tells me that I was shaking like I was seizing. She tells me that a whole bunch of people asked her if they should call an ambulance and a whole other bunch of people told her that she should just put a bullet in my head. Paige says, “They told me I should just put you down.”

  “Thanks for defending me,” I say.

  “I didn’t defend you,” Paige says. “I just didn’t shoot you.”

  I say, “Thanks for not putting me down. What time is it?”

  “Two.”

  “Party still-”

  “Yeah, but the beer’s cashed, so most everyone’s gone. By the way, she was looking for you and then she saw you and went back inside.”

  “Vauxhall?”

  “She’s over there.”

  Paige points over at a huddle of people smoking. Vauxhall’s still got her costume on. She’s a monster in the moonlight. I grimace and Paige notices. She pats me on the head and says, “You’re not any better. You know that, right?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say.

  Paige laughs. “I’m going inside. Come in and get me when you want to leave.”

  I lie back on the lawn and stare up at the stars. The back of my head is still spinning and it’s like I can feel the planet moving beneath me. The stars stuck and flashing and the soil whirling, me in the middle. I feel so much better. So much stronger.

  “What’re you looking at?”

  It’s Vauxhall sitting next to me. Her non-face all ghostly.

  “Nothing,” I say. “Space.”

  Vaux looks up. Shrugs. “You crack your skull open?”

  “Heard about that?”

  “Saw the blood. I don’t understand why you’re not in a hospital right now.”

  “I’m a professional.” I manage to prop myself up on my elbow. I ask, “Any chance you’re going to take off that costume?”

  “I wasn’t going to sleep in it.”

  “How about now? At least let me see your eyes. Easier to talk.”

  Vaux pauses and then takes off the shades. And then she takes off the hat and lets her hair hang down. Lets it breathe in the half-light. “How’s that?”

  “Great start.”

  And it is. Even with her face wrapped up she’s still striking. And despite the emotional pain, I actually don’t blame her. I’m disappointed but not mad. In my head I’m not ranting and railing about her being a slut. Maybe it’s the head damage, but I’m not wanting to spit in her face. No matter how many dudes she hooks up with tonight or in the next week or month, the two of us will be together and in love and she will be mine. It’s like a sour candy; this is just the bitter outer part. Eventual sweetness this way lies.

  “Would you believe me if I told you that I’ve seen you before? That I’ve been thinking about you for years? Like in a dreaming sort of way?”

  “Maybe. How many girls do you say this to?”

  “Only you. You’re the first. So, why’d you sing to me?”

  “I don’t know. You’re cute.”

  With that, Vaux slowly unravels the bandages from her face. This is like a striptease but the payoff is so much better. She does it slow and teases something awful and part of me dies and is reborn with each inch of face she reveals. First her eyes. Then her nose and finally her lips and chin. She’s amazing, in the night, under the stars. Her features aren’t flattened by the fluorescent lights. Her skin breathes out here.

  She asks, “What have you heard about me, Ade?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, the rumors.”

  “I haven’t heard any rumors about you, Vauxhall. Wouldn’t matter, anyway.”

  She smiles. It’s a heartbreaking smile.

  But then I say, “I did see you with that guy Ryan a few hours ago. And…”

  “Does that turn you off?”

  I look at Vauxhall as hard as I can, push my eyes to see under her beauty. “I don’t… don’t think I’d be the right person to be judging you. It’s not like I think it’s, well, I just… Are you with Jimi?”

  “What did Jimi tell you?”

  “Nothing, but other people have said that you were.”

  Vauxhall nods. “It’s complicated. A long story, but the short answer is that we have a connection but I don’t think I love him. If that makes sense.”

  I swallow and it hurts. “I think it does.”

  The last few jags of Buzz go rattling down my nerves and my eyes roll back into my head for a second while I just let the feeling surge through me. The overwhelming peace of it like falling asleep but never sleeping. I don’t know how long I’m like this when Vauxhall says, “Hey. Come on.” And her voice shakes me back into the present. She is so incredibly soft in this light. Then, looking back at Oscar’s house, she asks, “Want to go to the roof?”

  “Okay.”

  We make our way back upstairs not saying anything.

  Of course, I’m thinking maybe she’s going to do with me what she did with Ryan Mar. Whatever exactly that was. Part of me, the lower part, is excited at the thought, has been sleepily dreaming of this. The other part, upper, doesn’t want it to go down like this. Really doesn’t want this.

  But just being in Vauxhall’s presence I’m getting goose bumps again.

  It’s like she’s radioactive. Like there’s a Geiger counter in my chest that’s pinging violently the closer I am to her. This girl is not only beautiful and deeply funny and clever and complicated and so freaking flawed and hooking up with random assholes, but something tells me she’s also like me. It’s the same thing that tells me that we will be together. It is inevitability. Going upstairs I’m giddy with expectation, the same way I felt when I went into Black Bart’s haunted cave at Casa Bonita for the first time. Scared. Jazzed.

  Up the stairs she’s in front and I can’t peel my eyes away. Despite the boxy suit, I catch glimpses of feminine shapes beneath. A calf. Thigh. Ass cheek. It’s intoxicating but over so quickly.

  Now the party is just ten loud people. They’re falling over each other. Lying in sleepy piles. Guys are copping feels. Girls are crying and talking too close to each other, face-to-face, like they might kiss or they’re sharing each other’s breath.

  “Good view on the roof?” I ask.

  “Sure,” Vaux says. “Mountains sometimes.”

  “You come up on Oscar’s roof often?”

  “-”

  Vaux and I make our way to a porch on the second floor and from there to a ladder that rocks back and forth when she climbs up.

  “Not sure I’m in the best state to be climbing ladders,” I say, trying to hold the ladder steady as I climb.

  Over the roof, Vaux looks down at me and smiles, says, “I’m completely wasted and I made it. You worried you’ll fall? Maybe hit your head?”

  SIX

  On the roof we can’t see shit.

  Just trees and the Christmas lights of distance houses and the haziness of stars. The roof slopes hard and the tiles are loose, but Vaux leads me over to a spot where the roof isn’t nearly as angled and I sit down next to her and lean back on my hands.

  She lights a cigarette and offers me a drag.

  I take it even though I don’t smoke.

  Vaux starts with a story about how when she was little, her father bought her a jumbo-sized copy of Winsor McCay’s comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland. She tells me all about how the drawings just sucked he
r in, how even then it looked like cinema to her. Forgotten and neglected cinema. She tells me she identified with the princess who was always lonely. “As a kid,” she says, “I’d think of my dad as King Morpheus. Only he was really sweet but just as magical. He’d made this whole thrilling world for me to play in.”

  “Sounds nice. That’s a lot like my dad.”

  “A dreamer, huh?”

  “You could say that.”

  Vaux switches gears, asks, “How’d you get it? Your ability?”

  I laugh, nervous. Ask, “What are you talking about?”

  Vauxhall says, “You know.”

  Still being coy I ask, “Did someone tell you some-”

  “Hitting your head and walking away from it the way you do. The way your eyes are rolling around in your skull like you’re high as a kite. I can see there’s something more going on with you, Ade,” Vauxhall says. “Besides, your friend Paige told me that you can see the future. And even if you don’t believe me that I believe that, I do. I can see it. I can read it on you. So, please, tell me how it happened.”

  This girl, I want to explain everything. I want so much to laugh and cry right now. But I relax and just start talking. “An accident,” I say. “Just a fluke.”

  “Typical origin story, huh? Radioactive spider bite, gamma rays, the usual.”

  “Not that spectacular.”

  I tell Vaux it went back to dissecting toads in eighth grade. I tell her that before we could even get started, before I’d even sat down at the lab bench, scalpel in hand, I accidentally stepped on Kevin Harris’s new shoes and he caught me with a fist on the right side of my face, just below the orbital socket of my eye. I say, “I went spinning into Vanessa Katz and then tumbled over a lab stool and wound up on the linoleum. My forehead hit first and my skull bounced. Went black for only heartbeats, but in that darkness I saw something. Like a short film or a trailer for a movie. A young woman and an older man meeting. It’s hard to recall the details now but what I overheard was that he’d been lost after an accident. Something with amnesia. Or maybe he was in hiding. It was on the news. Anyway, they ran into each other at a food court and hugged and sobbed and sputtered in front of the Chick-fil-A.”

  Vaux says, “Classy.”

  I tell Vaux about the Buzz. I tell her how, for me, at first, it was like being over-caffeinated but in the best way imaginable. I say, “It was a breaking-the-laws-of-physics high. That first time I was sure I was beaming light. Everyone could see it. Kids in the halls stopping to look at me. Pointing me out across the basketball courts. I was radiating some heavenly light or something. The Buzz lasted until the next morning and then melted away, like how your body melts back into itself after a hard workout.”

  Vaux nods, staring off into the non-view. She says, “I know that feeling.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah, that so strange?”

  “Uh, no. I’m just surprised is-”

  Vauxhall does this finger-twirl thing, says, “Come on, don’t leave me in suspense. Tell me the rest of your story.”

  “Okay. So, two days after the knockout I was at the mall with my friends and I saw the girl from the vision. I sat down in the middle of a record store and watched the dream come real and the players took the stage and it was acted out exactly as I’d seen it. Every detail. The tears. The intense smiles. I couldn’t breathe. I hurled when I got home.”

  “Must have been amazing,” Vauxhall says. “The power of that.”

  “After that it was just me chasing the Buzz around. It’s harder to start a fight than you’d imagine. I said some of the worst things I could think of to the worst people I knew and still came up empty. What it came down to was me going bat-shit crazy just for the thrill of a ten-second ride into the future. Something I shouldn’t be able to do. Something that no one should be able to do. It felt wrong but so right.”

  Vauxhall puts her hand on my shoulder. Squeezes it. This is the first time she’s intentionally touched me, and there’s an electric current. All the hairs on my arms stand up. I can feel each and every one of them.

  What’s really funny is how open I am about my ability. How I’m just letting it all spill out. Then again, I’m talking to the only person I’ve ever really loved.

  Vaux asks, “What do you see when you knock yourself out now?”

  “Decades out. I need to push it to get the Buzz stronger.”

  “What’s it like, your future?”

  “Clean, fun. I don’t have any lasting head injuries or any brain problems. At least not that I can tell. It’s what’s been keeping me doing it, really. Knowing that I end up fine. It’s funny, but in the future, I’m like this daredevil. Kind of a Jackass sort of dude.”

  “Like what?”

  “Jumping off buildings. Stunts. I have no idea why.”

  “And you’re not like that now?”

  Up on the rooftop with an invisible city spilling out in front and all our peers asleep or rocking drunkenly beneath, I sigh and say, “I’m looking forward to it but, sometimes, I worry I’m out of control. Even now. I mean I know that last summer I was out of control, but I’m not sure when, if, I’ll ever really get under control. Some of the stuff I’ve done, I’m not really proud of. Most of it, thankfully, I don’t remember.”

  This is a lie. I remember a lot of it but I don’t want her see me that way, to think of me that way. Not now.

  Vaux can see I’m holding back. She says, “I was out of control for a while too.”

  That thought, her kind of out of control, it has my stomach sinking.

  She says, “I did some really… regrettable things.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Vaux reaches into her purse and pulls out this tiny digital video camera and then flicks it on and says, “I think we’ll start here.”

  “Start what?”

  Her face half hidden by the camera, its lone little red eye now her right eye, she says, “This is the first take, the first fourteen minutes, of my new film. Not sure of the title yet, but we’ll get this. Free-form at the moment.”

  Awkward under the camera’s stare, I ask, “What’s it about?”

  “About when the past meets the future. I’ve always said that by the time I was seventeen I’d have made a feature-length documentary film.”

  “So, do I-”

  “Just act natural,” Vaux interrupts. “Tell me about your family. About your childhood. What you liked to do as a kid. Your best friends. Your first kiss. Tell me about who you used to be.”

  I ask, “Used to be?”

  Vaux nods. “Don’t you find that who you used to be is always more interesting than who you are?”

  “Not really.”

  The camera says, “Then you just haven’t thought about it enough. Tell me something weird. Something that will give me some glimpse into you. More about your mom.”

  I say, “Dragonflies.”

  “Huh?”

  “My mom, when I was six, just after my dad started drinking, before she found All Souls Chapel and was still working at the bakery, she got totally obsessed with them. The Green Darners. The Mosquito Hawks. Darning Needles. Dragonflies. Russian folklore has it that dragonflies are devil’s knitting needles. Romania they’re horses possessed by Satan. Sweden they weigh the souls of the damned.”

  “Spooky.”

  “Mom dragged me all over the foothills looking for them. We had this Corvair. Blue and dented everywhere by some cataclysmic hailstorm in eighty-nine. We called it Pineapple Face on account of the dings. The way my mom drove it was like one of those centrifugal force rides at the state fair. The kind you stand up in and it spins around and plasters you back against the walls. I always loved those rides. Love how it takes a few seconds longer than you expect for the force, or whatever, to hit, just a few seconds longer of stillness before your stomach catches up. Those seconds are magic. Mom driving the car was the same way. She’d turn lanes so fast, without signaling, that I’d see it before I felt it. My
stomach was still in the other lane for a few seconds and then whoosh, it’d come sliding back smooth as silk.”

  “Sounds fun in a really stupid sort of way.”

  I laugh. “Only times she’d slow down was when she saw a dragonfly. She’d pull the emergency brake right there, right in the middle of the highway sometimes, and jump out and chase after them with the nets she had in the trunk. Then she’d hold what she caught in front of me and say, ‘Aeronautic marvels. It’s the wings. Two pairs. Two pairs and they can coordinate those and move them so fast that’s it almost against the laws of physics. Almost.’ I always tested her. ‘Which one is that, Mom?’ ‘Shadow Darner. Aeshna umbrosa. Like ambrosia. The foodstuff of the gods.’ It was fun back then but now, now it’s pretty obvious how crazy she was. Is.”

  Vaux, taking her eye from out behind the camera, says, “You’re a dream. Go on.”

  And she films and I talk. I talk until nearly dawn, when the lights of the city that we can’t see are fading out, blending in with the light of the sun. I talk through my childhood, but it’s like it was a movie I saw. Not something I really experienced. I keep coming back to me now.

  Then I take the camera and put the questions to her.

  Watching Vaux in flickering green light, her face glowing, she tells me stories about her father, how he would get her stoned and take her to rock concerts (“Summer I turned fourteen we hit five shows, even traveled as far as Topeka to see Bowie.”) and how they used to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show every Friday night for like two years. Said that she was practically raised in that movie theater by squadrons of drag queens and Monty Python-quoting geeks.

  She’s tells me stories about her mother. About her cousins. Extended family. What foods she most likes. Which ones she hates. Her favorite colors and what they mean to her. Her favorite clothes. Why she loves movies. What music she despises. She goes ballistic with politics. Cries about chimpanzees and Amazon destruction. She laughs about her period. Recites Baudelaire. And she sings a number from Grease 2, something about reproduction.

  Vauxhall makes it clear that this theatrical thing, it isn’t just an act. It isn’t like the way Jimi does his show for attention. The real Vauxhall is on the outside. Her heart right there for anyone to see it, to touch it. Any emotion crossing her, it’s suddenly out in the open. I’ve never met anyone so unafraid of talking. She’ll mix it up with everyone.