Where Futures End Read online

  “Movie tonight, huh?” he blurted, scanning the science fiction film club flyer she held in her hands, hoping to distract her from whatever was making her look at him like that. Kate Chesterfield was listed as the film club’s president. Chess? Had to be her.

  Chess’s gaze narrowed. “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

  Dylan’s gaze went to the gold band that had slid down her arm. “You’re wearing the bracelet.”

  She put a protective hand over it, scrutinized Dylan. He could hear her vorpal, undeveloped as it was, snick-snick-snick. Why were everyone else’s vorpals so much weaker than Dylan’s? Impossible to say. Maybe it ran in families—his brother’s was stronger than most, but he never used it, didn’t really know how.

  “You’re Hunter’s brother.” She tilted her head to one side. “From the pawnshop.”

  “Dylan,” he said, a bit deflated.

  “Took me a minute to recognize you.”

  Dylan shifted his stance. Well, it had almost worked. He looked at the bracelet. He could still ask for it back—she’d been nervous about taking it from the shop.

  An image popped into Dylan’s head: Chess smiling at him, the gold robot mask pushed up over her dark hair. Like a matching set, mask and bracelet.

  He tore his gaze away from her and pointed to the flyer. “Which appendage will it cost me to get into your club?”

  “What?”

  “Arm? Leg? I’m prepared to give both.”

  She looked him over.

  “You’re appraising them,” he said, shifting nervously under her gaze.

  “No, it’s just . . .” She gave him that same curious look she’d given him in the pawnshop. Same glint in her eyes. His legs wobbled. “I thought you didn’t go to Hevlen anymore.”

  Dylan’s stomach tightened. He looked down at his uniform—his brother’s uniform, pants and blazer, rolled at the hems and cuffs. Plus the Battle of the Bands shirt from the pawnshop, definitely a violation of the dress code. Was it the shirt that had given him away? Hunter never wore anything from the shop—he couldn’t be sure it hadn’t been pawned by someone from school. He was careful about that kind of thing.

  Chess was still looking at him, waiting for him to say something. At any minute he might offer her a shop discount on obscure movie paraphernalia out of sheer awkwardness. He might start quoting Metropolis. Now that he thought about it, he already was. It was a silent movie.

  He cleared his throat and studied the flyer for The Day the Earth Stood Still. “Are you showing the original or the one with Keanu Reeves?”

  “Do you have to ask?”

  Dylan laughed. “Maybe they should have cast him as the robot.” He tweaked his neck and made his face into a blank mask, Keanu-style. “The Day Keanu Reeves Stood Still.”

  Chess smiled, a slow smile that had Dylan holding his breath to see how it would end. She tilted her head to the side. “Seven o’clock. In the auditorium.”

  She turned back to her friend. Dylan eyed the bracelet still glinting on her wrist. Later, maybe.

  His stomach rumbled. He shivered against the chill coming off the gurgling fountain—

  Since when had there been a fountain around here? He turned toward the cafeteria.

  The building was gone.

  And the crowds of students.

  The burble of water was a stream and he was in a wood.

  But only for one more step, and then the buildings returned, with the deafening noise from the crowd. Dylan jerked to a stop, as if doused with a bucket of water. The mineral smell of cold dirt lingered. But the wood was gone.

  He gasped for air, then doubled over with his hands on his knees. His heart was a skittering rabbit.

  The Other Place. He’d stepped in for a moment, and then stepped right out again. Was that what had happened?

  His skin prickled in the cold.

  Rain drummed on the city bus window later that afternoon on his way home from the public library. Dylan sat in the back, whipping through the pages of a tattered book, desperately looking for the Girl Queen. He found a woodcut illustration called “The Fish-Girl.” How do I get back there? he asked her. As though a picture could answer.

  Why is it so hard? he wondered. What’s keeping me locked out?

  In The Blue Fairy Book, rewards always went to the virtuous, to the pure of heart. Maybe that’s my trouble. He hadn’t exactly been virtuous these past months: lying, cheating, pretending.

  He’d been looking for his rabbit the first time he’d found the Other Place, so maybe that was the key: You had to look for something lost. But it wasn’t only that he’d been looking for something lost.

  He’d also desperately needed to get away.

  His parents had been arguing. Mom was angry at Dad for disappearing again, instead of being happy to have him home. Whenever they shouted at each other, Dylan would wish for someplace nicer. And then it would appear: the Other Place.

  Like a dream.

  Or a hallucination.

  Am I going crazy?

  He could see the Girl Queen so clearly in his mind: a half elf, winter-pale. Not perched on a throne, but out in the trees, climbing just as well as his brother could climb the trees behind their house. Scolding Dylan in a language he didn’t know but a tone he could understand—Higher, higher! Swinging by her knees, teasing him for being afraid. Her hair hanging down, a shivering flame inverted.

  Someone leaned over his seat. “Fast reader.”

  Dylan looked up. He recognized a girl he’d gone to elementary school with. The hood of her dingy anorak framed her face so that she looked as little like a queen as possible. The effect was so jarring that Dylan only stared dumbly.

  “I heard a rumor you were going to Drury this year,” she said.

  Dylan’s brain finally started working again. “True story,” he said.

  “How come I never see you around?” Her cheeks were pink with the cold. Dylan remembered a brief crush, fourth grade. Some incident involving his sticking an eraser into her ear. He prayed she didn’t remember. “Are you on work release?”

  “Something like that,” Dylan said. Better than telling her he’d cut school to go to philosophy class at Hevlen in the morning and hang out at the public library all afternoon.

  “Me too.” She waved a hand at her black pants, which Dylan supposed was part of some work uniform. “What book is that? Looks ancient.”

  Dylan clapped it shut. “They’ve got this whole collection of rare books at Washington State that they’ll mail to the local branch.”

  She blinked. “Cool. Is that where you work—the library?”

  “I, uh . . . I spend a lot of time there.”

  “I work at the pet store downtown. The one with the weird snakes and exotic birds? I basically just clean up all kinds of abnormal animal crap. You should come by and see these really freaky giant lizards we’ve got. Monitors.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen them.” Dylan gazed out past the raindrops at shining sidewalks sliding past. “I used to go in that shop as a kid and try to draw them. All my old school artwork looks like it was copied from cave paintings of dinosaurs.”

  He turned back to find her confused expression.

  “That place used to be a comic shop when we were kids,” she said. “The pet store moved in only a few years ago.”

  Dylan gripped the rail, suddenly unsteady. “You sure?” His heart pounded. Did that mean he’d seen those animals in the Other Place? He reached up and yanked the cord. “Uh, this is my stop.” The cord was wet. No, his palms were sweating.

  The girl moved aside to let Dylan stand. “Hey, you want to go to a party Friday?” she asked. “Bunch of Drury kids, no tie needed.” She flashed a smile.

  Dylan turned toward the door as the bus lurched to a stop.

  “Or do you have plans with your Hevlen friends
?” the girl asked.

  “No, no plans.” He imagined calling them up: Hey, guys, remember me? The guy who got kicked out? Then he imagined himself at a basement party with Drury kids. Yeah, I left Hevlen. I guess they got sick of me—must have been all those math awards.

  “It’s at that puke-green house behind the high school,” the girl said. “You know the one?”

  Dylan just nodded, waited for the door to whoosh open, and then barreled down the steps. He crossed the street toward his house, then froze. His mom had just stepped out onto the porch. “What are you doing home so early?” she asked.

  Dylan tucked the fish-girl book behind his back so his mom wouldn’t see it. He definitely couldn’t tell her he’d gone to the library instead of to Drury. “Fast learner?” he tried.

  His mom glowered at him. Clearly not in a joking mood.

  “Early release day,” Dylan said quickly. He reached tentatively with his vorpal and tried to gauge whether she believed him. Maybe they could go for fish and chips, just the two of them. It’d been ages since they’d done anything like that. Here’s an Impossible Question: How does a mom forget she has two sons?

  “If I find out you’re still cutting classes—”

  “I know, Mom.”

  “—you’re off to your dad’s, I don’t care at which end of Puget Sound he’s got that houseboat parked.”

  “Okay.” Dylan rubbed a hand over his eyes. They’d had this conversation one too many times.

  His mom studied him in silence for a moment. Her vorpal ticked back and forth like a metronome. “I just came home to take Hunter to the doctor,” she said. “And now I’m heading back to the pawnshop.”

  No fish and chips, then. “They find a way to stop his ego from swelling?”

  “Very funny. Jumper’s knee. And he’s fine,” she added in a way that said Dylan should have asked. She walked past him toward the car Dylan hadn’t noticed. But then she stopped, turned to look at the book in Dylan’s hand.

  Dylan felt a surge of panic—she’d freak if she found out where he’d been all afternoon. He imagined the novel as a chemistry textbook and tried to send the same thought out to her.

  “You know what?” she said, moving her eyes to Dylan’s face. She chewed her lip. “You get a good report card this semester, maybe we’ll go to the lake for Thanksgiving.”

  The book felt heavy as lead now. Dylan squashed his rising guilt. He nodded, and then she headed to the car.

  As he stepped into his living room, he squeezed his eyes shut like he sometimes did when he walked into a room, and prayed he would step into a different world.

  He opened his eyes to find darkness.

  The air was close and warm and stale. This wasn’t his living room—where was he? He reached out and knocked his elbow against wood, brushed his hands over linen and soft velvet. A crack of light showed between double doors. He was trapped in a wardrobe.

  He breathed in. He knew that smell—her, the Girl Queen. These were her clothes, her wardrobe. He was in the palace. In the Other Place.

  “Hello?” he called, and pushed at the doors. Locked. He pounded his fists on the wood. “Let me out!” He was like a maniac. “I’m here! I’m here! Let me out!” She would be there any moment, her face glowing with surprise at seeing him. “Let me out!”

  Finally—footsteps. Rushing to meet him. It was her. The doors shuddered.

  Dylan blinked in the yellow light of the living room. The wardrobe was gone. He was only scrabbling at the inside of his own front door.

  Hunter eyed him from a doorway upstairs. “Where’d you come from?”

  Dylan collapsed against the wall and clenched his eyes shut again. He reached out with his vorpal. He flung out his hand in search of a wardrobe door, hanging clothes. Nothing.

  “Are you drunk?” Hunter asked. “It’s two o’clock. And shouldn’t you be at school?”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “I want my blazer back.”

  Dylan shrugged it off and hurled it up over the banister.

  Hunter snatched it from the railing, held it out in his fist. “Stop doing that. Stop pretending to be me.” He went back into his bedroom.

  Dylan’s mouth went dry. Hunter knew? He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants—Hunter’s pants—and then realized he had lost the library book, the one with the fish-girl illustration. Dropped it outside or left it in the Other Place? He checked the porch—wasn’t there. His head felt muffled, confused. How did Hunter know? He went up to his brother’s room.

  It was cluttered with half-disassembled junk from the shop—DVD players and microwaves waiting to be repaired. Hunter sat at his desk, fiddling with a dinosaur of a radio that looked like it had time-traveled there from some unchronicled era. At his elbow was a framed photo of Chess squinting against the sunlight. A UW Huskies poster overhead was stuck with so many thumbtacks that Dylan wondered if Hunter was afraid it’d be stolen. Then again, he’d caught on to the fact that Dylan had borrowed his clothes, so maybe that wasn’t such a crazy idea.

  Hunter jerked on some hazardous-looking wiring. “What do you want?”

  “Did Chess tell you I was at Hevlen today?” Dylan asked.

  “Chess?” Hunter looked up, his screwdriver clutched like a dagger.

  “That I was wearing your blazer and . . .” Dylan looked down at the pants he was wearing.

  Hunter seemed to notice them for the first time. His gaze darkened. “Did you think I wouldn’t hear about Conrad’s class?”

  Dylan’s stomach dropped.

  “Why do you do that?” Hunter went on. “Everyone thinks you’re crazy.”

  A wave of dizziness hit Dylan. They knew? They had all noticed he wasn’t Hunter? He put a hand against the door frame to steady himself. “Sometimes . . . sometimes people think I’m you. Because of—”

  Hunter stood, grabbed the blazer he’d discarded on the bed. “Because you wear my clothes? Funny how that works.”

  Dylan shook his head. “It’s more than that. You know it’s more.”

  The silence was thick with Hunter’s contempt. “Your vorpal.” He crossed his arms.

  It sounded so stupid coming out of Hunter’s mouth. It always sounds stupid. Vorpals, a girl queen waiting for him in a palace—it sounded crazy.

  “You’ve got to stop, Dylan.” Hunter jostled his arm. “Come back to reality.”

  Dylan jerked away. “I’m not crazy.”

  “Dad really screwed you up, didn’t he? Letting you believe all that stuff was real.”

  Dylan felt the cold sting of windy Alki Beach, remembered the day he’d asked Dad the Last Impossible Question. The Impossible Question that had changed everything between them. And then right afterward, when Dylan had gone to the shed, hidden the bracelet . . .

  He pushed the memory away. “It is real. Even Conrad—”

  “Conrad is a thousand years old,” Hunter said with a snort. “He doesn’t know who’s supposed to be in the class and who got kicked out of school for cheating on a stats final.”

  Dylan winced.

  “Why did you cheat, Dylan?” Hunter sounded plaintive, almost angry. “You’re smarter than most of the kids in that school. Dad was so proud of you—came to all of your math competitions before you left Hevlen,” Hunter said. “He’s never even come to any of my basketball games.”

  Wrong, Dylan thought.

  At Alki Beach five years ago, Dylan had watched the boats and told Dad about the sails he’d seen along the river in the Other Place: shimmering membranes made from dragon wings. Mom doesn’t like to hear about those things, he’d told Dad. Can’t I come live with you instead?

  The Last Impossible Question.

  Dad’s whole face had changed, shifted like sand trickling down a steep bank. Not everyone’s fit to take care of a kid, Dylan. You’re better off with Mom. Dad�
�s voice was like water flooding his eardrums, like a wave crashing over his head.

  It’s time to give up those stories anyway. None of it’s real. You know that, right?

  “I hated those math competitions,” Dylan said, his throat raw. “They were all Mom’s idea. I never wanted Dad to come.”

  Hunter shook his head. “What do you want, Dylan?” The air hummed, full of Hunter’s exasperation. Maybe it was just the radio. “What will make you stop this? Tell me, I’ll give it to you.”

  Dylan’s gaze went to the photo of Chess.

  Hunter noticed. He pushed Dylan against the door frame. “You’re living in a fantasy world.”

  Dylan caught a metallic glint of fear in Hunter’s eyes, even though Dylan was the one with a doorjamb pressed against his backbone. Because he knows my vorpal is stronger than his.

  Unless they were right, Dad and Hunter. Unless it was all in his head.

  Dylan suddenly couldn’t catch his breath. He thought he could feel his vorpal like an extra organ, churning next to other worthless organs—appendix, gall bladder. But he was afraid to use it, afraid that if he tried, it wouldn’t be there, that he was fooling himself after all.

  Hunter still loomed over him. “All of this crap you’re pulling—getting kicked out of school—can’t you see what you’re doing to yourself?”

  “Can’t you,” Dylan pleaded, “can’t you just admit that you remember where we went when we were kids?”

  Hunter’s jaw tightened. His vorpal ground like stuck machinery. “You know what I remember?”

  Just say it. Tell me you remember. I didn’t make it all up. Please.

  “I remember you pretending.”

  Dylan thought his lungs might be going flat. He searched Hunter’s face, trying to figure out whether to believe him. He couldn’t decide.

  He turned toward the stairs.

  “Dylan?” Hunter said. “Stay away from Chess.”

  Dylan couldn’t help himself—he sneaked out of the house and went to the film club that night.

  “Klaatu barada nikto,” he said to Chess at the door to the auditorium, just like in the movie. He jammed his hands into his jacket pockets. Why did he always have to be so weird?