Where Futures End Read online

  “Just go,” I plead with Michael.

  “But your money,” Michael says. “You need the money.”

  “I’ll be fine. This’ll be at the top of FeedBin for ages.” Or a day maybe, or an hour. Not enough time to make ten thousand dollars, but enough to delay a transfer a little longer, maybe, if MyFuture’s feeling generous.

  He senses my hesitation. He looks at the girls with their e-frame cameras. “Let me show you,” Michael says to me. “So you can understand.”

  I’d like to understand, I really would. I’d like to understand why a guy like Michael would bother waiting year after year for someone who left and probably never looked back. I’d like to know why people leave in the first place. Even when they love you, even when they owe it to you to stay. But all I really understand is that people have all kinds of debts between them that are never going to get paid.

  “You don’t owe me anything,” I tell Michael.

  Michael’s lined face is a maze of anxiety and disappointment. “Just let me show you.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” I say. “You look perfectly normal to me. You feel perfectly normal.” I move my hand down to grip his.

  He grips back. “I’ll show you.”

  And then I’m not holding his hand and I’m not looking into his face. I’m sensing him with something other than my eyes or my skin. His face is not a normal face but a screen of flickering images, a loose collection of colors, like dust motes caught in a shaft of light. His hand is warmth and light and energy, but nothing solid.

  He’s a cloud.

  And then he’s back to normal, back to real. His lake-water eyes search mine but how can he expect to find anything there other than shock and disbelief and confusion, and I hope not revulsion, I really hope not.

  “I told you it wouldn’t end well,” he says. “Do you believe me now?”

  Overhead, the tufted clouds are hands of loose molecules reaching for each other, stretching and stretching.

  “Happy endings are for movies,” I say.

  He smiles, the first smile I’ve seen on him, and it looks good. He hands me Dylan’s notebook. Then he turns toward a shimmering wave of heat roiling up from the cement and he steps through it and he’s gone.

  I feel the horde of viewers at my back. I sense a million clicks on FeedBin as my revenue rockets up to ten thousand and more.

  3.

  WHEN WE WENT HIGH-CONCEPT

  (thirty years from now)

  EPONY

  Cole and I come from a town in Iowa with one main road—one way in and one way out. He was Colburn then. Now he’s Cole. They made him do that.

  Any time I walked past his house, his chickens would follow me to the edge of the yard like I was their mother hen. They were partial to me. I understood the feeling—more than once during the summer I was sixteen I found myself following the siren strum of Cole’s battered guitar. He’d sit on his porch and play rage-rock tunes slow as love ballads, crooning about oil wars, his anger locked tight in his throat.

  He’d play at the creek bend where the small boys swung from rope lengths over the water like pendulums, arcing through the air out of sync with his staccato rhythms. They had yet to learn the reality of coaxing corn out of soil so desiccated by chemicals you had to use more chemicals to make anything grow. Cole sang it to them.

  I listened, out of sight. Half because I was fascinated Cole had started caring about anything other than trucks, which he’d drawn on the back of every school assignment when we were in the fifth grade. Half because hearing Cole’s voice was like waking up slowly and listening to someone tell you where you are.

  Once last August, he stood in the creek, guitar abandoned on the bank, and called to me, “Did you come all the way here to lurk in the trees?”

  I startled. At school he hardly talked to me, mostly because he hardly talked to anyone. Rumor had it there was a sign-up sheet going around for people who wanted to have a full conversation with him. But I knew that was just teasing. I knew because I was the one who’d started the rumor.

  I kicked off my shoes and moved in knee-deep. The shock of cold water stole my breath. Cole was dark from the sun, his yellow hair like parched grass. He cocked his head to the side like my grandpop used to do; I swear it’s a gesture taught to all farm boys who plan on growing up to make trouble. I fought to stand my ground against the current pushing at the backs of my legs.

  “Can’t you swim?” Cole had asked.

  “I learned in this creek. They threw me in and I declined the opportunity to drown.”

  It surprised us both that we had anything left to laugh about. The price of seed had gone up that year like it had every year. We got patented seeds that were supposed to withstand the pests migrating from places where it was even hotter, but the patent meant we weren’t allowed to store the seed for replanting.

  Cole shivered; the water around him rippled. “Can’t you come any closer, then?”

  I took a few hobbled steps forward, unsure whether to brave the icy temperatures. The current and his smile soon convinced me.

  A few days later, I was walking toward town to buy a Coke when the sound of Cole’s guitar floated to me over stands of late-summer witchgrass. I stopped to sit on the fence he had propped himself against and asked him if he ever watched feeds about people visiting from the Other Place. “You look half vanished, standing in that grass,” I told him. “Ever seen them do that? Just step between worlds?”

  Everyone had seen those videos, so Cole only smirked like we were sharing a joke. “I saw a video of one showing up at a dentist’s office. He just stood there, bug-eyed, watching a woman get her teeth cleaned.”

  I laughed. I had seen a lot more than that—had actually met one in person, which wasn’t that common, except in big cities. But Cole was studying me like he didn’t much care to talk about other people at the moment. I stared back. His county fair T-shirt was too small for him, and the date under the logo pinpointed the start of his growth spurt at two years earlier. Why had it taken me so long to notice?

  “It’s hot as hell,” Cole said, pulling at his shirt.

  “I wouldn’t know, personally,” I joked. “But I’ll take your word for it.”

  Cole laughed, and he left his guitar right there propped in the grass so we could walk to the creek.

  We met at the creek all through September—after school, weekends. We sunned ourselves on gravel bed islands and hoped the younger kids didn’t watch us kissing. When the rainstorms finally came and the creek swelled, our islands disappeared, so we sat in Cole’s barn instead. I missed the sound of the world rushing past us, the water surging over rocks.

  That spring, just after my seventeenth birthday, the government blew up the levees protecting southern Louisiana and let the area flood so that New Orleans wouldn’t. The government had stopped footing the bill for relocating people after hurricanes had destroyed so much of Florida’s coastline that they had to let Disney buy out the entire state. So just before the levees blew, the mega-corporations swooped into southern Louisiana to promote their new townships and evaluate everyone for sponsored relocation. Unlike all those poor people in China’s floodplains. Google was never going to knock on their doors offering to move them to drier parts. I kept my eyes glued to the newsfeeds because Grandpop had warned me that our farm, so close to the Mississippi River, was in a floodplain too.

  At first, my dad said the government wouldn’t let our land flood, that the country needed every bit of corn it could get, because the heat and wind were hard at work turning places like Nebraska and Kansas into sand dunes, destroying farmland and cattle ranches.

  But when the Mississippi started swelling, it was a choice between cities, with their people and businesses, and farmland. The farmland would have to go. Ours included.

  We heard a rumor that Microsoft-Verizon, which boasted the most
luxurious townships in the country, had plans to come around and evaluate everyone for relocation. “What are they going to do with a bunch of farmers?” Cole said. “They’re not going to relocate us. We don’t have anything they want.”

  He took to hanging out with some older boys who itched to make someone else feel as desperate as they did. On a hot day at the creek, I saw one of them hold a little boy under the water until he stopped thrashing and then let him up just in time. At night, Cole would slip away to meet up with them—in the attic room of that girl whose parents go to town most weekends, or at that guy’s half-done house where the front is mostly bare plywood. Cole and his friends would get so drunk so fast, Cole told me, it was like someone was holding their heads underwater and their day had come full cycle.

  Sometimes I’d go with him and we’d all watch feeds from different townships and talk about relocating. Or Cole would play his guitar along to the radio and change all the lyrics to swear words. Sometimes he and I would lie in the attic bed together and kiss, and wonder if we should do more than kiss, but then other times he’d be far away, staring at the ceiling, barely acknowledging the brush of my kneecap. “No one cares about this place,” Cole told me. “We don’t count for anything out here away from the big cities. We might as well be ghosts.”

  Microsoft-Verizon showed up in town. They asked how many hits we usually got on our feeds. We had to tell them that we weren’t blanketed with cameras like cities were and that corn planting wasn’t all that entertaining anyway. I mentioned Cole had a solo coming up at a Woodbury Prep choir competition. They weren’t impressed.

  The Mississippi went on rising. Our days were numbered.

  Cole stopped playing his guitar for me. He started spending all his time with the older boys and forgot to tell me where they were going. Rare days I did run into him, he could hardly look me in the eye. I wasn’t sure how to tell him that just because Microsoft-Verizon saw reason to reject him didn’t mean I felt the same.

  I holed myself up in the attic with downloaded school assignments that I ignored in favor of online stories about the Other Place. People were always posting their own made-up adventures with the Girl Queen. But I liked the original stories best, the ones Brixney had transcribed from Dylan’s famous notebook ages ago. I read about Dylan and Hunter passing into another world and wished I could do the same. What would it be like to find a lovely land, all cool greens and blues instead of the thermostat stuck on high . . .

  I had posters of the Other Place tacked up on my walls, created by artists who mixed descriptions from Dylan’s stories with information we’d gotten from the people who actually lived there. Snowcaps and grasslands; swaths of forest, like farms for shade. The posters were like those old-world travel ads designed by hucksters that urged people to See the New World!

  But the truth was, we couldn’t go to the Other Place. According to the stories, that other world overlapped with ours, and to visit it you had to be able to tune out our sights and sounds and tune in to the Other Place’s—an ability we had yet to evolve, except perhaps in a few rare cases like Dylan and Hunter. It wasn’t that the rest of us didn’t have vorpals. It was just that a vorpal strong enough to sense the Other Place was a rare trait, something that would crop up only when the right genes came together.

  So until our DNA worked a little harder, we weren’t going anywhere.

  Cole and I and some other kids from our valley made the three-hour drive together to the Woodbury Prep competition. We competed a few times a year because it was our best shot at college scholarships. Cole sat in the back with the other boys and slept and listened to his headphones, but once I felt him touch my hair and once he caught me staring at him in the rearview mirror. I remembered our days at the creek, and sheltering in his barn, and got moony all over again because I don’t know when to quit.

  In a city like Woodbury, it wasn’t just our clothes that were wrong (everyone there wore disposable stuff they could trade for the latest fashion). We carried old wireless devices while all the other kids had flexi-screens molded around their arms that chirped with constant notifications. I would stare at the ones decorated with images of teenage boys and wonder why anyone would want to wear a face on their arm.

  Cole had tanned skin and a strong body, something you can’t easily find in the city, where all the boys are espresso-steamed and pale. The girls at Woodbury Prep loved it when he mentioned anything rustic like collecting eggs from a chicken coop. They had no idea how gross fresh eggs are—usually completely covered in chicken crap. Cole was a fascinating artifact, with his cotton shirts and his farm chores back home. I guess I was fascinating too. It was fascinating how I pined for Cole across so short a distance as a coffee shop table.

  The Woodbury concerts are about as famous as prep school competitions get, so the coffee shop was crowded. Cole was leaning on the table, striking this strong-arm pose as if he’d studied online clothing catalogs. Really, he was trying to hide the hole in his shirt and that’s the real reason he was clutching his elbow. I was trying to get a good look at the flexi-screens stuck on the arms of some nearby girls. One frowning boy seemed to dominate the displays. His shaded cheekbones and blown-back hair made me wonder if he was from the Other Place, but you only ever heard it said that aliens looked just like everyone else.

  I’d only ever met one, so I couldn’t say if that was a fact.

  What I could say is that I wouldn’t prefer to meet another one, unless he had more apologies to offer than the last one did.

  I kept staring at the face on the flexi-screens until Cole told me, “He’s in a band. Stop gawking.”

  “Why is he so upset?” The boy was scowling but still prettier than I had ever seen a boy.

  Cole smirked. “All of his songs are about how he and his girlfriend got relocated to different townships. It’s high-concept.”

  I’d heard of high-concept groups. My friend Willer had a poster of one called Warehouse Burn, a group of boys who supposedly couldn’t stop themselves from setting things on fire and then singing about it.

  “Or he’s suffering an allergic reaction to all that hair gel,” Cole said.

  I glanced again at the frowning face, the hair standing practically on end. “Could be he regrets signing his contract without reading that clause about eyeliner.” Cole smiled, a rare sight these days. I thought about reaching for his hand, which was toying with the handle of his coffee cup. Did he still want to do things like that with me—hold hands? Kiss?

  It’d been a long time. I kept my hands to myself.

  The girls saw us looking at their screens and came over to ask Cole if black coffee was considered a food group back home. He shrugged because we couldn’t tell them that we didn’t have money to order anything fancier. The girls leaned on his chair and talked up the choir competition and asked Cole if he was nervous about his solo. They started touching Cole’s collar, pulling at the sleeve they didn’t realize had a hidden hole. They marveled at how thick the cotton was. One girl said, “Are you like those boys in Warehouse Burn? Can’t wear anything too flammable?” and winked at him. But he got all bothered because he couldn’t stand to feel like anyone was making fun of him, especially when he didn’t have the money to stop it, which was always. He said, “Would you please stop touching me.”

  “Geez, Colburn,” I said once they’d hurried away, “they were just trying to flirt with you.” Though really, I was glad his glower had scared them off, considering girls back home collected Cole’s moods like kids collect trading cards. (I had them all, from Charmingly Blunt to Lost In Self-Pity.)

  “They can’t see me sitting here with a girl already?” Cole said.

  I again considered reaching for his hand, but he had it wrapped firmly around his coffee cup. And he wasn’t even looking at me. He was watching the girls walk out of the shop, a defeated look in his eye.

  “Thanks for the coffee,” I mumbled. He
’d spent his last few dollars on me. He could have spent them on one of those other girls, but what girl wants just coffee? Besides me, I mean.

  He laid his hand over the tips of my fingers, tentatively. “Great idea, right? Getting you coffee before the performance. Great for the throat.”

  I shrugged. “It warms me up.” But that was a lie. I was already warm—in the tips of my fingers and everywhere else.

  I realized the woman at the next table had been watching everything. She saw the hole in Cole’s shirt too, I think, because she kept looking at his hand after she came over and he clamped it on his elbow again. I recognized her from the Microsoft-Verizon interviews and went numb with surprise. What was she doing in Woodbury?

  First she said to Cole, “Doesn’t it feel terrible to be misunderstood?” I thought, Cole’s not exactly some big question mark—he’s just moody as hell. But I kept my mouth shut and Cole couldn’t figure out what to say, so the woman added, “And a guy can’t help wanting what he wants.” It was like a line from a play, so we didn’t say anything to that either. “I’m looking forward to the concert,” she said to both of us and smiled at the rip Cole was still hiding.

  I realized a girl at the counter had been watching us. Even before glimpsing the red tag that circled her wrist, I knew she was from the Other Place. She’d been watching Cole too.

  Three years earlier, I had stood on the back staircase looking into our kitchen, where a much older boy drank straight from the tap. He was a farmhand Grandpop had hired for the season.

  A creak on the stair gave me away. He turned, drew the back of his arm across his mouth. His face was exactly as I had imagined. Olive-green eyes and fine eyebrows that might knit together in interest over whatever a fourteen-year-old girl might have to say. A streak of dirt bronzed his jaw.

  That afternoon, Grandpop took me to look at the collection of junkers he kept in the north pasture and while we were out there alone said, “The people from the Other Place usually stick to the big cities.” I knew. Mostly, people spotted them sitting in cafes and parks, or driving down the street, ordinary as you please. They lived in houses and apartments and hotels, usually hosted by government officials but sometimes by volunteer families. “But the best way to know a people,” Grandpop continued, “is by studying their food.”