Where Futures End (12 page)

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 messed 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.

He and the songwriter had already scribbled some lyrics on a paper placemat.

“This is the story.” The producer directed his acetone breath at me. “Cole's not supposed to get involved with your type—it's against the law but he can't help himself. And you can do what you want with him, can't you, because your powers of persuasion are sort of superhuman. Your vorpal, yes? So here we go. The first part is Cole's and the second is Epony's.”

The songwriter read the lyrics off in a monotone:

 

I know what you are,

how you watch me.

If I go too far

will you stop me?

 

“Effing ethereal,” the producer cut in to remind us.

 

I know what they say,

how they watch me.

If I want your heart

can they stop me?

They won't understand this.

They can't come between us.

 

I stole a glance at Cole. He raised his eyebrows at me. I remembered laughing in the creek together and then quickly pushed the thought away. The creek was just another current in a morass of currents now.

“Right, let's try it in the booth,” the producer said, and handed the paper placemat to Cole. “Sing it like a girl would, Cole, like a sweet effing innocent girl.”

While they mixed the final track, we went to a movieplex to watch Girl Queen movies. We rented a space that was nothing but a shelf on a stack of shelves facing a huge screen. Footrests rose up from the floor; pops rolled down from a fridge hatch.

On-screen, a river pooled around a city of sun-dazzled glass, and an actor portraying Dylan called a silvery creature out of the water. It was the seventh Girl Queen movie in a row we had watched.

“Watch out for the stinger!” I hollered at the screen, because I knew this movie by heart. It was based on a popular story someone had posted online about Dylan's adventures with the Girl Queen and her brother. There was no telling if it had gotten the look of the Other Place right, but it seemed close enough to what Dylan had described in his
own stories, so I was willing to go along for the ride.

During a lull in the action, Cole told me, “They shouldn't have turned your vocals down on the chorus. I was drowning you out.”

“We aliens don't like to be loud,” I said, poking him in the ribs. “We're a shy bunch. We're really only here to make humans like you sound better.”

“Seriously, though,” Cole said.

I shook my head. “It's
your
voice that's good. They'll have to do all that thickening with mine. I never heard you sing so high.”

“Sounded like a mosquito in heat.” He climbed up on the back of the seat and popped open the fridge hatch to use as a headrest. The chemical smell of refrigerant reminded me of ice-cream bars and frozen lemonade. “Ethereal my ass.”

“Looks ethereal from this angle,” I joked, and prodded him so he leaped off the chair back.

He dropped into the seat and leaned against me. “If I had known they were going to try to turn me half into a girl, I might not have done this.”

“Yes you would have.” I slipped an arm around his shoulders, praying he wouldn't pull away. My heartbeat was an overproduced version of itself, all bass notes. “Those tween girls like the non-threatening brand of angst. Get used to it, girly boy.”

He laced his fingers through mine so that his arm was across his chest. “Those lyrics . . .” He grimaced at the distant movie screen. “I hate acting that way around you.”

I stiffened. “Like you're in love with me?”

“No, like I can't do anything about it.”

The light from the screen lent his face an early-morning, dirt-streaked window kind of glow.

“You can do something about it.” I brushed my chin against his shoulder.

He shifted in his seat so that I thought maybe I was bothering him. But then he turned and kissed me, and the sound of river water from the movie reminded me of our islands in the creek.

Then he jerked away, scowled at the armrest. “You like doing any of this?”

“Kissing you?” I almost laughed. Was there some other reason to do it?

“No, I mean my non-threatening high notes.” He flopped back in his seat. “And these pants that are about three sizes too small.”

I touched the back of his shoulder, trying to coax him closer again. “It's what everybody wears.”

He reached to pull his guitar out from under his seat. “Never mind.” He started strumming, and that was the end of that.

We ordered hot dogs and a case of designer candy that made smoke pour out of our mouths. Cole riffed on his guitar despite protests from the other shelves.
“I've tasted sorrow, salt, and sickly sweets,”
he sang.
“Hate it all, but a boy's gotta eat
.
”

I passed in and out of sleep for the remainder of the movie. I kept seeing my kitchen wallpaper in the Girl Queen's palace, faded and curling. Cole's hens scrambling for the fence line. In the dark nighttime scenes when blue
light washed over us, I pretended the world was flooding and I was safe up on a high shelf with Cole and candy, and pretended that was enough.

“Will they buy it?” Cole asked, his thumb hitting an errant note that jolted me out of dreaming.

He meant the girls, the tweens with their lust for high-con. Would they buy that I was an alien? That he was in love with me? That was what he cared about. What kept his mind occupied even while he kissed me, so that he could hardly remember to enjoy it. His shrill tone set my teeth on edge. “They'll eat you up.”

We stayed at the movieplex all night and into the following day. Just watched movie after movie and dozed during the boring parts and tried to remember if we existed beyond our shelf. I came to the conclusion that we kind of didn't. The context for every moment of our lives was gone, underwater. Me with no profile, like some mythical creature exiled from Atlantis.

After they'd finished the track, they had us come down and listen to it, and I forgot it was me singing and got goose bumps from the shimmering synths and the bass notes like a heartbeat. Cole's voice was a prepubescent version of itself and so sweet I could almost cry. Effing ethereal, after all.

The plan was that when the single hit the airwaves, every flexi-screen within range of a signal would light up with an image of Cole's haunted expression. Anyone who clicked through to the webpage would discover a forlorn Cole reaching for me as I faded away. Below the image, a
single line of text: “They won't understand this.”

It was almost the exact pose from that most viral of ancient feeds, the moment Michael faded away from Brixney. Despite what the lyric said, everyone would understand it.

I was wheedling the guy at the grocery counter to let me take some tomatoes and a head of lettuce when the single dropped. His flexi-screen lit up. He tapped on it in a way he thought was discreet, arm below the counter. His gaze went to my wrists and found no screen or red bracelet. Wide-eyed, he waved me on. I thought,
See? Who needs credits?

On my way home, past house-fronts painted white against the early summer heat, it hit me: I was an alien now.

I started running.

Cole was fidgeting in the entryway of my family's premier town house, his boots smearing dirt on the new white premier tiles. I pointed at the brand-new flexi-screen on his arm, which was spouting our single. “Take it off, what are you thinking? Before they get here.”

He jolted. Tugged it off. Then paused, the music echoing, his screen still lit up with the image of his own face. “Wait, who's
they
?”

“I don't know,
they,
people. Fans. Turn it off, they can track your location.”

Cole swiped at the screen and our singing stopped. We looked around. We waited. I kept staring at the door. “Should we barricade it?” Cole asked. He cracked a smile. I
chucked the lettuce at him.

“Turn it back on.” I nodded at his screen.

He made a swipe, tapped through to our website. “Six hundred eighty-seven subscribers.” His face went premier white.