Future Perfect (19 page)

Like a cramp in my belly, an echo of Laura. Like my grandmother sitting next to me in the car, saying, “You know I'm right, darling.”

“Are you okay?” Brandon says. He cups my neck with his big warm hand and he's peering into my face.

I open my mouth but there she is, Morgan leaning against the side of her little Audi. She's staring at us. “No,” I say. “No. I'm going.”

He reaches out and runs his other hand up my arm, clasps my shoulder. He's got me surrounded. His thumb brushes the side of my neck and I am frozen. “You're brave,” he tells me with a so serious, so sincere look on his face.

I am overcome with the urge to laugh at him.

“I mean it,” he says. “I've always thought so.”

I push his hand off, swerve around him and around the front of my car. “Great!” I say. “That's great!”

He doesn't mean it. He's making fun of me. What is wrong with him? What is wrong with me? I yank the door open and fall into the car. My hand shakes, trying to fit the keys into the ignition. He's watching me with his hands in his pockets and I give him a thumbs-up that means
fuck off
. He nods but doesn't move and I clench my teeth. Morgan has straightened up, is still watching us with her arms crossed, but he is watching me instead. I pull out fast, swerve away. I can't drive. I am shaking and now I am sobbing, my whole body caught in the storm, all of me hurting, all of it. I pull over and rest my head on the steering wheel.

A knock on the window makes me jump.

“Are you okay, honey?” Mrs. Tam says. Mr. Tam stands stoically next to her, gazing off into the distance.

I look at her.

“Do you need me to call someone?” she says.

I swallow, and I feel the tears still running down my face. I look at my wet hands, short fingers, calluses from volleyball, tanned darker, my hands.

“I'll be fine,” I say.

“You don't look fine,” she says dubiously, and I'm afraid if I start laughing I'll never stop.

A
ll week: Laura's chair is still empty in every class, in the cafeteria. Jolene draws wobbly overlapping circles in her notebooks, covering entire pages in black lines. Hector and I catch each other's eyes and he smiles tentatively and I look at him, willing him to come say hello but he just looks away. I smile a lot at other people. They keep laughing at my jokes even though I'm not making any. I'm not eating. And every night I get home and lock myself in my bedroom, lock everyone out and write a draft of an essay. At four in the morning I delete it again.

Then, the interview is tomorrow. The application deadline is tomorrow. There can't be any more missing pieces. So I fill it in.

When I write the last word, put the period at the end of the sentence, briefly consider the urge I have to write THE END in all caps at the bottom of the page, I realize my head is pounding.
It's four in the morning again and all the lights in my room are on, and all down the hallway and down the stairs and in the kitchen. I have turned on the few lights my father hadn't, so that the whole house except for the guest room and my grandmother's room is glowing while Dad drools on a pillow on the parlor couch and Grandmother is off in Palo Alto at a conference. The windows rattle in the wind once, and then again, and I hear my father snoring, a sound that has been drifting in and out of my consciousness all night.

I stand up and pace around the bed as Soto watches me with half-closed eyes. I shut the laptop and tuck it under my arm and head downstairs and into the kitchen with her at my heels. Jolene is sitting at the counter eating a bowl of raisin bran. She's wearing my robe, which looks more like a queen-size blanket wrapped around her. She smiles at me tiredly when I'm at the door. Even when she's exhausted she has perfect posture, her spine like the straight stitching on a hem.

“I finished it,” I say. “Did you get any sleep?”

“Not really,” Jolene says. “Do you want cereal?”

“No,” I say. “I have to hit the submit button.” I sit at the counter.

“Do you want to submit it?”

“No,” I say. “I have to.” She picks up the empty bowl to drink the milk, but stops when I say, “I wrote about getting weight-loss
surgery. I can't think of anything else to write about. And I have an interview.”

“Those aren't good reasons,” she says, setting down the bowl.

“It's a lie. I wrote that my weight has been holding me back all this time,” I say. “It was a lie.” Then I look at her. “What if it's not a lie?”

“Are you trying to talk yourself into it?”

“I don't know!” I say. “I don't know. What if my body really is just broken?”

“You're not broken,” she says.

“Neither are you,” I say. She smiles at me crookedly, tiredly. Soto stands and nudges her head against Jolene's knee. She drops her hand on Soto's head, who sighs.

Jolene says, “We will be okay. Whatever we decide to do.” Her eyes are drifting shut as she scratches Soto's head. Soto is drifting off too. “We don't”—she yawns—“we don't have to decide right now.”

“Go to bed,” I tell her softly. “Maybe you can get some sleep.”

She shakes her head but she slides off the stool. Soto pads after her, up the stairs. They creak all the way up, and the door clicks, and there is silence. Even the wind has stopped outside and it has gotten warm.

I open the laptop. Just a few clicks and my mouse is hovering over the submit button. I read the first sentence involuntarily. “Weight-loss surgery: It is my only choice, and my only chance
to make a difference for both myself and the world.” This isn't making a decision. It's just presenting a possibility, I think. And before I can call myself on my own bullshit, my finger twitches on the mouse and I've sent it and my application is complete and I am done.

T
here are biscotti crumbs all over the table, and four crumpled napkins and an empty plastic cup coated with the tannish slime whipped cream leaves behind after you've sucked your drink dry and scooped out the rest of the good stuff with your straw. The interview has been over for ten minutes, but I am still sitting here with my hands in my lap, staring at my empty cup. There's lipstick on the straw. I never wear lipstick. At the end of the interview we both stood up and she looked at her watch and said, “Wow, we've been talking for ages!” and smiled at me widely and warmly. She shook my hand, firm and warm, and looked into my eyes and said, “Good luck, Ashley. I mean it. You're an incredible candidate and deserve all the success in the world.”

I said, “Thank you, Dr. McGillicuddy.”

She said, “I wish you all the best with your surgery, too. You're a brave girl. Smart, ambitious, and brave.”

And I said, “Thank you, Dr. McGillicuddy.”

“I'll be looking forward to watching your career!” she said, and then she was out the door into the brittle cold of Cambridge and I sat down hard again on the wooden chair.

I am supposed to text Laura when I'm done, but my phone is still in the bag Grandmother lent me, a sleek black thing with many buckles and a blue satin interior and too many pockets. I have a wallet, and gum, and my phone, and every time I have to check two or three pockets before I can locate what I need.

The night I submitted the essay I had hit send and then picked up the phone and texted Laura:
I'VE DROPPED OUT OF SCHOOL AND I'M MOVING TO MEXICO TOMORROW
, and she called me because she knew.

I said, “Come with me to Boston,” and she said, “Okay,” and was getting out her gold credit card and finding a seat on my flight while I held the phone to my ear and listened to her type.

She'll be expecting me to call her now and tell her how charming I was, how animated and lively and forthright and compelling in my enthusiasm.

Five more minutes go by. I'm watching them on the clock behind the counter, next to the chalkboard sign that says
BABY IT'S COLD OUTSIDE
and then lists eight hot drinks, half of them with peppermint. The iced drinks looked lonely off to the side. I had gotten to the coffee shop an hour early and ordered an iced
peppermint one and drank it even though it was so cold outside. I was not prepared for how much the cold outside would hurt, that kind of wind that slices right through you and leaves you shaking in its wake and more vulnerable for the next gust and then even more for the next. Even with my father's ancient cashmere trench coat and a scarf and a knit Red Sox hat I bought at Logan Airport, I have not been able to get warm.

“Hot bath,” Laura had said when we finally got into our room. She disappeared into the bathroom for an hour while I lay on the bed in a cocoon I had made of all of our blankets and shook. The heat on the giant wall-length furnace was turned all the way up. It made a keening, howling noise that disrupted sleep but I wasn't going to sleep anyway.

I know I should reach down now and pull my phone out of this strange bag and call Grandmother and say, “She thinks I am a good candidate. She believes that I can do this.” I am trying to decide if Grandmother would reply, “Well certainly,” in that infuriatingly condescending voice or, “I'm glad you didn't screw it up,” or give me a skeptical
hmm
noise. I can't decide which would be worse. I wonder if all of those things are the exact same thing.

I get up from my wobbly café chair because baby, it's cold outside, and I order a peppermint thing, hot this time because I am shaking a bit in the café, where it is a little bit chilly and the bell over the door keeps chiming, chiming as people hustle in looking like they are wrapped in down comforters, all of them
with red noses and hats pulled down over their eyebrows. No one in Boston seems to have eyebrows when it snows.

It's snowing and I should go, but the hem of my dress pants is still damp and sticking to my ankles and my feet are still cold. I packed flats. I packed for a whole city I didn't know anything about. I should go out and find the law school, find the spot where my mother sat on the lawn in front of the entrance, the huge white columns and glinting swathes of glass behind her, but I can't move. I need to stand up and figure out how to take the red line to the blue line, where the airport hotel is where everything is beige and other brown colors. And then I will have to tell someone about the interview.

Dr. McGillicuddy had come through the door and I knew immediately it was her because she looked like a Dr. McGillicuddy, like she should be too small for a name like that but she could handle it easily. She had narrow shoulders and an angled bob and horn-rimmed glasses and she smiled at me like she was very pleased to be out in the cold to meet a stranger who was sweating in the unbreathable, unnatural stretchy fabric of her new pantsuit but still couldn't get warm.

She said, “Ashley!” and looked me straight in the eyes and pulled off her gloves to shake my hand. I said, “Hello,” and sat back down. I watched her tuck her gloves in her pocket and shrug out of her coat and drape it over the back of her chair with neat, efficient movements.

“Can I get you anything?” she said to me as if she didn't notice the whipped cream melting on the top of the giant iced drink sitting in front of me, and then, “Give me just a sec,” when I shook my head no. She returned with hot tea in a ceramic mug and set it in front of her, wrapping her long elegant fingers around it, leaning forward closer to the steam. “Ah,” she said. “Finally warm. You must not be used to this kind of cold.”

“I didn't pack very well,” I blurted out, and she laughed.

“I can't imagine you have winter clothes lying around anyway! Though you're certainly going to have to invest in some for the next four years.”

I nodded, and she regarded me over the rim of her cup as she took a sip.

“So,” she said. “Let's say I am starting here with a clean slate. I know what you want to study, and I know that you want to do it at Harvard.” When she tilts her head her bob swings against her cheek. “Tell me about yourself, Ashley.”

“Okay,” I said, and there was nothing. Nothing in my head, nothing in my throat, nothing on the tip of my tongue. I opened my mouth as if something might come tumbling out but we both sat there for a full minute, looking at each other. She took another sip of tea and set the mug down, folding her hands on the table.

“You must be nervous,” she said kindly.

“I'm cold,” I said, and she laughed.

“That too. Well, why don't we start with an easy one. How
long have you wanted to go to Harvard?”

“Always,” I said.

“That long, eh?” she said, and smiled.

“As long as I can remember,” I said. “My mother—” I thought of the Harvard T-shirt in my suitcase. It was supposed to be for sleeping in but I couldn't make myself dig it out last night.

“Yes, Harvard tends to become a family tradition. I hope my daughter will attend, though she's not particularly interested in medicine,” she said wryly. Her lipstick was a perfect dark red that matched her blouse, and she had a double strand of pearls around her neck.

I nodded.

She said, “What made you decide to choose the medical field, Ashley?”

“My grandmother,” I said. “She's a surgeon. Was a surgeon. She pioneered laparoscopic surgery at her hospital. She retired. She was the first woman in her class at Stanford. She volunteered for Doctors without Borders. She volunteered for the Red Cross. She volunteers at clinics in L.A.” I'm ratatat-chattering but I can't make myself stop.

“And that's what you want to do?” Dr. McGillicuddy said.

“Yes,” I said. The train hadn't pulled into the station yet. “I want to change the world. I want to be an agent of change. I want to be the change I wish to see in the world,” I said. “I think health care is a universal human right. I think physical well-being is the
essential foundation of a healthy world and the first step toward actually making a difference.”

“A personal responsibility to design and continually perfect ourselves and our institutions as tools for social development and justice,” Dr. McGillicuddy summed up.

“Exactly,” I said, sitting stiffly, speaking quickly. “It starts at home, it starts here, it starts with my own body. I'm scheduled for weight-loss surgery when I return home.”

She looked surprised. “Gastric bypass? Which procedure?”

“The one that makes you lose the weight!” I said, and laughed, and she laughed with me. I gestured to myself. “I need to be a role model. I need to demonstrate that I understand my responsibility and take my own personal, physical health seriously.”

“Aren't you on the volleyball team?” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “Yes. I was. I wasn't really a great player? But I am a superior strategist as well as able to influence, encourage, and motivate as a team player.” In my head I heard Coach saying,
You think you might want to let someone else score a point?

“Leadership qualities,” she said.

“I like to think so!” I said, and we both laughed. I kept opening my mouth, and the words kept spilling out, piling up on the table between us, face up. Nothing I could take back. Emptying out my brain of everything I ever heard come out of Grandmother's mouth and watching Dr. McGillicuddy nod along with the up and down of my jaw as I talked, and then she was
gone and I am sitting at the table alone, wondering why it wasn't buried under a pile of bullshit.

There is dread in my chest, expectation smothering me. Weight-loss surgery suddenly seems real and unavoidable. A feeling like I've just buckled myself into the first car of a roller coaster and it's too late to scramble back out.

I sit there until the bell over the door rings again and a whole army of students comes pouring in, all of them wearing red and yellow scarves, pink-cheeked and shouting at one another. All of them so bundled up, bodies obscured, wrapped in layers and layers of insulation, I don't know how they could tell each other apart or even remember what their own selves look like. The whole place is filled with their noise and the zipping whisper of waterproof fabric as they move and my peppermint thing is getting cold. I stand up and shuffle back into my coat, try to sidle my way around the edges.

“Nice hat!” a person says, nodding at me. They are a perfectly spherical column of tiered down. They push back their hood and I see they're wearing a hat too. Their face is broad-boned and appealing and I like it.

“I got it at the airport,” I say stupidly, and they laugh.

“Good deal,” they say, and turn away, pulling off their mittens.

It is too cold outside to be alive and it's only early November. I shuffle down the street in my flats and wonder how I will
survive this. I think about all the clothes I'll need to buy. I realize I'm planning for the future again, that it includes Harvard, that everything is going the way I planned, but my stomach is too full of liquid and I can taste the peppermint creeping back up my throat. I squint my eyes against the flurries and I keep hurrying, though I don't know where the T stop is and I don't know where I'm going.

When Laura gets back to the hotel, I want to pretend to be asleep. I put my pillow over my head instead and feel her leap onto the bed, bouncing it.

“You didn't answer your phone,” she says, shaking my shoulder. She smells like cold and wind and I can feel how icy her hands are even through the covers.

“Oh my god don't touch me you are so cold,” I say.

“By which you mean gloriously alive and totally wide awake! I love snow, Ashley. It is beautiful and mesmerizing and hypnotic.” Her enthusiasm is as lovely as ever, and I am smiling.

“Mesmerizing and hypnotic are the same thing,” I say.

She ignores me. “It glows when it's dark out, did you know that? It covers everything and then it reflects the light so that everything seems brighter and more lucid.
Lucid
is a really good word for it I think. It's a clarity that is just overwhelming, Ashley, I can't even stand it.”

I sit up. “Where have you been? What time is it?” I feel
around in the covers for my phone.

She shrugs. “I took the train into town and I've been just walking around and thinking about art and things and life. Kind of my own interview, except with myself and the world.”

I snort. “We have been at George Love Academy too long.”

She says, “Don't laugh! I was digging down deep to figure out what I really want. What I really need as an artist, you know? But I don't want to know where I'm going. I want that to be the end result, not the goal. I want to have now, and not be worried about later.”

“That sounds terrible,” I say without thinking. But she laughs.

“It is awesome, Ashley,” she says. She's still wearing her coat, a pink designer duffel with fur on the hood that her stepmother had left over from ski bunny days. Laura's eyes are shining and water droplets are sparkling in her halo of hair and she bounces on the bed once, twice, and then hops up. “I haven't ever really thought about the future before. Not like you. I understand why it's important to you now,” she says. “And that's why I need to take my time, you know?” She shrugs out of her jacket and tosses it on the chair.

“Hang it up so it dries,” I say to her.

She spins around. “Your interview! How did it go? Do they love you?”

“It was fine,” I say.

“Just fine?” she says. “I am going to guess it was actually
totally spectacular and you are sitting there thinking too hard about all the things that are the most likely to go wrong and how they're going to go wrong and how terrible everything will be when they do.”

“No,” I say. “You know I never think crazy, irrational crazy things like that.”