K Breese - Future Imperfect

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?”

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 her 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.”