Джей Эшер: The Future of Us

I turn off the faucet and look outside. Now Emma’s trunk is open and she’s tossing her silver sneakers on top of her saxophone case. She slams the trunk, but it pops back open as soon as she walks away.

I KNOCK ON the passenger window of Emma’s car. “Can I get a ride?”

She reaches across and unlocks the door. I lower my head to climb in, something I didn’t have to do when Emma first got her license. I position my skateboard between my knees and click the seatbelt into the buckle.

Emma puts the car in reverse. “Thanks for coming down.”

“Rough night?”

Emma nods. “I’m not in the mood to face certain people today.”

I wonder if she means Graham. His locker is near mine, so I get to see him pull Emma into a groping session every morning.

It always fills me with so much joy.

“Want to swing by Sunshine Donuts?” I ask.

Emma turns on her blinker. “Absolutely.”

A mile past Wagner Park, Emma pulls up to the orange speaker-box and orders herself coffee with cream and sugar and a cinnamon donut. I ask for a glazed donut and chocolate milk.

“I don’t get it,” Emma says as she pulls forward. We’re still two cars back from the pickup window. “How did this happen to me?”

“Not that I’m buying into the future stuff,” I say, “but I have no idea why anyone would even joke about your future sucking. You’re really smart and—”

“Thanks for bringing that up,” Emma says. “But I wasn’t talking about my future sucking. I was talking about the whole website in general. How is it possible to read about something that hasn’t happened yet?”

The car in front of us pulls up to the window. I reach into my back pocket and offer Emma a few crumpled dollar bills, but she pushes my money away.

“At first I thought it was the CD-ROM,” she says, “but maybe it’s the phone jack that made something happen during the download. Remember that electrician who rewired the house?”

“You think he accidently wired you into the future?” I say, trying not to laugh. “Anyway, that was months ago.”

“But I didn’t have a computer yet. Maybe we should move the computer to your house to see if the website works there.”

No way. We can’t start running back and forth between our houses again.

“But that still wouldn’t explain how it happened,” Emma says. “Or how we can read about things that occur fifteen years from now.”

I point out the window at the cars driving by. “If you want me to play along, here’s a theory. You know how Vice President Gore calls the Internet the ‘Information Superhighway’? Let’s say everyone’s going the same direction on this superhighway. Time travel would be about finding a way to jump to a different spot.”

The car ahead of us pulls away. Emma drives up to the window and then passes her money to the Sunshine woman. “So you think this website jumps us ahead somehow?”

The woman hands our drinks to Emma, who passes them to me. I place her Styrofoam cup of coffee in the drink holder so she can grab the donut bag.

“Honestly, I’m just playing along,” I say. “I still think it’s all a prank.”

We don’t say much for the drive to school. When we pull into the student parking lot, I check my watch. The bell is set to ring in three minutes.

“I know I dragged you into this,” she says, turning in her seat to face me, “but I’m a little hurt that you’re not taking it more seriously. If you saw your future and it looked terrible, I don’t think you’d be so quick to blow this off.”

“But it’s not real,” I say. I crumple up the donut bag and stuff it into my empty cup. “How about after your track meet, let’s try to figure it out? Maybe whoever made it misspelled your name somewhere or got a date wrong. We’ll find something.”

“Why do you need to prove it’s a prank so badly?” Emma asks.

“So you can stop worrying. Your life is going to turn out fine.”

Emma looks into the rearview mirror, and then turns to me. “Josh, before you came back over last night, I found something else on that website.”

The way she’s staring at me gives me the chills.

“If someone’s pulling a prank on me,” she adds, “then they’re also pulling a prank on you.”

“ME?” Josh’s eyes squint in confusion.

His webpage was one of the many things that kept me awake last night. I should have told him about it the instant he came up to my room.

“Emma.” Josh waves a hand in front of my eyes. “What are you talking about?”

“Last night,” I say, “before you came over, I was looking at the Facebook website. Remember where it says I have three hundred and twenty friends.” I pause and exhale slowly. “It showed you as one of them.”

There’s silence in the car.

“It said ‘Josh Templeton,’” I add, “along with a picture of you. An older you.”

Josh taps the Sunshine Donuts cup against his knee. He didn’t want to believe any of this. He wanted to prove it was a prank.

“You have short hair like David,” I say. “And you wear glasses.”

“My eyes are fine,” Josh says.

“Not in the future, apparently.”

Josh presses his thumbnail into the Styrofoam cup, making half-moon marks up one side. “Did you see anything else? When you clicked on Emma Nelson Jones’s picture, it took you to another webpage. Could you do that with mine?”

I nod. “It has your birthday as April fifth, and it says you went to the University of Washington.”

“Like David,” Josh says.

“And now you live back here again.”

“In Lake Forest?”

I wonder how he feels about that. Personally, I’m determined to move away someday. There’s no actual forest in town and Crown Lake is nine miles down the highway, surrounded by expensive houses. The downtown is only three streets long, and you can’t do anything without everyone knowing about it. But Josh is more laid back than I am. He seems to think Lake Forest is perfectly fine.

“Where’s my house?” Josh asks. “They don’t have me living with my parents when I’m in my thirties, do they?”

I shake my head. “I think you’re out by the lake. There was a picture of you in your yard, and you could see a dock in the background with a motorboat hitched to it.”

“Very cool,” Josh says. “So they made me rich.”

I roll my eyes. “Why do you keep saying ‘they’? Who are you talking about?”

“The people who created this joke of a website. I’m going to go to the tech lab today and see if anyone’s been scanning pictures of—”

“When you say ‘the people who created this,’ don’t you get it? At some point in the future, we created it. I don’t know exactly what it is, but it looks like interconnected websites where people show their photos and write about everything going on in their lives, like whether they found a parking spot or what they ate for breakfast.”

“But why?” Josh asks.

The first bell rings for homeroom. Graham’s going to wonder where I was this morning. We usually meet at his locker and walk to band together.

I grab my bag and then reach for the door.

“Hang on,” Josh says as he spins a wheel on his skateboard. “That Facebook thing, did it say whether or not I’m married?”

I flip through my keys so I can unlock the trunk. “Yeah, you’re married.”

“What does it say about… her?” Josh asks, his face pale. “My… you know… wife ?”

“I thought you didn’t believe in this,” I say.

“But I still want to know. It’s my future, right?”

“Here’s the thing,” I say, taking in a breath. “In the future, you’re married to Sydney Mills.”