“Who would you make impulsive calls to?”
“The Night Lights. You. People on my Enemies List.”
“Who’s on your Enemies List?”
“Pretty much everyone.” A boy tripped over Jonah’s shoe. Jonah didn’t blink. “I’d rather talk to you in person, anyway, so I can see your weird little fang.”
It’s true, I have a tiny, pointy canine tooth. It gives my mouth a rickety quality I’d never liked until that moment.
“If we’re in class, pass me a note the old-fashioned way,” Jonah said.
“Okay with me.” I was leaning away from techno-communication myself. What did I need a cell for, anyway? It’s not like anyone ever called me.
Jonah had a laptop, and he wasn’t above using it when he needed information. He scoured the internet for institutions that might be housing Matthew, and sent emails to doctors, nurses, and administrators asking for information. The people who bothered to respond usually brought up patient confidentiality and refused to answer any questions. I did some Googling myself, to help out, but I had to be careful since my mother had no sense of boundaries when it came to privacy. Diaries, emails, search histories, phone calls—she considered nothing of mine off-limits from her prying, which was pretty hypocritical of her considering how guarded she was with her own secrets.
On Saturdays, Jonah went to the library to use their computers, since his father was often rumbling around at home, and Jonah didn’t want him to stumble across his secret mission. I went with him, helping search the internet and sometimes skimming through old phone books from the year Matthew “died,” hoping to find some outdated clue the internet had missed. We read medical journals and books about treating brain-damaged patients, following up every mention of a doctor or institution that worked with them, starting in Maryland and working our way outward—north, south, and west across the country—hoping it would lead us to Matthew.
Jonah took the phone numbers home and dialed them after school before his father came home from work, day after day after day, asking for Matthew Tate, hoping to find a trace of him. But so far he hadn’t found anything.
I avoided going to Jonah’s house because I didn’t want to run into his father. I was afraid Mr. Tate would yell at me for trying to trick him.
We listened faithfully to the Night Light Show and looked forward to Kreplax’s Party for People from the Future. October 4 came at last. I spent that afternoon polishing my college application essay, but I was too excited to concentrate. Maybe my college self would show up at the Party for People from the Future and tell me where I’d get in—somewhere good, I hoped. Then I’d only have to fill out one application.
Over the summer, I’d visited campuses from Maine to Philadelphia with Mom and Dad, settling on a nice array of just-below-Ivy schools to go with my solid-not-stellar SATs. The colleges shone like warm beacons along the Eastern Seaboard, each a small lighthouse: Bowdoin, Bates, Wesleyan, Vassar, Haverford. Professor Dad endorsed them all—cozy and safe, yet intellectually stimulating. I tossed NYU in there to shake things up, the one urban school on the list. Maybe, when the time came, I wouldn’t want cozy and safe. Maybe I’d want glamour and danger. Why not keep my options open? By next year I could be a whole new person. Anything was possible in the Future.
Jonah came over to my house after supper to get dressed for Kreplax’s party. Meeting people from the Future seemed to demand costumes.
“Do you think any of the other Night Lights will show up?” I asked. “I want to meet Myrna. And poor, sad Dottie.”
“I doubt Dottie will be there. She hasn’t called since that night she had the blues. I think she’s still sad. Plus, she’s probably scared to go to West Baltimore.”
My Costume of the Future was a silver minidress with silver tights, white go-go boots, a crimson wig, and white plastic sunglasses. In my mind I guess the future of fashion happened in the 1960s.
Jonah wore a mechanic’s jumpsuit sprayed with glow-in-the-dark paint, and goggles decorated with red sparkles. Kind of a Devo look. We weren’t the weirdest-looking people at the party, though. Not by a long shot.
A wrinkled man in a snappy suit and panama hat guarded Kreplax’s doorway. “Are you from the future?” he asked us.
“No,” Jonah said. “Are you?”
“Do I look like I’m from the future?” The old man trained his bloodshot eyes on the next guests. “I want to meet somebody from the future. I want to know what’s going to happen to my grandbabies.”
Kreplax lived in a rowhouse not far from the Art Institute. The next block over was rubble, boarded up and abandoned. He’d hung a large banner from a second-story window that said, in spray-painted letters, WELCOME, PEOPLE FROM THE FUTURE. Guests flowed through the house, from the front stoop to the weedy backyard.
“How many of these people do you think are actually from the future?” I asked Jonah.
“You ask dumb questions sometimes,” he said, taking my hand. “Come on, I want to meet Kreplax.”
In the kitchen, the refrigerator door hung open, heavy with beer. Everything from the top of the stove to the jelly jar glasses was coated with a greasy film. The white ceramic of the sink had gone rusty. The cupboards were papered with cutouts from magazines, pictures of UFOs, the pyramids, the Grand Canyon, and a few naked women.
A guy in a leather vest and no shirt but lots of tats pumped beer out of a keg. “Are you Kreplax?” Jonah asked.
The guy shook his head.
“Do you know where he is?” Jonah asked.
“I don’t even know who you’re talking about,” the guy said.
We wandered through the house, past ratty furniture, cracked linoleum, and wallpaper that looked like it had been clawed off in places.
“Are you from the future?” Jonah asked a chubby kid with a green mohawk.
“No, I’m a shape-shifter,” the kid said. “But I can see how you’d make that mistake.” He touched the sharp edge of his hairdo.
“What’s a shape-shifter?” I asked.
“Sometimes I turn into a reptilian creature,” the kid said. “I’m unconscious when it happens, but my friends have actually witnessed it. Once it happened while I was riding my bike.”
“When you shape-shift, do you turn into a reptile with a green mohawk?” Jonah asked.
“No, but I get a kind of fin thing that runs down my back.”
“Cool,” Jonah said. “Can you do it now?”
“Do what?” the mohawk boy said.
“Shape-shift into a reptilian,” Jonah said.
“I’ll try.” The boy squeezed his eyes shut, concentrating. Nothing happened.
“It’s not working,” he said. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “Maybe later.”
“It never works when you try to do it on purpose like that,” the boy said.
We found Kreplax in the basement, showing off a half-built wooden canoe screwed onto a rack. We knew he was Kreplax because he wore a large sign around his neck that said I AM KREPLAX. He had a gray beard and wore a togalike dressing gown and a Roman centurion helmet made of tinfoil. He noticed us and said, “Welcome, time travelers. How far have you come?”
“From another world,” Jonah said. “Homeland. And Roland Park.”
“Homeland is the past, not the future,” Kreplax said. “This is Tita and Gryphon. They’re from Toronto, 2110.”
“Greetings,” Tita said.
Tita and Gryphon didn’t look particularly futuristic. Tita had flowing gray-blond hair and wore a print housedress and a wreath of dandelions. Gryphon—tall, thin, giant Adam’s apple poking from his long neck—wore a kind of brown pilgrim suit.
“Did you come just for the party, or—?” Jonah asked.
“No, we’ve been living in this time thread for a while,” Gryphon said. “Somebody brought back some ’shrooms from an earlier time trip, and we wanted to pick up some more. Your era’s drugs are much mellower than ours.”
“Really?” I s
aid.
Tita nodded. “And more organic.”
“Are these the fashions of the future?” I asked.
Tita shook her head. “We bought these here in your time thread. At the Salvation Army. We couldn’t get away with 2110 fashions here.”
“We’d be arrested!” Gryphon said.
“Why? What do they look like?” I asked.
“Very revealing,” Tita said.
“We have holes cut out where our sex organs are,” Gryphon said. “To let them breathe.”
“Your scientists haven’t discovered this yet, but the sex organs need plenty of air,” Tita said.
“You should have worn your real clothes to the party,” Kreplax said. “You’re among friends here. We would have understood. We would have reveled in it!”
“Yeah, I’m dying to see everybody’s organs,” I said.
“Instead, you’ll have to make do with my Powwow canoe.” Kreplax waved his arm over the half-built boat. “Are you entering a craft?”
“Powwow?” I asked.
“It’s a big canoe race,” Kreplax said. “We hold it every June. Anyone can enter a canoe, but it must be homemade. We launch them off the industrial beach past Pigtown. The winner gets an Indian headdress.”
“Huh.”
“There are bands, food, and balloons filled with nitrous oxide,” Jonah said. “Five dollars for a big one.”
“So it’s a party,” I said.
“A wingding,” Kreplax said. “The police never come to that part of town. There’s nothing there but abandoned factories and toxic waste.”
“Sounds great.”
“Some people see Powwow as just an excuse to huff nitrous,” Kreplax said. “But to me, it’s a Clash of the Titans.”
Jonah and I admired the canoe. Then we went back upstairs and settled on a lumpy couch in a second-floor den filled with charts, maps, and books.
Two guys sat on another couch across the room, drinking cans of Fresca. Their eyes flicked over us, barely taking us in. “This Kreplax guy’s out of his mind,” one said.
“Seriously.”
“At least we landed in the right thread this time.” He glanced at his BlackBerry—at least, that’s what I thought it was. “Dude, it’s almost my birthday! We’ve got to get back. I don’t want to spend my birthday with a bunch of twenty-first century Neanderthals.”
“Let’s bounce.”
They disappeared into the bathroom.
“What would you say if I told you I was from the future?” Jonah asked.
“From when in the future?” I said.
“Say, fifty years from now. I’m my own grandson.”
“I’d say bullshit.”
“But how would you know for sure? You wouldn’t even wonder for a minute?”
I looked at his pale Casper face, with its snowy eyebrows and lashes. He did kind of look like a mutant strain of human developed in the genetic labs of the future.
“Maybe I’m the one from the future,” I said.
“Sorry,” Jonah said. “That’s just not believable.”
We eyed the bathroom door. The two guys hadn’t come out yet.
“Do you ever wish you could go back in the past and change something?” Jonah said.
“What, like assassinate Hitler?”
“I mean in your own past.”
“Sometimes I’d like to stop my parents from marrying each other,” I said. “But then I wouldn’t exist, so it doesn’t seem like a very good idea.”
Jonah was quiet.
“There are a few embarrassing incidents I wouldn’t mind averting,” I said. “And no, I won’t tell you what they are. Except to say that one of them involves peeing in my seat in first grade.”
He smiled but seemed far away.
“I puked all over the lunchroom table in second grade,” I said. “But that’s all you get.”
Still quiet.
I watched the bathroom door. The future boys didn’t come out.
“What are they doing in there?” I said. “Do you think they climbed down the fire escape?”
“Maybe bathrooms are portals to the future,” Jonah said. “And they’ve left us.”
“Down the drain.”
Jonah picked up a beer bottle full of cigarette stubs and shook it.
“Is there something you’d like to change?” I asked him. “About your past?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’d like to go back about nine years and cut the ignition wire to my mother’s car. Or fake a fever and stay home from school so she couldn’t leave the house without taking me with her.”
“Maybe we could get one of these time travelers to go back for us and fix everything,” I said. “But that might start a different chain reaction…Some other horrible thing could happen instead. Maybe you’d be killed—”
“I wouldn’t care,” Jonah said. “That would be better than this…this—” He touched his chest, groping for the word he couldn’t find.
“Stop.” I couldn’t stand it. “We’ll find him.”
I had to do something. In a romantic comedy, I would have been able to wipe all his troubles away with a single kiss. But that wasn’t going to happen—not the kiss, not the troubles vanishing with it. I felt so close to him, but I didn’t want to kiss him. And I didn’t get the sense that he wanted to kiss me. So when it came to helping, all I could think of was those two Fresca-drinking time-traveler boys in the bathroom-slash-portal-to-the-future. Maybe they could show us how to zip back into the past and make everything turn out right. I’d make it happen. I’d find a way.
I got up and knocked on the bathroom door. “Hello? Fresca drinkers? Are you in there?”
No one answered. I opened the door.
The bathroom was empty.
NOVEMBER
CHAPTER 9
“See that guy?” Anne pointed out a schlub sporting a cardigan and shaggy sideburns. At his side stood a surprisingly perky brunette. “That’s Clayton. He’s the head of the Neurobiology Department. His wife is a bed stylist.”
I had to clamp my jaw shut to keep from yawning. Caroline Sweeney’s annual pre-Thanksgiving faculty dinner was so boring it made my teeth ache.
“What’s a bed stylist?” I asked.
“She works for Homewares, when they shoot their catalogs,” Anne said. “Her whole, entire career consists of arranging the beds so they’re artfully rumpled in the pictures. Like someone just had great sex in them.”
“That’s her job?”
“Yeah.”
“For real.”
“Yeah.”
We snickered. I ate another gingersnap.
Anne’s mother, Caroline, crossed the room, sweeping us up in her wake. She was trim and attractive, a classic brunette in pearl studs and red cashmere. “Anne, stop making fun of Clayton’s wife. Why don’t you and Beatrice take that tray of crab balls out to the sunporch and pass them around?”
“Okay,” Anne said, her voice thick with reluctance. “Come on, Bea.”
Caroline disappeared through the swinging kitchen door. My parents mingled on the sunporch—Dad telling a joke to a circle of laughing admirers, Mom hovering on the edge of the circle, staring out the window. The main attraction of the Sweeneys’ backyard was a stone birdbath, iced over.
“Crab ball, Mom?” I offered her the tray.
“No, thanks, honey.”
Anne offered crab balls to Dad and the others, who gobbled them up with cocktail sauce. Dad glanced back at the kitchen door, still swinging, and rattled the ice in his glass.
“Time for another scotch.” He headed for the bar. The circle broke up.
“The students adore your father,” a perfumed woman said to me. “Aren’t you lucky to live with such a charming man!”
“He’s even more charming at home,” Mom said. “Isn’t he, Bea? He rides a unicycle through the house—”
“—even up and down the stairs,” I added.
“He juggles eggs as he makes breakfast every mornin
g—”
“—which he serves to us in bed, of course,” I said.
“—and pulls fragrant bouquets out of his ass,” Mom finished. “He’s just a joy.”
The perfumed woman’s chin jiggled. She couldn’t tell if we were joking or not, but decided to play it safe and assume we were. She coughed up a brittle laugh and excused herself.
“We shouldn’t do that,” I said. “People will think we’re weird.” Actually, I didn’t mind if people thought I was weird. But for some reason, I didn’t want them to see that side of Mom—if it was just a side, and not her whole personality.
“Faculty spouses have to work hard to be liked,” Mom said. “Look at that poor bed stylist person with her tight smile. I don’t have it in me.”
Dad didn’t come back from the bar. The kitchen door was swinging again.
“Do you want to go home?” Mom asked.
“Now?” I knew the rules of faculty parties, and that would be breaking them. “We haven’t had dinner yet.”
“I’m not hungry. Anyway, we’ve got French Bread Pizzas in the freezer.”
“Won’t Dad be mad?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” Mom said. “I imagine he’ll have mixed feelings.”
The party was dull, but I didn’t feel right leaving so early. It seemed rude. And I didn’t want a French Bread Pizza.
“I think we should stay through dinner,” I said. “This party is a big deal to Dad.”
Anne tugged on my sleeve. “Let’s get out of here before my mother makes us freshen people’s drinks. My room.”
I checked with Mom. “Go ahead,” she said, and headed for the bathroom.
I followed Anne upstairs. Riding trophies and plastic horse figurines crowded her shelves. She had a vanity in the corner draped with jewelry, makeup, and nail polish bottles. On her desk was a pile of college catalogs, with Vanderbilt on top.
“We have to stick together,” Anne said. “There are more faculty parties to come. A lot more.”
“I hate them,” I said. “I always feel so stiff around adults when they’re trying to have fun. I get embarrassed for them, like they’re trying too hard and they don’t know everyone can see it.”