The Predicteds

by Christine Seifert

  “Josh Heller’s mom has more money than God,” Ruth says to me. “Not that I care. But ever since she married David Kable, she’s rolling in it.”

  “Jesse’s dad,” Dizzy supplies for my benefit. “Have you met Jesse yet?” She sucks in her breath. “Oh, yeah. He was in the closet with you that day. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “He seems pretty…” I search for the right word. “Pleasant.” It’s not really what I mean, but I can’t find the words I want.

  Dizzy laughs. “Pleasant?”

  “You obviously don’t know about his past,” Lexus says as she runs her fingers through her hair, her head tipped backward.

  “What about it?” I ask. More gossip. These girls are absolutely full of it.

  “Well…” Dizzy says, giving Lexus a complicated look. “It’s all just rumors. Be quiet, you guys. Jesse saved her life. She doesn’t want to hear this.”

  “Yes, shush,” Cuteny says. “Besides, it’s rude to talk about people behind their backs.”

  Lexus laughs loudly. “When did that ever bother you, Cute?” She turns back to me. “There’s been a rumor going around, since forever ago, that Jesse was stalking this older girl who broke up with him. She had a restraining order against him.”

  “Allegedly,” Cuteny notes.

  “Allegedly,” Lexus repeats. “It’s probably not even true. You know how rumors are.” We all nod.

  “I don’t care if he is a stalker. Because Jesse is yummy!” Cuteny yells. Everyone giggles. “And Sam,” she adds, doing a fake make-out session with her hand in front of her face. Clearly, this girl wants every guy at QH. I wonder how she feels about Bucky Roy.

  Suddenly, I feel really tired and startlingly out of place, like a zoo animal, or some kind of unusual Minnesota wildlife—a black-tailed prairie dog on display for these Oklahoma predators.

  I walk away. Nobody stops me.

  ***

  I walk down one of the docks scattered around the lake. In the night breeze—with the noise of the party behind me—I feel like I can finally relax. I can think out here. I let my feet dangle, the bottoms of my heels skimming the lake water. A breeze ruffles my hair, and I reach to adjust my barrette.

  “Hey,” someone says.

  I whip around. “Oh, hey,” I say, struggling to stand up.

  “No,” Jesse says. “Stay there.” He walks toward me and takes a seat a few feet from me.

  He brings one leg up, squaring his foot on the dock, moving his body away from mine. We don’t say anything at first. I play with a rock that I’ve found on the ground.

  “Who are you here with?” he asks me.

  “Nobody. Just hanging out with Dizzy and company.”

  “Ah,” he says knowingly.

  “And you?”

  “With January.”

  “Really?” I say, surprised. Jesse doesn’t seem to fit into the three major groups I’ve identified at QH. He’s definitely not a farm boy, but he isn’t preppy and All-American like Sam either. And he’s certainly not a stoner loser, like that kid Nate Gormley. So what’s he doing with January, who is, by Brooklyn’s standards, anyway, a total genetic land mine?

  He must read my mind. “We’ve been friends for a long time. Since we were little kids.” He sounds defensive, even though I’ve said nothing. I just nod.

  It takes a second to dawn on me. “So you knew the shooter.”

  He doesn’t answer, at first. “Yeah,” he finally says. “I knew him.”

  “Did you know that…I mean, did you ever suspect that he would do something like this?”

  “We were friends. At least, I thought we were.”

  We listen to the voices in the distance, the tinkling of beer bottles clinking, cans crushed in fists.

  He breaks the silence first. “I try to keep an eye on her. On January. She’s depressed. You know, this whole thing with her brother has been really hard for her.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “She’s been drinking too much—she’s getting herself into dangerous situations. It’s weird to see her like this. She used to be so—sweet. Full of life. Smart. Funny.” He stares wistfully. “Now she doesn’t care what happens to her. She’s…” He trails off, as if he can’t think of what to say. She’s what?

  He starts over again. “I just wanted you to know that…” He pauses. I throw a rock in the lake and watch it sink into the blackness of the water. “I just wanted you to know that she’s not my girlfriend. But we are very close.”

  “Oh,” I say. It’s the answer to the very question I wanted to ask. Not that I ever would have asked. It’s too forward. I make a point never to chase guys. It’s a policy I live by. We sit for a long time without talking before we both get up to leave.

  On the walk back to the parking lot, Jesse swings his hands, making fists as he walks. He pauses abruptly when we pass some geese nosing around the sidewalk. It’s past eleven now—not a time you usually see geese out—but all the artificial light and noise and people must confuse them. They are like college students, vampires, or night-shift workers: the absence of sunlight is hardly cause for sleep. “Hey, there,” Jesse says, bending over. The geese are obviously tame, used to people feeding them. One of them pecks at his open palm and squawks angrily when she discovers there is no food. “Sorry,” he says to the goose in a voice that is tender and soft.

  The sounds of squawking geese are replaced by a girlish scream in the distance. It echoes. It’s not a scream of a girl in danger so much as a scream of a girl who is trying to get a guy to notice her.

  “That’s January,” Jesse says.

  “Do you think she’s predicted?” I wanted to ask the question before. It’s rude to ask it now, but I can’t help it.

  “We’ll find out eventually.”

  “I know,” I say, thinking about what Melissa told me. They’d be releasing the names publicly. Sometime soon. “But do you think she is?”

  “Yes,” he says plainly. “I do.”

  “And who else?” I throw out the question before I realize that it’s probably rude and gossipy to ask. I don’t want to be like Brooklyn. “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.” We both start walking again, faster this time.

  “No, it’s okay. I think we all suspect the same people. Her brother is a suicidal school shooter. Her dad drank himself to death. Got drunk and wrapped his car around a telephone pole. Not even an original way to go.” He pauses. “What can you expect? That’s what we’re all thinking. Trapped by genetics.” We walk a little farther.

  “Can you imagine?” I ask. “Thinking you are destined for something like that? I can’t even fathom it.”

  “No, you wouldn’t know. You can’t imagine what…” He stops talking and crosses his arms, looking over his shoulder at the parking lot. “I’m sure it’s really hard,” he finally says.

  The crowd is dwindling. People are saying good-bye, driving away. They are going home or going to drink someplace else. I’ve heard about the old train car just outside of Perry, thirty-five miles south of Quiet. Apparently, it’s an abandoned car: open, creepy, shadowy, remote. Everybody under the age of twenty-one—so the rumor goes—drinks out there. It’s haunted, they say. Sometimes the ghost of a little old woman appears, and people think she’s the wife of a man who killed himself and her in that very car, back before any of us were ever born. I don’t buy it. But it does make for a good creepy place to hang out, I guess.

  Jesse is looking intently at me now. I look away bashfully, very unlike me. He reaches out toward my face, but he stops before he touches it. “You look real,” he tells me suddenly. “Like a real person. Not like any other girl here.” He closes his eyes. Before I can respond, we hear that scream again. It’s January in the distance. His eyes snap open, his expression changes. “I really have to go.”

  He’s off, jogging toward the parking lot, toward January.

  I stand there, staring, unable to move until I realize what’s bothering me: You can’t imagine,
he’d said.

  Did that mean he could?

  PART II

  together

  chapter 8

  We had a connection right away. Before we even talked to each other, I knew. I don’t even know how to explain it.

  —Jesse Kable, quoted in the book, The Future of the Predicted, publication forthcoming

  “You have to come to Dell’s,” Dizzy says for the eightieth time.

  “Dizzy, I don’t know any other way to say no.”

  “Good,” she says, “then you’re coming.” She grabs my hand and drags me off the porch. “I’m going out,” I call to Melissa, who is in the front room, reading medical journals. Fortunately, Dizzy lets me grab my flip-flops from the doorway, but I don’t have time to change clothes. I feel like a total slob in a baby pink Gap hoodie and faded jeans so long they practically cover my feet.

  Brooklyn is waiting in Dizzy’s car, a shiny BMW. Nice. She’s obviously not keen on the idea of me coming with them—I can tell by the tight smile plastered on her face—but it doesn’t keep her from dominating the conversation on the ride over. Apparently, she’s scored a major coup. After the lake party, she went home with Sam, where they hooked up. “We’re pretty much dating now,” she tells me confidently.

  “Congratulations,” I say sarcastically. Brooklyn strikes me as the kind of girl who needs a boyfriend to feel good about herself. I should probably have some sympathy, give her a chance, but I dismiss her easily, simply because I don’t like the way she narrows her eyes when she talks, like everybody smells bad.

  I’ve always avoided Dell’s Diner on Main—it’s the kind of place that you wouldn’t feel right entering by yourself, kind of like the prom or a wedding chapel. Walking through the crowded parking lot with Dizzy and Brooklyn, I discover my suspicion was right: it is like a private party. Everybody from QH is at Dell’s, the place to be when it’s too hot, cold, early, or wet to be at the lake; the only thing to do in Quiet on a Sunday night. We are still talking about Sam when we walk into the diner and practically run into him. He’s dressed in a football jersey and cargo shorts.

  “Hey, girls!” he calls. “Daphne, right?” he says to me.

  Brooklyn says to him, like she has a bite of old cauliflower in her mouth, “Daphne agreed to come with us. Aren’t we lucky?” She gives me a pageant smile and a hug that actually hurts. She hates me. Well, at least it’s mutual. Dizzy and Brooklyn flirt with Sam while I stand there, mushed between what feels like a zillion people in the main entryway. I stare impassively out the diner window to the parking lot. Under the streetlight, Nate Gormley—the kid I saw at the lake with January—puffs hard on a cigarette and runs his fingers through his tangled, greasy hair. January stands near him, a long trench coat covering her body, her skinny arms crossed against her chest and an inflexible scowl on her face.

  “Girlfriends!” Dizzy crows, running toward Lexus and Cuteny as they step through the doors. With them is Dizzy’s ex-boyfriend, Josh Heller. He’s wearing plaid shorts and a baby pink polo with the collar flipped up.

  Josh raises his hand to Sam for a high-five. They lock hands in guy solidarity. “What’s up, ya big wussy?” Josh says to Sam with obvious affection.

  “Nothing. I see you’re still dressing like a clown, you stupid prepster.”

  They bump shoulders, side to side, forcing everyone else to step around them and give them room.

  Somebody get me a barf bag.

  “Hey,” Josh says. “How come they got to go ahead of us?” He points out two women—probably in their late twenties or so—who walked in behind us, but who are now being led to an open table by the large windows. “That’s discrimination,” he says. He turns to the crowd milling behind him. “Right?” he asks.

  “Right,” a few voices respond.

  “Don’t start something, Heller,” Sam warns, but you can tell that Sam doesn’t mean it. “I’ve seen you in action.” He laughs.

  “And we won’t stand for it!” Josh yells.

  “Right.” The voice of the crowd is growing smaller and less indignant.

  “We demand to be treated with respect.” By this time, Josh is laughing obnoxiously. He’s drunk. He reminds me of my great-uncle Freddie, who used to walk around carrying those tall cans of beer in a paper bag, like a bum.

  “You’re such an idiot, Josh,” Dizzy says to him. She’s playful, so I can’t tell if she’s serious or not. Did she actually like this guy?

  “Is this a job for Lefty?” Josh asks, flexing his left arm. “Or Right-Man?” Neither “bodyguard” looks particularly impressive to me.

  “I’m calling my dad,” Brooklyn says, pulling her cell from a giant, metallic-gold purse. She dials while Josh and his buddies snicker. Brooklyn gives a measured wave back at some girls who have just walked in the door. “Lexus,” she screeches while she waits for her dad to pick up her call, “I need to tell you about the Miss Chitlin Pageant. It was a disaster. Daddy?” she says into the phone. She pauses for a moment. “I know you are busy. I know. But this is important. I’m being discriminated on.” She looks meaningfully at an older waitress with a hairnet who is carrying coffee and slices of pie from the display case to a table of diners.

  “Against,” Josh says, between fits of laughter. “You’re being discriminated against, not on.”

  She waves her hand dismissively at him. By the way she pouts, I guess that Daddy must not share her outrage. “Fine!” she says and slams the hot pink phone shut.

  “Can you believe this?” she says to me, as if I am likely to be upset. “My dad is an attorney, and he is going to be so pissed when he understands what happened here tonight.”

  “I can imagine. It’s a complete violation of our civil rights!” I realize too late that I’m totally making fun of her, and unfortunately, she figures it out. After a twenty-second delay.

  “Who asked you anyway?” Brooklyn demands, her little fake-tanned face scrunched into a pouty frown. “You know, I wasn’t going to say anything, but as long as we’re here, I might as well tell you: I don’t like you the way you flirt with Sam. It makes you look…desperate.” She crosses her arms triumphantly. “And I don’t like the way you talk to all of us. You think you’re better than we are.”

  Sometimes, the truth is hard to admit. So I pretend I don’t hear that last part. I stay focused on the part about Sam. “What? I’ve talked to the guy like, once. How could I be flirting with him? Trust me. I’m not the least bit interested in Sam.” I give Sam a quick glance. He’s standing with his hands in his pockets and staring at the ground. “No offense,” I say to him. “I don’t even know you.”

  “Come on, Brooklyn,” Sam says good-naturedly. “Don’t be silly.”

  Brooklyn purses her lips, looks from Sam to Josh to Dizzy to me. “I don’t like you,” she says gravely. “I can’t fake it anymore. There’s something about you. I have a sick sense for these kind of things. There’s something not right about you”

  “Sixth sense,” I say. “You mean a sixth sense. Not a sick one.”

  Josh lets out a howl of laughter. Nobody else dares speak. “Come on, Sam,” Brooklyn says, tugging at his arm. “This place is for cool people only. It’s not for losers.” She seems to be on the verge of forming the shape of an L with her fingers, but she catches herself, perhaps realizing just how lame and outdated that gesture is. I need to close my eyes to keep them from rolling in my sockets.

  I swear, Quiet is twenty years behind the rest of the world.

  Regardless of my commendable restraint, her now-aborted gesture causes me to make another grave tactical error: I laugh. Not just a subtle laugh—a guffaw. It’s not directed at Brooklyn, per se. It’s just me getting a case of the nerves, cracking under the pressure of everything, I guess. Brooklyn puts her hands on her hips and wrinkles her noise as if something smells bed. “That is so rude, Daphne.”

  She’s right. It is. But that doesn’t mean I can stop.

  As everyone gets quieter and turns to look at me, I laug
h even harder. It’s something about the way Brooklyn is standing with her arms crossed, her lips pursed, and her head cocked to one side that makes me feel like laughing for days. I could easily stop—I’m not prone to laughing fits—but it feels kind of good, releasing all that tension from PROFILE and January and the shooter and everything else into the air. So I keep going, even when someone lightly pokes me in my ribs and tells me to knock it off. “I’m sorry,” I say to Dizzy, who is standing with her eyes scrunched in a confused expression.

  “Calm down,” she tells me. “Brooklyn is trying really hard here.”

  As I’m standing there almost doubled over, holding my gut, laughing like a maniac, I feel a whoosh of air through my hair. Brooklyn is furiously winding up her giant gold purse above her head like it’s some kind of medieval weapon. She lets loose, and I duck just before the bag can smack me in the head. I stand there stunned, because I’m truly amazed that someone would use her oversized purse as a weapon.

  In the millisecond it takes me to contemplate the oddity of this whole scene, the giant bag makes its way back around to Brooklyn’s side, taking out Josh, who is standing behind her staring out the window. He falls forward on the fake-leather bench, across the laps of an old man and an old woman. The old lady fans a Kleenex over him, as if he’s a too-hot dish or a bowl of soup with a fly in it. Dizzy runs to him.

  Naturally, the entryway erupts in uncomfortable laughter, save for Brooklyn, who stands with her hands on her hips. “Get up,” she tells Josh.

  For a second, I think that he’s laughing too, but when he slides off the old people, stepping on the old man’s shoes, I see that he is pissed. “You bitch,” he says, and I look to Brooklyn to gauge her reaction to this. It takes me a second before I realize that it’s quiet and everyone is staring at me, including the couple on the bench, who look far too old to be eating dinner this long after sunset.