by Libba Bray
A doctor is standing at the end of my hospital bed. He thrums his thumb across the sole of my foot, but I don’t feel it. Mom and Dad are sitting in chairs beside the bed. Mom’s eyes are red and puffy and her hair’s a little greasy. Dad needs a shave. He’s watching the doctor poke at me. I can’t move my body at all.
The doctor says something about “tough decisions.” He says something about hospice to Glory, who leaves and comes back with a business card. She gives it to Dad, who stares at the raised black lettering on the crisp white background. Glory and the doctor mumble a few words about “giving you time to think things over” as they leave the room. The respirator keeps humming. Mom and Dad sit there in their chairs, alone together.
Dad moves the card in his fingers like he wants to give it away but can’t. Dad always makes all the decisions, but he can’t make this one. Finally, Mom’s hand comes to rest on top of Dad’s. She takes the card. In the set of her shoulders there’s a grim determination I’ve never seen before.
“It’s okay,” she says. “I’ll do it.”
When I wake up, Dulcie’s perched next to me eating from a bag of jelly beans. I’m really glad to see her, and I can feel the ghosts of my dreams evaporating.
“Hey, you,” I say, rubbing sleep from my eyes.
“Hey, you, back.”
“Did I miss anything?” I ask, surveying the scene. Middle Guy’s down to his boxers. He’s telling Gonzo a story, or slurring it, mostly. Gonzo’s drooling and his eyes are half-closed. Left Guy’s lying on his back on the ground. He rubs his stomach and moans.
“Middle Guy dared Left Guy to down an entire package of hot dogs, which he did,” Dulcie says.
“That was some stunt you pulled today,” I say, stretching. “You almost got us killed.”
“But I didn’t.”
“But you could have.”
“But. I. Didn’t.”
Right Guy drops a log into the fire drunkenly. It hisses and sparks.
“Whatever,” I say. “Thanks.”
“For what?”
“For saving me back there at the Food Court of Despair.”
“You’re welcome.”
“This has been one hell of a trip, man.”
“Yuppers.” She tilts her face toward the night sky and smiles in that way that makes her so very Dulcie.
“Beautiful,” I mumble.
“What?”
“Oh. Um. The stars. Beautiful.”
“Yeah,” she says. “For ghosts.” She sucks a jelly bean in her back teeth. “It takes millions of years for that light to reach us. By the time we see it, that star’s probably dead and gone.”
“Wow. Way to kill the mood.”
One of her eyebrows lifts. “Did we have a mood?”
“Um, no. Not, I mean, not a mood mood.”
“Hmph.” Dulcie loops an arm around my shoulders. It’s warm and nice. “How ’bout this, then? Somewhere out in the galaxy, right this minute, there’s a big ball of gas and gravity heating up, pressing together, forming something new and bold and awesome, until finally, it can’t take it anymore, and it spits out all this energy, just sending that light out into the universe. Schoooom!” She swooshes her other arm through the air and goes kapow with her fingers. “Even stars gotta leave home, see things, go places. Better?”
“Better,” I say.
“What we’re seeing right now is a twinkling farewell concert: Thanks—you’ve been great. Drive safe, now.”
I laugh. “‘Drive safe, now’? Really? That’s what they’ve got to say?”
“Mmmm.” Dulcie nods. “Stars. Twinkly, yet surprisingly considerate.”
I can’t seem to stop myself from taking hold of her other hand. I lace my fingers through hers and rub my thumb over her palm. The skin there is rough, calloused, like she’s been hitting it against something hard. “What happened here?”
She slips her hand out of mine. “Nothing,” she says, frowning.
I don’t know what I’ve said. I’ve just started to ask when Left Guy moans louder and rolls onto his side like he’s in pain.
“Is he okay? Should we do something?”
Dulcie waves it away. “He’s fine. He’s going to blow chow in about twenty minutes, but he’s not going to die.”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t look so good to me.”
Dulcie shakes the jelly-bean bag, hunting for the right flavor. “Trust me, he doesn’t die for another forty-two years.”
My stomach goes cold. “Hold up—you know what’s going to happen to him? You can see people’s futures?”
The fire casts shadows across Dulcie’s face, dulling some of the brightness. She’s got a weird expression, like she swallowed a popcorn jelly bean when she thought she was getting lemon. “I didn’t say that.”
“Yeah, actually, you just sort of did.”
“You sure you don’t want to see that ice sculpture thing … ?”
“No. Do not change the subject. All this time, you’ve been feeding me bullshit about not knowing and only being a messenger when you can see the future—my future?”
“I told you, I didn’t say that.” She looks pained. “Cameron, please. Trust me.”
“Why? Why should I trust you? Oh Jesus.” I laugh. “I’m in the middle of fucking nowhere, no meds, no doctors, all because of you!”
“You’re alive, Cameron.”
“For how long?”
“How long does anybody have?” she asks softly.
By the campfire, the guys are really upping the ante with Balder. By my last count, he’s been strangled twice, impaled four times with various objects, and had handfuls of rocks thrown at him. He’s laughed off every insult with “Is that the best you can do?” I wish I felt as bulletproof.
I cross my arms and glare at Dulcie. “Tell me my future. I want to know.”
“No can do. Against the rules.”
“We’re way beyond rules here, Dulcie.”
She stands firm, and I can tell by the way she’s set her chin that she’s not budging on this one. Funny how you can start to know little things like that about people.
“Okay, fine. We’ll take it down a notch. What about the goon brothers?” I ask. “Can you tell me theirs?”
She glances in their direction. “I’m telling you, Cameron, it’s not a great idea.”
“I think it’s the best freaking idea I’ve heard in a long time. Go on. Fire away.”
Dulcie fiddles with the laces on her combat boots. “No,” she says quietly.
“Screw you, then.” In the firelight I see Dulcie flinch. It’s a small thing, but I feel lousy about it, and I wish I could take it back. She puts the jelly-bean bag to her head like a carnival magician deciphering a message from beyond through an object. “Marty—Left Guy—is going to barf hot dogs tonight.”
The bag comes down, and Dulcie pops a green jelly bean in her mouth.
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
“Technically speaking, it is the future.”
“Look, you got me out here, on some crazy mission, and I never know what’s going to happen from one minute to the next. I don’t even know if I’m going to live. The least you can do is tell me a few meaningless things—”
Her head snaps up. “Nothing’s meaningless, Cameron.”
“Tell me the future! Their futures. I want the real deal. Long-term stuff.”
“Okay,” Dulcie says, but she won’t look at me. “He—Left Guy—is going to end up running his uncle’s restaurant. He’ll have a serious alcohol problem and be divorced twice before he’s forty. He’ll think he’s all chummy with the twenty-somethings who work for him, but behind his back, they’ll comp all their friends and call him Chimp Brain.”
I laugh. “Ha! That’s amazing! Chimp Brain. What about the others?”
“Dave—Right Guy—is going to get married, have two kids, work as a computer programmer, and collect toy trains. He’ll build this elaborate model train set in his basement and wor
k on it on weekends.”
Dave, Right Guy, is currently eating beans and franks out of a can with his fingers. The tomato sauce dribbles down his chin and onto his shirt.
“Sounds boring.”
Dulcie watches him. “He loves it. It’s his life.”
“Whatever,” I say, holding out my hand. Dulcie pours some jelly beans into it. I get a lime and a chocolate together. It tastes strangely good, tart and sweet at the same time. “What about Middle Guy?”
Middle Guy’s singing a song about a guy named Louie while strumming his air guitar with real feeling. His goofiness is winning me over. Dulcie’s gaze finds him briefly.
“Keith …” She stops.
“Yeah?”
“Keith—Middle Guy—is going to drop out of college next year, enlist in the army and go overseas.” She picks out the green jelly beans and puts them methodically into her palm.
“And?” I say, downing the last of my candy. “That’s it?”
“He’ll tell everybody in his platoon about the day these guys gave him a ride to the Party House and he met Marisol and how she gave him a kiss and how it was the most rockingest time ever and that was the day he decided to quit school, which led to his joining the army. He’ll be telling that story when he steps on a land mine hidden in the desert sand and gets blown to bits.”
It’s like the earth gives way underneath me and I have to jump up to make sure it’s still there. “Whoa,” I say, nearly falling over a rock behind me. “Whoa. God, Dulcie. Why the hell did you tell me that?”
“You asked. I told you it wasn’t a good idea.”
Middle Guy, Keith, hops around doing this goofy dance and singing loud. He’s about as alive as you can get.
“That sucked, Dulcie. How do you expect me to drive this guy around knowing that?”
“Welcome to my life, cowboy.”
I walk away from her, reeling, but come back. “If you know all this stuff about us … if you can see what’s going to happen and it’s already in motion, why bother? Why should we try to do anything? We can’t change it.”
She hops up, opens her arms wide. “Did I say that you couldn’t change it?”
“No, but …”
“What I see is the course as it stands now. Today. At 10:27:07 p.m. Relatively Standard Time. Tomorrow, Keith could pick up a book, read a sentence there that completely alters the course of his life, and decide he wants to become an English professor and that’s it. New ball game. Destiny isn’t fixed, Cameron.”
“A butterfly flaps his wings in South America and they get snow in Chicago,” I say, repeating something I learned from my dad.
“Right. Exactly. The snow comes down in Chicago, and a seventeen-year-old kid’s mom tells him to shovel the walk. He’s in the front yard just as this new girl walks by. She slips on a patch of ice, but he catches her, and that’s how they start dating. And on and on, a revolving door of action-reaction, of interconnection. Things can change, Cameron. It’s the one constant of this universe.”
“So now, just by randomly picking Keith up on the side of the road, I’ve altered the course of his life?”
“And he’s altered yours.”
“But which way?”
She shakes her head. “That I really don’t know.”
“What if I told Keith not to enlist? That he’ll die if he does?”
“You can try it, but he’ll probably think you’re crazy. Haven’t you ever watched any TV sci-fi? People think they can warn other people and it always backfires.”
“So I’m just supposed to sit with this information for the next one hundred miles to the Party House?”
“You feel responsible for his life choices?”
“Well, I didn’t until a minute ago, till you sprung your little news on me.”
“Sorry I upset you.”
“Forget this, man. I’m gonna tell him,” I say.
“Do whatever you need to do,” she says, flopping to the ground. She opens the jelly-bean bag again and picks out two pink ones.
I make my way over to where Keith is sitting with Balder. “Hey, um, Keith, right?”
“Yeah, that’s me.” He goes back to singing his song and Balder joins in on the chorus. Balder, it turns out, is a very happy drunk.
I don’t exactly know how to begin this conversation. How do you tell a guy you know how he’s gonna die? “So what do you think you’ll do, you know, after college and stuff?”
“I don’t know. Can’t think that far ahead.”
“Maybe you’ll meet somebody at the Party House.”
“I have a house!” Balder slurs. “It is called Breidab … Bradeblack … Braeder … it is called Balder’s house, and it is very, very nice. You should come and try to kill me again there.”
“Awesome, dude.” Keith fist-bumps Balder.
“You could totally meet somebody at the Party House,” I say, trying to get Keith back on track. “And, you know, maybe she lives there and you’ll want to stay.”
Keith scratches his chin. “Yeah. Maybe. I hear Daytona’s nice. I could be a beach bum for the rest of my life. Stay by the ocean.”
“That sounds great, man. You should do that.” Ha! Take that, Dulcie, you angel of doom.
“I don’t know,” Keith says. “Daytona’s expensive, and my money for school just ran out. But I got a cousin in the army. He says they really take care of you. I was thinking of enlisting this summer.”
Balder nods. “Man is the augmentation of the dust. Great is the claw of the hawk.”
“Okay, Balder? Could you and your Norse goodness do me a solid and take a hike? I need a minute here.”
Balder bows. “As you wish, Cameron the Noble. This Twist My Brains beer is worthy. I shall have more.”
“You do that.”
Balder stops to wrap a meaty arm around my neck. You wouldn’t think a yard gnome would be so butch, but I can barely breathe. “What is your battle cry again?” Balder asks Keith. “Oh yes. I love you. Man.”
“Love you, too, B,” I squeak out.
Balder releases my thankful neck. As he stumbles off, he crumples a beer can against his skull and it sticks there. One of the logs sinks deeper into the campfire, sending out a shower of sparks that flare in the dirt and vanish. It’s getting a little chilly. I stick my hands in my pockets to warm them. Something sharp sticks me. I pull out the screw.
“What’s that?” Keith asks.
“This? It’s kind of a funny story. This old guy at a hardware store gave it to me. It’s supposed to be important. Actually, he said it was a magic screw,” I say, rolling my eyes so he doesn’t think I take that shit seriously.
“A magic screw?” Keith repeats, grabbing it from me.
“Yeah? I know. Like I said, I didn’t believe the guy. …”
Keith laughs so hard I’m afraid he’ll burst something. “Hey, guys! Guess what Bonehead here has? A magic screw!”
Everybody’s laughing now. Gonzo rouses from his stupor and makes high-pitched snorting noises.
“Hey, I didn’t say it was magic,” I argue. “Just that it’s … a necessary part. That’s what he told me. It’s a necessary part.”
“Necessary part of what?” Keith chokes out.
“I … don’t know. He was old. A little senile.”
“Dude, you totally believed him. Admit it.” It’s Gonzo. He’s forgotten that these guys wanted to give him demeaning nicknames and has practically joined their fraternity.
“Laugh it up, Stumpy,” I say.
Gonzo can’t stop laughing long enough to be insulted. All I hear from him is a high-pitched “Magic screw!”
Keith’s slapping Left Guy on the back. “Hey, baby. You wanna screw? No, it’ll be magic, I swear.” He breaks into a kind of chortling that comes out of his nose in snorts and honks. It’s the sort of contagious laughing that ripples out to everyone.
“Yeah, yeah, okay. I was joking. …”
“No, no, I’m sorry, man. Here, let me make it up
to you,” Keith says, putting his arm around me and trying to get his breathing under control. There are tears streaming from his eyes. “You want a screw?”
That’s all it takes for the whole crew to fall out again like a pack of deranged hyenas, their laughing punctuated only by guttural gasps of “magic” and “screw.” I can see this will be the joke played out at my expense for the next one hundred miles.
“I’m gonna get some more firewood.”
Dulcie follows me out of the campground. “You can get mad. It’s okay. It won’t kill you to say it, Cameron.”
“I’m not—” I whip around. “Okay. Fine. Yes. I am mad at you, Dulcie. Satisfied?”
She curls herself up in her wings. “See? You’re still here.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know. It’s making me swoon. Tell me more.”
“I’m mad because you came into my life and totally messed with it so I don’t know what’s what anymore.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m mad because you told me about those guys and now I have to care. I’m mad because you won’t tell what’s going to happen to me. Because you don’t give guarantees.”
“True, true.” Her wings open up again.
“Jesus. I’m mad because you make me feel like things are possible when they probably aren’t, or maybe they are, I don’t know. I’m mad because …”
“Because?”
“Because you make me give a shit.”
Dulcie gets really quiet. “Yeah. Sorry about that.”
Her feathers smell like rainwater after a drought. She’s so close I could kiss her. If I weren’t so pissed off at her right now, I might try it. I want to fight with her, then kiss her. “And … and that’s why I’m, you know. Mad.”
“Thanks for telling me.”
“You’re … welcome.”
“Cameron,” she says, her face tilted toward mine. “It’s about time.”
“Time for what?” My mouth has gone dry.
“Time. Exactly twenty minutes.”
With a thunderous groan, Left Guy sits up, dazed, and barfs hot dogs everywhere.