by A. S. King
I answered her question. “Yes.”
She answered my question. “No.”
Then we found a booth in the food court and made it our home base. It was central to the eating area and we would see plenty of people during lunch hour, which was coming any minute. Ellie went to buy a variety of disgusting microwaved Mexican food at Señor Burrito and I was tortured by lunch foods and wasn’t hungry. I locked eyes with a woman who looked about forty. She had several shopping bags next to her on the empty chairs at her table.
Transmission from shopping lady: Her granddaughter will be part of a rebel group that will blow up the busiest train station in New America. She will go to jail for this, and after jail she will be sent to Camp #32.
I wanted to pretend that I was as crazy as Darla when I saw things like that. I would rather have stuck my head in an oven and denied my family any future at all if that was what it was going to look like.
“You look like you saw a ghost,” Ellie said to me, returning with her tray of gross food and a tray of plain nachos for me.
I did see a ghost. I saw a ghost of everything that is good in the world dying.
“They steal them to make them breeders,” I said. “In breeder camps.”
Ellie took a too-hot bite of her cheese enchilada and fanned her mouth. Then she said, “Shit.”
Ferret Company will sniff out exiles
Just a Tuesday lunch hour at the mall. Just two country girls hanging out eating nachos in flip-flops and shorts. The older women had tans already. Some of them had babies in strollers. Some of the baby-stroller women were young. As young as us, maybe. Some had tattooed boyfriends in baseball caps. Some had boyfriends in business suits. They all seemed to scorn each other.
It was one big competition, this food court.
People drew lines.
The food court was just like everything else now: Divisive. Self-righteous. Hopeless. I could totally see why a second civil war was on its way… if it wasn’t just in my bat-ingesting head.
Transmission from the tattooed baby-daddy in the baseball cap: His grandfather escaped a gunfight in Vietnam that killed twenty-one in his platoon. He came home to find that his wife had had a kid with someone else, so he hitchhiked all the way to Crescent City, California, where he discovered giant redwood trees and decided they were the most beautiful creatures on the planet. Even more beautiful than his wife, who’d had a baby with someone else while he was getting shot at in Vietnam. So he stayed there. He wrote a letter home to his wife only once. It said, “Thank you.”
“See that girl over there?” Ellie said to me. “Her ancestors were Lenape Indians. They used to carve arrowheads and hunt, like, ten miles from here. Her great-great-great-grandmother was a talented weaver and died from tuberculosis.”
I looked around. The food court was filling up. It was a mix of mall employees, shoppers, mall rats and the old guys who sit on the benches all day and people-watch. I got transmissions from some of them, but nothing about the war.
Then the old guy in the wheelchair showed up.
Transmission from a wheelchair-bound old guy with a big smile and a USS Pledge baseball cap: His father was a great talker and he never got a word in edgeways. So he took the role of the quiet kid. When his father died, he was finally able to hold real conversations and be funny. He was sixty-one when that happened. He regrets it taking that long. Also, his great-great-grandson will somehow hurt my family during the Second Civil War. Something involving fire and a tunnel.
The way he looked at me, it was like he could see infinity, too. Or maybe I was staring at him. Anyway, his great-great-grandson would hurt the O’Briens. And there is a tunnel.
“Are you seeing tunnels anywhere?” I asked Ellie.
“Tunnels?” she asked, still looking at the kid she was reading. “No tunnels. I see, like, hospitals or something. Not like I’ve ever been to a hospital.”
She meant the camps. They looked like hospitals. “No tunnels, though?”
“Nope.”
Something told me I needed to know more about the tunnels, so I looked back at the old man in the USS Pledge hat. Another transmission: The tunnels will be filled with smoke and there will be no escape. Before the smoke, the tunnels will facilitate an exodus… an exodus led by the women who live in the trees.
I blinked. I’d seen visions of women in the trees before. Why would women live in the trees?
More transmission: His great-great-grandson will own a bright red pickup truck. It will have a bumper sticker on it that says MY OTHER TOY HAS TITS. He will wear a uniform that sports the letter K in a yellow circle. He will steal girls from over the border even though there are border patrols. Eventually he will be promoted to the head of Ferret Company. Ferret Company will sniff out exiles.
I was scared of this guy. Not just of the great-great-grandson who wasn’t born yet, but of the man in the wheelchair. It was like he was sent to freak me out. Why didn’t I see anything mundane? Why not some bizarre journey to his German ancestors in lederhosen? A quick jaunt to life on the USS Pledge? A date with a cute girl in one of those 1950s dresses that puffed out at the knees?
Ellie asked, “You okay?”
I spun myself around away from the wheelchair guy. “Yeah.”
“No you’re not,” she said.
“He freaked me out,” I said. “That’s all.”
“All I’m getting is boring crap,” she said, and motioned toward the middle-aged manager of the pizza place with the really great calzones. “That guy? His father was a plumber in Newark, New Jersey. He was known for his expertise in unclogging toilets.” She rolled her eyes. “I have a fucking superpower and all I get are plumbers and napkin ring stories. Great.”
“Let’s stop for a minute,” I said.
She looked at me. “You sure you’re okay? What the hell is he looking at?” she said, looking over my shoulder.
“Is he still looking?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit.”
“Who is he?” she asked.
“I have no idea. But his great-great-grandson is going to hurt my family and do a lot of bad shit to people.”
“No shit,” she said. “Maybe we should kill him now.”
“It’s already done. If we wanted to kill anyone, it would be the son or the grandson.”
“Geez, Glory. I wasn’t serious.”
“I’m getting a calzone,” I said, and I got up. Instead of walking away from the wheelchair guy, I walked right up to him and then around him to the Italian place. He spun around and followed me.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
“You look familiar,” he said.
“Huh. Well, maybe I look like someone you know.”
“Sorry about that,” he said. He put his smile back on. “I must be mistaking you for someone else.”
Clearly he was just some old guy who couldn’t see all that well.
As I stood in line for my calzone, it became clear that this man’s great-great-grandson couldn’t do anything to my family if there wasn’t a future beyond Glory O’Brien—if Glory O’Brien didn’t live long enough to have a kid or something.
This felt freeing—as if I could shake off Darla and Bill and all the other fates that had been haunting me. I could have a future. Maybe a kid… or two. Maybe a career or a hobby or something that wasn’t as hollow and empty as day one postgraduation.
I smiled. But then I was horrified. What kind of a cruel joke is it to know that any family I create will only be stuck in this hell? A hell where girls are stolen and bred? Where boys are made to fight wars they don’t want to fight?
I looked around the food court. I saw the baby-daddies. I saw the women in fake tans and formal hairdos. I saw a little girl wearing makeup eating lunch with her mom. I saw the third button on Ellie’s shirt undone, exposing just enough.
I grabbed my calzone, threw a ten-dollar bill at the owner and escaped.
“I don’t get why we had to leave right then,” Ellie said. “It’s not like anything happened.”
“I had a panic attack. Or whatever they are,” I said, driving down 422. “I couldn’t breathe.”
“You can get pills for those,” she said.
“What’s that mean?”
“It means you could have just walked around with me and we could have stayed. It’s my only day away, you know? I wanted it to last longer than a lousy hour.”
I called conversations like this Everything’s About Ellie. It was a TV show in my head and there was a laugh track. It’s my only day away, you know? [Insert laugh track laughter.] I wanted it to last longer than a lousy hour. [Insert laugh track laughter.] If Ellie Heffner had panic attacks, the world would stop for her. But me? I’d just have to suck it up because it was her only day away.
She’d tried, in the food court, to get me to change my mind with manipulative huffs and noises and faces but I just gathered my stuff and headed down the escalator, which only made the whole thing worse. By the time I got to the bottom, I not only couldn’t breathe, but I was also dizzy and felt like I had to vomit.
Then the elevator door opened to my right and the USS Pledge guy in the wheelchair came out and the panic was vast.
Just the thought of a future—mixed with the thought of my someday procreating—nearly knocked me out. I knew I couldn’t say this to Ellie. Ellie would think I was either being a prude or dumb or overreacting to something that seems normal to most people.
To me, living long enough to have a kid was never guaranteed.
To me, bringing a kid into a world that was about to collapse was a mistake.
Was this what Darla felt? That bringing a kid into the world she saw—the world in Why People Take Pictures—was a mistake?
All of these things descended when he wheeled out of the elevator. And so I took off through the main doors. And then I ended up on 422 driving us home.
Oh well.
“Can we go somewhere else now that you’re calmed down?” Ellie asked.
I pulled into the McDonald’s parking lot. I said, “I’m not calmed down. Panic attacks are serious. It’s not a matter of just calming down.”
“Sorry.”
I sighed. “We can go somewhere else if you want. I just need some time away from people.”
“Even me?” she asked.
“Even you.” Things were breaking in my head. I needed time away from people. I needed time away from everything.
“Well, then drop me back at the mall and go driving or something.”
[Insert laugh track laughter.]
I don’t know why I got so angry with her so quickly. Actually, I don’t think it was all that quickly. I think it started a long time ago and I was just holding it in. And now I felt it rise in me and rush out of my mouth.
I said, “Rick has two kids.”
She said, “What the hell are you talking about?”
I said, “Just look around over there.”
“Over where?”
“On your mother’s commune,” I said. “They live there. Or one of them does, anyway.”
She looked at me as if I’d just slapped her and I did just slap her. It’s a very dangerous thing, knowledge. The bat was a very dangerous companion.
“Rick is only nineteen,” she said. “You’re so full of shit.”
I didn’t say anything.
“How do you know this? You saw it? In who?”
“In Rick. Last night. At the party.”
I could feel her glaring at me, but she didn’t say anything.
“I think he’s slept with other women there, you know,” I said. I didn’t say maybe including your mother but I didn’t have to. It would sink in.
“That’s bullshit.”
“You saw him with Rachel’s mom,” I said.
She steamed. I saw it pouring out of her. Hot steam. “This shit isn’t real, Glory. Stop believing it as if it’s real,” she said. There was silence in the car as I drove back through the mall parking lot. Then Ellie said, “You’re probably just jealous, anyway.”
“Jealous of what?”
“I had sex first.”
“That makes no sense.”
“You’re pissed because I didn’t tell you,” she said. “But I didn’t tell you because I knew you weren’t mature enough to handle it.”
“You have no idea how mature I am.”
“I know you never had a boyfriend. I know that. So how would you know anything about anything?”
“I don’t need a boyfriend to know things, Ellie.”
“You’re trying to get Rick and me to break up because you’re jealous.”
I stopped the car outside the mall entrance. “Just go,” I said.
“Admit it.”
I looked at her.
“Admit that you’re just jealous.”
“I’m not jealous. I’m not anything. I was just telling you what I saw. Rick has two kids. That’s all I know. It could be bullshit. This could all be bullshit, okay? We’re going crazy, right? We drank a fucking bat, all right? What the hell do I know? I was just telling you what I saw.”
She was halfway out of the car when I said this and she turned around to say something, but I hit the accelerator a little so she’d just shut the door and get out.
As I drove to the mall exit I started to cry again. This was not a good day for me and crying. I felt like such an idiot for letting Ellie into my life this week. It was supposed to be my freedom week.
I drove around for a while to get my tears back into my body where they belonged. I eventually got to where I wanted to be—the library main branch. I went to the research librarian and I asked her to point me toward the war section.
“I’m looking for tunnels,” I said. “What wars had tunnels?”
She shrugged. “I’m pretty sure most wars have them.”
“What about the Civil War?” I asked.
She searched her computer and then handed me a printout about the tunnels in Vicksburg, Mississippi, during the Civil War. Then she took me to the stacks and found me two other books. One about the Korean War and one about Vietnam, both about tunnels. Then she got me a copy of The Great Escape on DVD and sent me to the front desk. After I checked them out, I sat in a quiet corner of the library and read. Tunnels were scary things. Very scary things. They collapsed, they could be infiltrated from both sides and trap people. They could be burned up. As a girl prone to anxiety and mild claustrophobia, tunnels made me feel generally like peeing in my pants. I was hoping my descendants would not inherit my irrational fears.
Two hours later, my panic attack was long gone and I got a message on my cell from the pay phone at the mall from Ellie, who was ready to be picked up and driven to her next destination. [Insert laugh track laughter.] I went to the mall and picked her up and she didn’t say anything to me about Rick. She didn’t apologize to me about calling me jealous or implying that I was stupid.
She did say, “I’m sorry about telling you to calm down or whatever. I know you can’t do anything about it.”
“Thanks.”
“Want to go out for dinner?”
“Nah. I need to get home. I haven’t had any time since graduation and I have shit to do.”
“Chinese takeout?” she offered.
“No thanks,” I said.
The silence wasn’t awkward for me. I didn’t squirm through it. I didn’t have anything to say.
“I know which kid is his,” she finally said. “Rick’s, I mean.” She looked out the window. “You can tell by the hair.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“And the kid is almost two,” she said. “Which means he’s been doing this for a while.”
“Yeah.”
“The day I leave that place will be the best day of my life,” she said.
“Sorry about blurting it out, but I thought you should know,” I said. “Probably not the best
way to tell you.”
“Sorry I said all those things,” she said. “It hasn’t been a great week.”
“No shit.”
Awkward silence.
“Will you still talk to me after this?” [Insert laugh track laughter.]
“I don’t know.”
“We can’t go through this bat stuff without having each other,” she said.
“I’ve been through plenty of stuff by myself without your help,” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means exactly what I said.”
“What stuff? Did you have a boyfriend that you didn’t tell me about?”
I rolled my eyes. “Why does everything with you have to be about a boyfriend? Jesus! You’re obsessed,” I said. “Look—fine. Go sleep with Rick again. Marry him. I don’t care. Just don’t ask me to get more crab killer for you, okay?”
“I don’t get what you’ve been through,” she said. “I was asking. You don’t have to be so bitchy.”
“You don’t get what I’ve been through?”
Awkward silence.
She said, “Well, are you going to tell me?”
“Forget it,” I said.
“Is it your mom and how she—uh—killed herself?”
“Just forget it,” I said.
“I never talked to you about that because I thought you were over it,” she said.
I stayed quiet as we drove the final mile home. If I’d opened my mouth, a dragon would have flown out and would have flamed Ellie so badly in my car, she’d have been nothing but a pile of stupid, selfish, boy-obsessed ashes.
Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future
The Second Civil War will start with a bomb. It will be a very big bomb. I am beginning to think that whatever happened to me happened so I would know this stuff and do something about it. But what can a seventeen-year-old girl do about anything? I can’t even vote.
From what I saw, the explosion, in a state capitol building, will kill seven state senators and many capitol staff. The media will go wild, which will be nice because before the bomb, the media will have already stopped reporting nightly on the disappearance of girls from the border states of New America.