Forget Tomorrow

by Pintip Dunn

  It’s even better than I imagined. The rays are warm on my neck, and the air smells like honeysuckle. I tilt my face up, absorbing every ounce of sunshine.

  “You act like you’ve never been outside before,” a voice says.

  A girl stands before me. Friendly brown eyes. Dark fuzz on her scalp. If she had hair, it might be the same color as Marisa’s, like chocolate swirled with butter as it cooks on the stove.

  “It feels like it’s been forever.” I crouch down and pick up a leaf. But my hands don’t stop after one. I pick and pick, until I have a small pile in my hands. Red, yellow, orange, brown—the colors remind me of Jessa.

  A slight breeze blows through my hair and I shut my eyes. The next leaf that falls will be yellow. Opening my eyes, I zero in on the falling foliage—dark brown. I was dead wrong. I crack a small grin, feeling closer to home just for imitating Jessa’s game.

  “My grandmother used to make flowers by folding leaves and wrapping them together,” the girl says. “Of course, this was when she was a little girl, and there were parks and trees on every corner. Is that what you’re doing? Making roses out of fallen leaves?”

  I look at the girl, my heart pounding. This might be the thing I’m looking for. Not sure if sullen girls have any use for imitation flowers, but it’s worth a try.

  “My sister does the same thing.” I move to another patch of fallen leaves. “And yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing.”

  She falls to her knees next to me and begins picking up leaves, too. A couple of girls racing up and down the courtyard vault over us. “My name’s Beks, by the way. Are you new here? I don’t think I’ve seen you before.”

  “I’m Callie. I have the cell next to Sully’s.” No need for her to know I’m the girl with no black chip.

  “Lucky you. She’s not exactly sweet, but she’s got that loose brick in her wall. Some company’s better than nothing, right?”

  She gestures behind me. Most of the girls are clumped together in groups of twos and threes, trying to squeeze a week’s worth of conversations into fifteen minutes. But a lone girl slouches against the wall, not looking at anyone. Her skin is stretched taut over a frame of bones, and horizontal marks decorate her arms from wrist to elbow.

  “Is that Sully?” I ask.

  “That’s what she calls herself. The rest of us call her Calendar Girl.”

  “Why?”

  Beks puts down the leaves and holds out her forearms. “She cuts herself every time we go outside, to keep track of time. It’s pretty gruesome. Instead of doing it to ourselves, the rest of us use her as our calendar.”

  Even as I watch, a couple of girls approach Sully and count the marks on her arms. They don’t speak to her, and she doesn’t acknowledge them in any way.

  I think suddenly of the tree that grows in the middle of our school lobby. Students cover the bark with their initials and drawings—the only place in school where graffiti is tolerated. The only place it’s even possible. Everything else is metal and plastic.

  Living things, it seems, are easier to disfigure.

  “How does she do it?” I whisper. “Does she have a knife?”

  Beks wiggles her fingers. “You might think someone’s smuggling in nail tints. But that’s not tint on her fingernails. It’s dried blood.”

  My stomach churns like I’ve eaten too much glop.

  “When I got here, she only had five marks on her arms,” Beks says. “And Gia over there arrived when she had twelve. You should go count her marks, so she can be your calendar, too.”

  “Um…that’s okay.” I turn back to the leaves. My fingers chafe from handling their crumbling surface, and my mouth is dry at the thought of a girl who cuts herself to keep track of time. “Beks, have you seen anyone use any needles here?”

  Maybe I won’t have to win Sully over after all. Maybe I’ll be able to keep the imitation roses for myself.

  She shakes her head. “You mean, as a weapon? I’ve never seen the guards with anything that subtle. Why do you ask?”

  Disappointment blooms in my chest, and I scrape up some grass along with the leaves. “No reason.”

  We work in silence until the horn blares, signaling the end of the fifteen minutes. As I carefully put the leaves in my pocket, Beks holds out her pile.

  “For me?” I ask, shocked.

  “I don’t have any use for them.” She shrugs. “It was fun to feel close to my grandmother for a few minutes.”

  I take the leaves, and we fall in line behind the other girls. Before we go inside, I turn back to Beks, plucking a red leaf from my pocket.

  I hand it to her. “To remind you of the sun,” I say and hope it gives her a fraction of the comfort Logan’s leaf gave me.

  I fold a leaf in half and roll it into a tight cylinder. Taking another leaf, I wrap it around the cylinder. Fold and wrap, again and again, until the creases resemble the petals of a rose. I tie off the bottom with a sturdy stem, repeating until I have enough “roses” to form a bouquet.

  Biting my lip, I survey my handiwork. Fallen leaves are fragile by nature. I lift the bouquet gently, praying it holds. The action opens a floodgate and questions rush in, one on top of the other. Did they call my mother yet? Does Jessa miss me? Who does Marisa joke with in class?

  I shouldn’t care. I’ll probably never see them again. This is my life now. These walls. A tray of glop. A loose brick with an eye on the other side. The sooner I get used to that, the better.

  “Nooooooo!”

  My fingers close over the roses, and at the last second, I stop myself from crushing them. That noise. High-pitched. Keening. The wail of a soul being separated from its body.

  I hear it again, louder this time, coming from the hallway. “You can’t make me!”

  I lurch to the front of my cell and press my face against the bars.

  It’s Beks, being propelled down the hall by a burly guard with whiskers. Her hands are caught behind her in a pair of electro-cuffs. He pushes her with the butt of his baton. She pitches forward, and he yanks her back up. The whole process starts all over again.

  “I won’t do it!” She curls into a fetal position on the ground. “I won’t!”

  The guard lifts her by the arm, and her body unfurls. Up and down the hallway, I see elbows poking out of the cells. I imagine the girls from the courtyard, all with their faces straining against the bars. All with their hands pressed against their chests.

  The guard prods Beks with the baton. She flies forward, landing on her stomach in front of my cell.

  She looks around wildly before locking onto my face. I can’t be sure she recognizes me, but she reaches through the bars and grabs my ankles.

  “You have to stop them,” she says hoarsely. “You can’t let them do this. To me. To any of us. You’ve got to stop them!”

  I crouch down. I want to touch her face, but I can’t reach it.

  “Please.” Beks’s eyes reach right inside me and yank. “Help me.”

  Before I can respond, the guard wraps his arm around her stomach and lifts her up. He flings her over his shoulder and carries her down the rest of the hallway. He stops in front of the mysterious door at the end, the one that’s always been shut until now.

  “I’m sorry,” he says gruffly. “But you have no choice.”

  He tosses her inside the room beyond. The next few moments are a blur. I hear a rush of footsteps. The screech of a table as it’s being pushed to one side. A man yells, “No!”

  And then, a gunshot sounds.

  11

  I rock back on my heels. What happened? Was Beks…shot? For what?

  My stomach heaves. I want to crawl to the darkest corner of my cell, curl up into a ball, much like Beks did, and stay there until my ears stop ringing, until the image of her wild eyes fades from my mind. Until I forget everything that happened.

  But I can’t. I press myself against the bars, straining to see. The elbows begin to disappear. One by one, the other girls retreat into their cells,
to nap or sleep or cry. To dig their fingernails into their arms until they break skin. To do whatever it is they do to make this mockery a life.

  I don’t. I stay by the door. Because she asked me to help her.

  Me. Poor Beks. You got the wrong girl. What could I have done?

  Hours pass…or maybe only minutes or even seconds. Time doesn’t make sense anymore. What is future and what is past? Did I kill my sister or didn’t I? Can I still save her? Like I didn’t save Beks?

  The door of the interrogation room finally opens. The burly guard with the whiskers walks out, and Beks follows him. Her hands and feet are bound with electro-cuffs. But before the pent up breath even leaves my lungs, another guard exits the room, carrying a black body bag. The corpse.

  So somebody was shot after all. Just not Beks.

  Burly Whiskers goes to the entry and does the whole routine. Handprint, blood sample, retina scan, numeric code. The entire entourage leaves. And they don’t come back.

  Where did they go? What did they do with Beks?

  No matter how long I wait, the black bars imprinting lines onto my forehead and cheeks, I don’t get any answers.

  I remember Sully’s words. They keep you here until something changes.

  This must be the change she was talking about. The change that takes you out of Limbo and puts you somewhere else.

  Which can only mean one thing: Sully knows. Whatever it is that happened to Beks, Sully has the answer.

  I’m waiting for her when she removes the brick. We stare at one another, blinking back surprise and the loose dust the movement of the brick stirred up.

  “Tell. Me. Everything.”

  “About Beks or the needles?”

  “Both,” I say. “Beks first.”

  Sully’s eye narrows. “So demanding, hatchie. Haven’t you learned? You don’t have the power here. I do.”

  If my fingers could fit, I’d reach right through the wall and shake her. “This isn’t a game, Sully. Somebody is dead.”

  “You want something from me. I need something from you.”

  I push the bouquet of “roses” through the hole in the wall.

  Her eye disappears as she examines the gift. A moment later, she’s back. “What is this, a bunch of leaves? What do I want with some dead leaves?”

  “They’re not just leaves, Sully. This was my sister’s favorite craft project. And when I felt cooped up at school, the boy I used to like gave me a red leaf.”

  Her eye rolls. “You are super boring to me, hatch. Who cares?”

  I take a deep breath. “There’s this line by Emily Brontë. It was in an old book of poems my mom gave me. She wrote, ‘Every leaf speaks bliss to me/ Fluttering from the autumn tree.’” I wet my lips. “I hoped these leaves would make you feel that way, too. We may be stuck inside, away from the sun, but I hoped the leaves would remind you how it feels to be free. To be able to take whatever path we want and land anywhere we choose.”

  I wait, bracing myself against her laughter, anticipating her ridicule. The eye blinks at me. Blink, blink, blink. And then it crinkles a little at the corner. “You’re all right, hatch.”

  The breath whooshes out. “So you’ll tell me?”

  She disappears, as if she might be putting the roses in a safe place, and comes back a moment later. “What do you know about Beks’s story?”

  “Nothing. She mentioned a grandmother,” I say. “It sounded like they loved each other.”

  “Her parents were arrested when Beks was young. They were suspected of having psychic abilities. Beks lived with her grandmother until she got her future memory.” Sully’s voice softens with something I don’t expect. Something that sounds almost like regret.

  I swallow past the lump in my throat. The memory can’t be good, not if Beks ended up in here. Not if Sully sounds like that. “What happened?”

  “In the future, a robber breaks into their house. The grandmother gets in the way, and he puts a bullet through her chest. In a rage, Beks tackles the robber, wrestles the gun from his hands, and kills him.”

  The softness disappears from Sully’s voice. “FuMA arrested Beks, and she’s been in Limbo ever since, waiting to see if she would be deemed aggressive.”

  I freeze. The conversation with Chairwoman Dresden replays in my mind. You, my dear, qualify as aggressive. Aggressive. Aggressive.

  “What do you mean?” I ask faintly.

  “FuMA leaves most of us alone. But once in a while, they decide one of us is too aggressive. Our ripples are too strong to be left unchecked. That’s why Beks was so hysterical. Because she knew her grandmother’s dead.”

  “I don’t understand.” The pieces don’t fit together, no matter how hard I jam them. “Why would her grandmother be dead? FuMA knew about the robber. Why didn’t they stop the crime from happening?”

  Sully laughs, harshly. “Where are we, hatchie?”

  “You said we were in Limbo.”

  “That’s right. But where are we housed? Are we in the PuSA facilities, with the rest of the criminals?”

  “No,” I whisper. “We’re in the FuMA building.” If we were truly criminals, even future criminals, we should’ve been shipped to the Public Safety Agency.

  “Do you get it now?” The words are tired. Not regular tired, not even bone-tired. The kind of tired you can’t cure, even with a lifetime of sleep. “It’s not FuMA’s goal to prevent crime. It’s to facilitate the receipt and fulfillment of future memory. The fulfillment, hatchie. It’s FuMA’s goal to make sure our memories come true.”

  The truth crashes over me. We will endeavor to make as many details come true as possible, the Chairwoman said. I thought she meant the ancillary details. I thought she was talking about the color of my shirt.

  No. I don’t want to be right. I can’t bear to be right. “So who was shot in the interrogation room? Are you saying it was…the robber?”

  “He wasn’t supposed to live, hatchie,” she says, her voice as dull as the cinder blocks. “By arresting Beks, FuMA messed up the chain of events. When they decided she was aggressive, they had to fix her ripples. The only way they could do that was to bring the robber here and make Beks kill him. Just like in her memory.”

  I jerk back from the hole so I no longer have to look into Sully’s eye. So I can stop listening to her.

  She keeps talking, anyway. “Now that Beks has fulfilled her memory, now that they forced her to do it, they’re moving her to PuSA. Because she’s a real criminal now. Just like her memory predicted.”

  I turn away from the wall and bring my knees to my chest. I’ve made a terrible mistake. The worst miscalculation of my life.

  Because the Chairwoman said I was aggressive. And when the scientists discover my real memory, FuMA will make sure it comes true.

  They’re going to make me kill my sister.

  12

  Sully’s voice drifts over me. “You still there?”

  Our transaction is finished. I gave her the roses; she explained what happened to Beks. So why is she still talking to me? “No, I’m not.”

  I keep my back to the wall. But she won’t go away.

  “I didn’t even tell you about the needles,” she says. “Don’t you want to hear about the needles?”

  Hot tears pound at my eyelids, but I refuse to let them out. Everything is working against me. FuMA. Fate itself. Why did I ever think I would be able to fight them?

  “Listen, hatch. I know it’s a lot to take in. I remember when I first found out. I was catatonic for a week.”

  I have to try. My sister’s counting on me, and I can’t fade away. I have to keep fighting. For her.

  Mustering all my strength, I crawl back to the wall. “Tell me about the needles.”

  “Before you came here, a girl named Jules lived in your cell. She was as crazy as they come. She screamed insults from morning to night. Heckled the guards when they walked past her cell. Once, she even threw her bucket of urine in their faces. No one was surprised when th
ey deemed her aggressive.”

  A smile tugs at my lips. I would’ve liked to see the urine dripping from Scar Face’s cheek.

  “A few weeks ago, they made her fulfill her memory.” Sully pauses. “Or at least, I think they did. Her fulfillment wasn’t like any I’ve ever seen. Usually we hear gunshots or bodies being thrown around. Hers was deadly quiet. She went into that room with a guard, and a scientist followed with a rack of syringes. One row with clear liquid, a second row of red. A few minutes later, they all walked out, seemingly unhurt. And that was it.”

  I frown. “What was her memory supposed to be?”

  “Attempted murder. She attacks her dad, I think. But where was her dad in all this? And what happened to the attack?”

  “Maybe her dad was the scientist,” I say.

  “Maybe. Or maybe they weren’t fulfilling her memory at all. Maybe they were performing some other experiment we don’t know about.”

  I’m not sure what to make of the story. Not sure if and how it relates to my own memory. My syringe had clear liquid in the barrel, not red. What does the red liquid mean? Are we even talking about the same substance?

  Sully mumbles something I don’t catch. I turn and look through the hole. Her eye isn’t there. She’s sitting a few feet from the wall, and I see her face for the first time.

  Oh, I’d seen her face in the courtyard. But that was from twenty yards away, when her features were shadowed by the building. For the first time, I see her slashing cheekbones, the perfect heart-shaped mouth. The mouth that’s currently trembling, although her eyes are as steady as ever.

  I gape. How many times did I look into her expressionless eye and assume she had no feelings? That entire time, her mouth would have given her away, if only I had seen it.

  “What did you say?” I ask.

  She lifts her head and turns toward the hole, although I know she can’t see me from that angle. “Now you know why I keep to myself. My brain scans show that I’m not aggressive. I should be safe here in Limbo, for the rest of my life. But I want to make sure.”