The Probable Future

by Alice Hoffman

  “Of course I don’t think you’re stupid,” Jenny said. “I was only …”

  “Trying to protect me? Making certain I wouldn’t be contaminated. By what? A teddy bear? A dollhouse? Or did you think she might pack my presents in poison? Maybe if I touched one, arsenic would course through my bloodstream. Was that it? Or maybe I would just know that someone cared about me.”

  “Stella, you don’t understand my mother. How manipulative she is, now that she wants something. That something is you. She can rectify her mistakes. But she was never there for me. She only thought about herself.”

  Stella actually laughed, but the sound was bitter. She’d practiced sneering in front of the mirror, and now she put that practice to use. “You can’t be serious.” Stella grabbed her boots and was pulling them on. Her mouth was pinched; her skin white as ice. “She was the one who thought only of herself? And of course you’re perfect. This is exactly what she said would happen. She told me you’d try to turn me against her. She said you’d blame her for everything.”

  “What do you mean, she told you?” Everything Jenny had ever wanted for her daughter seemed to be slipping away in this very instant, on this very day. Everything she had tried to do so right seemed to have somehow gone terribly wrong. “Have you been talking to your grandmother?”

  “I’ve been talking to her for years. That’s right! We call each other when you’re not around. When you can’t butt in and ruin things for us the way you ruin everything.”

  Stella wound a scarf around her neck. Her eyes were cold, flecked with yellow. The same eyes her father had. She had more of his attributes than she had ever imagined. She realized that in the instant when she saw that she’d hurt her mother. She didn’t have to be the good girl, minding her manners, doing as she was told. Stella could tell that the balance of power had shifted and it felt good. Somehow, while her mother wasn’t paying attention, Stella had gained control.

  “Well, I love this present my grandmother sent, and I don’t care what you think. If it’s not here when I get home from school, I’m leaving. I mean it. I’ll move in with my father.”

  “Oh, Stella, don’t be ridiculous.” Will was too self-centered to take care of anyone; he hadn’t even had Stella sleep over at his place. In order for her to stay at his apartment, he’d have to clean up, he’d have to go to the market, buy milk and bread, set his alarm clock, think about someone other than himself.

  All the same, Jenny felt pinpricks of fear along the back of her neck. People lost each other all the time, didn’t they? People walked right out of each other’s lives.

  Keep your mouth shut, Jenny warned herself. Wait this day out and be smart. Thirteen, she reminded herself. That’s all it is. It’s a number, but it’s an illness, and like any virus, it will pass.

  “I mean it,” Stella said as she set out for school, already late, but taking her time, flushed with her new sense of power. “I’ll leave and I won’t come back.”

  Jenny had said these same words to her mother, and not long after, she’d made good on the threat. She was wise enough now to let Stella go without further argument. After she heard the front door close, she forced herself to look at the little house that had been sent from Unity, even though the mere sight made her feverish. She’d forgotten how like a wedding cake it was, with its circular structure painted white. She’d forgotten how pretty it could seem from a distance, if you didn’t know any better, if you hadn’t been inside. There was her bedroom at the rear of the house, with the sheer curtains in the windows, the place where she’d spent so many lonely hours as she waited to grow up. There was the front door she’d slammed after that last fight with her mother, when she ran to meet Will and escape from Unity. And there, in the corner of the parlor, behind the sofas sewn from velvet scraps, beside bookcases that had been carefully stained to resemble golden oak, was a copy of the glass memento case. Ten tiny arrows, their tips painted scarlet, had been set in two neat rows.

  All around the house, laurels had been set out, planted in plaster, blooming forevermore, made out of felt and wire. The original hedge in Unity was said to be the tallest in the Commonwealth, unflagging and hardy, growing taller each year. Jenny ran her fingers over the tiny bees that were attached to the blooms and felt a thrumming in her fingers. She could smell wild ginger and lake water, a rich, damp scent that got into your clothes and your hair and stayed there, stitched to you with muddy thread.

  Seeing it all again, the hedgerows and the frayed rugs, the memento case full of arrowheads and the garden gate, Jenny Sparrow realized that all things really did come back to you. Action brought reaction; salt thrown into the wind flew back into your own eyes. It stung more with each passing year; it could blind a person who wasn’t careful. Like it or not, time had passed. What Jenny had feared most of all had already occurred, and there was no way to prevent it or ignore it or deny it had happened.

  Stella had turned thirteen.

  II.

  ON THE WAY TO SCHOOL, Stella hiked up the blue skirt of her uniform and loosened her braids, so that her hair fell down her back, nearly to her waist. Her one and only friend, Juliet Aronson, had informed her that her ashy hair was her best feature. As far as Stella could tell, it was her only good feature, so she might as well flaunt it. Anyway, braids were worn by the kind of girl her mother wished her to be, the sort who wore pink sweaters and was voted class president, who excelled in after-school activities, from the drama club to the Mathletes. Clearly, that was not the sort of girl Stella happened to be.

  As soon as she turned off Marlborough Street, Stella stopped on the corner and took a tube of lipstick from her backpack. The shade was called Cheap, a scarlet tint that made her look sullen and out of sorts. It was perfect. Juliet Aronson had told her she looked ten years older when she wore it, and Juliet was an expert when it came to matters of rebellion, makeup, and fate.

  Stella rubbed at her temples as she approached the Rabbit School for girls, a place she had despised since kindergarten. She probably would have hated the school even if she hadn’t been a charity case, one of the few scholarship students, an outsider from the time she was five. She forced herself to push through the crowd outside the heavy oak doors, and went to hang her coat in her locker. Standing there, under the fluorescent lights, Stella realized it wasn’t exactly a headache she was experiencing, more like something fizzing inside her brain. All through homeroom she felt exhausted, drained, perhaps, from the fight with her mother, who continued to pry into every aspect of her life, allowing her not the slightest bit of privacy, not even in her dreams.

  It had always been impossible for Stella to keep a secret from her mother, or to even attempt to have a private life. If Stella dreamed about walking on the ledge of a tall building, the following morning, over a plate of waffles Stella was all but forced to eat, Jenny would turn the conversation around to a study that documented the fact that everyone had a few irrational fears. If she dreamed about one of the boys at the Cabot School after a dance, one of the many who never even noticed her, the very next morning her mother would announce that Stella did not have permission to date until she was sixteen, as if anyone would ever ask her, as if she’d say no if they did.

  “Are you sleepwalking?” Juliet Aronson called to her as Stella made her way through the corridor. “Wait up!”

  Because Stella had skipped fifth grade, Juliet Aronson, although in the same class, was a year older. She had short brown hair and gunmetal eyes and enough audacity for two people; she had a knack for getting her own way. There are lessons to be learned in a ruined childhood, and Juliet had learned these well. She had, for instance, convinced the headmistress that a physical therapist had insisted she must wear high heels because of a defect in her spine. The dark fuchsia lipstick Juliet had on? Much needed, due to a reaction to the sun, which caused her to break out in blood blisters without the deep shade to shield her delicate mouth. Now Juliet was clip-clopping after Stella in her two-inch heels; she was out of breath by
the time she’d reached her friend by the stairs. “I’ve been calling to you all the way down the hall, birthday girl.”

  “I wish I was thirty,” Stella said. “Then I’d be running my own life.”

  “You do not wish that. You’d have wrinkles. You’d be all worried about why you weren’t married yet, and why you were wasting yourself on some crappy job or some dopey man who was already married and playing you for a fool. Enjoy your youth, kiddo. Trust me, you’ll be fourteen before you know it. From experience I can tell you it sucks. Here. This will help.” Juliet handed over a shopping bag. “Happy thirteen.”

  Stella smiled in spite of her pounding head. The Rabbit School was a competitive place, one of the few all-girls private schools left in Boston, and Juliet Aronson was the only other charity case in her grade. Birds of a feather flocked together, that was true enough; Juliet and Stella were lucky to have each other. As a team they made certain to reject everyone else before they themselves were cut to the quick. Neither, after all, could afford to shop on Newbury Street or go to summer camp in Maine. Stella’s mother had a steady but small salary, and her father earned very little at the music school where he taught sporadically. The other girls at Rabbit had whispered about Will Avery for days when he’d come to the Harvest Fair Fund-raiser so obviously loaded, turning on the charm for Señorita Smith, who was a fool for any man who remotely resembled her vision of Don Quixote.

  Don’t let them see if you’re hurting, Juliet had advised just last week. Neither one had received an invitation to Hillary Endicott’s birthday party at the Museum of Fine Arts—I don’t think you’d fit in, Hillary had told them after the Harvest Fair, her tone friendly, as if her pronouncement of what they were lacking had been an act of mercy, until Juliet spat on her expensive leather boots. To make up for Hillary’s party, they’d gone off to snag some silk scarves at Saks instead. Act like you don’t care, Juliet had told Stella as they ducked into the Boston Public Library, where they could sit comfortably in the reading room and sift through their loot. And after a while you won’t feel a thing.

  Not caring was Juliet’s real expertise. Ten years earlier, in a well-publicized criminal case, Juliet’s mother had poisoned her father. After several years of foster care, Juliet now lived with her mother’s youngest sister, a graduate student at Emerson College, in an apartment in Charlestown. The aunt was the one who’d finagled the scholarship to the Rabbit School when Juliet was in sixth grade, not that Juliet had cared whether or not they accepted her. She was miles past acceptance, years beyond anything remotely resembling hope.

  “Go ahead, open it,” Juliet said of the present she’d given to Stella. “You’re going to love it.”

  Inside was a black dress, stolen from the designer department on Saks’ second floor, perfect in every way, skimpy and sheer, the sort of thing Stella’s mother would never allow her to wear. This beautiful dress belonged to another universe, light-years away from the pink cashmere sweater, which she hoped would spend the rest of its natural life boxed up, relegated to the bottom of a dresser drawer.

  Stella threw her arms around her friend. “I absolutely love it!”

  “Actually, it’s a good thing I got you something to wear.”

  Stella looked at Juliet blankly. The pounding in her head was simply miserable.

  “Earth to Stella. What is wrong with you? Ever hear of the curse? You’re leaking.”

  They rushed into the bathroom, well aware that they’d be late for Miss Hewitt’s math class and the exam they both feared.

  “Oh, shit.” This was the first time Stella had menstruated and she was near tears. “Why today of all days? I have the worst luck in the world.”

  “Actually, I think that would be me.”

  Juliet visited her father’s grave every other Sunday, and therefore would not have been available for birthday parties even if she’d been asked. She regularly tore up her mother’s letters from Framingham State Prison without reading them. She’d heard it all before: the excuses, the reasons why. None of it mattered to Juliet Aronson. She signed her own report cards, made her own lunches, and kept a rope ladder under her bed, in case a fire should break out in her apartment, for her aunt smoked when she studied and often fell asleep in bed, books open, a cigarette still burning in the ashtray. Juliet was used to disaster, and could therefore always be depended upon to be ready for the next catastrophe to come. Now, for instance, she pulled an extra pair of panties out of her backpack. Always be prepared, that was her motto. Always expect the worst.

  “You think this is bad? I got my period for the first time when I was on the T going to Cambridge and I just had to sit there on the train and bleed until we got to the station in Harvard Square. I went to the Coop and refused to leave until they gave me a pair of sweatpants.”

  Juliet sat on the sink and lit up a cigarette from a pack she’d bought at the corner store; she’d recently convinced the shop owner that she was a twenty-three-year-old graduate student, with a bit of help from her aunt’s pilfered ID. “I think I’m supposed to slap you or something. Welcome you into the world of women. My aunt slapped me, but maybe that was because it was her white jeans I was wearing, and I had to throw them away.”

  “Oh, great. A slap. Terrific.” No wonder Stella’s head had felt fizzy and why her stomach ached. No wonder she was in such a terrible mood. “Welcome to the world of pain.”

  Stella had changed her clothes, folding the stained skirt and panties into her backpack, slipping the blue blazer over the new black dress. She realized that the fabric was practically see-through. You had to have courage to wear something like this, even when it was half covered up. You had to have faith that you could pull it off and not look like a total fool. Stella smoothed down the skirt and buttoned her blazer, then went to wash her hands. So far, this business of being a woman had been exhausting.

  “I hate my mother,” Stella said idly as she dried her hands and dashed on more lipstick. In the flickering light of the washroom she looked especially pale without lipstick and extraordinarily trashy with it. “She watches over me like I’m some sort of wilting flower.”

  “You think your mother’s bad? At least she’s never killed anyone.”

  “Only emotionally.”

  They laughed as they rushed to Miss Hewitt’s class.

  “If anyone bothers you about not wearing your full uniform,” Juliet whispered, “tell them you’re bleeding to death. That ought to shut them up.”

  “Right.” Stella was self-conscious in the black dress. She wondered if she had put on too much lipstick.

  “And let me deal with the authority figure. You know how sincere I can pretend to be.”

  Once inside the classroom, Stella scuttled to her desk while Juliet apologized to Miss Hewitt for their lateness. Juliet explained they’d had female problems, the sort of thing her mother had never had time to explain to her since, Juliet reminded Miss Hewitt, Mrs. Aronson was in the state prison at Framingham and was a vile murderess who had left Juliet to fend for herself in the cruel world. How could Miss Hewitt debate that? How could she dock them points for tardiness? Stella was impressed by Juliet yet again. A loyal friend was so comforting, even on a day as horrible as this. Quickly, Stella set to work on her exam. She had actually studied, hoping to raise her faltering grade out of the realm of the C’s, and she might have done exactly that if she hadn’t happened to look up after writing her name. Her gaze settled on Miss Hewitt and once it did, she couldn’t look away. There, plain as day, was a fish bone, right in the middle of the math teacher’s throat.

  Stella blinked. She’d been dizzy after all; she probably wasn’t seeing straight. But when she looked again, the bone remained exactly where it had been, wedged in tightly. It was a delicate object, white and narrow, a trout bone, perhaps. From its form and shape anyone could tell it would be impossible to cough up once it had caught in the trachea.

  Stella’s pulse was pounding and her mouth had gone completely dry. Right away, she un
derstood that she had somehow managed to see Miss Hewitt’s future, the physical manifestation of the math teacher’s fate. Sitting at her desk, ignoring the exam for which she had dutifully studied, helpless against the forces of destiny, Stella’s complexion turned ashen. Her heart bumped against her ribs and her head spun. When she fainted, the other girls in the classroom gasped and left their desks so they could gather round. Someone pulled down Stella’s sheer skirt, for modesty’s sake; another student rolled up her blazer, in order to cushion Stella’s head on the hard, tile floor.

  Naturally everyone understood the situation once Juliet announced that Stella had gotten her period for the first time and that her cramps had indeed been wicked. The school nurse was called in to assist with smelling salts and a cold compress. At last, Stella came to consciousness, sitting up slowly, hands clutching her aching head. For an instant she didn’t know where she was, not until she saw Juliet Aronson’s worried face.

  “Happy birthday,” Juliet said.

  It was Juliet who convinced the math teacher to allow Stella to leave early. Poor Miss Hewitt, as unaware of her own dire future as she was blind to Juliet Aronson’s manipulations, assured Stella that she could make up the test after the weekend. A taxi was called, her coat was retrieved from her locker, and that should have been the end of Stella’s troubles. But on the way home, Stella spied a pea-shaped object inside the taxi driver’s skull. She nearly fainted again, but she held herself together with sheer will. She would not act like a baby. She would not let this get the best of her, whatever it might be, a curse or an omen or a crossed wire somewhere inside her head. She opened the taxi’s window and forced herself to breathe deeply; just in case there was more to see, she kept her eyes closed all the rest of the way down Beacon Street.

  Once home, Stella ran upstairs to the third floor and double-locked the door. She fetched a glass of water from the kitchen, then went to the hallway. She pulled a chair over to the model house sent by her grandmother and attempted to block out the day’s events. There was something calming about concentrating on the little house, paying attention to the details, the perfect miniature rugs, the brown and white Spode china, the tiny fireplaces—one red brick, one gray brick, one made out of stone—the glass case in the corner of the parlor, covered with a scrap of embroidered cloth.