Future Imperfect

by K Ryer Breese

  “Who?” Liz laughs. “Who else?”

  “Uh, yeah, she’s interesting,” I say, reaching around each of them, hands scouring the countertops looking for the bottle opener, desperate for the bottle opener. Gina has it. Has been holding it the whole time. She hands it to me and asks, “Ade, how did you get into the party, anyway?”

  “I was invited. Me and Paige.”

  They laugh like jackals.

  Gina says, “You three-you, lesbo, and the new bitch-are like a perfect team.”

  “How’s that?” I ask, eyes narrowing.

  Chris, she says, “You’re all mutants.”

  “Why’re you lumping Vauxhall in with…”

  “Are you serious? Have you even seen her?” Chris snickers. “That crazy bitch is like the biggest-”

  “Opposed to who?” I interrupt. “You ugly skanks’re just jealous. Maybe she wasn’t raised in Crestmoor. Maybe her dad’s not a doctor. Doesn’t make her any less-”

  I stop when I realize they’ve all gone quiet.

  Standing behind me, Vauxhall says, “My dad’s dead.”

  Liz and Gina cringe, make sympathetic faces. Heather laughs uncomfortably. And then all four of them, moving like some trained acrobatic team, squeeze out of the kitchen in seconds. There was a magic trick and the bitches have evaporated.

  “Friends of yours?” the mummy asks.

  “Not at all.”

  I’m thinking right here is the real beginning.

  The way this story really truly starts.

  Standing here, looking at Vauxhall in her getup, I’m imagining how we’ll reenact this story for friends years from now. In my mind I see us older and sophisticated, maybe at a restaurant sipping wine and eating strange cheese, and Vauxhall’s covering her mouth and laughing and telling our friends, also mature wine drinkers, that we met for real, really met, at a costume party at some dude’s house, some dude neither of us can recall. We’ll laugh about that. I’m sure of it.

  Right now, me getting all dreamy leaves a wedge of uncomfortable silence between us. Vaux breaks it by leaning in and saying, “It’s not what you think it is.”

  What a great opening line.

  “What’s not?”

  “My costume. It’s more complicated than it looks.”

  I take a sip of cider, say casually, “Okay. Let me guess. Uh, a mummy?”

  “Didn’t see that coming.” Vauxhall laughs.

  “I got nothing.”

  She looks disappointed. “Why are you drinking that bitch fizz, anyway?”

  The cider in my hand, I shrug. “Tasty?”

  I’m leaning against the stove and put my right hand down on the range and while it’s there, just fleetingly, Vauxhall puts hers on top. The touch is brief. I feel only the warm leather. The hand beneath is a mystery. I feel the shape, but without touching the skin, it’s like touching a picture.

  This is our first official touch, as brief and unexpected as it is.

  And this is exactly when some asshole barges in with a bottle of wine, splashing it everywhere. His eyes are bloodshot.

  He sees Vauxhall, his face twists into a mischievous grin.

  “Sorry.” He laughs. And turns and leaves.

  “Know him?” I ask Vauxhall.

  A silence follows. Both of us rocking in our shoes. I break the tension, ask, “Right, so, I think I should know, but what’s the costume?”

  “I’m Negative Woman.”

  “Who?”

  “From Doom Patrol. Comic book. She has to wear bandages, otherwise this black energy spirit can fly out of her body and wreak havoc.”

  “I never read Doom Patrol.”

  “From the sixties. What do you read?”

  “Usually new stuff. Recent stuff. Really, I’m more into the art.”

  “Oh. One of those.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, most people read comics for the story lines. The characters. They’re like soap operas, only with big pecs and fancy suits and the ability to shoot electricity from fingertips. Then there are the people into the indie zines that are just like these examinations of human failing and stuff. And there are people like you. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all,” she says, and I don’t believe a word of it. She adds, “Personally, I like the most messed-up characters. The ones with demons. With secret powers that they can barely control.”

  “You that way? Have some sort of energy being inside you just itching to get out and tear the world apart?”

  Vaux’s bandage face registers nothing. “Aren’t we all like that? All of us with this powerful person inside that we can hardly control but can’t ever really let out. The consequences would be too great.”

  I shrug. “I’m not sure I do.”

  Vaux laughs. “You just might have lost contact with him. Or her.”

  “Her?”

  Vaux laughs again. “Why not? Maybe you’ve got some out-of-control bitch deep inside you. Some hellacious chick who’s just rearing to break out and break hearts and bring the world to tears.”

  “I don’t think I do.”

  “That’s lame, Ade. Come on, be clever with me for a few minutes.”

  I take another sip of my girl drink. “Technically,” I say, “I’m a superhero.”

  “Technically?”

  “Yeah. Totally. I can see-”

  We’re interrupted when Paige struts in. “Hey, guess who she is?” I ask.

  Paige looks Vaux over, says, “The Question?”

  Vaux shakes her head.

  “Uh, some evil Charleston mummy character?”

  “Nope.”

  “That one mummy from Marvel Boy?”

  “Negative Woman.”

  Paige’s face lights up. “Ooh, an obscure one. Doom Patrol, right? What was her name again?”

  “Valentina Vostok.”

  “Damn, that’s good.”

  They talk comics for twenty minutes. Bouncing from The New Mutants (“Is Wolfsbane the shit or what?”) to Avengers (“A baby with Vision? Huh?”). I stand there transfixed. A butterfly pegged to a specimen board. They move on to school. Friends. Parents. Watching Vauxhall is like watching a mime. Her movements carry so much more weight since I can’t see her face.

  Paige asks about her name. I find myself leaning in. Physically trying to move myself close so I can hear every word even though the party in the background isn’t that loud. I’m only an observer here.

  A very biased one.

  This story, I’ve been filling in the blanks of it ever since my first zit.

  Vaux says, “My parent’s named me Vauxhall Renee Rodolfo because they were told it was a strong name. They were told that giving a baby a strong name ensures that she will grow up to be a powerful woman like Sojourner Truth or Isadora Duncan. These women were powerhouses. They were revolutionaries. My parents were told this by their guru. They always insisted that my name is the strongest name they could find. Dad said, ‘It’s the v and the xh combo. Those sounds, they’re like jumping into a lake of ice. You hear those sounds, and you wake up. That’s real.’ Bunch of New Age bullshit, if you ask me.”

  Paige laughs. “Hippies, huh? Mine too. Named me after an actress.”

  I say, “Hippies are so deluded.”

  Vaux continues like she’s lecturing us. Only she doesn’t talk down and keeps it simple. Part of me thinks her lines sound rehearsed. There’s something very Jimi about it.

  Vaux says, “My parents decided early that their daughter would stand out. They decided this the night they were married. At least that’s what they’ve told me. What they say is that they were married on a cliff overlooking the Pacific in Baja. The stars were out and there was a man with a ukulele. There was a rabbi and a Buddhist monk. After the brief ceremony, they jumped off the cliff hand in hand and swam naked while the wedding party rained daisies down on them. As they swam they kissed and talked and my dad said, ‘We will have a daughter. She will be incredible and have an incredible name.’”
>
  “That’s cool,” I blurt.

  “The word comes from Faulke’s Hall. Faulke de Breaute was the captain of King John’s mercenaries. Over time the word changed to Foxhall. And then finally to Vauxhall. Great example of how a word grows and letters migrate over time. How the f and l in flutterby switched places with the b and changed the word to butterfly. How the day’s eye became the daisy. Mutation. Evolution. My mother once told me that the evolution of a word gives it its strength. That means it’s tested. Proven. She said, ‘Your name’s migrated along the alphabet. It’s grown and now, now it’s your name. The last and final step to perfect balanced energy.’ Said, ‘You can tell the glow of someone influential a mile away. It radiates, darling.’ You believe that?”

  “Serious New Age shit.” Paige shakes her head.

  Vaux says, “Before Dad died, yeah. After, Mom got goofy.”

  “Sounds like mine,” I say. “Dad too. He lives in another dimension.”

  “Like The Twilight Zone?”

  “No. Like really. He’s in a coma.”

  “Sounds bad,” Vaux says. I can imagine her grimacing under the wraps. “I’m sorry. That must be really hard.”

  “I’m not sure if it is. We relate to each other the way trees or rocks or clouds relate to each other. Just sharing the same place. My mom thinks he’s still in there, like trapped in a shell. Says she can talk to him and in his nothing to her he speaks volumes.”

  Vaux, under all her bandages, gives a look. A tilt of the head that suggest either she’s confused or that she’s feeling sorry for me. I’m guessing it’s something more remote. Maybe even understanding.

  Paige says, “Welcome to Ade’s whole life.”

  Vaux laughs and I want desperately to pull the bandages off her face. Just to see her expressions while she speaks.

  I want to see her lips move.

  Her cheeks flush.

  The chat group in the kitchen breaks up when a mob of frat guys from DU suddenly appears and raids the coolers.

  Vauxhall stays in the kitchen talking. I go take a piss but then, when I get back to the kitchen, I can’t find her and so I wind up in the living room on a couch talking to someone I don’t think I’ve ever seen before about football. I know nothing about football. But he assumes I do because he’s heard about my head injuries.

  This guy, beer in his goatee, says, “I’ve just been assuming, you know. That’s jacked up if it wasn’t from like rushing a lineman and shit.”

  I don’t correct him.

  Goatee guy gives me another beer and we stop talking after that and I just sit there, in a drunken daze, and people-watch. I think I see my ex, Belle, but maybe it isn’t her. Paige passes by and waves.

  I’m not sure if it’s what I’ve been drinking, but I don’t want to get up. I want to stay right here and watch for my girl. I’m doing exactly what my mother always told me to do if I ever got lost in a department store. Just stay where you are. Just hang tight and wait. And again I’m playing through the rest of the night, planning my next moves, getting a bit sweaty thinking about when exactly we’ll hold hands, when exactly we’ll kiss, and what it will feel like to touch her.

  To really touch her.

  I’m daydreaming on the couch long enough to watch two people pass out and then, finally, I see Vauxhall again.

  Thing is she’s stumbling upstairs with Ryan Mar.

  FOUR

  Ryan’s a guy I’ve seen in the halls maybe twice.

  He plays basketball and wears red Converse shoes. They’re making their way upstairs, Ryan laughing with his hand on Vauxhall’s ass.

  Her arm around his waist.

  Her mouth whispering things into his ear.

  And then they’re gone.

  For two seconds I think maybe it’s just a prank. That or she’s giving Ryan a tour. That maybe they’re really just good friends from way back. But I’m not convincing myself.

  I want to shout. To let her know that that’s not me.

  That she’s got the wrong dude.

  That, Wait, Hey! I’m over here.

  What happens inside my stomach is something horrible.

  Most of me screams out in tatters and my brain fizzles out into glitches.

  I can’t breathe.

  This is not supposed to happen.

  I stumble out away from the couch and drop my beer on the carpet. The way I’m swaying, almost vomiting, everyone backing away from me must be thinking that I’m on something really gnarly. That maybe my drink was spiked.

  This isn’t what I saw.

  I find Paige in the garage talking on her cell. I tell her to hang up, that it’s urgent. I tell her that I need to her to take me home, that I need to crawl under my house. I say, “I just saw Vauxhall take Ryan Mar upstairs.”

  When I say it I almost puke.

  Paige frowns this sad frown and hugs me. “I was trying to tell you,” she says.

  “You were telling me she was with Jimi,” I say. My voice all panic.

  I’m getting angry. I’m burning up.

  “I was trying to tell you that. And also-”

  “That she’s a slut?”

  I want to just fall down in a heap. Curl up. Die.

  Paige just hugs me again. Says, “I don’t know, Ade. It doesn’t-”

  I get a crazy feeling and storm out of the garage and push my way to the bathroom. And I do the only thing I can think of that will stop the pain raging in my gut: I smack my head hard as I can against the sink.

  There is a crunch and it’s pretty deafening but nothing I haven’t heard before.

  The feeling, it hurts. The pain is like a flash of rain that washes clear a street. It’s a shock of cold water and, honestly, it feels great.

  Here is how it works, step-by-step: After my head hits, I fall back. I see the ceiling and the silly, ornate fan spinning lazy circles. I hit the floor, but it’s like falling into water. I just sink down into it and the light fades. There’s this cheesy-ass British TV show I saw once about some doctor dude who travels through time in like this blue telephone box and why it reminds me of what happens when I fall back into the floor is that the show opens with this pretty dope sequence of lights going down a tunnel to a sick synth riff. Leave out the synth riff, sadly, and keep the tunnel of psychedelic lights and you get a sense of what I’m seeing. And at the end of the tunnel? Well, it’s like a curtain going up. There’s like the swell of the symphony, only it’s totally a drug-induced sort of rush, and then I open up my eyes to some future scene.

  Not too long ago it was me downtown base jumping.

  Now, I see myself on a beach.

  This is likely after college and it’s got that plastic sheen, that future fakiness.

  I’m maybe in California, though I’ve only ever been there once when I was little, so it could be somewhere else. The sand is hot. My shoes are off. I’m in a wet suit. The ocean is wild, tossing up these enormous whitecaps. I can tell, just the way my chest is heaving and by tasting the salt water on my lips, that I’ve been in the water. I’m dry now, but judging by the fact that there’s a surfboard in the sand beside me I’m guessing I was in there getting crazy. The sun is so high, so distant, it’s like the earth has gone spinning off course.

  This beach, it’s not Colorado but, of course, I think of the phone call from the phlegmy dude. In the future, I laugh to myself. Whatever happens that he was stressed about, it’s not that bad. If the dude’s really a seer he’s a super-sucky one.

  Total crank.

  Here, in the next decade, the warmth feels great. The sand too. But over the ocean there’s a storm. Really dark clouds and fingers of lightning. This is why the waves are so big, the surfing so good. And probably, just because I’m such a future badass extreme sportsman, I’ll bet I’m on this beach, at this very moment, just for these waves. Just for this storm.

  These waves, my heart racing, I need to go back in.

  I’m reaching over for my board when I notice the guy in the mask.
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br />   He’s tall, young. Wearing jeans and a green wifebeater. The mask, it’s one of those Mexican wrestler deals. Black with sequined flames around the eyes. Sequined white and red teeth around the mouth.

  The guy says, “I thought I might see you here.”

  “Why’s that?” I ask. My future voice is deeper. Raspy.

  “The storm. The waves. This is totally your thing. Thirty-foot swells like this, you get guys from all over the country, hell, the world, descending on these beaches for a chance to ride one of those monsters. Go down in history.”

  “That why you’re here?”

  The masked man says, “Nah. I’m here to talk to you.”

  “So why the getup? Do I know you?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, if you don’t mind, I think I’m going back out there. Can this wait?”

  And the dude in the Mexican wrestling mask starts to say something, but the vision starts shaking. The sand is shaking. The world is shaking.

  I’m pulled back through the tunnel.

  Back through the lights.

  Then I realize it’s someone shaking me awake, shaking me out of my future stupor and back into the present. I’m not on the beach anymore, I’m on the floor of Oscar’s bathroom and there is a burly dude with a ball cap pulled low over his eyes standing over me. He says, “I gotta take a piss, freak. Fucking. Move. It.”

  I can’t stand from the strength of the Buzz, so the guy with the baseball cap just drags me out of the bathroom and leaves me on a throw rug in the hallway. My bottom lip is busted open, but all I can taste is cider.

  Liz Chin finds me and rolls me onto my back. My vision’s all distorted from the high rampaging through my veins and I can barely see her face. But I hear her just fine. She says, “How dare you do that shit at someone’s house? During a party? You’re sick.”

  I ask her to get Paige for me. “Please,” I say, drooling.

  She rolls her eyes and says, “Think your little dyke bitch is gonna nurse you back to health? You’re pathetic, Ade. And by the way, your new girlfriend is sucking some dude’s dick upstairs.”

  I close my eyes and focus on my high.

  Everything in me has shattered.

  The Buzz is all I’ve got left.