To this I just give her a hug and ask her to help me to the bathroom.
Why I’m so dead tired is because I haven’t slept in days.
That’s actually not quite accurate, I did get about three hours of sleep on Sunday but that was post-concussion, so I’m not actually sure it counts as sleep. It was more like just plain unconsciousness. And a good ten hours or so was spent in a daze. Not sure if a daze counts as sleeping.
My arm over Paige’s shoulder, my feet scuffing, dragging, I tell Paige that she can think of this as an experiment. I tell her that, really, it’s one of those experiments where everyone involved is blinded to what’s actually happening. I say, “And I think I’m close to a breakthrough here.”
“Breakthrough, huh?”
“Yeah. You see it’s like that game Mouse Trap.”
“The one with the little plastic mice?”
“Right. And the whole trick of it is to set up this complicated trap and catch the little plastic mice… no, wait, maybe the trick is to not get caught…”
“Anyway…”
“Well, whatever it is, this is like it. Except the mice are me and Vauxhall and Jimi and you are somewhere in there too. No, I’m the trap and Vauxhall is that… What the hell am I talking about?”
Pretty much, it’s been the Me, Vauxhall, and Jimi Show. The past three days have seen us doing just about everything together from eating to sleeping and I’d be lying if I didn’t say it was incredible. The parts I can remember, well, they were incredible for sure.
It began last Friday, after school, when Jimi ambushed me in the parking lot. He drove up beside me in his neighbor’s car, the way you see it happening in movies, me walking quickly, the wheels of his tires turning slowly, and he rolled his window down and waved me over. I went. Vauxhall was sitting in the backseat reading a paperback book. Jimi told me to get in. He told me to get in fast and not to think about it. He said, “Thinking about things kills them.”
I got in. He sped up and out of the lot and we were off.
Halfway to Boulder, on 36, I asked him where we were headed. I’m not sure why I waited so long to ask. He smiled and said, “We’ve got many things planned for you, grasshopper.”
We didn’t actually make it to Boulder but stopped in Louisville at a guy named Roger’s house. Really it was his parents’ house and it was massive. One of those McMansions that spring up outside of the city, the kind that look so new and sterile you can’t imagine anyone really living in them. They’re like big, empty waiting rooms. Waiting rooms in fields, in cul-de-sacs, below mountains. At Roger’s there was a party. Enough booze for a cruise ship full of people but less than a hundred of us there. We ate hot links and greasy chips. There was a keg. There was pot. I woke up on the couch in Roger’s basement to find the moon nearly down and stumbled upstairs to find the house empty. Everyone was on the lawn shooting off fireworks and I pulled myself over to a lawn chair, slumped down into it, and watched Vauxhall move, talk, laugh, drink, in the kaleidoscope carnival light. Someone walked over to me and punched me in the shoulder, said, “You dog, you. What’s her name?”
I said, “Vauxhall.”
This random guy, he said, “Yeah, right.”
Whole time Vaux and I didn’t really talk. Just a few words here and there. Really it was just me observing her, the way I had been for the past two years. Only this time up close. This time in person. At the party, she moved through the crowd the way a leaf moves down a stream. Caught up swirling in conversations here and there, spinning for a time, and then washing free and moving on. There were times she’d vanish for an hour or two. Sometimes with Jimi. Sometimes not. When she was gone the party would pretty much stop for me. It’d be like someone turned down the music or turned on the lights. The empty chatter would rush back in. I’d sit on the couch and pout. But then, Vauxhall would return, sweep me up, and introduce me to someone, laughing and nodding and splashing white wine on all the carpets.
Today, with the hallway empty, and me falling asleep between footsteps, Paige sweeps me up and walks me into the bathroom.
She sits me down on a toilet and says, “That’s all I’m helping. This is gross.”
“Do happen to have an energy drink or-”
“No.”
“Coffee?”
“No, Ade.”
“Okay.” And I close the door to the stall but open it up again quickly. “Hey, Paige,” I say. “You should probably not be in the men’s room.”
After Roger’s place, things got weird fast. We didn’t go back to Denver until Sunday night. We were camped out in a field, some random, desolate place that was beautiful the way only empty sky and empty land can come together and be beautiful, and sitting on the hood of Jimi’s car. I was bumming about how Vauxhall and I still hadn’t found the time to talk. Mostly it was Jimi doing the talking and the two of us listening.
And whatever had developed between the two of them, it was obviously deep. Deep enough that often times they’d just give each other sideways glances and then nod knowingly. They had whole conversations, long detailed discussions, with just a few looks. A shake of the head. An eyebrow raised.
I felt like a ghost.
THREE
It all ended last night around two in the morning when I found myself back home, sitting on my lawn, Jimi behind me, his head on my shoulders, and Vauxhall in front of me, sitting between my knees.
The three of us a totem pole to the over-partied.
Jimi fell asleep. Was doing that little stop-start, head-jerking thing that people who are way overtired do when they first drift off. I didn’t bother moving him because I didn’t want Vauxhall to move. Even though I was losing feeling in my feet, I didn’t ever want to move.
Sitting there, the night chirping around us, cars throwing occasional light, Vauxhall, not turning around to look at me, said, “So, what did you see this time?”
“Nothing. I didn’t go under.”
The beautiful creature between my legs laughed. “You missed?”
“Ha, ha. Very funny.”
Vaux asked, “You choose what you see? Like if I were to ask you what will happen to me in five years? Or will I win the lottery?”
“I don’t really have much control over it.”
Vaux turned to look back at me. “Prove it.”
I said, “You’d need to knock me out.”
Vaux turned away, shook her head, and even though her shirt was buttoned up high I caught a glimpse of cleavage. Part of me suddenly got very warm.
“I hate to say this,” I said. “But I’ve actually had a vision about you.”
Vaux sighed long and loud. “Is that so? Sounds like a pick-up line. Or are you just really trying to make me knock you out?”
“I’ve seen you before. Two years ago. I had this vision of you coming into the lunchroom and singing. Just the same as you did the other week. And-”
“What?”
“I don’t…”
Vaux looked back at me again and asked, “What else did you see?”
“Us in love. Riding off into the sunset.”
Vaux said nothing.
“Yeah. A little weird, right?” I felt really stupid.
Then Vauxhall got up, pushed Jimi off my shoulder, and he slid down to the grass in slow motion but didn’t wake up. With him there snoring in blades of wet grass, Vauxhall stretched and looked up at the stars for a few heartbeats before looking down at me, me looking up at her beautiful face, and the world just paused there. The moonlight, the stars, even the passing headlights of the cars all focused in on Vauxhall and illuminated her exquisiteness.
I asked her, “Why are you with him? He’s such an-”
“Asshole?”
“Yeah. Did I mention this before?”
“You did. Maybe I chalk it up to bad-boy attraction. Us girls are kind of hardwired for it. Lame, I know. But with him there’s something more. It’s not love. For me it’s really not. We just have this thing that-”
I interrupted, “
He also said something about you trying to change.”
Vaux shook her head. Sighed. “What if I told you that I was like you?”
“I-”
“Like you, Ade, only I don’t see the future. And I don’t need to knock myself out. What if I told you that for me it happens with intimacy? With sexuality?”
“Okay.”
“You don’t buy it?”
“I do.” I was being entirely honest. And right there, that moment, dawn was just around the corner and the both of us were so exhausted and hung over, suddenly everything made sense. The reason she and I were meant to be together wasn’t because I was obsessing over her for so long, it wasn’t that she found me irresistibly charming and funny, it was that we were cut from the same cloth. Whole time I’d been wondering about others like me, she was waiting only a few years away. It was so Hollywood it made me want to laugh.
I asked Vaux, “What do you see?”
“The past.” She closed her eyes. Her eyelids fluttered, delicate and soft as moths. She said, “Would you believe me if I told you that I can see the past, see deep inside someone’s history, when I’m with them? Would you believe that the thrill of it, of seeing their past, their hidden history, their stashed away ideas, I get this crazy high?”
I cleared my throat, nodded. “I would.”
“You have that high?”
“The Buzz, that’s what I call it. That’s why the bathroom at Oscar’s. That’s why the handful of concussions this year. Not so good for my memory, terrible for my future prospects. But… it’s miraculous.”
Vauxhall nodded. “It is. Anyway, that’s why I’m with him. Jimi’s past, his hidden history, is so crazy that it gives me the most unbelievable high every time I look into it. Each act of abuse I uncover, it helps him and it helps me. I’m like the shrink who can get inside his head and clear away the sins, pull down the cobwebs, and let in the light. He needs me, and I admit that I like the feeling I get from it. Is that wrong?”
“No, it’s not wrong. And the other guys?”
“It’s the same thing. I’m helping them, Ade.” Then she smiled at me and her teeth were so bright and wonderful and she said, “It’s good to know I’m not alone.”
God, how I wanted to kiss her right then.
“Me too. You’re the first person I’ve ever met who can-”
And that’s when the crack came.
I felt something hit my head, something super hard like a two-by-four or a tire iron. I’ve been hit with both of those before and this felt remarkably the same.
Anyway, it was concussion time again.
What’s funny is that I was shocked that I wasn’t on the beach with the masked dude again. Instead, after diving down the tunnel of swirling light, I wound up at home. At home with my mom and some of her All Souls Christ friends sitting across from me. Like grilling me or something. Also there was a projector and a slide show on.
Strange. And thankfully short.
And that only meant the Buzz would be really weak.
I woke up in the back of Jimi’s car with the Buzz already fading from my system.
I was in my boxers, a ratty blanket covering my legs. Vauxhall was in the front passenger seat looking down at me with worried eyes. Jimi was in the driver’s seat smoking.
Vauxhall asked, “Are you okay?” And then she punched Jimi in the arm and told him he was a dick for hitting me. She told him he could have killed me doing that. She said, “Sometimes I think you’ve completely lost your mind.”
Jimi said, “Isn’t it what he does?”
Turning to me again, Vauxhall asked, “Seriously, though, are you all right?”
I nodded, rubbed the back of my head, and felt a serious knot buried under the hair. “What the hell did you hit me with, Jimi?”
“A baseball bat,” Vauxhall said. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry, Ade.”
I told her I’d be fine. I’d hit myself with worse before.
She laughed uncomfortably.
“So, Jimi, why am I in my boxers?”
Jimi asked me, “What did you see?”
And that’s when I noticed he was wearing my clothes.
FOUR
“Why are you wearing my clothes?”
Jimi didn’t answer. He threw his cigarette out of the window and then scratched at his chin and pulled a notebook out from the glove box. He opened the notebook, took a pen from his pocket, turned to me, smacked his lips, and asked, again, slowly, “What did you see?”
“I saw the future. I saw myself at home. Boring, really.”
Jimi asked, “How far out?”
“I don’t know. Weeks, maybe. I wasn’t focused, I wasn’t trying, and when I’m not trying I only see a little ways out. Could have been months.”
He wrote that down. Then he asked, “Can you make it sooner?”
“Make what sooner?”
“The future you see, Ade. Can you see something in, like, days?”
“Maybe, but I can’t control it. Why, Jimi? What’s-”
He shushed me and held up the notebook. On the cover, it read THE BESTIARY. Jimi said, “It’s a catalog of the worst sorts of creatures: parents.” He wasn’t laughing when he said it. He added, “My whole childhood, right here. Everything I can remember. Everything I can’t. But what happens next, after today, after next week, that seems pretty important to know too. I’m hoping you’ll help me see it?”
“I can only see my own, Jimi. I don’t think I’ll-”
That’s when I threw up. All over the back of Jimi’s car.
And then, thankfully, I blacked out. Happens. When you’ve had as many concussions as I’ve had, blacking out is almost second nature. Throwing up too.
When I woke up I was inside my house, fully dressed, lying in bed with my mom hovering over me, dabbing my head with a wet towel and singing that one hymn about being in the garden with Him.
When she saw I was awake she stopped singing. Smiled.
“Was I dressed when I got in bed?” I asked.
Mom made a funny face. An uncomfortable face. She said, “Yes, dear. Of course you were. Just like you are now. Your friends just dropped you off, said you’d… well, they said you’d had an accident. But I know…”
And then she went off to get the Revelation Book. I stayed in bed totally confused, unsure of why I was so messed up and not really certain if what I remembered happening had really, actually happened. I decided, right before falling asleep, that I needed to see Dr. Borgo again. And, for the first time in a very long time, I wondered if my future, the one my mom was so eager to chart out, could somehow be wrong.
Be totally, absolutely wrong.
But right now, sitting on the toilet, my only thought is what I’m supposed to do next; I yell for Paige to come back into the men’s room. I yell for her to help me up again. I yell, “I’m not naked or anything, you can totally come in here.”
She opens the door to the stall and says, “I never left, dumbo.”
“Can you get me out of here? Was I going to puke or something?”
“I think you had to take a leak.”
I screw up my face. “I’m totally confused. By the way, you seen Jimi or Vaux today? Were they at school?”
“No,” Paige says.
She helps me up and on our way out of the bathroom she tells me that this is officially the last time she’s going to help me like this. She tells me that even if I got totally crippled and was in a wheelchair the rest of my life she wouldn’t ever help me to the bathroom again. She says, “But I’ll give you a chance to redeem yourself.”
“You love me and you like cleaning up after me. If you didn’t, you would have nothing to bitch about. I add the spice to your life.”
Paige laughs. “Promise you won’t do your thing. At least a week off?”
Fingers crossed behind my back, I say, “Promise. By the way, did I tell you that Vauxhall is just like me? Isn’t that freaking crazy? The two of us just these beautiful, messed-up psychic being
s? How-”
“Yes, Ade. You told me. I’m very happy for you and I really hope the two of you wonderful junkies have a great future together.”
“Ouch.”
CHAPTER FIVE
ONE
Quail Telephonics
Denver, Colorado
To Whom It May Concern:
So, I’ve been getting these calls. Really it’s only been two, but they’ve been bizarre enough that I’m kind of getting stressed out about them. The first was roughly two weeks ago. Old, raspy-voiced guy on the other end of the line telling me that he saw me in a vision (!?) and that my life was in danger. Only, he didn’t seem that concerned about it. Freaked the hell out of me, if you’ll excuse my French. Wrong number, everyone said. Prank call, they told me.
But it happened again last night-Thursday, September 24-and it was the same guy. He knew my name. He said much of the same stuff as last time. That he saw me in a vision and that my life was in danger, only this time he went further, he said that what he saw scared him. Said it would be at a reservoir again. A battle royale, he said. Someone will die. He said, and I’m quoting here, that “what goes down is almost biblical.” So I started suspecting my mom had something to do with it, but that’s just paranoid thinking and I don’t want to be That Guy.
Anyway, why I’m writing is because I’m wondering if you’d be willing to help me out here. I don’t think this is anything for the cops to get involved in, but I’m hoping you can maybe track the calls. Maybe trace them for me? Caller ID it just shows up as “unknown” and star 69 doesn’t get me anything but what sounds like a fax line.
Thanks for your time. Let me know!
Ade Patience
TWO
Paige and I go to Rock Island.
It’s this dance club down on Fifteenth in LoDo and they’ve got a dark dance floor (tonight the DJ’s spinning ’80s industrial) and in the basement some pool tables and a few ragged chairs to kick your feet up in.
We head to the basement. I drink some Coke while Paige dances to one of her favorite songs, that super-annoying metal cover of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” and then we pulls chairs over to a corner and just sit and chat. Paige all sweaty and me with a knit cap pulled low over all my damage and Band-Aids.
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