Nearly to the bottom of the hill and after what had to be two or three sonic booms, the Fastest Boy Alive reached the turn before the Intersection of Doom. This was a stoplight whose timing was specifically designed to foil his goal of reaching the bottom without any application of brakes and was doubly troublesome for being hidden by a blind curve and a slight leveling of the hill. Ordinary mortals might be confounded by such a thing, but not him.
He concentrated on the Present while chancing a quick look at the Secret Future. When he was just a little kid it took him, like, forever to figure out how to do this, but now it was as easy as . . . well, riding a bike. And his bike was a time machine, he figured, because the faster he went, the further ahead he could see, just because he got to everyplace sooner.
Rounding the bend in the Secret Future, he saw the light was just turning green. In the present, he was about to come around that corner. He swerved around the guy getting out of the car without checking first to see if there were any hell-bent bikers bearing down and went by so fast he almost didn’t hear the man utter a bad word in surprise. And then he was around the bend where the light was just turning green.
Then the Secret Future went all nutty. Corry saw and felt himself hitting the back of a car that had been turning in front of him, one he thought was going to be out of the way before he got there up until the car stopped suddenly and left its rear end right where Corry was steering the bike. Corry felt himself flying headfirst down the hill—the Fastest Broken Boy Barely Alive.
He winced and very nearly lost control of the bike. Sometimes the Secret Future was so vivid, he forgot it was a ghost future and that it wasn’t permanent. He reluctantly applied the brakes.
Of all the things he had to get used to in his life, the part about how the future isn’t really the future until it’s actually happened was the hardest. Just thinking about it made his head hurt, so he didn’t think about it too much. It was Corry’s Secret Future, and that was that. Maybe it happened, and maybe he changed stuff around so something different happened instead. Usually it was just a lot easier to go along with it because it was so much less confusing that way, especially since it took a second or two for the Secret Future to go away properly. Which was why, even as he jerked his bike around the big Chevy’s fishtail, he could still see the asphalt coming up to greet his face. Thankfully, the adjustment took just before he got a chance to feel what would have happened next.
He remembered when he first figured out how things worked with the Secret Future. It took a good year or so of experimenting with it, which involved mostly saying inappropriate things at odd moments just to see how it played out. This gave Violet no end of grief, which he felt bad about when he looked back on it.
Corry was old enough to have developed an appreciation for the decisions his mother made in raising him and had only just recently begun to turn a critical eye on some of those decisions. A certain commune in Maine sprang to mind. And immediately sprang back out again because Violet had made him promise to never talk about it. Not that he remembered much. What he did remember was how suddenly they had left, heading out into the woods near nightfall and fully expecting to be eaten by some sort of creature until happening on a farmhouse occupied by an elderly couple named Crandall. The Crandalls, fortunately, had a god who told them they had to take in Violet and Corry. Corry wasn’t sure which god that was, but he was awfully glad this god had left instructions for their care.
And the sound of the shotgun; he remembered that, and he remembered what happened to Charlie Bluff’s leg. He didn’t want to remember either of those things, but they wouldn’t go away.
Once past the Intersection of Doom, there was nothing left for the Fastest Boy Alive to do but come to the bottom of the hill and coast to a stop. He could have allowed his momentum to carry him through the next intersection, but it was even worse than Doom. It was Certain Death. He didn’t need to see the Secret Future to understand that. Plus, he had to turn left from that point and head back uphill again. Not that it mattered, as it was uphill in all directions; he had come to a stop in the bottom of a bowl.
Corry looked down at his watch—a black, plastic marvel with a digital face that he’d gotten for Christmas and which, if he wasn’t careful, he could stare at for hours—and saw that it was still too early. He pulled the bike off the side of the street and walked it to the playground just to the right of the Intersection of Certain Death.
He used to make the mistake of going straight to the hospital from school, the same route Violet drove every morning in the Dart. She knew what time school let out and could do simple math, yet still it took her a week to figure out that Corry was getting there much too fast. But once she did there was holy hell to pay, and for a week he lost the use of his bike and television after supper. From this he could have learned to travel at a more reasonable rate of speed, but that struck him as an unacceptable solution. It made much more sense to just not show up until she thought he should.
Being the first truly good day of the year, the playground was plenty occupied with little kids, their moms, and even a couple of dads. He pushed the bike past all of them—his legs a little achy from the recent burst of exercise—until he got to the edge of the cement pond. In another month or two, this part of the park would be the most popular, for in the center of the circular recession was a nozzle, and from that nozzle water would burst forth, filling the bottom of the pond and covering the heads and faces of many a grateful kid. But it wasn’t quite warm enough yet for it, which was a shame. Corry would have been pretty happy with a brief dousing.
Reaching an empty grassy spot, he tipped over the bike and slipped off his backpack, dropping it down next to the front wheel. Both the inside part of the pack and the back of his shirt were wet with sweat. He sat down and watched the kids play.
It was a lot of work, trying to keep his head in the present all the time. Nobody understood that. Not even Violet, who he had tried to make understand a bunch of times without any real success. This had more to do with her insistence that he not talk about it than anything else. He didn’t get that at all, but . . . well, sometimes it seemed like his own mom was kind of scared of him. Which was weird, but he didn’t allow himself to get too deeply into the idea.
Relaxing and leaning back onto the grass, he let go of the present and watched as the kids running around the metal play sets blurred and elongated until they all looked like giant centipedes that grew longer the faster they ran. At the same time their shouts became almost an incoherent flurry of noise, like ten radio stations playing at once.
If he wanted to, he could focus on a point in their Secret Futures. Two seconds ahead, say. He’d been practicing that during recess, which was why all the other kids in school called him Spooky behind his back. It didn’t bother him all that much; it wasn’t the first time someone called him a name like that, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. He was just different, and that was that. If they couldn’t deal with that, whatever. He didn’t much care for most of them anyway. Except for maybe a couple of the girls.
Anyway, he was pretty sure he was some kind of superhero, and superheroes were never understood when they were in their secret identities. That was just the way it was. Like Spider-Man. He was miserable pretty much all the time despite being just about the coolest superhero there ever was. Sometimes he wished the guy could be a bit more like Superman, who never seemed to have any problems at all.
Once he was old enough to understand that nobody around him saw the world the way he did, he spent much of his free time wondering why. In the comics, it was always a radioactive accident or something like that. But he couldn’t remember ever not seeing the Secret Future, so it either happened when he was a baby—and Violet had never mentioned any accidents—or he was a mutant or something. Which meant, since Violet didn’t have any special abilities, it had to have something to do with his father.
Unfortunately, while Violet was well versed—if not well-informed—on any varie
ty of subjects, on the matter of his father she knew exactly three things; he was tall, he was a soldier, and his last name was Corrigan. Even if Corry knew where to begin, he had a feeling that he didn’t have enough facts to narrow down a search. And it got worse. As he understood it, Violet had been using drugs—which he was never ever to use himself under pain of extreme death and blah, blah, blah—when she “knew” his father.
Corry had only the vaguest understanding of sex. What he did understand was that there was a difference between the word knew and the word “knew” when his mother said it in reference to his father. For one thing, she made the little quotation marks with her fingers. But he understood drugs very well, albeit vicariously. When she “knew” his father, it was one night, briefly, and she was tripping. She could very well have imagined the army jacket and the name and even the height. And supposing she didn’t, who was to say it was even his jacket?
His father, then, had taken on a series of remarkable characteristics during Corry’s lifetime. The latest incarnation had Daddy Corrigan portrayed as a time traveler, sent to the past to make a baby who would grow up and save the world. Corry liked that story a lot. It was better than the alien one that preceded it and way better than the one he cribbed from the Bible. Of course, all these stories ended with a heroic sacrifice, but that was okay.
He checked his watch again. It was time to get moving. He stood up and then with great effort collapsed the centipede-children back into their singular selves, like he was shoving one of those trick snakes back into its fake peanut can. But unlike the snake, the children were still there in the Secret Future, only de-emphasized, like unfinished connect-the-dots puzzles.
Slipping on his backpack, he saw that one of them was about to skin his knee. It looked painful. But these things happen.
* * *
“Hey, Stuntman! How’s it going?”
“Hey, Carl.” Corry smiled, hopping off his bike at the parking lot gate. Carl the guard looked to have survived winter all right, which Corry thought was sort of amazing as he was something like two hundred years old. “Anything going on?”
“Pitching’s looking good this year, Stuntman.”
Carl habitually jumped ahead several steps when engaging in small talk, which gave the boy who already saw the future no end of fits. In this case, he was pretty sure Carl was talking about the Red Sox because Carl believed everyone he spoke to devoted all of their free time to following the team like he did. Corry never figured out a way to explain that he wasn’t a big sports fan.
“Yeah?” he asked.
“This is their year,” Carl added for emphasis.
“Uh-huh. Can I go in? My mom’s waiting.”
“Sure, go on ahead.”
“Thanks.”
The first time he biked to his mom’s work, Corry had neglected to stop for Carl the parking lot guard, mostly because he just didn’t know he was supposed to. Instead, he cruised right past the booth and then spent the next ten minutes avoiding the crazy old guy who was trying to grab the back of his bike. This was what earned him the nickname Stuntman. If Corry had chosen a nickname for Carl based on the same incident, it would have probably been Heart Attack, just because it looked like Carl was having one the whole time.
Corry walked the bike the rest of the way, up to a metal bike stand outside the front door. The stand was there so he could, theoretically, have something to attach the bike lock to. He had a lock, but he only used it outside the school. He figured one of the adult-sized ten-speeds would vanish a lot faster than his kid-sized, one-speed dirt bike. Plus, Carl would make sure nobody took off with it. Other than listening to the sports stuff on the radio, he didn’t have much else to do.
Violet was waiting for him in the lobby by the front desk with one eye on her watch. Corry wondered if she honestly believed she could control his rate of travel by monitoring his arrival time, or if she just did that to make herself feel better. He suspected the latter, reasoning that adults liked to think they were in control of things and sometimes went out of their way to convince themselves they were. It was the same with his teachers, who loved to think they knew everything going on in the school, even when they didn’t know half of it.
“How was the ride, honey?” Violet greeted. She was wearing her white uniform and had her hair pulled back tightly behind her ears. He always thought that made her look like a Vulcan.
“Fine,” he said, allowing her to muss up his sweaty head of hair—a gesture of affection she’d taken up a number of years ago in lieu of hugging.
“Everyone’s been asking about you,” she said, leading him past the reception desk, which was occupied by a lady Corry didn’t know. She was on the phone anyway.
“Really?”
“Uh-huh. Mr. Pierce has been dying for a good game of rummy.”
All of the guests at McClaren Hospital were men, and all of them were crazy. Violet had been working there, and bringing Corry, for a year before he was even told this, and it came as a surprise. But it turned out there were different kinds of crazy. There was Really Crazy, and then there was only Mildly Crazy. The ones he knew were the second kind. Most of them had checked themselves into the hospital, which he thought was pretty good evidence they were crazy. Not that it was a bad place, but he wouldn’t want to live there all the time.
As for the Really Crazies, they were kept somewhere else. Corry had never been there and wasn’t even sure how to get there, which was all right with him.
“Do you have lots of homework?” Violet asked, doing that annoying thing where she tried to start a normal conversation.
“No,” he said. Which was always going to be the answer regardless of how much homework he actually had. But that was a required parenting question or something.
When Corry first started visiting, it was partly because he didn’t have much else to do, but mostly because Violet didn’t like how when he was at home alone he tended not to do his homework. Which, considering how much of his upbringing had been spent around people telling him to always challenge authority, made some sense. But it turned out challenging authority was one of those things only adults were allowed to do.
To solve the problem, Violet brought him to work, made him sit in a corner in the lobby, and do all his lessons. Problem was, he was in fifth grade at the time, and fifth graders don’t get enough homework to fill up a whole afternoon. So when he was finished, he just sat there and stared at stuff. After a while she started bringing him into the common room when he was done so he could watch television, and pretty soon he was skipping the lobby and just doing all his work in the common room, right in the middle of the Mildly Crazies. Which was actually pretty great. A lot of them were really smart—a few way smarter than his teachers, even—and helped him with the tougher stuff. And when he was done, he’d play card games and watch television until it was time to go. It was like having a whole hospital full of substitute parents—crazy parents, but whatever.
As they walked—in silence, as Violet had run out of things to ask him—the familiar smell of the hospital corridors hit his nose. The odor was oddly comforting, only because he hadn’t smelled it in such a long time. Violet said that was a clean smell, but Corry thought maybe the cleaners just used extra bleach to make it seem like they were working hard, like how he always cleaned his room by pushing stuff to the wall just to show lots of carpet. And if he looked really closely at the cement floor, at the spot where the rubberized wall met up with it, he could see a layer of dust that told him he was onto something.
The common room was halfway down the corridor, right at the edge of the Mildly Crazy wing. It was a big room with a lot of old board games stuffed in a closet, a color television, and big, double-paned windows that showed off the back of the property, which was hilly and green in the summer. Toward the end of the day the sun always streamed in through the windows and sometimes made cool little rainbows on the walls and the carpet. Mr. Conway—who was a scientist when he wasn’t crazy—explained to Co
rry about the rainbows, how the double panes on the glass acted like a prism when the light hit them just right, and that the colors are actually part of the sunlight. Or something. Corry liked it better when he didn’t understand it, so he promptly forgot the details.
Before they reached the doorway, Corry peeked ahead into the Secret Future and noticed with great disappointment that the room was nearly empty, except for Janet and some guy he’d never seen before.
“Hey, kiddo,” Janet greeted once they reached the threshold, looking up from an old outdoors magazine she was flipping through. “Everyone’s in session just now. They’ll be by later.”
Janet was an orderly, like Violet. But she was more of the crowd-control type while Violet was more of a medication-and-clean-up type. Since Janet was easily the largest woman—in all directions—Corry had ever met, he could understand why she did that kind of job.
Corry’s gaze drifted over to the man in the chair in the corner. He was a way old guy, skinny but with extra flesh hanging off of him like somebody had deflated him recently. The man returned the gaze and smiled. In the Secret Future, Janet was introducing them.
“Why don’t you work on your homework,” Violet suggested, patting him on the shoulder. “I’ll stop by again later. Okay?”
“Sure,” he said flatly, slipping off his backpack.
Violet rubbed his hair goodbye and left, either not noticing the new Mildly Crazy in the corner or not particularly concerned that she was leaving her son with him. Didn’t look like the guy could get up out of the chair in anything under five minutes, so it probably wasn’t a bad bet.
“This is Mr. Nilsson,” Janet said, leading Corry closer to the chair. “Mr. Nilsson, this is—”
“You must be young Corry Bain,” Mr. Nilsson said. Corry’s stomach did a back flip, inadvertently causing him to step backward to keep from falling over. It wasn’t the old man’s voice that set him off. He actually had a deep and soothing voice, one much better suited for a radio announcer or a professional wrestler. And it wasn’t that Mr. Nilsson appeared to already know Corry.
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