Jay Asher - The Future of Us

We don’t say much for the drive to school. When we pull into the student parking lot, I check my watch. The bell is set to ring in three minutes.

“I know I dragged you into this,” she says, turning in her seat to face me, “but I’m a little hurt that you’re not taking it more seriously. If you saw your future and it looked terrible, I don’t think you’d be so quick to blow this off.”

“But it’s not real,” I say. I crumple up the donut bag and stuff it into my empty cup. “How about after your track meet, let’s try to figure it out? Maybe whoever made it misspelled your name somewhere or got a date wrong. We’ll find something.”

“Why do you need to prove it’s a prank so badly?” Emma asks.

“So you can stop worrying. Your life is going to turn out fine.”

Emma looks into the rearview mirror, and then turns to me. “Josh, before you came back over last night, I found something else on that website.”

The way she’s staring at me gives me the chills.

“If someone’s pulling a prank on me,” she adds, “then they’re also pulling a prank on you.”

“ME?” Josh’s eyes squint in confusion.

His webpage was one of the many things that kept me awake last night. I should have told him about it the instant he came up to my room.

“Emma.” Josh waves a hand in front of my eyes. “What are you talking about?”

“Last night,” I say, “before you came over, I was looking at the Facebook website. Remember where it says I have three hundred and twenty friends.” I pause and exhale slowly. “It showed you as one of them.”

There’s silence in the car.

“It said ‘Josh Templeton,’” I add, “along with a picture of you. An older you.”

Josh taps the Sunshine Donuts cup against his knee. He didn’t want to believe any of this. He wanted to prove it was a prank.

“You have short hair like David,” I say. “And you wear glasses.”

“My eyes are fine,” Josh says.

“Not in the future, apparently.”

Josh presses his thumbnail into the Styrofoam cup, making half-moon marks up one side. “Did you see anything else? When you clicked on Emma Nelson Jones’s picture, it took you to another webpage. Could you do that with mine?”

I nod. “It has your birthday as April fifth, and it says you went to the University of Washington.”

“Like David,” Josh says.

“And now you live back here again.”

“In Lake Forest?”

I wonder how he feels about that. Personally, I’m determined to move away someday. There’s no actual forest in town and Crown Lake is nine miles down the highway, surrounded by expensive houses. The downtown is only three streets long, and you can’t do anything without everyone knowing about it. But Josh is more laid back than I am. He seems to think Lake Forest is perfectly fine.

“Where’s my house?” Josh asks. “They don’t have me living with my parents when I’m in my thirties, do they?”

I shake my head. “I think you’re out by the lake. There was a picture of you in your yard, and you could see a dock in the background with a motorboat hitched to it.”

“Very cool,” Josh says. “So they made me rich.”

I roll my eyes. “Why do you keep saying ‘they’? Who are you talking about?”

“The people who created this joke of a website. I’m going to go to the tech lab today and see if anyone’s been scanning pictures of—”

“When you say ‘the people who created this,’ don’t you get it? At some point in the future, we created it. I don’t know exactly what it is, but it looks like interconnected websites where people show their photos and write about everything going on in their lives, like whether they found a parking spot or what they ate for breakfast.”

“But why?” Josh asks.

The first bell rings for homeroom. Graham’s going to wonder where I was this morning. We usually meet at his locker and walk to band together.

I grab my bag and then reach for the door.

“Hang on,” Josh says as he spins a wheel on his skateboard. “That Facebook thing, did it say whether or not I’m married?”

I flip through my keys so I can unlock the trunk. “Yeah, you’re married.”

“What does it say about… her?” Josh asks, his face pale. “My… you know… wife?”

“I thought you didn’t believe in this,” I say.

“But I still want to know. It’s my future, right?”

“Here’s the thing,” I say, taking in a breath. “In the future, you’re married to Sydney Mills.”

Josh’s mouth hangs open.

I open my car door. “We’re going to be late.”

I IMAGINE Sydney Mills standing in front of me. Her long brown hair is held back by a white headband, and her eyes are the color of sweet caramel. She opens her arms and I pull her into a kiss, the fullness of her breasts pressing into my chest.

Then I open my eyes, grab my skateboard, and meet Emma at the trunk.

“Sydney Mills?” I say. “That’s ridiculous!”

Emma stuffs her silver running shoes into her backpack. “But now you want this to be true, right?”

“Why would I want to believe something that’s a hoax?” I say. Even so, I’m tempted to make Emma drive us home so I can see for myself. But if we’re late to school, the secretary will leave a message on our home answering machines.

Sydney Mills is a year ahead of me. She’s insanely hot, she’s one of the best athletes in school, and she comes from a wealthy family. I have no idea why anyone would match us up even as a joke. We’ve been in Peer Issues together since January and we’ve never said a word to each other.

“Look at you,” Emma teases, bumping her arm against mine. “You’re in love.”

Emma reaches up to ruffle my hair, but I pull away. I sling my backpack over one shoulder and start walking toward school.

“Wait up, Mr. Mills,” Emma calls.

I stop and turn around.

Emma shifts her saxophone case to her other hand. “It’s okay. I’d be walking like a maniac, too, if I discovered Cody and I were married and vacationing in Waikiki.”

Waikiki?

“I wasn’t walking fast because I’m excited,” I say. “I just hate it when you… you know… touch my hair and stuff.”

“I’m sorry,” Emma says, and I know she gets it. She doesn’t want to hurt our friendship either. That’s why she let me put distance between us for the past six months.

Emma points at a white convertible with its top up. “There’s Sydney’s car. Maybe you should leave a love sonnet beneath her windshield wiper. Or a haiku! It’s probably best if you don’t try to rhyme.”

For the junior high talent show, I bombed with my rap act. I thought I could be the first redheaded rapper. I called myself RedSauce. A few times a year, Emma brings it up to torture me. But that’s better than my brother, who mentions it almost every time we talk.

“So, Sydney and I go to Waikiki?” I ask.

As we push through the double doors of the school, Emma leans in close. “Your future self isn’t as revealing as I am,” she says, her breath sweet with cinnamon. “You don’t give juicy details about whether you and Sydney do it on the beach, so don’t get all hot and bothered.”

Emma waves goodbye, and then gets swallowed by the mob of students.

“You’re just jealous!” I say, but I don’t think she hears me.

I’M COMPLETELY DISTRACTED in band. After I miss my cue for the fourth time, Mr. Markowitz points his baton at the horn section and says, “How about everyone take a five-minute break? Flutes, come see me to talk about solos.”

I glance toward percussion, but Graham isn’t here yet. Sometimes he gets held up meeting with the swim coach, which is fine by me. I’m still dreading seeing him. I set my instrument on my seat and head to the water fountain. As I lean over the arc of water, I think about what happened on my computer. It all seems less real today, especially the part about Josh marrying Sydney Mills. That’s like matching me with Leonardo DiCaprio.

“Guess who?” Graham covers my eyes with one hand and wraps the other around my waist.

I wipe my mouth and then turn to face him. As soon as I do, my breath catches. He shaved off his hair! All that beautiful blond hair is gone, and now his scalp is prickly and pale.

“What did you do?” I ask.

He grins and rubs his hands over his head. “Greg and Matt came over after Ultimate Frisbee and we buzzed our heads. Do you like it?”

All I can do is stare.

“Admit it,” Graham says, lacing his fingers into mine. “You want to run your hands over my big, smooth head.”

I’m not in the mood for this. When he presses against me, I back away.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I say.

Neither of us says anything more. Sometimes it feels like if it weren’t for making out, we’d have nothing to do with each other.

“IT’S TIME TO END it with Graham,” I say, looking into my paper lunch bag.

We’re in the cafeteria so Kellan can load up on her daily special, french fries and Sprite. Kellan is an inch shorter than me, with shiny black hair and perfect skin. And she can put away fries without gaining a pound.

“Weren’t you going to break up with him in the park yesterday?” she asks.

I smile at a few girls who walk by us. “I never ended up seeing him.”

“Well, what’s stopping you from doing it today?” Kellan pays the cashier and heads to the condiment station. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not stopping you.”