Game changer, p.13
Game Changer, page 13
“You should be nice and relaxed now,” he said.
“Mmmyeah,” I croaked.
“Good. Now I want you to go back to the moment of one of your shifts. Imagine it deeply.”
So I tried. And got nothing. The thing is, the jumps were both instantaneous and not. Like being under anesthesia. You know the “after” is different from the “before,” but you can’t access the in-between.
“This is pointless.”
“Just keep trying.”
I sighed and moved slightly, feeling the water ripple around my body. I felt myself getting tense, so I forced my limbs to relax again. Then my mind started to ping on something. You know how sometimes you unexpectedly trigger the memory of a dream you had? Not even a recent one, but one you had maybe years ago, but never remembered until that moment? That’s what this was like. The in-between was there—I just had to relax into it.
Soon I was there again. The “Elsewhere,” as the Edwards called it. I remembered flashes of light and sound. Uneven, like Morse code. There was an indescribable sense of movement. I was moving left and right, back and forth all at once.
“I got something,” I rasped. “I got something!”
“Slow it down,” Ed said. “Take it in. Let the feeling linger. What’s around you?”
But my mind was already drifting, and I was now seeing cheeseburgers in my head, because I was hungry. I told them, and they didn’t seem as exasperated as I thought they would be.
“That’s how your mind is interpreting the realities,” Ed said. “Just go with it. Pick a burger.”
“Which one?”
“The best-tasting one.”
“How do I know how it tastes before I pick it?”
This is the moment that Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke to use the Force. But somehow choosing an imaginary cheeseburger seemed like an absolute waste of a Jedi Master’s time.
I chose one. But I didn’t get to eat it—because it devoured me first. The moment it was chosen, it enveloped me. Its meat was rancid. Fetid. Disgusting, but it was too late to escape, because I had lost control. Then I realized that I was reliving my arrival in this world. I remembered that sense of foreboding when I snapped back to the field after I tackled the quarterback. I knew it was bad, even before I knew how bad.
I leapt up almost involuntarily, knocked open the lid, and spilled out onto the floor beside the tank, dripping wet and out of breath.
“Well,” Ed said. “It looks like you had a breakthrough.”
11
Nevermore
I couldn’t sleep that night. Not because of my headache—my deep-brain EMP float had eased that. It was because I couldn’t stop thinking about Leo. To me, he had always been the definition of dignity. But now he had been knocked so far down, every one of his expectations had fallen to the level of simple survival. A place where one’s own self-respect had to be sacrificed on a regular basis just to make it through the day.
The idea of basic human dignity being stripped away was way on the edge of my radar. People whose lives were so far removed from mine, they might as well have been on a different planet. It’s like the way my parents always change the channel whenever some ad comes on for a charity about starving people in terrible places. It isn’t just a case of “not my problem.” It’s “not my universe.”
But what happens when someone’s future is stripped away—their entire life hamstrung right in front of you? Someone who, in a sense, you love, although you’d never use that word to describe it—but what is friendship if it isn’t some kind of love?
On Tuesday Leo called me. He left a message while I was at school. He was the only person I knew who actually left voice messages—same as the Leo from my world. It was comforting.
“It’s Leo Johnson,” he said, “from Publix.” Like he needed to remind me. “Yeah, so meet me at St. Clair Park at four o’clock today.”
It would mean ditching football practice—an inexcusable offense—but my priorities had shifted.
St. Clair Park was actually St. Clair Memorial Park. A cemetery. The place where Angela was buried. Leo was waiting for me when I got there, and led me to her grave.
“I wanted you to see it,” Leo said. “I don’t know why, I just wanted to show it to you.”
Angela’s gravestone was pink. Seeing that gravestone made it painfully real. According to the date, she died a year and a half ago. On April Fools’ Day, like it was all some cosmic practical joke.
“I’m glad you had me come here,” I told him, even though I wasn’t, really. But he needed to do this, and I respected that. I could withstand a few nightmares if it eased his. “She would have hated that it was pink,” I told him.
Leo laughed. “Got that right. But my parents still saw her as their little princess.” Then he got serious again. “I’ve been getting more memories of things that couldn’t have happened,” he said. “Not big ones, just little things.”
“Like what?”
“Like, did you once break your arm at a birthday party?”
“Ha!” Now there was a memory I’d prefer to forget myself. “Freaking Norris. He was swinging at a piñata and missed.”
“Who’s Norris?” Leo asked.
“A friend of ours,” I told him. “Sort of.”
Leo accepted it, but clearly had no memory of him.
“Of course I could have heard about it somewhere. That would be the sensible explanation.”
“Yeah,” I had to admit, “it would be.”
“But here’s the thing. You know that scientist guy—Stephen Hawking? Well, right before he died, he published a paper saying that parallel universes probably exist. They say he would’ve gotten a Nobel Prize for it, but you gotta be alive to get one of those.”
“So you’re saying you believe me now?”
He took a deep breath. “Let’s not go there,” he said. “Let’s just go with what is. What we know for sure. And what I know for sure is this.” Then he took out a football from his backpack. “I was thinking maybe we could toss it around.”
“Here? In a graveyard?”
“The dead don’t mind. And neither do the caretakers. My dad and I come here and toss a ball around sometimes. They know us. They know about Angela. And I’m sure the caretakers won’t mind you handling a football here, considering who your father is.”
My father. It was an odd thing being in his shadow now, when I had never known him to cast much of a shadow at all.
“I was thinking,” said Leo, “that maybe I’d get my GED and go to community college. Maybe get back into football. Some community colleges here have good teams, don’t they?”
“Yeah, Leo,” I said, trying to keep my eyes from clouding up. “Yeah, they do.” I backed up to put a fair throwing distance between us, then we started tossing the ball back and forth over the dead like it was a perfectly natural thing to do. We kept it up until sundown, when the caretakers politely shooed us out and locked the gate for the night. But before I left, I put a hand on Angela’s headstone, said a silent prayer, and made her a promise that I would not leave her like this.
“If you need my help with this thing that you say is going on,” Leo said, “you got my number.”
Then we went our separate ways.
I got home just in time for an honest-to-goodness sit-down dinner—something that was rare for our family in this world, although in my original dump of a house, we did it almost every night. Here, no one lived on the same schedule, so most of the time it was takeout, and leftovers from yesterday’s takeout.
But tonight, Cara, our housekeeper, had prepared a real meal: a roast with fingerling potatoes, which always sounded vaguely cannibalistic to me. Cara was Black. She tried to serve us, but I insisted on serving myself—and, following my lead, so did Hunter.
“Why don’t you go home, Cara,” my mom said. “You’ve had a long day.”
To which Cara responded, “Thank you, ma’am. Enjoy the roast.”
I hated that she called my mom “ma’am.” I hated that she was cooking for us instead of for her own family. I felt uptight and awkward about it even after she had gone. Especially because the me from this world never gave it a second thought. He didn’t even know or care if she had a family.
My parents made small talk over dinner, trying to engage Hunter and me, but we were both the princes of one-word answers. How’s school? “Good.” Doing anything interesting? “Eh.” Coach working you too hard? “Naah.” Eventually they just resorted to talking to each other. Today’s topics of conversation were the Icelandic refugee crisis (which was a unique aspect of this world), and whether or not electrolyte-infused goji berry protein powder was a growing trend in the supplement market.
I, of course, had to open my big mouth about that. “Do goji berries grow in Iceland?” I asked. The question stymied my parents.
“I don’t know,” my mother said. “Probably not. Why?”
“Because I don’t get how you could talk about a country’s civil war in the same breath that you talk about some stupid protein powder.”
My father gave me one notch beneath a glare. “All these things affect our lives in one way or another.”
“Actually, I was thinking that maybe we could take in an Icelandic refugee family,” Mom suggested. “Let them stay in our carriage house.”
And my dad said, “I’ll look into it. I think it would be . . . a meaningful gesture.”
I accessed some memories of my parents here. They were quite the philanthropists—donating time and money to worthy causes. Some causes more than others. But taking in a displaced family seemed a step out of their comfort zone. I didn’t think much about it at first.
Hunter ate quickly and excused himself. I was done only seconds after him, but my parents asked me to stay for a moment.
“Why?” I asked. “Is there dessert?”
But the reason had nothing to do with the food, and everything to do with why we were having this meal in the first place. It was to ambush me.
“We heard you’ve joined a social action club at school,” my dad said.
I immediately became suspicious. “Heard from who?”
He just shrugged. “Just around. People talk.”
Then my mom chimed in. “We think it’s wonderful that you’re taking an interest in social issues, Ash. We just want to make sure that this is really something you want to be involved in.”
“And that you’ve thought it through,” added my father.
Clearly, they knew what club I had joined. I was not interested in this conversation. “Are we done?” I asked, pushing my chair back to indicate that, even if they weren’t, I was.
Dad sighed. “Ash, I’m no fan of segregation. If you ask me, anyone should be able to go to any school they want. But not everybody feels that way.”
“And we need to respect those feelings, too,” said Mom, like thunder chasing lightning.
“I have no respect for people who feel that way,” I told her.
“And that’s your prerogative,” said my father, “but your actions have ramifications you might not have considered.”
“Like what?”
My father went silent for a moment. “I’ve been considering a run for mayor,” he finally said. “And I expect the support I’ll be getting will be from people who like things to change much more slowly . . .”
“You mean not at all.”
“I mean that you can’t change people’s minds without first winning them over. There are what? Six states now trying to ban segregation? If they succeed, I’m sure more will follow. In the meantime we have to look at things practically.”
There’s this old movie where all the real people start getting replaced by pod people, who pop out of giant veiny seeds. They look the same, but you can tell that something’s terribly wrong—and if you’re not careful you become one of them. That’s what my parents were now. Pod people.
“What if I told you that my best friend is a Black kid?” I hurled at them. “A Black kid who dropped out of school and works as a supermarket checker, because he never had the chance to do anything else.”
“I’d say that you were lying,” said my father. “Because I know all your friends.”
“You once knew this one . . . ,” I prompted, watching them for that moment of confused recognition—but there was nothing. They were so single-minded with their agenda, and so close-minded in other ways, the proximity effect didn’t seem to work on them. Their tunnel vision didn’t leave room for anything in the periphery.
“We’re glad that you’ve taken on a cause so admirable,” Mom said, getting the conversation back on point.
“But,” added Dad, “maybe you can redirect that energy.”
And then Mom laid the rest of their cards on the table. “Why don’t you help us choose an Icelandic family to take in?”
While I had sympathy for displaced Icelandic people, there was a glaring absurdity to this pod-people solution.
“Are you kidding me? There are families on the other side of town who are struggling, and you want to ignore them and help people from Iceland instead?”
I stood up, and so did my father.
“Ash,” he said, “my own son taking a vocal stance right now on such a hot-button issue as segregation is going to make it very difficult for me to run a campaign.”
“Well, then,” I said, “maybe you need to redirect that energy.”
“I heard the whole thing,” Hunter said when I passed his room upstairs, a few minutes later. “I want you to know that I think it’s pretty cool what you’re doing. Even if it does screw things up for Dad.”
“Thanks, Hunter.”
He took a moment to think about it. “I . . . I’d probably feel a little awkward going to school with black kids at first,” he said. “But just because it makes me uncomfortable doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen, right? I mean, if we just did things that made us feel comfortable, we’d never leave the couch. Maybe I’ll do something to fight segregation, too.”
“Start by sitting in the integrated section at the Towne Centre, and other places,” I suggested. “See which friends join you, and which ones don’t. Then maybe make some new friends.”
He grinned. “That easy, huh?”
It reminded me of something else Hunter had said should be easy. And so I made a pact with him. “If you do it, I’ll stop selling drugs for good.”
He considered that. “Even to me?”
“Especially to you.”
He weighed that and nodded. “I can live with that,” he said.
I had another sit-down dinner the following night—but thankfully not at my house, and not with my parents. Leo asked me over for dinner.
“Don’t make a big deal of it,” he told me. “I told my mom we tossed a ball together, and she wouldn’t get out of my face until I invited you over. I think she thought I was making it up, and she called my bluff.”
I said yes, but I was almost afraid to go. I didn’t want to see how he was forced to live in this world. Turns out he lived in the same place as before, but the house—as well as the neighborhood around it—was different. Homes that had once been well kept were in disrepair. Sagging overhangs, peeling paint, yards gone to seed. Someone passing by on their proverbial high horse might turn up their nose and say these people just didn’t care—but I knew that couldn’t be further from the truth. Of course they cared—but how can you pay for a new roof when you’re struggling to put food on the table? How do you paint your house when you’re already working two jobs? True in my original world as well, but that didn’t mean my privileged ass ever thought about it before today.
If you looked close enough, however, there were plenty of signs that people took pride in every way they could. A small but perfectly manicured flower garden in an otherwise wild yard. A car detailed and polished to a showroom sheen, in absolute defiance of the dent in its side.
In my world, Leo’s parents had rebuilt their porch, but here it sagged from the weight of fifty summers. And yet above it, hanging from the awning, were dozens of beautiful wind chimes tinkling and twinkling in the night. Yeah, this was Leo’s home.
“Where I come from,” I told him, “your mom has a side business making those.”
“Yeah, she makes ’em,” Leo said. “No business though. She sells them at church bazaars sometimes, but mostly she gives ’em as gifts.” Then he added, “Wish she’d give away more—those damn things keep me up all night.”
Leo’s mom greeted me at the door a bit awkwardly. “Ash Bowman,” she said, “pleased to meet you. I hope you like mac and cheese.”
“And not the store-bought stuff,” Leo was quick to say. “The real thing—from scratch.”
I smiled as I shook her hand. “I always love your mac and cheese, Mrs. Johnson.” Then I gave a nervous little cough. “I mean . . . I always love homemade, and I’m sure yours is something special.”
It was a fair enough save, although Leo gave me a sideways glance.
“Leo tells me you’re encouraging him back into football. Good to see a prominent family like yours taking an interest in others.”
I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t my family, it was just me—but that would have been petty. “Talent deserves attention,” I told her instead. “Glad I can give some.”
She glanced at Leo, glowing with just enough pride to be below the embarrassment threshold, before going back into the kitchen.
In my world, Mrs. Johnson was the head of human resources at a local hospital. According to Leo, she still worked at the hospital, but here it was in food service, wheeling meals to patients. Minimum wage, which here was single digits. There were pictures of Angela everywhere. She looked the same as I remembered. Except that she was gone. Leo’s father was in a lot of pictures, but wasn’t present that night. “He works the night shift,” Leo told me. I didn’t ask doing what.
“The Blue Demons having a good year?” Leo’s mom asked as the three of us sat down to dinner.
“I guess,” I told her. “Two and one. Still too early to say.”
I dug in. There was no lobster in the mac and cheese; it had crawfish instead, which to me tasted exactly the same. Comfort-food perfection. I complimented Mrs. Johnson on it—but then Leo said something that sent me spiraling.
