Future Perfect (14 page)

“No,” I say.
“No.”
I take two big steps over to her and she's smiling at me, just a small smile. She shakes her head, a quick fond,
Oh, Ashley
.

“Oh yes,” she says. She swallows and says, “So, Simons wants to step in. She wants to
intervene
. She wants to
mediate
. She wants to get me into a program that can support me through the preliminary steps.”

“Well that's good . . . right?” I say hesitantly.

She goes on. “And my parents want to send me to—to an inpatient program.”

“Oh hell no,” Laura says. Her voice is low and furious.

“Simons can help, though,” I say excitedly. “I mean, we can fix it so—”

“No,” she says. “You can't fix everything. Especially me.”

“I don't think you need to be fixed!” I say. “I didn't say that.”

In the next room my grandmother says, “Ashley?”

I lower my voice. “I'm sorry. I just.” I don't know what to say.

“Everyone wants to fix me,” Jolene says. She has gone perfectly still, staring at the counter with her arms crossed over her chest and her narrow shoulders hunched. I put my hand out and then pull back when the kettle goes off. My grandmother calls again when I lift it off the stove. I step around Jolene, who hasn't moved at all, and peer into the parlor.

“The tea?” grandmother says.

“Almost done.”

“Your voice.”

“Okay,” I say.

“But how can they do that?” Laura says behind me. “Any of them?”

Jolene shakes her head. One shoulder goes up. “My parents tell me that while I am under their roof I am subject to their concerns about my psychology and my perversion.”

I grimace and Laura yelps at the word. “They're just going to have to—”

Jolene interrupts hard. “I didn't tell them what I wanted to do. I
don't know
yet.” Her face is miserable, her hands twisting. “But they want to know what I think transitioning will accomplish. ‘Do you really think you'll be happy when you're a real girl?' my father says. Just like that.”

“Oh Jolene,” Laura says. “No.”

“Principle Simons told me all about what she said to them. She said that my parents can't hold me back and I am a butterfly and George Love Academy is a chrysalis and I am meant to be free but it would be cruel to let me do it alone.”

I turn back to the stove, drop a handful of chamomile bags into the teapot to steep.

“And my mother said that it would be kinder to be cruel,” Jolene continues. “At least until I come to my senses.”

She slips between Laura and me. She picks up the teapot with two potholders. I don't know what to say to her. She carries it out of the room cradled in both hands, and I hear my grandmother say, “Ah, Jolene. Thank you, darling.”

Laura looks at me and turns to go into the parlor after her.

I pick up the sugar bowl and follow them. Jolene's already curled up into a small ball again at the farthest corner of the couch. Laura is sitting on the other side of the coffee table with a cookie in her mouth.

“You'll stay in the guest room of course,” my grandmother says, holding her hand out to me for the sugar bowl. A sleepy Soto pads into the room and circles around me, bumping her head into my knees and under my hand. Her fur is warm from the sun. I sit on the floor and put my arms around her neck, but she pulls free and jumps onto the couch, circles twice, and puts
her chin down on Jolene's knee with a sigh.

Jolene says, “Thank you.” I don't know if she's talking to Soto or my grandmother. She reaches out and runs her fingers down Soto's nose, again and again, and Soto closes her eyes in bliss.

“You can stay wherever you need to,” I say. My grandmother leans forward to start pouring the tea. “You can do whatever you want to, you don't have to—”

“I know that,” Jolene says. Serene face.

“You're brave,” I say. My grandmother holds out a cup to me and I climb up off the floor, sit next to Jolene on the couch and pick up the teapot.

“Shut up, Ashley,” Jolene snaps. “Don't do that. Don't be the same as everyone else.”

I jerk and slosh the hot tea over my hand. “I—I don't want to be,” I say.

“The couch, Ashley,” my grandmother snaps.

Jolene and Laura watch me set the pot down and dab at the brocade with a napkin. “You're not,” Jolene says, and I look up at her, Soto snoring in her lap. “Usually.”

Jolene has given me that gift our whole lives—that forgiveness when I am wrong. I can feel the backs of my eyes prickle like I'm going to start bawling too.

“Okay,” I say.

“So, then,” my grandmother says. “I can send Ashley's father
over to fetch your things once he's back from the”—she wiggles her fingers in the air—“the whatever it is he's doing to occupy himself today.”

“I can go,” Laura says. “I'm extremely diplomatic.”

“No,” Jolene and I say at once.

“I hope you stay,” I say to her.

She nods.

Grandmother says, “Good,” and sets her empty teacup down, lifts herself from the armchair. She pauses at the door. “You'll be just fine, Jolene darling.”

Jolene has both hands wrapped around her teacup, closing her eyes as she takes a long sip. I reach out to pat Soto, curled up against Jolene's body like a parenthesis, setting her apart from the rest of the couch.

I want to smooth Jolene's hair back and squeeze her hand and promise her that everything is going to be okay. That everything's fine and no other alternative to fine is possible. But I can't lie—even for Jolene.

T
he week crawls by. I avoid Hector, and skip lunch, and watch Jolene wilt. By Friday morning I cannot stand it anymore.

Omar has a show tonight—in an actual San Francisco gallery, Laura says. She was ready to take off herself, speeding up the highway and leaving us all behind, but I had that overwhelming impulse to sweep us all away. Shoot past school and keep going, catch Highway 1 and drive until we see the city lights.

So we are playing hooky, as my grandmother would call it, on a Friday morning. We're driving fast and furiously up the coast, taking the long way to San Francisco. I don't think I've ever deliberately made the choice to reject all the things I'm supposed to be doing, leaving behind the
should
and barreling directly into the
want
. It must be what Laura feels like all the time.

Laura is in the passenger seat next to me, her head bumping against my shoulder and her feet, both of them, out the window. Her long, graceful toes look like they should be dragging across
the cliffs that loom up on our right, scraping across the tops of the pine trees that crowd us up against the bluffs, dropping straight down into the sea. Black water, white froth, a wide-shouldered blue sky, it's everything, rushing right through us so it's everything we feel. Jolene is curled up at the back door, both arms crossed on the window ledge. Her eyes are closed and her face is turned up to the sun. Her hair is just as gold and white as the clouds and it is whipping around her head, streaming along the side of the car like a torch. I can feel my hair in a nest around my face, a cloud of salt smell and tangles, and I laugh.

We've been quiet for a hundred miles, the wind scouring us clean and everything strewn behind us, left to scatter in the wind, melt in the seawater and dissolve in the sun. I drop my foot harder on the pedal, take the series of curves ahead of us in long, languid loops. Jolene smiles but doesn't open her eyes.

Home is hours away and the ocean is so close I could run my fingers through the waves and I am almost convinced that we will be all right.

I thought about calling Hector—this is the kind of thing he is best at, this driving-too-fast kind of freedom, and that is when I like him the most. When he grins at me and his face is exactly like a thrown-open window and there is nothing but pure happiness in him. It opens something in me, too. Just for a little while. But he still hasn't called. It feels like he should know everything that's happened, but he's too far away to talk to. He'll come find me
when he is ready. At least, I think he will. I'm not sure how else to handle it. We've never had an argument before.

I have only been to San Francisco with my grandmother, for her conferences. I don't know the city well, and there's a frisson in my chest that feels a tiny bit like fear. We're plunging right into the middle of a place I don't know, crowds of people I'll never see again. Laura's father gives her his platinum credit card and sends her there for every holiday and birthday because he's too busy to shop and her stepmom is somewhere tropical. Laura knows the city almost as well as she knows San Ansia, which seems like an overwhelming amount of information to me. And Jolene does not seem nervous at all. I keep glancing in the side-view mirror at her peaceful face, which is the best part of the trip so far.

We're supposed to be in the Tenderloin, somewhere in the middle of the city, but I automatically take the exit to the Great Highway, which runs up the side of San Francisco like a hand on a thigh. It's getting dark earlier; the sun is casting a redder gold, bright on the sides of our faces. I squint against it, glancing over at the ocean, all tumbling sparks of silver.

“We're here,” I say, and nudge Laura, who's slipped into a nap with her head against the window, her mouth slightly slack and her sunglasses sliding down the bridge of her nose.

“What? No,” she says, peering past me and out at the ocean. “Oh,” she says. “We're supposed to be downtown. Are we late? I think we're running late, the show is at six and I knew we weren't
going to make it if you took the One, shit.” She's lifting her butt off the seat, digging through her pockets to find her phone.

“We're not late,” Jolene says, sitting up and yawning. “We're really early, aren't we?” But Laura is texting rapidly, biting her lip and squinting at the screen as we swoosh by the Beach Chalet's long row of glinting windows and swing a right at the rickety windmill. “I wanted to go to the Camera Obscura,” Jolene says wistfully, looking behind us like she could see the beach behind us over the trees.

“Maybe on the way back?” I say.

“We're not going to have time to see it,” Laura says, still texting. She's frowning at the phone now.

“Maybe we can drive up again soon,” I tell Jolene.

“The shorter way, maybe,” she suggests, and I snort.

“Omar's taking the bus,” Laura says, sitting back in her seat and dropping the phone in her lap. “I told him to wait, but he's loaded up everything into a duffel bag or a rolling suitcase or something and he's taking the bus from buttfuck nowhere and then walking.”

“You didn't tell me we were going to give him a ride,” I say to Laura. We're cresting the hill at the top of Golden Gate Park, and I just miss the yellow light.

The brick church at the opposite corner squats and scowls, and it looks like all the condos across from the park are for sale. I can't picture Laura living in one of them with Omar, kimonos nailed
over all the windows and streamers of photographs clothespinned to strings crisscrossing the ceiling and Omar cooking rice and vegan tortillas while Laura—I can't imagine what Laura would be doing or why she'd want to live surrounded by bad photos and with someone who smokes all the time and never eats cheese. I'm not even sure she likes him. I secretly think he's just a place far away when she needs to escape.

She met him on one of her shopping trips, at a coffee shop where he was chain-smoking American Spirits. Just two years older than us. She ended up staying overnight with him. “Nothing happened,” she told me breezily. She just slept really well on his roommate's futon. I, on the other hand, couldn't sleep that night, not knowing where she was. In the morning, she arrived at my house with lattes, still wearing her sunglasses. She went “Oof!” when I hugged her tight.

“No one ever notices when I'm missing.” She had laughed at me. “You know I'm always okay.” The elegant, dismissive flip of her fingers.

Now we shoot through the light as soon as it turns green. Laura says, “Well, I told you I had to help him set up. He's bound to get lost or lose something.”

Jolene leans forward between the seats. “You are nice to him,” she says. “But I thought he had roommates or bandmates or something?”

Laura shrugs. “Maybe. But I promised to help and now he's
getting really sad at me and saying I don't even have to come and the worst of it is that he isn't being passive aggressive, he thinks I don't want to go and it's really okay with him even though it hurts his feelings.”

Jolene says, “That sounds like the definition of passive aggressive to me,” and I laugh.

Twisting around in her seat, Laura glares at Jolene and then at me. “It's not,” she says. “I know him better than anyone. He's got a really good heart. He's sincere. He's respectful.”

“He's kind of helpless,” I say.

“Like a kitten,” Jolene says.

“Not super cute in a grown dude,” I say.

Laura flops back in her seat and crosses her arms over her chest. “Yeah,” she sighs. “At least he's talented. Sort of.”

“He's in a show,” Jolene says, all encouragement. “Doesn't that prove something?”

“I don't know,” Laura says. She's gnawing on her thumbnail. “I don't know how it works.”

“Guess you'll find out,” I say.

She glances over at me sharply. “Yeah,” she says. “Guess I will.”

We hit the Tenderloin. I've always been shit at parallel parking but I manage to wedge us between a rusted-out scooter and a Smart car without knocking either of them over. The Smart car's got its windows busted out. The smell of pee, which is the first
thing that let us know we had definitely crossed over Van Ness and were in the heart of darkness, is even more violent out here. Jolene is gagging and Laura is texting and my fingers are tight around the steering wheel. There's a man sitting on a folding chair in front of a bodega called Grand Liquors that fills half the block and he's hunched over with a towel draped over him. He looks like he's breastfeeding under there but I know—and I cringe when I realize it—that's really not what he's doing. Laura would laugh at me if I pointed it out. I don't like how lost I feel out here.

I don't want Jolene to notice him, or the white woman next to him wearing flip-flops. Her feet are black all the way to the ankles, and then she is the palest blue-white I've ever seen, with eyes as watery as skim milk. She's staring at us. I turn around to make sure the car is locked but I catch sight of the glass littering the street and sidewalk around the Smart car, and realize it doesn't matter out here on this stretch of block where everything is gray and greasy and shimmering with a kind of sadness and stink.

“Are you sure this is it?” Jolene says. She seems calm. Happy, even. “I mean, did Omar tell you the right address?” She's shrugging into her cardigan. I realize that I forgot my sweatshirt, and I can see the goose bumps on Laura's shoulders.

Laura looks up. “He didn't have an address, he said. He said to ‘come find it off Turk and Taylor.'”

I point up at the street signs on the corner. “There you go,” I say. I am jittery, and trying not to look back at the people on the
street. I can feel them staring at us and I wish I could assure them that I know exactly how much I don't belong here.

“No, there he is,” Jolene says. We turn to see Omar huffing down the block toward us, his head hunched over and his lank black hair flopping in his face. He's hurrying with his arms wrapped around a pile of frames and a duffel bag bouncing on his back. He is scrawny and his little legs look hilarious, pistoning down the street. I cover my mouth so I don't start giggling hysterically.

Laura takes off, her sandals slapping against the pavement, and I hope she doesn't step in anything.

We start after her, not wanting to be left behind. She pulls the bag out of Omar's arms and scolds him for not listening to her when she said to wait for us. He's nodding with his head down, and then points at the busted grate they're standing in front of. Everyone on the block can hear her say, “Seriously?” even from all the way back here.

Two boarded-over windows are barricaded by metalwork. The gate in front of the door is hanging from its hinges and the entranceway seems to just be covered by a few more boards. It is dark in there. I have never seen anything like it in real life—maybe in gritty movies, or cop shows with a lot of angry people yelling. I didn't think places like the entire Tenderloin existed in
real
life, really. But Jolene is grinning.

“Guerilla art,” Omar is telling Laura earnestly. He sets
everything down on the sidewalk and starts to drag the limping gate open and I cringe because I would give up my hand-sanitizer-is-killing-the-planet stance in favor of drowning everything that has touched this sidewalk and that gate in gallons of the stuff about now.

I had planned to revel in the gritty realness of a life that is so far removed from our precious, tiny little town, but now I am wondering if I am not as resilient as I thought I was. The sky is still blue, I remind myself. The buildings are settled against the exact same clouds and the ocean is just twenty minutes away. This is the same planet and I am the same person and we are probably not going to catch any diseases . . . if we're careful.

Jolene pats my arm. “We're not going to catch any diseases from the sidewalk,” she whispers, and I wonder if I had said that aloud or if my twitching is that easy to read. Jolene pats my arm again soothingly like she is trying to settle down all the words that are bubbling up looking for a way out of my mouth. “Lots of people
don't
get diseases here,” she says.

“Statistically speaking that is really unlikely.” My voice is very grim.

She's still grinning. I'm disconcerted.

A woman in red shorts and a tube top stops next to us, snatches up a cigarette butt from the stained pavement, and pops the end in her mouth. I shriek, “You have got to be kidding me!” She stops short and looks at me hard with one eye screwed shut.

“I didn't mean to get upset,” I say to her. She grunts and walks away and I put my hands over my face and Jolene is giggling at me. “Oh god,” I say.

When I pull my hands away from my face Jolene is grinning at me. “I don't think I've ever seen—you don't like this place very much, huh?” she says.

My fingers are twitching around the car keys in my pocket. “I want to go,” I tell Jolene.

“You're fine,” she says, looking very reassuring. “It's okay. We're all here together and it's not like—” She pauses and frowns. “Nope. I don't have anything worse to compare it to right off the top of my head.”

I choke on the unexpected laugh, and cough, and then I'm breathing normally again. She pats me again, a little more firmly, and picks an armful off the pile of Omar's stuff on the sidewalk.

“I'll wait out here with the stuff,” I call, but then I scoop everything that's left and bolt inside behind her.

By eight, the dirty, windowless store with the torn-down interior walls is packed. There are Christmas lights attached to a chugging generator that drowns out the yelling on the street and the traffic noise and the random cop-siren
whoop-whoops
. There are bunches of candles stuck on folding chairs, with sticks of incense stabbed into them and dropping big columns of ash. Bare bulbs swing dangerously low over everyone's heads, turning the clouds of
pot smoke and incense smoke and cigarette smoke and smoke-machine smoke a jaundiced yellow that looks like it ought to smell worse than it already does. The smells mingle and disappear into the jangling, screeching noise coming from the CD player that's sitting in the corner, one that looks like my mom's with the two attached speakers and the handle. It fits here, though. Everything fits here, the stained concrete floors and the graffiti on the walls and greasy scraps of the
SF Weekly
scattered like someone was trying to house-train a puppy. Everyone is wearing heavy black glasses and the dudes all have button-down shirts and tight jeans in primary colors. Most of them have beards. They're all even slimmer than Jolene, elongated like fun-house mirror reflections, and they're drifting gently around the room like they're dandelion fluff being wafted by a steady wind.