But I’m going to get into all that soon enough.
Today, it’s the roof and the ground and my eyes on the prize: When She and I are together and moving toward what comes next at lightning speed.
Who is She?
Only the most astonishing girl in the world. I’ve only ever seen Her once and it wasn’t now. Like not in the present. I don’t know Her name or where She’s from. I saw Her in a vision in eighth grade, one of my very first visions, and I know that we’ll be in love. As cheesy as it sounds, I know this girl’s the one.
Us meeting will be classic.
Blockbuster.
Twenty-one seconds.
How it’ll go down is like this: She will walk into the lunchroom with Jimi Ministry like they own the place and She’ll get on top of a table. Jimi’ll beat-box and She, standing there bright as a burning building, will sing. Yeah, She’ll sing.
Her voice will be low and smoky and start almost like a whisper.
She’ll sing, “Your own personal Jesus… Someone to hear your prayers…”
And then She’ll move over to me. Me sitting there enraptured.
“Your own personal Jesus…”
And I won’t feel myself stand but will see my perspective change as I rise up above the table and over my little lesbian friend Paige’s sloping shoulders. It’ll feel like I’m going to float to the ceiling, but I’ll stop, caught up in that voice. She and I, we’ll stand there, staring into each other, for what will seem like millennia. Clouds’ll swirl, mountain ranges’ll rise and crumble to dust, oceans’ll swallow land and then retreat, leaving lakes and sinuous rivers, and dubbed on top of it all will be this girl’s voice.
It’ll be epically sick.
But I realize now there’ll be a little wrinkle in our whirlwind romance. This is because Jimi Ministry is there with Her. He’s an asshole. And the fact that he introduces Her, well, I didn’t know it a year ago but I know now that it’s not good. I can’t put my finger on it, but things could get ugly. With Jimi, that would make sense.
Ten seconds.
Below me no one looks up.
Below me it’s just the ground rushing.
I’ve spent two years of sleepless, clammy nights waiting for Her to arrive.
Six seconds.
Good thing I noticed the calendar in the vision. Right there on the wall just under the poster of the food pyramid. The date I’ve been counting down to for twenty-four months is August 10, 2010.
Three seconds.
Want to know the best part?
August 10, 2010, is tomorrow.
FOUR
It’s an old joke, but it’s true: Jumping off a roof is easy; it’s the landing that’s hard.
I need to land on the lawn.
Last time, the time that Nancy Springer saw me and puked, I missed the lawn by two feet and hit the bike rack. Took twenty-seven stitches to get my scalp back on.
Today, I’m feeling confident.
My aim is good.
There is a fury of wind.
The flapping of my clothes.
And then, well, forget the rolling, skip the falling on your side, the key to me making this a successful journey into my near future is by hitting my head at just the right angle and not busting up the globe of it too bad. From what I’ve read on the Internet, I’m guessing that giving the “dorsolateral prefrontal associative” area a decent wallop is what makes the magic happen.
Smack.
Crunch.
Going unconscious, it’s like standing in an explosion.
Most times, like this time, I find myself in a tunnel. I go down the tunnel and the lights whiz by me and then, where it ends, the light parts and I dive into the darkness between.
It’s dizziness and sleep and then only pure, beautiful, matte black.
And I open my eyes to the future.
Today, what I see is me ten years in the future. How I know it’s the future is because things look plastic. Not twisted or distorted the way they do it up in the movies. No CGI, no carnival colors. Just plastic like you’re in the suburbs. Plastic the way the waxed-up leaves are on the zebra bushes in the planters by the play space at the Cherry Creek Mall. My skin is shiny. My body feels so much more malleable.
And in this plastic future I seem happy.
Really happy.
I’m walking downtown, still Denver. This time I’m wearing a suit and it’s very sunny and I can feel the first pinpricks of sweat popping up in the small of my back. I think about taking off my coat but don’t because I’m turning the corner and now I’m on the shady side of another street. Downtown is busy. Cars pulling people places. Buses heaving back and forth on the mall. This must be spring because the sun is small and tight in the sky and the air smells like rain though there are no clouds anywhere. I walk into an office building and wave to someone, a woman with brown hair and thick-framed glasses sitting at a small desk, and then take an elevator to the fiftieth floor. When I get out, I stand at a bank of windows and admire the hustle and bustle of downtown, the mountains where there is snow.
In this vision I’ve got a backpack on but it’s not heavy. No one mentions it.
I take a flight of stairs to fifty-one and walk through a maze of offices where people wave at me. Then I walk out onto a balcony. I’m sweating more, but it’s not from the heat.
What I do next is I climb up onto the railing.
I stand there for a few seconds, swaying gently, my arms outstretched, just balancing on this two-inch-wide tube of metal. I’m thinking I’m glad it’s not a windy day.
And then I jump.
I fall face-first.
Arms at my side the way soldiers drop out of planes in the movies. The wind’s rushing up into my eyes and ears, grabbing at my hair and making my cheeks float open like the cheeks of astronauts do when they’re in simulation machines.
The backpack, it’s a parachute.
I don’t pull the cord until I’m fifty seconds from hitting pavement; I time it on my wristwatch. And when I do pull the cord, and the chute explodes behind me, I’m smiling so wide that I can see the white of my teeth reflected into the dark windows of the office buildings as I rush past them.
The way the chute’s set up, my fall won’t be totally broken.
I’m going to hit the ground and hit it hard.
My future: It’s just me getting crazier and crazier.
I’m guessing I have the ultimate concussion from the fall. How crazy is it that I see myself in the future jumping off a roof just to see the future? I assume that I don’t actually die. Maybe I do. Can you imagine the future I’ll see in those few split seconds before my soul jets skyward? Must be like a thousand years in the future.
I don’t see the landing.
Instead of being there and finding out, I’m here with someone calling my name and I rocket back through the tunnel, the lights spastic. When the tunnel vanishes is when I open my eyes.
My left eye, actually. The right one is swelled shut already.
Everything’s blurry, but I’m on the ground at Mantlo High and there are people standing over me. I can see two of them shaking their heads.
Already they’re shaking their heads.
Me, back in the present, I’m on my back lying on some tossed cigarettes and wilted grass just after lunch has ended and everyone else at my high school is getting ready to go back to class. All of them have to walk past me as they go to physics and gym and whatever it is that Mr. O’Connor feels like teaching today in American history. Right now, they just think I’m a few concussions away from full vegetable. A few knockouts from the way my dad is.
Someone, a girl, maybe Kristen LaFontaine, judging by the voice, says, “It’s only Tuesday and he’s already at it.”
And someone else, someone gay, most likely Eric Hovda, says, “At least he waited until the second week of school. Don’t even know why they keep letting him come back.”