Just a Tuesday lunch hour at the mall. Just two country girls hanging out eating nachos in flip-flops and shorts. The older women had tans already. Some of them had babies in strollers. Some of the baby-stroller women were young. As young as us, maybe. Some had tattooed boyfriends in baseball caps. Some had boyfriends in business suits. They all seemed to scorn each other.
It was one big competition, this food court.
People drew lines.
The food court was just like everything else now: Divisive. Self-righteous. Hopeless. I could totally see why a second civil war was on its way… if it wasn’t just in my bat-ingesting head.
Transmission from the tattooed baby-daddy in the baseball cap: His grandfather escaped a gunfight in Vietnam that killed twenty-one in his platoon. He came home to find that his wife had had a kid with someone else, so he hitchhiked all the way to Crescent City, California, where he discovered giant redwood trees and decided they were the most beautiful creatures on the planet. Even more beautiful than his wife, who’d had a baby with someone else while he was getting shot at in Vietnam. So he stayed there. He wrote a letter home to his wife only once. It said, “Thank you.”
“See that girl over there?” Ellie said to me. “Her ancestors were Lenape Indians. They used to carve arrowheads and hunt like ten miles from here. Her great-great-great-grandmother was a talented weaver and died from tuberculosis.”
I looked around. The food court was filling up. It was a mix of mall employees, shoppers, mall rats and the old guys who sit on the benches all day and people-watch. I got transmissions from some of them, but nothing about the war.
Then the old guy in the wheelchair showed up.
Transmission from a wheelchair-bound old guy with a big smile and a USS Pledge baseball cap: His father was a great talker and he never got a word in edgeways. So he took the role of the quiet kid. When his father died, he was finally able to hold real conversations and be funny. He was sixty-one when that happened. He regrets it taking that long. Also, his great-great-grandson will somehow hurt my family during the Second Civil War. Something involving fire and a tunnel.
The way he looked at me, it was like he could see infinity, too. Or maybe I was staring at him. Anyway, his great-great-grandson would hurt the O’Briens. And there is a tunnel.
“Are you seeing tunnels anywhere?” I asked Ellie.
“Tunnels?” she asked, still looking at the kid she was reading. “No tunnels. I see, like, hospitals or something. Not like I’ve ever been to a hospital.”
She meant the camps. They looked like hospitals. “No tunnels, though?”
“Nope.”
Something told me I needed to know more about the tunnels, so I looked back at the old man in the USS Pledge hat. Another transmission: The tunnels will be filled with smoke and there will be no escape. Before the smoke, the tunnels will facilitate an exodus… an exodus led by the women who live in the trees.
I blinked. I’d seen visions of women in the trees before. Why would women live in the trees?
More transmission: His great-great-grandson will own a bright red pickup truck. It will have a bumper sticker on it that says MY OTHER TOY HAS TITS. He will wear a uniform that sports the letter K in a yellow circle. He will steal girls from over the border even though there are border patrols. Eventually he will be promoted to the head of Ferret Company. Ferret Company will sniff out exiles.
I was scared of this guy. Not just of the great-great-grandson who wasn’t born yet, but of the man in the wheelchair. It was like he was sent to freak me out. Why didn’t I see anything mundane? Why not some bizarre journey to his German ancestors in lederhosen? A quick jaunt to life on the USS Pledge? A date with a cute girl in one of those 1950s dresses that puffed out at the knees?
Ellie asked, “You okay?”
I spun myself around away from the wheelchair guy. “Yeah.”
“No you’re not,” she said.
“He freaked me out,” I said. “That’s all.”
“All I’m getting is boring crap,” she said, and motioned toward the middle-aged manager of the pizza place with the really great calzones. “That guy? His father was a plumber in Newark, New Jersey. He was known for his expertise in unclogging toilets.” She rolled her eyes. “I have a fucking superpower and all I get are plumbers and napkin ring stories. Great.”
“Let’s stop for a minute,” I said.
She looked at me. “You sure you’re okay? What the hell is he looking at?” she said, looking over my shoulder.
“Is he still looking?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit.”
“Who is he?” she asked.
“I have no idea. But his great-great-grandson is going to hurt my family and do a lot of bad shit to people.”
“No shit,” she said. “Maybe we should kill him now.”
“It’s already done. If we wanted to kill anyone, it would be the son or the grandson.”
“Geez, Glory. I wasn’t serious.”
“I’m getting a calzone,” I said, and I got up. Instead of walking away from the wheelchair guy, I walked right up to him and then around him to the Italian place. He spun around and followed me.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
“You look familiar,” he said.
“Huh. Well, maybe I look like someone you know.”
“Sorry about that,” he said. He put his smile back on. “I must be mistaking you for someone else.”
Clearly he was just some old guy who couldn’t see all that well.
As I stood in line for my calzone, it became clear that this man’s great-great-grandson couldn’t do anything to my family if there wasn’t a future beyond Glory O’Brien—if Glory O’Brien didn’t live long enough to have a kid or something.
This felt freeing—as if I could shake off Darla and Bill and all the other fates that had been haunting me. I could have a future. Maybe a kid… or two. Maybe a career or a hobby or something that wasn’t as hollow and empty as day one postgraduation.
I smiled. But then I was horrified. What kind of a cruel joke is it to know that any family I create will only be stuck in this hell? A hell where girls are stolen and bred? Where boys are made to fight wars they don’t want to fight?
I looked around the food court. I saw the baby-daddies. I saw the women in fake tans and formal hairdos. I saw a little girl wearing makeup eating lunch with her mom. I saw the third button on Ellie’s shirt undone, exposing just enough.
I grabbed my calzone, threw a ten-dollar bill at the owner and escaped.