Fifty thousand dollars couldn’t take me back to an hour before, when I didn’t know anything about Jasmine Blue’s attempts to steal my father from my mother, and ultimately, me.
Fifty thousand dollars couldn’t buy back my father’s will to paint. Couldn’t buy him a time machine where he could burn those pictures and tell Jasmine Blue to leave him alone before Mom found out.
It couldn’t buy Ellie a new life, away from Rick, who was now bugging her about breaking up with him. She said he was passing rumors around the commune.
And it couldn’t take me back to Saturday night and stop Ellie and me from drinking the bat.
“What if it never goes away?” she’d asked on the way home from graduation. “What if we’re stuck like this forever?”
“Shit,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. A minute passed. “But seriously. What if we’re stuck like this?”
Her question meant more to me than she’d meant it to. What if we’re stuck like this? That was the question I’d been asking about Ellie and me for a long time.
I approached the commune’s back field, where Jasmine’s flock had laid out a bunch of tables with snacks and drinks. I looked for Ellie but she wasn’t there yet. At this point, the sky was still pretty bright at the early stages of dusk, and the only planet showing was Jupiter. I stood and listened to the birds in their nests and getting ready to sleep. It was a sound I’d heard a hundred times before, but I’d never really noticed it or something. It was peaceful. It made me feel more comfortable with all my secrets, and now, Dad’s secrets.
There was no one around. Maybe they were finishing their dinners. Maybe rolling out their drums from wherever they stored them. Maybe taking naked pictures of themselves to send to other people’s husbands—pictures like thin, lightweight atomic bombs that could disintegrate a family in a nanosecond.
Kapow.
“Hey!” Ellie came up from behind me.
“Hey,” I said. I told her to stop and listen. “Isn’t it weird that birds make completely different noises when they’re bedding down to sleep at night than they do in the morning?”
She said, “Duh.”
I said, “No, seriously.”
She answered, “You need something to eat.”
Then we went to the table and loaded up our plates with commune food. I chose two types of paleo crackers made out of what tasted like nuts and berries and pretended to like the almond butter and celery but I hated it, so Ellie took it from me without a word and finished it. It was the friendliest thing she’d done in weeks.
We walked toward a blanket that Ellie had already laid out for us. I admit I was concerned about lice. I sat down anyway.
“Sorry about today,” she said. “I was so freaked out. This is so…”
“Messed up,” I said.
“Totally,” Ellie said. “When I got home I saw Rick. And he’s still swearing he didn’t give me those… things.”
“Huh.”
“He said I probably caught it off a toilet seat or something. Like that’s even possible.”
“It’s possible,” I said, annoyed that we were still talking about lice. Annoyed that we weren’t talking about the history of the future of everything.
“Not probable,” she said.
“No.”
“I saw naked people again. I can’t see your war or whatever. None of my naked people are toting guns, anyway.”
“Heh.” I couldn’t help it. The idea of Ellie seeing naked people after seeing those pictures of Jasmine Blue was funny. And every time I looked at Ellie, I saw Jasmine. I was so mad at her again, even though it wasn’t her in the pictures.
“I saw my mom has these two great-grandsons. That was cool.”
“You saw the grandsons?” I asked.
“Great-grandsons,” she said. “So they must be my grandsons, right? Only child and all that.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s cool. I can’t—uh—I don’t see any grandkids in my future, anyway.”
This was the closest I’d ever come to telling her my secret. But she wasn’t listening.
“So… Rick. I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said.
“What is there to do?”
“He lives here.”
“And?”
“And I still like him.”
I looked at her sideways. “Seriously?”
“I’m… used to him,” she said. “That’s probably more accurate.”
We sat and watched the commune people milling around. I thought about what it must be like to be so free. No jobs. No responsibilities. No rent.
“So, did you get any sweet graduation presents?”
“Just a check from my dad, you know? No party or anything. I mean, why party when there’s a party right next door, right?”
More silence. More watching the commune people interact with each other. Even Ellie’s dad was out at the food table, loading up a plate.
“Did you get in trouble for coming to graduation?” I asked.
“Double chores when I got back,” she said. “I can tell you this: Chickens pretty much have boring futures. Chop chop.” She made the motion with her hand. Chop chop. “But they’re always naked, so at least that’s something.”
We laughed.
“Did you see much stuff at graduation? I stayed away from people.”
“Oh yeah,” I answered. “Crazy stuff. Mostly the war.”
“Do you think it’s real?”
I nodded.
She said, “I see people living in trees. I saw that. And there was this one thing I didn’t really understand, but everywhere was flooded and people used boats. It was the future, though, so the boats were really cool. It was hot, too, and no one could use air-conditioning anymore because there was no more oil.”
“You’re having hippie visions,” I said.
“Yeah. I guess.”
“I’m having war visions,” I said.
“We’re going crazy,” she said.
“We’re not going crazy,” I said. “And what’s crazy, anyway?”
“I guess.”
“How’d you get the marker off your arms?” I asked.
“Special soap we use for poison ivy,” she said. She held her arms out for me to see. “It’s still there, though. You just have to look really hard.”
I looked hard but couldn’t see in the near darkness. But I knew what it said.
Free yourself. Have the courage.
“I need a break from this place,” Ellie said. “I want to meet complete strangers and find out what I can see about them.”
“Tomorrow we should hit the mall,” I said. “It’s full of complete strangers.”
“I hate the mall,” she said. It was a reflex. Jasmine hated the mall, so Ellie had to too, even though I’d hidden her consumerist contraband under my bed through middle school.
“It’s not like you’re going to buy anything,” I said. “Trust me. It’s a good spot. A lot of different kinds of people.”
Dusk fell into night and the stars came out and we lay on our backs and watched the show. Jasmine Blue organized her drum circle and I was right—I couldn’t look at her without picturing those pictures.