Last night, if my mom’s Friends-in-Christ at the All Souls Chapel heard all this, they’d have freaked out. They’d have laughed, wondering if I was joking, and then, when they saw I was serious, gone all pale and walked away. I’ve seen that so many times.
I started my junior year at Mantlo High two weeks ago.
Summer’s gone and I’m stuck chasing down concussions at school. Pretty much just guarantees me getting suspended a whole grip of times. But this year, it’s going to be different. This year, it will be the best year of my life. The year where everything changes. I know because I’ve already seen it.
Fact is: I don’t hit my head for the pain. This isn’t some masochistic thing.
I have a gift. A power.
I am an oracle.
A soothsayer.
When my head gets rocked, when my skull cracks and my brain bounces, there is this tunnel of light that appears and in my mind I dive down into it. This tunnel, it doesn’t lead to Heaven or some other universe, it leads to what comes next.
When I get a concussion I can see into the future.
THREE
So it makes sense that in about forty-five seconds I’m going to jump off the roof of my school.
It’s about two stories up and I’m expecting a pretty major concussion.
For me, this roof is a stepping-stone. Just like today and tomorrow are only heartbeats in the way of what’s coming.
What’s next is all that matters.
Fact is: When I’m not in the future the world just seems so slowed down.
The right here, the right now, for me it’s like an ancient civilization.
On the lawn right now, snacking on their lunches and guzzling sodas, making out and smoking, my fellow classmates are Romans and Greeks. They are soon to be fossils and ash sculptures from Vesuvius. Stuck in time the way trees are.
But me, I’m always moving forward.
How do I do it?
How does me getting my head bashed in send me spinning into the future?
Who knows?
I’ve been writing to experts, people like doctors and physicists and philosophers, but none of them can give me a straight answer as to why. Either they don’t believe me or they feel sorry for me. Like, short bus sorry for me.
All but one guy and he’s my shrink.
His name is Dr. Reginald Borgo and he knows that what I can do is real. He’s mentioned to me that he’s seen others, people who can do some pretty spectacular shit, but I’ve yet to meet any of them. Borgo assures me they’re out there. That it’s just a matter of time. I should also mention that most medical professionals consider Borgo a quack. Figures, right?
I’m moving out of Denver.
I’m quickly moving out of my junior year at Mantlo High School.
I’m moving away from my coma father and my Jesus-obsessed mother.
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.
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,
And then She’ll move over to me. Me sitting there enraptured.
“
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.
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.
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.
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.
