He smiles, the first smile I’ve seen on him, and it looks good. He hands me Dylan’s notebook. Then he turns toward a shimmering wave of heat roiling up from the cement and he steps through it and he’s gone.
I feel the horde of viewers at my back. I sense a million clicks on FeedBin as my revenue rockets up to ten thousand and more.
3.
WHEN WE WENT HIGH-CONCEPT
(thirty years from now)
EPONY
Cole and I come from a town in Iowa with one main road—one way in and one way out. He was Colburn then. Now he’s Cole. They made him do that.
Any time I walked past his house, his chickens would follow me to the edge of the yard like I was their mother hen. They were partial to me. I understood the feeling—more than once during the summer I was sixteen I found myself following the siren strum of Cole’s battered guitar. He’d sit on his porch and play rage-rock tunes slow as love ballads, crooning about oil wars, his anger locked tight in his throat.
He’d play at the creek bend where the small boys swung from rope lengths over the water like pendulums, arcing through the air out of sync with his staccato rhythms. They had yet to learn the reality of coaxing corn out of soil so desiccated by chemicals you had to use more chemicals to make anything grow. Cole sang it to them.
I listened, out of sight. Half because I was fascinated Cole had started caring about anything other than trucks, which he’d drawn on the back of every school assignment when we were in the fifth grade. Half because hearing Cole’s voice was like waking up slowly and listening to someone tell you where you are.
Once last August, he stood in the creek, guitar abandoned on the bank, and called to me, “Did you come all the way here to lurk in the trees?”
I startled. At school he hardly talked to me, mostly because he hardly talked to anyone. Rumor had it there was a sign-up sheet going around for people who wanted to have a full conversation with him. But I knew that was just teasing. I knew because I was the one who’d started the rumor.
I kicked off my shoes and moved in knee-deep. The shock of cold water stole my breath. Cole was dark from the sun, his yellow hair like parched grass. He cocked his head to the side like my grandpop used to do; I swear it’s a gesture taught to all farm boys who plan on growing up to make trouble. I fought to stand my ground against the current pushing at the backs of my legs.
“Can’t you swim?” Cole had asked.
“I learned in this creek. They threw me in and I declined the opportunity to drown.”
It surprised us both that we had anything left to laugh about. The price of seed had gone up that year like it had every year. We got patented seeds that were supposed to withstand the pests migrating from places where it was even hotter, but the patent meant we weren’t allowed to store the seed for replanting.
Cole shivered; the water around him rippled. “Can’t you come any closer, then?”
I took a few hobbled steps forward, unsure whether to brave the icy temperatures. The current and his smile soon convinced me.
A few days later, I was walking toward town to buy a Coke when the sound of Cole’s guitar floated to me over stands of late-summer witchgrass. I stopped to sit on the fence he had propped himself against and asked him if he ever watched feeds about people visiting from the Other Place. “You look half vanished, standing in that grass,” I told him. “Ever seen them do that? Just step between worlds?”
Everyone had seen those videos, so Cole only smirked like we were sharing a joke. “I saw a video of one showing up at a dentist’s office. He just stood there, bug-eyed, watching a woman get her teeth cleaned.”
I laughed. I had seen a lot more than that—had actually met one in person, which wasn’t that common, except in big cities. But Cole was studying me like he didn’t much care to talk about other people at the moment. I stared back. His county fair T-shirt was too small for him, and the date under the logo pinpointed the start of his growth spurt at two years earlier. Why had it taken me so long to notice?
“It’s hot as hell,” Cole said, pulling at his shirt.
“I wouldn’t know, personally,” I joked. “But I’ll take your word for it.”
Cole laughed, and he left his guitar right there propped in the grass so we could walk to the creek.