Jay Asher - The Future of Us

I glance into the blue recycling bin next to the copier and notice a single sheet of paper in there. I pull it out. The copy is dark, but I can make out enough. Someone copied a two-page spread of phone numbers for people named Jones.

“Is your friend thinking of going to California for college?” the man asks. “Because my daughter—”

“I highly doubt it,” I say, folding up the paper and stuffing it into my back pocket. “But thanks.”

I hurry to the front door of the library. Once outside, I hop on my board and skate toward home as fast as I can.

THERE’S NO ONE AT HOME. Even so, I lock my bedroom door before pulling the two sheets of paper from my backpack. I unfold them onto my desk, pressing my fingers along the creases.

After punching in the toll-free activation number on the back of the phone card, I start by calling J.B. Jones. An answering machine picks up, saying it’s the home of Janice and Bobby. I quickly hang up and cross out Jones, J.B. with a pencil.

The next number I try is an old lady who’s convinced I’m her granddaughter. It takes almost five minutes before she lets me hang up. I should have gotten the ten-dollar phone card.

Next up is Jones, J.D. I follow the steps on the card and dial the number.

A woman with a singsong voice answers. “Hello?”

“Hi,” I say, “is Jordan there?”

“Junior or Senior?” she asks.

I clutch the phone against my shoulder, wipe my sweaty hands on my shorts, and clear my throat. “Junior, please.”

“My nephew’s living with his mom now.”

Think fast, Emma.

“Yeah, I know,” I say. “I couldn’t find his number, but I thought this might have been it.”

There’s silence on the other end.

“What’d you say your name was?” the woman asks.

I consider making up a name, but I feel nervous enough as is. “My name is Emma. We’re friends from school.”

“Jordan certainly had plenty of those. You got a pen?”

As she recites the number, I scribble it in a margin of my photocopy. We say goodbye and I hang up, staring at the phone number of my future husband.

Some people would wait. Josh, for example, would think this through carefully. He’d weigh the options, and then call David to get his brother’s opinion. I, on the other hand, just flip over the phone card and start dialing.

“Hello?” It’s a guy’s voice.

“Jordan?”

“No, it’s Mike. Hang on.”

The phone gets set down. There’s a television on in the background, and something that might be a blender. Mike, who I’m guessing is my future brother-in-law, shouts for Jordan and then says, “How should I know?”

The blender stops. Footsteps approach the phone, and then a guy’s voice says, “What’s up?”

“Is this Jordan?” I ask.

“Who’s this?”

“It’s Emma,” I say, smiling broadly. “We met at that party… recently?”

I hold my breath, hoping Jordan went to a party at some point in the past month.

“Jenny Fulton’s?” he asks.

I exhale. “Yeah. Jenny’s.”

There wasn’t much to go on when I looked up Jordan on Facebook. It had his name, his picture, and his hometown. Even so, my goal is to keep him on the phone long enough to figure out how, at some point in the future, our lives intersect.

“So what’s up?” he asks.

“Not much,” I say. “What have you been up to?”

“Just hanging out.”

Silence.

“Have you been… fishing recently?” I ask.

“Uh, no,” he says. “I’ve never been fishing.”

Dead silence.

“So what have you been doing?” I ask.

“Mostly looking for a summer job.”

“Cool,” I say.

The blender starts up again. “Listen, was there something you wanted?” he asks. “Because I should probably get back to—”

“Oh, right,” I say, picking up speed. “Anyway, I was thinking about our conversation at the party.”

“Are you sure you’re not talking about Jordan Nicholson?” he asks. “I think he was there, too. People always get us mixed up.”

It’s strange, but Jordan doesn’t sound like an asshole. He almost seems nice. So how is it possible that someday he becomes the kind of person who ends up staying out for three nights, most likely cheating on me? Would he believe that was possible if I told him right now?

“It was definitely you,” I say. “We were talking about where we’re applying to college and you—”

“Hang on,” Jordan says.

I hear a screen door slam and a girl’s voice say, “You ready?”

Jordan tells her it’ll be a second. “Sorry,” he says to me. “No, I really think you’re talking about Nicholson because I’m already in college. I just got home for the summer.”

“Really?” My voice catches. “Where do you go?”

I squeeze my eyes shut. Maybe this is where Jordan and I meet. I have a rough list of where I want to apply next year, all out of state, and all near an ocean.

“Tampa State,” he says. “I just finished my first year.”

I open my eyes and force a laugh. “You’re right. It was Jordan Nicholson. I am so sorry.”

“Do you need his number?” he asks. “I think Mike has it.”

“No, that’s fine. I’ve got it.”

“Okay, well…” Someone shuts off the TV and I can hear the girl laugh in the background.

As I hold the phone against my ear, I actually feel sad. In the future, Jordan and I were supposed to meet at college and get married. Now, we’ll probably never even know each other.

We say goodbye. When the line disconnects, I continue listening to the silence in the receiver. An automated voice eventually comes on, saying I have ninety-three cents remaining on my card. I hang up and walk over to my dresser.

In my top drawer, beneath my socks and underwear, I keep a journal. I don’t write in it a lot, maybe a few times a year. I flip to an entry I wrote back in March. It’s a list I made after a college counselor talked to us about the application process.

Emma’s Top College Choices

1: Tampa State

2: University of North Carolina at Wilmington

3: University of California at San Diego

I grab a black marker from my desk and draw a line through “Tampa State.” If I don’t go to college there, I won’t meet Jordan. And if I don’t meet Jordan—

There’s a knock on the door. I bury my journal back in my drawer. “Who is it?”

The handle turns, but the door is locked.

“Emma,” Josh says. “I need to talk to you.”

When I open the door, Josh’s hair is sweaty, with several strands matted to his forehead. He’s holding the Scooby-Doo keychain in one hand, and a folded-up sheet of paper in the other.

“Everything okay?” I ask.

He wipes his brow. “I skated here from the public library.”

I glance nervously at the paper in his hand. “I guess we just missed each other.”

Josh frowns as he unfolds his paper. It’s the first photocopy I made from the phone book. It came out too dark and I tossed it in the recycling bin.

“I know what you’re about to do,” Josh says, “but you can’t unmarry your future husband.”

The way he says “unmarry your future husband” makes my stomach lurch.

“You can’t go around changing what’s supposed to happen,” he says. “I know you’re upset because you’re married to this jerk, but according to Facebook, we’re still friends. I promise I’ll be there for you. If you end up going through a divorce, maybe I can loan you money for a lawyer, or I can let you move into my guest room for a while.”

Loan me money? Anger pulses through me. Right, because he and Sydney are so rich!

Josh notices my phone card on the desk, with the silver scratched off the back to reveal the activation code.

His voice is hushed. “You did it?”

I nod slowly.

“You talked to Jordan?”

“It’s over,” I say. “We’re never going to meet.”

The color drains from Josh’s face.

JUST LIKE THAT, the future is changed forever.

Fifteen years of history—future history—is changed because Emma didn’t like the guy she married. But she only had a few sentences from fifteen years in the future to work with. That’s not nearly enough information to make such a drastic decision about her life. And his life! Come to think of it, any person who was impacted by their relationship, even in the slightest way, will be twisted in countless new directions.

I want to both scream and laugh hysterically. Instead, I crumple the photocopy in my hand and throw it across the room. The paper barely makes a sound when it hits the wall.

“You can’t do that!” I shout.

“Actually,” Emma says, crossing her arms, “it was easy. He goes to Tampa State, so I’m not applying there. North Carolina is now my top choice.”

I collapse onto her bed and press my hands over my eyes. She doesn’t get it! She knows that even the smallest change to our present will ripple into the future. On that first day, Emma was unemployed. The next day she had a job, but we have no idea what she changed to make that happen. One time we looked, Jordan had gone fishing. But later, he mysteriously hadn’t come home for three days. Then macaroni and cheese became lasagna. Maybe Emma doesn’t think it’s important that her dinner was different, but what if next time she cooks, something causes her to make meatloaf and she gets mad cow disease and dies because one little ripple changes her dinner plans in fifteen years?

But to change her future husband? On purpose? Those consequences are immeasurable!

“Admit it,” Emma says. “You would’ve done the same thing if your life looked as bad as mine.”

“No.” I sit up. “I wouldn’t have. You have no idea what else you’ve changed. This is dangerous stuff, Emma.”

“Look who’s talking,” Emma says. “You made a face at Sydney yesterday. Would you have done that if you didn’t know you were going to marry her?”

“I’m talking about changing the future,” I say.

Emma laughs. “Well, what do you think happens when you do something different in the present? It changes the future! You did the same thing as me.”

“It’s not the same, and you know it,” I say. “Mine was a reaction, but you intentionally made a humongous change. You really wanted to go to Tampa State. I saw you and Kellan researching it in that college-ranking book, and you were saying how close it was to where your dad lives. But now you won’t go there? We need to do things exactly as we would’ve done them before Facebook.”

“Why?” Emma says, and I can see she’s on the verge of crying. “So I can end up unemployed at thirty-one like the first time we checked? Or angry that my husband spends all my money when I do have a job?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” I say. “What if, when you were unemployed, you were just one day away from finding your perfect job? Or maybe, when your husband realized you were angry about him buying that iPad thing, he returned it the next day. Emma, all you saw were tiny snippets of the future.”

“I don’t care,” she says. “I know I wasn’t happy, and that needed to change.”

This is making me nervous. The future seems so fragile. For instance, I already saw that I’m going to the University of Washington like my brother. And I definitely want that to happen, but what if knowing I’ll get in makes me slack on the application, and then I get rejected?

“You’re making that face,” Emma says as she types in her email address.

“What face?”

“Like you’re judging me.”

Emma types her password to get into Facebook, and then turns to me with deliberate slowness. “I’m going to speak as calmly as I can,” she says. “The way you’re judging me means you’re not even trying to understand what that life felt like for me.”

“It’s not that I’m not trying. I’m just—”

“You’re being extremely selfish and cruel.”

“How am I being cruel?”

“You know why you don’t care?” Emma’s getting more pissed by the second. “Because you’ve got your perfect wife. You’ve got your beautiful children. And you’ve got me living in your guest room! Do I even have a window in there?”

When Emma says that, I force myself to keep a straight face. “I get it,” I say.