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Forget Tomorrow
By Pintip Dunn, Liz Pelletier Entangled Publishing, LLC
Copyright © 2015 Pintip Dunn
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63375-561-1
CHAPTER 1
"The next leaf that falls will be red," my six-year-old sister Jessa announces. An instant later, a crimson leaf flutters through the air like the tail feather of a cardinal.
Jessa grabs it and tucks it into the pocket of her school uniform, a silver mesh jumpsuit that is a smaller version of mine. Crunchy leaves blanket the square, the only burst of color in Eden City's landscape. Behind our patch of a park, bullet trains shoot by in electromagnetic vacuum tubes, and metal and glass buildings vie for every inch of pavement. Their gleaming spirals do more than scrape the sky — they punch right through it.
"Now orange," Jessa says. A leaf the color of overripe squash tumbles from the tree. "Brown." Sure enough, brown as mud and just as dead.
"You going for some kind of record?" I ask.
She turns to me and grins, and I forget all about tomorrow and what is about to happen. My senses fill with my sister. The voice that lilts like music. The way her hair curves around her chin. Her eyes as warm and irresistible as roasted chestnuts.
I can almost feel the patches of dry skin on her elbows, where she refuses to apply lotion. And then, the moment passes. Knowledge seeps through me, the way a person gains consciousness after a dream. Tomorrow, I turn seventeen. I will become, by the ComA's decree, an official adult. I will receive my memory from the future.
Sometimes, I feel as if I've been waiting all my life to turn seventeen. I measure my days not by my experiences but by the time remaining until I receive my memory, the memory, the one that's supposed to give meaning to my life.
They tell me I won't feel so alone then. I'll know, without a shred of doubt, that somewhere in another spacetime exists a future version of me, one who turns out all right. I'll know who I'm supposed to be. And I'll never feel lost again.
Too bad I had to live through seventeen years of filler first.
"Yellow." Jessa returns to her game, and a yellow leaf detaches from a branch. "Orange."
Ten times, fifteen times, twenty, she correctly predicts the color of the next leaf to fall. I clap and cheer, even though I've seen this show, or something like it, dozens of times before.
And then I notice him. A guy wearing my school's uniform, sitting on a curved metal bench thirty feet away. Watching us.
The back of my neck prickles. He can't possibly hear us. He's too far away. But he's looking. Why is he looking? Maybe he has super-sensitive hearing. Maybe the wind has picked up our words and carried them to him.
How could I be so stupid? I never let Jessa stop in the park. I always march her straight home after school, just like my mother orders. But today, I wanted — I needed — the sun, if only for a few minutes.
I place a hand on my sister's arm, and she stills. "We need to leave. Now." My tone implies the rest of the sentence: before the guy reports your psychic abilities to the authorities.
Jessa doesn't even nod. She knows the drill. She drops into step beside me, and we head for the train station on the other side of the square. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him stand up and follow us. I bite my lip so hard I taste blood. What now? Make a run for it? Talk to him and attempt damage control?
His face comes into view. He has closely cropped blond hair and a ridiculously charming grin, but that's not why my knees go weak.
It's my classmate, Logan Russell, swim team captain and owner of what my best friend Marisa calls the best pecs in this spacetime. Harmless. Sure, he has the nerve to smile at me after ignoring me for five years, but he's no threat to Jessa's well-being.
When we were kids, his brother Mikey made a racquetball hover above the court. Without touching it. ComA whisked him away, and he hasn't been seen since. Logan's not about to report my sister to anyone.
"Calla, wait up," he says, as if it's been days instead of years since we sat next to each other in the T-minus five classroom.
I stop walking, and Jessa clutches my hand. I give her three squeezes to let her know we're safe. "My friends call me 'Callie,'" I tell Logan. "But if you don't already know that, maybe you should use my birthday."
"All right, then." Coming to a stop in front of us, he jams his hands in his pockets. "You must be nervous, October Twenty-eight. About tomorrow, I mean."
I lift my eyebrow. "How would you have the first clue what my feelings are?"
"We used to be friends."
"Right," I say. "I still remember the time you peed your pants on our way to the Outdoor Core."
He meets my gaze head on. "Ditto for the part where you splashed us both with water from the fountain so no one else would know."
He remembers? I look away, but it's too late. I can smell the protein pellets we made a pact never to eat, feel the touch on my shoulder when Amy Willows compared my hair to straw.
"Forget her," the twelve-year-old Logan had whispered, as the credits rolled on the documentary on farming methods before the Technology Boom. "Scarecrows are the coolest ever."
I had gone home and daydreamed I'd received the memory from my future self, and in it Logan Russell was my husband. Of course, that was before I learned the older girls waited until a boy received his future memory before deciding if he was a good match. Who cares if Logan has dimples, if his future doesn't show sufficient credits to provide for his family? He may have a swimmer's physique today, but it might very well melt into fat twenty years from now.
By the time I figured out my crush was premature, it didn't matter. The boy of my dreams had already stopped talking to me.
I cross my arms. "What do you want, October Twenty-six?"
Instead of responding, he moves behind Jessa. She's taken the leaves from her jumpsuit and is twisting them around each other to make them look like the petals of a flower. Logan sinks down beside her, helping her tie off the "bud" with a sturdy stem.
Jessa beams as if he's given her a rainbow on a plate. So he makes my sister smile. It's going to take more than a measly stem to compensate for five years of silence.
They fool around with the leaves — making more "roses," combining them into a bouquet — for what seems like forever. And then Logan holds one of the roses up to me. "I got my memory yesterday."
My arms and mouth drop at the same time. Of course he did. I'd just used his school name. How could I forget?
Logan's birthday is two days before mine. It's why we sat next to each other all those years. That's how the school orders us — not by last name or height or grades, but by the time remaining until we receive our future memory.
I notice the hourglass insignia, half an inch wide, tattooed on the inside of his wrist. Everyone who's received a future memory has one. Underneath the tattoo, a computer chip containing your future memory is implanted, where it can be scanned by prospective employers, loan officers, even would-be parents-in-law.
In Eden City, your future memory is your biggest recommendation. More than your grades, more than your credit history. Because your memory is more than a predictor. It's a guarantee.
"Congratulations," I say. "To whom am I speaking? A future ComA official? Professional swimmer? Maybe I should get your autograph now, while I still have the chance."
Logan gets to his feet and brushes the dirt from his pants. "I did see myself as a gold-star swimmer. But there was something else, too. Something ... unexpected."
"What do you mean?"
He takes a step closer. I'd forgotten his eyes are green. They're the green of grass before summer, a sheen caught somewhere between vibrant and dull, as if the color can't decide whether to thrive in the sun or wither in its heat.
"It wasn't like how we were taught, Callie. My memory didn't answer my questions. I don't feel at peace or aligned with the world. I just feel confused."
I lick my lips. "Maybe you didn't follow the rules. Maybe your future self messed up and sent the wrong memory."
I can't believe I said that. We spend our entire childhood learning how to choose the proper memory, one that will get us through the difficult times. And here I am, telling another person he screwed up the only test that matters. I didn't think I had it in me.
"Maybe," he says, but we both know it's not true. Logan is smart, too smart to be beat by me in the T-minus seven spelling bee, and too smart to mess this up.
And then I get it. "You're kidding. In the future, you're the best swimmer the country has ever seen. Right?"
Something I can't identify passes over his face. And then he says, "Right. I have so many medals, I need to build an addition to my house in order to display them."
He wasn't kidding, something inside me yells. He's trying to tell you something.
But if Logan's one of the anomalies I've heard rumors about — the ones who receive a bad memory, or worse, no memory at all — I don't want to know about it. We haven't been friends for half a decade. I'm not going to worry about him just because he's deemed me worthy of his attention again.
Suddenly, I can't wait for the conversation to end. I reach for Jessa's hand and connect with her elbow. "Sorry," I say to Logan, "but we need to get going."
Jessa hands him the bouquet of leaves, and I tug her away. We are almost out of earshot when he calls, "Callie? Happy Memory's Eve. May the joy of the future sustain you through the trials of the present."
It's the standard salutation, spoken the day before everyone's seventeenth birthday. In the past, Logan's address would have filled my cheeks with warmth, but this time his words only send a chill creeping up my spine.
We walk into the house to the smell of chocolate cake. My mother's in the eating area, her dark brown hair twisted into a bun, still wearing her uniform with the ComA insignia stitched across the pocket. She's a bot supervisor at one of the agencies, but she gets paid by the Committee of Agencies, or ComA, the governmental entity that runs our nation.
We drop our school bags and run. I hug my mother from behind as Jessa attacks her legs. "Mom! You're home!"
My mother turns. Powdered sugar clings to her cheek, and chocolate frosting darkens one eyebrow. The red light that normally blinks on our Meal Assembler is off. Actual ingredients — packets of flour, a small carton of milk, real eggs — lay strewn across the eating table.
I raise my eyebrows. "Mom, are you cooking? Manually?"
"It's not every day my daughter turns seventeen. I thought I'd try making a cake, in honor of my future Manual Chef."
"But how did you ..." My voice trails off as I spot the small rectangular machine on the floor. It has a glass door with knobs along one side, two metal racks, and a coil that turns red when it's hot.
An oven. My mother bought me a functioning oven.
My hand shoots to my mouth. "Mom, this must have cost a hundred credits! What if ... what if my memory doesn't show me as a successful chef?"
"It wasn't easy to find, I'll give you that." She takes off the rag around her waist and shakes it. A cloud of flour puffs into the air. "But I have complete faith in you. Happy Memory's Eve, dear heart."
She hoists Jessa onto her hip and pulls me into a hug so that we are in a circle of her arms, the way it's always been. Just the three of us.
I have few memories of my father. He is not so much a gaping hole in my life as he is a shadow who lurks around the corner, just out of reach. I used to pester my mom for details, but tonight, on the eve of my seventeenth birthday, the heavy knowledge of him is enough.
My mother begins to clear the ingredients off the table, the bare, gleaming skin of her wrist catching the light that emanates from the walls. She doesn't have a tattoo. Future memories didn't arrive systematically until a few years ago, and my mother wasn't lucky enough to receive one.
Maybe if she had, she wouldn't have lost her job. My mother used to be a medical aide, but as more and more applicants came with memory chips showing futures as competent diagnosticians, it had only been a matter of time before she got downgraded to bot supervisor. "You can hardly blame them," she had said with a shrug. "Why take a risk when you can bet on a sure thing?"
We sit down to a dinner usually reserved for the New Year. Everything has the slightly plastic taste of food prepared in the Meal Assembler, but the spread itself is unrivaled by the best manual cooking establishments. A whole roast chicken, its skin golden brown and crispy. Mashed potatoes fluffy with butter. Sugar snap peas sautéed with cloves of garlic.
We don't talk through most of dinner — can't talk, our mouths are so full. Jessa savors the snap peas like they are candy, nibbling at the ends and rolling them around her mouth before sucking the entire pods down.
"We should have invited that boy to dinner," she says, a snap pea dangling from her mouth. "We've got so much food."
Mom's hand stills on the serving spoon. "What boy?" she pries.
"Just one of my classmates." I feel my cheeks growing red and then remind myself that I have no reason to be embarrassed. I don't like Logan anymore. I help myself to more dark meat. "We ran into him at the park. It was no big deal."
"Why were you even there in the first place?"
The chicken suddenly feels dry in my mouth. I messed up. I know that. But I couldn't bear to be stuck inside today. I needed to feel the sun's warmth on my face, to look at the leaves and imagine my future.
"We only talked to him for a minute, Mom. Jessa was calling out the color of the leaves before they fell, and I wanted to make sure he didn't hear — "
"Wait a minute. She was doing what?"
Uh oh. Wrong answer. "It's no big deal — "
"How many times?"
"About twenty," I admit.
My mother pulls the necklace from under her shirt, where it normally resides, and rubs the cross between her fingers. We're not supposed to wear religious symbols in public. It's not that religion is illegal. Just ... unnecessary. The traditions of the pre-Boom era gave their believers comfort, hope, and reassurance — in short, everything that future memory provides us now. The only difference is we actually have proof that the future exists. When we do pray, it's not to any god, but to Fate herself and the predetermined course she's set.
But my mom can be excused for clinging to one of the old faiths. She never got her glimpse of the future, after all.
"Calla Ann Stone." She grips the cross. "I depend on you to keep your sister safe. That means you do not allow her to speak to strangers. You do not stop in a park on your way home from school. And you do not display her abilities for anyone to see."
I look at my hands. "I'm sorry, Mom. It was just this once. Jessa is safe, I promise. Logan's own brother was taken by ComA. He would never tell on her."
At least, I don't think he would. Why did he talk to me today? For all I know, he was spying on Jessa. Maybe he's working for ComA now. Maybe his report will be the one that sends my sister away.
Or maybe it has nothing to do with Jessa. Maybe the falling leaves reminded him of another time, when we used to be friends. My mind drifts to an old book of poems Mom gave me for my twelfth birthday. Pressed in between the pages, next to a poem by Emily Brontë, is a crumbling red leaf. The first leaf Logan ever gave me. A small piece of my heart, one I didn't even know still existed, knocks against my chest.
"You were lucky." My mother strides to the counter and snaps up the cake stand. "Next time might not work out so well."
She plunks the stand on the eating table and lifts the dome. The chocolate cake is higher on one side than the other, the frosting glopped on and messy. Each mark of the handmade-ness reproaches me. See how hard your mother worked? This is how you repay her?
"There's not going to be a next time," I say. "I'm sorry."
"Don't apologize to me. Think how you would feel if you never saw your sister again."
The chocolate cake swims before my eyes. This is so unfair. I would never let them take Jessa away from us. My mother knows this. I just wanted to see the sun. The world is not over.
"That's not going to happen," I say.
"You don't know that."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Forget Tomorrow by Pintip Dunn, Liz Pelletier. Copyright © 2015 Pintip Dunn. Excerpted by permission of Entangled Publishing, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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