The Foreseeable Future Page 10

  I’d never known my eyes could look like that.

  For Seth’s benefit, I shrugged. “It was weird. It was like watching someone else.”

  And he nodded, satisfied.

  ELEVEN

  My phone buzzed beneath my pillow. Still half asleep, expecting Seth or one of my friends, I answered. There was a pause before a confused voice asked, “Is this Audrey Nelson?”

  “Yeah.” I lifted my head to see if Rosie was still around. She wasn’t. A plate of half-eaten Eggo waffles rested precariously at the edge of her desk.

  “This is Kristy Summers calling from the Steeds County News. Did I wake you?”

  I hesitated. “You did.”

  The woman’s laughter was high-pitched and hollow. “Good to know some things never change. Even the bravest teenager in northern California likes to sleep until noon, am I right?”

  “Uh.” I was mildly offended by the northern distinction. “I work nights?”

  “Oh, of course. My bad. At the Crescent Bay Retirement Home, correct?”

  “Sorry,” I said, “but why are you calling?”

  “Well, I’m hoping to learn more about you when I interview you and Cameron Suzuki for the Steeds County News!” She shouted the last three words, as if describing a prize I had won.

  At first, my mind was blank.

  “Cameron?” I sat up straight as the events of last night arranged themselves in my memory. “Cameron agreed to do an interview?”

  “Well, no. We actually haven’t been able to get in touch with Miss Suzuki, or her parents. We were hoping you could help us out with that.”

  My eagerness vanished. “Cameron’s in the hospital.”

  “Oh no!” The reporter crooned. “I’m sorry to hear that. Is something wrong?”

  “Uh, she had a heart attack.” I was ready to get off the phone, but Kristy’s rapid responses left no window through which I might make a graceful exit.

  “But you successfully performed CPR. It says so here, in my notes.”

  “Cameron had surgery literally yesterday. I don’t think we can come on your show. And actually, this isn’t a great time to talk. I have to . . .” I trailed off, hoping she would take the hint, but Kristy was content to wait out the silence.

  “When will Miss Suzuki be mobile, do you think?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “We could certainly do the interview in the hospital.”

  I tried to imagine what Seth would say upon learning I’d brought a film crew to Cameron’s hospital room. “I’m not going to bother her.”

  Kristy went “Hmm,” conspiratorially, as if together we could brainstorm a new plan. “I suppose we’ll just have to interview you by yourself! I think, in a way, your perspective is the most interesting. And then maybe you and your friend could come back on the show in a few months. Our viewers love a good follow-up story!”

  I tried to picture myself on the news. My mind conjured some poised, well-groomed version of Audrey Nelson who would, with calm humility, explain the steps of CPR to the people watching at home. The fantasy was appealing, if not entirely realistic.

  “You know, you might not get this opportunity again. . . .” Something like admonishment had seeped into Kristy’s tone.

  “This opportunity?” I echoed.

  “To be recognized.”

  Did I even want to be recognized, again, by the Steeds County News? Most people I knew got their news from the Internet.

  “I don’t think I’m interested.”

  “No?” I could imagine Kristy Summers tilting her head, confused.

  “No.”

  “Okay, I get it.” She sighed good-naturedly. “Not a morning person. Fair enough. Why don’t you get some coffee, think it over, and call me back?”

  “It’s not morning,” I reminded her, before hanging up the phone. “It’s noon.”

  I fell back against my pillows.

  I couldn’t let Kristy Summers interview me. There was no way Cameron would appreciate the news station continuing to air close-up shots of her lifeless face. Plus, Seth had so automatically disapproved of the video’s existence, it hadn’t even occurred to him that I might not resent the attention.

  And, in reality, if I were to appear on our region’s low-budget morning show, my mother would watch only reluctantly, through the cracks between her fingers. Dad and Jake would tune in and wait for me to do something mockable—to hiccup, or misuse an idiom—so that they could enter my humiliation into the Nelson family catalog of shame.

  Hanging up on Kristy Summers had been my only choice.

  Before I could commit to getting out of bed, Rosie came lurching into the room, holding out her phone like it was something thrilling and illicit. “Move over,” she said, shoving on my shoulder until I made space.

  She slid into bed with me and angled the screen so I could see the video—the one starring Cameron Suzuki as temporarily-but-not-officially dead. Someone had uploaded the clip to YouTube and given it the clunky title of California Teen Hero Saves Life of a Friend.

  The video had been watched 7,034 times.

  This was why Kristy Summers had called—not to offer me attention, but to capitalize on the attention I was already getting.

  I should have known.

  “You don’t look so good,” Rosie said, smirking at the screen. For a few seconds, I watched my arms flexing, my facial muscles straining as I endeavored to pump blood to Cameron’s heart. Seth’s shoes were visible in the background— not his boots, but the leather sandals he’d worn to the beach, two days ago.

  I shut my eyes just before the video’s single line of dialogue. I had sounded strangely calm when I’d announced to the crowd, I need to stop. No one had offered to take my place.

  “There are a lot of comments,” Rosie warned.

  “Nice comments?” I asked.

  She read aloud: “‘Is it just me, or is this girl the spitting image of Emma Stone?’”

  “That’s nice. Emma Stone is cute.”

  “Emma Stone is a babe. Here’s a not so nice one.” My sister dropped her voice to portray the patronizing tone of a man on the Internet. “‘Sorry to disappoint all of you but I’m a paramedic and Audrey Nelson clearly has no idea what she’s doing. To be honest she’s probably making things worse. Are we sure the victim even survived?’”

  “All right,” I said. “Next, please.”

  “‘Holy shit, this girl is a superhero. Most girls her age would just start screaming and crying. LOL.’”

  “Is that supposed to be a nice one?” I asked.

  “They called you a superhero. . . .”

  “They insulted our entire gender.”

  “Kind of like this one: ‘Crescent Bay girls are hot. Anyone in Redding want to take a road trip for some tail?’”

  Hearing these words exit my little sister’s mouth made me feel impossibly dirty. “I don’t like this,” I said, skin crawling.

  Rosie let her phone fall facedown into the blankets. Snuggling against my shoulder, a rare display of affection, she said, “The whole thing is kind of cool, though. It’s like you’re famous.”

  I smiled in spite of myself. Rosie actually sounded impressed. And even though it was embarrassing to realize that everyone had seen or would soon see this footage of me sweating, grunting, and pounding on another girl’s chest—even though I was dreading Seth’s reaction to the video’s debut on the World Wide Web—a part of me thought, if I had to be slightly famous, at least it was for something unambiguously good.

  “This woman just called and asked me to come on the news,” I told Rosie.

  My sister lifted her chin from my shoulder. “What’d you say?”

  “I said no.”

  She fiddled with the frayed edge of my bedsheet. “No one else in our family has ever been on TV.”
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  She was right. Occasionally, recordings of our mother ended up online, but panel discussions among bespectacled professors were not exactly the stuff of prime time.

  “Maybe we’re just not TV people,” Rosie added, before changing the subject. “Hey, how’d you even know you could do it?”

  “Do what? CPR?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I didn’t know for sure. I just had to try.”

  After a pause, Rosie asked, “Does everyone at your work know you’re going to Whedon?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “They’ll be sad when you quit,” she informed me.

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah, now that you’ve gone viral.”

  I laughed, because Rosie was exaggerating. To qualify as viral, YouTube videos needed hundreds of thousands of hits. They needed to generate spin-offs and parodies and cheesy jokes delivered by talk show hosts. Ideally, they featured an animal doing something strangely human, or someone’s grandma struggling to adjust to the new millennium.

  But before work that night, when I checked my phone for any word from Seth, a text from Sara echoed Rosie’s claim: Are you aware that you’ve gone viral??

  I followed the link attached to my best friend’s message. The view count had already tripled.

  TWELVE

  Tamora Sinclair was nocturnal. She had been nocturnal since her retirement ten years ago, and she was not going to change her ways just because the nursing home only served meals when the sun was up. According to Maureen, our newest resident had spent her first night watching public access television and proceeded to sleep through the next day. Now, in the middle of my first unsupervised shift, Tamora was wide awake and paging me.

  When I entered her room, I found her sitting cross-legged on the bed she must have made herself—two more things of which residents in Assisted Living were not normally capable—and wearing a silk robe patterned with sunflowers. Her silvery blond hair, so straight it appeared flat-ironed, was tied at the nape of her neck.

  “There you are,” she said, as if it had taken me longer than two minutes to run to her room from the Health and Rehabilitation wing, where I worked the bulk of my hours. Contrary to its optimistic name, Health and Rehabilitation was everyone’s last stop. The opposite of health, if anything.

  “How would I go about getting a midnight snack?” Tamora asked politely.

  “I don’t think midnight snacks are allowed, exactly.”

  Tamora blinked. Her eyes were eerily bright, and the lower half of her face hung from cheekbones you could tell had once been enviable. “Then how exactly do you expect me to get through the night?”

  “Sleeping?” I suggested.

  “I like to sleep during the day. Helps me avoid human interaction.”

  “Then I think your best bet is to wake up around six, go to the dining room long enough to slip some food into your pockets, and become a secret snack hoarder.”

  Tamora looked at me, one corner of her mouth turning south in amusement. “Like a child robbing the cookie jar?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’m seventy-eight years old.”

  “Around here, that’s pretty young.”

  Rolling her eyes, Tamora changed the subject. “Did they call?”

  I was on the verge of asking, Did who call? when I remembered our parting words from the night before. After the video’s first appearance on the local news, Tamora had warned me that my phone would ring. “Yes,” I admitted. “They called.”

  “Did you decline to comment?” she asked again.

  “More or less. But I’m getting all these e-mails, mostly from people who write for different websites. They won’t leave me alone.”

  Tamora’s chin rotated in the air; I couldn’t tell if she meant to shake her head or nod at me. “Let’s strike a deal. You bring me food every night, and I’ll teach you how to deal with the press.”

  In my pocket, my pager launched into a tinny version of “Pop Goes the Weasel.” I still hadn’t seen Seth tonight, and if I wanted our breaks to align I had to report to Maureen and find out what she needed from me now.

  “That’s a good deal,” I said vaguely, already turning on my heel. “I have to catch up with my boss. I’ll see what I can do about bringing you a snack, all right?”

  Tamora looked hurt by my hasty good-bye, but I was used to sleepless residents trying to keep me in their rooms with various entrapments—stories, advice, photo albums, or what someone promised was an especially riveting Law and Order rerun. They were lonely. I was busy. Disappointing people, Maureen had assured me, was part of the job.

  * * *

  * * *

  My lunch break did not align with Seth’s. What my supervisor wanted was for me to change Mr. Leary’s urine-soaked bedsheets without rousing Mr. Leary himself. Remaking an occupied bed was a skill I’d honed during my first week on the job—a skill of which I was weirdly proud, though I wasn’t exactly sure how to phrase it for my résumé.

  By the end of my shift, I was exhausted and convinced I would head straight home. But in the parking lot—the sunrise bleeding through the haze, rendering everything pinkish— Seth was, as usual, leaning against the trunk of his Jeep. With his stance wide, his arms crossed, he grinned at me.

  “Long night?”

  “Endless,” I answered.

  “Bedtime?”

  “Not yet.”

  Something about Seth’s perfect composure convinced me not to mention the video. The whole thing was out of our control. And maybe he was already over it, or maybe Cameron hadn’t been as traumatized by the footage as Seth had predicted.

  Maybe Cameron was just psyched to be alive.

  Instead of driving down to the beach, we took the crooked, wooden staircase that led all the way from the nursing home to the sand. Few residents could still manage these stairs, leftover from the property’s life as a summer camp for city kids.

  “Question,” said Seth, a step below me. “If you could be anywhere with anyone right now, where would you be and with who? And don’t say right here with me, because that’s cheating.”

  “What if it’s true?” I asked.

  “Still cheating.” He had turned away from the beach. The backdrop of white sand put his features into high definition. The truth was that the only other place I wanted to be was in my bed, but that was a boring response. A conversation killer of a response.

  “Okay. In a hotel room, overlooking a big city . . .”

  Seth grabbed my hand to help me over a step that had rotted and caved in. “And who would be in this hotel room with you?”

  “My brother and sister.”

  He laughed. “Really?”

  “Yeah. My family travels a lot, and Whedon usually pays for my parents’ room, so Jake and Rosie and I get our own. We always end up watching trash TV or joyriding the elevator in our pajamas or telling one another weird secrets. It’s when my siblings seem most real to me. It’s like we have to get out of Crescent Bay, and away from our parents, just to see each other.”

  “I know what you mean,” Seth said. “Both of my brothers have already moved out, and when I visit Cory at his place with his wife and his kids, we’re totally civilized. But when he comes home, especially if my dad’s around, it takes about ten minutes for us to start wrestling on the floor of the living room.”

  I jumped from the bottom step to the cold sand. “Seriously?”

  “Last Sunday, my twenty-six-year-old brother tried to suffocate me with a couch cushion. Either of your siblings ever try to murder you?”

  “Nah,” I said. “We stick to verbal aggression.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “It does?”

  “Yeah. You talk really fast.”

  In my family, if you didn’t talk fast and loud, brandishing the biggest word
s in your vocabulary, no one would hear you at all.

  I wanted to ask Seth an unexpected question, but not the same thing he’d asked me. Feeling wired and brave, before I could curb the impulse, I said, “If you had to marry one of your ex-girlfriends, who would you choose?”

  Seth turned his palms toward the sky. “If I had to marry one of them?”

  “Yes!” The question was ludicrous; we were eighteen years old, but I had a potentially self-destructive need to make Seth admit that he’d felt this way before. He’d already wanted multiple girls the way I wanted him now.

  “Well, my preference would be to avoid making a lifetime commitment to anyone before, you know, puberty ends.”

  I was pretty sure puberty had finished its work on Seth O’Malley years ago. He could easily have passed for twenty-one.

  “But if I had to pick . . . I’d pick you.”

  “That’s cheating!”

  “You never said I couldn’t pick you!”

  “But I’m not your ex. I’m not even your—” I stopped.

  In school, the joke had always been that if you wanted to date Seth O’Malley, you could add your name to the waiting list.

  Seth grinned. “You’re not my girlfriend?”

  I closed my eyes. Heat spilled across my cheeks and the ocean roared in my ears.

  “Why is that, exactly?” he asked.

  I could smell the laundry soap on his shirt, the wood smoke trapped in his hair. “I guess I didn’t know it was an option,” I said.

  “Oh, believe me,” Seth said, grabbing and swinging my hand through the air. “You’ve got nothing but options.”

  We were walking north along the edge of the ocean, stepping over driftwood and tangles of kelp. Ahead of us towered the dune that barricaded Crescent Bay’s beach from the rest of the coastline. At the top was a sort of hollow in the rocks, a cave just big enough for two people—if the people didn’t mind being horizontal.

  I was about to ask if he felt like taking a hike, when Seth cleared his throat and announced, “I went to see Cameron yesterday morning. After work.” Standing with his spine straight, he was half a foot taller than me. “The good news is that the surgery went well. Oh, and she never saw that video.”