Young Writers Society

THIS CHAPTER CONTAINS DEPICTIONS OF DEPRESSION, LGBT+ REPRESENTATION, MISGENDERING, AND EXCESSIVE SWEARING

Lou 201X

“Goodbye sun…” the ball of gas descends beneath the fucking mountain because fuck my life I can’t have one god damn sunset on a lake before summer ends. Ashburrow, West Virginia: middle of fucking no where USA, home of the apocalypse. It’s not a hyperbole either. My dad’s hometown was once ground zero for the battle for earth, he says the woods out behind our new home held a gateway to a realm of the paranormal and most notably: the demon empire. And as the shadows threatened to crawl throughout the hills, clawing at the dry grass, I couldn’t possibly imagine anything sinister about this place. Nothing. At. All.

I gripped the withered grass so tight that my fingers slid into the dirt. “Fuck it,” I said, and rolled back inside.

“Hey sweetpea!” Dad yelled as I slid the patio door shut and drew the thick red curtains over it. Privacy curtains, a relic from our house in Levittown, USA. My father leaned back from the stove and handed me a mug of tea, “I was just going to go out there to sit with you.”

“Thanks, but I’m going to go to my room.”

“Oh, please,” he placed a hand on my shoulder, which I tried to shrug off, but he clearly didn’t get the message, so I kept rolling them all the way back to the patio door and down into the grass. “Humor an old man! My daughter’s going to graduate in a year, I may not have that many years left in me.”

When I didn’t respond he slid down the railing to the top step of the porch, groaning as his joints creaked, and placed his arm over his head dramatically, “Woes me! I see the light! Saint Peter! Have you lost weight, you look so different since the last time I saw you.”

A smile lifted the right corner of my mouth, thankfully the side facing him because it meant he could stop now. He chuckled to himself and stared off at the purple hued clouds. There’s not much to see in this direction besides the clouds. It’s all down hill from here and the hill is just a shaved strip of land where the telephone lines can trail up the mountain uninhibited. All dry crackling grass and ticks until the small town at the base of the hill where either I need to get glasses or it’s too far to see. I doubt the hawk that keeps our bird feeder out of business could make out any of the buildings from it’s perch on our chimney.

“Beautiful isn’t it?” he says, leaning down the steps towards me. The steam off his mug hits the back of my neck and I flinch. “You can see for miles with no light pollution. Ugh! And the stars… I shoulda shown you some constellations while we still had the time. Have you seen the Milky Way yet?” The wind whistled through the trees, “Big strip of stars in the sky. Kind of…bright and… milky.”

“I know what the Milky Way is, dad.”

“Just checking. Those schools don’t teach ya the cool practical stuff anymore…you seem quiet.”

I keep my eyes on the horizon, letting them blur until I see three horizon lines blending together like a stack of cards… fuzzy, moldy cards with primordial thickness… “Just tired.”

“You got school in the morning—first day of school eh? Gotta take a picture before you get on the school bus like when you was in kindergarten.”

“I can drive though.”

“Yeah…” he swallowed, “Yeah I know—”

“And you bought me a car, so…”

“Yeah I know, but, like, in a— for uh—”

“So am I gonna wait for the bus to show up—”

“Well—”

“And be like: ‘sorry bus dude, gonna waste your time using your vehicle as a prop for insta.’”

He coughed, a wide smile on his face. “Insta? Is that really a thing you kids say? That sounds like old people slang when we don’t know what we’re talking about.”

I chuckled, “But like…”

“Yeah, no I get ya. It’s… it’s dumb, I guess.”

I went back to staring at the sunset, it was basically gone now, just a blurb of purple.

“Scott! Do you know where the box of photo albums went?” My godfather called from inside the house. I heard the door slide open, “Oh, are we having a last day of summer tea party?”

My dad handed him the mug that I left abandoned, “Just taking a few breaths.”

“Ah…” Mr. Thompson, my godfather, settled himself on the same step as my father, directly behind me.“You excited for school? Last year, yay!”

A rock sunk from my throat to my uterus. I’d made a grave miscalculation trying to bide my time until I had run out the timer of social expectations. There was no escape now. It was a wall of fathering, an impenetrable barrier of dad jokes and thinning hair lines that blocked the door to the house.

“Yeah,” I conceded, “last year. Woooo…”

“Sucks you have to start at a new school, though.” Mr. Thompson sighed.

In all fairness, it was a relief to be at a different school for the last year. I thought I had to stick it out for another 180 days of Lacrosse Jeremy’s stupid feet on my seat before eighth period leaving clods of dirt on my chair and Bethany Breath of a Horseradish calling me Louise cause “that’s the name god gave you.” Shut the fuck up Bethany; a half asleep twenty something year old woman who spent nine hours pushing me out of a uterus named me Louise and she don’t know jack shit about me. Just cause she was a fucking “chosen” don’t mean she knows anything about naming a seven pound sack of bones.

“You okay there, Lou?” Dad asked.

I loosened my grip on the grass. “Yeah I’m fine.”

Fuck you Bethany.

Starting at a new school isn’t all that different from just continuing on at the old one. Maybe some more haggling with the principal over what classes count as credits for graduating. I had to take the calculus final from last year to prove to them that I didn’t need to retake algebra. It wasted some time I suppose.

“Oh!” Dad set his mug down between his knees, “You took Lou to her counseling session at the school right?”

“Yeah, she’s all set, Scott, don’t worr—”

“Is my trophy still there?”

Mr. Thompson chuckled, “Really, man?”

“I barely passed my classes, what with all the running around, side-stepping the apocalypse. The Championship was my one achievement.” He tapped me on the shoulder, “Look out for a gold trophy with wings, Lou. Your old man made the final pass that won us the championship.”

My godfather sipped his tea, “You know, if you had quit the team, you might of had time to study once in a while instead of leaning on me for all your notes.”

“And we wouldn’t have won the championship, if I had.”

“You can’t know—” and then he stopped, because of course my dad knew. He’s like me, and knowing him he probably knew before try-outs.

“I made my choice, and I’m gonna be proud of it.”

“Bet you didn’t see three years of sitting on the bench in those visions of yours.”

“Well.” Dad sipped his tea. “No great football career is made of gold. You get a dream one night telling you there’s a trophy in it for you at the end and then you get punched in the face by a demon pocessed scarecrow and have to sit a few games out.”

“Obviously,” He slapped my dad on the back, making him spit out some of his tea, “That’s how all the greats were born. Babe Ruth—”

“Head-butted by Nessie.”

“Lebron James—”

“Kicked in the balls by a Yeti. It’s how you win sports!”

“Step five on the hero’s journey: assaulted by a paranormal creature.”

The two of them laughed at each other, giggles bubbling up until that had to set down both of their mugs because drinking was no longer an option for their giddy asses.

I wonder what new hell my peer group will be. Whose house has the best parties for me to avoid, who’s parking spot is off limits, who “sneakily” cheats a glance at my paper during a test. 180 days, I tell myself, then it’s a new group of idiots.

***

It wasn’t hard to tell that this was a dream. In my lucid moments I tend to avoid any place who’s main sensations include vibration pulsing through my bones and horrible claustrophobia. But it happens sometimes in visions. The possible future includes scenarios that I’d never even think to enact. Parties are… a waste of my goddamn time.

So, as it happened that I was feeling the backbeat of “I’ve Got a Feeling” vibrating my vocal cords into a low growl, I was shaken from the pretense of the vision, loosing any faint reasoning of how I got here. Here being almost in the front row of what looked like an outdoor concert stage being absolutely dominated by a band of butch lesbians in ripped up flannels and rings of eyeliner.

My arms fell to my sides as I opened my eyes and I searched around me for the path of least resistance, which was a feat given that I only measured up to the shoulders of any given person around me. I pushed myself through and wandered my way to a playground about a minute’s walk away from the stage. I suppose this must be that park Dad was telling me about before we moved in. Ashburrow was basically wilderness on all of its many axises, but one edge of town had a protected patch of forest hosting a few varieties of endangered species, which the town helped fund by hosting concerts and outdoor theater productions. They have a swingset, it’s lit.

My ass slides into the cracking rubber seat, pinching slightly at the sides, but I ignore it and push myself back off of the soggy wood chips. It rained recently, clearly. I think back to the weather report for this week and count out any days that before the rainstorm predicted for Saturday. I’m at least a few days in the future then. My body swings back and forth, legs kicking aimlessly into the dark forest. It’s probably a mistake to sit on a swing set in the middle of the woods when it’s so dark you can barely see the tree line around you in the sliver of moonlight, but— I think about the moon from before I went to bed. Still a crescent, and the moon was waning, so it can’t be more than a week or its an entirely different moon cycle. The temperature is still warm, even at night, so I suppose its still somewhat summer. Either that or global warming just got real. Realer. My guess is Sunday night.

I grind my feet into the wood chips to make a quick stop and slide my phone out of my pocket to check my math. 9:48 PM Sunday night. “Woo,” I say to myself and put my phone back in my pants.

Before I can kick myself off again, a tree branch snaps from behind me.

Murderer. It has to be. In these woods? It’s the place I’d pick to serial kill.

Out of the trees walks a guy with bright hair cropped short on the sides like mine, only mine is so flat and strawy that it falls to one side. His hair is curly and the top sits in a solid puff almost like a pompadour.

How dare he have the same hair as me.

“Ooo!” he says, taking a seat on the swing next to me. “You and I had the same idea.” As he sat down he pushed himself off and immediately caught up to my height, forcing me to swing with more force to keep up. “Now I can swing and listen to the concert. Hashtag winning.”

“You still say hashtag?” I smirked.

“I’m bringing back hashtag,” he corrected. “Hashtag hashtag. Hashtag hashtag will rise again!” And with that pronouncement he thrust himself off the swing and stumbled to a glorious standing position. “Hashtag,” he mumbled, “my ankles, ugh.” He slumped down into the woodchips, fingers sliding in-between his brightly colored geometric socks, “So that’s why I stopped jumping off swing sets.”

I slowed to a stop by dragging my heels into the ground again, “You’ve made a grave sacrifice, rando’s ankles, for your country, and for your art.” I saluted him and went back to swinging lazily. Behind us, back at the concert stage, an uproar of cheers sprung up. He glanced back and forth between me and the general direction of the cheering behind us and laughed.

“You got a gift with timing,” he told me.

I rolled my eyes. “This isn’t even my final form.”

He laughed again, but obviously he didn’t get the extent of my joke. If I used this ability to it’s fullest potential I could do a lot better than stupid coincidences for the lol’s. Imagine predicting turns in the stock market, or where lightning will hit, or horrible disasters that destroy whole towns. When I woke up from this dream, I would know far more than when to do jokes.

“Say, I don’t recognize you, which is weird since—” he motioned around him, “there ain’t many places to hide. Were’d they dig you up from?”

“That’s cause I just moved here. A couple weeks ago.”

“Oh, you must be Thompson’s kid. We see him around the supermarket.”

I shook my head, “That’s my godfather. He’s living with my dad and me.”

The boy shrugged, “That’s chill. You still in school?”

“Senior, this year.”

His eyes lit up, “I’m a senior! That’s awesome! Actually…” he narrowed his eyes at me, “You do like kinda familiar, are you in my Physics class?”

“Actually, I think it’s Ms. Blaine’s Physics class?”

Without missing a beat he said, “Not after my hostile take-over. Do you stand with the rebellion, comrade?”

“I’m always up for a rebellion, are we talking a basic overthrow of the student teacher hierarchy or are we barricading the desks Les Miz style?”

“Only if I can get my hands on a historically accurate costume, if we’re doing Les Miz, we’re doing it right. All y’all are gonna have to stay late so we can practice the choreography.”

“Maybe we should pick a revolutionary musical with a better ending.”

“That…” he laughed, “Yeah, maybe. So, you moved here for your senior year? That’s kinda fun, like a trial run. If you hate us, you can just leave at the end of the year.”

My shoes ground into the wood chips, and I paused to shake them off, “Your school have a warranty? Or am I responsible for any damages?”

“The bathrooms would suggest that we are not. Speaking of bathrooms, I’m Sam, they/them pronouns.”

I glance hi—them over trying to process the pronoun. They had a boy cut, an over sized lavender T-shirt, cargo shorts, and tall socks wedged into white converses. Each element said boy to me, but I wasn’t there to argue. In all honesty I had never even heard of someone using those pronouns, I didn’t know what… they were supposed to look like.

“Lou, she/hers, I guess.”

Sam took a deep breath and put a smile back on hi—their face. “Yeah, I mean, I use the boys room—one of those ‘if you had to choose’ scenarios—no respect for the school there. I think they decided that they if they kept fixing things, they’d just get broken again, so we only have the one toilet now. I’d say, 2 stars on Yelp.”

“Well that just makes you a wuss. One stall and you give they still get a second star?”

“Yeah,” they dropped their hands into their lap, “well, at least they don’t touch our graffiti.”

I nodded solemnly, “The cuneiform of Ashburrow High School. It would be a travesty to loose such a precious heirloom of our forefathers.”

“Our forefathers don’t have much to add other than penises on everything.”

“Art for Art’s sake.” I drag my feet in the wood chips in the shape of a cartoon dick, and Sam smirked at it.

“A regular ol’ Picasso over here.”

“A Pee-caso,” I corrected.

“Ha!” they slapped a knee.

***

I woke up laughing, but when I opened my eyes and I found myself on my back, in my bed, in reality, I slowly closed my mouth. It wasn’t the weirdest dream I’d ever had. Nor was it my most improbable vision. But it was weird and it was never going to happen, and so I shook it off. I didn’t dwell on it. I threw on some jeans, a black T-shirt one extra too big, and shuffled to my car without disturbing the menfolk.

Ashburrow’s high school is a twenty minute drive from our house. It was still two hours before school started and the sun was blaring off the horizon, so I took the back way through the woods using the bisected hill and the trunks of the birch to block the sun out. In the early morning, and all other times of day, these roads lay vacant and I drive in the center of them barreling down with my windows down, mumbling songs that come on my radio. The brakes of my car creak as I slow to the turns.

When I got to school I sat in my car and slipped my head into one hand leaning against my car door. It’s not hard to fall asleep anymore. I just let my thoughts drift to the back of my mind, into that crick in my neck and everything goes black.

I lifted my head up from my lap where my hands gripped the hilt of the stick I was whittling. I didn’t know where I was, but it’s probably within the area that you would call Ashburrow. I was sitting on an overturned tree trunk amongst trees whose leaves were beginning to turn. I sensed cold, though I can’t exactly feel it in vision, so I thought it must be about October. The trees were in a clearing right above a sharp drop and from there I could see Ashburrow curled up amongst the sea of orange and red leaves, and beneath it the patchwork of civilization, whose gridded roads and square buildings I could make out with impeccable detail. It might have been October, or maybe just really high up. My dad and Mr. Thompson said there were hiking trails, up the mountain from us, some we could even drive to, but I’ve never been. I glanced around for a trail sign, but all I could see was a marker labeled “5 miles” perched precariously in the side of the mountain threatening to jump off the side.

I set down the spear I was apparently carving and peered further over the edge, at the carnage of a mudslide that carved out all the bushes that might have broken my fall if I were to slip.

The voice that broke my concentration was familiar, “Lou, don’t make me keep telling you to keep away from the edge.” I step back into the arms of someone tall, or at least significantly taller than me. H—They catch me in a net of floral lace that runs around the boarders of the floaty white linen sleeves of their floaty white linen blouse. They brought me to my feet away from the edge. “Don’t make me be a park ranger. Cause I will, and you know I know how, you’ve met Pa, he taught me everything.” Their smile was wide and glistening with pink lip gloss that sparkled as much as their teeth. A mixture of the blinding light reflecting directly into my corneas and the recognition of that same goofy smile which I had seen not an hour before laughing at my dick threw me off balance again and they had to catch me before I tumbled over the back of the log. “Jeezums, Lou. We should just go home, you can’t fight anything on those jelly legs.”

Before I could even ask, I shook awake in my car, the nuclear alarm ringtone blaring out of my phone whose lock screen read “Fuckin’ School, Ya Dingus!”

“Sam.” I ran my fingers through to the back of my skull, took a deep breath, and stepped out of the car. As I entered the hallowed halls of an American public high school, I told myself that it was not the completely coincidental appearance of some…person—there has to be a better word for them—but instead something inherent in the vision itself which had me so shaken. Was it that the colors were more vibrant up on the mountain? Or that standing on the edge left me, for once, with butterflies swirling in my stomach? Or that I could feel the heat in my face as I fell backward into the arms of a more feminine presenting stranger. This town was… it was vivid. Like a boxy TV set that had been running with static had been smacked real good with a hammer, my power was running smoothly.

I slid into what I now claimed as my first period seat at the back of a Latin classroom and kept sliding until I was tucked into my desk with my feet hooked under the seat in front of me.

“You can’t sleep in class,” they said, poking my shoulder to wake me.

“I haven’t even fallen asleep yet—” I argued, but I was in a different classroom now. One with lab tables and a none of the pleasant sunbeam that I had strategically curled myself up under in the back of my latin classroom.

Sam raised one eyebrow at me, red stained lips pursed. “You were snoring.”

I nodded slowly, keeping my attention fixed on the details around me.

We were in the middle of some sort of busy work, all of my twenty classmates were half focused on finishing a worksheet which I found stuck to the side of my face. Mine was done.

“So…” they turned back to their own worksheet, “Did you see anything interesting?”

“Like movies?” My laugh cracked nervously.

“In your…” they glanced around them and then lowered their voice so that only I could hear, “In your vision?”

***

I shouldn’t blame people for what they say and do in a vision. But when I make it to my last period, Physics, and Sam was sitting in the second row across the room from me in a bright red short sleeved button up shirt with a blue bow tie and their hands crossed over a new yellow spiral bound notebook, I couldn’t help but to glare. It started out as staring to gather intel on this mysterious person, but my brow felt tense and my lips turned down and I knew that if they were to turn around and look at the back of the class, they’d see me glaring. A glint of light would steak across my eyes anime style and the room would drop ten degrees.

It was just one reality which I could enact, and for all I know the probability could be slim, but the words echoed in my mind. No one, in any of my alternate realities, enacted or not, had ever admitted to knowing my power—aside from my dad and my godfather of course. I’d forgotten how to worry about people finding out, butmy heart seized up and my back sweated and my tongue was so dry that my tastebuds gritted the roof of my mouth like sandpaper.

I should have checked the date when I was in there. I woke up at the end of my class with the bell, which broke off the vision right when I needed to ask questions. How did they figure it out? Maybe it was a joke. But then there was the way they said it, checking the room for eavesdroppers. They wanted to know what I’d seen, maybe they were making me hang around them to see what their future was, or for test answers. And if they figured it out, who else could?

I kept my eyes on them throughout class, not really taking in any of the information as my mind went over every possible scenario that could lead me to that future. There were too many and they drowned out the introduction Ms. Blaine had prepared, they drowned out the slamming of locker doors as the school packed up to leave, they drowned out the sound of my car engine groaning up the side of a mountain, they drowned out the small talk I shared with my two guardians as we sat around a pot roast my dad had cooked up for the three of us. I only shook myself out of it as I lay in bed at 11 staring across the room at the curtains swaying in the night air from my open window because I had something Sam didn’t: the ability to dream a different reality into existence.

This time, as I drifted off, I found myself alone in a field, one that sloped up towards the top of the mountain. The mountain Ashburrow sits on doesn’t have a very tall peak, so the small clearing was rife with wildflowers that broke up the tall grass I was standing in. The wind whipped through my clothing, slapping the hood my raincoat to my back. Above me raged a thick haze of clouds crackling with switches of lightning.

My eyes locked on the peak though, where a single person clung to the rock.

“SAM!” my mouth screamed. I wanted to slap my hand over it, but my fingers wouldn’t move the way that I wanted them too, instead they curled into fists as I stumbled through the grass toward the peak.

What the hell, I thought, but my mouth was already forming different words.

“SAM!” my throat yelled again.

Why can’t I control it?

The rocks scraped against my knees as I crawled up the wall barely twice my height, but the rocks were slippery and my fingers were shaking.

Why can I feel it? I stared down at my bleeding hands and as my last bit of will over this vision faded away, I began to climb again. It was hard work, but I remembered Sam teaching me to find the hand holds in a wall of rock and I made slow work of it.

“Sam!” I threw myself over the ridge and crawled to them.

“Lou!” they clung with one arm wrapped around a rock, their knuckles white. Beneath their hips sat a series of carvings in the shape of a circle. “I told you to go home!”

“When have I ever listened to you?” I yelled back against the wind.

A twinge of a smile curled onto the corner of their mouth, but it faded as they looked down and the carvings beneath them began to glow. “Lou, I think this is it. This is the end of the world.”