Autumn's Wish (13 page)

“I love you. I love you more than I can ever say in words…and I'm really good with words…but they're not enough. None of them are. Except maybe these.”

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a black velvet box. His hands are steady now as he opens it to reveal a beautiful round diamond on a delicate platinum band. He looks back up at me—at us—and his eyes shine with tears.

“Autumn Falls,” he says. Then he grins wickedly.

“J.J.,” Future Me says with a jittery laugh, “I swear to God if you anagram now—”

J.J. grins wider. “Autumn Falls…”

A dramatic pause. He can't stop smiling and neither can I, but I'm dying to hear him say it. Then he stops smiling. He looks up at me, completely open, sincere, and vulnerable.

“…will you marry me?”

“Yes.”

My voice is soft when Jenna answers the phone. I can't help it. I'm completely in awe of what I'm about to say. “Jenna…I'm in love with J.J.”

“You are?! What happened?”

I tell her everything, and when I'm done she screams. “This is
amazing
! I don't even care if Sam goes to MIT. I have perfect-Brit-boy Simon waiting for me!”

“Yeah,” I say, “it's amazing. For both of us. But the future keeps changing. What if we mess it up?”

“You won't,” she assures me. “
We
won't. The future you saw is based on what's going on
now,
right? So all we have to do is stick with that and everything will work out the way it's supposed to. I stay with Sam, and you keep going with your plan to break up Carrie and J.J. at the Scare Pair dance.”

“But what about J.J.?” I ask. “The way I feel…it hurts to have it inside like this. I just want to run over to his house and tell him!”

“No,” Jenna says. “That's off-plan. Off-plan changes the future. Break him and Carrie up, then let it happen naturally from there.”

“How?! How do I wait that long?”

“Future You did, right?”

“I don't know! I don't when J.J. and I got together. They didn't say. What if they got together after I saw this future and then ran to his house and told him how I feel?”

Jenna's silent for a moment, but I can hear her breath speed up the littlest bit as she paces her room. “No,” she finally says. “I get what you're saying, but it doesn't sound right. Every time you've made a move based on what you've seen, it changed the future. I don't think you can risk it.”

“You're just saying that because you want to meet hot-boy Simon,” I grouse.

“Yes!”
she retorts; then she pauses a second. “Wait a minute…when you were at my house, did I look for you at all?”

“Why would you look for me?” I ask. “I was right next to you.”

“No, I mean
you.
Past You. 'Cause you're telling me this now, so when I'm actually there in the future, I'll remember this is the moment you told me about and I'll look for you, right?”

“I guess…”

“And you'll look for you too!” she shouts. “Which will be even weirder because now you'll know J.J.'s going to propose before he actually does it, which could change everything…unless the Future You that you saw
already
knew he was going to propose because she had once been
you
you and had seen it all before….”

“Okay, you're making my head hurt,” I say. “I've got to go.”

“No off-plan!” she calls just before I click off. “Simon and I are counting on you!”

Once she's off the line, I stare at the phone.

I really want to text J.J.

Like,
really
want to text J.J.

Would it really hurt things if I texted J.J.? We're friends again now, right? We used to text all the time.

I surf the Net until I find the perfect thing to send: an episode of
Drunk History
about Baron von Steuben getting Washington's army into shape. I copy the link and text it to J.J., then wait an agonizing thirty minutes until he texts back:

“That's it?!” I scream to my phone. “A smiley face?!”

I throw my phone onto the bed and throw myself down after it.

I suck at being patient.

I'm convinced there's no way I'll ever get to sleep. I do, but I dream about J.J. and me on our amazingly perfect four-month cross-country road trip, so I'm completely miserable when I wake up and realize I have to wait six years for that to happen.

As if to rub in my trauma, there's an email from Carrie on my phone. It's for the whole Senior Social Committee. Tomorrow's the Scare Pair dance, and tonight we have to put all the date cards together. It's all about the last minute, because Carrie had the Senior Social Committee extend the questionnaire deadline until the end of the school day
today
so we get as many people as possible. Carrie's plan is to have all eight of us in the sisterhood meet at Brody's house right after school. That's when Brody will stop the server from accepting any more questionnaires, run her program, and print out the results onto fancy cards that we'll stuff into envelopes and label.

I have only the vaguest idea of how I'll sabotage the Scare Pairs and make them what I want. I'm hoping it'll all come together at the last second.

School is all about dodging J.J. There is no way I can handle our kinda-sorta not-really-around-other-people friendship right now. Just before lunch, there's a horrible moment when I see him walking down the hall toward me with his arm around Carrie. He's smiling down at her with his forehead close to hers, and even from twenty feet away I can tell they're all flirty and whispery, and I know if he looks up and sees me my chest will open up and my heart will flop onto the floor in a pool of horror.

He starts to raise his head, but I duck into the library. Clearly it's a Quest Bar and Diet Coke by myself day.

When school ends, I desperately wish I were meeting J.J. for another tutoring session, but I'm also desperately glad I'm not. I don't think I could sit two inches away from him and not say something stupid or try to curl into his arms. Instead I ask Brody LeClair for a ride to her house. Better to ride with her than with Carrie, who would be telling me all kinds of cute stories about her and the guy I'm supposed to marry.

Brody's house is huge. There are four giant bedrooms upstairs, and since she's an only child and a tech genius, one room is her “office.” It's filled with computers, scanners, printers, and machines I can't even comprehend. I wouldn't be surprised if she could control a manned space flight from here. The one machine I
do
understand is the giant wall-mounted TV at the end of the room. In honor of Halloween, we're going to have a Tim Burton film fest while we work, starting with
The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Brody and I are the first to arrive, which gives her a chance to stop the questionnaire site and start her pairing program. Carrie and Gus are the last to show, but we're all happiest to see them because they bring the pizzas, drinks, and snacks. Their timing is close to perfect, because the Scare Pair program finishes up just five minutes before they arrive.

“Okay, here's the deal!” Carrie says after we lay out all the refreshments. “Eat and drink all you want, but don't get the date cards or envelopes dirty. Brody just printed out labels for everyone coming to the dance. Now she's printing out the Scare Pair cards.” She reaches for the humming printer and pulls out one of the freshly printed cards. It's thick stock and about the size of an iPhone 6 Plus, with a fancy orange and black border around the edge. The envelopes match perfectly.

“Ouch.” Carrie winces as she looks at the card. “This one's for Steffi Aaronsen and it pairs her with Wayne Jarvitz. She won't like that at all. See?”

Carrie holds out the card. It has Steffi's name in huge drippy-blood font. Below that, it says,
shall meet her Scare Pair
in italics. Then, in a smaller version of the drippy-blood font is Wayne Jarvitz's name. Since Steffi's name is the big one, this is her card. Wayne's will have the same information, but the other way around. Beneath the smaller name it says in smaller italics,
Don't like what you see? Give it just one dance. Don't be a ghoul—that's the rule.

“Brody's awesome and already printed out eight stacks of label sheets, one for each of us. The whole student body is there alphabetically, so you'll find who you need. Everyone start grabbing cards as they come out of the printer, stuff them into the envelopes, label the envelopes, seal them, then put them into one of the two plastic bins. When we have enough, the envelopes should stand upright in there. Just please try to keep them all in alphabetical order. The time we spend now is time we save at the start of the dance.”

We all set to work. Despite the efforts of each year's Senior Social Committee, dances don't usually get big crowds. The computer thing helped, though. We have around two hundred people coming—two hundred envelopes to stuff with cards for one hundred Scare Pairs. For a high school dance, that's huge. It's also a ton of stuffing/labeling/sealing work, but it helps that we're all snacking, watching the movie, and squealing about every pair we read.

“No! Way!” Gus shouts as he looks at one of his cards. “I got Doug Church! I didn't even know he was out!”

“But you knew he was gay?” Meegan Rudolph asks.

“Oh, please,” Gus says. “Everyone knows he's gay. He's as gay as Kyler Leeds.”

“Kyler Leeds is not gay!” Carrie and I shout at the same time. We catch each other's eye and smile, and for a second I forgive her for wanting to steal my perfect future.

We all gab about most of the pairs we read, and though I keep an ear out for my friends, I know it's actually better if I don't hear their names. Then only one person and not all eight of us will know I changed things around. And maybe one person will think they remembered it wrong.

“YES! Brody, your program is a genius!” Carrie cries, waving her card in the air. “I got J.J.!”

“Of course you did!” Kassie dolphin-squeals back. “You guys are MFEOFAETLND!”

My head throbs, and it's not just because Kassie's screeching nonsense letters in a register high enough to break glass. My life jut got a lot harder. I can still change Carrie and J.J.'s Scare Pairs—I have to more than ever now—but everyone's going to know someone swapped them. If I'm lucky, they won't guess it's me.

A few minutes later, Mariah Amhari holds a card in front of her face and moans. “I got Keith Hamilton.”

Carrie wheels in her seat to face Mariah. “Seriously? Want to trade?”

I don't move a muscle, but inside I'm turning cartwheels.
Yes! This is perfect! Switch!