The Future of Another Timeline

^SIX BETH

Balboa, Alta California… Irvine, Alta California (1992 C.E.)

Lizzy had the biggest car, so she always drove when we did things as a group. Which was good, because it turned out Heather had invited her cousin Hamid, and Soojin had brought that poseur Mark. As we drove to the movies, I wondered whether Mark still had scars from his unimpressive experiments with chest carving. And then I remembered with a nauseated jolt that we’d left Mark’s best friend floating in Woodbridge Lake a couple months ago. Maybe I’d try to be nice to the guy for once.

The double bill at the Balboa Theater that night included Total Recall. As we piled into the stained pseudo-velvet seats in the balcony, I wound up between Lizzy and Hamid. I was a little annoyed at first, but it turned out that Hamid had seen RoboCop on video, and could actually string together a few sentences about it.

“I really liked how RoboCop had those advertisements and news propaganda bits.” He turned to me and offered some of his popcorn. Hamid and Heather hung out sometimes, so we’d met before, but all I knew was that he was a senior who had gotten into UCLA.

“Yeah. I love movies that are violent and funny at the same time. The ads made it seem like Total Recall will be that way too. Plus it’s the same director.”

“Exactly! Paul Verhoeven is rad.”

I’d rarely met anyone who cared that movies had directors, let alone that those directors might have something to do with the tone of the film. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but Hamid was pretty cute. It wasn’t his looks, which were perfectly fine but not particularly noteworthy—he had short black hair and one of those perfect golden-brown California tans that all of us wanted. The main thing was that I liked talking to him. We discussed our favorite directors until the lights went down, at which point I was definitely developing a crush.

We started holding hands around the point where Arnold Schwarzenegger’s eyeballs pop out in the thin Martian atmosphere. It was one of those surreptitious moments in the dark, eyes carefully averted, that I’d experienced half a dozen times with other boys. Usually all that came of it was extra popcorn butter on my fingers and a few awkward glances once we’d returned to the light.

Not this time. During our post-movie excursion to the donut shop, Hamid managed to jam a folded napkin into my hand. Much later in the evening, alone in my room with headphones blasting Million Eyes, I peeked. There was a phone number. Below it, he’d written: “Get your ass to Mars. Or call me. Or both.” Of course I called.

The following weekend, Hamid picked me up in a beat-up old sedan that was clearly a family hand-me-down. School was finally out for the summer and I’d spent the day listening to my mom on the phone signing me up for SAT prep classes. It was a relief to sit on the cracked seats with someone who had opinions about things other than my academic future.

“Air conditioning’s broken. Sorry about that.”

I didn’t mind. Hot air blew in the open windows and the horizon was smeared with a dirty orange sunset. He’d installed a decent stereo, so I fiddled with the cassette player. A tape popped out with no label.

“What’s this?”

“A mixtape Heather made for me. You’d probably like it.”

He was right. Trouble for Nora filled the car with sound and we drove toward the beach.

“So what are you going to major in at UCLA?” I asked.

“I have no idea, honestly. I’m undeclared and I plan to keep it that way for as long as possible.”

I was taken aback. Lizzy and I both planned to study geoscience, and spent a lot of time talking about how we’d organize our careers. Everything started with escaping from Irvine, of course, but usually ended in some remote Arctic region where we’d discover the secret of how life evolved.

“Isn’t there something that you want to study? You could major in film.”

He laughed bitterly. “My parents are paying for college. I’m not allowed to major in film.”

“What do they want you to major in?”

“Pretty much either pre-med or business.”

“That sucks.”

He turned to me briefly with a lopsided smile, and for a moment he was so gorgeous that I lost the thread of my dark premonition that one day he’d be a depressed middle manager posting about cult movies on Usenet.

“What do you want to major in?”

“I’m going to be a geoscientist.”

“Oh yeah? You going to travel through time?”

I rolled my eyes. “That’s cultural geology. They only call it that because the Machines are found in rocks. I’m going to study actual geology. You know, like how the Earth was formed.”

He laughed and sped off the freeway toward Balboa Beach. “I like you, Beth Cohen. I think you might be the coolest girl I’ve ever met.”

Everything we did that evening was an excuse to have a long conversation. We talked about the artificiality of high school as we ate pizza; we talked about the movie Wings of Desire as we took off our shoes to feel the sand where it met water. Around us were the amplified noises of the Fun Zone—a mix of videogame zoinks, music from half a dozen speakers, and kids getting off on sugar and booze—but all of it was muffled by the retaining wall of our voices. Eventually we were silent again, holding hands in the dark and soaking up what remained of the day’s heat as it radiated from the sand.

“Sometimes I think going to college is kind of like dying. You’re this one kind of person, with all different interests, but then you have to cut those off and become somebody totally different.” Hamid looked down as he spoke, digging a hole in the sand. I felt joined to him by mournfulness, plus the tragedy of how we were only now getting to know each other. He was about to disappear into a future neither of us could imagine.

Impulsively I ran my fingers through his hair, and it felt soft but also sad and profound and terrifying. And then, suddenly, it was scalding hot and urgent. Hamid turned to me and we were kissing, and also touching each other in a way that made my muscles tighten involuntarily. I was filled with an ache I’d only seen described in cheesy erotica they stocked in the “sexuality” section at Brentano’s bookstore.

We paused and I whispered in his ear. “You are so beautiful.” I had always wanted to say that to someone and mean it.

He looked into my eyes, his face serious. “So are you.”

We stood up, arms wrapped around each other, bodies pressed together as closely as possible.

“We should probably go home.”

“Yeah, we should.”

As we kissed again, I wondered if what was happening between us meant anything. Maybe we would never do this again, or maybe we’d have some kind of John Hughes–style summer romance. Maybe we’d fall in love. We trudged back to the parking lot, which was mostly empty. Then we spent a while listening to music in the car and saying we should leave but instead figuring out how to configure the seats so that we could lie next to each other.

I wanted to kiss every part of him that I’d read was a good place to kiss: his neck, his eyelids, his chest, his stomach. Everything. Each time he returned my kisses, place by place, and I could feel the softness of his lips even in the parts of my body he wasn’t touching. At a certain point it seemed like the most obvious thing to do was cover ourselves in a musty blanket from the back and take off all our clothes. I had never been naked with anyone like this before, for the sole purpose of exploration. It was like science.

As we fumbled toward what I’d been told would give us pleasure, I kept wondering what my body was supposed to be feeling. Intermittently I went numb. Images popped into my head whose origins I didn’t want to remember. Angry hands between my legs. A voice that turned my name into a curse. Concentrating intensely, I reoriented to the sound of Hamid sighing and ran my hands down the shallow ravine of his spine. But I’d lost the thread of what we were doing. It was like watching a movie where you didn’t get a bunch of the key references. Good—maybe very good—but also confusing.

Afterward we held each other, shaky and sweating and engrossed by conversation again.

“I guess I thought that would hurt more.” I spoke into the curve of his neck, and could feel the cords of his muscles move before he shifted onto his elbow to look at me.

“Wait, why?”

“Well, because… you know, it usually hurts the first time for girls.”

Hamid was startled. “You were a virgin? I thought… well, you don’t act like one.”

“What does a virgin act like?”

“I mean, you’re one of Heather’s punk friends. I thought you guys were all worldly.” He laughed, and managed to look both adorable and embarrassed. “I guess that sounds stupid.”

“I mean, I think I’m flattered?”

“I was a virgin too.” He looked uncomfortable, then put on a mock pedagogical expression. “So, I guess that’s welcome to adulthood, kids. I hope you’re ready for the important responsibilities.”

“I’m ready.” I hugged him hard.

For the next several weeks, I divided my time between the crucial hours spent with Hamid and the irrelevant ones devoted to everything else.

Hamid and I became regulars at a restaurant in Woodbridge Mall called Knowlwood. It was elaborately decorated like an idealized 1950s house, complete with white picket fences, World War II paraphernalia, and flowery wallpaper. There were antique portraits of a white family on the walls, their cheeks and lips airbrushed into various shades of rosy pink. Every time we visited, I wondered who those people were.

I watched Hamid eat a pile of fries covered in melted cheese and bacon bits, debating whether to ask him what he was doing tomorrow. Would that seem weird? He hadn’t called for a couple of days and I didn’t want to seem needy. But then, before I could ask, he told me everything I wanted to know.

“So my entire family is going to Florida for a month.” Hamid sighed and shook his head. “They are obsessed with Disney World. There’s some new thing called Pleasure Island that my aunts and uncles say is the greatest resort ever built.”

Reflexively, I put on my best movie preview voice. “It was a simple family vacation. They thought it would be paradise… but they wound up in HELL.”

“Don’t even get me started.” Hamid shrugged in disgust. “It’s going to be so boring. There will be nothing to do but play with my five-year-old cousins in the pool. Maybe Heather and I can go see some Disney movies if we’re lucky.”

I couldn’t think of a good reply. There was a stopper made of doubt in my throat. I wanted to feel like none of this mattered, but I was starting to suspect it did.

Hamid called me that night. We talked for a while about the stupidity of Disney World, and how it was like wanting to take a vacation inside a plastic replica of a vacation. Then I tried to defend Disney on the basis of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Tron, and we wound up in a half-serious, half-giggling debate that reminded me of talking to Lizzy. It was nice to have a conversation with a guy who wasn’t trying to impress me or snub me or worse. Then I thought about all the evenings we’d spent in his car with the reclining seats, and remembered how Hamid wasn’t like Lizzy at all.

“I’ve had a lot of fun these past couple weeks.” My heart pounded as I said it.

“Me too.”

“We should hang out when you get back.”

I could hear him moving around and maybe shutting a door. “Yeah, I want to. We’ll be back in July.”

He was infuriatingly casual about it. We’d lost our virginity to each other! It seemed like we should be saying something more profound, or romantic, or explicitly dirty. But I couldn’t think of a way to get us there, without an extremely awkward detour. So I resorted to irony.

“Awesome. I’ll be awaiting our rendezvous with excitement.”

It turned out to be the right move. “Totally.” He laughed, and then it was almost like I could hear him accumulating seriousness in the low hum of our phone connection. “I’m going to miss you.”

Something was squirming in my chest like an alien. It felt good, but I also wanted it to stop. Part of me was glad I wouldn’t have to see him again for a while.

“I’ll miss you too. Send me the worst Disney postcards you can find.”

“Challenge accepted.”

I hung up with a smile on my face.