Game Changer Read online

  I found myself getting light-headed as I stood there, and realized I was hyperventilating. I shut my mouth, and shut my eyes even tighter, and sat back down, burying my head in my hands. When I opened my eyes again, Leo was staring at me.

  “Ash, are you okay?”

  I wasn’t okay, but I couldn’t get into this with Leo. Our friendship was like an island of normalcy in a rising sea. I needed that normalcy and didn’t want to drag him into the waves. Meanwhile, he was looking at me like I had some serious insult to the brain. That’s what doctors call a bad concussion—an “insult”—like maybe the brain might be fine if it just had a really good comeback line.

  “This is not what you’re thinking,” I told him. “It’s not something . . . physical.”

  “I never said that it was,” he said, with a calm that felt forced—so I forced myself to seem calm, too.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I just got confused, is all. One person’s green is another person’s purple, right?”

  He still stared at me like he was going to ask what the hell I was talking about, but he backed down, and we both returned our attention to the game. But not really. Well, at least the Jaguars were still teal and gold, but the cat on their helmets was facing the wrong way. Then, when it went to commercial, Leo lowered the volume.

  “Do you remember a couple of years ago, when Angela came down with meningitis?” he asked, entirely out of the blue.

  “Yeah . . .”

  “It shook us all up pretty bad. Even after she was all better, my parents were on edge, and I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking the strangest things. Every rainstorm was a hurricane. Whenever the wind blew, it was a tornado. I kept bracing for the worst, and even though it never came, I still kept bracing. We all did. Crazy, right?”

  “Wow . . . ,” I said. “I’m sorry, Leo. I didn’t know.”

  “Anyway, we went to see this talk doctor. She said we had PTSD. And she helped us get through it. Best thing we ever did.”

  The game was back on, but he kept the volume down. “Ash, if there’s something messing with your head, it’s okay to talk about it. And if you can’t talk about it with me, that’s fine, I get it. So if you want, I can give you her number.”

  I looked back at the TV, unable to hold eye contact with him. “Thanks, Leo,” I said. “After the game, maybe.” Yet even as I said it, I knew all the talk in the world wasn’t going to fix this. “But for now, do you think you could maybe . . . just . . . turn the colors off? Just make everything old-school black-and-white?”

  He looked at me, and for a moment I thought he might push for an explanation. But then finally he picked up the remote. “I can do that.”

  He tapped a few buttons, and I watched as the colors faded and were gone. And although it didn’t calm me entirely, it narrowed the bandwidth of my stress to simple light and shadow.

  “There you go,” Leo said. “Black-and-white. Just like the old days.”

  The rest of that week was so unremarkably normal, I was lulled into a false sense of security. People talk about “the elephant in the room,” but this thing with colors, I beat it down until it was more like a mouse in the corner. One tiny blip of weirdness in an otherwise rational world. And if I was apprehensive about our next game, I was in denial about that, too.

  There was no reason to think that what happened last Friday would repeat. And for three whole quarters, it didn’t. But the fourth quarter was an entirely different story.

  Less than five minutes to go in the game. It was third down for the opposing team, first and goal. We were down by six, and the other team’s quarterback was throwing passes like guided missiles. I knew I had to take him down before he could throw the ball for the touchdown.

  It began like a normal play—and perhaps for everyone else it was. The ball was snapped, I engaged the offensive linemen, getting past them like a greased pig, and headed straight for the quarterback, feeling as fast and powerful as a locomotive.

  This time it happened the moment I sacked the quarterback.

  I felt the impact. Felt the instant of ice—and this time I actually sensed myself sliding sideways, but just like the chill, it only lasted an instant. And then I was running off the field with the rest of the defensive team. I didn’t remember hitting the ground, or getting up. I must have tackled the quarterback, because the other team was punting. I must have lost at least five seconds, maybe ten, and that weird scrambling in my head—the ache-less headache—was back.

  I told myself it was nothing. I had a game to play and couldn’t let something like this get in the way. Whatever it was, whatever it meant, it could wait. For all I knew everything was now back to normal, and this was the end of it.

  We won in sudden death, making our claim of an undefeated season more legit, because we had two victories under our belts now. It wasn’t until I got to the locker room that things started to really go sideways. It began when I looked at my helmet. Yes, I had been seeing our helmet on other teammates continually for the last twenty minutes, but there are things you don’t notice until you really take the time to look at them. On my helmet—on all of the helmets—instead of a snarling blue wave, there was a grinning blue demon.

  I swallowed. Hard. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t ask anyone about it. The locker room suddenly felt humid, and more sweaty than usual. I showered, dressed, and got out into the fresh air as quickly as I could. Well, I thought, at least it’s still blue.

  I waited for the others in the parking lot. The plan was to go to the usual place, with the usual people, and eat the usual food. I had been hungry. I wasn’t anymore.

  “I’ll ride with Layton,” Norris said when he saw me waiting. “Because I don’t feel like risking my life again.”

  Layton laughed, and squeezed Katie a little closer. “Yeah, I heard about that. What a waste it would have been if you actually got hit,” he said. “Not you guys—I mean the car.”

  I gave him the obligatory sneer. Katie, I noticed, was wearing her makeup a little heavy today. Actually, I had noticed it before. Some girls do that. Cupcake face. It’s like the way some guys wear too much cologne. Stenchies. Usually the Cupcakes and the Stenchies find each other and discover spackled, pungent bliss. But Katie had always been a less-is-more kind of girl. Not that she was fully slathered in the stuff now, but more and more often she looked like she had been professionally made up for a glamour shoot. A little much for football and the food court, even for a cheerleader.

  I might have given it more thought, but at the moment, I was seeing blue demons everywhere—stickers on cars, T-shirts, the scoreboard in the field. I just wanted to get out of there. That’s when I clicked the button on my remote to find my car, because I couldn’t see it in the lot.

  My car was an old Dodge that had seen better days. But that wasn’t the car that responded to my remote. I thought it was just coincidence, so I did it again, only to see the same car flash and beep.

  “Ha!” I said. “That Beemer has the same frequency as my piece of crap. Maybe I oughta take it.”

  “Dude,” said Norris, shaking his head. “That is your car.”

  The crystalline form of solid water is less dense than the liquid. That’s why ice floats. But it’s only slightly less dense. That’s why we say things like “the tip of the iceberg,” because they float low, and from above appear much smaller than they actually are.

  Our altered school mascot was just the tip of today’s iceberg, and when it came to density, I was feeling far denser than anything in the universe at the moment.

  I stared at the sleek, shiny black BMW, and kept hitting the lock button, watching the car flash and beep, flash and beep, still thinking there must be some mistake. Leo took the keys from me. Gave me a twisty grin and hit the unlock button. The locks thunked up.

  “Duh,” he said in a voice that was slightly off-key.

  “Right,” I said. “I don’t know where my head was at.” Which was true. Leo looked at me for just a moment longer, and let it go.

  Now that I saw it—now that I knew the car was mine, the memory of it broke the surface. I remembered being inside it. I remembered driving it. And the memory of the near accident from last week? Now I remembered it in this car. My old Dodge was still there in my mind, too, but it had been shuffled lower in the deck.

  Now I was feeling a rolling in my stomach. I thought I might be sick. Stupid, right? If this was an ’80s movie, I’m sure I’d be happy as a clam, and race around town with Marty McFly riding shotgun, and Ferris Bueller reclining in the back, breaking the fourth wall. But when weird crap happens in the real world, it’s not popcorn-friendly. It’s pretty damn terrifying.

  “Hey, listen, I’m kind of zonked,” I told my friends. “I think maybe I’m coming down with something. I’m just gonna go home.”

  I said my goodbyes and left in a car that could do zero to sixty in 3.1 seconds.

  The stop sign at the first corner was blue. That hadn’t changed. Oddly, that was comforting. Still, my hands were shaking and my stomach still seizing, so I put on some music. My playlists were all the same as they had been, but now they sounded much better on the car’s high-quality sound system. I came to a full stop at the next stop sign, closed my eyes, and took a moment to balance myself atop the iceberg.

  Either something was very wrong with me, or something was very wrong with the world. Believe it or not, I could deal with something being wrong with me far better than the alternative—and if there was an explanation for this, like Katie’s color-shifting dress, or even a bad concussion—I would have gleefully jumped on it. But I suspected there was no simple explanation. I did my best to shut down my higher brain functions and stop thinking about it. I focused on driving. The ride was smooth. The leather seats comfortable. But when I got to my street, I didn’t turn onto it. Part of me said to turn, but a more present part of me knew it was a mistake. I understood why.

  A seventeen-year-old who drives a BMW doesn’t live in a small, fifty-year-old tract home. But where did I live, if not here?

  A car behind me honked, so I pulled off to the side of the road. I could sense that if I put my brain on autopilot, I would make all the correct turns, and it would get me home, wherever that was—but I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to know where I was going before I got there. I was quickly discovering, however, that my brain didn’t work that way.

  It was the skaters that got me moving. Two of them. Twins. One of them knocked on my window, startling me. I rolled it down. “Yeah, what do you want?”

  “Hey, could you help us?” one of them said. “We’re kind of lost.”

  I sighed. “What street are you looking for?”

  “Cabrera Drive,” the other one said.

  The name struck home. Literally. “I . . . I live on Cabrera Drive,” I told them. Prior to that moment, I had never even heard of it. And yet I knew that I lived there.

  “Cool,” said one of the twins, “we must be neighbors.”

  And since we were going to the same place, I offered to give them a ride.

  One sat shotgun, the other in the back. They weren’t exactly Ferris Bueller and Marty McFly, but now that they were here, I realized that I was glad for the company. My own head had become a treacherous place.

  They were pale and a little too thin, and I had a sense that I had seen them before, but couldn’t place where.

  “Hey, I got a joke,” said the first one. “Knock, knock.”

  “Who’s there?” I obliged.

  “Depends on which door you open.”

  The one in the back snickered. I didn’t get it. I hated when I didn’t get jokes.

  The twin next to me rapped me on the shoulder. “Don’t you see? It’s like ‘The Lady or the Tiger.’”

  “Oh yeah, I read that story.” As I recalled, we never find out what’s behind the door the guy was told to choose—a man-eating tiger, or the beautiful girl—because the story ends just as he opens it. I remember wanting to reach through the pages and wring the author’s neck.

  “But if it’s the tiger,” said the twin in the back, “you’ve gotta ask yourself . . . is it alive, or is it dead?”

  “If it’s Schrödinger’s tiger, then it’s both,” said the twin next to me.

  “Yeah,” I said, catching on, and proud of myself for it. “But only until you open the door. And if it’s not dead, then you are.”

  Schrödinger, if you didn’t know, was a scientist who mathematically proved that a cat inside a box is both dead and alive at the same time, until you open the box. I had argued in class that Schrödinger was wrong—because if the box started to smell like dead cat, you didn’t have to open it to know.

  I drove into a neighborhood where the streets wove and meandered like they had all the time in the world to get where they were going. Lawns were huge, and trees were lush. I remembered each house I passed, but only once I saw it. That’s the way it seemed to work—memories had to be triggered. Then we came to a guard gate, marking the entrance to a gated community.

  “Bet you live on the other side of the gate,” one of the twins said to me.

  “Yeah, I do,” I told him, knowing for a fact that I did, but still unable to picture the house itself.

  “You can just drop us off here,” the one next to me said. So I pulled over and they got out.

  “We’ll see you around,” said one.

  “Yeah. Thanks, Ash,” said the other, then they hopped on their boards and rode off.

  Only much later did I realize that I had never told them my name.

  3

  Coke and Crayolas

  Here’s what I know:

  We live in a huge house in a fancy gated neighborhood. That’s because my father got a full football scholarship to Notre Dame, then was drafted by the Dallas Cowboys and was a lineman for six years, before a busted hip ended his career. He never quite became a household name, but he made a lot of money in those six years, which he used to start a successful chain of vitamin shops. Now, instead of selling automotive parts that people don’t need at inflated prices, he sells vitamin supplements that people don’t need at inflated prices, and makes a whole lot more money doing it.

  He became a pillar of the community when he returned to his hometown, and was even elected to the school board. Then, when the holier-than-thou board member tried to do away with the high school mascot, my father punted him halfway to the next county. I can’t quite say the Tsunamis were now history, because to be history, you have to have actually existed. No one but me remembers our mascot Tsammy Tsunami, the Angry Wave. Mom is still a nutritionist—that hasn’t changed—only now she’s published books and creates the proprietary formulas for our family’s chain of shops.

  I wrote all this down, but it really wasn’t necessary, because once I remembered it, I couldn’t unremember it. It was kind of like that big box-o-crap in your garage. You have no idea what’s inside until you open it. Then, once you do—once you see the contents—you remember every single object. So now I had a brainful of new memories—yet I still remembered the world where we weren’t rich, and the world before that, where red was the color of stop.

  I think the weirdest part was the moment I pulled up to our house. Even though I didn’t know where I was going, I knew once I got there. I quickly noticed that mine wasn’t the only car that was different. Instead of Mom’s questionable Kia, and Dad’s dinged-up Honda, our driveway was now a study in German engineering. A second BMW, and a Mercedes. All the cars had the same personalized license plates as they had before. My mother’s was EATRYT, and my father’s was PGSKN♥R (which I always thought was marginally creepy), and of course mine, QBSACKR.

  It’s hard to describe what I felt as I got out of my car and approached the front door. You know how before a tsunami, the ocean pulls out and leaves an eerie calm of flopping fish for a hundred yards out? I know all about that, because “the calm before the wave” was always our team cheer before we took the field. Hundreds of people shushing, a few seconds of silence, and then violent screams of death and destruction as the team ran out. Well, my fish were all flopping as I stepped up to the front door—and although I kept waiting for the surge of devastation, it didn’t come. I was just left with that lingering void. A numbness like I was having an out-of-body experience while still in my body.

  “Hi, Ash!” said Hunter cheerfully as I stepped into the kitchen. He was scarfing guacamole and chips while standing at the granite-topped island in the middle, because what else do you do with all that space, but have a granite-topped island? “How was the game?”

  “We won,” I told him. He put up his fist for a knuckle punch. It took a moment for me to oblige, because Hunter and I never shared gestures like that. Then he pushed the guacamole bowl in my direction. The Hunter I knew would have either finished or hidden the guacamole before I entered the room. But to be fair, I might have done the same to him. I dipped a chip in. Mom’s guac tasted exactly the same, low sodium, and full of mystery spices.

  On a hunch, I did some digging in my mental sand, and found that beneath the flopping fish was a memory of the Konniption concert. Not only had I gone, but I had gotten a ticket for Hunter. We sang along to “Come As You Were” on the way home. Suddenly I knew, without even having to check, that my WarMonger 3 file had never been erased.

  Hunter glanced at me and his eyebrows furrowed a bit. “You’re looking kinda pale. You okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said unconvincingly. “I just took a hard hit today, is all.”

  “Let’s check your vision,” he said. “How many fingers am I holding up?” And he flipped me the bird.

  “Two,” I told him. “Thanks for the peace sign.”

  He laughed, I grinned. It felt brotherly. That was a feeling Hunter and I had never shared before.

  “Seriously, if you feel that rattled, tell Mom,” Hunter said. “She’ll overreact, but hey, better safe than sorry, right?” Then he sauntered off to do whatever an alternate reality brother does.