Strange Attractor at the End of the World

An original short story

She looked me square in the eyes and said the words that would end the world as I knew it: “I can see the future.”

I could tell my friend Dee was dead serious by that pleading look in her eyes. She knew I had every reason to think she was just messing with me, but here she was asking me to believe the impossible anyway. And so, reluctantly, I did.

“Okay,” I told her. “Are you gonna prove it by giving me some information that only a person from the future would have?”

“I didn’t say I’m from the future, not exactly.”

“Yeah, that would be a hard sell, since…”

“Since I’ve known you since second grade, yeah.” Dee paused a moment, apparently racking her brain to remember some future event she’d be able to predict. “All right, Jay. I think I’ve got something.”

“Well? Spill it.”

“Any minute now, your mom’s gonna walk in and say your dad can’t get you this weekend.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. My dad was always canceling on me when it was supposed to be “his weekend,” and Dee knew it. It felt like she was poking fun at me where I was most vulnerable. “That’s a shitty thing to say, Dee.”

She winced and threw up her hands. “I’m sorry. That sounded bad. I’m not joking though; he’s seriously gonna cancel.”

“All right, fine, that’s your prediction. Just leave it at that,” I said, picking up a game controller to try and refocus the conversation. Dee dutifully picked up her controller, but I had to get in one last point before starting the game: “There’s no way he’s missing this weekend. We’re going camping for my birthday. We’ve had it planned for weeks.”

We sat and played in silence, and after a while, I felt vindicated that my mom hadn’t come in as Dee had predicted. But I couldn’t shake that looming sense of dread I always got from worrying that I might be abandoned, rejected, ignored. I was starting to resent Dee for bringing up my dad like that. I found myself transferring the anger I might have felt for him onto her.

But then my character died, and as it went into ghost mode, slowly drifting toward the nearest spawn point, I looked over at Dee and watched her face as she played. I could describe the subtly distinctive movements of her eyes and mouth, the way her nose crinkled up when she was having a hard time… But that wouldn’t affect you anything like the way it affected me, so I’ll just say I felt something like homesickness around her. Except the home I was missing didn’t exist yet. It was somewhere in the future. But only if I actually got up the courage to tell Dee how I felt about her—and if she felt the same for me, of course.

“Dee?” I started, without actually knowing where I’d end up.

“What’s up?” she asked without actually looking away from the game.

Before I could continue, my mom burst in unannounced. “Your dad just called, Jay. I’m sorry, but he’s not gonna be able to make it this weekend.”