The Fifty-Seven (57) Lives of Alex Wayfare (final)

300 Pages·2014·1.6 MB·English

by  Buehrlen M G

M G Buehrlen
THE 57 LIVES OF ALEX WAYFARE
For Joel and Nicholette
Look. You’re holding it in your hands. At last.
CHAPTER 1

THE DISCLAIMER

This is the way my story begins. Not with a bang but a whimper. Nothing
more than a calm voice, a careful smile, and a pair of spectacles perched
on the tip of a thin nose.
But don’t let that deter you. You’ll be happy to know a bang comes in
the end.
Literally.
Along with a kiss, a promise, a death, a broken heart, and an end to
life as you and I would have known it.
Because that’s the point everything changes. That’s the point I mess
everything up and send this world spinning down an entirely new path.
It’s the moment I look back and realize all the signs were there, lined up
shoulder-to-shoulder from the very beginning, unblinking. It makes me
wonder what might’ve been if I’d sought the truth about my visions
earlier. If I hadn’t been so afraid of what they meant. If I hadn’t let my
selfish anger get in the way. Maybe things would be better off now, in that
alternate timeline. The one we’ll never get a chance to experience. The
one I erased.
Porter doesn’t think so. At least he says he doesn’t, but something’s
changed in his eyes. He looks at me differently now. He says I did
nothing wrong. He says it over and over. That it was “meant to be.” I
know what he really means is this: what’s done is done. You can’t
change a Variant in time.
Which is true. You can’t. Not once you’ve created one. But Variants
can change the future.
And trust me, sometimes that’s much worse.

THE INQUISITION
Dr Farrow sits across from me in a gray business suit. Her posture is
impeccable. Her brassy hair is wrapped in a tight bun. A psychiatrist-
issue notepad rests on her knees. The sun slants through the blinds of
her huge corner office windows and draws lines of gold across the
carpet. It traces shadows over my beat-up sneakers.
I expect Dr Farrow thinks I’m like all the other troubled teens who walk
through her door. She probably assumes my “acting out” stems from
problems at home or school. And if I wanted to, I could tell her what she
wanted to hear. Make it easy for her. Blame it all on Mom and Dad, on
being unpopular at school, on depression, whatever. Take your pick. But
I promised myself I’d tell the truth this time, no matter what. There was a
chance, however minuscule, that Dr Farrow could help me. Maybe she’d
finally give me the answers I’ve been looking for. Maybe today, I’d find
out what the visions meant.
So when she asks why I played a prank on my history teacher that
ended up getting both of us suspended, I tell the truth.
It was supposed to be a joke. Something to embarrass him the way he
embarrassed me in class all semester long. A little payback for the F on
my recent essay. Only it got way out of hand. Before I knew it I was
suspended for a week, Mr Lipscomb decided to take off the rest of the
semester (the coward), and my parents made me an appointment with a
shrink. And not just any shrink – a psychiatrist straight from one of the
best AIDA clinics in Washington DC.
It was all so humiliating.
I tell Dr Farrow that my suspension never really sank in. It still feels like
it didn’t happen.
She straightens her thin-rimmed spectacles and blots her coral lips
together. “How did your teacher’s cell phone come into your possession
in the first place?” She speaks slowly and calmly with no hint of judgment
in her tone.
I shift on the oversized couch. The soft maroon leather squawks
beneath my cords. AIDA’s founder, Durham Gesh, stares down at me
from his portrait on the wall. “I’m the AV assistant at school. Mr Lipscomb
scheduled to have a TV and DVD player set up for his next class, so I
went to hook it up for him. It was his free period, so he wasn’t in the
classroom. And his phone was just… sitting on his desk.”
“So you used your authority as AV assistant to tamper with a faculty
“So you used your authority as AV assistant to tamper with a faculty
member’s personal property?”
Putting it like that makes me feel even worse than I already do. I fight
with my body to sit up straight, but all it wants to do is shrink down, turn
to liquid, and seep into the couch cushions.
Dr Farrow exhales through her nose with a slight whistle. “Do you
mind telling me how you did it?”
I prop my ankle on my knee and finger a loose flap of rubber on the
heel of my battered sneaker. “I swapped the phone’s vibrator motor with
a more powerful one. One that would sting if he had it in his pocket. Then
I wired it so once it started vibrating, it wouldn’t stop.”
“And the explicit rap song ringtone?”
I don’t mean to, I truly don’t, but the corner of my mouth twitches as I
try to suppress a grin. Dr Farrow notices right away.
“Do you still find what you did amusing?”
“No.” The urge to grin vanishes. I push my glasses up the bridge of my
nose – the black-framed nerdy ones I’ve worn since I was six. “I just find
it ironic. That song was already on his phone. I just set it to the ringtone. I
wanted everyone to see the kind of person he really is.”
“So that’s why you chose to call his phone during an assembly, while
he was at the podium addressing the entire school?”
The scene plays out in my head, as fast as a camera flash.

THE PRANK

I’m in the gym, watching from the top of the bleachers under a string of
blue and gold school pennants as Mr Lipscomb steps up to the podium at
the center of the basketball court. He’s so short he has to stand on a box
to reach the microphone. He adjusts his shirt collar – not because it’s
uneven, but because he always does that when he’s about to say
something superior – and begins talking about how the mock trial team
(his mock trial team) won state last year, and they plan on doing it again
this year.
His lips are spread wide. His teeth glisten. His words are coated with
supremacy. I crush my cell phone in my hand, remembering how he’d
humiliated me the day before.
humiliated me the day before.
He’d held up my essay on early American colonies in front of the
whole class. The red F in the top corner glared down at me. Several kids
laughed. “Been reading too many sparkly vampire novels, Miss
Wayfare?”
I honestly had no idea what he meant by that. I never read fiction, and
I was too incensed by the F to try to decipher his insult. It was the fourth
F he’d given me already that year, and it was only October.
“Watching too many werewolf and zombie movies?” he added.
I shook my head, totally confused.
“No? So you decided to make up something as absurd as cannibalism
in Jamestown just to see if I was paying attention?”
Half the class turned in their seats to laugh and stare at me. Tabitha,
the girl who’s hated me since kindergarten (for reasons unknown, I
swear), made a cough into her hand that sounded remarkably like,
“Freak.”
I don’t think I’d ever gone so red in the face. I was livid. “I didn’t make it
up,” I told Mr Lipscomb. “There are eyewitness accounts. I can show
you.”
He walked down the aisle and dropped my essay on my desk.
“Fiction.” He said it like it was a dirty word. “Next time, stick to the
textbook.”
“The textbook is wrong,” I mumbled, gripping the edges of my paper in
both fists. Just because he’d never heard of the cannibalism cases in
Jamestown didn’t mean they weren’t true.
He made his way back to the front of the class and directed everyone
to form groups for midterm projects. Everyone except me. With a smirk
he said, “Alex, you can work on your own this time. You can jeopardize
your grades all you want, but I won’t have you bringing the others down
with you. Unlike you, they aspire to graduate.”
Yeah. The prick.
So back in the gym, I squeeze my phone in my fist so hard that this
time I nearly bruise my palm. I was right about the cannibalism. Not only
had I read eyewitness accounts at the library, but I’d actually seen what
those people were reduced to during the Starving Time. That’s what my
visions do – they show me the past in vivid, stomach-wrenching detail. I
visions do – they show me the past in vivid, stomach-wrenching detail. I
don’t know how it works, or why it happens. All I know is when I was
fifteen, I had a vision that made me feel like I was there, like I was one of
the starving colonists living in Jamestown. I wandered through the
settlement, my stomach yawning with such hunger that even the leather
on my shoes looked appetizing. I saw a mother rocking a dead child in
her arms. I watched a man climb into a grave he had dug himself,
resigning to death. I looked on as another man was hung by his thumbs
for carving up his dead wife like a Thanksgiving turkey.
I still feel the sting of that vision. I live with the terrifying bite of it every
day. My dreams are plagued by it. Especially after a few days at the
library proved all those horrific things I saw actually happened. There
really had been a Starving Time, and there really were eyewitness
accounts of all I had seen. Somehow that made the nightmares worse.
So for Mr Lipscomb to say it never happened, to look me in the eye after
class that same day and refuse to let me prove I was right… Well. I just
thought I deserved a bit of justice.
So I dial his number.
His phone rings in his pocket. The vibrator motor stings his thigh, and
he shrieks into the microphone. He actually shrieks. The ringtone peels
through the gym, the rapper rhyming about beating up his cheating
girlfriend “because she deserved it” and dropping the F-bomb every other
word. The entire student body bursts into howls of laughter. Mr
Lipscomb’s face is as white as his starched collared shirt, and he swears
as he fumbles to rip the phone from his pocket. Not once or twice, but
half a dozen times. Each explicit word amplified through the speakers.
Then, as if that weren’t enough, his foot slips off the back of the box he’s
standing on. He topples to the floor, still swearing.
By this time, the gym resembles the primate house at the zoo.
Whooping, hollering, feet beating on bleachers. Mrs Gafferty, our
principal, and three other teachers gather around Mr Lipscomb and
escort him out the side doors. Mr Caswell, the boys’ gym coach,
manages to calm everyone down with his drill sergeant voice and glare.
The rest of the assembly is canceled, and soon we’re all filing out into the
hallway in uniform lines to the tune of muffled laughter and countless
retellings of the Mr Lipscomb Incident.
Part of me feels awful for him. My little prank was supposed to make
me feel better, but seeing him shriek and swear and fall like that… It
me feel better, but seeing him shriek and swear and fall like that… It
didn’t bring me any satisfaction. All it did was make me feel like I couldn’t
breathe right. Like there was something heavy and cold sitting on my
chest.
Not even an hour after the assembly, Mrs Gafferty called me into her
office. I guess Mr Lipscomb only has one enemy.

THE WHOLE TRUTH

After I relay all this to Dr Farrow – all but the part about actually being in
Jamestown; I’ll save that for later – her expression softens even more.
Almost like she sympathizes. “Was this your first time to the principal’s
office?”
“No.”
She makes a motion with her hand, inviting me to elaborate.
I heave a sigh, then hand it all over to her. “There was the time I wired
the bell to ring two minutes early for each class. By the end of the day we
all got out of school like fifteen minutes before we were supposed to.
None of the teachers complained, but Mrs Gafferty knew it was me.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Because Mr Lipscomb always holds us after the bell during last
period. Half the kids always miss their bus. The parents call and
complain, but he keeps doing it. I don’t think that’s fair.”
Dr Farrow lifts her pointed chin. “Anything else?”
I pick at the loose flap of rubber on my sneaker again. “I may have
posted a few of Tabitha’s personal text messages on the cafeteria’s
scrolling message board…”
“How did you…?” Dr Farrow holds up her hand and shakes her head.
“Never mind. I don’t need to know.”
I sink lower into the couch cushions.
She hovers her pencil above her notepad. “Tell me what you like to do,
Alex. What are your hobbies?”
“I don’t know. I guess I like to fix things.”
“Yes, I gathered that you’re tech savvy. But what else?”
I think about that for a long while. Normal girls would say they liked
I think about that for a long while. Normal girls would say they liked
volleyball or texting or going to the mall. I could lie and say I liked those
things too, but I don’t. I tell the truth again. “I like to stay in one place.”
She stares down her thin nose at me. “What do you mean?”
“I mean…” How can I put it in terms the PhD with dozens of framed
degrees and certificates wallpapering her office can understand?
Dr Farrow squints her eyes and sucks in her cheeks. She looks like
she’s trying to bore a hole in my brain and pluck the answer out herself. I
wonder if she learned that technique at Johns Hopkins.
“Do you mean you prefer to stay at home?” She says it like she just
uncovered one of my major secrets. By simply staring at me.
I shrug. “I guess that’s one way to put it.”
She scribbles something onto her notepad. “What do you like to do at
home? Watch TV?”
It would have been so simple to say yes. Yes, Dr Farrow, that’s why
I’m a pariah of my own making. That’s why I have no friends and I’m
failing eleventh grade. I’m obsessed with television. Totally consumed by
it. Is there a cure?
“No,” I say. “The only time I watch TV is during movie nights with my
family. And even then, I only watch the same few classics over and over.
Arsenic and Old Lace, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca. Those kinds of
things.”
“Do you play video games?”
“No.”
“Read, then?”
“Never.”
She lifts an eyebrow. “Not even for school?”
I tug the sleeves of my navy blue sweater down over my wrists and
clutch them in my palms. “Well, some. Only when I have to, or if my
sisters want me to read to them. But I never read on my own. And never
any fiction.”
“What do you do when you have a literature assignment?”
“I find the summaries online. That way it’s fact, not fiction. Gatsby did
A, B, and C. That’s as far as I go.”
“And you find that results in adequate grades on your assignments?”
I look down at my fingernails. “I get by.” I’m not sure why I lie that time.