Chapter Text
Andrew Minyard has become unstuck in time.
He understands this implicitly. It has happened for longer than he can remember, and he can remember a very long time. See, when he meets someone, he is whisked away to the last time he will ever see them. When he was born, he must have seen his mother giving him away.
Everybody says the choice was random. Andrew Minyard believes in fate because it sits right there in front of him like a fat bullfrog croaking in his ear. There’s not a question about it. That’s ridiculous. When he was born, he must have understood that he would lose his mother, and like any infant taken away from its mother, he must have cried. He must have been a healthy baby, because he isn’t dead. Nobody would’ve paid him special attention so he must have been lucky.
He was a healthy baby, so he must have cried loudly, screaming like an animal, while his twin babbled and fussed. His twin was easier to care for. No, the decision was not random, he can count up his reasoning on his fingers.
He learns to count on his fingers when he is four years old. When he is six years old, he is brought to a house, and in the house is a man wearing a brown business suit and a woman wearing a dress. “Welcome, Andrew,” says the man.
Andrew looks at him blankly for a second, catching his breath. He has to be steady on his feet because when he opens his mouth he will trip and fall through time. “Hello,” he says, somber and strange. He did not speak until he could say full sentences. He did not speak because it was not worth seeing the ending.
Police sirens wail and Andrew stands quietly in a corner, wearing pajamas and flat-soled running shoes. It is dark outside. The man in the brown suit is now wearing jeans and a button-down and handcuffs behind his back. Two policemen take him out of the house. The front door slams behind them.
Andrew’s hair is longer than it was. He takes note of that. He wants to know how long it will be before the last time he sees this man.
That is the ending he sees. It does not take any time at all, so when he comes back to the present, he waits for the social worker to leave. Then, he looks up at the man and says “When my hair is longer than it is, policemen will take you out of your house.”
The man hits him. The woman puts the landline phone on a shelf where Andrew can’t reach it.
In two months, Andrew’s hair grows longer and he turns seven. That’s why he pulls up a stepladder to the phone shelf and calls the police. He tells them that the man made him say please.
The police tell him the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. This is the wrong story. Andrew remembers that in the ending, the soles on his running shoes were worn smoother than they are. So, he runs.
That does not work either. When they catch him they cut his hair. He waits three months for it to grow back and they cut it again, successfully thwarting fate.
Eventually, the bullfrog named Fate croaks loud and clear, which happens when the police find out that the man has been growing green plants under white lights in the basement. It’s a silly thing to arrest someone for, Andrew thinks. They never even made him help with the gardening.
Andrew steals a watch from Walmart. It has Thomas the Tank Engine on the straps and the date and time on the face in nice neat digital numbers. For the next few endings, he remembers to look at it.
The bullfrog named Fate doesn’t like Andrew very much. When he is nine he finds a book of Greek myths in the bookshelf of the room that he sleeps in, and he reads it. He learns about a woman named Cassandra who angered the god of prophecy. She sees endings too. Nobody ever believes her too. Everything makes sense.
Until Andrew is thirteen, he never sees further than a year or two in the future. He never knows people for longer than that.
When Andrew is thirteen, he meets a woman named Cass, and immediately likes her, just for the sake of her name. He isn’t wearing his watch in the ending he sees of her, instead he is wearing black armbands with a steady metal weight to them, but he feels like a real teenager, a tough one. He’ll live to be sixteen, maybe.
After that he meets Drake and learns that he will live to nineteen. He is not wearing his armbands in that ending, they are wedged between the mattress and the bedframe like a landline phone he can’t reach. He is not wearing fucking anything and he is laughing so, so hard, and he sees a face that looks just like him. An exy stick swings down heavy, hard like a baseball bat and it makes a noise like a meat hammer on chicken cutlets and it squelches when it pulls away.
Andrew didn’t know he could laugh that hard. He can’t take it. Fuck fate, he thinks, fuck you he says to the bullfrog that goes croak, croak, croak, and he tries to kill himself. He butchers himself. His wrists are more blood and raw meat than skin, red manacles sloughing off of him and welling up again, the white pull of tendons underneath. He does it with a vengeance, more angry than decisive, he does it with one of Cass’ kitchen knives and he wakes up still bleeding sluggishly into the bathtub.
He does not tell anyone. Nobody notices except Drake, who just laughs and says “You’re supposed to swipe longways, not across. Like a credit card .” When spring rolls around and it gets too hot to wear long sleeves, he starts wearing black armbands.
Andrew, obviously, does not have any friends. Some kids try, but mostly they laugh at his Thomas the Tank Engine watch without realizing that it croaks 6-10, 6-10, 6-10 for every single one of them. June 10th is the last day of school.
Andrew sits in a plastic chair outside the principal’s office. He is angry, hands shaking above his knees, head bowed, so angry he forgets how to breathe. He hadn’t even hurt anyone. He hadn’t said anything. He doesn’t even hear when someone sits next to him, doesn’t notice until they say “What’re you in for?”, and then his noticing means fully jumping up from his seat, standing as tall as his height will let him, facing them.
It’s an older kid, crispy dyed hair, dressed too light-colored to be goth on purpose and too drab to be anything but a loser. On the backs of their hands, dotted in the meat between finger bones, are little wounds. They’re picking at one as their gaze flicks up to him. “Damn,” they say, and nothing else.
Andrew twists his memory back, finds what they’d said to him in the first place. Considers not answering at all, but that would make him look like a scared baby Doe . He says “Brought a knife to school.”
He waits for time to unstick around him, but it doesn’t. He’s worked this phenomenon out too: what it means is that this, already, is the ending. He’ll never see this person again.
He likes it when this happens.
“Huh.” The kid looks at him for two seconds too long, like they’re about to say something they shouldn’t.
“Say it,” Andrew says when he can’t stand it anymore. There’s too much he can’t stand. He needs to be tougher, the toughest thirteen-year-old in the world, and he will be, he’s sure of it. He will live to nineteen and have a body that’s muscular and heavy like he has enough to eat. Fate said so.
“Scissors,” says the kid. “Like, little plastic-handled scissors with your school supplies. Nobody gives a shit.”
He hadn’t thought of that. He scowls and sits down a seat away from the kid and in his mind he shoots himself through the skull.
“Sorry,” says the kid.
There’s nothing to say to that.
“Don’t take those off, though,” says the kid, gesturing to his armbands. “If that’s— where the scars are. They’ll imprison you. It’s not even their fault, but those hospitals have locks on them.”
It’s not even their fault.
“I can see endings,” Andrew says. “This is one.”
“So one of us is getting expelled,” the kid says dully. “I cyberbullied a teacher for being racist.”
“Was she?”
“Dude,” says the kid, insulted. “Do you even go to this school.”
“Maybe not,” he says just to be contrary.
“Is it me? Who’s getting expelled?”
Andrew lasts at this place until June 10th. This, at the beginning of the year, is an ending. These two logical premises add up to a “Yes.”
“Well.” The kid sighs for a long time, the kind of sigh that chorus kids do when they’re showing off their lung capacity, and gestures towards the door of the principal’s office. “You first, innit.”
“You’re not even British,” Andrew says.
“Loanwords are a thing,” the kid protests, but before they can argue, the door opens.
That is the first time somebody believes him.
Andrew is still thirteen when he gets a letter. He sends it back. He thinks about the croaking bullfrog that tells him that he will live to nineteen, like it or not, and the face that looks like his own.
Andrew is the toughest thirteen-year-old in the world and he does not need anyone to kill for him. He does everything he can to forget the return address on the letter, and the signoff, the love, Aaron, and all the other pathetic words in that scrawl of ballpoint pen. He tries to forget the feel of the thin notebook paper as he ripped it to pieces and shoved it in a new envelope. The envelope is from Cass’ Thank-You Card stationery collection.
It is the funniest thing Andrew has ever done, he insists on thinking as he bloodlets it out of him. But there’s just too much blood in him. It just won’t drain.
Andrew is handcuffed to life. The cuffs are sharp and metal and croak loudly in his ear. Incidentally, he is also handcuffed to a bed. Incidentally, it is also funny.
The day after that he goes to the library during lunch, puts his elbows up on the dull oakwood-colored front desk, and tells the librarian “Give me something awful.”
It’s the first time he’s initiated a conversation in a long time. The time-skip still works: the mechanics of it run on his words, not theirs.
June 10th, says his watch because of course it does. He’s not Matilda and she’s not Miss Honey. She’s wearing a t-shirt with the school’s name on it and blue jeans and her eyes are tired. She hands him a thick hardcover with a black dust jacket, not covered in plastic like the books here. It’s got a little red ribbon on it. It says Vonnegut . She says “This is for you, to read over the summer.”
Andrew never says please but he can manage a thank you . Summers are hell, always. He has not had one good summer. He’s afraid of the deep end of the pool. “It’s above my reading level,” he says, “whatever shall I do.”
The librarian winces like she agrees with him, which he hates. “Typically high school seniors read these. You’ll be all prepared for AP Literature,” she says. “The content is heavy, you know.”
Andrew understands. She’s hoping he’ll live to senior year, or that he’ll grow up and stop being a troubled child, start being an English major maybe. She shouldn’t worry, he wants to tell her, he lives to nineteen.
All bets are off after that.
“It is not too heavy. I can carry it,” he says, and takes the thick book from her, bicep-curling it to prove it.
She laughs very quietly. Anxiously. “I think you can, Andrew. I think you can. Take care for me, okay? ”
Another reason Andrew hates summers: for a long time all his endings ended on this anniversary. He’s not yet used to knowing he’ll live through them.
“Thanks,” he says again, and realizes he never learned her name.
“Something awful?” The librarian asks, raising her eyebrows.
It makes perfect sense to Andrew, he does not see the confusion. Some awful book, where awful things happen, so he can be in some other awful world. He’s had enough of kid’s books. He needs something that can keep his attention.
And yeah, sometimes he reads something so awful that it spins around in his head for days, leaves him a little nauseous, staring at the ceiling and sitting on the floor. But at least it’s something to focus on.
“Something about time travel,” he says on a whim. “Or I’ve heard good things about a Vonnegut.”
The librarian steps out from behind the desk, and he follows her to the V section of Science Fiction. “It’s no Magic Tree House,” she says, reaching up on the shelf high above his head and handing him a bright red paperback labeled Slaughterhouse Five .
“That looks awful,” he says admiringly. The simplistic squiggles on the front, the violent blurb on the back. It’s a small book with small print, a special edition that was made to draw as little attention as possible. He can finish it by the end of the day if he reads it during math. The first line goes ‘ All of this happened, more or less.’
“Take breaks,” the librarian says. “Don’t read it all in one go, it’s heavy.”
“It’s ninety-seven pages,” he says, flipping the book open to— you guessed it— the ending. The ending says One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, ‘Poo-tee-weet?’ “Can’t weigh that much.”
“I’m serious,” she says.
“So am I. Am I checking this out or just stealing it? I’ll bring it back, you can trust me.”
She chuckles dismissively. “Come with me.”
He follows her back to the front desk, where she scans the peeling barcode and then asks him for his lunch number, which means his Student ID Code. Lunch number is what elementary kids call it. Andrew isn’t a little kid.
He tells her the number. He can tell by the look on her face that his name comes up on the screen, Andrew Doe , and she knows what it means.
Not everybody knows what Doe means, and it’s never a good sign when they do.
“Did you know I thought doe-eyed meant hazel for a long time? I read it in a poem. Assumed that it was too old for the color hazel to have been invented so instead he meant eyes like mine. I was not sure how time worked, back then.”
It’s the most sentences he’s said at once in fifteen weeks. He remembers. It works to distract her from the name at hand.
“My real last name is Minyard, did you know?” he adds because his cuts haven’t even scabbed over. “I have a brother, did you know? I think I’m the evil twin.”
She shakes her head warmly. “You’re not evil,” she says.
Beg to differ. They wrote him up, marked it on his permanent record , when he brought a knife to school. He didn’t even hurt anyone. But they knew he was evil, wrong, too blank-faced and quiet and viciously mean, so it was only a matter of time.
“Question,” he says. “You were the guest speaker. Last year, Greek Myths unit, none of the other kids go to the library enough to recognize you. Do you know the myth of Cassandra?”
She blinks. “Cassandra of Troy? Of course.”
“I read it in a kiddie myth book a long time ago. It never said what she did to get cursed.”
“Well.” She drums her fingers on the desk. “You remember that Greek gods were not perfect.”
“Yes.” Give him a straight answer, dammit.
“Cassandra rejected Apollo’s advances on her, and he took insult,” she says, all prim and proper like reading from the book itself.
That’s awful.
Andrew thinks about that. He thinks some more. And what did Poseidon do to Medusa? Zeus to Leda? Do you have a pretty answer for that too? He tries not to laugh, and he takes Slaughterhouse Five , turns around, and finds a table in the corner where he can eat his lunch alone.
Uncle Luther visits Andrew in juvie. The man looks deeply uncomfortable with his surroundings, the crossed-armed policemen at every door and the kids who must’ve stared at him in the hallway to get here. “You’re making the right choice,” Luther says by way of greeting.
Andrew does not remember inviting him here. “What choice?”
Then, he is the second-oldest he has ever been. In other words, Luther’s ending is just before Drake’s.
His armbands are still on, not yet wedged between the headboard and the mattress, and they are downstairs in a kitchen with white marble countertops. Luther is trying to convince him of something and he isn’t listening.
In some endings, Andrew has control. It’s like lucid dreaming, waking up from the vision, time-traveling a message from past to future. This is the case now, in this kitchen, Andrew is thirteen years old and not nearly tough enough for what happens next.
“You’re trying to bribe me with liquor,” Andrew says. “This seems beneath you.”
“Just go upstairs,” says Luther. “Stop being difficult.”
“I can see endings,” Andrew says, and smiles wide, and climbs the stairs. I’m nineteen , he tells himself, taking the stairs two at a time, a professional athlete, the strongest he has ever been. I’m nineteen, I’m nineteen, I’m nineteen.
That way the message gets passed back in time, lodged in his mind for the ending just behind that guest bedroom door.
Andrew gives Luther a truth and Luther says “Misunderstanding,” which is a word he will hate for the rest of his life. He was expecting it, after that ending.
He says “Poo-tee-weet.”
“What?” says Luther.
“That’s what birdsong sounds like after a massacre.”