all of which have been spent with their faces buried in my hair while they cried, "You have a _gift._ " Sometimes, I didn't know why I was so sure it would work. But when I stood back and let myself admit it, I had to admit it to myself, anyway. And in admitting it, I made myself stop just for a moment and say, "I _know_ the future." I said it because it's not arrogant to believe you can tell the future, right? We're all born knowing the world is round, so we can look around and feel confident the earth is not flat. I learned about the shape of the sun, the moon, and the stars. It wasn't arrogance. I'd felt arrogant once. I'd felt really arrogant, and in that one case I _was_ wrong. I don't want to sound conceited about my ability, but it's not arrogance when you really believe it. I knew I had this gift because I knew it. It might work, or it might not work, but that's what we all said about every other way of knowing in the universe. We don't know the future unless we're born today. How many people do you know who can make a new pair of jeans with magic? How many people can do a spell to get their ex-boyfriend back that works every time? Only the ones who really believed in their power believed it was possible. The only weird thing about it is that when you first find out, you have to learn not to blab about it. Even to people you trust. Even to people who are in on your secret. After some years of practice, it became pretty easy, and some people really started to believe I was the real deal. In a way, it was like being in the CIA, or maybe Special Forces. If you had a gift like that, it meant living a double life, even if your family never suspected it. When I finished saying what my dad told me, I finished it in my mind. The only part of me that was talking to this boy was my eyes. I could tell him my thoughts and see his, but I didn't like it. In my mind, I was having the conversation with my dad and not a boy, and I was embarrassed. Sometimes I felt like the boy in a cartoon, who's talking to the turtle, and then he'd go, "Hey!" and the turtle would put its hand over its face. _Told you so!_ "What'd I tell you?" he said. "Don't be afraid of it, but respect it." _I'm not afraid of it._ But he was right about the other thing. I did need to respect it. I knew he was right. A lot of us have things inside us we don't understand, and it's okay to respect what you don't understand. I'd known that since I was a child. Sometimes, we're a mystery to ourselves. I didn't like that, but I knew it was true. So did he. "You don't have to be afraid of your ability," I said. "Okay," he said. He was wearing new sneakers and old jeans, no socks, and he was wearing no shirt. The shirt he'd worn last time was probably in some boy's closet now. He sat on the bed and then pulled off his shoes. His socks were gray, and the bottoms were caked with dirt. He tossed them into the basket that was in front of my dresser. "I do, though," he said. "I'm not saying it's going to be okay and be as easy as it seems. I'm just saying if you believe you can see the future, then you have to believe you can do it, too. If I have a lot of hope, that's good. I can do it. But if you don't, well, you're in for a rough time. It's no fun." "I've seen some bad stuff," I said. I didn't even try to hide the bitterness in my voice. He frowned at me. "Yeah, well, bad stuff happens to everybody. It just looks different from person to person." He was right. It does look different, and I knew this one wouldn't be like the time he didn't eat his school lunch, or the time the other kids started chanting his name after he tripped in the gym, and he lay in the fetal position and stayed that way until a minute before the bell rang. "I'm not trying to get out of anything," I said. "Okay," he said. "I want you to know how you feel about it. If I do a good job on you, maybe it will make you want to do a good job on yourself. It's hard when nobody believes you can do it. When I was in sixth grade, I went into a record store on the corner, and the guy let me play their demo-tape player and listen to records. He said he had some of his own and would lend them to me. I listened to some Motown and James Brown and that was cool, but when I got ready to pay him, he told me, 'You know, that stuff can mess you up, especially if you have a lot of anger and frustration.' I didn't know how he could tell that about me, because I was a good person and didn't go around doing bad stuff. He saw the future, so maybe he really did have something. He never said as much again, but I thought about it." This boy made me feel angry and frustrated. "What are you trying to say?" I said. "That maybe you can do a really bad thing to yourself. Even before you knew about your gift, you had to be careful or you could screw up your whole life. Do you want to screw up your whole life?" he said. He spoke to me like he did with all the other kids in his family. When I was little, I didn't think much about this. I was just happy to be able to talk with him. Then I got older and started to think I was smarter than him. And then I found out I was smarter than most of the people I hung out with. After that, we didn't have as much to talk about. It took me a while to understand what he was saying. I thought of the time I did the Ouija board with a group of friends, but as I told him that, I remembered I'd talked to myself when I was alone, too. What happened that night was okay, because the Ouija board didn't work anyway. "Yes," I said. "I want to screw up my whole life, because I'm doing pretty good right now." "Well, it's not your fault," he said. "You have to learn from it, though." He stood up and put his shirt on. "How do you feel about the future, like a year in the future?" I shrugged my shoulders. "I guess that would be better than the present, but what does it mean? That it's gonna be okay?" "You're thinking of your life as a movie. It's like the end credits at the end of a movie, like in that old movie _Blade Runner_ —you've heard of it?" I nodded. "They've shown that on the late night movie," I said. "Well, the picture comes up after everything's over, when the credits are rolling." "A picture of what?" "You know that shot they do when the credits are rolling? They do it in the credits." "That's a movie," I said. "Maybe. Maybe it's not a movie. The credits might be a way of saying they're making us work out our own drama." I thought of some of the places I'd seen in my vision. The waterfall. I remembered the waterfall now. _Oh yeah!_ "That's what I saw," I said. "Like an instruction manual." "Or you were taking a break from it," he said. "Sometimes, we get tired of being in it. We step outside of it. To catch our breath. You know that old story about the frog and the scorpion? Sometimes I wish the frog could learn from the scorpion." I looked around my room. "I don't want to step out of my life." "There are always choices you can make." I thought about how I made the scorpion. "Like what?" "How come you wanted to get those shoes?" he asked me. "Why?" I said. "Cuz they were so pretty." I'd never thought of that, but maybe he was right. "Okay," I said. "Like what?" "Like how about this," he said. "When I told you about being in the CIA, I never said my job would be easy. I don't want you to think that it would. But if you can't see the future, you don't know what it might look like. You don't know what you could do to help yourself or to keep from screwing it up. If your gift is a problem, then you have to learn to see it, but you can't see the future. You just can't see the future. It might help, though." I thought