Arnesto Modesto Read online

  “Mom, did you talk to Arnesto?”

  “No, why?”

  “Never mind.” She was the only one who stayed home with him, but she had never played Nintendo. It seemed very unlikely that she would have been aware of how many lives he had left at any given time, much less called up Arnesto to inform him of his achievement. Oh well, he was still recovering. He would figure it out when his strength returned.

  When he walked into homeroom, Arnesto was sitting at his desk looking smug. Pete walked one column of desks past, then sat in his own desk next to Arnesto’s.

  “Seriously, though, good job,” Arnesto said.

  “Okay, tell me. How did you—”

  “Hold on, here it comes,” Arnesto interrupted, watching the door. In walked Mrs. Gonzalez, who was both their homeroom and Spanish teacher as well as one of their favorites. Arnesto waited until she closed the door and put down her bag before looking at her students. Arnesto then turned to Pete and with a flair, raised his right hand to his right ear while making an expression indicating he was listening for something.

  “¡Bienvenido, Pedro!” Mrs. Gonzalez exclaimed. Arnesto couldn’t help but laugh at his own brilliance.

  “Gracias,” Pete said.

  “Do you believe me now?” Arnesto whispered.

  “No,” Pete said, hoping Arnesto wouldn’t hear the lack of conviction in his voice. He still didn’t accept that Arnesto could predict the future, but the wall of disbelief was beginning to crack. It wasn’t how Mrs. Gonzalez said what Arnesto had written that bothered him; it was the way he seemed to know exactly when. But it still wasn’t sufficient evidence to convince Pete. That would come soon enough.

  After surviving his first day back at school, Pete returned home. He did some homework, had dinner with his family, then turned on the television. He was watching Night Court when he saw an ad for Saturday Night Live featuring Tom Hanks. A minute later, the phone rang. His dad said it was for Pete.

  "'Oh, a stumble!'" came Arnesto’s voice.

  “What now?”

  “Tom Hanks on SNL. He does this Olympic skating bit, it’s hilarious!” Arnesto must have seen the same commercial.

  “Are you inviting yourself over Saturday night?” Pete asked, getting the hint.

  “Do you want irrefutable proof that I’m a god?” Arnesto asked.

  “Fine, you can come over.”

  ***

  Saturday night arrived and the boys prepared to watch the show. Arnesto couldn’t wait to show off, even revealing in striking detail information about the skit that was about to begin. Pete, on the other hand, wanted it to be over.

  During the sketch, Arnesto frequently quoted the lines right before they happened. "'Oh! A tempo change! Very dramatic.'"

  “Please stop,” Pete said, struggling to contain his frustration.

  “One more. ‘0.0 — that’s the Russian judge.'"

  “...the East German judge,” Phil Hartman’s character said.

  “Oh, ‘East German,’ huh, I remembered that wrong. I’m not a very good god,” Arnesto said.

  “You’re not a god at all! You must have hacked their system or they sent you a script or you saw a rehearsal or something.” Pete was rattled.

  “Well, let’s keep watching. Maybe someone will make a mistake I can point out before it happens,” Arnesto said.

  “No! Fuck.” Pete shook his head. “If I say I believe you, will you stop spoiling shows for me?” he asked. Arnesto had to think about it. Besides keeping his and the spectator boy’s faces intact, he had made little use of his skill other than showing off and getting on Pete’s nerves.

  “Fine,” Arnesto said as if the compromise was in any way unfair to him.

  “Why is it so important that I believe you anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” Arnesto shrugged. “You’re the only one who knows. There’s nobody else I can talk to about it.”

  Pete looked at Arnesto and saw something he had never seen in his friend before: fear. Arnesto was afraid. He was also alone. In that instant, he knew things would be different. His friend had, for lack of a much better term, some kind of superpower. And who could Arnesto possibly go to for help? Arnesto came to him. Pete’s sense of pity for his friend turned into a swelling of pride.

  “No there isn’t anyone else you can talk to,” Pete said at last. “And there can’t be.”

  Arnesto turned to face him. “What?”

  “You can’t tell anyone. Can you imagine what would happen if word got out about this? People would never leave you alone. Ever. My god, the masses would stop at nothing to question you — or kill you. What about the government? If they found out, they would lock you in a cell for the rest of your life. Or perform experiments on you.”

  “Shit!”

  Pete stood and began pacing. “Arnesto, we will have to be extremely careful. No more talking about this stuff in homeroom unless we are sure nobody can hear us. And no talking about stuff from the future, including movies and television shows.”

  “I already said I wouldn’t!” Arnesto protested, though with a smile because he was no longer alone. It was clear now that Pete believed him.

  “Wait a minute, why didn’t you warn me about getting mono?” Pete sounded miffed.

  “I didn’t know.”

  “So you can remember an SNL sketch almost verbatim but couldn’t remember me lying on my deathbed for two weeks?”

  “You weren’t on your deathbed,” Arnesto said. “I don’t know how it works. It seems random.”

  “But this all started with your great play in gym class way back when?”

  Arnesto sat bolt upright. “No, it didn’t! This has been happening for… years. They were little things, though. I always sort of shrugged them off.”

  “Is there any sort of pattern you can detect?”

  “It seems like they’re increasing in frequency.”

  “That’s good... I think,” Pete said, scratching his head. “Is there anything you can remember about the future right now?”

  Arnesto looked straight ahead and unfocused his eyes. After a few seconds, he turned to Pete. “No, nothing.”

  “Hmm. Maybe you need to think about something specific. Like high school. Concentrate hard and see what you can remember.”

  This time, Arnesto closed his eyes. He took a deep breath and let it out. At long last, he opened his eyes, looking disappointed.

  “Nothing?” Pete asked.

  “Dude, nothing ever happens at school.” Pete nodded in agreement.

  “It’s late,” Arnesto said. “I should get going.”

  “Alright, we’re not making much progress tonight anyway. I’ll see which of my parents will drive you home. I’ll check in with you on Monday.”

  Come Monday morning, Pete checked in with Arnesto. No new memories. Tuesday, Wednesday, nothing. Soon Pete stopped checking in and soon after that, they stopped talking about it altogether.

  Finally, three weeks later, Arnesto grabbed Pete and pulled him aside after Trigonometry. “I had one — a future memory. We have to go to the mall!” he said.

  “What? Why?”

  Arnesto looked around to make sure the coast was clear. “There’s a chick with enormous knockers!”

  “What... the hell is wrong with you! For fuck’s sake, I thought somebody was going to die or something. Well, what mall? When?”

  “I don’t know,” Arnesto said.

  Pete’s shoulders slumped. “Do you remember anything else?”

  “No. I was checking out Stephanie Summers in class — as always — and she stretched, arching her back, sticking out her chest like this—” Arnesto mimicked the motion.

  “Arnesto, stop! People can see.”

  “And I remembered the girl at the mall. Dude, you have to see this chick!”

  “How will we find her if you don’t know where or when she’ll be?”

  “Hmm,” Arnesto said. “I guess we’ll do what we did last time and we’ll run into her sooner or
later.”

  “But now we can’t. The first time, it happened naturally. Now, I’m always going to be thinking, ‘Is this the day? Should we go to the mall today?’ Our thought process has been altered because you had to go and alter the timeline.”

  “You’re right… damn it.”

  “No offense, but so far your skill only seems good for depriving me of pleasure.”

  Intervention

  School Entrance

  Monday, March 28, 1988

  Morning

  Pete was waiting for Arnesto at the school entrance when he arrived Monday morning. Arnesto knew it was important if Pete couldn’t even wait for him at their lockers.

  “Do you remember anything about Chris Wood?” Pete asked as they walked down the hallway. Arnesto shook his head. “Anything about a tree?” More head shaking. “What about a car?”

  “No. What’s going on?” Arnesto asked.

  “They’re saying Chris Wood borrowed his parent’s car Saturday night without permission, lost control, and hit a tree. He’s alive, but he hit his head pretty hard. They’re saying he may not be the same after this, even if he makes it.”

  “Wow, that sucks.” Arnesto knew who Chris Wood was, but they didn’t have any classes together and never crossed paths.

  “How about now? Remember anything now?” Pete asked.

  Arnesto shook his head. “No, nothing. Why?”

  “If you had remembered before it happened, could you have prevented it?”

  “Interesting. How would that work? Walk up to him and tell him he’s going to get into an accident? If his joyride was a spur-of-the-moment decision, he would have thought I was crazy. Or if he planned it, he would have wondered how the hell I knew.”

  “Right. Either way, he doesn’t believe you and drives anyway. Maybe he avoids the accident but thinks you’re a freak and tells everyone. Or worse, he still gets hurt and thinks you tampered with the car somehow.” They sidestepped a couple football players walking the opposite direction. Pete continued, “The trick is to help without getting caught.”

  “We could have anonymously called Chris’s parents suggesting they hide the keys. Or blocked their driveway that night. Or—”

  “Or chopped down the tree, if we knew which tree. Wait, the accident would have still happened, never mind,” Pete said.

  “Actually, that’s not bad, depending on what was behind the tree. If it was a field, then losing control of the vehicle while not having a serious injury might have scared some sense into Chris. My solutions would have worked that night, but maybe he would have tried again later and hit a different tree on a different night.”

  “Phew!” Pete said. “It’s enough to make your head spin. Let’s say you were able to save him and get away with it. Here’s a bigger question: should you? I keep thinking about that kid whose nose you saved at the powderpuff game. What if getting hit would’ve started him on the path to becoming a world-class plastic surgeon?”

  Arnesto laughed. “Or maybe the trauma of the event would’ve turned him into a supervillain. I can tell you this: life is not a zero-sum game. If I do something good, the universe isn’t going to compensate by making something bad happen. It could even lead to more good, like the woman who saves a drowning baby that grows up and becomes a doctor and saves the woman’s life many years later.”

  Pete smiled; he liked what he was hearing.

  “It’s kind of a moot point. There’s no way I could exactly reproduce my former life even if I wanted to. Everything I do and say, for example, this very conversation, may bring about changes that I couldn’t do anything about even if I knew about them. So yeah, may as well try to help people. Wait a minute. Did you just talk me into becoming a do-gooder?”

  Now it was Pete’s turn to be amused. “I guess it’s true, ‘With great power, comes great responsibility.'" Pete noticed Arnesto’s confused look and said, “Voltaire.”

  “I know,” Arnesto said, lying. “You just reminded me that they’re making a Spider-Man movie… someday.”

  “Spider-Man, huh? Is it any good?”

  “Yeah, it’s great. They had this cool trailer of a helicopter caught in a giant web between the towers of the World Trade Center. No, wait, they pulled the trailer... I can’t remember why. But anyway, they keep making more and more Spider-Man movies and they only get worse.”

  “So I’ll only see the first one.” Pete smiled. “See? You can use your power for good!”

  “Let’s see about that,” Arnesto said, noticing the situation escalating outside their homeroom door.

  “You don’t hit a girl!” Todd Shea yelled. He was arguing with Nicholas Montgomery about some incident that occurred the previous summer. Apparently, Todd had just found out about it and decided to voice his concerns. Todd also had backup: three of his intimidatingly large jock friends whose names Arnesto didn’t know.

  “She gave me a bloody nose!” Nicholas said, standing alone.

  “I don’t care. You don’t hit a girl!”

  Despite Todd’s well-crafted rebuttal, Arnesto knew — from experience — that the conversation was about to turn physical. He maneuvered around the jocks and positioned himself alongside Todd and Nicholas, who were only inches apart.

  “Guys, teacher’s coming,” Arnesto said. They looked around but didn’t disperse as Arnesto hoped they would.

  “What teacher?” one of the jocks asked.

  “Come on, guys, you don’t want to get suspended over something that happened last year, do you?” Arnesto asked.

  “He hit a girl!”

  “Well, you make a good point. But still, this is not the place. You’ll get suspended,” Arnesto said, hoping to reinforce his point through repetition.

  “Teacher,” one of the jocks said as Mrs. Gonzalez approached.

  “Fag,” another jock whispered as he bumped into Arnesto’s shoulder.

  “Fagesto,” the first jock said.

  “Heh, Fagesto,” the second jock repeated. They chortled back and forth at their hilarious new insult.

  They did it. They actually found a way to make my name worse.

  “Thanks, Arnesto,” Nicholas said with a smile as they watched the jocks leave for their respective homerooms.

  “Guess they’re not fans of gender equality,” Arnesto said, rubbing his shoulder where the jock had bumped him. Nicholas left for his homeroom as Arnesto and Pete walked into theirs.

  “That was brave,” Pete said after he and Arnesto took their seats. “What would have happened if you hadn’t stepped in?”

  “Nothing.” Arnesto put his A-period books on his desk then resumed rubbing his shoulder. “Seriously, there would have been a minor scuffle, then they both would have gotten suspended for a week. That’s it.”

  “Oh.” Pete sounded disappointed. “Then why did you intervene?”

  “Nicholas is a friend of mine. I always regretted not backing him up.”

  “Well, you made up for it. How do you feel?”

  “Kind of good. I hope I didn’t make it worse somehow.”

  ***

  As their sophomore year dragged toward its final days, Pete started to enjoy coming to school in the morning. Arnesto’s memories were coming in faster than ever before, and Pete never knew which of Arnesto’s faces would greet him. Usually there was neutral-face, which meant no new memories. Sometimes there was giddy-face, which meant Arnesto remembered something interesting, though usually not useful. Finally, there was concerned-face, which meant Arnesto remembered something negative.

  But this time, Arnesto was wearing a new expression which made concerned-face look paltry by comparison. Arnesto stood motionless, staring blankly with his head leaning into his closed locker. He had bags under his eyes. Pete looked around the area to verify the coast was clear.

  “Rough night?” he asked. Arnesto replied with a weak nod. “I can tell. You look like shit. You remember something?” Another nod. “What? What did you remember?” Arnesto stood up, turned, and lifte
d his heavy eyes toward his friend. He muttered a single word.

  “Everything.”

  Connections

  Morgan Residence

  Saturday, June 25, 1988

  Late Evening

  The bullfrog left the pool skimmer and went flying over the chain link fence into the woods behind Pete’s house. Arnesto was impressed. “Good distance.”

  Pete wore a satisfied grin. “That might be the winner. Here, you get the last one while I get the snacks.” He handed the long pole to Arnesto who walked toward the deep end of the pool as Pete disappeared into the kitchen. Pete reemerged as Arnesto raised the final trespasser out of the water. The deal was they could only use the hot tub if they cleared out all the bullfrogs first.

  Arnesto took slow strides around the pool toward the fence as he balanced the amphibian at the other end of the skimmer. “For the championship,” he proclaimed as he brought the skimmer end back before swinging it forward. However, the bullfrog slipped off the end too soon and only landed about ten feet behind the fence. “Damn it, I still don’t have the touch.” He put the skimmer down by the pool and stepped into the hot tub where Pete was already waiting. Pete handed him a root beer popsicle. “Thanks, I needed this,” Arnesto said, taking a bite.

  “So let me get this straight,” Pete said. “You have the memories of an old man — excuse me, an older version of you — thanks to a brain procedure involving some Star Trek shit that you came up with that also kills you.”

  “That’s correct,” Arnesto said, taking another bite of his popsicle. “Well, I’m like ninety-nine percent sure it killed me. My final moments wouldn’t have made it out of my hypothalamus into long-term memory. Believe me, at that age, I was ready to die.”

  “I have so many questions.”

  “I grant thee three.”

  “Hell no! You come into my hot tub eating my popsicles and lay this shit on me. I’m asking you everything,” Pete barked. Arnesto laughed so hard he almost choked on his popsicle.

  “Okay! Ask away,” Arnesto said, once he regained his composure.