The Futures

by Anna Pitoniak

Genres: Coming of Age; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A heart-wrenching debut novel about a young couple trying to find out what they really want in life—and whether or not that includes each other.

Julia and Evan fall in love as undergraduates at Yale. For Evan, who grew up in a small town in Canada, Yale is a whole new world, and Julia—blond, beautiful and rich—is part of his vision for a successful future. After they graduate in 2008, they move together to New York city, where Evan takes a job at a hedge fund—another step forward in the life he imagines for himself.

Julia, who has only known a life of privilege, graduates with an art history degree and no plan for her own future. She lands a low paying assistant job at a nonprofit, unsure about what she really wants, and wondering when everyone else figured that out for themselves.

With the market crashing and banks failing around him, Evan becomes involved in an increasingly high-stakes deal at work, and begins to realize that the price of privilege may come with dangerous strings attached. Meanwhile, Julia reconnects with someone from her past—someone who offers her a vision of a different kind of life.

Told in alternating perspectives, The Futures is a vivid story about love—falling in and out of it—betrayal, and the burning desire to be valued.

A Blackstone Audio production.

Release date: January 17, 2017

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 320

Sample

Prologue

It was a story that made sense. An old story, but one that felt truer for it. Young love goes stale and slackens. You change, and you shed what you no longer need. It’s just part of growing up.

I thought I had understood. It seemed so simple at the time.

We moved in on a humid morning in June. Our suitcases bumped and scuffed the walls as we climbed three flights of stairs, the rest of the boxes and furniture waiting unguarded in the foyer. The locks were clunky and finicky, resistant on the first few attempts. Sunlight streamed through the smudged windows, and the floorboards creaked beneath our weight. The apartment looked smaller than it had before, on the day we signed our lease. “I’m going down for some boxes,” Evan said, holding the door open with one foot. “You coming?”

“I’ll be there in a minute,” I said. I stood in the center of the room, alone, finding that I couldn’t breathe.

What else was I going to do? He had a job and a place to be. I didn’t, but I had him. I could feel the tremors of change even before we graduated, growing more pronounced as the date approached: time to get serious. We’d been dating for more than three years, and we loved each other, and my friends already had roommates, and I couldn’t afford to live by myself. So we signed a lease. We packed our things in shared boxes. It felt sensible and grown-up. And maybe taking this plunge would repair whatever hairline crack had already appeared between us, in the late months of senior year. Double or nothing.

In New York, we settled into a routine along with our friends, accruing habit fast. We all endured the same things: shoe-box apartments, crowded subways, overpriced groceries, indifferent bosses. What kept everyone going was the dream: store windows on Madison Avenue, brownstones lit golden in the night, town cars gliding across the park. Imagining what it would be like when you got there, someday. Manhattan was like a dazzling life-size diorama. A motivation to work harder, stay later, wake earlier. Fantasy is the only escape valve—what’s all the pain worth without it? But not for me. I’d screw my eyes shut and try to imagine it, what the future would look like, what alchemy might transform our current situation. But nothing came. There was no thread of hope. Who was this man next to me, his body curled up against mine? What was this feeling of vertigo that sometimes came with the blurry edge before sleep? I realized that I had made a mistake. Evan wasn’t the one. We weren’t meant to be.

And so my life in New York grew smaller and smaller, a thorny tangle of dead ends. I rattled around in the tiny apartment. I hated my job. Evan was too busy. My friends were too busy. I was lonelier than ever. The problem was obvious. I was trapped in an airless bubble, with no plan to get out. My life lacked any escape.

Until, against my better instincts, I went looking for it in the wrong place.

Chapter 1

I could hear footsteps and murmurs from the other room. The creak of the door opening finally dissolved the last shards of sleep. When I opened my eyes, there was a pale face peering through the crack.

“Who is that?” somebody whispered.

The door slammed shut. The alarm clock said it was a little past 9:00 a.m. It took me a minute to remember where I was: on the third floor of an old stone building in New Haven, still wearing my clothes from the night before. I found a half-melted stick of gum in the back pocket of my shorts, tugged my T-shirt straight, and pressed my palms against my hair. When I opened the door to the common room, a plump woman was surveying the scene with a look of dismay. Empty Bud Light cans were scattered across the floor, and dirty clothes were heaped in one corner. She started fanning the stale air toward an open window. It was move-in day, late August, the first real day of college. This had to be my assigned roommate, Arthur Ziegler, and his family. I’d meant to clean up that morning, but I’d forgotten to set the alarm last night when I stumbled into bed.

Arthur was crouched in the corner, fiddling with a nest of wires. Arthur’s father, a bald man in a polo shirt and khakis, was humming to himself as he peered down at the street. Arthur’s mother was sniffing the air, her frown deepening. The room was quiet except for the car honks and shouts from outside. I cleared my throat. The three of them turned in unison.

Arthur’s mother forced a smile. “Well—hello,” she said, stepping over. She was small, round and doll-like, with a tartan headband and sensible shoes. “I’m Elaine Ziegler, Arthur’s mother. This is Gary.” Gary waved. “And this is Arthur. Arthur, what—what are you doing?”

“Hang on,” he said, peering at a plastic box. A row of green lights blinked to life. “Got it.” He stood up, dusting his hands on his jeans, then he followed my gaze. “Oh. The router. Setting up the wireless connection. Figured it was the most important thing to start with, right?”

“Yeah. It’s, uh, nice to meet you all.”

Elaine Ziegler kept staring. Maybe she was trying to reconcile it, the polite young man suddenly emerging from the shell of a passed-out lunk. Then she clapped her hands together. “Well, let’s get to work. Gary, you make the bed. Arthur, why don’t you start unpacking those suitcases? And I’m just going to…here we go.”

She shook open a black garbage bag and bent over, reaching for the empty beer cans on the floor, crinkling her nose at the smell. I felt a hot bubble of guilt.

“Mrs. Ziegler, I’m sorry. Let me…” I hurried to start gathering the cans.

“Well…” She paused, then handed me the bag. “All right. Thank you, dear.”

When I was done, I announced that I was taking out the trash. Elaine and Gary were absorbed in a discussion with Arthur about where to hang a poster. The door creaked on its hinges when I opened it, but they didn’t notice.

  

The captains had given us the morning off from practice. There was a diner on Broadway that I’d passed before, a place that served breakfast all day. The room was packed and buzzing, new students chattering excitedly with their families, utensils ringing against china while waiters wove through the crowds with plates aloft. I was about to give up when the hostess finally caught my eye and led me to an empty stool at the counter.

After, while I was waiting to pay at the register, a girl walked in. Other heads turned too, taking in her tanned legs, her cutoff shorts, her scoop-neck T-shirt. She had a blond ponytail sticking out from a faded Red Sox cap and a freckled nose. She leaned into the counter and said something inaudible in the din, and even that—the shape of her mouth forming silent words—carried some kind of promise. I tried to edge closer, but it was too crowded. A waiter handed her two cups of coffee. She pushed the door open with her shoulder. I craned my neck but lost sight of her on the sidewalk.

I wandered for a while, only returning to the dorm when I knew Arthur and his parents would be at lunch. I changed and jogged up to the rink for afternoon practice. I was the first to arrive, which was what I’d been hoping for. The burn of the laces against my fingertips as I tightened my skates, the smell of the locker room, the wet reflection left behind by the Zamboni, the sound of the blade carving into the ice, the wind and echo of the empty rink—it was like slipping back into a native tongue. This was the best part. It only took a second, in that first push away from the boards, to feel the transformation. From a bulky heaviness to a lighter kind of motion. The friction of the blade melted the ice just enough, sending me flying forward on threads of invisible water. I was in a different country, a different side of the continent, but in those moments at the rink, home came with me. The ice was a reminder of the world I had left behind just a week earlier: long winters, frozen ponds, snowbanks, pine trees. It had always seemed like a decent enough reward for life in a cold, forbidding land: the gift of speed, as close as a person like me could come to flight.

  

I grew up in the kind of small town that isn’t easy to get to and isn’t easy to leave. It started as a gold-rush settlement, and while no one got rich from the land, a handful of prospectors liked it enough to stay. It’s in a mountain valley in the interior of British Columbia, surrounded by wilderness, defined mostly by its distance from other places: seven hours to Vancouver, two hours to the border, an hour to the nearest hospital.

In a small town like ours, where there is only one of everything—one school, one grocery store, one restaurant—it’s expected that there is only one of you. People aren’t allowed to change much. I was held back in kindergarten—I’d had some trouble with reading comprehension—and it marked me well into the next decade. I was big for my age, always a year older, and I think people liked me more because of it. It made the picture snap into focus: I was a hockey player; I was a born-and-bred local; I was a hard worker even if I wasn’t the brightest. An image easily understood, one as solid and reliable as the mountains in the distance. I grew up with boys like me, most of us hockey players. We were friends, but I sometimes wondered how alike we really were. The things they loved most, the things that made them whoop and holler with glee—keg parties and bonfires, shooting at cans on a mossy log, drunken joyrides in a souped-up F-150—only gave me a vague, itchy desire for more. I could imitate easily enough, like following an outline through tracing paper, but it never felt like the thing I was meant to be doing. I got good at faking laughter.

Maybe the girls at school sensed this difference. It happened fast: one day puberty arrived, and they all started paying attention to me. From then on, there was always someone waiting at my locker when the last bell rang, twirling her hair, holding her textbooks tight to her chest. I genuinely loved those girls, loved that they banished the loneliness, but it was a generalized feeling; it didn’t matter who was next to me, whose bed or musty basement carpet we were lying on. I had sex for the first time with a girl a year older than I was, eleventh grade to my ninth. After she had coached me through our first short but glorious session, she started telling me her plan. She was going to drop out at the end of the year and move to the Yukon, where she’d work as a chef at a logging camp. The pay was good, and the setting was wild. She propped herself up on one elbow, resting a hand on my bare chest. She hadn’t told anyone, but she was telling me. She kissed me in conclusion. “You’re a good listener, Evan,” she said, then she moved lower beneath the duvet.

A pattern emerged from the filmstrip of tanned faces and soft bodies. All the girls liked to talk dreamy—about the jobs they’d get, what they’d name their kids someday. We became blank screens for each other, desire reflected into a hall of mirrors. It solved a problem for me, but sometimes it left me wondering if that was it—if love was always so easily caught and released. I realized after a while that I gave these girls something very specific. They knew it even before I did, that I would be gone someday. I wouldn’t be there to hold them accountable when their dreams eventually fell short. I wasn’t like everyone else, wasn’t meant to stay in this town.

Not that people didn’t attempt to leave. They’d go for a few years of community college or university, but a small town like ours possesses a strange gravity, and they always came back. A few of my teammates were going to escape by leaving school early to play hockey in the Major Juniors, a path that would lead some of them to the NHL. I might have done the same. But I’d heard about someone from town, a decade ago, who’d played for an American college instead. He was rich and successful and living in New York by that time. He came back occasionally to visit, and I glimpsed him once at the gas station, filling the tank of a shiny high-end rental car. Even in that split second, I saw that he carried himself in a different way, and something within me latched on. I’d known that the world was bigger than Carlton, British Columbia, but I’d never really thought about just how big it was. I was fourteen years old, and I made up my mind. I played in Junior A and kept my college eligibility. Despite my reputation, I was smart, or at least I wanted to be smart, and I studied hard in school. In spare hours I shot tennis balls into the street hockey net, did squats and flipped tires and jogged the dirt roads around our house. On a Saturday morning, I drove two hours to take the SATs at a town on the border. In the fall of senior year, I finally got the call. The one I’d been hoping for. A new door, swinging wide open.

On the afternoon before my flight east, I stood with my parents in the driveway as the sun slipped behind the mountains, casting an early twilight over the yard. My parents owned the town’s grocery store, and they couldn’t afford the vacation time or the cost of the plane tickets. My mom would drive me to Vancouver, where we’d spend the night in an airport motel before my flight the following morning. My dad was staying at home to work. I’d said good-bye to my friends at a party the night before, truck headlights illuminating the clearing in the woods where we always gathered, squat kegs and foamy cups of beer clutched in the semidarkness.

It was quiet during the car ride out of town. “Music?” my mom asked, and I shook my head. The trees along the highway blurred together.

“Evan,” she said after a long silence. “It’s okay to be nervous.” She looked over at me, her face tanned from the summer. A long salt-and-pepper braid fell down her back. Her bare arms were lean from years of carrying boxes from delivery trucks to the loading dock. It was her hands on the steering wheel, their familiar age spots and creases, her thin gold wedding band, that made me understand that I was really leaving.

But I shook my head again. “I’m fine.”

“Well,” she said. “I guess you’re probably pretty excited about it.”

I was. I still was. But the anticipation had been building up for so long, and now that it was actually here, the moment felt disappointingly ordinary. We could have been driving anywhere, on a family trip, or en route to some hockey tournament. I had the feeling that eventually we’d turn back in the other direction, toward home. It seemed impossible that this was how life transformed itself: a drive down a road you’d driven so many times before.

“Only a hundred more kilometers,” she said an hour later, as we whizzed past another road marker. I felt like I should make conversation—it was the last time I’d see her for months—but I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Checking in?” the clerk at the motel asked.

“The reservation is under Peck. Two rooms,” my mom said, digging through her wallet. I raised my eyebrows at her, my eternally frugal mother. Only when we were wheeling our bags down the hallway, away from the lobby, did she lean over and whisper: “You’re a grown-up now, honey. I think you deserve your own room, don’t you?”

  

I was on campus early. Every year a rich alum from the hockey team paid for the team to have use of the rink for one week in late August. The captains would run the practice, skirting the NCAA rules that prevented us from officially beginning practice until October. Most of the players lived off campus and could move in early. After my flight—the longest I’d ever taken, the first one out of the country—I caught a shuttle bus to New Haven. I was going to crash at the hockey house for the week, along with the other freshmen. The door was unlocked when I arrived.

“Hello?” I called into the empty living room. I followed the sound of voices to the back of the house, where I found two guys sitting in the kitchen, eating dinner.

“Hey. I’m Evan Peck. I just got here.” I held out my hand.

“Hey, man. I’m Sebi. And this is Paul. We’re new, too.”

“Where are you guys from?”

“Medicine Hat,” Sebi said.

“Kelowna,” Paul said.

Our team was mostly composed of guys like that, guys like me—Canadians from the prairies and the western provinces, some New Englanders, a few boys from Minnesota. It made settling in easy. The routine was familiar, the intensity turned up: twice-a-day practices, runs and lifts, team dinners. I was exhausted, not so much falling asleep every night as passing out, too tired to feel homesick. On the second-to-last day of that week, toward the end of afternoon practice, I noticed a man sitting in the stands, watching us scrimmage. He wore a crisp suit and tie, which seemed incongruous with both the August heat outside and the manufactured cold inside the rink.

“Did anyone else notice that guy?” I asked in the locker room.

“The guy in the stands?” one of the seniors replied. “That’s Reynolds. He’s paying for all this.”

The same man was waiting outside the rink when we emerged in the late afternoon light. He wore mirrored sunglasses and leaned against a bright yellow sports car. One of the captains went over and shook his hand, and they spoke briefly.

“Guys,” the captain called out to the rest of us. “We’re going over to Liffey’s for beers. Mr. Reynolds is treating.”

“I still don’t really get who this guy is,” I said to Sebi as we trailed the group down Whitney Avenue. At the bar, quiet on a weekday evening when the campus was still empty, Reynolds took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and slapped his card down to open the tab.

I thought of the dwindling contents of my wallet as I reached for the pitcher. I was planning to find a job on campus, but until then, I was spending the last of the money saved from my summer job. At least the beer was free. A little later, Reynolds came over to our table and pulled up a chair. “You’re all new, huh?” he said, reaching to pour himself a beer. “I don’t recognize any of you from last year.”

We nodded. “Yes, sir,” I said.

“Well, this is my favorite time of year, getting you guys together for the first time. The main thing is you get to know each other. These early days are the best, let me tell you. When everything’s still up for grabs.”

Reynolds had the build of an athlete in retirement, muscles gone soft, a cushiony midsection. His mirrored sunglasses shone like an extra pair of eyes from the top of his head. He squinted at us. “Not that I don’t expect a return on my investment.” He laughed. “I’m paying for this because I expect you guys might be able to bring home a national championship in your time here.”

We sipped beer in silence. “Did you play at all after college, Mr. Reynolds?” Sebi finally asked.

“It’s Peter. No. No, I wasn’t good enough to go pro, never expected to. But there’s another game, you know. It pays better and it lasts longer.” He laughed again, his teeth glowing white. “Moved to New York, started in banking, and now I’m running a hedge fund. You know how hedge funds work?”

He talked and talked, going into more detail than any of us could absorb. I tried to pay attention, but I kept drifting, noticing instead the embroidered monogram of his shirt, the gold wristwatch peeking from beneath his cuff. His accent still had the last traces of a childhood spent somewhere in Canada’s sprawling interior. He was rich and young. He’d done everything right. But he looked tired beneath it all.

The sky outside had darkened. Reynolds waved down the waitress to close out his tab. “Have to head back,” he said, draining his beer. He passed around business cards. “I know you guys are good, but odds are you’re not going to the pros after college. Call me if you ever want advice.”

Earlier that day, before afternoon practice, I’d finally moved my things into my dorm room. The other students would be arriving the following morning. That night, after Reynolds left, I wanted to forget what I was about to face: the people who had earned their place at this school through different means—through more legitimate means. I’d spent the previous week pretending that this place belonged to me, but it was only that—pretending. After leaving the bar, a few of us picked up a case of beer and a handle of whiskey and brought it back to my room, drinking until late. By the end of the night, it had done the trick. I’d almost forgotten. I kicked the empty cans aside and collapsed onto the bare bed.

  

In the dim basement of a frat house, in a room that smelled like beer and dirt, a girl pressed her body against mine. She kept laughing at everything I said. It was that first night after everyone arrived, the first real night, and my teammates and I ventured in a pack from party to party. I moved my hand down her waist, over her T-shirt, and she drew closer. Okay, I thought. It still worked. We danced for a while, and then we were kissing. She tasted like tequila and salt. A few songs later, she pushed closer with impatience. She was cute, with a great body, and both of us were the right amount of buzzed. But in that moment sex seemed only marginally appealing, not worth all the trouble. I felt a little melancholy. My teammates were scattered throughout the room, distracted by other girls or games of beer pong, so I extracted myself and left the party unnoticed.

Back at the dorm, the light coming through the door to my entryway caught a figure in silhouette. It was a girl, tall and long-legged. Blond. She looked familiar. As I got closer, I recognized her from the diner that morning. Her hair was loose and long, and she’d changed into a dress. She was looking for something in her purse and didn’t see me until I was right behind her, reaching for my key card.

“Oh! God, you scared me,” she said.

“You need to get in?”

She laughed. “I think I managed to lose my card already.”

“You live here, too?”

“On the fourth floor. I’m Julia.”

“I’m Evan. Third floor.”

I stepped aside to usher her through the open door. “After you.”

“Oh—thanks.”

The door fell shut with a loud bang.

“So, Evan.” She smiled. “Where are you from?”

“Canada.”

“Really? That’s cool. Where in Canada?”

“The middle of nowhere. You’ve never heard of it.”

“Try me.”

“Carlton. It’s in British Columbia, the interior.” She shrugged, and I laughed. “I knew it. What about you?”

“Boston. Well, just outside Boston. Brookline.”

I was tempted to say something about the Red Sox, remembering the hat from that morning, then I reminded myself that she didn’t know I’d been looking.

“Did you go out tonight?”

“Yeah, with my teammates. Hockey,” I added.

“That explains the Canadian thing. You must get that a lot. Or you will.”

I laughed. My beery buzz had vanished. The way she was looking at me wasn’t the way the other girls looked at me back home. Her face was like an image firmly fixed on canvas where the other girls’ had been slippery glass. Right here in the present, breathing the same air, not off in some imagined future. Midnight wasn’t late. The night was just starting. “Hey, are you hungry?” I asked.

“Starving, actually.”

We walked to the pizza place on Broadway. Up at the counter, she reached for her purse, but I waved her money away. I could give her this, at least. On the way home, we sat on a low stone wall, waiting for the pizza to cool. I watched as she plucked a piece of pepperoni from her slice. Her kind of beauty snuck up on you. You had to look a little closer to really get it. Someone called her name from across the street. She waved back at him.

“That was fast,” I said.

“What was?”

“You made friends already.”

“No, we went to high school together. There are a bunch of us here.”

“Oh. That must be nice.”

“I guess. What about you? What do you think of it so far?”

“This place?” I swiveled, taking in the panorama. “Just like the brochure. But more drunk people.” She laughed. “It’s about what I expected. Or not. I don’t know. I’m still taking it in.”

“Different from home?”

“Are you kidding?”

She smiled. “It must be an adjustment.”

“That’s an understatement. What about you? What do you think of it?”

“It’s just like the brochure.”

“Touché.” I laughed. “So, Julia. How was your summer?”

She blinked once, staring down at the sidewalk. She blinked again.

“I’m sorry. Wrong question?”

“No, no, it’s just—long story. I don’t need to burden you with it.”

“You can tell me.” A beat. “People like to tell me things.”

“You’d better be careful. I might never shut up.”

Eventually she took the last bite of her pizza, and then she held the crust out toward me. “Do you want it? I never eat the crust.”

“Sure?”

“I wouldn’t offer it to just anyone,” she said in mock solemnity. “But I can tell we’re going to be good friends.”

Back in the dorm, we stood in the hallway outside her room. It was late, 3:00 a.m., then 4:00 a.m. Other students tripped up the stairs to bed, but we kept talking and talking, and whenever I thought maybe the conversation had reached its natural end, one of us fired off in a new direction, bringing the other along. She didn’t invite me inside. Mostly I was glad for that. Finally, when she started yawning uncontrollably, I said that I should probably get to bed.

“Yeah. Me, too.” She paused, hand on doorknob. “Thanks for the pizza, Evan.”

“Anytime.”

She smiled. “See you in the morning?”

  

Julia had a boyfriend. Of course she did. A guy named Rob, from her boarding school. They’d been together for almost two years. But by mid-September, she was barely mentioning Rob. Usually I was the one to ask about him, as a way of making sure he did in fact still exist. I wondered how much she and Rob actually spoke, how much she told him about her new life at college.

It turned out to be easy enough: making friends, fitting in. It didn’t seem to matter how different two people might be or how different their lives had been before college. That was true for me and my roommate, Arthur. We fit together like puzzle pieces, a big one and a small one. And it was true for me and Julia. She took my hand at parties, leading me through the crowd. She came and went through our unlocked door like another roommate. She helped me cram for midterms; she read my papers. I needed the help. That was what surprised me most—how hard the work was. It was like the other students saw English where I saw hieroglyphs, even in the most basic, introductory courses. Maybe that hometown feeling had been right all along; maybe I was the same as the Evan Peck who’d failed kindergarten way back. I couldn’t admit this to anyone, not even to Julia, although she probably saw it anyway. She saw everything about me.

One night in late October, coming home from practice, I passed her in the courtyard, where she was on the phone, pacing back and forth. I pointed to the door, but she shook her head. Then she snapped: “Rob, listen to me—no, just listen. Why are you so pissed? Seriously? What do you want me to say?” She rolled her eyes at me and mimed holding a gun to her head. She cupped her hand over the phone. “Sorry. He’s ranting. I’ll see you up there in a minute.”

I spent Thanksgiving with Arthur’s family in Ohio. On Sunday afternoon, we got back to campus. Every time I heard footsteps on the stairs from the other students trickling back, I wondered whether it was Julia. We hadn’t spoken during the weeklong break. I fiddled with my cell phon. . .