Free Jumper 1 - Jumper by Steven Gould

theaters line Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue. In two hours I was offered drugs, girls, boys, and children. When one of them said they could provide a driver's license, it was only to lure me down an alleyway, so they could "jump" me. I jumped first and quit trying for the day.
     
    The Stanville Public Library is just off the downtown district, a three-block-by-two-block area of public buildings, restaurants, and dying stores. The Wal-Mart at the edge of town and the big mall twenty miles away in Waverly were taking the downtown business.
    I walked along Main Street and thought about how different this stupid little town was from New York City.
    The boarded-up front of the Royale movie theater had graffiti on the plywood, but the message was "Stallions Rule!" In New York the graffiti on theaters was obscene or angry, not high school athletic bragging. On the other hand, there were over fifty movie theaters in the midtown section of Manhattan and that didn't count the porno houses. Here in Stanville the only theater was closed, done in by the video business. If people wanted a real movie theater, they had to drive to the sixplex in Waverly.
    It was pointless to compare restaurants, but the variety and range of them hit home when I came to the Dairy Queen. It was brick with high glass windows and bright fluorescent lighting. It had all the atmosphere and charm of a doctor's examining room. I thought of seven spots in Greenwich Village that would serve me anything from gourmet ice cream to "tofutti" to frozen yogurt to Bavarian cream pie. I could be at any of them in the blink of an eye.
    "I'd like a small dip cone, please."
    I didn't know the elderly woman behind the counter, but Robert Werner, who used to be in biology class with me, was flipping burgers. He looked up from the grill, saw me, and frowned, as if I was familiar but he couldn't place me. It had been over a year, but it hurt that he didn't recognize me.
    "That will be seventy-three cents."
    I paid. In the Village it would have been considerably more. As I walked back to one of the plastic laminated booths I saw myself in the mirror that ran along the back wall. No wonder Robert couldn't place me.
    I was wearing slacks from Bergdorf's, a shirt I'd gotten from some snotty clerk on Madison Avenue, and shoes from Saks Fifth Avenue. My hair was cut neatly, slightly punkoid, far different from the untrimmed mess I'd worn a year before. Then I would have been wearing worn, ill-fitting jeans, shirts with clashing patterns, and three-year-old tennis shoes. There would have been holes in the socks.
    I stared for a moment, a ghostly overlay of that earlier, awkward me causing me to shudder. I sat down, facing away from the mirror, and ate my ice cream.
    Robert came out from the kitchen to bus a table near me. He looked at me again, still puzzled.
    What the hell.
    "How's it going, Robert?"
    He smiled and shrugged. "Okay. How about you? Long time no see."
    He still didn't place me.
    I laughed. "You might say that. Not for over a year."
    "That would have been at...?" He paused, as if remembering, inviting me to fill in the blank.
    I grinned. "You're going to have to remember all on your own. I won't help you."
    He glared then. "Okay. Dammit. I know you, but where from? Give me a break!"
    I shook my head and nibbled on my cone.
    He turned to finish bussing the table, then straightened up suddenly. "Davy? Christ, Davy Rice!"
    "Bingo."
    "I thought you did a milk carton."
    I grimaced. "Poetically put."
    "Did you go back home?"
    "No!" I blinked, surprised at the force in my voice. More softly I said, "No, I didn't. I'm just seeing the old hometown."
    "Oh." He put his hands in his pockets. "Well, you look really good. Really different."
    "I'm doing all right. I..." I shrugged.
    "Where are you living now?"
    I started to lie, to tell him something misleading, but it seemed petty. "I'd rather not say."
    He frowned. "Oh. Is your dad still putting those posters up?"
    "Christ, I hope