To Be or to Become

By Gibson Presmy

Follow the adventure of Joliette, a teenage girl from Montreal who accepted the offer to go save her dad who is trapped in the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664108820

Gibson Presmy

Gibson Presmy started writing at the age of seven. He wrote his first song in the first grade. It was composed of all the names of his classmate with a dish that rhymed with it, all curated by his teachers. Nineteen years later, he presents to the public his very first novel.

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Copyright © 2021 by Gibson Presmy.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 09/27/2021

Xlibris

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Contents

ACT ONE

Chapter 1 Rough Mornings

Chapter 2 Time

Chapter 3 The Truth

Chapter 4 Dad

Chapter 5 Don’t Do Drugs

ACT TWO

Chapter 6 Again and Always, Rough Mornings

Chapter 7 A Blast from the Past

Chapter 8 Guns and Ammo Shop

Chapter 9 Kenny Thi Liang

Chapter 10 More Guns and Ammo

Chapter 11 Last Ride

Chapter 12 Last, Last ride, I promise

Chapter 13 Lucky Number

Chapter 14 I Was This Close

ACT THREE

Chapter 15 The End

To Helen Bedard.

Here it is, my book of the future.

Act One

Chapter 1

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ROUGH MORNINGS

OK, so boom! This was just a regular day, a regular life, for me. Never I ever get exciting things happen to me. I think I have the most predictable life of all previous life forms that came before me. I mean, I could already predict how my whole day—no, my whole week! —was going to be. Like a psychic. I’m just a big ball of predictable morning poop. I wake up to a mess, late for school. My elder sister Carole singing to Drake in the shower, typical. Can’t lie, I do that too. But I’m singing to Stray Kids. I lived with her and Grandma since the accident five years ago. Mom was a scientist, and Dad was the chief of operation in the army. She got into an experiment that went horribly wrong. And I mean, no survivors. They told me she was the subject of that experiment. Then just a month later, they told me my dad passed away in a helicopter crash. I’m still not sure what an astropsychologist do, but that’s what the Canadian space agencies told me she was. I didn’t really know what she was working on. But it took every bit of free time with me.

I was really young when all that happened and didn’t really know what was going on honestly, but by the look on Grandma’s face, I could tell it was bad. I was sad. Really sad. They were at work all the time. I couldn’t really see them often, and now I’ll never will. I miss my parents a lot. It has been five years now, and my dad is still missing. The army says he’s dead. That’s what they kept telling me to help me move on, but there’s something somewhere deep inside me that knows my dad is still alive. You never know with the government. Since COVID-19, I get the impression that they never tell everything up front, and their excuse is because they didn’t want people to panic. They are hiding stuff from me because they think I’ll freak out. Whatever.

I saw my dad’s crash report. I wasn’t allowed to, but I did. And there was no dead body found on the crash scene. No pilot, no soldiers, and no Dad. They crashed in Congo, Africa, I mean, ugh! Maybe he is dead. But my dad is a survivor. He knows how to handle crucial situations. One time he forgot Mom’s birthday, and to make it up, he had to be a human subject for a whole month at my mom’s laboratory. He also told me how to survive if I ever get lost somewhere with no food or communication system. He told me a lot, even though I didn’t see him a lot. He had a way to ask really good questions and always in the perfect time. He always used to tell me how questions were more important than the answers. It’s hard to explain, especially now that he’s gone. Welp, I didn’t have time to miss them. And I sure didn’t have time to wait for my sister. I had to go to school already. I’ll just come back home on break and clean the rest of my filthy self.

The subways late—again. My mom always used to tell me, Nothing is late, everything came too early. She loved the idea of time and used to tell me quotations from like, Galileo or Einstein. It didn’t change the fact that the metro was late again. What’s the deal with people not being on time anyway? I thought