Restart

  “Everyone did,” he replies gruffly. “A lot of brave men are still buried there. They’re the heroes. I’m just the one they picked to hang a bauble on.”

  I can’t help asking. “What did you do? To earn the medal, I mean.”

  I can still only see one eye, but it’s impossible to miss the flash of impatience. “I stood on my head and spit nickels. Listen, smart guy, when you get to be my age, you don’t always remember the details of every single event in your life. But I don’t expect a young punk like you to understand that.” He closes the door.

  Old people are supposed to have wisdom, but Mr. Solway is definitely wrong about me.

  I’ve already forgotten more than he’ll ever know.

  I love pep rallies.

  I love the noise and the cheering. I love being with the whole school, packed onto the bleachers in the gym, showing our spirit and raising the roof, stomping and screaming our heads off. (Getting out of class doesn’t hurt either.)

  I’m a huge football fan. It’s definitely my favorite sport. All those downs are kind of confusing, though—first down, second down, touchdown, down by contact, illegal man downfield. Hard to figure out. But when the Hiawassee Hurricanes thunder onto the field with their shoulder pads, it’s all good. Guys look amazing in shoulder pads.

  This season might not be as awesome as usual because Chase Ambrose isn’t on the team. Chase is our star, and out of all the players who look good in shoulder pads, he looks the best. He hurt himself falling off a roof this summer, and the word around school is that he has amnesia. He can’t remember anything—including the fact that I’ve had a crush on him since sixth grade, and he doesn’t even know I’m alive.

  So he isn’t one of the players in full uniform showing off on the gym floor while we stomp and cheer. Oh, he’s down there, all right—recording the goings-on with a video camera. I don’t really get that part. It’s one thing for Chase to be off the team. It’s quite another for him to join the video club. (Those kids are basically nerds.)

  The point of the rally is to get everyone all riled up to annihilate Jefferson on Saturday. So we’ve got dummies dressed in Jefferson jerseys, and our guys are kicking the stuffing out of them. And our mascot is beating up Jefferson’s mascot (actually just a Hiawassee kid in a jaguar suit). Chase is filming them close-up, holding his camera right in there to capture every fake punch. I miss the shoulder pads, but he still looks good.

  And then the rally’s over. We file off the bleachers and start for our lockers to get our stuff to go home. The team heads out to practice, clattering down the hallway that leads to the field house. There’s a bit of a traffic jam there—players going one way and the rest of us going the other. A few elbows fly.

  Brendan Espinoza somehow gets bumped into the path of the players. (That’s typical Brendan, who could cross an empty parking lot and slip on the one banana peel in the middle.) The guys know Brendan, and make a game of bouncing him around like he’s a soccer ball. Pretty soon, the team is laughing, the kids are laughing, and Brendan is flying back and forth, holding on to his camera for dear life. It’s pretty funny.

  A chant goes up while Brendan flails. It’s like the whole football team is calling out, “Pass it! … Pass it! … Pass it!”

  There’s a blur of motion, and suddenly Joey Petronus is slammed up against the wall by two fistfuls of his football jersey. It’s Chase! His handsome face is normally chiller than chill. But right now, it’s boiling mad.

  “Let the kid go!” Chase demands.

  Brendan stumbles free, collapsing to the opposite wall.

  The other Hurricanes haul Chase off Joey, and there’s a lot of shoving going on. Shoving comes naturally to football players. (It’s even part of the game. Every play starts off with two lines of guys shoving each other.)

  Two Hurricanes hold Chase, struggling, by the arms. Chase looks almost small, dwarfed by all those players in pads and cleats.

  Aaron and Bear muscle into the center of the action, putting themselves between Joey and Chase.

  “Dial it down!” Aaron orders. “We’re all teammates here.”

  “What did that guy ever do to you, huh?” Chase spits at Joey, yanking his arms free.

  “Like you’ve got anything to say about it!” Joey shoots back.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Joey indicates Brendan, who’s dusting himself off, surrounded by his fellow video clubbers. “Yeah, right. Like you never had a little fun with Espinoza.”

  I laugh at that one, because no one messed with the dweebs more than Chase, Aaron, and Bear. But Chase looks so mystified that it hits me: If he really has amnesia, is it possible that he doesn’t remember?

  Chase addresses the entire team. “We were shooting your pep rally to make you look good. You’re welcome.”

  The players stare at him in horror. He has no clue what he said to upset them, but I do.

  He said we.

  (We, the video club. You, the team.)

  Joey hefts his helmet. “We used to be tight with this kid Chase Ambrose. We were more than teammates; we were boys. But lately, I don’t even know who he is.” He leads the Hurricanes in a jog out to the field.

  Aaron and Bear hang back. I’m expecting them to take Chase’s side, since those three are best friends. Chase seems pretty shocked when Bear wheels off with the others.

  Aaron eyes Chase with a long face. “You shouldn’t have done that, man. Joey’s your friend. He’s had your back plenty of times.”

  Chase is still defiant, but a little more subdued than before. “So I should just let him beat up a kid half his size for no reason?”

  Aaron stands his ground. “If you’d told him to stop, he would have stopped. You didn’t have to attack him.” He shakes his head. “None of us are perfect—not even you. Next time, take a second to think about who your friends are.”

  He disappears after the team.

  “Thanks, Chase,” Brendan says in a shaky voice.

  Shy but grateful, the video club members express their gratitude. Not too many people ever stand up to the football team. Only Chase can do it, because he’s one of them.

  At least he used to be.

  Shoshanna Weber rolls her eyes. “Please be real! Why would anybody thank him? Is there any one of us he hasn’t treated like garbage?”

  Brendan looks at her in surprise. “Didn’t you see what happened there?”

  “I saw him being a goon, like he always is. Today he was on our side. What about tomorrow? Remember what he did to my brother!” She storms off.

  Wow, Joel Weber. Just thinking about him puts a lump in my throat. I almost forgot he’s Shoshanna’s brother. A lot of this stuff feels kind of harmless until something like Joel Weber happens.

  Chase seems a little shell-shocked by the whole thing. After all, he took on the football team on behalf of the video club kids. And what’s his reward? Getting dissed by one of them.

  The others try to smooth it over.

  “Sorry, man.”

  “She didn’t mean it.”

  “You were awesome back there.”

  Brendan is last. “You didn’t have to do that,” he says. (Although it’s pretty obvious he’s glad someone came to his rescue.)

  Then they’re gone. The hallway has cleared out by now, so it’s just Chase and me.

  He’s still bewildered. “I didn’t even know she had a brother.”

  “Yeah, Joel Weber. Quiet kid, plays piano. He got bullied so bad that his folks sent him away to boarding school.”

  That’s the edited version of the truth. What Chase doesn’t remember is he basically starred in that bullying. I don’t think his goal could have been to force Joel to leave town, but he definitely intended to make him miserable. I wonder if he was sorry when he heard that the Webers were sending their son away.

  I guess no one will ever know, not even Chase himself. However he felt about what happened to Joel, he’s already forgotten it.

  Chase c
hews it over. “I was in on that, wasn’t I?” he says finally. “I was in on a lot of stuff. People look at me funny around here, and maybe it’s not just because I’m the idiot who fell off a roof.”

  “No one thinks you’re an idiot,” I put in quickly.

  “Yeah, but it isn’t the kind of thing Albert Einstein ever did.” He pauses thoughtfully (a good look for him—makes him seem older). “You can’t believe how weird it is to have this whole life, and everyone remembers it except you.”

  “I’m Kimberly,” I tell him. “But you always call me Kimmy.” Not exactly true, but how’s he ever going to know? I always wanted to be called Kimmy, especially by him.

  We shake hands like two businesspeople meeting for the first time.

  “Well, I’m late for video club,” he tells me. “See you—Kimmy.”

  I’m speechless, so I just wave at him.

  This has to be the best day ever. If Chase forgot everything, it means he also doesn’t remember that he’s totally out of my league.

  I have to join the video club as soon as possible.

  My dad always uses this expression: “If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.”

  Well, that isn’t always true. It looks like Ambrose, and it talks like Ambrose. But no way that’s Ambrose.

  How can a person be so different just because he fell on his head? Okay, so he’s sidelined from football. Nothing you can do about some dumb doctor’s orders. And amnesia. That’s pretty out there, although Wikipedia says it’s real.

  But even if every single memory is erased from your head—wiped clean like my phone when I dropped it in the toilet—you should still be the same person, right?

  Chase just isn’t. That’s not the kid Bear and I grew up with, played sports with, broke all the rules with, since we were in second grade.

  You can see it in his eyes. He looks at us like he barely knows us—or any of the Hurricanes. I guess I understand that. We’re like new people he just met for the first time. Even so, shouldn’t we be starting to hit it off by now? That’s not happening either. He’s not into the things we’re into. Not football, not anything.

  That hurts. I get that his memory is erased. But is our whole friendship erased too? Being boys with someone isn’t just a bunch of stuff you did together in the past. There has to be more to it than that! But right now, it’s like we’ve got zero in common with the guy.

  Worse, the kids he does have stuff in common with are all losers! The video club—really? The Chase I knew whaled on those guys worse than any of us! And now they’re who he wants to hang out with? Who’s next, huh? The Care Bears? And those wusses have totally forgiven him too—except Shoshanna, for obvious reasons. I wonder if he’s figured that out yet.

  The big question is this: Is the old Ambrose trapped in there somewhere waiting to realize what a dork he’s being and get back to normal? Or is this new nerd-loving Chase the only Chase there’s going to be from now on?

  That’s a pretty big deal, and not just because we’re supposed to be boys. He has something that belongs to all three of us—something important. What if he doesn’t even know he’s got it?

  Bear isn’t a deep thinker. He’s all action. “Dude, this is stupid. Let’s just ask him. Say, ‘We know you have it; fork it over.’”

  “The guy has amnesia,” I reason. “That means he might not even remember where he put it.”

  Bear snorts. “You buy that? Trust me, he remembers just fine. That thing’s valuable. He’s faking all this amnesia stuff so he can keep it for himself.”

  “You’re talking about our boy!” I exclaim angrily, giving him a shove that would put one of those video dweebs halfway across town. “You’re a jerk for even thinking it!”

  He shoves me back. “Then you’re the jerk, because I know you’re thinking it too.”

  But I’m not thinking it. Honestly, if Chase is just punking us all with this amnesia stuff, that would be better. If tomorrow he says, “Fooled you!” I might be ticked off for a day or so. Then I’d shake his hand for putting one over on us.

  Mostly, I’d be glad to have the old Chase back.

  “One way or the other, we’ve got a problem,” I tell him. “If we face him with it, and he honestly doesn’t remember, then we’ve just confessed to a guy who isn’t really our friend anymore.”

  “Big deal.”

  “It is a big deal,” I persist. “Because the new Chase is a goody-goody. He stands up for losers; he does community service when he doesn’t have to. If he forgot what we did, I don’t want to remind him. A guy like that could turn all three of us in because it’s The Right Thing To Do.”

  “Unless he’s lying,” Bear adds grimly.

  “And we’ll deal with that too—if necessary. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to squeeze the truth out of someone when you can’t let him know what you’re trying to get him to say. I’m a plain guy. I like plain talk. But in this case, it’s too dangerous.

  Our best chance to coax it out of him is at the Graybeard Motel. But it’s not so easy there either. Bad enough he does community service when he’s off the hook; why does he have to be so gung ho about it? It’s depressing to watch him. He delivers more snacks in twenty minutes than Bear and I could stretch into a whole afternoon. And in that extra time, he reads to people. He pushes wheelchairs around. He helps the old fogeys with cell phones they don’t have a prayer of figuring out.

  “Is it just me,” Bear mutters, “or is he deliberately trying to make us look bad?”

  “I don’t think it’s on purpose,” I mumble back. “He really likes it here.”

  The old fossils like him too. We can’t walk three feet down the hall without some Dumbledore or Dumbledora hauling him in to adjust the TV or to reach something from a high shelf.

  Bear is insulted. “We’re taller than Ambrose. We can reach stuff. How come nobody ever asks us?”

  “Because we’d say no,” I remind him. “Or maybe just ignore them. Listen, it’s annoying that all these blue-hairs love Chase, but it’s not a mystery.”

  Even sour-faced Nurse Duncan, who wishes our community service was over even more than we do, has a smile for Ambrose—and an even deeper scowl for Bear and me.

  It doesn’t help that Chase has forged the closest friendship of all with the one resident he should be staying away from—that crotchety old warhorse in room 121. Wouldn’t you know it? The one graybeard who hates everybody—and who all the other graybeards hate right back—has decided to love Ambrose. Go figure.

  It’s those stupid Korean War stories that brought the two of them together. Chase can’t get enough of them. And the geezer is overjoyed to have someone willing to listen who doesn’t have to change his hearing-aid battery five times in the course of it.

  “How come you guys have so much to say to each other?” Bear demands.

  Ambrose shrugs. “He’s interesting. It’s not every day you meet somebody who’s won the country’s highest medal.”

  Why does he always have to bring that up? It makes me nervous. And it makes Bear practically crazy.

  “Wikipedia says the Korean War only lasted three years,” I grumble. “He’s already told you every minute of it. What more is there to say?”

  Ambrose laughs. “He’s nice.”

  “He’s not nice. Ask anybody in the building. He calls noise complaints on squeaky wheelchairs. He yells out spoilers on movie night. The nurses hate him even worse than we do. If this was a reality show and they got to vote somebody out of the Graybeard Motel, he’d be on the street.”

  But Chase gets called away to wheel Mrs. Bergland to her weekly canasta game—as if one of the orderlies couldn’t do it.

  “Maybe he just likes war stories,” I offer to Bear.

  He isn’t buying it. “He never liked war stories before.”

  And that’s the whole problem. We know the kid—but we don’t. Which makes it almo
st impossible to figure out what’s going on inside his head.

  Or how worried we should be.

  A few more memories have come back.

  Mostly, it’s just images and impressions, but there’s one that’s pretty concrete. My mother has been showing me a lot of old pictures in the hope that something might ring a bell. One snapshot of an ivy-covered building looks kind of familiar—the student union at Johnny’s university, Mom explains.

  It triggers a flashback. It’s not that I remember it; more like it’s already in my head, and I’m just noticing it now.

  Mom and seventh-grade Chase are dropping Johnny off at college. Our car pulls around the long circular drive in front of the building in the photograph. Johnny gets out. It’s his first day of freshman year, his first time living away from home. He seems terrified.

  And what do I feel? Sympathy for my poor scared brother? Or for Mom, who’s on the verge of tears? For myself, even—I’ll be losing my brother to a new life in a faraway place.

  I don’t feel any of those things. Instead, I’m thinking: What a wuss this kid is! I can’t believe I ever looked up to him! What a wimp! What a baby!

  My scorn is so sharp that it jolts me back to the here and now. How could I have made such harsh judgments about my own brother? When I was in the hospital, Johnny was there at my bedside every minute Mom was, just as worried about me, just as torn up by my accident.

  I guess that wasn’t payback for the wonderful brotherly loyalty I’ve shown him over the years.

  People say I’ve changed. I’m barely beginning to understand how much.

  Dr. Cooperman isn’t surprised that my memory is returning. My brain is totally fine, he says at my next appointment. After all, I remember everything that’s happened since coming out of the coma. Not that it would be easy to forget things like Shoshanna dumping frozen yogurt on my head or Brendan going through the car wash on a tricycle. Or how it felt to push Joey against the wall—a blur of violence, anger, and lightning-fast action. And something else too—I may not be proud of it, but it’s the truth: satisfaction. I didn’t like the way a situation was going and I changed it with my own physical power.