“What are you doing?” I demand.
“Writing you a discharge.”
“Not gonna grill me more? Not gonna ask me to come right out and say it? You were the one who said I needed to confront it, not run away.”
“This isn’t running away,” she says calmly, and rips the paper off and hands it to me. “I’ve been doing this for fifteen years, Isis. Some people need me—a total stranger—to listen. However, some people are only further injured when a total stranger listens. As a doctor, and with you as my patient, I can’t suggest you continue speaking to me on this matter with a good conscience. I’m not the one who should hear it. Someone else—your mother, your father, maybe Kayla, or Sophia, or perhaps someone you haven’t met yet—one of them will make you feel safe enough to say it. One of them will be the one you decide to tell. It’s up to you.”
I stand and grab the paper warily, like it’s a trap. But Mernich just smiles.
“Would you like your diagnosis?”
“I’m crazy.”
“Not at all. Do you know what disassociation is?”
“Something crazy people have.”
Mernich’s smile turns patient. “It’s what occurs when a person goes through a traumatic experience. It’s a… Think of it like a coping mechanism for the brain. Say someone throws a snowball, and it’s going to hit your eye. Your eyelids react much faster than the snowball flies to protect the cornea. Disassociation is like an eyelid for the brain. A traumatic event can cause the brain to disassociate the event. Sometimes this manifests as a simple case of shock that quickly wears off. Other times, we see intense reactions, such as withdrawal, PTSD, and in your case—”
She looks up, and I dread the next words to fall from her mouth.
“—memory gaps.”
“What?” I scowl. “I don’t—”
“You have periods of painful blackouts when you try to recall a certain person in your life. Your brain has identified this person as the source of overstimulation, and perhaps pain. You have what’s called lacunar amnesia. It’s a very centralized and rare thing.”
“So I’ve lost my brain? Part of my memories? I’ve totally forgotten them?”
“You haven’t really forgotten—the brain never truly forgets. I believe in your case, the memories are still there but buried beneath layers. It might take months to get them back. But you may also never get them back at all.”
“Who…which person was it? The one I forgot?”
“Think back. What have your friends told you? Have they been acting strangely toward you, concerning a certain person?”
It filters in slowly—weeks of Kayla’s weird looks, of Wren’s concerned sighs, and Sophia, shaking her head and saying it’s sad. And then Jack’s fractured expression when I first woke up and said I didn’t know him. I stare, wide-eyed, at Mernich’s passive face.
“Jack. That Jack guy. Everything they say about him doesn’t make sense. But why do I have this lactose amnesia thing? I mean, my head was bad, but…”
“You suffered significant head trauma. I believe the lacunar amnesia is a combination of that and your own disassociation of the traumatic event of fighting off your mother’s attacker.”
“Did Jack— How do I know him?”
“You’d be better off asking Sophia that question, perhaps. But you’re leaving the hospital with that discharge slip right away, aren’t you? You were quite eager to go.”
I look at the crumpled yellow note in my hand and close my fist around it.
“It can wait.”
Mernich smiles at me.
“Yes. Yes it can.”
Chapter Two
3 Years, 25 Weeks, 5 Days
My mind is a white blank of confusion. I knew Jack. I know Jack. The underwear model-esque dude with the rude mouth knows me.
Before this extremely vexing realization, he’d just been a guy I was grateful to. But now he’s a guy I know! I know guys! Guys who aren’t harmless Wren! Why hadn’t anyone told me? It’s not like I’d hate them for telling the truth. In fact, I kind of actually encourage truth-telling for everyone on this planet! It fosters clear communication and ensures things mildly don’t fucking suck!
I find Sophia in the common room, reading a romance novel. The heaving bosom on the cover distracts me for point-two seconds before I realize I have better boobs than that and slam my hands on the table.
“Sophie! Soapy! Soapbutt!”
She looks up calmly and puts a bookmark between the pages. “Yes, ma’am?”
“Not to be rude or overly confrontational, but why the fucking hell didn’t you tell me I had amnesia?”
She gasps. “You have amnesia?”
“Soapy!” I lament. She stands, putting her book under one arm and offering her other to me.
“Oh, stop. I’m kidding. Come on. Let’s take a walk.”
I debate how effective screaming until I get my way will be and decide not very and then lace my arm with hers. She leads me down the too-sterile whitewashed halls. We weave around interns and gurneys. An old woman waves hello from her wheelchair, and Sophia waves back.
“Hello, Mrs. Anderson. How are you feeling?”
“I’m well, dear. What about yourself? I heard you have that surgery coming up. Dr. Fenwall is very excited about it.”
“Oh, you know him.” Sophia smiles wider. “He’s excited about everything. I’m not getting my hopes up.”
“Don’t talk like that, sweetie! I’m sure it’ll be a success and you’ll be out of here and on dates with that dashing young man of yours in no time.”
Sophia laughs, but once we’ve turned the corner, her smile fades rapidly, like a flower caught in a first frost.
“She seems, uh, nice,” I try. “Also, dying. But nice.”
“We’re all dying, Isis,” Sophia says. “Some of us just a little faster than others.”
Feeling somehow chastised, I try to look around instead of at her.
“They really need to redecorate,” I say. “Maybe paint some hearts on the walls. And puppies. Just strew puppies everywhere. Puppy bonanza. Pupanza.”
She doesn’t say anything, leading me to a stairwell. Maybe this is it. Maybe she’s going to stop being my friend forever. Maybe she hates puppies. Maybe she hates painted hearts on walls! Maybe my big mouth has finally landed me in trouble I can’t get out of, except I could totally get out of this stairwell by jumping over the railing and straight down—
“Isis, you’re being silly.”
I look up. “Was I thinking out loud again? Mea culpa.”
Sophia holds open a door at the top of the stairs, and sunlight streams into my eyes. She ushers me through it. I burst onto the roof, fresh, crisp winter air lapping at my face. From here, you can see most of Northplains, Ohio, nestled in the rocky valley below. Thrushes swoop around the treetops, a massive flock of them sitting on the roof, pecking at nothing. They look so calm. So small. So peaceful.
“AHHHH!” I scream, charging at them. They scatter with angry squawks, the noise deafening for a split second.
“That’s what you get for being so damn cute!” I shout. Sophia walks up beside me, the wind toying with her beautiful platinum hair.
“This is where I come when I’m sad or feel alone.”
“It’s great!” I shout too close to her ear. “It’s great,” I whisper.
“I’m glad you like it. I’ve never shown anybody. Well, except Jack. I’ve shown him. And Naomi knows I come up here.”
“Because she’s nosy as balls.”
“Because she’s nosy as balls,” Sophia agrees. She perches on the edge of the roof. Warily, I lower my hands and inch toward her. I look over the edge—it’s a long way down. As in, an extremely dead way down. But Sophia doesn’t seem worried at all. She just gently kicks her heels against the building.
Not wanting her to feel left out, I sit next to her and gingerly ease my feet over. She hums. The sun is thinking about going down—still bright and full but drooping
tiredly. The world is at peace. Or it’s ignoring us. It doesn’t know we exist. Sick and recovering people live in separate worlds. The regular world is focused on living, and ours is focused on not dying. And sitting up here, inches away from death? That’s another third world entirely. It’s the edge, the in-between. Everything is fragile and could change at the slightest breeze, a single, soft push.
“What are you thinking?” Sophia asks.
“Deep, intense thoughts. So deep. At least two indie songs’ worth of deep.”
She laughs and hums higher. A thrush starts chirping with her, or maybe at her.
“What’s that on your arm?” she asks. I pull my sleeve down over it instantly, out of habit.
“Nothing.”
“If it was nothing you wouldn’t wear long sleeves all the time.”
“It’s nothing, honestly.”
“Did you try to kill yourself?”
There’s a beat. The thrush stops chirping.
“No,” I say finally. “I’m crazy. Not stupid.”
The silence returns with a vengeance. The weight of every world ever is on this roof, bearing down on the two girls sitting on the lip of it.
“Have you ever had sex?” she asks. I abruptly start wobbling for no discernible reason. She grabs my arm and I gasp for air.
“You really are trying to kill me!”
“It’s just a question.”
“But this isn’t answering my sort of direly important question about my amnesia and Jack!”
“I had sex.” Sophia picks at her dress. “With Jack.”
“That’s great!” I feel my throat tighten, and deep in the pit of my stomach something burbles. Perplexed at my sudden bodily reactions to her words, I do the smart thing and brush them off entirely. “I mean, good for you, really! I mean. Good! I hope it was good! You two are good! Together!”
“Jealousy doesn’t suit you.” She laughs.
“Jealous? Uh, did you miss the part where Jack is a giant black hole in my brain instead of an actual person?”
It hits me with the force of a dozen Godzillas break-dancing over the ruins of Tokyo.
“Did I…did I—”
“No! Oh no!” Sophia says. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to wind you up like that. I don’t think. Um. I don’t know what happened between you two for certain, but last I heard, you and Jack were engaged in a brutal, egotistic battle. Not sex.”
“Sounds rad.”
“He said you called it a war. Occasionally, ‘crusade.’”
“He must’ve done something really shitty if I pulled out the medieval terminology.”
“I don’t doubt you and he had some misunderstandings.” She nods. “He can be cold. Cruel, even. And you’re the opposite. But he’s really not trying to be. He just ignores people’s feelings in favor of logic and rationality.”
“Ugh.” I stick out my tongue. “One of those.”
“He blackmailed you.”
“That’s standard issue in a war.”
“You planted fake weed in his locker and nearly got him suspended.”
“Jolly good.”
“He kissed you.”
I feel the blood drain out of my face and down to my feet.
“Uh, yeah, no—”
“Uh, yeah yes,” she corrects. “Avery told me. I forgot to thank you, by the way. Even if Jack doesn’t visit as much with you around, Wren and Avery do. And it’s so nice to see them again. It’s been years. They’re feeling very guilty, you see.”
“Wait, wait, hold on one flaming-ass second!” I get off the edge. “You’re telling me your boyfriend kissed me?”
“I don’t know, did he?” She cocks her head to the side. “I trust Avery’s word, even if she is unforgivable, but I trust your memory more. You should try to get it back. Then we’d both know the truth.”
“If he kissed me, you should…you should just break up with him! He’s a scumbag! And don’t even talk to me again. I’m even more of a scumbag.”
Sophia laughs and gets off the edge, putting a hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay. How could you know he had me? You were new, and he doesn’t talk about me a lot.”
My skull suddenly throbs, the pain imploding along my forehead. I gasp and massage my temples as a jumble of memories come flooding back—Jack’s face going soft when he talked about Sophia. A cigar box. A letter with her signature. His anger at me for snooping and trying to get to know Sophia, so palpable and cold I felt frozen down to my lungs. Something that happened in middle school. A baseball bat. A kiss. Someone kissing me (Jack?), and the knowledge he had Sophia ringing through my head the entire time.
“Are you okay, Isis?” Sophia asks gently. I grip her hand and clasp its slender frailness between one of my own.
“He talked about you,” I say. “I remember now. Jesus, he didn’t talk a lot about you, but when he did…he was so overprotective. So thorny. He wanted to make sure no one hurt you. He wanted to—he wanted to keep you safe. Once, I tried to read a letter by you; I mean, I broke into his house to do it, but it was with good intentions, I promise. He keeps them all in his dad’s cigar box in the dresser. They’re all neat and you can tell he— He cares for those letters more than his life. And he found me reading one, and he was so mad, I thought he was going to literally ax me. Ax me a question. And that question was, ‘Do you want to die quickly or slowly?’”
Sophia’s face flares pink, and she looks at the ground.
“He loves you, Sophia,” I say slowly. “Don’t ever doubt that. I mean, I can’t remember most of him, but there’s a sliver of him I remember now, and my gut tells me he loves you, without a single fricking doubt. My gut isn’t wrong. Except when it has food poisoning. Then it is very, very wrong.”
Sophia looks up, her deep blue eyes welling with the softest of tears. She chokes back a laugh. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to accuse you—or anyone. I just…I’ve been with him for so long it feels like I can’t tell anymore. And ever since you transferred to his school, his letters—”
She looks my face over, like she’s searching for something in my expression. Then she shakes her head. “I’m sorry. Never mind. Thank you.”
Before I can say anything more stupid, she walks through the door and takes the steps two at a time, leaving me to the wind and the birds.
I look down at my hands. The memories were so vivid. The smell of stir-fry Jack made. His mother’s face, his mother’s painting. Their dog, Darth Vader. Jack’s room—the smell of sleep and boy and honey and mint, a smell so familiar it comforts me.
Comforts?
I make a face and throw that trash thought in the brain-trash. The dude is clearly an asshole. He kissed me when he had a girlfriend! Me! I’m not even kiss-worthy! Not compared to someone like Sophia. He had Sophia and he kissed me, so he clearly must be a blind idiot as well as an asshole. He’s two for two, and the third strike’s the last. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s guys who take advantage of a girl’s trust to do sleazy things like mack on another girl.
I take the stairs two at a time. I don’t see Sophia anywhere in the lobby, so I go back to my room, turning over the semi-what-the-fuckery I’d just encountered. The memory of that Jack smell hits me again for no reason when I turn a corner. I furiously shake my head. Nuh-uh. Whatever I had with him is over. As soon as I find out the details, the past is going in a vault and never coming out again. Sophia is too nice. And she’s my friend.
And Jack is the only thing she has left.
“Besides, I don’t even like him. I don’t even know him. How can you like a carbon-based cootie machine?”
“Who’s a carbon-based what?”
I look up to see Wren standing by my bedside, holding a stack of papers. His green eyes shine behind his horn-rimmed glasses, his floppy hair even floppier. The second I register it’s him, I open my arms and run toward him, but when I realize the papers are math worksheets, I back up to the wall.
“What are those?” I whisper accusingl
y.
He blinks. “Your makeup work for Algebra II?”
I hiss and arch my back. Wren sighs and puts the papers on my bedside table next to a vase of wilted sunflowers Mom got me.
“You have to do them sometime if you wanna graduate with the rest of us.”
“Yes, well, in case you haven’t been paying attention, I’m not one to follow the conventional traditions of the masses. Also, there are roughly four hundred people in our graduating class and I like maybe three. You being one. Kayla being the other.”
Wren looks expectantly at me.
“And Knife Guy.”
He exhales. “Still not fully recovered, I see.”
“Actually! I am. So now I can ask you! Why didn’t you tell me about Jack?”
Shock paralyzes his face for a second.
“You seemed sort of traumatized, Isis. How could I tell you when you were lying in bed with that huge bloodstained bandage around your head? I was just happy you were alive. We all were.”
“Yes, I appreciate being alive and well and all, except you forgot the I-love-my-brain-and-would-like-to-know-what’s-going-on-with-it-at-all-times-jerkwad part!”
“Look, I’m sorry, all right?” Wren takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. “It’s my fault. I’m…wary of girls in fragile states. I don’t know how to help them. I’ve never known how to help them. All I do is hurt them. And with Sophia here in this hospital, too, I’ve just been on eggshells. I’m sorry. I was wrapped up in my own head, and I forgot about you.”
I feel the anger drain out of my body when Wren grins sheepishly.
“You’ve really…I haven’t told you how much you’ve helped me,” he says. “But you have. You really have. Before you came, I just stayed friends with people on the surface. I didn’t feel comfortable getting to know people for who they really were. I was fine with them just liking me superficially. But then you— I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you. So I didn’t tell you. I should’ve. I’m sorry.”
There’s a terse quiet. Finally, I lightly punch him. In the ear.
“C’mere, you piece of shit!” I yank his head under my arm and noogie him. “You think you’re so cool, worrying about everyone else like a dumb worry warty ass. I’ll show you—”