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 accusingly.
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—”
“Ahem.”
I look up. Sophia stands there. Wren goes white down to his roots and pulls out of my headlock all in a split second.
“S-Sophia,” he stammers.
“Wren.” She smiles. “It’s good to see you. Tallie misses you. So do I. But Tallie misses you the most.”
Wren’s white face gets green-tinged as he struggles to speak.
“I’ve been…busy.”
“Too busy for Tallie and me?” Sophia cocks her head. “Busy for four whole years? Jack and Avery visit her, but you don’t anymore.”
The tension in here is hells thick and no attention is on me, so obviously I have to rectify this situation by asking annoying questions.
“Who’s Tallie?”
Wren won’t look at me or Sophia, his eyes riveted on the floor instead. Sophia just keeps smiling.
“A good friend of ours. Don’t worry about it. I’m sorry I barged in. I’ll come back later.”
When she’s gone, Wren releases the breath he’d been holding.
“I thought you two were talking while you were here?” I ask. “Why are you so shaken up?”
“If you can call it ‘talking,’” Wren whispers. “She just stares at me from across the room, or the hall, and smiles. We don’t actually talk. That was the first time in…years.”
“Is Tallie someone important?”
Wren knits his lips shut, and I know I won’t be able to wheedle it out of him.
“Ah, look, never mind. It’s cool. You got some secrets, I got some secrets. Our secrets should get married and have babies.”
Wren looks shocked.
“Platonically,” I add. “Entirely platonic baby-making.”
“Is that…a thing?”
“Everything is technically a thing!”
I turn and hop into my bed, smoothing the covers to feign a modicum of decency like a proper lady would. Wren looks like he’s having some internal battle. His mouth’s all screwed up and his shoulders are shaking.
“Hey? Are you okay?”
“I told you before. I had the camera,” he blurts.
“Camera?”
“Avery gave me the camera that night in middle school. She wanted the whole thing on tape.”
The thing. I remember it vaguely, but the second he says it in his own words it comes flooding back—Jack, with a baseball bat. Middle school. Avery, Wren, and Sophia were all there. Two? Three men? Avery said she hired those men to get back at Sophia, because she was jealous.
“Avery bullied me. No. Back then I let myself be bullied.” Wren spits the sentence. “We hid in the bushes. It was up by the lake—Lake Galonagah. The nature preserve. Avery’s parents had a cabin up there. She invited us all to a party and then lured Jack and Sophia to the woods, where the men were waiting.”
My heart beats in my ears. Wren clenches his fist.
“I got it all on the tape, Isis. It was horrible. I should’ve stopped—I should’ve put it down and saved Sophia. But I didn’t. I was a coward. I was frozen. All I could do was stare at that screen, and as long as I stared at it, I could pretend it wasn’t happening, that it was a movie instead of real life.”
He gives a shuddering gasp. I leap out of bed and put my arms around him.
“Hey, hey, shhhh. It’s all right.”
“It’s not.” Wren chokes. “It’s not all right. Jack saved her. I couldn’t do anything, but he saved her.”
I pet circles on his back. “What about the men? What happened to them?”
Wren looks up, eyes red on the edges. The fear takes over again. Reality seeps in—I can see it in the way his expression fixes itself. He rearranges his face, his body, so that he’s standing straight and tall.
“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice much firmer. “It’s been a rough day. I need to get home. Try to do some of that math work, okay? Text me if you have questions.”
“Wren, I—”
“Don’t, Isis. I’m still… You’re recovering. And I’m recovering. Just—just don’t. Not right now.”
I take a step back. “All right. Get home before it’s dark, okay? And don’t forget to eat something.”
He smiles. “I won’t.”
I watch him pull out of the hospital parking lot from my window. After a half hour, I text him: EAT SOMETHING YOU MASSIVE DOOF. He responds with an emoji of a grilled cheese sandwich. It’s not nearly enough, but it’ll do for now.
Mom comes to visit after dinner. I’m picking at rehydrated saltwater crocodile slash Frankenstein’s butt jerky slash chicken, so when she holds up a bag of fast food, I run into her arms, imagining roses all around us.
“I love you,” I say. “Truly, my love for you has never been larger than in this moment. Except that moment you pushed me out into the world screaming and covered in goo.”
She laughs. Her trench coat is still chilly from the air outside, and her hands are cold. I rub them with mine to make them warm. She sits at my bedside, and we quietly eat french fries and burgers, enjoying each other’s silence. The hard stuff doesn’t get talked about until we’ve had a good laugh or two. Some normalcy has to be put between the darkness and us. That’s how you get enough strength to face it. And by now we’re experts at scrounging around for the strength to move forward together.
I wave the yellow slip Mernich gave me. Mom’s eyes go wide, and she dabs the corner of her mouth with a napkin.
“How did you get that?”
“Blackmailed a few congressmen. Bribed some drug lords. The usual.”
“Isis!”
“I got it from Mernich, how else?” I laugh. “You need to sign off on it and give it to the front desk. And like, I guess they’ll do one last CAT scan of my head or whatever, and take the bandages off.”
“I wouldn’t let you come home unless they did,” Mom says sternly. “I’ll give it to them when I leave tonight. I’m surprised—Mernich said you wouldn’t be ready for another week.”
“I managed to win her over with my svelte charm and palaces full of money and boys. Mostly boys.”
Mom barely hears me, her focus all on the slip. She looks up and grins. “Are you ready to go home?”
I can practically see the relief on her face. The bills always stick out of her purse when she comes to visit. I’d taken a peek at some when she went to the bathroom—the amount of money is ridiculous. Now she won’t have to worry about it as much, though. Praise the J-man.
“Are you kidding? I’m ready to belly-flop into the driveway of home! I’m ready to smear my soulful existence all over the roof of home. I’m ready to corporeally merge into the walls of home. I’m ready to graft the windows of home onto the skin of my butt.”
Mom tactfully ignores my superlative theatrics and nibbles a pickle. But I know the look in her eyes. She’s nervous.
“Something wrong?” I ask.
“The trial.” She swallows. “Leo’s trial is this Friday.”
“You told me.” I nod. “I’ll be there with you, okay? If I could just testify, if your lawyer would just let me testify—”
“You remember what she said.” Mom shakes her head. “Even if you did, the defense would argue your head injury and rule it as inadmissible.”
I snort and down soda. “What about Jack?”
Mom looks startled. “Jack? What about him?”
“Is he testifying?”
“I’m not sure. You’ve never mentioned him before. Why now?”
“I remember him. My session with Mernich made me remember him.”
“Oh, that’s fantastic!” Mom smiles.
“Why didn’t you tell me I’d forgotten him?”
“Honey, I’d been meaning to. But Mernich advised me not to. She wanted you to come to the realization on your own. She said it’d be healthier.”
“It’s not healthier, it’s just more fricking confusing!”
“I wanted to tell you so badly,” Mom says. “Believe me. But I was so scared for you. I did everything the doctors told me to, so nothing would go wrong. I didn’t want to take the chance I’d mess up your healing process.”
When I don’t say anything, Mom sighs.
“He’s a nice boy, you know—”
“I don’t know what he is, Mom.”
My voice is sharper than I meant it. Mom flinches. I eat a fry and exhale.
“Sorry. Today has been so weird.”
She gets up and kisses my head. “I know, sweetie. Try to get some rest. That bag on the table has your clothes in it—”
“Real clothes!” I crow, eyeing the lumpy bag. One of my Converse shoelaces sticks out over the bag, and I’ve never been happier to see a shoelace before in my life.
“So don’t forget. You’ll be out by tomorrow, and at home, where I can take care of you. Oh God, Isis. I’m so glad you’re coming home.”
“Me too, Mom.”
Mom leaves, and Naomi comes in for her final night check a few hours later. I pick at the last stubby french fry and let the mindless cartoons on the TV start to lull me to sleepland.
“I heard you’re leaving,” Naomi says.
“Yeah.”
She quirks an eyebrow. “No cartwheels? No screaming?” She crosses the room and feels my forehead. “Are you feeling all right?”
I lean back. “Everyone lied to me.”
“Yeah? Why’d they do that?”
“You did, too.”
“I most certainly did not!” Naomi looks offended.
“You could’ve told me I had amnesia.”
“That psychology stuff is up to Dr. Fenwall and Dr. Mernich. They told me about it, but I wasn’t allowed to tell you. They are my bosses, after all. I could get fired if I did.”
“Oh.” I frown. “Sorry.”
Naomi sits on the bed and crumples my hamburger trash into her palm.
“Why do you think everyone else kept it from you?” she asks quietly.
“Because they wanna see me squirm.”
“Nonsense. They wanted to protect you. They wanted to see you get better.”
“Even Sophia knew.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised; that girl knows everything. Sometimes it’s like she can see right through people.” Naomi shivers slightly, but the room isn’t cold. “Now, promise me you won’t sneak into the kids’ ward tonight, all right?”
“But…I gotta say good-bye to them.”
“I’ll take you in the morning to say good-bye. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“Be specific.”
I huff. “I promise I won’t scale the wall and pull myself up over a precarious windowsill ledge into the kids’ ward.”
“That’s what I like to hear.”
She readjusts my IV and taps the monitor. After a quick check of my chart, she closes my blinds and turns the light off.
“Good night, Isis.”
“’Night.”
The hospital bed is comfortable enough, but too much comfort nags at you after a while. Makes you feel useless and lumpy. But I’m leaving. Tomorrow is the last day I’m here. The real world is out there waiting for me. My real memories are out there, waiting for me.