I only meant to reassure him, but something serious flickers over his face, something that makes my heart skip three beats. It skips three more when he laces his fingers through mine and pulls me toward the stairs.
I step through the classroom door and look around. It’s only half-full, maybe twelve of us or so. Cally glances up from her phone, giving me a little wave, and Kyle and Seth nod from their desks. Adam looks up too, but the smile on his mouth doesn’t reach his eyes. I feel a hand—Blake’s hand—on the small of my back. We make our way to our seats, and then I feel something else. Adam’s eyes burning into me as we pass.
He releases my hand once we’re upstairs. I look around the narrow hallway and then follow him through his open bedroom door. I blink in the sudden brightness, and I feel like I’ve stepped onto another planet.
I never thought about Adam’s room before, but if I had, I would have guessed death metal posters and clothing strewn all over the floor. Maybe a stolen street sign nailed to the wall next to a spray-painted quote about anarchy.
This room is so clean it belongs on a sitcom. No, maybe on one of those crime shows, where murders seem to occur in only meticulously tidy houses. As if serial killers all share a rule about freshly scoured sinks and bedroom floors that are never, ever littered with yesterday’s dirty socks. His room is like that, so Spartan it almost looks like pretend.
The bed is neatly made. Two bookshelves above it are filled with a variety of fiction, and I’m not talking about X-Men comic books. Tolstoy, Nietzsche. Serious stuff. Stuff I’d probably only read if I were ordered to do so at gunpoint.
A tiny desk sits by the window, home to a computer so old I find myself searching for a floppy disk drive. The monitor is one of those huge boxy deals, some leftover from a computer era long past. That said, I could eat off the keyboard. It practically gleams. I think of my own smudgy laptop, one with all the bells and whistles, and wince.
I turn around, getting ready to comment on how pristine everything is, and that’s when I see the back wall, a wall that is covered top to bottom with photographs. Black and white, mostly, but a few colored ones are mixed in.
I stare at the densely packed collage, photos of bridges and skyscrapers and that famous opera house in Australia. There are close-ups too. The detail on a soffit. An angular porch. There’s so much to look at, I could be here all day.
Adam must see me gaping because he sinks into the chair by his computer and shrugs. “I like architecture.”
“Understatement,” I say, exhaling slowly as I spot another narrow bookshelf crammed with books on that very subject. A sleek black-and-gray skyscraper made of Legos perches on the top.
“Did you make that?”
He nods, looking fidgety. “In the third grade.”
“You made that in the third grade?”
I was probably still eating paste in the third grade.
I take a breath and turn to face him. On the desk beside him, I see a stack of envelopes like mine. Even from here, I can see that one is from Yale.
Adam must see me looking because he flips it over and rolls his chair in front of the stack. “What did you need, Chlo?”
“Okay, brace yourself, because I know how this is going to sound.” I wipe my palms down the sides of my jeans and take a breath. “I think all of my lost memories have something to do with our SAT study group.”
Adam glances up sharply from his desk.
“The SAT group?” he asks, and his voice sounds pinched. “That ended months ago.”
“Yeah, I know, but there’s something weird about it. I mean, do you know how many of us have scores over two thousand?”
Adam shrugs as if the idea of this doesn’t seem so very crazy to him. But it is. Completely crazy.
“Look, we’re not all MIT material like you,” I say, sweeping my arm around the room. “I don’t know what that group did, but I’m not that smart.”
“Yes, you are, Chloe. You’re as smart as anyone on the dean’s list. We’ve been over this.”
We have? Man, I wish I could remember that because that look he’s giving me almost makes me believe it’s true.
“I know I’m not stupid,” I say, “but I’m not a star student. I’ve slacked for three years, Adam. I don’t even think three months of solo tutoring with a Harvard professor would land me the kind of score I’ve got.”
“This year, you’ve got a 3.9 GPA,” he says.
I do? Not important right now. I shake my head, moving closer to him. “Look, if the scores aren’t weird enough for you, what about Dr. Kirkpatrick?”
“What about her?” he asks, frowning at me.
Maybe I’m too close. I step back, feeling suddenly uneasy. This is…I don’t know what this is. All I know is, this isn’t going right. He’s suddenly jittery and distracted. Shuffling papers and checking his phone.
“She monitored our study group,” I say.
He checks the window and then his phone again, and it’s like he has absolutely no opinion on any of this. What the hell?
“Doesn’t that strike you as a little weird?” I ask, hoping to get some sort of reaction.
“She was there to help us with some relaxation techniques. Easing test anxiety or whatever. I don’t think it’s a big deal.”
As soon as he says it, I have a flash. Dr. Kirkpatrick at the head of the class, looking serene and composed. She tells us to take a deep breath. I close my eyes and obey.
Here and now, Adam is watching me with a stony expression. And can I blame him? I come here with some bizarre theory, one I have no evidence to back. I look like a complete whack job.
“Forget it,” I say. “I shouldn’t have come here.”
I take a step toward the door, and a muscle in Adam’s jaw jumps. Why did I think I could trust him? What, because I harbor some sort of hormonal fascination with him?
I feel completely stupid.
“I’m sorry I bugged you,” I say, reaching for the door handle. The moment my fingers graze the knob, he’s off his chair and moving toward me.
This room has about the same square footage as a postage stamp, so when he steps in front of me, there is nowhere to go unless I dive into his closet or throw open the door. So I stand there and wait, forced to look up to meet his eyes because we are that close.
“You’re not bugging me,” he says, fingers resting on my shoulders. I sink into his touch. “This is going to be all right, Chloe. You’re going to be all right.”
I shake my head because he’s wrong. My entire world is inside out and upside down, but right now with his hands on my arms and his smell all around me, I don’t even care.
And there’s nothing all right about that.
Chapter Thirteen
Dr. Kirkpatrick sits in her pale green armchair wearing a practiced expression of serenity. She spent years in school training herself to spot signs of deception. I figure my chances of pulling this off without her figuring me out are about one in a billion. But I’m out of options. The only lead I have in this mess is sitting across from me, and I’m not leaving this office until she tells me something.
This time she waits ten minutes before speaking. Maybe she wants me a little nervous today.
“So how did your exercise go?”
Exercise? Oh crap. I rush through our last meeting in my mind, remembering her little assignment. The scrapbooks.
“I think it helped,” I lie. Testing the waters. Given the way her eyes just narrowed a little, I’d say those waters look muddy as hell.
“Would you care to tell me a little about it?”
“Well, to be honest, the details in the old stuff felt more real,” I say, hoping that little nugget of honesty will throw her off enough to buy my next line. “But just looking at the newer pictures gave me better perspective.”
“Perspective?”
“Yeah,” I say, tipping my head back and forth, like I’m searching for the word. “Like I can remember things better.”
“Good,” she says, and she looks strangely relieved by this. “How does it make you feel, remembering these moments more clearly?”
I square my shoulders and look her right in the eyes. “I feel like I miss Julien.”