I picked up an acorn and rolled it in my palm as a story started clicking together in my head. She’s hidden away with her family since the outbreak, maybe in one of those mansions uptown. She gets bored. Dyes her hair green. It’s not enough. One day when Mom and Dad aren’t looking, she sneaks out of the house for a few thrills and gets careless. And then, boom. Here she is.
It was plausible. Probable, even. It was a little depressing, though, to feel the mystery of her drain away so easily. Surely there had to be more to her than that. Maybe—
“Why do I know how to tie my shoes?”
I looked up. The girl was leaning forward, elbows on her knees, knife in hand. Her eyes were wolflike.
In the universe of questions I thought she might ask, this one was nowhere to be found. “I don’t under—”
“When I woke up this morning I bent over and tied my shoelaces without even thinking about it. How can I do that if the memory of learning how to tie my shoes has been erased?”
Luckily, months of living with Lassiter’s had made us all experts on the subject of memory.
“Because different types of memory are stored in different parts of your brain,” I said. “There’s episodic memory, which is your memory of all the events in your life, kind of like your own personal autobiography. Semantic memory is general knowledge type stuff, basic things you know about yourself and the world. Cultural stuff, language and symbols, your name, where you’re from. Procedural memory is like muscle memory: it’s your memory of things you’ve learned to do through lots of practice.”
“Like tying my shoes.”
“Exactly.”
“So the virus erases episodic and semantic memory.”
“Mostly episodic,” I said. “That’s all gone. Some semantic memory is still left though. See, those two types of memory live right next to each other in the brain. They think that some pieces of your semantic memory—like your name or where you’re from—are so connected to the autobiography in your head that they got wiped out right along with it. Other parts of your semantic memory that weren’t as connected are still there.”
“Like what?”
I had to chew on that one a second. “Oh! Okay. Who’s Superman?”
The girl cocked her head. “He’s a superhero.”
“What’s his costume look like?”
She shrugged. “Blue tights. Red cape. Big S on his chest.”
“Now tell me about a time when you read a Superman comic book or saw a Superman movie.”
The girl’s eyes narrowed on the grass between us as she tried to remember. She shook her head.
“See? The idea is that a semantic memory like that survived because it wasn’t as strongly linked to your personal story. It was just something you knew.”
She lowered her head, nodding like she was filing it all away. “How did this happen? The virus.”
“We don’t know.”
“You don’t know, or nobody knows?”
There was something exciting about the way she talked. It made me think of a razor slashing through the air.
“Nobody knows exactly,” I said. “There’s this Founder’s Day thing we used to have in the park every year. Practically the whole town went. They’re pretty sure that was ground zero for the outbreak, but nobody knows where the virus actually came from.”
The girl took that in; then she looked over her shoulder and nodded toward a wide black smudge in the woods out past the northside mansions. “I saw lots of places like that. Houses burned down. Broken windows.”
“Half the people in town lost their memory on the sixteenth. It was”—I swallowed dryly—“a confusing night.”
“Half the town lost its memory? The other half was immune?”
I shook my head. “They weren’t exposed. As far as we know, no one’s immune.”
She looked away. Her grip on the knife tightened. It was a while before she spoke again, and when she did she said, “Am I ever going to get my memory back?”
For the first time, there was the slightest quiver in her voice. Greer told me that every time he’d come across someone who was recently infected, this was the question they circled back to again and again.
He’d usually tell them something vague and hopeful. It’s early yet. People are working on a cure all the time. We have to be patient. I had those exact words all queued up, but when the time came to say them, I couldn’t, not to her.
“There’s a doctor in Manhattan,” I said. “Evan Lassiter. He’s the one they named the virus after. He’s been studying it ever since the outbreak, trying to create a cure or a vaccine, but none of them have worked.”
“So . . .”
“So you’ll be able to make new memories, but no, your old ones aren’t going to come back. I’m sorry.”