“So did that help?” she asked. “Do you guys know who I am now?”
Greer laughed. “Oh yeah,” he said. “You, my friend, are what they call a big ol’ nerd.”
Minutes later Greer was sitting on the ground by his chair, sorting through towers of hardback books while the girl watched.
“You thinking St. Edwards?” I asked from my place a short distance away.
“Gotta be, right?”
“What are you guys talking about?” the girl asked.
Greer placed a hand on top of one of the stacks of books. “These are the yearbooks from every school in the area.”
“Greer, uh, liberated them from the local library,” I said.
“Anyone who went to a school anywhere near Black River is in one of these,” Greer went on. “St. Edwards is the closest private school.”
“Why do you think I went there?”
He gave a casual shrug. It was another part of his showmanship. Acting like the whole thing was a snap.
“Solid dental work, general physical health, what looks like professionally dyed hair. That probably means money. No piercings, tattoos, or jewelry says a fairly conservative family. Around here that generally means private school.”
“That,” I added, “and it definitely sounds like you studied a lot.”
The girl sifted through the note cards in front of her. “So that’s why I knew all this stuff? From studying?”
Greer tossed a book aside and grabbed another.
“If you drill facts into your head hard enough over a long enough period of time, they can move into your semantic memory, which you still have most of. Usually it happens with common-knowledge things, like the president’s name or the fact that we live on Earth in the United States, but it can be other things too.”
“Or in your case,” I said, “everything.”
“Lot of good it did me,” she said. “I still don’t know my own name.”
“Yeah,” Greer said. “That’s because—”
“Card already told me.”
Greer sputtered. The girl and I shared a hint of a smile before she turned again and slid a yearbook off one of the stacks. “So where did you two go to school?”
“Black River High,” Greer said. “The school for weirdoes, morons, and troublemakers.”
“Oh yeah? Which of those were you?”
“All of the above, probably.”
“You don’t know?”
Greer shook his head.
“But if you’re so great at figuring out who people are, how come you don’t know who you are?”
“We were able to figure out his name,” I said. “But that was it.”
Greer closed a book and opened another. “We know that me and the birdman here went to the same school. But we didn’t know each other. And apparently everyone I did know is either infected, dead, or on the other side of that fence.”
“But couldn’t you just—”
“We better get back to it,” I said. “Right, Greer?”
“Right. Sorry. You two hush. Work to do.”
He leaned over his books. The girl left him alone, moving across the meadow to sit closer to me. I was backlit by the sun, so she raised her hand to shield her eyes, which cast a little mask of shadow across her face.
“So there’ll be a picture of me in one of those? And my name?”
I picked a blade of grass and wound it around a fingertip. “That’s the idea. But there are thousands of pictures, so knowing more about you narrows things down. Like for you, Greer will probably be looking at academic clubs, student government, library assistants.”
“Nerd stuff!” Greer called out. “Somewhere in this stack I bet there’s a picture of you and Card at some interschool dweeb mixer.”
She laughed, which made her nose wrinkle prettily. “So you’re a nerd too, huh?”
I shrugged. “Guess so. But I’m a sci-fi slash comic book nerd. Looks like you’re more of an academic nerd.”
“So if we met, we would’ve had to fight to the death.”
“Probably.”
The girl smiled again. It was like this weird drug. Every time I saw it, I tried to think of ways I could get her to do it again.
“Oh hey,” I called out to Greer. “You should also check band. Jazz band maybe.”
“Good thinking!”
“What? Why band?”
“You’re a musician,” I said. “You play guitar anyway.”
“I do? How do you know that?”
I started to reach for her hand but pulled away at the last second. I pointed instead.
“Those calluses on your fingertips. You got them from holding down the strings of a guitar.”
She held her fingers up before her eyes. “I was wondering where those came from.”
“We’ve seen it before,” I said. “Astrid plays a little too. Her calluses were fainter, though. Looks like you’ve been doing it longer.”
“So wait, if I picked up a guitar right now . . .”
“You’d be able to play,” I said. “Whole songs you wouldn’t even remember learning.”
“That is just . . . spooky.”
“A lot of this is,” I said. “You’ll get used to it.”