She stopped outside the building, blinking in the bright sunlight, breathing in the fresh, cool air. She fumbled in her backpack and slipped on the sunglasses her mother had given her. They had round lenses, with metal edging, ugly, but they kept out the light that sliced hard into her eyes and her brain. The sunlight was harsh today, like a judgment.
She could go back to Adam’s room, pull the curtains closed, and sleep off the rest of the day. She had some pills hidden under the mattress, pills she’d stolen from her mother when she’d left home. You couldn’t take sedatives while living on the streets, it was too dangerous to be that vulnerable. And amnesiacs often had insomnia, as if kept awake by what they couldn’t recall. But she was safe here. Pills it was.
Back at the dorm Jane walked past the front door, around the side of the building and to the window she’d left cracked, which faced onto a small, grassy area. She pulled herself into the room and fell onto the floor.
Adam walked in, freshly showered, wearing a robe. “Hey, graceful,” he said. He shut the door quickly behind him.
“Hey.” She pulled herself to her feet and turned away from him as he dressed, the way she would for a brother if she’d had one. She busied herself lowering the window shade.
“How’s Bettina?” Jane asked. She was his German graduate-student girlfriend at the University of Texas, a few miles to the north. Adam often spent the night at her apartment, which made it easier for Jane to hide out in his dorm room.
“Fine. Hey, I didn’t realize today was, you know, today. I should have been here this morning.”
“Adam, I don’t need coddling.”
“Good, as I’m hardly a coddler.”
But you let me stay here and you pay for my food and you’ve never asked for anything in return…except that I put my life back together. “I’m totally cool.”
She avoided looking at him by checking her phone, as if she regularly received calls from anyone other than Adam. One message from Mom: Are you all right today? I don’t know why I pay for this phone, you never call me. I love you, sweetheart. Let me help you. At least let me know how you are.
Jane deleted the text and collapsed on the spare bed. She wanted to go to his grave, suddenly. She had never been because she could not face it. But she missed him.
“I’m decent now,” Adam said. He collected his gear for class. He’d pulled on jeans and a T-shirt that promoted the St. Michael’s robotics team—he wrote software for the robots. “You know it’s OK not to be OK today.”
“Gag, you sound like a therapist.” Jane hated therapists. They wanted to crowbar open your brain and peer around inside, giving you false hope.
He sat next to her and he hugged her. Gently. She didn’t like that at first, but it was Adam, her pretend brother, and so she let him and then the hug felt reassuring, like she wasn’t so alone in the world. He hugged her a moment longer than she liked, his face closer to hers, and she scooted back. Then he went all brotherly tough love.
“You have to get reenrolled. If you can sit through one class, you can make it through five. But if the administration realizes you’re camping out here, they could deny you readmission forever. Not to mention the trouble I’d be in.”
“Are you kicking me out of your room?” She would have nowhere to go. Except home. That was not an option.
“I don’t mean to sound harsh, Jane.” His voice softened. “You know I only want what’s best for you.”
“I don’t want to talk about this today.” And she knew the way to shut him up was to focus on the accident. It was pure magic, the way it silenced everyone. Jane got up and went to the iPad he kept on the desk.
She opened up an Internet browser and typed in the address for Faceplace, a social-media site she’d used before the accident, and briefly afterward, as she tried to remember and understand the lives of her classmates at Lakehaven High School. People whose faces she saw every day but didn’t really know.
“What are you doing?” Adam said, watching the screen, realizing. “Let it alone.”
She signed in to Faceplace, pausing to remember her password—which was password. She had an unfounded terror of her amnesia suddenly robbing her of current memories, her damaged temporal lobe sabotaging her, so she went with the obvious. She had not signed in to her page for ten months. Jane’s page appeared, with its old profile picture, smiling at a Lakehaven High School football game. A few days before the accident. The last good picture of her. Her mother had claimed if she replaced it with a picture of her in the hospital, fresh from the coma, people would be nicer to her.
She had no new friend requests. Adam was pretty much it on the friend front. She went to the search field and typed in “David Hall.” The first result gave her David’s page. His parents hadn’t taken it down.
“Jane, don’t do it.” Adam leaned over her shoulder. She clicked on the result.
Many new posts were already on his page today. Flowers, photos of David throughout his life, an animated banner ribbon that read, “We Will Never Forget You.” Hundreds of likes. Posts from names she knew—people who were once her friends.
David, we will never forget you. Will love you always.
David, bro, missing you still. Thinking about you and all the good times.
The world is emptier without you, David.
Cannot believe it has been two years. Know you are at peace in the company of Our Lord.
“Don’t,” Adam repeated. But he didn’t move to shut down the iPad or take it from her.
Jane read the rest of the kind tributes to David, and was relieved no one mentioned her by name. Adam leaned into her shoulder. Then she went back to her own page. At the top was a new posting, from today, from a user name she didn’t recognize: Liv Danger. A tickle in her brain. Was that a person’s real name? On the posting it read,
I know what you claim you don’t remember, Jane. I know what happened that night. And I’m going to tell. All will pay.
“Is this a joke?”
“Who is Liv Danger?” Adam asked. “Is she someone you know?”
“I have no idea.” A thought, unformed, danced at the edge of her mind. Like a memory that could never take form. Jane’s hands started to tremble. Suddenly her guts twisted. She bolted down the hallway to the bathroom. She was sick, twice. She washed her face, staring into her dark-circled eyes in the mirror. She brushed her teeth and came back to the room. Adam looked up from the iPad.
“This Liv Danger looks like a fake user. Account set up last month, friends with mostly other accounts that have huge friend numbers.”
“I haven’t approved any new friends.”
“Then someone hacked your page and approved her.”
“Hacked me?”
“Your password is password, Jane.” He rolled his eyes, but his voice was calm. “But they could also buy your password off a hacker website. They get account information on thousands of users when there’s a breach on one site, so they’ll just try the same passwords on all your sites: banking, social media, online stores, and so on. Is your password ‘password’ everywhere?”
“Yes. It’s easy for me to remember,” she said defensively. “I don’t have to worry if my memory slips again.”