6. Kamala was my best friend when we were seven. She and David were dating when he died. She could hate me but she doesn’t. She is sticking with me and helping me at school. I need to write down a bunch of memories with her.
7. My favorite movie in high school was Casablanca, but I saw it during the time of my life that’s lost in the Black Hole. A poster for it hangs in my room still. I haven’t bothered to watch it again. That other girl I was liked it. What if I don’t? I don’t have anything to put up on the wall in place of that poster if I hate it.
8. I don’t remember my dad dying. That is still in the Black Hole. So what Mom told me: He killed himself, but it was an accident. With a gun. His business was having problems. He was an accountant and he was starting a new business, setting up offices to do bookkeeping in underserved neighborhoods. (All these words are not mine, this is from a printout of his website that Mom showed me.) He had a gun and he was handling it and it went off and he didn’t realize it was loaded. But he was alone when it happened. So. People said things. That he killed himself. Mom stopped writing the mommy blog for a while and started writing a widow’s blog, but the sponsors weren’t as good and it was just so depressing.
I should say a lot more about my dad, but not now. I know when I was little he smiled a lot and didn’t seem sad enough to take his own life. But over the past few weeks I remember him from when I was younger: how excited he was when we moved into the house on Graymalkin Circle, how hard he took it when the company he started with Cal Hall failed. They were business partners first, then neighbors, and Mom and Mrs. Hall were best friends, maybe they were too close. Love and hate, two sides of a coin. The hardest thing is not remembering losing Dad. But Mom said I’ve been through so much, to think of it as a blessing. Mom means well.
9. I only remember David up to eighth grade. In high school he got tall and he got hurt-my-heart handsome. The braces he got early were gone. Mom had a picture from last year of him and me after the musical, both of us still in costume, in the chorus of concerned parents of River City who knew how to spell “trouble.” I look mad and not really happy to be there and of course I don’t remember why I didn’t like being in The Music Man. He is of course beaming. Mr. Popular. So I’m told. But he was already setting the seeds for that in middle school: football star, class president, academic achiever, soloist in the winter choir concert. I looked in the yearbook for pictures to see if I was ever around him in high school. I found one: I’m behind him while he’s singing in front of the choir and I am watching him. Not looking at the audience. Looking at him. Mortifying. We are together in twelve pictures in our last year in middle school. Inseparable. Then down to one in high school. Try to remember: things change.
10. I remember summers: school years run together but the summers came back to me. I would walk to the library, often alone. Past the baseball fields; I would see David and Trevor there. Sometimes Kamala walked with me and we talked books we loved. We would (or I would, if I was alone) stay in the cool of the shelves, reading, checking out books. Madeleine L’Engle, I loved A Wrinkle in Time so much Dad bought me a copy so I wouldn’t wear out the library’s (I would just sit and read it if it was still on the shelf, all day, and if it wasn’t, I read the rest of the Time Quintet and the Vicky Austin books); Edward Eager; Lloyd Alexander; Ursula K. LeGuin; then later I binged on British mysteries (I was never into Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys). I was competitive about the summer reading challenges and when I came out of the coma and came home, Mom showed me, tucked under my bed, all these posters, colored and filled in with stickers, of the summer reading programs I had finished. I had done them all. There was a jagged tear in one corner that Mom said Kamala tore in my poster because she was mad I finished and she didn’t and she doesn’t like to lose. Then she said she was so sorry and she had taped it up and then I remembered those summer days in the library, all up until high school, and then I asked Mom if I had still participated, and she said I was too old. Then she cried over the posters. In the corner of one David wrote, Stop being such a bookworm, Jane, come out and play, in his small, cramped handwriting. I knew it was his handwriting, he didn’t sign it. He had come to the library after playing basketball in the heat with his friends. To see me, to find me.
11. Lakehaven has two middle schools: Hilltop and Ridgeway, and they both feed into Lakehaven High. I went to Ridgeway and so did David, Kamala, and Trevor. Most of my friends are Ridgeway. In high school I made some new friends from Hilltop, in French class (I don’t remember any of my French) and in choir (I don’t remember any songs). But those new friends were gone from my memory. Including the one and only Adam, who had to reintroduce himself to me, and never gave up. Everyone liked David, and after he died I turned radioactive.
I could have fought or begged to keep a friend. I’m the biggest coward around. I didn’t have the bravery to have a friend, to confide. I didn’t tell Kamala or Adam the truth about my memories, how lost I felt. It felt like part of my brain was gone. My heart, too. Gone. Memories are the engines for our feelings.
5
YOU WANT ME to take you back to Saint Mike’s?” the rideshare driver asked Jane. She had pulled over to the side of the road, a half mile away from the cemetery.
Yes, that would be great, Jane thought. I have a bed I can hide under. But she made her hands stop shaking. You can hide later. See this through. “Do you know where High Oaks Road is?”
“No, I can find it on the GPS, though…”
“It’s not far. I can just tell you.”
“I took a video of her attacking you after I called the police,” the driver said. “Do you want it in case she comes after you again?”
After a moment, Jane said, “Yes.”
“Give me your e-mail address and I’ll send it to you.”
Jane did. “Thank you.”