“I’ll eat in my room, if it’s all the same to you,” the girl said evenly.
Evelyn said, “I understand.”
She wasn’t asking for understanding, especially not from Evelyn.
At home she went straight to her room and grabbed the bald elephant. She looked at it carefully, trying to imagine her mother doing the same thing. But she couldn’t. Her dad used to read to her in this room. She rummaged around inside herself, wanting to feel what Clara had felt, and not felt, all that time in the glass coffin, after suddenly losing her dad, and not having Kim, either, and living with Evil Lynn all those years. She had Clara’s memories, of course, but because of the Memory Enhancement, so much of Clara was gone forever. The girl felt a pang for this previous self she would never really know—a pang Rose hadn’t felt, it occurred to her. Well, maybe Rose hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
But Rose reached out to people who seemed alone. Shouldn’t the girl somehow try to feel closer to Clara, a lost soul if ever there was one?
That, as Rose would say, was as worthy a project as any.
In the meantime, she picked up her phone. An ad came on for antiaging skin care. Poor Clara, there wasn’t an antiaging ingredient in the world strong enough to penetrate her inner self. The girl swiped the ad away and tapped the calculator. It was seven p.m., so there were five hours until midnight, then five twenty-four-hour days until midnight Friday, and add twelve to get to noon on Saturday, plus two more final hours until two p.m. Total: 139 hours. Then of course each hour had sixty minutes, so there were 8,340 minutes, or 500,400 seconds before the red light would get turned on. She kept recalculating and watching the numbers, emerging and disappearing, in a cold, detached sequence.
The girl ate two full plates of pasta at the desk in her room. She slept through the night—with the light on.
Monday morning the girl woke to the hoo-hoo-ing of birds on Mrs. Moore’s windowsill. They sounded genuinely heartbroken. Memory Enhancement for birds—it was something Dr. Lola could start offering. The tagline was obvious—birds hoo-hoo-ing before and ha-ha-ing after.
Then she realized—the red light was gone. No blue light, either.
The girl had to get ready for school.
In the shower, which soap to use? Clara would’ve chosen the unscented soap; Rose had used Evelyn’s. Or should there be a third bar of soap? This was ridiculous, facing paralysis over soap. She closed her eyes and reached for a bar—which turned out to be Evelyn’s. Fine. The same thing with clothes—just grab a few things without looking and put them on. She ended up in blue pants and an old sweatshirt. She didn’t wear lipstick. She tucked some hair behind one ear and not the other.
At school, the halls felt small and stuffed with jostling, bellowing kids. One of them was talking about how Dylan Beck got in trouble last year on Halloween—“showing up in his underwear as the Invisible Man who didn’t know he wasn’t invisible.” But she noticed a girl with the most gorgeous purple hair. She couldn’t help stopping her, putting a hand on her arm, and saying, “Your hair is fantastic—it’s like the scent of lavender got captured in a hair color.” Oh God, should she have said that? But the purple-haired girl looked thrilled, which gave the girl a thrill, too.
Outside homeroom, Selena rushed up to her. “So this Saturday I booked you a DJ! Isn’t that great?”
“Huh?”
“Don’t you remember? You promised. At brunch.” Selena jabbed an elbow into her ribs.
The girl saw that Selena had deep frown lines between her eyebrows. Rose had thought Selena was always cheerful and smiling. “This Saturday?”
Selena narrowed her eyes. “What’s wrong with this Saturday?”
The girl remembered how much Rose had needed to sleep last weekend, all the rest of Saturday and until two o’clock Sunday. With the extra Alitrol she might sleep clear through to Monday. “How about the weekend after? I’ll be ready by then.”
“I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that. This party is on.” She turned around and said over her shoulder, “Here’s your chance to actually get with Nick again. Don’t blow it like last time!”
In the cafeteria, the girl picked up a sesame-seed bagel, oatmeal-raisin cookies in a pack, and pineapple juice sticks.
At the scanner, Cooper had a little glint in his eyes—beautiful eyes, brown with flecks of green. But that unibrow—ugh. “Hey, how you doing? Want to talk later, about what happened at Forget-Me-Not?”
She shook her head. “Nothing happened, as it turned out.”
“Your memory—?”
“Wasn’t tampered with.” Wait, Dr. Star had told her what her new cover story would be. “I mean, I tried Memory Enhancement, but it didn’t work. So that’s the end of that.” She put her money on the counter.