But that’s not what happens. In the series of photos on the next page, Sam and I are standing on the front porch with these silly little chalkboard signs Mom made us use for this same photo every year, since the time he started kindergarten and I started preschool. Our First Day of School photo. There we are holding our chalkboard signs, Sam’s with “Eleventh Grade,” and mine with “Ninth Grade,” written on them.
I look at myself. Examine my summer-lightened hair and sun-freckled nose, my big smile, and what must’ve been a completely new and carefully chosen outfit, from my red backpack all the way down to the little brown boots on my feet.
Though this is the me I remember being, the one I expected to see when I looked in the mirror, I have no memory of this moment, or the night before it, or anything after that, until I woke up in the hospital. I don’t know what I felt like, standing there on the front step on the first day of high school. I don’t remember if I was more nervous or excited. I don’t know how many outfits I tried on before I settled on that one, or if I talked to Paige and Jules the night before. All of that is behind-the-scenes, cutting-room-floor stuff. The stuff you know only because you remember.
This is as close to the beginning of the time I’ve lost as I’m going to get.
I flip the pages, through fall, and pumpkin picking, and my first Homecoming dance. Jules is still in these pictures, and I’m relieved. And then it’s Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I’m smiling for the camera in all these photos, in all these moments, and I don’t remember a single one. I can’t feel them the way I could with the earlier photos. I go through the next year, and the next. I move on to my yearbooks and go through each of them, one by one.
I’m surprised to find I’m on a lot of the pages. Student Council and volleyball, art and photography clubs—at least freshman year. I seemed to give up art club and photography after that. I show up in some random candids. Paige and Jules are by my side in a few, and then it’s just Paige. I look for Jules and find her among my class, follow her school photos along with mine and Paige’s, and I can almost see when we went our separate ways.
It’s funny how even in a school as small as ours, the things you’re a part of seem to define and separate you. Paige and I dropped art and photography, and she stayed. We stuck with volleyball and Student Council, and she joined the yearbook staff and started a student magazine. We all went to the same school, but by the end, it looks like that’s all we did together.
And then Matt comes into the picture—literally. In my sophomore yearbook, his school photo is there, and I know from Paige that it’s the year we started dating, but I don’t know how we met or what he said to me or how we began. He’s all over the yearbook too—water polo and swimming, track and Student Council. Maybe that’s how we met. I try to picture it—the me I remember, sharing a class with the cute boy in the picture. Maybe we sat next to each other and he said something sweet that made me laugh, or maybe we spotted each other across the room, and there was a spark right away. Maybe there were butterflies. I don’t know. Did he take me on a first date? Ask me to one of the dances we put on? Where and when was our first kiss? Who said “I love you” first? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. But I do know that he seemed to genuinely care about me at the hospital, and that he seemed just as genuinely hurt that I didn’t know him. That makes me want to know him, and who we were together. It makes me want to know more about what happened on Walker’s boat.
And then there’s Walker. The only picture I can find of him is in my freshman yearbook. In it, he doesn’t smile, just stares past wavy, disheveled hair at the camera like he’s looking right through it. And then he’s gone, just like last night. He isn’t anywhere. I wonder if he moved away and came back, or maybe he dropped out. Maybe he got in trouble. I search his picture like it’ll give me an answer, but there’s nothing. All I know of him is that we went to school together until ninth grade, but I wasn’t friends with him then. And that he pulled me out of a sunken car, breathed air into my lungs, and saved my life—which makes me want to know him now.
That, at least, I can do something about.
But as I sit here looking over years of my life that I don’t remember, it starts to hit me what I’ve really lost. A photo takes a fraction of a second to snap. Even if I added up all the time, in all the photos, from all these years, it probably wouldn’t amount to more than a few minutes of my life. What about all the unrecorded moments? All the thoughts and feelings. Times I laughed until I couldn’t breathe, or cried myself to sleep. Things I dreamed of, and secrets I kept. These are the things that make up who we are, and these are the things I’m worried I won’t get back.
Unless I can.
Unless I can find them the way Dr. Tate mentioned, by getting back to the familiar. The routines of my life.
I make up my mind then, that that’s what I’ll do. I’ll step right back into my life, like it was before. And when I don’t know what that was like, I’ll find out. And maybe this will work. Maybe things will come back to me and I’ll feel like myself again.
This feels better, having a plan. Hopeful, even.
I get up and go to the kitchen island, where I left my new phone.
“Paige?” I say when she answers. “It’s Liv. Can you come over today?”
TEN
AFTER I HANG UP with Paige, I go upstairs to get ready. I shower quickly, doing the best I can to wash my own hair. I know Paige already saw me in the hospital, but I feel a little nervous about seeing her again, and I want to look like I’m doing better than I was there. More like me.
In my room, I open and close drawers, finding my way to my clothes. None of them are familiar, so I settle on a tank top and comfy shorts that I hope I would normally wear. All this tires me out a little, and my ribs are beginning to ache, but I go back into my bathroom, find a comb, and stand in front of the mirror. It’s still a little foggy from my shower, so I grab a towel and wipe the space in front of me.
This new reflection stops me every time I see it. Of course I’m taller than I remember being, but my body is different too. Somewhere in those four years, I grew the same curves I’d look at on other girls and hope for. All these differences were startling at first, but now that I’m dressed in my own clothes instead of the hospital gown, and the bruises on my face are starting to fade a little, I can almost see that this is me. This version of myself doesn’t seem so far-fetched. I might even get used to her.
I finish combing my wet hair just as the doorbell rings, and I take one last look in the mirror before I go down to answer it. This is going to work. Paige is going to tell me everything I need to know, and I’m going to listen to every word so I can pick up where I left off.
“Wow,” Paige says, surveying my life laid out on the table for me. “Your mom must’ve stayed up all night to do this.”
“I think she did.”
Paige runs her eyes over the yearbooks and family photo books. “That was really sweet of her.”