Everyone We've Been (16 page)

After I leave my mom's room, everything is in fragments.

The whole world feels shredded, like strips of paper with all the sentences out of order.

Soon my shock gives way to anger, to paranoia.

I can't focus on my homework. I can't eat. I can't look at my mother or at Caleb.

How can any of this be true?

Does it matter that they did it to protect me? That they figured they didn't have any other options? That I agreed to the procedure?

Would I really choose to forget?

No.

No?

I have no answers. I don't even know the girl my mother was telling me about. The girl whose brother died because of her mistake.

The worst thing is that it makes sense. It explains the fog over my memories after age eleven. It explains my dad, my mom, my older brother. The way Mom sometimes reacts around little kids. The summers where it felt like our house was sinking from the weight of sadness in it—Mom said Rory died in June, five years ago.

How did I not know?

How?

Hours after Mom's revelation, Caleb finds me in the kitchen, holding a glass of water and staring blankly ahead.

“Addie, I'm sorry,” he says, even though it is Mom who stalks around the house with swollen eyes and the shadow of a dead baby. She has done it for years now. Caleb, too, in his own way. I think of the
R
on his chest. I remember it raw, the black-purple of bruised skin, and I feel like I am made of freshly tattooed skin. It hurts. I want to go back to before it.

R
is not for a Rachel or Rebekah or Randy.

It's Rory.

My other brother.

“How could you?” I ask, not sure what I am asking.

Erase him? Lie to me for six years? Tell me the truth?

The glass of water sweats around my palm.

“Did Mom drag me there? Did they even tell me what they were going to do?” I ask.

Caleb nods. “Mom sat down with you before she made the appointment and told you what it was for, why she thought you needed it.”

“And I told her I didn't want it, right? I must have.”

He runs a hand over his head. “You told her you could try harder, that you could be stronger, that you didn't want to forget him, but then she asked you—we were sitting at the dining table and I'll never forget it—she asked what you wanted more: to feel better and move forward, or to remember.”

I chose moving forward.

“Even after you had it, I wanted to tell you, but you were destroyed by Rory dying, Addie,” he says, looking down, remorse palpable in his voice. “That's the one thing they got right—you needed some sort of help, and months of therapy wasn't helping. Mom was sure it was the only way to save you, and what was I going to do? I was thirteen.”

“So you just silently hated me instead.”

He frowns. “I didn't—don't—hate you. I hated the pretending. I hated that we couldn't talk about Rory. All those birthdays…he'd be almost seven now. I hated that we had to pretend like everything was fine. And then after all the bullshit and the pain, all you wanted was to go away and live like it never happened.”

“I was already living like it never happened.”

“Do you really think that's true?” Caleb asks.

I mentally rifle through anything and everything that has ever seemed out of place. My parents' divorce. Mom's overprotectiveness. The invisible boy.

Oh God, the invisible boy.
How can he be a coincidence, some fluke bout of crazy, after all this? Is he…could he be connected to Rory somehow?

People don't spontaneously appear and disappear; something makes them. And in any case, they have to come from
somewhere.
Somewhere like the past.

Who is this guy?

I look at Caleb.

I want to say,
Do you know why I went to Overton today? Because I'm seeing things. Because just like everything outside me, something is broken inside me, too.

But I look at my older brother, and even though I've known him every day of my life, I don't recognize him.

I'm not telling him about Bus Boy.

I slip past him and head upstairs.

My mind is racing a million miles per hour, and I can't even think about sleeping, though it's past ten and I have school tomorrow.

I think about texting Katy again, but what would I say?
Guess what, my parents are crazier than we thought—they erased my dead little brother
?

I can tell from Mom's and Caleb's reactions that it wasn't easy, that it hurts them just to say his name after not doing it in so long. Or did they do it in private, when I wasn't around? Did they think about him at birthdays, random days of the year to me that made them want to crawl under the covers and hide? Did seeing me happy, normal, when they couldn't be make them hate me? Is that what Caleb meant about me getting to live like it never happened?

My chest hurts at how random things I never thought about must have devastated them.

But I don't have enough space to feel sorry for them. Not when the corners of my room seem to be crowding in against me.

Not when there are tiny storms erupting in my head, thoughts of packing my bags and leaving and never coming back home, questions about what I can trust and who I can trust. Not when everything feels like a lie.

I want to call my father and scream at him, scream and not have to see the hurt in his eyes.

This is why he stopped loving me.

But he's probably in the air.

I put on headphones and listen to my favorite piece from the concert, “Air on the G String.”

Now the melody snakes its way around me. Every instrument's part tangling and interweaving with the rest, like clasped hands tightly tucked within each other. One hand tracing the lines on the other's palm; the webs between the fingers damp with sweat. This song makes me feel close to something, to someone nameless and faceless.

I don't want to feel close to anyone tonight, though. I want to be unreachable.

So I pull out my viola, despite the hour, and play a different song.

I play loudly and recklessly. I play angrily, for so long that I push the corners of the room further back and hold them there. Mom doesn't dare ask me to stop, even though she has to get up early for her six-thirty report.

My fingers tremble from the music or anger or fear, and I keep playing. Playing away the ghost of a brother I didn't know I had, playing away all the questions that I still can't answer.

I keep thinking about Bus Boy, about the night on the bus. I can't shake the feeling that everything that happened tonight, everything since the accident, started the moment that boy walked onto the bus.

But how does
that
make any sense?

Rory would be six now, not seventeen. How can they be connected?

I don't have any of the answers, so I play away the questions. Caleb pounds twice on my door, begging for quiet. I play harder.

And then I stop.

To say I float into At Home Movies the day after our kiss is an understatement.

I blow in with the wind, weightless and airy and tangled up in the sunshine that beat across my face as I rode here. A stupid pop song is matted into my wind-battered hair, trickling into my ears and head and throat. I am
buzzing.

I find Zach in the Comedy section, kneeling beside a stack of DVDs on the ground, sorting them.

I wait for him to notice me, my hair particularly thick and wild today and the pair of peach-yogurt-colored short shorts that prompted Caleb to make a face when we collided in the hallway this morning.

On the ride over, there was a tiny bit of fear that last night never happened, or that Zach regrets it and will now try to steer us back into friends territory, but it dissipates almost immediately when I see him.

Zach notices my feet first, and then his eyes travel up the length of me, twinkling by the time they reach mine, a smile already stretched across his face.

“Dad?” he yells across the store. “I'm taking my break now!”

And then he grabs hold of my hand and pulls me to the back of the store, tripping over the DVDs on the ground in the process.

“Walking hazard!” he says as we run out the door, both of us giggling.

“Hi,” he says when we get outside, his grin impossibly wide.

“Hi.” I grin back, feeling the muscles in my face stretch, finding a new normal.

And then we kiss behind his father's store. It's almost exactly the same as last night, only against the wall of the building instead of the garage door this time. The air is urgent and humid but perfect. And Zach's one hand is at the back of my neck, while the other plays with the edge of my shirt. The skin on my stomach burns from his touch.

I don't ever want to stop kissing him. And happily, he doesn't seem to want to stop kissing me, either. Kind of the opposite.

“So, listen,” he says, playing with my shirt still, when we come up for air. “If we're going to keep doing this, I think we should go out on a date.”

“Are you saying you'd like to keep doing this?” I ask, husky-breathed, signaling at the space between us. I can't believe the words that are coming out of my mouth. Confident words. Flirtatious words.

Zach responds by leaning in to kiss me again, but I retreat a little and ask, “What made you change your mind? About being friends and all that.”

He scratches his head now and grins. “I was
trying
to be friends, but last night—last night I kind of realized that I'm not interested in being just friends. I think the first kiss did it.”

“Funny, I feel like they just keep getting better,” I breathe.

“Should we test that theory?”

When we kiss again, I loop both arms around his neck, and Zach's hand feels like fire on my lower back.

After what seems like mere seconds, the back door flings wide. We jump apart.

“Zach,” Mr. Laird says in an even voice. “I will kick your butt to Timbuktu.”

“I'm not smoking!” a red-faced, red-lipped Zach protests.

“Damn straight you're not,” his father says. “You are also not taking a twenty-five-minute
break
on my watch.”

Twenty-five?
Zach and I look at each other, incredulous.

“Fine,” Zach says, but he's smiling as his father goes back inside. We follow Mr. Laird, still holding hands, and tingles travel up my arm.

I help Zach finish stocking the DVDs, and then he mans the counter while Mr. Laird has his lunch and watches TV in the breakroom. He keeps the door open, though, presumably to keep an eye on us.

“Can I ask you something?” I'm standing on the other side of the counter, leaning against it as Zach does inventory. When he nods, I ask, “What's with the smoking?”

He glances up at me, as if he's surprised that's what my question is about.

He puts down his pen before he answers me. “I went to an all-boys boarding school at the start of ninth grade. Fincher? It's just outside Raddick. My dad and my older brothers went there.
Everyone
smoked at Fincher. All my friends, the teachers. Students weren't allowed to smoke on school property, but we would literally walk half a mile out to where the school's sign was and smoke right in front of it. As long as we weren't
behind
it, we were fine.”

I laugh.

“The first time my roommate, Dean, offered me a cigarette, after I'd been there, like, two months, I tried it just to see what the fuss was about. It was
horrible.
Like, I-nearly-hacked-a-lung horrible.”

I giggle again.

“Then Dean got caught smoking in the locker room one time and wound up with an expulsion warning. I hid his last two packs in my suitcase, hoping it'd deter him.”

“Did it?”

Zach shakes his head. “He gave me this.” He leans forward to point out a tiny scar on the side of his right eye. The scar isn't raised and it looks old, but I reach out to run my finger over it.

“Violent boy.” Zach tsks. “Anyway, I forgot all about the two packs and came home for spring break.” He drops his voice, like he doesn't want his father to hear this part. “And then my parents sat me down and said they couldn't afford another year of tuition for me at Fincher.”

He speaks louder again, but not quite as loud as when he started the story. “I was pretty devastated. I was making all these friends. My brothers had both gone to Fincher and graduated; it was supposed to be, like, a rite of passage for my family.”

“That sucks,” I say, and he nods. He rips open a bag of gummy bears and sets them between us.

“It does. But at least I had the one year.” He chews on a bear. “Kevin probably won't even get that.” It's the first tinge of real sadness (non-Lindsay-related, anyway) I've ever heard in Zach's voice, and it makes something twitch in me, too. “Kevin might not
need
that, since he already curses like a sailor.”

I laugh, reaching for some gummies.

“All
my
bad habits I learned at Fincher.” Zach picks up the pen and checks something off on his piece of paper. “Anyway, it's spring break. Dad tells me I can't go back the next September. I try to act cool about it, but I sit in my room, moping all week. And you know what I find? Two packs of cigarettes. I smoked both of them in a weekend.”

“Zach,”
I scold, as if it's happening now.

“I'm trying to quit, though. I'm way better than I used to be,” Zach says, looking proud. “Dad has promised to get me a Sonic CXX if I'm down to two a day by the time school starts in September.”

“That's”—I pause, searching for the right word—“nonjudgmental of him.” I imagine the Cerebral Event—aka stroke—my mother would have if she ever caught me with a cigarette in hand.

“He's worse than
me
!” Zach laughs. “Or he was. But he finally stopped at the end of last year, all these years after he picked it up at Fincher.”

“Well, I hope
you
stop,” I say, unable to hide the disapproval in my voice.

“So what about you?” Zach asks. “What's
your
vice?”

“Hmm,” I say with mock thoughtfulness. “I'm weirdly addicted to gummy bears. This is practically poaching.” I pop one into my mouth as I speak.

Zach smiles, but he appraises me seriously before saying, “You love your viola more than you do people.”

I'm so taken aback by it that it takes me a while to answer, and I remember that he said something similar at his house last week, too. “You've only seen me play once.”

“I know,” he says.

There's a long pause before I say, “Well, maybe I just haven't found the right person to love.”

Zach's lips are tilted up at the corners. “Yet,” he says.

“Yet,” I say, and eat another gummy bear.