Everyone We've Been (26 page)

“It makes zero sense,” I say, “that you are sitting right here and we can't work out anything else about you.”

Now that I understand why he's here, now that I have some sort of lead, I figured I only had to ask the right questions for the rest to become clear. It's why I haven't broken and done the obvious thing—ask Katy. I was sure I could piece it together myself. It's
my
memory, after all. I knew him—Zach. The name still seems magical after days of not knowing.

But after an hour of grilling him for information, I've learned exactly one thing about him. And it didn't even come from him; it came from going over and over the details of the night I started seeing him. It came when I remembered what was sticking out of his backpack when he got on the bus.

A folded tripod.

His backpack contained camera equipment.

It is late at night and we are at Jolley's, an old-timey diner just off the highway. I cradle my cup of coffee, blowing on it while I watch Zach, who's sitting across the booth from me. As we've been talking, I've forgotten numerous times that I am the only one who can see him. After a few odd looks from strangers, I've started pretending to be on the phone or reading the menu aloud when someone walks by.

“It seems like I can only tell you what you already know,” he says now, and I roll my eyes. He's kept repeating that one all night. His explanation for why he knew I'd gotten his name right but couldn't tell me any more. “You have to find the things they couldn't explicitly wipe. Like a feeling, things you associate with…the other me.”

“Uh-huh.” I already tried listening to “Air on the G String” on my phone, and that feeling of recognition, that warmth I got listening to it at the concert the first night I met Memory Zach, came back, assuring me I'm on the right track. But while it might have triggered my memory of Zach the night of the accident, it's hardly going to give me his last name. I am starting to lose patience with myself now, starting to think I might need to go crawling back to my parents or Katy for answers.

I'm staring absently over the rim of my coffee mug when I feel Zach's gaze on me.

“What?” I ask. I can't read the expression on his face.

“What do you think happens when you find him?” he asks, fidgeting with a chip in the wood on his side of the table. “You know, to me?”

I shrug. “Why would anything happen?”

Zach nods, seems to shake off his worry, and leans forward. “Okay, go back to the tripod and camera stuff. Can you use it in any way?”

“Maybe you're a photographer?” I ask hopefully, and Zach says, “Maybe.”

I sigh, pretty sure this is what it is like to talk to an amnesiac. Someone who knows absolutely nothing about himself. I push aside the thought that, in some ways, that's exactly who I am. Who I've been.

“Okay,” I say, and type “Zach Lyndale photographs” into my phone's browser. Also “photography,” “pictures,” “photos.” “There are a surprising number of Zachs in Lyndale who happen to be photographers. Most of them over the age of fifty.”

Zach laughs and I am startled again at the warmth in his voice, the fullness of it. I glance up at him, wondering if maybe that was a memory—if, somehow, I am remembering the real him. And I am surprised to find him already watching me, his eyes twinkling. I glance away quickly.

One thing that is
not
going to make my life easier?

Falling in love with the Memory of some boy I used to know. The
invisible
memory of some boy I used to know. Everything I see him do happens only in my head, and I
like
him. Tonight, when we were on the bench, our bodies so close it was like we didn't need the coat at all, it felt like something heavy had lowered itself onto my chest. It was the realization that I was inches from kissing an invisible stranger, and I wished the space between us was less. But more than that, I started to get the sense, to understand for the first time, that I might have loved the real Zach. The breathless, pulsing kind of love that you can't recover from. The kind you can't forget.

So why would I have erased him?

“What other types of cameras are there?” Memory Zach asks, mercifully drawing me out of my thoughts. It takes a second to remember what we're talking about.

“Video,” I say, scribbling down the names of three Zachs I've found without pictures who could conceivably be the one I need: Zach Easton, Zach Thomas, and Zack Neil. “Maybe you even
sell
cameras. Do you sell cameras, Zach?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” he says.

“But what do you
feel
?” I intone, making the corners of his mouth tilt up. My stomach twirls at it and blood rushes to my ears.

I glance at the screen of my phone again.

“Okay, let's try…” I type in “Zach cameras” and get mostly useless hits.

“Hey!” I say all of a sudden. Someone glances over at me from across the diner, and I duck my head, bringing my voice to a whisper. “What about that job you were ‘working' at the Cineplex that day? What does
that
mean?”

Zach narrows his eyes, thinking. “Camera. Cinema. Movies?”

I type in “Zach movies Lyndale” and take a sip of my coffee while I wait for the search results.

“What's wrong?” Zach asks. I'm frozen, staring at the screen of my phone. “Addie?”

“I think this is it.”

It is an article, nearly three years old, about a local fifteen-year-old boy with an interest in filmmaking. Making
horror
 movies.

“Meridian High School students and best friends Zach Laird and Raj Gupta celebrate after their third-place finish in a national short-film contest,” a caption says.

What has stolen my breath, though, is the picture. In it, an Indian boy faces the camera, looking very solemn. He's the boy who bumped into me and couldn't stop staring at the theater that day. Next to him in the picture—next to
Raj
—a tall, red-haired boy stares at me with a grin as wide as the sun.

“Are you sure?” Memory Zach asks, moving around to my side of the table so he can see.

But I only gape at him, fighting to keep my breath steady and my mind calm, and then stare again at the boy who looks exactly like him. Who
is
him.

Zach Laird.

The name forms in my mind, wrapping around my brain in a way that is familiar and foreign and confuses me.

I look at the picture again.

I don't know the first thing about him, the
real
him, but the steady ticktock of my chest, the bomb racing to an inescapable explosion, confirms something I haven't been sure of—only suspected, only feared.

And it speaks with complete assurance.

I once loved this boy.

Zach and I see each other in spurts. For minutes between viola practice and the store and the Cineplex and my dad's apartment and his trips to Caldwell. Since he's much busier than I am, I'm usually visiting him at one of his two jobs or at his house.

So when I stop by at the Cineplex after school one day and one of his co-workers says Zach is taking out the trash, I head outside to the back of the theater and literally pounce on him.

His back is to me, and when I wrap myself around his waist, he jumps. “Holy shit, you scared me,” he says, turning around to face me.

I cough and feel my eyes water as he exhales smoke directly into my face.

“Sorry,” he says, giving me a wide smile. “I was literally plotting ways to kidnap you.” He kisses my top lip.

I don't kiss him back, just stay frozen, unable to erase the frown on my face.

“What's wrong?” Zach asks.

“You smell like a chimney.”

Zach holds his cigarette far away from his body for dramatic effect. With his other hand, he reaches to cover my eyes. “You did not see me smoking.”

“I
smell
you smoking,” I retort, taking his hand off my face. “I thought you were quitting. Your dad bought you a CXX.”
When it's all your family has been able to do to keep At Home Movies running the past few months.

Zach seems surprised, his eyes wider than normal. “I didn't know it bothered you so much.” He puts out his cigarette.

“It's just gross,” I say, wishing we were spending the first time we've seen each other in a week making out, but I don't feel like kissing Zach at all right now. Also, weirdly, I remember what Raj said once:
Where there's smoke, there's Lindsay.

He nods, still watching me. “Sorry.” He runs a hand through his hair. “I
was
really down to two a day, but then with school. And Raj keeps wanting to make something to enter for the Valley Con Short-Film Contest, and I'm avoiding him because that's all he talks about. I feel like shit.”

I take a step toward him now, put my hand on his shirt. “Why don't you want to enter?”

“I
do,
” Zach insists. “I just…can't think of anything good. And then my dad pays eight hundred freaking dollars for a CXX that I can't use.”

“Maybe,” I say thoughtfully, “maybe you're thinking too narrowly. Like, a while ago, I felt so sick of my playing, and then I borrowed some of Katy's music, transposed it down a fifth, and learned a couple of
her
pieces. I was pretty bad at them, but it made me feel better.”

“Addie, you don't get it.” Zach's voice is impatient. “I think I just need time or something. I need to figure it out on my own.”

“It seems like you've been having a lot of that,” I say.

“What do you mean?” Zach frowns.

“Time on your own. I've seen you, like, twice in two weeks?”

“I've been busy with school,” he says.

“I have school, too. And practice and a bunch of other things.”

Zach looks like he's about to protest—he has two jobs
and
school—but then his face softens. “You're right. Sorry. What were you saying about trying Katy's songs?”

“Maybe do something totally different,” I say, consciously letting the tension slip from my voice and body. I proceed a little more carefully now. “Like, horrodies are great and Ciano is brilliant, but maybe you could try something new?”

Zach takes a strand of my hair between his fingers. “You think so?”

“I do.”

I wrap my arms around his neck and stand on my tiptoes to kiss his chin.

“Sorry about my cigarette breath,” Zach says, looking into my eyes. And I shrug like it's no big deal. Truthfully, I've started carrying perfume in my purse so I can spray myself after I'm with Zach to prevent my mom from asking questions. Not knowing that he smokes is not going to kill her.

“Maybe you're right,” he says, slowly now, glancing above my head. “I just feel…stuck.”

I wrap my arms around his waist, and our chests heave in sync for a few moments before I put my hand in the back pocket of his jeans and promise, “I'm going to help you.” Then I muse, “How do we unstick you, Zach?”