More Happy Than Not (11 page)

“Yo. What are you doing?”

“Journaling.”

“You journal a lot?”

“Pretty much every morning since seventh grade,” Thomas says. “I'm almost done. How'd you sleep? Are my sheets still dry?”

“Fuck you.” My back does hurt a bit, but not so much that I can't get used to it.

“I left a new toothbrush and towel out for you in the bathroom if you want to wash up before breakfast.” His eyes are still on the page.

“You're cooking breakfast?”

“Yeah right. I only know how to make toast and Pop-Tarts. We'll figure something out.” Thomas smiles and returns to journaling.

I have to wait a second before I throw off the covers because of that thing that happens to guys when they first wake up. But he isn't even looking at me. I hurry out of his room and can only assume his mother's gone off to work already by the way he's freely letting me walk around the place. I find the bathroom and take a piss while looking around the shelves piled with clean and fluffy towels. At home, we share the same batch, raggedy and torn, washed at best twice a month. When I'm done brushing, I go back to Thomas's room, and he's already gone.

I follow the sound of clattering utensils into the kitchen, stopping once to check out all the photos on the wall. There's Thomas as a kid playing baseball—the same crazy eyebrows. The kitchen is twice the size of mine. There are red pots and pans hanging from the wall and they look so spotless. There's a mini TV on top of the fridge, and Thomas has the news playing like a grown man, but he's not listening because he's on the phone.

“
. . .
I can mail those back to you,” he says, pouring Corn Bran into two bowls, handing me one. “No, Sara, I think it's too soon to meet up
. . .
Look, I
. . .
” He looks at the phone before setting it on the counter. “She hung up.”

“Everything okay?”

“She wants every letter and card she wrote to me. I don't know
. . .
She's hoping I'll reread them or something so I'll miss her.” He sits down across from me, and shrugs. “Anyway, enough with
that. Sorry to report this was the only cereal we had left. I ate all the Lucky Charms the other night, but we have cookies and marshmallows. And a leftover chocolate bunny from Easter we can use. I hope that's cool.”

The last time I sat down for a meal in a kitchen was at my grandparents' house, and they're both dead now. Still, I jump out of my seat and crumble Chips Ahoy into my cereal, and Thomas gives me the biggest smile.

After breakfast, we head
out, walking nowhere in particular—in fact, walking away from my block. “So who are your friends around here?” I ask him.

“You,” Thomas says. “And I think Baby Freddy and Skinny-Dave like me just fine.”

“I meant on your block.”

“I know you did. It's embarrassing. My only friend here is Mr. Isaacs on the first floor. He's big on cats and obsessed with factories.” He shrugs. “I had to outgrow my friends after they played me.”

I'm a little nervous asking, but I have to. “What'd they do?”

“After what my father did on my birthday, I stopped wanting to celebrate it, but last year my friend Victor kept calling. He was going to throw a party, a night of board games and drinking. I was about to go to Victor's house, but then he called and canceled last minute to go to some concert with our friends. I thought it was part of some bigger surprise. My phone never rang after that. I was too depressed to drink alone so I just sort of sat in my room and did nothing. They didn't even bring me back a T-shirt.”

Without knowing Victor, I know he's an asshole. “You don't need dickheads like that in your life anyway. They slow you down.”

Thomas stops walking, turns me toward him, and says, “This is what I like about you, Stretch. You care about what happens to you. Everyone else seems resigned to grow up and become nobodies who are stuck here. They don't dream. They don't think about the future.”

I have to look away because all this talk of the future shakes me. I massage my scar. “You're wrong,” I say. Maybe I should turn around and go home so I don't waste his time. “I thought death was a happy-ending exit strategy. I appreciate everything you're saying, but—”

“But nothing.” Thomas grabs my wrist. “We all make mistakes. Every wrong job I take is a mistake, but it's also a step in the right direction. If nothing else, it's a step away from the wrong one. You would never do that to yourself again, right?” He's looking at me, forcing me to meet his eyes.

“Never.”

Thomas lets go and keeps walking. “And that alone makes you different.”

We continue down the block in silence until a young woman with a picket sign walks past us in the other direction.

leteo is here today but needs to be gone tomorrow

I chase after her, and Thomas follows. “Excuse me, excuse me. Sorry. What's with the sign?”

“A girl has gone brain dead because of Leteo,” the woman answers. Her voice is grave, and her eyes look vacant. “She's
the fourth this week. We're rallying to shut this place down.” The
woman sounds proud, self-important. She's probably also one of those crazy PETA people who throw fake blood at elderly women in fur coats.

“We?”

The woman doesn't answer. Thomas and I exchange a glance. We follow her. The closer we get to 168th Street, the louder we hear a crowd hidden by buildings. There are cop cars blocking the street, their sirens failing to warn other people away. We round the corner, and the street is as crowded as a holiday parade, except instead of character balloons in the air, there are picket signs being raised.

10

AN UNFORGETTABLE RALLY

I
've seen pictures of the Bronx district Leteo Institute before, but the unhappy rioters add an edge when seeing it up close. You'd think the institute would look more futuristic, like the Apple Store in Manhattan, but honestly, the Museum of Natural History looks more cutting-edge than Leteo does. The building is four floors high with bricks the color of ashes.

Leteo is getting the bad rap of a good morgue with their body count. It's still strange to me how hospitals never incite this sort of reaction when they're guiltier of more cases of malpractice. Maybe it's because Leteo is supposed to only exist in old science fiction shows and this advancement scares people.

A bald guy fills us in on the recent botched surgery. Apparently some schizophrenic girl in her early twenties was having a procedure done to wipe her mind clean of imaginary characters that have shadowed her since childhood. Instead, she never woke up at all, near death but not close enough. Representatives of the institute haven't come forth with any additional information about the girl's coma.

A curly-haired woman and an older man are trying to squeeze through the crowd, unsuccessfully. They both have signs:

no miracles for criminals

grief is natural. guilt is deserved.

It doesn't match the brain-dead bit.

“You did a criminal a favor!” the older man shouts over the crowd, as if someone from Leteo is listening to his complaints in person. “What, you going to save some terrorists next?”

“Excuse me, sir,” Thomas says. “What's with the signs?”

It's the woman who answers us. “We're here to speak out against the car accident, of course.”

“We don't know what you're talking about,” I say.

She nudges the man. “Harold, tell these boys about the wreck. You tell it better than I do.”

“You kids should get off your phones and watch the news,” Harold says. I turn to Thomas, who smirks. “A few months ago some yahoo crashed his car and killed his four-year-old son and wife. For some bizarre reason, the hellions at Leteo agreed to wipe the memory of his wife's and son's existences after he tried to kill himself in jail.”

“Why would he want to forget his family?” I ask.

“Guilt,” Harold says. “Leteo says he's able to function better with prison tasks under the belief he killed strangers. Maggie and I believe that is nonsense. That guilt is
his
to feel.”

“It's worse than a hit-and-run, truly,” Maggie says. “They view us all as clients, not patients. Big difference.” She turns her back on us and pumps her sign up as high as she can, screaming, “No miracles for criminals! No miracles for criminals!”

Police charge through the crowd in an effort to reach the entrance. Thomas drags me back so we don't get caught up in any of it. I turn one last time, bumping shoulders with a couple people, and I see a child on a man's shoulders waving a sign that reads
no to tabula rasa
. The kid definitely has no idea what it means, but if anyone snaps a photo it's bound to go viral.

On the other side of the crowd, there are Leteo supporters. Maybe only a fourth of the protesters, but they're here. They're probably friends or relatives of forgetters who appreciate how Leteo repairs lives. I half expect Kyle's parents to be there, though I can't possibly imagine what sort of sign they would have. Maybe
good job on making my son forget his twin. he always wanted to be an only child.
No, if they were around here, they'd more likely be inside Leteo to forget Kenneth too; I would if I had to live with someone who had his face and his laugh.

Thomas finally lets go of me when we get to the corner, but we stop and watch as a chant begins: “Never forget! Never forget!”

“I used to think
the procedure was the shadiest scam in all of Scamville,” I tell Thomas as we walk home, keeping my voice low as we passed a crowded bus stop—as if the entire country doesn't know about Leteo. New York hosts three institutes, one here in the Bronx, another in Long Island, and a third in Manhattan. I wonder if there are riots going down in front of the ones in Arizona or Texas, California or Florida. “I know someone who went through it. I don't know him anymore. I mean, I know him, but he's different now, you know.”

“Wait, what?”

“Kyle, this kid I grew up with. His twin brother was killed and it was sort of his fault, so he forgot Kenneth ever existed so he could live. I hope he's doing okay and not having any weird delayed reactions,” I say.

“You don't see him anymore?”

“Nope. His family moved away before they got it done. I'm not even sure where they went. Baby Freddy's mom somehow found out about the procedure and our entire block knew by the end of the day. It would've been impossible keeping everyone he's ever met from asking about his twin, so leaving made sense.”

Kyle and Kenneth, the Lake twins. We don't remember them nearly enough. In every generation on my block, a group of friends loses someone. One of the Big Kids, Benton, drunk-rode his bike into traffic a couple years ago. I don't know the details beyond that, but I guess it could be said that Kenneth took one for the team. The least we could do is fucking remember him, especially when Kyle can't.

My heart is racing just thinking about it, the way it pounds when I'm the last one standing in a game of manhunt. “Would you ever do it? The procedure?”

“I have nothing to forget, and I wouldn't if I did,” Thomas says. “Everyone plays a purpose, even fathers who lie to you or leave you behind. Time takes care of all that pain so if someone derails you, it'll be okay eventually. You?”

“When you put it that way, I have nothing I'd want erased either,” I say. “Well, maybe clowns. I could go without circus memories.”

“Doctors should work on erasing clowns. Period.”