The Forgetting (7 page)

It seemed odd that he didn't know when I knew everything about him. I took a sip of tea and let its heat burn through me. “I'm Georgie.”

“Okay, Georgie.” He was watching me over the rim of his mug but I kept my eyes trained on the floating tea bag in my own cup. “What the hell is a Beacon Hill girl like you doing on this side of town?”

I lowered my mug. “I'm from
Brookline
, not Beacon Hill.”

Nate shrugged. “Same difference. What are you doing here?”

I swallowed. I wasn't about to tell him the whole truth, but I wanted whatever clues he had about Jane Doe's life and death. “I was looking for…the other girl. The one who used to work that corner before Char.”

A shadow darkened Nate's face. “Why?”

“I just wanted to…find out about her.” I swallowed hard under his intense gaze.

“What for?”

My hands tightened around my mug. “Why are you getting so defensive?”

“Why are you so interested?” Nate shot back. “FAIR Girls is here to protect these girls.”

“Well, you certainly failed in her case,” I said, banging my mug down on the counter. My tea had gone cold.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

I froze, looking at him. Did he not know? I stood there, unable to move or even breathe. Nate's brow furrowed. “Georgie? Are you okay?”

The sound of him saying my name softened something in me. I sank into the closest chair and raised my face to him. “You don't know, do you?”

“Know what?”

I tasted tears in my mouth. “Nate, I'm so sorry. She…she's dead.”

Nate fell back against the kitchen counter. “What? When? How?”

“A few weeks ago. She…fell. From a balcony not far from here.” I had to look away from him to say the next words. “They say it was suicide.”

Nate's body seemed to crumple. He turned away from me and bent over the counter, his face buried in his hands. I kept my eyes averted and picked up my cold tea. I barely knew him; it seemed way too personal to watch him cry.

After a few minutes, I heard him clear his throat. He moved closer to me and dropped into the chair closest to me. His eyes were red-rimmed but dry and clear. “Suicide.
God
.”

I watched his jaw work up and down; he was still fighting tears. “Does that happen…a lot? With…girls like her?” I asked.

“Girls like her…” he murmured. “There were no girls like Annabel.”

I gasped and almost dropped my mug to the floor. The name uncoiled a dozen memories inside me, snatches of images: Annabel on the street, here at All Saints, in her dank little bedroom.
Annabel
. “That was her name.”

“Yes.” I started at Nate's response; I hadn't realized I had spoken out loud. “But not her real one,” Nate went on, his eyes unfocused. “That was just the name she used on the street. I never knew her real name.”

My shoulders deflated a little. But at least I'd gotten something. And now at least I could stop thinking of her as Jane Doe.
Annabel
. “What did you know about her?”

Nate's eyes slid back into focus and his expression tightened. “Why?” He leaned forward, his body knife-like. “And why were you looking for her if you knew she was dead?”

“I wasn't looking for
her
. I was looking for information
about
her.” I squirmed in my chair.

“And again I ask,
why
?” His voice rose. I flinched. Nate softened a little. “Sorry. I didn't mean to yell.”

“I wasn't doing anything wrong.” I got up and went to the microwave under the pretense of reheating my tea, but really I was covering. I hadn't thought this far ahead. How was I supposed to know that I'd run into the boy that Jane Doe—Annabel—had loved? I pressed my hand to my heart as the tea rotated inside the lighted microwave. What other secrets were contained in this vessel she'd given me?

The microwave dinged. I took a long time getting my mug out and turned around to face Nate. “I've been working on a piece for my school paper,” I said. “About teen suicide. And I stumbled across a mention of a Jane Doe suicide on the police precinct website. It had the address of where she'd jumped, so I came over here to see if I could find out anything more about her. That's when I bumped into Char, and she mentioned the other girl who used to hang out there.”

“How'd you know that was Annabel?” Nate demanded.

“I didn't,” I stammered. “It was just a hunch. Char said the other girl was dead, which seemed a pretty big coincidence, so I was asking her about it, and then you showed up, and then Jules showed up and…now we're here.”

“Uh-huh.” Nate's eyes searched my face. I tried to keep my face as guileless as possible. I wasn't skilled in the art of lying; I'd never had to be. “You're writing an article?”

“For my school paper.”

“What school?”

“Hillcoate Prep.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Really.”

“So?”

“That's a nice school, from what I hear.”

“Yeah, it is. Our paper competes for a national award every year.”

As soon as it was out of my mouth, I knew it was the wrong thing to say. He stood up so fast his chair wobbled. “You want to use Annabel's death to
win
an
award
?” He flung his arm toward the door. “Get out. Get out
now
.”

The darkness in his eyes chilled me to my veins. I grabbed my backpack off the table and clutched it to me. But I couldn't just leave. He was the only connection I had to Annabel. I could feel him everywhere in her heart. Even the timbre of his voice squeezed my insides. I looked up into his face.

“I'm sorry. I didn't know. When I went looking for her, she was just research. But after learning…what she was…and meeting you…she's not.”

Heat constricted my throat. I swiped the tears at the corners of my eyes. It wasn't an act. She wasn't just a heart anymore. She wasn't just some inconvenient echo of a ghost who was stealing my memories. She had become a mystery I had to solve.

“That's what I want to write about now. About these lost girls no one ever finds.”

Nate held my eyes with his own for so long that I could count the little gold flecks in each of his blue irises. “You shouldn't write about teen suicide,” he said finally. His voice crackled. “You should write about FAIR Girls. About human trafficking. About how it's happening around the corner from your fancy private school. You could open people's eyes to that.”

We stood there for a long moment, frozen in stillness, our eyes melded to each other's. In the silence that stretched between us, I heard the Catch so loudly that it bounced off the walls. Without breathing, I asked him, “Will you help me?”

Without hesitation, he answered, “Yes.”

• • •

When I got home, all I wanted to do was head upstairs to the privacy of my room and think about everything I'd learned. But my family had other ideas.

Grandma blocked my path the instant I walked in the door. “Where have you been?” she demanded. “Do you have any idea what your parents have been through?”

“I—”

My mother emerged from the living room into the hallway, the phone in her hand. “Georgie!” She lifted the phone to her ear. “She just got home. Thanks, Bill.”

Bill was Ella's father. Crap. I was in for it now.

Mom tossed the phone onto the bench in the hallway where all our hats and gloves and scarves seemed to congregate. “Where the hell have you been? Your father and I have been worried sick.”

As if to reinforce this, Dad appeared behind Mom, his face a mask of concern. “Georgie, you nearly gave us a heart attack.” He looked stricken. “Oh jeez, you know what I mean.”

Grandma took my elbow and led me into the living room. “Explain yourself, young lady.”

“We know you weren't at that rehearsal tonight,” Mom said. “So if you weren't with Ella, what were you doing?” She sounded like she was fighting very hard to stay calm.

I looked from her to my dad to Grandma and started a little when I noticed Colt sprawled out in the armchair in the corner. He was scribbling in the margins of a thick textbook. “I told you she'd be home,” he said without looking up.

Dad glanced at him and back at me. He folded his arms over his chest. “Look, we're not mad, Georgie. We just want to know what's going on with you.”

I loved how adults said they weren't mad when they clearly were. I heaved a sigh. “I'm really tired. Can we just talk about this tomorrow?”

Dad looked inclined to allow this, but Mom crossed the room until she stood right in front of me. “No. We'll talk about this now.” She stared at me for a moment, her jaw working hard. “Do you have
any
idea what it was like sitting in that hospital room? Watching you almost die? Do you?” Her voice had tipped over the edge into hysteria now. “And this is how you repay us? By running around God-knows-where with God-knows-who at all hours of the night?”

I looked at my watch. “It's nine-thirty.”

Grandma threw her hands up. “Georgie! Just answer your mother.”

“Fine. Can I sit down first? I did just have
a
heart
transplant
, you know.”

From his corner nook, Colt laughed. No one else looked amused, but they waited until I had taken my coat off and settled myself comfortably on the couch. “Look, I'm really sorry I'm late,” I said. “I didn't realize it would take so long.”

“What would?” Mom asked.

I tucked my feet up underneath me and arranged my face into a beatific expression. “Sydney asked me to write an article for the paper. About human trafficking,” I added, widening my eyes. Sydney was another close friend of mine. She edited the
Hillcoate
Banner
.

“What? Why?”

I didn't know who to look at since they'd all said it at once. “I think she felt bad,” I said, looking at Mom first. “That I can't go back to school with everyone else. So she asked me to write the article as a way of, you know, including me.”

Mom sank down next to me on the couch. “Honey, we're not keeping you out of school to punish you. It's for your own good.”

“I know that,” I said in my best I-trust-you-because-you're-the-parent tone. “But I really want to do this article. If it's good enough, she's going to submit it for the National Student Journalist Award.”

That got them. Dad perched on the edge of the coffee table across from me. “Honey, if it's for school, of course we support that. But you could've told us where you were going tonight.”

“I'm so sorry,” I said, furrowing my brow as I looked back and forth between him and Mom. “I just didn't think you'd let me go on my own, so soon after my surgery.”

“Where did you go?” Grandma interjected.

“There's this organization called FAIR Girls,” I said. “They have a chapter at a church in Jamaica Plain.” There was no way I was telling them I'd been in Mattapan. I'd be grounded until my sixty-fifth birthday. “I went to meet one of the volunteers there. And I didn't think they'd talk as openly with an adult there.”

Mom put her hand on my knee. “Honey, just tell us from now on. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. “I, uh, may have to go back. To do more research.”

“Just try to go during the day,” Dad said. “Deal?”

“Deal.” I slid away from Mom and stood up. “Um, I'm really tired. Do you mind if I—”

“Yes, yes. Good night,” Dad said.

I leaned over and pecked him on the cheek. But my face pinched together as I climbed the stairs. I loved my parents. I really did. I wasn't one of those ungrateful teenagers who was embarrassed to be seen with my mom. I'd been known to stay home on a Saturday night for family movie night—and I'd enjoyed it. It felt inherently
wrong
to lie to them—and yet, I'd just done it as effortlessly as, well…as effortlessly as Annabel must have done it to sell herself on the street.

I tottered over to my bed and collapsed onto it. The ceiling seemed to swirl as I stared up at it. What had driven Annabel to the streets? And Nate…involuntarily, I pressed my hand to my chest. She had loved him. That I knew for sure. I could feel it inside me. It was the one thing that was quiet and still.

Well, I could see why, with his angled cheekbones and deep ocean-blue eyes. And the way he had looked at me, like he could see all the way into my mind. And the passion in his voice when he told me I should write a story about trafficking. I replayed that bit of the scene over and over in my mind. He
cared
. Not like most of the boys I went to school with, who didn't give a crap about anything other than which frat they were going to pledge when they got to their Ivy League college.

I sat up. Was that why Annabel had loved him? Because he was the only one to care about her? I wove my fingers into my hair and pulled my topknot down. My excursion to Mattapan had given me a few answers, but it had brought on even more questions.

And most terrifying among them was which memories I would lose for the ones I'd gained tonight.

• • •

I jerked awake the next morning, out of dreams full of windowless bedrooms and dark street corners, gated cemeteries and silver sports cars, church basements and bottomless blue eyes. Every single one of those things belonged to Annabel, not me. I looked around my pink bedroom, naming each thing in it that was mine and mine alone.

When I got to the stack of music in the corner, I slid out of bed and crossed to it. The taste of the wooden reed between my lips was delicious. Annabel had never held an oboe in her life—that I knew for sure. This was mine alone, and it was a place where Annabel couldn't come.

I started with scales and moved on to passages I knew from memory—Saint-Saën's
Samson
and
Delilah
, Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, Dvorak's
New
World
. Pieces of music I was sure Annabel had never heard. I slid into the Mozart Concerto in C, a piece I'd mastered as a freshman. Then Benjamin Britten's
Six
Metamorphoses
, which I'd played at my last recital, and finally on to the Poulenc. Every note, every passage and phrase grounded me to who I was. She could take allergies and dream catchers away from me, but she couldn't have this. The oboe tied me to myself, and I would not let her undo that knot.

“You sounded good,” Mom said when I came downstairs to the kitchen for breakfast. She sat at the table reading the paper, a half-drunk cup of coffee within reach.

“Thanks,” I said. I poured myself a bowl of (heart-healthy!) cereal and added some blueberries from the fridge. “Sorry again about last night.”

Mom waved her hand. “It's forgiven. Do you want me to call Joel to set up a lesson?”

“Absolutely. The sooner, the better.” Joel was my private oboe teacher. I'd been studying with him for five years. I smiled as I spooned cereal into my mouth. Lessons with Joel always seemed to be outside of time and space. Surely they would push Annabel further out.

“You're still on track to audition next month, yes?”

“I think so.” I frowned. “They won't let me postpone, will they?”

Mom looked over the top of her paper. “Do you want me to call and find out? I'm sure once they understand the circumstances—”