The Impossible Knife of Memory (2 page)

I listened for footsteps until the empty lots and closed-up businesses turned into strip malls and then turned into almost-safe little houses. At the end of the last street, past a forgotten cornfield and the ruin of a barn, sat the house that I was supposed to call “home.”

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My father wanted me to remember the house. He had asked me over and over when we moved, carrying boxes in from the truck, filling the cupboards with groceries, removing rodent skeletons, washing the windows, “Are you sure you don’t remember, Hayley Rose?”

I shook my head but kept my mouth shut. It made him sad when I talked about how hard I tried not to remember.
(Don’t think I was crazy, because I wasn’t. The difference between forgetting something and not remembering it is big enough to drive an eighteen-wheeler through.)
A few days after we moved in, Daddy got unstuck from time again, like the Pilgrim guy in
Slaughterhouse
. The past took over. All he heard were exploding IEDs and incoming mortar rounds; all he saw were body fragments, like an unattached leg still wearing its boot, and shards of shiny bones, sharp as spears. All he tasted was blood.
These attacks (he’d have killed me if I used that word in front of him, but it was the only one that fit) had been getting worse for months. They were the only reason I went along with his ridiculous plan to quit trucking and settle down into a so-called “normal life.” I let him think that he was right, that spending my senior year in a high school instead of riding shotgun in his big rig was a practical and exciting idea.
Truth? I was terrified.
I found the library and a bank and made sure the post office knew that we were back and living in Gramma’s old house. On the third day, a girl named Gracie who lived down the street brought a basket of muffins and a tuna noodle casserole cooked by her mom, from scratch. She said she was glad to see me.
Gracie was so sweet—freakishly kind and non-zombified—that I forgot to be a bitch and I fell into like with her by the time I’d finished the first muffin, and suddenly I had a friend, a real friend for the first time in . . . I couldn’t remember how long. Having a friend made everything else suck less.
When the past spat Dad back out, he ate what was left of the tuna noodle casserole. (The muffins were already gone.) He went up into the attic and brought down a small box that hadn’t been damaged by mice or mold. In the box were faded photographs that he swore were me and his mother, my grandmother. I asked why didn’t Gramma keep any pictures of my mom and he said they’d been chewed up by the mice. By then, I could tell when he was lying.

So that day after detention, I made it home from school in one piece, pissed and hungry and determined to ignore all my homework. Dad’s pickup was parked in the driveway. I put my hand on the hood: stone cold. I checked the odometer: no extra miles since I left that morning. He hadn’t gone to work again.

I unlocked the one, two, three, four locks on the front door of our house. (
Our house
. Still felt weird to put those two words together.) Opened the door carefully. He hadn’t put the chain on. Probably slept all day. Or he was dead. Or he remembered that I had gone to school and that I was going to come home and that I’d need the chain to be off. That’s what I was hoping for.

I stepped inside. Closed the door behind me. Locked back up: one, two, three, four. Slid the chain into its slot and hit the light switch. The living room furniture was upright and dusty. The house smelled of dog, cigarette smoke, bacon grease, and the air freshener that Dad sprayed so I wouldn’t know that he smoked weed.

Down the hall, Spock barked three times behind the door to my father’s bedroom.
“Dad?”
I waited. Dad’s voice rumbled like faraway thunder, talking to the dog. Spock whined, then went quiet. I waited, counting to one hundred, but still . . . nothing.
I walked toward his door and gently knocked. “Dad?”
“Your bus late again?” he asked from the other side.
“Yep.”
I waited. This was where he should ask how my day went or if I had homework or what I wanted for dinner. Or he could tell me what he felt like eating, because I could cook. Or he could just open the door and talk, that would be more than enough.
“Dad?” I asked. “Did you stay home again?”
“It’s been a bad day, princess.”
“What did your boss say?”
Dead. Silence.
“You called him, right?” I asked. “Told him you were sick? Daddy?”
“I left a message on his voice mail.”
Another lie. I leaned my forehead against the door. “Did you even try to get out the door? Did you get dressed? Take a shower?”
“I’ll try harder tomorrow, princess. I promise.”

Death deals the cards. They whisper across the shaky table. Hernandez sticks a cigar in his mouth. Dumbo tucks his
wife’s letter in his helmet. Loki spits and curses. Roy sips his
coffee. We pull the cards toward us and laugh.
I don’t remember what my wife looked like, but I recognize
Death. She calls for our bets, wearing a red dress, her beautiful
face carved out of stone. My friends laugh and lie, already deep
in the game.
I remember what my little girl looks like. I remember the
smell of her head. The scar on her left knee. Her lisp. Peanut
butter and banana. I don’t think she remembers me. Death rattles bone dice in her mouth, clicking them against
her teeth. She spits them on the table and they roll.
We bet it all, throw everything on the line because the air is
filled with bullets and grenades. We won’t hear the one that gets
us, but it’s coming.
She tells us to show our hands.
We have never been so alive.

Lunch. First period.

Lunch served at o-dark-thirty. I couldn’t figure out why more high school students hadn’t risen up in armed rebellion. The only explanation was that the administration put sedatives in the chocolate chip cookies.

The eraser end of a pencil was shoved into my left ear. “Leave me alone.” I pushed away the pencil and the hand holding it, turning my head so that my left ear lay flat against the cafeteria table.
The pencil attacked my right ear.
I gave the classic one-finger salute to my tormentor. “I hate you.”
“Twenty vocab words.”
“I’m sleeping, watch. Zzzzzz.”
“Just my Spanish, Hays. And a little English help for Topher.
Pesadilla
. A quesadilla with fish, right?”
I sat up with a groan. Across the table sat Gracie Rappaport, the casserole-and-muffin-girl. Draped over her was her boyfriend, Topher, Christopher Barnes. (You might have heard of him. When he dumped some girl named Zoe on Labor Day weekend she blasted a disrespectful description of his man-parts all over the Internet. Topher responded with photographic evidence that Zoe was lying. When I asked Gracie about it, all she did was giggle, which was way more information than I wanted.)
“What is ‘denotation’?” Topher asked.
“Denotation is when a plot blows up,” I said. “And yes, a
pesadilla
is a quesadilla stuffed with fish. You are a genius, Gracie.”
“Don’t write that down.” A shaggy-haired guy with expensive teeth and dark-framed glasses sat down next to me. “She’s messing with you.”
Topher looked at the newcomer. “Where you been?”
The guy pulled a ring of keys out of his pocket and dangled them.
“You got it running?” Topher asked. “What was it this time?”
“I don’t know, but Mom said it cost a ton of money. I’ll be doing chores forever to pay her back.”
“Dude,” Topher said.
“Right?” answered the guy. “So, I’m broke. Feed me.”
Topher handed him a ten-dollar bill. “Bring me back a bagel, too.”
“Why don’t I get paid for doing your homework?” I asked.
Topher handed me a quarter. “Denotation. For real.”
“Denotation: a noun that describes the action of a student refusing to take notes during class,” I said.
“Denotation,” said the new guy. “The precise meaning of a word, without any pesky implications attached to it.”
Topher took the quarter back and tossed it to his friend. “Butter, not cream cheese.”
“That’s it,” I said, laying my head back down. “I’m done.”
Gracie lobbed a crumpled napkin at my nose. “Just my Spanish, Hayley, puleeeeeze.”
“Why, exactly, should I do that?”
She pushed her books across the table to me. “Because you’re awesome.”
Along with tuna noodle casserole and the muffin basket, Gracie had been carrying a photo album that day she came to our door with muffins. In it were pictures of her kindergarten class—
our
kindergarten class, because I had been in it, too. Looking at mini-me in a hand-knit sweater and braids gave me goose bumps, but I couldn’t pin down exactly why. The only memory I had of kindergarten was peeing my pants during nap time, but Gracie said that never happened. Then she’d asked if I still liked peanut butter and banana sandwiches.
(Which, I will admit, freaked me out because they were my favorite and there was no way she could have guessed that.)
I did her vocab and handed it back to her as Topher’s friend returned to the table carrying a tray loaded down with bagels and cups of coffee.
“Seven and eighteen are wrong on purpose,” I told her. “To make it more realistic.”
“Good call,” she said. “Thanks.”
The flat-screen televisions mounted in the four corners of the room finally roused themselves and blinked on, tuned into one of the all-news stations. The students who were awake enough to notice gave a halfhearted cheer. I watched for a minute, reading the words that crawled across the bottom of the screen to see if there had been any disasters overnight. Nothing, except for the latest celebrity-worship crap and suicide bombers who blew up a market and a kindergarten on the other side of the world.
“Can I go back to sleep now?” I asked.
“You need to eat your breakfast,” the new guy said, handing me a bagel. “Nice hair, by the way. Is electric blue your natural color?”
“I don’t do breakfast,” I said. “And yes, I come from a long line of blue-haired people.”
“What’s a ‘motif,’” Topher asked, mouth filled with bagel.
“At least have some coffee,” the guy said. “You look like you could use it.”
“I didn’t ask for coffee,” I said.
“Motif: a recurring object or idea in a story.” The guy pulled a handful of assorted fake and real sugar packets out of the pocket of his green-and-brown-plaid flannel shirt and set them in front of me. “Wasn’t sure what you liked.”
“None of them. If I want coffee, I’ll get it myself. And you forgot structure.”
“What?”
“A literary motif is a recurring object, idea, or structure. You forgot structure.”
He looked at Gracie, then me, then back at Gracie, a smile slowly spreading across his face. “You were right, Rappaport.”
“What about me?” asked Topher. “I seconded the idea.”
Gracie said “Shhh” as the boys bumped fists.
“Right about what?” I asked. “What idea?”
“I sort of promised Finn that you would write an article,” Gracie said. “For the school newspaper. I told him you were good at English and stuff.”
“Is this a joke?” I asked.
Finn (what kind of parent names their kid after the body part of a fish?) pointed his bagel at me. “How long will it take you to pull together two hundred words on ‘World of Resources at the Library’?”
“Forever,” I said. “Because I’m not doing it.”
“What’s an unreliable narrator?” asked Topher.
“Come on, Hays,” said Gracie. “You haven’t signed up for anything, even though you promised you would. You need more friends, or at least a couple of people who will say hello to you in the hall. Writing for the newspaper is the perfect solution.”
“I don’t need a solution,” I said. “I don’t have a problem.”
Gracie ignored me. “Plus, you two have a lot in common.” She counted on her fingers. “You’re both tall, you’re both quiet, you’re both strangely smart, and you are both a little weird. No offense,” she quickly added. “Weird in, um, an adorkable way.”
“Is ‘adorkable’ a word?” asked Topher.
“Weird, quiet, and strangely smart?” I asked. “That describes people who make fertilizer bombs. Maybe he does, but not me.”
“Fertilizer bombs?” Finn asked.
“Unreliable narrator?” Topher repeated. “Anyone?”
“I’m not writing the article,” I said.
The flat screen blinked and pixelated, and the school’s mascot, Marty, a white guy with bulging biceps holding a hammer in each hand (we were the Belmont Machinists, God knows why) appeared.
“All hail the demon overlords!” Finn called loudly.
I shot him a glance because I had been thinking the exact same thing, but when he looked back at me, I pretended I was doodling on the back of my hand.
The screen scrolled the morning announcements:
. . . the following colleges will have reps in the cafeteria this week . . .
. . . memory stick turned into the lost and found . . .
. . . no loitering around the flagpole . . .
And finally a list of the sorry souls who had to report to the Attendance Office, the Counselor’s Office, or go straight to hell and see the principal.
Finn punched me in the shoulder.
“Ow! What was that for?”
He pointed at the monitor. “You made the Doom List, Miss Blue! In trouble with the authorities this early in the year? You’ll make a great reporter.”

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The halls surged with a parade of beautiful strangers. They laughed too loud. Flirted. Shrieked. Raced. They kissed. Shoved. Tripped. Shouted. Posed. Chased. Flaunted. Taunted. Galloped. Sang.

Fully assimilated zombies.
I could laugh at them when I was with Gracie. When I walked through their herd in the east wing hall—alone—I was transformed from my confident freakself into a gawping pile of self-conscious self-loathing. Their shiny-teeth smiles made happiness look easy. They never tripped over their own feet. They could laugh without snorting and tease each other without sounding dumb. They could remember being six years old together and eight and eleven and giggle about all of it.
The flaunts, the taunts, the poses, they were all part of the lie. My brain understood this because I’d heard the whispers. The Honor Society officers who started their day off with a little weed that melted stress like chocolate. The cheerleaders who cut themselves where the scars wouldn’t show. Debate team members busted for shoplifting. Mommy’s pills being shared like cookies, and the way Daddy’s vodka made first-period Latin fly by.
As I walked down the east wing hall, I could feel their sticky fingers reaching for my brain. Puffs of yellow smoke curled toward my ears, my eyes, my nose and mouth. The hivemind wanted to penetrate and infect. Colonize. The danger was so real, so close, I didn’t dare open my mouth to ask directions. Or to howl.