“It’s okay,” Jared said, squeezing his hand. “I have permanent brain damage. I was also in a coma for a long time, which left me all skin and bones,” he said, using her words of greeting to him.
“Brain damage?” Evte said slowly. She glanced to Kyrone before staring at Jared again. “You need looking after?”
Jared shook his head. “I’m pretty self-sufficient,” he assured her. “I wasn’t to start with, but being independent was important to me.”
“You don’t look brain-damaged,” Jamir said. “You look normal.”
Jared chuckled. “What is someone with brain damage supposed to look like?”
Jamir shrugged. “I don’t know. Not normal.”
“Sorry to disappoint you. Would you think I was cooler if I told you I had amnesia?”
Jamir gasped. “Do you?”
“What’s am-nee-zee-ah?” Kofi asked, prompting everyone to laugh.
“I lost my memory,” Jared explained.
“All of it?” Tahiry asked, her eyes wide.
Jared nodded. “Everything up to waking up from the coma.”
“Wow!” Jamir breathed.
Evte tugged at her lower lip. “You’ve learnt to draw very quickly if your accident was eighteen months ago.”
“I could draw before the accident.”
Evte’s expression darkened, and she glanced at Kyrone, giving him a look that was knowing and suspicious at the same time. “Well, that makes no sense,” she said bluntly.
“Mum,” Kyrone cautioned.
“When I smell a rat, I’m going to find it and stamp on it. You said you lost your memory, yet you can still draw. That’s impossible.”
Jared gave her a wavering smile.
“You don’t have to explain anything,” Kyrone jumped in before Jared had a chance to speak.
“It’s okay,” Jared said. “I understand why it would be confusing. I didn’t understand at first either.”
Evte crossed her arms. “What’s your explanation, then?”
“It’s to do with how the brain works.” He curled his hand into a fist and held it up, staring at it for a second before pinching his lips together and shaking his head, clearly thinking better of whatever it was he had been about to do. “We’ve got different types of memories. Episodic, which is things we’ve done, and procedural, which are things we’ve learnt. They’re both stored in different parts of the brain. I can’t remember learning to draw or the pieces of art I created before my accident, but I still knowhowto draw.” Jared shrugged. “I’m not very good at explaining it. Sorry.”
“It was clear enough to me, babe,” Kyrone said, squeezing his shoulder.
“I had to learn to do a lot of things again,” Jared went on. “Not because I’d forgotten how to do them, but because I was so weak and my body wouldn’t do what my brain was trying to tell it to do.”
“That must have been difficult for you to cope with,” Evte said, her tone stilted and a little strangled.
Kyrone knew it couldn’t have been easy for her to take in what Jared was saying, but at least she wasn’t accusing him of lying anymore.”
“Yes,” Jared agreed. “But I’m managing.”
“You’re a brave young man,” Evte told him, her tone and stare softening into something far more motherly.
Just like that, Kyrone knew she was going to come round to liking Jared, just as he’d known she would.
