She looked at me quizzically. “What does that mean?”
“FromGulliver’s Travels. It’s a book about a giant and a bunch of very tiny people.”
“I’ve probably never read it. I’m homeschooled.”
“You seem very well-adjusted for someone who lost her memory,” I said.
“I’m good at faking it,” she said. “My mother told me that this morning.”
“You really don’t remember anything from before the disco room?”
“No. Thank God I found my hidden notes.”
“You write everything down?”
“Always. But Mother destroys anything she doesn’t want me to remember. Pretty much the very first letter I discovered was a warning to myself about her. By the way, thank you for telling me about social workers. The old Ava didn’t have a word for that.”
“The old Ava?”
“Yeah, I start over every year or two. The only reason I know anything is my system of notes.”
“You’re organized.”
“I don’t have a choice.”
A lady in a red smock passed out large sheets of heavy white paper and spread tubs of paint and small brushes out on the tables. “Just paint whatever comes from your heart,” she said before moving on to the other tables.
Ava and I looked at each other and busted out laughing.
“I might have a black, black heart,” Ava said.
“Then it will be a perfect match for mine.”
Ava shook her head. “No way. I may only have two days of memories and fifty-three TV shows under my belt, but I can already tell you’re the cowboy with the white hat on.” She leaned closer to me, and my head spun for a moment with the memory of kissing her. “Speaking of that, whereareall the cowboys? This is Texas, right? Shouldn’t there be cowboys everywhere?”
I laughed so loud the other kids turned to stare. We were alone at our table, thankfully, since we were the oldest by a long shot.
When I finally reined it in, I told her, “You can’t believe everything you see on television.”
“Bummer,” she said. “Cowboys are wild. They shoot first and ask questions later.”
“That’s one way to live,” I said. “But most of us ask plenty of questions.”
“Right. Like about this.” She lifted the bottom of her sweater.
My face heated as I saw the skin of her belly. I didn’t want to stare at it too hard, but there were lines of blurry ink. “What’s that?”
“I wrote it with a marker. It says to trust only this handwriting. It’s how I knew to read the shower curtain.”
“Shower curtain?”
“I have to leave notes where my mother can’t steal them.”
“Why would she do that?”
Ava picked up a brush and started painting a tree. It exactly matched the sample set out on the table. “As far as I can tell, my mother has been controlling my life by what she allows me to relearn after each seizure.”
“That’s terrible.”
