And then I realize I can’t remember my parents’ faces.
Terror barrels through me.
“What’s wrong?”
Aaron’s voice is so sharp—so intense—that I look up, startled. He’s staring at me from across the room, the fear on his face reflected in the mirrors on his closet doors.
“What’s wrong?” he says again. “Are you okay?”
“I— I don’t—” I falter, feeling my eyes refill with tears. I hate that I keep crying. Hate that I can’t stop crying. “I can’t remember my parents,” I say. “Is that normal?”
Aaron walks over, sits next to me on his bed. “I don’t know,” he says.
We’re both quiet for a while. Somehow, it helps. Somehow, just sitting next to him makes me feel less alone. Less terrified.
Eventually, my heart stops racing.
After I’ve wiped away my tears, I say, “Don’t you get lonely, being homeschooled all the time?”
He nods.
“Why won’t your dad let you go to a normal school?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about birthday parties?” I ask. “Who do you invite to your birthday parties?”
Aaron shrugs. He’s staring into his hands when he says, “I’ve never had a birthday party.”
“What? Really?” I turn to face him more fully. “But birthday parties are so fun. I used to—” I blink, cutting myself off.
I can’t remember what I was about to say.
I frown, trying to remember something, something about my old life, but when the memories don’t materialize, I shake my head to clear it. Maybe I’ll remember later.
“Anyway,” I say, taking a quick breath, “you have to have a birthday party. Everyone has birthday parties. When is your birthday?”
Slowly, Aaron looks up at me. His face is blank even as he says, “April twenty-fourth.”
“April twenty-fourth,” I say, smiling. “That’s great. We can have cake.”
The days pass in a stifled panic, an excruciating crescendo toward madness. The hands of the clock seem to close around my throat and still, I say nothing, do nothing.
I wait.
Pretend.
I’ve been paralyzed here for two weeks, stuck in the prison of this ruse, this compound. Evie doesn’t know that her plot to bleach my mind failed. She treats me like a foreign object, distant but not unkind. She instructed me to call herEvie, told me she was my doctor, and then proceeded to lie, in great detail, about how I’d been in a terrible accident, that I’m suffering from amnesia, that I need to stay in bed in order to recover.
She doesn’t know that my body won’t stop shaking, that my skin is slick with sweat every morning, that my throat burns from the constant return of bile. She doesn’t know what’s happening to me. She could never understand the sickness plaguing my heart. She couldn’t possibly understand this agony.
Remembering.
The attacks are relentless.
Memories assault me while I sleep, jolting me upright, my chest seizing in panic over and over and over until, finally, I meet dawn on the bathroom floor, the smell of vomit clinging to my hair, the inside of my mouth. I can only drag myself back to bed every morning and force my face to smile when Evie checks on me at sunrise.
Everything feels wrong.
