His eyes travel critically to where the hotpants used to be, then snap back to my face. “People change,” he says.
Maybe I became more like Bree. She was always trendy and stylish beside my retro mishmash, with her jet-black hair and striking feline-like features that stopped people dead in their tracks. We had part-time jobs that summer selling flowers in a stall at Paddy’s Markets. A jolt of nostalgia washes over me for simpler times and a life nobody cared about or followed or commented on.
Drew doesn’t seem to care about my high school fashion statements, standing here, hands on hips, staring at the pavement while he contemplates his problem. Our problem.Me, to be exact. He’s definitely that guy you warn your friends about. It’s the unreadable gaze. The volatility—acting all tough and distant one minute but charging your phone, playing your music, and making sure the air vents are pointed squarely at you the next. Bree and I would have a field day analyzing his behavior, but I have more than enough problems without my overactive imagination latching on to James Dean here.
“Where do you want to go?” he asks.
I can’t tell him. It’s way too big a favor to ask.
“Evie?”
This feels like a cross-examination. “I don’t know where to go, because I don’t know who I am now.” Being open with him is probably the shortest way through this conversation. “Listen, Drew, I’ve been diagnosed with a type of amnesia. I remember everything about my life up until I was sixteen, and nothing after, until I woke up in the hospital last week.”
He raises an eyebrow. I knew he wouldn’t believe me. “How is this happening?” he mutters.
“The doctors said it can be a response to trauma,” I start to explain, as if secondhand medical evidence will convince him.
“No, I understand that bit. I mean, how are we here? You and me?” He’s all furrowed brows and irritation.
“You picked me up.”
He uncrosses his arms. “You forced yourself into my car.”
“I thought you were the Uber driver.” I step toward him.
“You’re meant to check the license plate and the driver’s credentials.”
“I’ve never done this before!” I argue, up close to him now, voice shaking, eyes stinging. “And by ‘this’ I meanall of it. It’s like I’ve arrived in a foreign country and don’t understand how anything works. Everything looks the same on the surface, but nothing is exactly like it was.”
There’s no stopping the wave I’ve crested. Burning emotion rises to my throat. It’s the crash I’ve been resisting all week since I woke up and found out just how much of a mess my life had become.
“I have to tread carefully back into my memories, they said. So far, I haven’t even tiptoed. I’m effectively a sixteen-year-old trapped in a twenty-nine-year-old’s body. Like Jennifer Garner in13 Going on 30but without the magic-dust explanation, or the cool magazine career, or the long-suffering childhood love interest hovering reluctantly in the wings.”
He stares at me as if he can’t believe the words exploding out of my mouth, and no wonder.
“And now you want me to tell you where to take me, and it’s just piling even more pressure on an already impossible predicament!”
I’ve never been a delicate crier. I wish I hadn’t thrown my phone into the car. I feel the addictive urge to scroll, again, down the contacts list in case the names I need have reappeared. But they won’t have. There’s not a single person I could reach out to now and fall upon, in my hour of need.
Years of need?
It’s a quiet voice that pushes that thought to the surface. I don’t recognize it. Don’t want to dance with it, either. I can sense the way it wants to pull me into a sinkhole.
Empathy flashes across Drew’s face. A photojournalist’s professional witchcraft, perhaps. He places both hands on the hood of his car and thinks. I hate the fact that I am entirely dependent on this man. No access to money. No ride. No capacity to come up with a workable solution on my own.
“I have nowhere to go,” I confess.When did I become so pathetic?“I can’t go …” The wordhomegets stuck in my throat.
He nods as though he agrees. “Let’s see your phone. We’ll go through it and ring someone.”
I barricade the door. Suddenly, I’m ashamed of how short my contacts list has become. I was never the popular girl at school, but I hadfriends. None of whom I appear to have kept.
“Come on, Evie,” he says, stepping closer as I push my back harder against his car, heart pounding, mouth dry. For a millisecond, trapped between intense brown eyes and the heat of black metal, I feel sheltered from it all. Until he puts a hand on my shoulder, coaxes me aside, unlatches the door, and reaches into the back seat.
“It’s like the list was erased,” I admit quickly as he retrieves the phone. “It’s mainly my husband’s family, and the doctor and dentist and the cleaner and people like that. Oh, and someone called Chloe.”
He reemerges from the car, slams the door again, and stares at me. “Maybe you should be careful who you call from your past.”
“Calling someone was your idea.”
