I feel Katy’s body go rigid beside me. Her arm over my shoulder becomes wooden. After a second, she slips it off and puts her hands in her lap.
“Oh my God,” she whispers. “Oh my God.”
“I know,” I say. “I went there yesterday to ask if they could help with my memory lapses and not being able to sleep.”
She looks at me, surprised, all color drained from her face. “You said it was better—that you were sleeping. That you weren’t seeing him anymore.”
“I lied,” I tell her sheepishly.
“Oh God, Addie.” She says it over and over, under her breath.
“Iknow,” I say, and I want to reach across and hug her again because she understands. Because she’s my best friend and the only person I could tell this to—tell that my whole life has been a lie—and she’ll understand how much it hurts, how awful everything feels.
“Anyway, I think Bus Boy is related to Overton and to Rory. I thought for a second that maybe he was my brother, but he can’t be. He’s too old and they look nothing alike.”Also, I think I like him.I’m rambling now, only vaguely aware of Katy turning white as a sheet beside me. “So now I think maybe he got erased along with Rory when I was eleven. I mean, I could be wrong. Maybe I have brain damage from the crash. Maybe it is a Psychological Episode and I’ve imagined up some guy, but I don’t think that’s what this is. He feels familiar. I think I’m remembering him.”
“Addie,” Katy says, and when I look at her, I see that she is weeping now, the kind of crying where you can’t draw in enough breath. I’m confused because I know she’s shocked about everything I just told her, but that can’t explain her reaction.
“What’s wrong?” I ask her.
She’s shaking her head, struggling to find words and air. But finally both start to tumble out. “I told you to let me go to my mom. Oh God, Addie. You made me promise. I didn’t know about Rory. Obviously, you didn’t, either. I n-n-never would have let you if I’d known. We thought it was the f-f-first time. You wanted it to get over what happened.”
She’s saying words, stuttering them, but not one is making sense. I grab her arm to calm her down.
“What are you talking about, Katy?”
“We didn’t know, Addie,” she’s saying now, bawling again. “We didn’t know you’d had it done before.”
“I don’t understand,” I say, even as some of her words are starting to catch like burs on socks.
We didn’t know.
We thought it was the first time.
“I don’t understand,” I say again.
Katy takes a deep breath and looks at me.
“We went back, Addie,” she says, her words and voice finally clear. “You had the procedure done again.”
BEFORE
Early August
“Addie, what do you know about goldfish?” Zach asks, in lieu of saying hello, when I pick up the phone.
“Don’t they forget everything? Or is that a myth?” I ask.
“I think that’s a myth,” Zach says. It’s around eleven-thirty in the morning. I’ve just come back from today’s viola lesson and quickly fallen into a William Primrose wormhole. Most of the recordings online are fairly old because he died in the 1980s, but he’s probably the most expressive violist I’ve ever heard. He plays the way you use your fingers or vocal cords, thoughtlessly, naturally, like his viola is part of his body. I would kill for his dexterity. Even after all these years, playing is hard for me. The easier I need a piece to sound, the harder I have to work on it. But it’s worth it, if only for that moment I can play the piece all the way through without thinking about technical things and lose myself in the music completely.
“Well,” I say now, trying to unwind from practice mode and answer Zach’s question. “They’re gold. They’re fish. Freshwater, I think. And you have one.”
Zach sighs. “Had,” he says. “He was floating at the top of the fish tank, just, like,sitting there,when I woke up this morning. I tapped on the glass, trying to wake him up, and then used the net to nudge him, and that didn’t work. His gills aren’t moving. Also, his eyes are this weird concave shape and gray, which they never used to be. I looked online and those are all the signs.”
“That sucks,” I say. “He seemed…like a good fish.”
“Oh, he was terrible,” Zach says. “We actually started out with him and another fish—a yellow molly called Molly. But Goldie ate him within, like, six hours of both of them being brought home.”
“Oh my God,” I laugh. “Still. That sucks.”
