The Memory Book

by Lara Avery

  In fact, I had no control over my body as it is. My body hated me.

  Maddie had turned up the music as loud as it could go. My mouth tasted like pine trees.

  I started to think of Freud’s theory of the Death Drive, the idea that organisms could oppose the life force intentionally—the idea that evolution could work backward—and instead of loving and living, people could want to destroy themselves. But I happen to know a different kind of way that death can work in people’s lives.

  I know this is dark, Future Sam, but there’s something freeing about thinking about death. Like I didn’t think I was going to die right then in Maddie’s room, and I had no desire to die, but when you realize you’re close to death—when it’s that real—being scared of it, or being scared of even smaller things like people and parties and Stuart Shah; all of that seemed silly.

  I have a bigger, more formidable opponent.

  “Okay,” I said, and Maddie turned around from where she was shimmying across the room. I took the bottle from her and sipped, followed by a chug of seltzer. “I’m doing this. And guess what else?”

  Maddie was punching the air. “What?”

  I stood up. “We’re going to win Nationals.”

  “Yeah! Yeah, we are!”

  I started moving from side to side with her, my best attempt at a dance.

  Then I got a wave of fondness toward Maddie, Future Sammie. A kind of fondness I had only felt before toward my siblings, toward my parents, toward people I trusted. I wasn’t going to find my own way home. And I wasn’t going to be a deadweight, either. As Maddie had said, we needed each other.

  I picked up the cards off the floor and tossed them up in the air. “Do I win?”

  Maddie smiled. Her brown eyes lit up underneath her electric hair. “Everybody wins.”

  ROY, ROY, ROY

  After a few more songs, when I was starting to feel light and warm and sort of pretty, I heard them coming up the stairs, laughing. I unbuttoned my top button. The door opened, and there was Stacia, a pale fairy in overalls, there was Maddie, her hair now dry and alight with red, her lean arms pulling Stacia’s hand, there was Dale, his freckles pulsing, his vintage shirt tucked into polyester, and there was Stuart.

  He wasn’t wearing his usual black. He was in gray—gray jeans and a gray sweatshirt. His skin was darker than I remembered, dark brown, and his black hair was the same, shorn short and old-fashioned.

  “Hey!” he said right away.

  “Hey!” I said. Mimicry, I remember thinking. Just mimic the way everyone is talking and you’ll get by.

  “Hi, Sammie,” Stacia said in her almost-whisper, folding herself on Maddie’s floor.

  “Samantha,” Dale said in a robotic, sort of British voice. “Samantha McCoy, the reigning monarch of Hanover High.”

  “The monarch? What do you mean?” Then, to make it sound nicer, I let out a “ha-ha.”

  “The villa-Victorian!” Dale answered, twirling his fingers.

  The valedictorian. I swallowed my instinct to correct him, and reminded myself what a joke was, and that people made jokes.

  Maddie glanced at me with the trace of a smile and said, “Stu, do you know Sammie?”

  “Not really,” Stuart said, sitting next to Stacia and extending his hand. “I remember you, but I don’t think we ever knew each other.”

  I remember you, he said. I shook his hand. It was the shape and texture of a human hand but it almost burned me.

  “That’s right,” I said, and when I took my hand away, blood was beating through it.

  He was still looking at me. Maddie and Stacia passed around the bottle. Dale went to change the music.

  “Yeah,” he continued, “you were in Ms. Cigler’s class when I was a senior. She read our entire AP class your essay on Huck Finn. She was like, look at this sophomore. Y’all better step up your game.”

  “Huh,” I said, and nodded. I vaguely remember Ms. Cigler asking me for permission to share my essay, but I thought it was just for the other sophomore class. The thought of him admiring my work gave me goose bumps. I wanted to ask him about his writing, or how he liked being back in Hanover, but by the time I had picked which question and started to form the words the correct way, Maddie was passing him the bottle.

  Stacia began to sway to the music, her dangly earrings swooshing. Maddie gave one of them a little tug.

  “Ow!” Stacia said, and laughed. She flicked a spike of Maddie’s Mohawk. Maddie raised her eyebrows at me. I uncrossed my arms.

  Stuart took in Maddie’s room. “Who’s playing?” he asked Maddie.

  “The Knife,” I said before anyone else could answer.

  Stuart nodded with a small smile, a smile like the clerks at the Co-Op give to Mom when she tries to ask them about how their day is going during a rush. Just let me do my job, it said. When his gaze came back to me, just for a second, I jumped on it.

  “You’re in New York?” I asked.

  “Yes. I love it. Maybe a little too much.”

  “Me too,” I said. “I mean, I’ll be there, too, next year.”

  “Oh?”

  “At NYU.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Congratulations.”

  On the end of his words, I couldn’t help it, I got intense. “What do you love about New York?”

  He tilted his head to the side. “God, what a question. I mean, there’s the stuff everyone loves, like the history, the nightlife, whatever. But I have a feeling you want to know about what I, specifically, love about it, and I haven’t thought about that in a long time.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I want to know,” I said, and took a swig. He was matching the intensity. Maybe he didn’t like small talk, either.

  He looked at the ceiling, thinking. He had a long, smooth neck. Finally, he held up his hand, as if he were cradling his answer in his palm. “I love everything and everyone pressed together. I love being on the elevated part of the Q or the N. The windows of the upper stories of buildings are right there, just feet from you, and you’re right there, so close to someone else’s life. Or, like, when people fight or kiss on the subway right next to you. I think I just like being close to other people’s lives.”

  “Without having to mess with them,” I offered.

  He laughed. “Exactly.” Making Stuart laugh was like making something burst open, that satisfying feeling when you pop bubble wrap or bubble gum.

  Right then, Dale jumped up and clapped his hands. “All right, last shots, you winos. I’m ready to head to Nervig’s.”

  In Maddie’s tiny two-door Toyota, as if in a dream, Stuart and I ended up in the back, next to each other. The music blared so we couldn’t talk. Our legs didn’t touch except on turns, when he put his arm around the back part of my seat, saying, “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I said back, and looked out the window, savoring his solidness next to me.

  I would enjoy this while I could. His eyes had wandered. But he had remembered me. I hadn’t asked him the right questions, the flirting questions. But he remembered me. What Stuart said about New York kept bouncing around in my head: the train, sandwiched between lights and buildings and a huge world full of stories.

  At the last stoplight out of Hanover, on the way to Norwich, Dale turned down the music to get directions from Maddie.

  Stuart scooted forward to look out the window and asked, “So, where do you live?”

  I snapped to attention, like a bunny in a garden, hearing a noise. Danger. But this was a good kind of danger.

  “Strafford,” I said, and noticed I couldn’t turn my head without getting unbearably close to his head.

  “And?” he asked as the car eased forward.

  “And?” I repeated, hoping he couldn’t see the huge grin on my face in the dark.

  “What part of Strafford do you love?”

  “Ha!” I let out immediately. “Not much.”

  “Not one thing?”

  I suppose I hadn’t been asked a question
like this in a long time, either. I thought about it, feeling my adrenaline spike, and rolled down the window to catch the air coming off the mountains. It smelled like pine and clouds and like someone nearby was having a fire in their backyard. I loved the scent, but it was more than that, like what the scent was saying—the idea it had smelled like this since the mountains were formed and could still be so fresh. The sensation was hard to communicate, not just to Stuart, but to anyone. I took a deep breath. “This,” I said, and gestured toward the night.

  “Mm,” Stuart answered, closing his eyes as the wind moved through the backseat. The look on his face said he knew exactly what I meant, and the pleasure of being recognized was like fingers tracing my back. “Yes. This is nice,” he said.

  As we wound our way up Ross Nervig’s driveway, we could already hear the bass thumping from the house, past the trees. We parked behind a line of cars and slogged the rest of the way, Dale lighting up a cigarette, Stacia and Maddie linking arms. The house became visible, people perched on the porch railing, in clumps on the lawn, streaming in and out of the giant Colonial on the side of a green slope just like mine. Except ten times bigger. And full of people I didn’t know.

  I started to get nervous again, and tried to make my breathing steady. “Here we go,” I muttered.

  Beside me, Stuart heard. “Parties, right?”

  “Parties,” I echoed, shaking my head, as if I had been to a million parties to the point of shaking my head bemusedly about them.

  He put his hand on my back, just for a moment, and I twitched with surprise. “Don’t worry, it’ll be fun.”

  Was he flirting? Was this flirting? Or was this just regular human interaction? I was dying to ask Maddie, but she was already jogging up the yard, followed by Stacia, leaping onto the back of a friend of hers, laughing as he twirled her around.

  “Stu-ey, Stu-ey, Stu-ey,” the legendary Ross Nervig greeted us from the center of the porch, a mountain man with a full orange beard, holding a Solo cup. “How’s the city, fucker?”

  Stuart joined him. I found a corner and listened, vaguely shaking people’s hands as Dale introduced me.

  From what I could gather as they talked, Ross was in Stuart’s class at Hanover, where he had played rugby until he injured himself senior year. Now he worked for his dad’s contracting business, steadily growing a fan base for his drone music popular among Dartmouth hipsters. An Upper Valley resident for life.

  Stuart, I found out, was here to finish a collection of short stories, and to occupy his parents’ house in Hanover for the summer while they visited family in India.

  “Are you seeing someone?” Ross asked Stuart. “Are you still with that playwright with the hairy legs?”

  My ears almost physically extended across the porch.

  “Not really,” he said.

  Not really does not mean no. It means yes, in a way. Of course he had a girlfriend.

  I shook it off. I scanned the crowd for other people I recognized who I could stare at awkwardly. I had done what I came to do, what Maddie had challenged me to do. I had talked to him.

  But it still didn’t feel like I had won.

  I followed Dale inside, glancing back at Stuart briefly, who caught my eye, but I turned back around. Oh well, oh well, I kept repeating to myself, and looked around the gigantic wooden living room filled with skinny girls taking photos of themselves and baseball players taking photos of themselves. Is that what people do at parties? Stand around and take photos of themselves to prove that they were at a party? I had my laptop with me in my bag, and briefly considered asking Ross for the Wi-Fi password.

  A chair opened up by a bookshelf, but before I could sit, I heard my name through the shrieks and bass.

  “SAMMIE MCCOY!”

  Coop, good ol’ Coop, was pummeling through the bodies with a Solo cup of his own, his dirty blond hair tied up in a sweaty bun.

  “SAMMIE MCCOY!” he shouted again, and now people were following his eyes in my direction. “THE WOMAN OF MY DREAMS.”

  Christ. “A simple hello would suffice,” I muttered.

  I thought of when we were younger, when he used to freak out every time one of our moms made hot dogs. Every hot dog lunch, without fail, Coop would stand on the top of his chair, pumping his fists, and yell, “Hot dogs! Hot dogs! Hot dogs!” as if he had won the lottery. He was an excitable kid.

  He wrapped me in a sour hug. His words were slurring. “Never in my life would I think I would see Samantha Agatha McCoy at a party. Never in my life.”

  “Well, here I am!” I extracted myself. “And you remember my middle name,” I added, but he didn’t hear.

  “Do you know,” he started saying to me, then directing it to the crowd. “Do you know, that I have wanted to get drunk with this girl my whole life?”

  “What a coincidence,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “My whole life,” he said, almost solemnly. “This girl is my childhood friend. We’re from the same mountain,” he told a disinterested junior with a nose piercing nearby. “My childhood friend!” he repeated, and took me by the shoulders, his navy eyes wide.

  “It’s good to see you, too, Coop.” I smiled.

  I noticed Stuart and Ross coming through the front door, and I took a step backward.

  Coop kept going. “And the first time we talk in fucking years you tell me you’re sick!”

  “Whoa,” I said, and put a finger to my lips.

  “Oh,” Coop said, imitating me, finger to his lips. “Okay.” I wasn’t sure I was imagining it, but his eyes looked almost watery, as if he was about to cry.

  “I don’t want to tell people quite yet,” I said low to him. I was not looking at Stuart, but I knew he was still there, because I was finding out that when someone who you like touches you, you become connected to their body in an echolocation sort of way, and when they get closer, as Stuart was, my body also began to get warmer.

  “But you told me,” Coop said, way too loudly, a weird pride behind it.

  “Yeah, and now I’m wondering why,” I said off to the side.

  “Don’t be like that,” he said.

  “Coop!” someone yelled. A girl I can only assume was Hot Katie made a beeline toward us. Her long, tan legs fell from tight, acid-washed shorts, and her flat stomach sparkled with drops of sweat or beer or some other liquid under a crop top. I watched Coop’s eyes, and everyone else’s eyes for that matter, travel her body. I knew she didn’t do it on purpose, but girls like her made me feel like garbage. Like, what’s even the point with girls like her around.

  “Coop.” Hot Katie propped herself on his shoulder, and whispered into his ear, giggling. “Come with me,” she said, and they went. It was that easy? It was that easy. Oak trees belong with other oak trees.

  I could see Stacia and Maddie sharing a chair in the room next to ours, their legs entangled.

  I picked up a book called Anagrams and started to read. I felt someone’s eyes on me and looked up. Stuart. I held up the book like someone would hold up a glass. Cheers. Parties, right? Ha-ha. It’s not that I don’t know what to do or say it’s just that I’ve been to so many parties that I’m tired of them and would rather read this book ha-ha so don’t worry about me I’ll just be here.

  Then he walked toward me. I stared back down at the book, my eyes unmoving, but somehow I knew that he had just sidestepped a chair, had said excuse me to a girl who was dancing, and now he was here, next to me. He picked out a book of his own, a hardcover called The Writing Life.

  “Hey,” he said, thumbing through the pages.

  “Hey,” I said, reading the same sentence over and over again, my skin burning through my clothes.

  “Ross’s parents have a good book collection.”

  “Thankfully,” I said, and we both laughed a little.

  “Giving up this early, huh?”

  Instead of answering, I chugged my drink. And that was when I realized why the art of small talk eluded me. When I had a purpose, I could ask and
answer questions to break someone down. When I had no purpose, I hit a wall. I was tired of the wall. An idea, or maybe an impetus, or maybe I was just mimicking the Hot Katies of the world; anyway, something grew.

  His beautiful eyebrows began to furrow, wondering.

  When I want something, I want it. And I wanted Stuart Shah.

  I looked at him straight in his deep, black, beautiful eyes and said, “I want you to know that I have always had an enormous crush on you.”

  And I put the book back on the shelf and left.

  WHICH KIND OF TREE AM I—AM I EVEN IN THE FOREST?

  And now I’m here, sitting on the hood of Maddie’s car, giggling to myself in the dark. I can’t believe I actually just said that to Stuart Shah. I feel like what a superhero must feel like. I feel like I can hear everything, see everything, still feel the vibrating air between us and the snap of the book in my hand as I shut it and the edge of his sleeve I brushed as I left. I can’t remember when I felt such a rush.

  Probably when we found out we had gotten a good enough score to qualify for Nationals. Or, no, maybe when Mrs. Townsend told me that I was in the running to be valedictorian.

  Oh god, I was reckless.

  I was reckless but I feel like I won. Maddie told me to be brave, and I was.

  And funnily enough, Future Sam, when I did it, I thought of you. I thought of you looking back on me in that moment and watching me melt into the background, or go home and feel sorry for myself, and I got angry.

  If you are me later, let’s say… next year, after you’ve had your first successful term at college, I want you to be fucking cool. And not just cool as in a perfect, happy image of someone having a perfect time, the kind of stuff that I see in the photos people share at parties like this one, not a person defined by the captions you paste on your life. I think people fake that they’re having fun a lot of the time in photos, because they want people to think they’re having fun. Well, that’s not life, is it?

  Sometimes life is really terrible. Sometimes life gives you a weird disease.

  Sometimes life is really good, but never in a simple sort of way.