The Memory Book

by Lara Avery

  I had just finished my calculus homework, and Stuart walked up right as I closed the textbook. He was wearing his usual black and sunglasses. He walked quickly.

  “Sammie!” he said. “Hi!”

  I stood, shoving my work into my bag. “Hey.”

  When he was close enough to touch, he stopped. He took off his sunglasses, and I could tell he was looking at my dress. I followed his eyes, hoping I hadn’t spilled something on it. When we met each other’s gaze again, he seemed nervous.

  “It’s been a while,” he said.

  “A week,” I said.

  He smiled. I smiled back.

  “What do you want to do?” he asked.

  “Walk somewhere?”

  “Yeah.”

  And then we couldn’t shut up. We walked close, arms touching sometimes, first along the footpaths, then in town, Stuart waving occasionally to people he knew. He asked questions one after the other, like a nice reporter. What schools did you face? Where did you stay? Had you been to Boston before?

  When I told him about the loss (leaving out some possibly pertinent details), I could see him wince. He put his hand briefly around my shoulders and squeezed, which sent a confusing combination to my gut: a punch that would happen whenever I thought about the loss, along with a fluttering that happened whenever any part of Stuart’s body got within six inches of my body.

  “That sounds terrible,” he said, and told me about how on the last night of his run of Hamlet, he forgot an entire soliloquy. “On the last night! I’d done it a thousand times!”

  “I didn’t hear about that,” I said, trying to remember if I actually hadn’t.

  “Yeah, because no one noticed.”

  “No?” I asked.

  “Nope! And even if they did, they wouldn’t have cared.”

  “You just went on with the show?”

  “Yep, and no one was the wiser. But I’ll remember it forever. Because I failed.”

  “Yeah. I’ll remember the debate tournament forever, too.” I think, I remember adding silently.

  Stuart and I moved out of the way for two Dartmouth students skateboarding down the sidewalk. “Maybe we depend too much on other people for what we think of as success,” Stuart offered. “Like, maybe we share too much. Maybe that’s why good things lose their good feeling because we give it all away.”

  “As in, success can’t just be when people notice you.”

  “Right. That’s the funny thing about caring about stuff as much as we do,” he said. “We have to get used to the idea that no one cares as much as us, because guess what, they don’t. Succeed, fail, whatever, no one is going to give you a pat on the back for spending all hours of the day studying, or researching, or giving up everything to write. So we’ve got to just do it for ourselves.”

  By the time his speech was over, Stuart was standing in the middle of the sidewalk. He could never seem to walk and talk at the same time, especially if he was passionate about the subject. It was cute.

  Then I realized he was contradicting himself. “But you did get a pat on the back!” I said. “You’re published!”

  He stopped walking again, and this time he was more serious. “But what if I hadn’t been published?”

  “You…” I swallowed. “Yeah, all you would have to fall back on is whatever you liked about what you did.”

  “Exactly. And I would probably be working twice as hard now,” he muttered.

  “I know what you mean,” I replied. I thought of Mom and Dad, and that awful phrase, recognize your limitations. Maybe what he was saying went the other way, too. All the limitations Mom and Dad were talking about were just the limitations put on me by other people. I was going for my own goals.

  We continued walking, quiet. Heavy stuff, I guess.

  I had gone in trying to keep it super casual, Future Sam. Like rel-a-a-a-xed. No big deal. But that wasn’t me. And I wanted to melt with relief to discover that it wasn’t him, either.

  He broke the silence with, “What are you reading?” and of course, the flow was back, because I’m reading a book about this amazing alternative to capitalism called “heterodox economics,” which basically says that economics as we know it is tied to… oh, wait. Sorry. Anyway.

  We stopped for iced coffee and sat on the grass on the Dartmouth campus. I saw the spring-clad bodies everywhere and thought of that SAT word, languid.

  “So how do you get around New York?” I asked.

  “If I have time, I just walk everywhere. The subway is only faster if you have to go between boroughs.”

  “Really? That doesn’t seem physically possible.”

  He put up his hands in surrender. “Okay, that’s not always true. I just like walking.”

  “But you’re able to get everywhere on time?”

  “I don’t have a very, uh, strict schedule.”

  “You just write all day?”

  He squinted, almost as if it were painful that I asked. “I try. I also work as a barback a couple nights a week at this place downtown. Basically it’s just wearing all black and listening to rich people’s conversations, so it’s ideal. It’s what I would do anyway,” he said, and laughed.

  Stuart did an impression of a snobby woman ordering a cocktail. “And make sure the lime juice comes from a locally sourced lime tree, I don’t care if limes don’t grow here.”

  “And the ice is from a glacial stream…” I added.

  “And the glass from a Swedish glassblower…”

  We laughed so hard I snorted.

  I was feeling the echolocation again, the waves of energy coming off his body as he leaned on the earth while I remained upright, conscious of the shaving nicks on my bare legs.

  His nose, straight except for one bump near the end, where he must have broken it.

  He has a freckle on his collarbone.

  He gave me a sip of his iced coffee and I just did it, I just put my mouth on the straw, and he didn’t care.

  I am learning:

  There is no secret language, Future Sam, that you have to speak in order to talk to someone you like. You just talk to them. Bonus points if they can speak intelligently about life and work and the best coffee shops in Manhattan.

  I had imagined Stuart moving down the sidewalks of New York with his long strides, passing everyone, head down, thinking of settings and dialogue and characters, but here he was now, very different. Softer. More relaxed.

  And maybe there might be a softer version of myself, too.

  You don’t have to be a robot, Future Sam. What you’re doing doesn’t have to be going toward something. Sometimes you can stop, or at least pause. Sometimes you can just be.

  Anyway, eventually Stuart had to leave to work at the Canoe Club, where he was picking up a couple of bartending shifts while he was back in Hanover.

  We stood up.

  He looked at me for a long time with those wet black eyes, and bent slowly toward my face. Oh my god, he was getting very close. Radioactive burns imminent. I gasped.

  He stepped back quickly. “Sorry. Can I kiss you on the cheek?” he asked.

  “Is that standard?” I asked, and immediately blushed.

  “Standard for what?” he asked.

  “A standard good-bye for what we… for what just happened?” Remember how you had just decided that you don’t have to be a robot?

  He didn’t answer right away. Now he was nervous. He played with the hair on the back of his head, looking around. “What just happened?”

  “I mean, what we did today. Hanging out.”

  “Uh…” Stuart tried to hold in a smile. He shrugged, looking off into the distance, then looked at me. “We don’t have to categorize it.”

  “Let’s categorize it,” I said quickly, and waited. Stuart opened his mouth, puzzling, and I felt guilty, briefly, for pushing him, but then I didn’t. A kiss without context or meaning is the kiss equivalent of small talk. And what would happen if he didn’t want to categorize it, and just ran away forever a
nd didn’t talk to me? I’d go back to my work, to my little room above the attic, pining for him from afar. Big deal. I’m used to it. What else is new? “Sorry,” I continued. “I just have too much up in the air right now to fuck around.”

  “You do not…” he said, laughing, shaking his head. “You do not fuck around.”

  He put on his sunglasses against the setting sun, and the lenses lit up with two blazing spheres. He took one of my hands with both his hands and said, “I want to kiss you on the cheek because I think we had a nice date.”

  Date. Date. I nodded in agreement.

  He bent again and pressed his lips on my cheek, barely an inch from my own lips—one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three—and let go.

  UUGGHHGHGHGHGGGGHHHHHH

  Then the other shoe drops. When I got home, an email from Mrs. Townsend dinged on my phone:

  Sammie,

  I was sorry to hear about your debate loss. Don’t sweat it, kid! Hope you are healthy and rested. I also wanted you to know: Though they are not aware of specifics, I have informed your teachers of extenuating circumstances, and I have asked them to come directly to me with any issues or concerns.

  I know you’ve got a heavy load these days, so I wanted to make you aware of the following assignments you may have missed over Nationals week:

  AP Chem

  • Chapter 14–15 Review

  • Chapter 16 Review

  • Chapter 14–16 PreTest

  Ceramics

  • bowl with glaze

  As we approach the end of the year, especially finals, please let me know how I can help. TAKE YOUR TIME.

  And come visit me. I miss you.

  —Mrs. T

  How did I miss those due dates? They were written down on my calendar, on this very computer, on the same desktop as this very document. Green for biology, blue for AP Lit, orange for AP Euro, brown for ceramics, and yellow for chemistry. It’s right fucking there! I’m looking at them so hard they’re burning a hole in my retina!

  This is freaky. I do not like this.

  I followed the path of each color through the days left on the calendar—just a few weeks—and double recorded each assignment and test coming up, once on my computer, once in my planner.

  After I was finished, I noticed a new color, bright purple, an hour every day on the week leading up to graduation. On the day I graduate, it takes up the entire calendar.

  It reads Valedictorian speech.

  I flashback to my parents’ whispers, Agreed, and wondered how many inches I had taken in the long mile toward making them believe. Was I really fooling anyone? I picture blinking against the lights as I come through the Sheraton blackness, Maddie looking at me, angry, and the fear so cutting I want to cry.

  I could blow the whole thing in a second, and if I do, NYU is gone.

  Shit.

  ALTERNATIVE RESOURCES, PHASE ONE

  So I was in the corner of the ceramics studio, skipping lunch, scraping and kneading the hell out of wet clay, sweating with the effort. My chemistry homework was open on a stool next to me. I was pausing every few seconds to write the answers, then going back to molding this godforsaken bowl, which at this point looks more like the alcoholic cousin of a bowl, loopy and friendly and just not functional at all, like my dad’s cousin Tim, who at family gatherings always asks me when I’m going to put my brain to good use and go on Jeopardy! and win him some money; reason #5,666 why I need to keep said brain intact and get the hell out of here.

  Anyway, in walked Coop, shutting the door behind him. He pulled out a Baggie and a pack of Zig Zag rolling papers from his back pocket.

  “Sammie?”

  I turned off the wheel. “Yeah, what are you doing?”

  “Hey,” he said, not answering, and he giggled and walked over. In addition to the pocket for weed paraphernalia, Coop’s Carhartts had another back pocket for a folded-up notebook, and in the side pocket, a row of mechanical pencils.

  “Nice storage facility,” I said, pointing at his pants with a muddy finger.

  He sat across from me, pulling a stool between his legs, and began to work, hunched over like a craftsman, delicately pinching and sprinkling little green stubs. A strand of his hair fell in his eyes and he blew it back, brow furrowed. “Yeah,” he muttered. “Backpacks get too hot this time of year.”

  “Were you really just coming in here to roll a J?”

  “It’s my lunch routine,” he said, licking the edge of the paper with a shrug. “Then I saw you. So. What are you doing?”

  “Catching up.”

  “Oh, from Nationals, huh.”

  “How did you know?”

  “You told me that night at church. Plus, everyone was talking about it. I mean, not that you lost, but everyone was like, whoa, we went to Nationals in debate? People get excited about that stuff. I was bragging, like, ‘I know that girl.’”

  I laughed. Coop rolled the impeccable little cylinder between his fingertips.

  “But now I’m screwed.” I pointed to my chem homework, also muddy. “Not screwed, but. You remember…” I paused, wondering if we should get into this again. But Coop hadn’t told anyone after I had asked him to keep it quiet at the party. Which was nice. “You know how part of the disease is memory loss?”

  “Yeah,” Coop said. “How is that going? Are you okay?”

  “I forgot all these assignments. I never forget assignments. Never. And now I’m scared I will forget stuff during a test, or forget my speech at graduation, or…”

  Coop smiled a lazy smile, and put the joint behind his ear. “So you’re worried you’re going to be normal.”

  I gave him a little punch. “No…”

  “Those are all the things I worry about, all the time.”

  I considered that for a minute, and glanced at the joint. “Yeah, but you could just, I don’t know, stop smoking so much?”

  He looked up at the ceiling, pretending to think, and back at me, shrugging. “But if the valedictorian is worrying about the same shit, then what’s the point?”

  Then I had an idea. “Can I ask you something?”

  Coop leaned on the stool with his forearms and looked at me like there was nothing else in the world he’d rather do than answer my question. “Shoot, Samantha.”

  “How do you get by in school without flunking?”

  “Hmm,” he said, drumming his fingertips on his biceps.

  “I mean, how do you make sure you pass even when you’re, like…” I glanced at the joint again. “Mentally altered?”

  “Well, first of all, I don’t just ‘get by.’ I get okay grades.”

  “I know.”

  “How do you know?” he asked, and it had been a while since I saw Coop’s surprised face. Probably since we were kids.

  “I always look for the names of people I know on the honor roll.”

  “Oh.” Coop started in again. Granted, he probably was high, but he was also going deep. “Well, I don’t ‘do’ a lot of ‘work.’” He held up quotation symbols. “I learn what needs to be learned, which is mostly how to effectively communicate that I have learned something, without actually learning it. Do you follow?”

  “I do.” I watched this side of Coop with fascination—it was far from the stoner, “I don’t give a crap” person I had assumed he had turned into since we stopped being friends.

  “For example,” he continued. “With your memory thing. I don’t memorize things. That takes too much time. Instead, I set up opportunities for… alternative resources. Like phones, or makeup tests, or other kind souls who happen to be near me.”

  As he spoke, I thought of the colors on my calendar bleeding together, all the dates, all the assignments, all the moments that I might look away from my paper and look back to see nothing but numbers or words that meant nothing to me, having no one to reach out to and call “time-out,” flubbing test after test until they let me graduate out of pity.

  Coop was still leaning forward, watching me formulate. �
��What is that look on your face?” he asked.

  “Can you show me this stuff?”

  “What stuff?”

  “All these alternative resources you have.”

  He tilted his head. “Are you asking me how to cheat?”

  I sighed. I didn’t want to say yes, but as Mom always says, “Call a spade a spade.” I have tried doing it the old way, Future Sam, the honest way, where I work hard, and study, and memorize, and look where that got me. Plus, it’s just two weeks out of four years. The morality scale is still tipped in my favor, right?

  “Yes.”

  Coop smiled and winked, and sure, at that moment, I could see why girls wanted him to be the foundation to their human pyramid.

  “Okay,” he said, sliding each tool back into its rightful pocket. “Come over whenever.”

  A SCENE FROM PROVINCIAL LIFE: IN WHICH MOM SWITCHES TEAMS (FOR NOW)

  Mom is doling out spaghetti in heaping bowls while I take notes on José Saramago’s Blindness for AP Lit and try not to think about how Maddie was still giving me the silent treatment at school. Dad’s on his way home from work. Harrison is taking his computer time. Bette is under the table, cutting out construction paper shapes for god knows what. Davy is also under the table, playing a game she likes to call “Little Mermaid,” where she wears one of Mom’s bras, collects all the forks, and doesn’t talk, only gestures at things with wide eyes unless you pour water into her mouth.

  Davy tugs on my jeans, pointing at her bowl of spaghetti, then at Mom near the stove, and then at me.

  “What?” I ask. “That’s your spaghetti.”

  She points at mine, which is covered in sauce, and shakes her head.

  “Oh, no sauce?”

  She nods fervently.

  “Mom,” I say. “Davy wants to make sure you don’t put sauce on her spaghetti.”

  “I don’t play Little Mermaid,” Mom says, sitting down to dig in. “Not after the toilet incident.”

  Once, Davy had been so committed to Little Mermaid, she wouldn’t tell Harrison where the toothpaste was, so he splashed her with water from the toilet. Davy looked at me with pleading eyes.