The Museum of Us

by Tara Wilson Redd

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Tara Wilson Redd

  Cover sky background art by Shutterstock

  Cover couple photograph © 2018 by Stephen Carroll/Trevillion Images

  Cover design by Whitney Manger

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Wendy Lamb Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Wendy Lamb Books and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: Redd, Tara Wilson, author.

  Title: The museum of us / Tara Wilson Redd.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Wendy Lamb Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, [2018] | Summary: “Sixteen-year-old Sadie is lucky to survive an accident, but it changes her world forever when it reveals her secret life and the mysterious, thrilling boy at the center of it.” — Provided by publisher. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017028438 (print) | LCCN 2017040127 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-5247-6689-4 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-5247-6687-0 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-1-5247-6688-7 (lib. bdg.) | ISBN 978-1-5247-6690-0 (pbk.)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Medical care—Fiction. | Hospitals—Fiction. | Imaginary friends—Fiction. | Psychotherapy—Fiction. | Mental illness—Fiction. | Automobile accidents—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.R3998 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.1.R3998 Mus 2018 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9781524766894

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Boy Who Left

  Day 1

  Occlumency

  Day 2

  The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black

  Day 3

  The Burrow

  Day 4

  The Marauder’s Map

  Day 5

  A Place to Hide

  Day 8

  Will and Won’t

  Day 9

  The Riddle House

  Day 12

  The Only One She Ever Feared

  Day 13

  The Final Hiding Place

  Day 14

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  For my parents, David and Tina

  For Alexander, always

  George’s blue eyes captured her. They were dark as the deep blue sea and Sadie was adrift under a starless night. No going back now.

  Sadie turned the ignition key and revved her truck, Old Charlotte, to life. The air-conditioning raised goose bumps on her skin. It was one hundred degrees outside but she was cold. She checked her phone one last time: two texts—one from Lucie and one from Henry—and a voice mail from her parents. George rustled the maps in his lap and raised an eyebrow at her, so she tossed her phone into the glove compartment. George grabbed her wrist and kissed the palm of her hand, closing the glove box with the toe of his impeccably shined shoe.

  It had taken her three tries, private lessons, and eight months to get her license. Being behind the wheel was still strange and exciting and scary.

  She glanced at his maps. The whole pile was marked with red Sharpie. “Anyone with a true sense of adventure knows how to read a map. You have to imagine the world that goes with it,” George had told her. “GPS is the death of imagination.” So they’d spent last night lying side by side on the filthy basement rug dreaming up interesting destinations. They’d lost themselves in more exotic fantasies in Sadie’s many purloined atlases—Rio, Morocco, and always, always Moscow—but they weren’t going to be driving to Russia in a beat-up Ford F100, no matter how beautifully her parents had restored their truck, dear Old Charlotte.

  The limits of reality turned dreams back into paper maps. Even with a car, you couldn’t really escape. Mapped out, the landmarks of Sadie’s life made such a small circle: her parents’ repair shop, Henry’s house, the library, school. She would be a senior in the fall, but that didn’t expand her life into unknown territory. The colleges she hoped to visit in the fall were in-state. A tiny world.

  George had seen her disappointment. He’d tried to make it better. Even in St. Louis, with George there were adventures. “Let me give you one perfect day,” he had begged, and he’d drawn their adventure right there on the map. He circled destination after destination, linking them with one red line. “A bright red line toward destiny,” he had called it.

  And now they were on that red line.

  George slid on his Clubmasters, the dark lenses a villainous mask. He smiled and looked away, eighteen years of cultivated cool settling into a leather seat. His smile destroyed her. He didn’t have to grow up to be someone; he already was someone.

  Sadie put on her Ray-Ban knockoffs. On the floor, her polka-dot backpack was filled with snacks and books and her still-shiny driver’s license. The backpack sat between George’s black shoes, his black briefcase nestled beside it, holding whatever mysteries he’d packed away with his imported cigarettes. Old Charlotte was rumbling in anticipation, but Sadie gripped the steering wheel with clammy hands, her foot on the brake, toeing the clutch.

  A night of maps had seemed so far away from this plan.

  George put his hand on the steering wheel over hers. “To seek and find?”

  His voice washed away all doubt.

  “To seek and find,” she replied, putting the truck in gear with an audible creak.

  It was easy. Time slipped by them, unnoticed. The radio was broken, but it didn’t matter. George told her stories. He sang Beatles songs—at least, the parts he could remember, making up the rest. She didn’t care. Nothing could ruin this day.

  As the sun climbed the sky, they settled into the comfortable silence of the oldest of friends. They split a burger and milk shake. They stopped at the art museum, the history museum, the zoo. There was a whole world in Forest Park. Back in the truck, George fell asleep as Sadie drove home under a perfect sunset, his long legs buckled under him like a contortionist. He smelled like cigarettes and bourbon and looked so much like a little boy.

  I will never love anyone this much, thought Sadie, stealing glances at him as he slept. She retreated into that thought and fell into the memories of him, into their inseparable future together.

  She didn’t even see the tree.

  Moments passed like snapshots being thrown into the trash:

  The summer light filtered through green oak leaves.

  The drip of a melted pink milk shake falling sideways.

  The crushed door papered with bloodied maps.

  The shimmer of blue broken glass diamonds.

  The bone sticking out of her leg.

  The empty seat beside her.

  * * *

  Sadie was alone. The taste of blood faded and was replaced with the certainty that she was dying. She felt like she was seeing the world from the bottom of the oce
an. She couldn’t hear herself screaming, though she knew she was. All she could hear was the icy note of tragedy, like the dead sound people hear after a bomb.

  Then she wasn’t alone. People, strangers, were all around her. Hands were on her face, and more hands tied her down. But she needed to sit up. She needed to find him. She closed her eyes tight and when she opened them, she was in a different place. Am I dreaming, or dead? she thought in a panic. Lights went by and blinded her. Everyone was talking. She could tell they were trying to talk to her, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  An emergency room, she realized. She tried to get up and run, but her legs wouldn’t obey. She was trapped.

  “George,” she said, over and over. “Where is George?”

  Today is Day 1 of my captivity.

  I add “Day 1” right at the top of the page. I stop. I don’t know what else to write. My thoughts wander, and my pen makes a kind of out-of-control swirl right below the words until it runs off the page.

  Dr. Roberts gave me this notebook. I’m supposed to write my thoughts in it. I told her: “Fine. In exchange I will get my phone back.”

  Dr. Roberts just shrugged. She knows my phone is in a million pieces in what remains of Old Charlotte (may she rest in peace).

  I knew that too, but I didn’t want to give away something for nothing. That’s not what a spy would do. But that’s how this started; otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this down at all.

  I try to focus. I stare hard at the paper. Thoughts are nothing. Writing it down makes it real.

  I just want to get out of here. This is all a stupid mistake.

  I haven’t even filled one sheet of paper yet. There are pages and pages between me and freedom.

  If today is Day 1, then yesterday was Day Zero: kind of like the zero point, which is the point of detonation of a nuclear bomb. The zero point can be in the air, underwater, in outer space, wherever. When something blows up, the zero point is where it happens. From there, you can measure out in concentric circles and look at the impact. The farther away you go, the less impact there is.

  But time isn’t like space, exactly. And the thing about “trauma” (which is what everyone keeps calling my accident) is that it’s not a bomb that blows up once. Just thinking about it brings it back again and again. You can be years from Day Zero and find yourself right back at the point of origin. Unlike a bomb in space, a bomb in time has a gravitational pull. It bends time, taking you with it. I was in a car crash yesterday, and I was in a car crash five years ago. These things have nothing to do with each other, and I’ve explained that, but I can understand how it might look like they do. I don’t even remember the other crash. Not really. But people want to find patterns. Reasons why.

  I look down. My pen is resting on the page.

  I’m supposed to be writing. What have I been doing?

  Thinking. When I’m thinking I’m completely lost.

  Well, this is an awful start to a journal. I suck at diaries because I have nothing to put in them. I’ve thrown away every journal I’ve ever written in because they were worthless. I’m always so embarrassed to have thought that my life was worth writing about that I rip out the pages, burn them with a lighter, and then bury the hollow shell in a trash can in Blackburn Park so maybe it can have some peace while it decomposes far away from me. And I think maybe if someone found the empty shell of a journal sitting with all those brown bagged bottles in a park trash can, they might pick it up and wonder what it held: first my Hogwarts crest one, then my purple one with the little heart lock, then the one I had in ninth grade that said SADIE in gold on the front. People have been giving me journals my whole life, and I’ve failed to live up to every single one.

  Right now I’m writing in this floppy green one-subject Mead notebook Dr. Roberts pulled out of her briefcase full of the lives of other people. It’s different paper but the same old story. See, if you found one of my gutted journals and wondered what important secrets had been ripped out of it, you’d just be furthering the illusion that someone important wrote in it. Even throwing away my journals is just one more way that I’m a big melodramatic liar, trying to make something sound important that isn’t.

  I know the truth: nothing was ever in that journal at all, because nothing was ever in that life at all.

  I pick up my pen.

  Here are the three most interesting things about me, Sadie Black:

  1) I was homeschooled until middle school because my parents traveled a lot for car shows, because

  2) Said parents were formerly local radio celebrities (emphasis on local) with a show about antique cars and antique music, which is ironic because

  3) Five years ago they were driving one of said antique cars and listening to said antique music when we got in the car accident that made the local news.

  See? In the grand scheme of the universe, I’m pretty boring. I’m not even a National Honor Society member. I’m writing in this worthless little journal because my worthless little self crashed a worthless little truck for no reason into nothing. (Actually into a tree. The tree was real.)

  How’s that for melodrama?

  Melodramas were a popular type of film in the golden age of Hollywood. They are usually defined as exaggerated films that play on the emotions of the audience, often with stereotyped characters: an evil doctor, oblivious parents, a knight in shining armor, young lovers destined for doomed love. They made loads of money because women absolutely adored them. They were sometimes even called women’s weepies. Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, and my favorite, Now, Voyager, are all melodramas.

  I love melodrama because you don’t mean it, and then you do. It’s ridiculous, and then it’s not. You think you’re laughing at it, and then you’re crying. Being sixteen is a melodrama (she thinks, melodramatically).

  Do I mean it, or don’t I? I don’t even know. I don’t know if I’m the person in my head or the mask I wear to get by in the real world.

  I try one last time:

  I feel like nothing and all of this is about nothing and no one will ever read it.

  I feel all the anger, the bad things, rising out of the past and down into my fingertips. I press hard into the page.

  Except you, Dr. Roberts. I know you’re reading this. You specifically said that you wouldn’t, but I bet anything you are. I know how these things work. Stay out of my notebook.

  * * *

  If I weren’t so angry, I would rescind my previous statement about Dr. Roberts. Maybe I’d rip out the page, or just cross it out. I mean, maybe Roberts wouldn’t read my journal. As far as psychiatrists go, she’s not the most heinous quasi quack I’ve ever met. And I’ve met quite a few: my parents were “concerned” after the first accident, and last year my school was “concerned” when I started failing my classes. But whenever someone is “concerned” I just go into self-preservation mode, get my act together, put on my normal-person mask, and fake my way back to acceptable human behavior.

  I’ve had journals before. I’m not stupid: nothing anyone writes is really, truly a secret. The second you uncap a pen, you’ve already lost. Secrets are con artists: they trick you into letting them out. I know better than to write the truth in a journal. Your mind is the only vault you can trust.

  But can you even trust that?

  I can’t even keep track of the time.

  How can I keep track of my secrets?

  * * *

  Dr. Roberts comes in to talk with me.

  “When you were brought in, Sadie, do you remember what you were saying?”

  And I think, How could I have been so careless? How could I have been so stupid?

  “You kept talking about a friend of yours. George?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Well, the thing is, this George…was he injured? Was he in the car with you?”

 
“No,” I tell her. Nonononononono, I scream in my head. Because how could this be happening? And I’m still so messed up from the crash and everything, I can almost see George standing next to Dr. Roberts, like he’s coming to save me. But I know he couldn’t possibly be there, so I don’t say anything to him.

  “Can you tell me, who is George?” she asks.

  Panic sucks me into darkness.

  “He’s nobody,” I say.

  “Well, if you think of anything, be sure to write it down. In fact, just write down whatever you’re thinking about. We often underestimate what trauma can shatter. You never know what’s going to be important. Sometimes memories come back in pieces after an accident,” she reminds me.

  Write it down. She wants me to write it down. What will that do? It won’t change anything. But like an idiot, I try again once she leaves.

  I remember…

  But I don’t remember. Not really. I don’t remember what really happened. I just remember how it felt to me. And that’s too dangerous to put in writing.

  But I guess it’s my chance to contest the picture Dr. Roberts is painting in the notes she takes. My chance to fight back before my parents get home from Germany tomorrow. Sort out the lies I’m going to tell. My story in her notes scares me. I don’t know what she’s saying. She’s got a big legal pad she writes on, and when we were done talking yesterday she put the pages away in her briefcase with about a million other files. Schizophrenics and kleptomaniacs and suicidal people…and me.

  Her briefcase is actually nice. It’s the box kind, almost like George’s. George carries an Ettinger attaché case with red lining. I cut out a picture of exactly the right one from a newspaper in the library. I should definitely not have mutilated library property, but how could I not? It was perfect.