Everyone We've Been

by Sarah Everett

  My eyes are completely cloudy now, but I shrug. “I had a choice a second time, remember? And I chose it again.”

  “Well, today you had a choice a third time, and you chose to move forward. I hope you keep doing that.”

  I blink at him. Move forward. Just a few hours ago, I thought that meant erasing every moment after the bus crash, but now I realize it means leaving the past behind. Choosing to leave it, to move on, instead of living like it didn’t exist.

  There is a difference.

  And it means there’s something I have to do.

  AFTER

  January

  The front of Zach’s house is covered in snow and nearly indistinguishable from all the others on this street. Which is why I’m glad for Katy’s presence in my passenger seat, directing me.

  It took some convincing for my mom to let me take the car.

  “This was the scene of the crime,” Katy whispers as we walk up the driveway. “Where we found them.”

  “Oh,” I say, looking around, but there’s not a trace of recollection. The disappointment only lasts a millisecond before it is overshadowed by the task ahead, the reason we’re here.

  I ring the doorbell, and after a few seconds, we hear footsteps getting closer and then the door is flung open. For the briefest moment, I think it’s Zach. Maybe even Memory Zach, because this boy is younger, shorter, and skinnier than the Zach I talked with yesterday. But then his eyes widen and the boy grins, a different smile from any in Zach’s collection.

  “Well, hello, ladies.”

  “You’re repulsive, Kevin,” Katy spits before I can work out who this is and why he is here.

  “Is Zach around?” I ask, and Kevin’s eyes wander back to me. He knows me. Some version of me knows him.

  “Zach! Addie’s at the door!” he yells, eyes still fixed on me. “Thought you hated him now?” He smirks, and I realize he doesn’t know about the splice, the erasure. To Zach’s little brother, we had a completely normal breakup.

  When Zach comes out to meet us, his eyes are wide with surprise.

  “Um, hi,” he says uncertainly, looking between the two of us. “Is something wrong?”

  “Yeah, your moral compass. How dare you call her a coward, you cheater,” Katy hisses, and I grab her elbow to restrain her. Both Zach and Kevin look shell-shocked. Katy’s clearly been itching for a showdown with Zach for a long time, because when I asked her to come with me to his house, she was only too happy to go running for some pitchforks and firewood. I shoot her a look now—down, Katy—and take over. She relents, remembering our discussion on the drive over about how I’d get to do the talking.

  “Can I talk to you in private?” I ask a red-faced Zach. With him here now, the familiar turning in my stomach is starting, the lure to his gray eyes, the desire to touch his hair. Why didn’t I touch Memory Zach’s hair before he was gone?

  “Um, yeah, okay,” he says, scratching the back of his head. I remind myself that this is not Memory Zach; this is the boy who broke my heart. They might look and sound and act the same, but one is gone and one is someone I used to love.

  I start to follow Zach, and I hear Kevin’s voice behind us, telling Katy, “I’ll keep you company, babe.”

  I can’t hear what she says back, but the acid in her voice is hard to miss. I fight a smile.

  As I follow Zach through the hallway—passing family photographs and an autographed picture of a soccer star—I strain my mind for something familiar. The house feels warm, like I could imagine feeling comfortable here once, but I don’t remember it. Not in the detailed, specific way you recall places you’ve been to.

  Zach leans against the island in the kitchen and offers me a stool, but I shake my head. “So,” he says, a question in his voice.

  Across the room, a goldfish bigger than my hand swims across the tank, its tail waving some kind of greeting.

  I try to think of all the things Past Addie would want Zach to know. All the things she might have felt or wanted to say, but didn’t give herself the chance to. But I don’t know enough about her or enough about what she knew to speak for her, so I take a breath and tell him how I feel now.

  “You said I was a coward,” I say, jumping right in—starting in the middle of a thought because I can’t think where else to start. I don’t have much context for so many things in my life, but I can’t keep waiting to gain it. I want my life to be more than that. “For erasing you.”

  Zach hesitates. “I meant—”

  “I was,” I say, cutting him off. “But it wasn’t your place to tell me that. It was a stupid choice, but it was my bad choice. The way you acted yesterday in your car was completely unfair. You broke my heart. You lied to me. You don’t get to act like I’m the one in the wrong or like I’m the one who owes you an apology. I’m not obligated to remember you.”

  Hurt flickers over his face, but he doesn’t speak.

  “I want to,” I admit, feeling my voice shake a little bit. “But only because it mattered to me. Because it changed everything. You’re the first boy I ever loved.”

  “I’m sorry, Addie….”

  “It’s my fault I don’t remember. And I’ll live with that for the rest of my life.”

  I continue. “But you were a coward for not telling me you were still in love with Lindsay. For treating me like I didn’t matter.”

  “But I told you I was. At the very start. I said we should be friends.”

  I…don’t remember that.

  “Then why did you change your mind? Why did you let things go further and further with us?”

  “Because…” Zach sighs, pushes his hand into his hair like Memory Zach used to, but there’s so much less of it. “What I liked about you was how open you were, how ready you were to try new things. And I wanted to be a little bit like you. I didn’t want to keep moping about Lindsay. I wanted to be open to something new, to forget about her.”

  So I wasn’t the only one who was trying to forget someone.

  He looks me in the eye. “I know now that it was wrong and I wasn’t being honest with you or myself. But even though I wasn’t over Lindsay, I did like you and I told myself this was the way to move on.”

  Move on.

  There it is again.

  “Can you at least understand how much pain I was in and why I would want to erase you? You didn’t have to cheat on me. If you weren’t over Lindsay, if you wanted her, then you should have been honest with me. You could have just told me.”

  He looks ashamed, but he holds my gaze. “I know, Addie. I’m sorry. I fucked up. Some days I hate myself for what I did.”

  I am silent for a few moments, and then I tell him, “You shouldn’t have used me as a crutch, but I think to move on, you have to deal with the stuff behind you, to let it go. That’s why I came here.”

  And I’m not exonerating him.

  I’m letting him go.

  AFTER

  January

  Katy is still talking about it as we pull into her driveway. As we wave hi to her mom, watching a crime-investigation show in the living room, and take the steps two at a time to her room.

  “I mean, of all the things, who would have thought what that little skeeze responds to is, ‘I’m in a relationship.’ ” By “little skeeze,” she means Kevin. “He backed right off.”

  “Sure it had nothing to do with your rant on A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which you have never even read?” I ask as we enter her room, which smells just like my best friend. Like lavender. When I’d finished talking with Zach, I’d walked back to find Katy giving a purple-faced Kevin a piece of her mind. (“Do you know what girls ACTUALLY do at sleepovers? They talk about the pervy guys who catcall and lick their lips and how nobody likes them. Do you want that to be you, Kevin? DO YOU?”) I guess she needed to blow off all the steam she was holding in at Zach.

  Now Katy drags a chair up to her closet and retrieves a cardboard box.

  “Nah. I think the brat just knows Mitch has t
he hardest thighs in Lyndale and could crush him in a fight.”

  “Oh God, Katy,” I say as she cackles at her own joke. “Ew.”

  She shrugs and climbs down, handing the box to me. It is full of all the things we took from my room before the procedure, full of things that are in any way related to Zach. Pictures, horrody DVDs, notes. The clothes I wore on the day of the procedure.

  I hold up a DVD with a person covered in what seems to be a whole lot of ketchup. It has Zach’s name on the spine.

  “Maybe I should mail this to him?”

  “How do you know he didn’t give it to you?” Katy says, dismissing the idea. “Anyway, half my belongings are from exes. Remember Marvin Mouth?” I nod, and she points to a lamp on her desk. “And Josh What’s-His-Face?”

  “MacPherson?”

  “Whatever. These are his gym shorts. And, God, I wouldn’t own any T-shirts at all if I gave back stuff,” she says. “No, no, Grasshopper. You wouldn’t listen to my wisdom when you were heartbroken right after the Zach-or-Mac-or-Jack thing, but now I will teach you my ways. You borrow stuff from other people—books, clothes, DVDs, mannerisms, jokes—and after a while, you break up, and you stop remembering who it’s from. It all melds together and it doesn’t even matter, because now it’s yours. Such is the circle of life.”

  “I think that’s called stealing,” I say, eyebrow quirked in skepticism, mirroring her signature look.

  “It’s called appropriating,” Katy argues.

  “Also theft.”

  “Fine. Maybe I have a condition,” she concedes with a shrug. “But I thought the rule was that you get to keep one item for every time his tongue has been down your throat.”

  “Ugh.”

  “Oh, and there’s this!” she says, reaching back in her closet and giving me the biggest-ass umbrella I’ve ever seen in my life. “Part of the Zach Pile.”

  “What’s it from?”

  “Two Dollars or Less,” she says. “And the day of the best car wash of your life.”

  I don’t understand what that means.

  Zach told me the highlights of our relationship, but he obviously left out some things. And maybe the details he thought were important are different from those I did.

  “I’ll tell you what I know,” Katy says, squeezing my arm. “Whenever you want.”

  “Okay.” I nod, fighting a sudden swell of emotion in my throat. I throw my arms around her. “Thank you.”

  We hug for a moment, and then Katy fake-pushes me off her. “Love you, Sullivan, but I’m in a relationship, or did you forget? Who knew that line was so powerful? God, no wonder normal people date for ages!”

  “You mean other people don’t date for rock-hard thighs?” I ask, feigning surprise as I back out of her room, the box in my arms. Katy’s pillow just nearly misses my head, but she’s blushing. Happy.

  I drive home as quickly as I can in the snow, desperate to go through the box. I grip the box tightly as I carry it carefully up the stairs. I sit on the floor in my room and start taking the items out one by one. There are two ticket stubs for a concert at the community college during the September I was with Zach. Is that where I first heard “Air on the G String”? Does the real Zach know that was our song? I’ll never really know.

  I hold the stubs close to my chest, missing Memory Zach, and then take them away.

  There are a bunch of DVDs, a nun habit. There are pictures of me and Zach. In one, we are sitting in a room I don’t recognize—his?—and he’s smiling at the camera while I kiss the side of his face.

  Something stings the inside of my chest.

  There’s a picture of me and Zach and Raj, and I miss them, some kind of friendship I don’t know.

  There’s so much I don’t know.

  I look through the last items: the clothes I wore on the day we went to get Zach erased. A pair of light jeans, black kitten heels, a white button-down, and a blue blazer. Did we think these would make me pass for nineteen, for Kathleen Kelly? I can barely walk in heels.

  Too soon, there’s nothing left to discover. Nothing that tells me more about who I was and what happened. These things are something, but I want more.

  I want artifacts. Proof that I lived another life, a way to remember.

  And what about Rory—what do I have of him? Why aren’t the walls lined with pictures of his face? Why don’t I have a box full of things to remember him by?

  I allow everything to sink in—the things I’ve just seen that give me hints about my relationship with Zach, the things I’ll never know about being with him, about having a baby brother—and the force is so great I have to lie on my bed.

  I keep drawing in breaths, even though my lungs feel like they are full of too much air. Several minutes pass like this, and then I reach for my viola. I hold it by the neck, fingers fumbling over its strings, over its curves, like following the ridges of words written in braille. I bring it to my chin and play. Just a few bars, a few seconds of the Prokofiev piece I’ve been working on the past month. Its sound is really more suited for a violin, and the piece I have is actually Katy’s, transposed to a lower key, but its mood—its wistful, desperate, heavy sound—is made for my viola. It does something to steady me, to help me find a kind of rhythm in the rushed staccato of too many and too few faces and seconds and emotions that are crammed in tightly packed corners of my mind. And then I improvise, making up my own melody, one about getting lost and finding your way home, about the thickest fog you can imagine and pushing, fighting, breaking your way through it. About waking up.

  It’s not so good yet, but it’s familiar. And I can work on it—I can start writing my own story. One where no one thing—music, a boy, my broken family—is my whole story. Anyway, Mrs. Dubois says what’s important is how joyfully you play.

  Later, I head across the hall and knock on Caleb’s door.

  “Hey,” he says when I walk in.

  I hesitate. He hesitates, too. Then I sit on the edge of his bed. I know I’m making a face as I survey his room, but I can’t help it.

  “When was the last time you picked up this room?”

  “You can have it if you want,” Caleb says.

  “What?” I frown at him.

  “That day you used my computer, I was applying for aviation academies. Well, starting to fill out applications and then chickening out and then starting again. Around and around. But a couple of days ago, I sat down and forced myself to do it. To finish.” He shrugs. “Maybe I won’t get in anywhere. In which case, I’m keeping my fucking room.”

  We both laugh.

  “But you applied?” I repeat, shocked, delighted. He nods. He looks happy.

  “Why didn’t you before? I mean, I know you felt like you had to stay and make up for my not remembering or something….” I trail off because it sounds stupid. Why did Caleb stay?

  “Everyone talks about the day Rory died,” he says. Nobody talks about the day Rory died, I want to argue, but I let him continue. “Dad was at work. Mom was sleeping. But where was I? Nobody ever talks about where I was.”

  I ask the obvious question. “Where were you? Mom said you weren’t home.”

  “I was at the Lyndale Air Show. Me and Victor from next door rode our bikes to the grounds that morning, even though Mom had told me not to go.” There’s a pause, and then Caleb continues. “Before he left the night before, Dad told me to ‘look after things on the ground,’ because he always did. Because I was the oldest.”

  “Caleb,” I say, hearing where he’s going with this. “You were thirteen. Why shouldn’t you have been out with your friend? And what would you have done if you were home, anyway?”

  “Maybe I’d have taken Rory out of his crib when he started crying. Maybe I’d have seen that the basement door wasn’t shut before it was too late. I don’t know. I’ve always felt like I had to stay. Like I was atoning for something by sticking close to home, by never leaving Lyndale. And I wanted to look out for you, too, but when you started making plans for
New York…”

  “It made you angry.”

  “You were going to leave me here, and none of it had fixed anything. Rory was still erased and you were going to have a life and I wasn’t.” He shrugs again. “After everything, I kind of just want to get out of here. Even if I don’t go to aviation school straight away, I’m ready to leave Lyndale.”

  “To move on?” I offer.

  “Sure,” he says. It feels a little bit sad to think of being in this house alone with Mom. Dad gone. Both my brothers gone.

  When I say this, Caleb snorts. “Maybe the Asshole can move in, if you feel like you need a strong male figure.”

  I pretend to gag.

  “You’ll be out of here soon enough, anyway. You’re going to go off to New York, become so big with your music that the Asshole will be name-dropping you to get tables everywhere—though, God, I hope Mom’s not still dating him then.”

  “Nice, Caleb,” I say.

  We both laugh and I like this. I’ve missed this. The sound of us getting along, sharing a conversation we both understand.

  “Caleb,” I say. “Tell me about Rory. One thing you remember about him.”

  Caleb has to think about it for a while, and then he leans back and says, “Well, little-known fact, but Rory was kind of a klepto.”

  I guffaw. “What?”

  “It’s true. One time—Rory was about six months—we were driving with Mom and she’d stopped at Gas Fill. While she filled up, we three went into the convenience store to get some grub. I was pushing him in his little carriage, and we were walking around, arguing over which type of beef jerky to get. And then we paid and were leaving when the old man behind the counter started yelling at us to come back. Rory had a pack of gum in his carriage.”

  “You think he grabbed it?” I ask.

  “You swore you didn’t and I swore I didn’t. I mean, maybe it got knocked off the shelf and into the carriage.”