Everything I Thought I Knew

by Shannon Takaoka

  Had there been a tattoo on his neck?

  “Did he say anything?”

  “No. He just cried.” I added, “It was sort of like he was mourning my death.”

  “Okay.” My dad stood up. “That’s enough.”

  Mr. Platt excused himself to talk to the nurses who had been on that shift, both of whom I could see through the windows of my fishbowl room shaking their heads no.

  The mystery man was never identified. My meds were adjusted, and my parents spent the night. But there’s a feeling that I remember having about him for weeks afterward — one that I didn’t tell my parents or Mr. Platt or anyone else. Even though I knew I’d never seen him before and wasn’t even entirely sure if he was real or not, there was something about him that felt . . . familiar.

  Now, as I lie here not sleeping, not able to stop thinking about tunnels and blood and crashing motorcycles and the crying man, all I can hear is the thump, thump, thump, thump, thump of this unfamiliar heart. It’s like that creepy Edgar Allan Poe story, the one we all read in ninth-grade English, only this heart is not buried under the floorboards; it’s buried in my own chest, and I can’t get away from it no matter what I do or where I go.

  I look at the clock on my nightstand. It’s 2:15 a.m.

  Answers. I like to have answers.

  Tossing my duvet off, I get out of bed and retrieve my laptop from my desk. I climb back under my covers, power it up, and type two words into my browser’s search bar: Cellular memory.

  First, I find a few definitions and explanations via a variety of sources ranging from Wikipedia to publications that I’ve never heard of to one piece in Scientific American that cites some UCLA study on the neurons of sea slugs. Apparently, it suggested that long-term memories could be stored in neurons and then re-formed even when the synapses between neurons were destroyed. I’m not 100 percent sure how that might relate to a transplanted heart. But most of the stuff I’m finding goes like this:

  Cellular memory is a hypothesis, yet to be scientifically proven, that memories can be stored in individual cells in all parts of the body, i.e., not only the brain.

  Cellular memory is a pseudoscientific theory based on reported anecdotes from organ recipients who claim to have acquired the memories, habits, interests, and tastes of their donor.

  This is what I thought. “Yet to be scientifically proven.” “Pseudoscientific.” “Based on claims and anecdotes.” In other words, it’s likely to be as real as Bigfoot or the Bermuda Triangle.

  But still, I can’t stop myself from clicking back on that blog I found in the library with Jane. I reread the story of our budding artist, Janet, and then scroll through a few other entries, including one from a man who swears he must have inherited his donor’s personality because he now likes jalapeño peppers and it turns out that the previous owner of his heart loved jalapeños on everything. Jalapeños? I mean, come on. It seems ridiculous. Then I land on the story of Dave, a fifty-five-year-old sales executive, husband, and father of three:

  About six or seven months after my transplant, I was at a coffee shop and saw a guy I was sure I knew. I meet a lot of people through my job, so I figured he had to have been someone I met through a previous sales call or at a trade conference. “Hey, Ryan, how’s it going?” I said as he walked by, and I know I had his name right because he immediately looked my way. But as soon as we made eye contact, it was clear that he had no flipping idea who I was. I think he even came back at me with the universal I-can’t-remember-your-name response: “Hey! I’m well, thanks.” Then he went his way, I went mine, and I didn’t think much of it. Later on, I really got interested in meeting my donor’s family. I wanted to thank them and tell them how much this second chance meant to me and my wife and kids. The family agreed, and my wife arranged for them to come to our house one Saturday afternoon. She thought they’d be more comfortable at our house, not a public place. When the doorbell rang, I was pretty nervous. Turns out I had a good reason. I nearly had another heart attack right then and there when the guy from the coffee shop walked through the door — Ryan, the one whose name I knew and was sure I had met before. He was my donor’s brother. His brother!

  I’m caught in that weird space between sound asleep and awake again, and can’t seem to pull myself out.

  The tunnel dream is mutating.

  I was, or am, somewhere else first, sitting beside the woman connected to all the tubes. A hospital room. The ICU? Her lips are dry and cracked. Her face is thin, her skin so pale, cheeks hollowed out. I’ve seen her before . . . where? But then I’m not in the hospital. The woman is gone. I’m on the beach, waxing my board. Something darts by to my left. It’s the silver-gray pit bull — squat, barrel-chested — chasing a ball. The dog turns and gallops back toward me, dropping the ball at my feet, but before I can pick it up, I am speeding into the tunnel again, lights rushing by. The curve. The tree. Burning rubber. Squealing tires. Everything goes blank.

  “Chloe . . . Chloe, wake up.”

  My alarm is blaring next to me and my mom is sitting on the edge of my bed, gently nudging my shoulder. She used to just flip on my super-bright ceiling light or yell from the kitchen “Chloe, get up!” when I overslept, but now I think she worries about startling me.

  I look at my mom, at the glass of water she’s set on the coaster on my nightstand, at the way the vibration from the alarm on my phone makes the water ripple.

  “You’re going to be late for school,” she says.

  “Summer school,” I correct her, as I reach for my phone and turn off the alarm. “Nobody cares if I’m late.”

  She studies me carefully, and although I can tell she’s trying to resist, she asks anyway, “Is everything all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Just lazy.”

  She stands and tries to pretend she’s her before-Chloe-had-a-heart-transplant self. “No time to be lazy. It’s seven thirty-five! C’mon, I’ll make you a bagel for the road. And don’t forget your medication.”

  “I won’t,” I answer, and decide not to sigh or roll my eyes.

  When I come down to the kitchen, my mom holds out a warm brown bag, toasted poppy-seed bagel wrapped neatly inside. My favorite.

  I take it and she moves in to give me a kiss on the head, just like she used to do at school drop-off when I was little. Her movements are quick and stealthy, as if she’s trying to catch a grasshopper before it jumps. She doesn’t have to try too hard today. I lean in and wrap my arms around her, comforted by familiar sensations that I know are all mine: the soft, feathery feel of her favorite work-from-home wrap sweater. The coconut smell of her shampooed hair. I push the memory of the woman in the hospital room out of my mind.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” she says. “Dad bumped into Emma’s mom yesterday. She reminded him about Emma’s graduation party this weekend.”

  The party is not just to celebrate the end of high school but also Emma’s upcoming departure for Brown University.

  I release my mom, breaking the warm fuzzy spell of our hug. “I know,” I say.

  Like Emma, everyone in our circle is heading off soon to various U.S. News & World Report–ranked schools: Alexis Stewart and Mia Ryan will be sharing a dorm room at UCLA; Jordan McGuire got into Penn; Craig Swanson is a legacy at Yale (lucky for him and his unremarkable GPA). Party season is in full swing, as our senior class gathers around pools and barbecues and beer kegs to finally let off some steam, take a million group selfies, and pair up with their no-strings-attached crushes before everyone goes their separate ways.

  I could be participating in this fun-on-the-surface-but-competitive-underneath ritual of “Where’d you get in?” if I wanted to. I was mostly done with my college applications when everything happened with my heart, and my mom helped me finish and submit them. At the time, it was a welcome distraction from the wait for a donor. Later, when the acceptances started coming in, it felt as if they were meant for a different person. But I do need to make a decision soon. I can tell it’s driv
ing my mom to distraction, but she’s trying her best to give me some space.

  She wouldn’t have before.

  My mom picks up her half-full coffee mug from the counter and opens the microwave door.

  “Did you and Emma have a falling-out or something?” she asks while waiting for her coffee to reheat. “You two haven’t seen much of each other lately.”

  We haven’t. But there was no official falling-out. It’s been more of a quiet fade.

  “No,” I say. “She’s just busy getting ready for school.”

  My mom turns to face me.

  “I know you feel a little left out of all the graduation stuff. But it would not be kind to ditch her party, Chloe. You’ll be there soon enough.”

  But that’s the thing. Even though a top university is the destination I’ve been racing toward for the last six or seven years of my life, I don’t know if “there” is where I really want to be anymore. But I can’t tell my mom this. She’s convinced she missed her own chance at the Ivy League because her New Agey ’70s parents never pushed her hard enough.

  The microwave beeps.

  I pick up my backpack from a kitchen chair and fish for the car keys in the side pocket.

  “Mom. Don’t worry. I’ll go.”

  Driving is a relief. Lately, I crave motion. Velocity. Speed. Movement chases the thoughts from my head and unleashes me, temporarily, from the past and the future. There is only wind rushing into open windows. The familiar Vicks VapoRub smell of the eucalyptus trees swishing past. Music cranked up as loud at it will go.

  The traffic light at Mission Road breaks my momentum. I stop. I wait. I think.

  When was the last time I saw Emma?

  She visited me in the hospital when I was moved out of the ICU after the transplant and stopped by my house on occasion to watch TV on our family room sectional once I was discharged. I think she considered it her duty to keep me engaged with what was happening at school, so she always came prepared with a little gossip.

  Example: “Wes Thomas and Jordan McGuire broke up.”

  This had been no big surprise. They were each applying to schools on opposite sides of the country.

  “Saw that coming,” I said, scooping more popcorn from the bowl and turning up the volume on The Walking Dead. A minor character was getting his guts ripped out.

  Emma covered her face with a pillow.

  “Ugh. What happened to House Hunters International?”

  I shrugged. “You’ve seen one vacation villa in Ibiza, you’ve seen them all.”

  I could feel her shifting in her seat next to me, tightening her already-tight ponytail.

  “Lily Kim was accepted early to Princeton.”

  “Wow,” I said. “How’s Addison taking that?”

  Addison Watson, close friends with Lily and a contender for valedictorian, had wanted to go to Princeton since . . . possibly birth.

  “They’re not speaking.”

  “That seems like an overreaction.”

  “You think? Lily never said anything about applying to Princeton. I get why Addison’s pissed.”

  “What, Lily can’t try for the same school?”

  “Chloe.” Emma stared at me as if I had suddenly lost my mind. “It’s pretty bad form to apply to a friend’s top choice.”

  This got me wondering if any of the applications I submitted would prompt Emma to stop talking to me.

  She did have one more piece of intel to share.

  “Oh, and Justin Stein was suspended.”

  “Justin?”

  Now this had surprised me — Justin was the last person I would have expected to be suspended from school.

  “Got caught cheating on the AP chem exam.” Emma was almost whispering, this was such scandalous news.

  “Why was he cheating?”

  Justin didn’t need to cheat. He’s super smart.

  “He wanted a perfect score.”

  College application and acceptance season is a pretty tense time at high schools like mine. Everyone is exhausted. Everyone is trying to gain an edge. There are the kids who buy Adderall so they can stay up late and study after a full day of school and team sports. There are the parents who are constantly scheduling meetings with teachers, or better yet the principal, to protest “unfair” test scores. Weekends are fully booked with travel to soccer tournaments, SAT prep courses, and service projects. There are always a few kids who crack. Who decide to blow it all off and join the party-all-the-time crowd. Or end up in rehab. Or cheat. I guess that’s what happened to Justin.

  So although Emma was trying hard to be a good friend by keeping me company while I binge-watched zombies, I could tell it was making her twitchy. She had places to go and things to get done, and killing time with me was just that — killing time. There would be no extra credit for chilling out in my family room. Plus, our friendship was missing its usual competitive dynamic — and with it, a certain kind of energy — now that I had stepped, at least temporarily, out of the race.

  Competition had always been a big part of our relationship. When we were little, we used to argue about who was faster, who was taller, who could eat the biggest serving of mashed potatoes. The day after my dad got me up on my first two-wheeled bike, Emma was out in the elementary school parking lot with her dad, intent on catching up. If she was reading Harry Potter in second grade, then I demanded that my mom get me the books too. But we shared as much as we compared. Favorite books. Silly dance moves. Our top-secret secrets. If we were always pushing each other to do our best, we also supported each other when our best fell short.

  But in the last year, something had changed. The connection between us had become less supportive, more adversarial. All compare. No share.

  I’m a math and science girl. Emma is the wordsmith. When we did homework together, I’d show her how to solve for x or explain the rules of probability. She’d help me edit my English papers. Until her parents invested a fortune on a specialized math tutor and Emma announced that she didn’t need my help anymore.

  “My mom thinks I should just follow Margaret’s approach so I don’t get confused,” she explained one afternoon in late spring, last year. Margaret, an insanely smart graduate student at UC Berkeley, was helping Emma prep to get into AP Calculus our senior year.

  Later, Emma started sighing when I’d ask if she could proof an essay on King Lear or give my history position paper on the Reconstruction Era a review. “Chloe, I’m not going to be able to help you with your college application statements, you know. You need to be able to do those yourself.”

  “Already done,” I had replied. In reality, they were only partially done. But I wasn’t going to tell her that.

  The summer between junior and senior year, we didn’t go away together to camp in Oregon, as we had the previous six summers. Emma was enrolled in an SAT-preparatory course that kept her busy for the better part of June and July. She’d already taken the test once, but her mom, a Stanford alum and COO of a San Francisco technology company called Novae, was encouraging her to try for a higher score. I’d already taken the SATs too and wasn’t planning to again. “Why wouldn’t you?” Emma had asked. “It’s just another chance to do better.” I couldn’t tell if she was concerned about me wasting the opportunity or annoyed that I possibly didn’t need it to begin with.

  As senior year kicked off, Emma and I were back to meeting for lunch under the campus oak tree and after school to get our miles in for cross-country, but the weird undercurrent that had been there in the spring and summer remained. Emma’s sympathy seemed less than genuine when I confessed that I hadn’t made it into the AP History course taught by Mr. Britton, considered one of the school’s best teachers. And I was maybe just a little bit satisfied when I noticed her struggling in AP Calculus, despite Margaret’s best efforts.

  Then came the party. And Liam Morales.

  It was a warm night in late September. Craig Swanson’s parents had departed for a wine country weekend, leaving their hilltop hou
se and infinity pool under the care of their son — an opportunity too good for even the most die-hard overachievers to pass up. The books would get a break for a few hours.

  We didn’t really know Craig all that well, but Emma assured me that “everyone” was going. She wasn’t wrong about that. The back patio at Craig’s house was packed with people splashing in the pool, spilling drinks in the hot tub, and a few who were passing a vape pen around a huge outdoor firepit. I remember immediately regretting my decision to go along. I’ve never been big on crowds.

  Most of the night we spent standing with a cluster of girls who were, of course, discussing college application strategies. Aside from whatever was happening on Instagram and Snapchat, that’s all anyone in my circle ever talked about.

  Alexis Stewart had just announced that she’d applied to all nine University of California campuses.

  “Even Riverside and Merced?” asked Emma.

  “Well, only as an extra precaution,” Alexis explained. “Don’t want to end up like Jen Heatherton.”

  “Who’s Jen Heatherton?” I asked.

  “You didn’t hear this story?” Mia asked me. “Jen is Sarah Wise’s cousin. She was a year ahead of us. Anyway, Jen had a 3.9 GPA, was in honors courses, competitive sports, all that stuff. She only applied to Cal, UCLA, San Diego, and Davis. Davis was her safety school. Got rejected by all four. By then it was too late to apply to the rest without a deferral.”

  “You have to hedge your bets,” said Alexis.

  “Jen’s the one who tried to kill herself last year,” added Mia, next to me, more quietly.

  “Well, a 3.9 is not competitive enough for those schools,” said Emma. “What was her counselor thinking?”

  “I know.” Alexis shook her head. “But it was a 4.1 weighted . . .”

  I wondered if Emma hadn’t heard Mia’s final comment and was about to ask if Jen Heatherton was okay now, but the conversation had already shifted to the fairness/unfairness of weighted versus unweighted GPAs.

  People were applying to seven, eight, nine schools?