Everything I Thought I Knew

by Shannon Takaoka

  “Cool,” I say.

  “And now I’m interning at Airbnb. Emma’s mom knows their chief marketing officer, so she was nice enough to help me line it up. Plus there’s so much to do to get ready for school, and my mom is freaking out about what I need to get for the dorm, of course. But what about you? Did they let you graduate? What are you doing in the fall? Did you pick a school?” She stops to take a breath.

  “I’m in summer school right now,” I say. “I might defer a semester.”

  “Oh!” Mia frowns. “I’m so sorry, Chloe! That sucks — such bad timing.”

  “Don’t be sorry. I could be, you know, dead instead.”

  “Right, of course! Well, we’ve all missed you.”

  I know she means this, but it’s hard for me to return the sentiment, even if I’m not sure why. This entire event is the dictionary definition of the old me. My best friend’s graduation. Classmates that I’ve known since elementary school. A house where I’ve spent hours of my young life — playing Just Dance on the Wii, studying for the next day’s science test, making plans for our Saturday sleepover. If I didn’t feel at home here, how could I feel at home anywhere?

  “I’ve missed you guys too,” I respond, hoping I don’t sound like a total liar.

  I leave Mia with a promise to catch up after I say hello to Emma, and I wander into the crowd on the patio.

  The party is perfect, as I expected it would be. There are fresh flowers. A food truck serving grass-fed organic-beef mini-burgers and your choice of regular or sweet potato fries. Emma’s mom, as usual, has not missed a single detail. I spot her coming my way, clad in a chic summer shift dress. Rachel Klein, COO, Novae, Inc. might as well be spelled out in bold Arial font right above her head. Despite spending most of her time at the office, Emma’s mom looks like she lives at a gym. She runs marathons. She manages the annual school auction fund-raiser. She “leans in.” Like, all the way.

  “Chloe, so glad you made it,” she says, embracing me tightly. “Emma will be thrilled. How are you?”

  “I’m good,” I say, trying not to grit my teeth. I imagine it would be rude to lose it on Emma’s mom.

  “We’ve missed you. Where have you been this summer? I ran into your dad last week and he told me you were still completing a few credits for graduation.”

  “Yes. But I should be done in August.”

  “And you’re all set on a school? Let me know if you need a recommendation letter or a phone call — there are a few Berkeley alums on the board at Novae.”

  “I will, thank you,” I say, scanning the patio. “I haven’t had a chance to say hello to Emma yet.”

  “You haven’t? Well, let’s find her!”

  Emma’s mom takes my hand and pulls me through the party, stopping often to say hello to someone and offer an introduction. Most of them are her work colleagues — people who, as she would have reminded Emma before the party, are useful to know.

  We pass Emma’s dad, a lawyer, who gives his wife a quick peck on the cheek and my arm a squeeze, mouthing, “Hi, Chloe!”— all while continuing what looks to be an important phone call. We finally spot Emma standing near the olive trees that ring the backyard, talking to a tall woman wearing huge hipster glasses. Juno Barnett, the founder and CEO of Novae. She’s twenty-eight years old and currently on the cover of Fast Company, since the big news is that Novae is on track to receive the highest stock valuation ever for a tech company founded by a woman. Emma seems tiny next to her.

  Rachel presents me to Emma like a gift.

  “I found Chloe. I’m sure you two have a lot to catch up on.”

  Emma seems both happy and relieved to see me. She trades places with her mom, and the two women are already deep in conversation as we depart. Novae people rarely take a day off.

  “Your timing is perfect,” Emma whispers in my ear. “Do you know how hard it is to fake interest in a conversation about data science and machine learning?”

  In truth, I do find machine learning kind of interesting, but I want to back Emma up here, especially since she hasn’t asked me how I’m feeling.

  “Yikes,” I say. “Glad I could assist.”

  We walk together across the lawn, back in the direction of the house.

  “Do you want to get some food?” she asks.

  “Maybe later,” I tell her. “But first, I brought you a going-away gift.”

  She narrows her eyes. “It’s not another Apple Store gift card, is it?”

  “No, of course not. But I will gladly accept any extras if you received too many, poor girl. C’mon, it’s in the trunk of my car.”

  Emma follows me out to the street, where my car is parked next to an oleander hedge.

  I open the trunk and present Emma with a dented and dirty Dutch oven. She stares at it for a second and then laughs.

  “The Vampire Princess!”

  When we were nine, we buried one of Emma’s American Girl dolls, Julie, in my backyard, using a cracked Dutch oven that my mom was about to toss in the trash as the sarcophagus. Then we dug her up a few months later to see if she had “decomposed.” We weren’t expecting much but were pleasantly surprised to find that she had attracted a few spiders as well as a handful of dead bugs caught in their webs. After that, we called Julie the Vampire Princess.

  Emma sets the Dutch oven down on the sidewalk. “I’m really hoping a rat does not jump out when I open this. I can’t believe you still have her.”

  She pulls off the lid and Julie stares up at us, in all her undead glory. We had added our own touches in the weeks after we dug her up: red tempera paint around her mouth (now brown), ripped clothes, and dirt on her fused fingers.

  “I think you should take her to Brown,” I say, sitting down on the curb next to Emma. “If your roommate gives you any problems, just keep Julie on your bed and she’ll think you are deeply disturbed and not to be messed with.”

  “I love it,” says Emma. “Remember when we had her funeral?”

  “We argued over who got to throw the first clump of dirt on her coffin.”

  “You wanted to try to embalm her.”

  “You wrote a very stirring eulogy.”

  Emma looks a little sad. “I loved being nine.”

  “Me too,” I say. “We had so many good ideas back then.”

  “I know!” Emma laughs. “We were also planning to build a time machine in your garage.”

  “Don’t forget our comic series about the vegetarian zombies,” I say. “We were sure it was going to make us rich.”

  Emma looks confused for a second. “Did we do that? I don’t remember that at all. Jesus, Chloe, I must be losing it. Too much to think about lately!”

  We did make the comic, right? We sold a copy to my mom. Didn’t we? Now I wasn’t so sure. I don’t even like to draw.

  Maybe I’m the one who’s losing it.

  Emma brushes off the front of her skirt and stands up.

  “I have to go meet one of my mom’s work friends who went to Brown,” she says. “She’s supposed to give me a recommendation for the engineering program.”

  “What happened to English?”

  Emma’s face tightens for a fraction of a second. “My parents think an engineering degree might give me more options. You know how my mom’s always talking about women being underrepresented in STEM professions.”

  “But is that what you want?” I lift the Vampire Princess from the curb and hand it to her.

  “Of course.”

  She doesn’t look as sure as she sounds.

  Then again, I’m not so sure about anything anymore, so who am I to judge?

  I follow Emma back into the house and we part at the threshold of her back patio. We promise to get together again, just us, before she leaves. Maybe we will. I hope we will.

  As Emma disappears into the crowd, our friend Olivia catches me by the arm.

  “Chloe! Where have you been all summer? How are you feeling?”

  Ugh, not again.

  I need
to escape.

  “Fine,” I say, “but I’m starving, so I’m going to get at least three or possibly four mini-burgers.”

  “Wait,” she says. “Aren’t you vegetarian?”

  “Not anymore. Not since . . .” I say, shrugging. We both know what I’m referring to.

  “Well, it’s hard to stick with it, isn’t it?” She smiles. “Mia and Alexis and some of the guys from cross-country are at the table at the far end of the pool. Come join us after you get a plate. We have to catch up!”

  “Will do,” I answer, even though I’ve already decided to ghost.

  The food truck is parked in the driveway, and instead of getting in line, where I’ll surely run into yet another person who will ask me how I’m doing, I make my way to the street in front of Emma’s house.

  The chatter of the party recedes as I walk to my car. Once I shut myself inside, I exhale, realizing that all the muscles in the back of my neck have been squeezed tight. I’m glad to have escaped. But I don’t want to go home. I reach for my phone and type “Jane” into the search bar of my contacts.

  For a few seconds, I hesitate. Although Jane and I have been having lunch together almost every day at summer school and recently exchanged numbers, we don’t text each other regularly. Definitely not on weekends.

  Hi, I text, adding, It’s Chloe.

  Yeah, I can see that, Jane responds. What’s up, math nerd?

  What are you doing?

  When?

  Now.

  Hanging at my dad’s place in Pac Heights. Want to come over? He’s gone tonight and there’s a ton of weed here.

  Technically, I’m not supposed to drive into the city without clearing it with my parents first. Especially now. After.

  Also, I don’t smoke. Or at least I didn’t.

  Don’t.

  Didn’t.

  I text back.

  What’s the address?

  My parents are going to be pissed about the tattoo. Not because they are against tattoos per se — my mom actually has a tiny shamrock on her ankle — but because of the very remote chance that it could get infected and throw my whole recovery process out of whack. The thing with being constantly on immunosuppressants so that my body doesn’t attack my heart is that it can’t do such a great job fighting all the regular stuff it’s supposed to fight off either: Colds. Flu. Strep throat. Blood infections. In fact, if someone so much as sneezes in my direction these days, my parents get really uptight about it, which is a pretty big departure from our life before.

  Until recently, being an only child had meant getting treated more or less like an adult in my house. My parents weren’t particularly concerned with rules. They didn’t enforce a curfew. They didn’t restrict my internet access or demand too many details if I was headed out somewhere with Emma. They would even pour me a glass of wine with dinner every now and then, especially when they were opening a good one and were feeling a little “European.” Of course, this may have been because I’d never really given them much cause to worry. They knew I wasn’t going to sneak out through my bedroom window in the middle of the night or have the number of the school’s drug dealer on my phone. But now they’re always checking on where I am and what I’m doing. They try to make it seem like they’re not, that they’re just touching base to ask if pizza is okay for dinner or if I have plans to go anywhere after school — but these are things they never really touched base about before.

  In fact, my phone’s recent history is primarily made up of missed calls from Mom and Dad:

  3:00 p.m. and 5:45 p.m. on Monday.

  5:14 p.m. on Wednesday.

  Multiple times in the last six hours, including at 12:01 a.m., when Jane and I were at a shop on Haight Street, drunk, cementing our new BFF status by getting some ink.

  It wasn’t Jane’s idea. It was mine.

  We’d been hanging at her dad’s Pacific Heights apartment, drinking an expensive-looking scotch whisky from his liquor cabinet. It smelled like leather and burned my throat but gave my lips a warm and tingly buzz. Jane’s dad has a huge classic vinyl record collection, and we were playing albums one after the other, lying on a shaggy sheepskin rug among a pile of sleeves. Led Zeppelin. David Bowie. Radiohead. R.E.M.

  Music was something that I didn’t really pay close attention to before. In my pre-transplant life, it was mainly filler. Something that served as background during study sessions and sleepovers, that helped me keep up the pace when I trained for cross-country meets. Or that my mom and I could tease my dad about whenever he sang along to his cheesy ’70s favorites. I mean, sure, there were plenty of songs I liked or that I could recite the lyrics to in an earworm kind of way, but I don’t think I had ever once listened to a single album from beginning to end or devoted myself to a particular band or artist.

  Now I couldn’t get enough. Music was becoming an obsession. I cranked it up loud in the car. Lived with earbuds connected to my head. It opened my mind to another universe — one that I never knew existed. And it also made me feel less alone with my thoughts.

  At Jane’s dad’s, I couldn’t stop pulling records off the shelves, one after the other. I studied the jacket art and read the liner notes. It felt like I was discovering something . . . not new necessarily, but buried, like unearthing fossils. When I came across the Velvet Underground’s Loaded, I carefully slid it from its sleeve and put it on the player. That subway station entrance on the cover — it looked so familiar to me, even though this night was, in fact, the first night in my life that I’d ever played any vinyl record, let alone this one. And when the trippy opening guitar chords of the second song started up, I turned to Jane: “Shhh. Listen. This is your song!”

  She laughed at the chorus to “Sweet Jane.” “My dad would love you. You know a lot about music.”

  “Not really,” I answered.

  Jane passed me the joint she’d been smoking, also from her dad’s supply. “He’s old-school about his pot,” she’d told me. “Still likes to roll his own.”

  I held it between my fingers for a moment, watching it smolder.

  I’m most definitely not supposed to smoke. Never. Ever. For heart transplant recipients, smoking is one of the things that is banned for life.

  I took a hit of the joint anyway, trying not to look like a complete amateur in front of Jane.

  “So your dad doesn’t notice that you drink his whisky and smoke his pot?” This seemed like something my parents would be wise to, at least if I tried it more than once or twice. Not that my parents have pot in the house.

  “My dad?” Jane snorted. “He doesn’t notice anything. Honestly, he’s usually not even here. His girlfriend, Grace, is, like, twenty-six, and she’s always got something lined up on the weekend. And she hates it when I’m around, so they usually steer clear.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked, stifling a cough.

  “Because I’m a total bitch to her, why else?” Jane laughed. “Plus, I think she likes to pretend that my dad doesn’t have a daughter that’s basically old enough to be her sister. Her much hotter and more interesting sister.”

  The record wobbled ever so slightly as it turned on the player. I concentrated my focus on the soft, satisfying scratch that accompanied the music and imagined myself dissolving into the rug.

  Then Jane asked, “Do you know who your heart donor was?”

  Although the song was still playing, in my head the needle was yanked away from the turntable, bursting the bubble we’d been floating in thanks to the scotch, the pot, and Lou Reed.

  “No,” I told Jane. “Donor identities are confidential. If I want to try and find out, I can write a letter to the family. But it’s up to them to write back.”

  Jane sat up on her elbows. “So are you going to? I mean, aren’t you curious? Even a little bit?”

  “I don’t know. It just seems like it would be weird for them, and for me, so probably not.”

  What do you say, after all, to the loved ones of the person whose death was your ultima
te lucky break? Thanks so much! I’m sure I’ll get a lot of use out of this heart!

  But I didn’t tell Jane the real reason I wasn’t going to write a letter. I already know that my donor’s next of kin do not want to be found.

  “I’m sorry, Chloe,” Dr. Ahmadi had said a few days ago, returning my call from earlier that week. After what had happened at the beach and reading all those stories about cellular memory, I’d finally gotten up the nerve to ask about contacting my donor’s family. Maybe if I knew more about the person who gave me their heart, I wouldn’t feel so strange all the time. Maybe this heart wouldn’t feel so foreign. Maybe once I knew for certain that I wasn’t really inheriting anybody’s memories or anything like that, I could stop questioning every impulse, every feeling, every desire, and every random thought that floats through my mixed-up head.

  But Dr. Ahmadi put a quick end to my attempts at playing detective. “I checked with hospital records. Your donor’s family has made it clear that they do not wish to be contacted. By law, I can’t give you any more information than that. While I personally think it’s therapeutic for the family to meet their loved one’s transplant recipients, some just want to move on. They don’t want to be reminded of their loss. You understand?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  But I was also disappointed. The part of me that likes to ask questions and have answers wants to know more.

  Before I could put the next record on the turntable, my phone buzzed with a call from my mom. I’d texted her after Emma’s party to get permission to stay in the city with Jane, but I hadn’t confirmed that I’d arrived safely. Instead of picking up, I texted back in all caps, I AM ALIVE AND WELL. DON’T WORRY, then looked over at Jane and grinned.

  “Let’s go get a tattoo.”

  She laughed. “Now?”

  “C’mon. It will be fun.”

  “It’s illegal, math nerd. You have to be eighteen.”

  “Really?” I asked. “You have one.” I’ve noticed the teal hummingbird on her shoulder when she wears a tank top.

  “I know a guy. And my dad was okay with it. Are you sure your parents won’t kill you?”