Everything I Thought I Knew

by Shannon Takaoka

  Kai is already gone when I come out.

  On Thursday before lunch, Jane drops into the chair across from me in the library. She’s wearing huge sunglasses even though we are inside. I think I’ve heard her refer to these as her “hangover shades.” She’s been wearing them a lot recently, I’ve noticed.

  “I’ve got good news and bad news. Which do you want first?”

  Is she serious? Who wants to wait for bad news?

  “Bad.”

  “So everyone in my mom’s department at the hospital had to change their passwords.”

  I sit up in my chair.

  “Oh, no. Because of us? We’re not about to get arrested, are we?”

  She laughs. “That would be pretty wild, huh? My association with the class valedictorian ending up being the thing that lands me in jail.”

  “I wasn’t valedictorian.”

  “Close enough. But don’t worry. I don’t think we’re busted. It sounds like it was just some system security upgrade or something? I heard my mom talking to Paul about it — about how it was such a pain in the ass to set up and she had to call the weird tech-support guy at work who’s always telling her she looks like Naomi Watts. He sounds creepy.”

  “Okay, but what about the password . . .”

  “Right, the password. Anyhow, I tried to get into the system this morning after everyone left for work, but the log-in screen is different and the password in my mom’s desk doesn’t work anymore, so I think we are out of luck with the records. At least for the time being. Sorry.”

  Shit. Right when we were so close. I cross my arms and look at Jane.

  “So what’s the good news?”

  “The good news is that there’s going to be a huge party at my friend’s place in the city this weekend and you should come with me.”

  “That’s the good news? A huge party?”

  “Yes.” Jane nods. “I think it would be good for you to get out and have some fun. Forget about all this heart stuff for a little bit.”

  “This heart stuff?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Jane. You were with me last week when I knew the way to that house. When I knew how to ride the bike. And now you’re telling me to just forget about it?”

  She hesitates for a minute, then she removes her sunglasses and looks at me carefully, as though she’s debating whether to say something more. She takes a breath. “I’ve been thinking. Are you sure you knew the way there exactly? I mean, it could be that you’ve just been down that street before and that’s why it looked familiar. Why you remembered it.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “No, it’s not that.” Jane’s face is serious, which is unusual for her. She also looks really tired. “I know that you’re definitely going through something right now, which, under the circumstances, seems totally normal. It’s just that . . . maybe this whole password thing is the universe telling you to, I don’t know, let it go? Get on with your life? Because, the way I see it, you have this second chance and, instead of looking back, why not look forward? You know? Live your life for you without the burden of also living your life for someone else. Maybe it’s better that you don’t know that much about who your donor is. Was. Whatever.”

  Better that I don’t know? I can’t believe I’m hearing this right now.

  “You’re the one who told me that I should find out about my donor,” I remind her.

  Jane thinks about this for a second, and then she shrugs.

  “You don’t always have to do what people tell you to do, you know. It makes for a much more interesting time. Plus, it’s not such a big deal now that we’re pretty sure we know who your donor is anyway, right?”

  But, for me, this is not just about knowing my donor’s name. I wanted to find out more about her — so I could maybe make some sense of what’s going on in my own head. Also, I just feel more comfortable with certainties. With proof.

  At the same time, a little part of me wonders if Jane’s right. Maybe I should just let it go. For now, at least. Although it’s frustrating to get this close and hit a dead end, perhaps it would do me good to take a break.

  We went to Sarah Harris’s house, and she’s gone.

  The password for the hospital records system doesn’t work.

  Her family doesn’t want to be found.

  If I believed in signs, all signs at the moment seem to be saying: Stop obsessing. Take Jane’s advice and live my life. Go to parties. Have fun. Act like I’m seventeen. Maybe if I do this, if I quit dwelling on everything that’s different now that I have a new heart, my head will settle down and get back to normal. And I can stop driving myself crazy.

  This heart is mine now. That’s what matters.

  I kick Jane’s foot under the table.

  “So what night is the party?”

  Two nights later, I take Jane up on her party invitation in San Francisco. But first, we’re supposed to have dinner with her dad. He’s in town all weekend, and this is the only reason my mom let me come into the city for the night. She insisted on talking to him on the phone before Jane and I left my house earlier today, which was 100 percent mortifying, but he assured her that he would indeed be around and keep an eye on us.

  Only now I think he must have completely forgotten what he told my mom, because it looks like he and his girlfriend, Grace, are on their way out as soon as we walk in the door. They are both dressed as if they are headed to a fancy party. He’s in a shirt and tie and Grace wears a chic black dress. “Oh, hey, love,” he says, giving Jane a quick peck on the cheek. He’s got a trace of an accent that sounds vaguely British.

  “Hey, Dad,” says Jane. She gives Grace a cool stare. “Grace.”

  Grace looks like someone who hoped to have already been out the door. “Hello, Jane.”

  Jane’s dad smiles big at all of us, seemingly oblivious, or at least acting oblivious, of the tension between his girlfriend and his daughter.

  “Sooo . . . I forgot that Grace and I have this event at the de Young tonight. Do you and . . .” He looks at me, searching his brain for my name.

  “Chloe,” says Jane.

  “Oh, yes. So sorry, Chloe. Jane is always scolding me, rightly, for not remembering people’s names. Do you two mind if we take a rain check on dinner?”

  “Fine by me,” says Jane, even though she seems a little disappointed. I’m not sure if it’s because she really did want to have dinner with her dad, or if she was relishing the opportunity to torture Grace. “How about you, Chloe?”

  “Oh, yes, sure. No problem,” I say.

  “Thanks, love,” he says to Jane as he lifts his suit jacket off the back of a chair and shrugs it on. Grace is already waiting by the door. “You two probably didn’t want to hang out with us boring grown-ups anyway.”

  Jane looks pointedly at Grace. “Probably not.”

  “Okay, girls,” Jane’s dad says, “don’t stay out too late. Chloe . . .”— he says this with a flourish, proud of himself for remembering my name this time — “I promised your mum I’d keep you two out of trouble. So, no more tattoos on my watch, yes?” He takes his wallet out of his suit jacket and extracts a single bill for Jane. A hundred-dollar bill. “For dinner. And take an Uber, please.”

  A hundred dollars and an Uber. I guess this is his idea of keeping us out of trouble, though I’m pretty sure it’s not at all what my mom had in mind.

  Once they are out the door, I turn to Jane and give her my best wild-girl grin. “Let’s take your bike.”

  Speed and rushing wind and city lights flying past are just what I need right now. Adrenaline. Movement. Moving forward, moving on.

  She nods as if she’s impressed. “Only if you drive,” she says. “I do not feel like being responsible, in any way, for anything, tonight.”

  A few hours later, after spending half of our cash on dinner, we’re climbing off Jane’s birthday motorcycle in front of a small, box-shaped house in the Outer Sunset. As soon as I remove my helmet, I
can hear the music thumping loud from inside. We climb the steps to the front door and ring the bell. A boy with curly brown hair and a red plastic cup opens it, spilling the sounds of the party out into the night.

  “Jane! What’s up?” He sets his cup down in a little alcove in the entranceway, wraps her in a hug, and adds, “Haven’t seen you in a while, beautiful.” He catches my eye over Jane’s shoulder and holds his hand out. “I’m Nate, and this is not my house. My parents would kill me if I threw a party this big.”

  “I’m Chloe,” I answer as we follow him into a packed living room, where the air is thick with body heat. Jane dives right into the crowd, and I notice that people right and left are greeting her with some variation of “Where have you been hiding?” and “How’s it going?” and “What have you been up to this summer?”

  Even though this is a very different party, with very different people, there’s something about Jane’s entrance here that mirrors my own experience at Emma’s graduation a few weeks back. It’s like she’s been out of the loop for a while. Long enough for everyone to be curious about where she’s been. And now I’m curious too, because Jane definitely seems to have been out partying somewhere recently, a lot.

  Tonight is the first time I’ve hung out with any of Jane’s friends, aside from the guy who gave me my heart tattoo. But he seemed more like an acquaintance. Immediately, I notice that she’s different around them. Louder. Wilder. Determined to be the center of attention. Instead of Jane, she’s JANE, in all caps, illuminated by stage lights. And I’m different too. As I make my way through the sea of people, unsure of where to go, my earlier motorcycle-riding, devil-may-care attitude begins to fade. Here, I’m more like the old me — uncomfortable in a crowd, too concerned about saying something stupid to say anything at all.

  Jane appears to be looking for someone. I see her craning her neck and scanning the room. At first I think she’s looking for me, that she’s just realized she left me almost as soon as we walked in the door, but then she makes eye contact with a petite freckled girl whose honey-streaked hair is woven into two short braids. As soon as their eyes meet, Jane turns away and almost seems to pretend like she wasn’t looking for her at all.

  Jane disappears into the party and I find a place at the edges, where I get distracted by the view through the front picture window. There, I can just catch a glimpse of the ocean below. The Sunset district is home to Ocean Beach, the city of San Francisco’s only surfable stretch of coast. Here, long rows of pastel-colored houses, like the one I’m standing in now, are strung across a hillside that ends in a long, wide beach edged by grassy dunes. I wonder if Kai ever comes out here. He probably does, just not with me. Notorious for its strong currents and big waves, Ocean Beach is no place for beginners.

  It’s too dark for surfers now. The cloud cover is patchy but the moon is waxing, giving off just enough light to illuminate a small sliver of water. A few bonfires burn on the beach. I close my eyes and imagine that I hear the sound of waves crashing on the shore, but a loud laugh breaks me out of my wallflower — or I guess I should say windowflower — bubble.

  Jane. She and a tall, dark-haired guy in a flannel shirt are looking at something on her phone. I turn my attention to the party. Other than Nate at the front door, no one else has introduced themselves. Everyone here seems to know one another already.

  Passively, I watch people talking and flirting, imagining what it would be like to be one of them: the Asian girl with pink hair and blunt bangs, for instance, wearing a tight pencil skirt and thick-framed glasses that make her look like a cool librarian. The girl with the braids, who Jane seemed to know. She moves with ease among all the partygoers, making introductions and passing around cups. Right now, she’s talking to a cute black guy in a plain white T-shirt who leans against the wall, and when she moves to the next group, I notice him noticing the librarian. I ship it, I think.

  Next, my gaze lands on a white guy on the sofa in an oversize gray hoodie, his bleached-out hair twisted into a sloppy bun. Hold up. I know him. Where have I seen him before? I instantly recognize his face. But I don’t know his name. Like the man with the tattoo. The dog. Stop it, I tell myself. Stop it, stop it, stop it! You haven’t seen him before. You are doing it again. Just stop. You are supposed to be forgetting about all of this. You are supposed to be moving on.

  But then his eyes meet mine and widen in recognition. He points. At me. “Hey! You’re the girl who snaked my wave!”

  Jane’s head snaps up from whatever she and the flannel-shirt guy had been looking at on her phone. The guy in the gray hoodie is loud. Everyone in the room looks my way.

  “Are you talking to me?” I ask. Maybe I just think he’s pointing at me.

  “At North Point Beach on Wednesday. You caught that huge barrel. That was you, wasn’t it?”

  Now it feels as if everyone is waiting for me to answer. But, despite my embarrassment at being singled out in a room full of strangers, I breathe a small sigh of relief. I didn’t recognize him because he’s some memory from another life — he’s a memory from my life. This is just a regular, run-of-the-mill, “small world” coincidence. Nothing mystical or weird is going on.

  “Umm, yeah, that was me,” I say, hoping that Kai was exaggerating about what a faux pas it is to take someone’s wave. “Sorry I cut the line,” I add. “I’m still learning.”

  He looks surprised.

  “Well, your surfing etiquette may suck, but you definitely have some balls, I’ll give you that. What the hell are you doing out at the Point if you’re still learning?”

  I kind of just want him to shut up now because it’s making me super self-conscious that everyone is listening, including Jane. I shrug. “Umm . . . am I not allowed there or something? I didn’t realize it was experts-only.”

  “Well, you sure didn’t look like a beginner to me. Nice ride, even if you did end up taking a thrashing for it.”

  “Thanks,” I mumble, catching Jane’s eye. She gives me a curious look.

  I’m hoping to just blend back into the crowd, but now the guy in the hoodie is coming over and handing me a beer that I don’t really want. “I’m Tyler,” he says. “Ever surfed down there, at Ocean Beach?” He gestures out the window.

  “No,” I say. But as soon as the answer leaves my lips, an image of a huge green swell, spider-webbed with foam, flashes through my head. I remember a spraying wave arching over me, blocking out the sky and the sun. I remember dragging my fingers across a racing wall of water.

  Tough paddle out, I think. But tough paddle out where? As I’d just told Tyler, I’ve never surfed Ocean Beach.

  “We’ll start getting the grown-up waves in November and December. Gonna be wild and death-defying, as usual. You should come give it a try.”

  I shake my head, as much to clear it as to signal a polite decline to his invite. “Thanks, but I don’t think I’m ready for Ocean Beach.”

  Except here’s the thing. Just like riding the motorcycle and listening to the Velvet Underground on vinyl and dying in a tunnel every single night, I feel like I have surfed Ocean Beach. Many times. So much for forgetting about my heart donor. So much for moving on. I can’t even get her — is it her, Sarah Harris? — out of my head for a few days.

  Tyler is still talking, but I missed most of what he just said.

  “I’m sorry, what?” I ask. “It’s kind of loud in here.”

  “I said, did you meet Jenna? She’s a hella good surfer. Kicks my ass every time.” He yells across the room, “Jenna!”

  “I’m right here, Tyler.” The girl I saw Jane watching earlier, the one with the cute braids, joins us. She’s petite but muscular. She almost looks like a gymnast. “Stop yelling.”

  “Oh, hey, Jenna,” he says. “Sorry. I’m, like, really stoned. Anyway, this is Chloe. I’ve seen her surf and you should get her number, ’cause you’re always complaining about how there’s too many dicks and not enough chicks out in the lineup.” He laughs and laughs at his not-that-fu
nny joke.

  “I only complain because you surf bros act like you own the waves.” She turns to me. “I’ll bet he gave you the what-do-you-think-you’re-doing-here? look.”

  “Yeah, kind of,” I say.

  “Well, you’ll get a lot more of that if you want to surf Ocean Beach, but don’t let it stop you. Most of the guys out here are all right once you get to know them. Even Tyler.” She gives him an affectionate shove.

  “What? C’mon girl, you know I’m your number-one fan.”

  Standing with both of them, I start to feel a little more comfortable. Less out of place. It helps that we’re talking about surfing. Still, I can’t seem to shake that weird out-of-body feeling I’ve had since Tyler asked if I’d caught waves at Ocean Beach. That feeling of having lived another life — a life connected to, yet different from, the one I’m actually living right now. It’s disorienting and familiar, electrifying and terrifying, all at the same time. But then the sound of glass shattering knocks me back into my current reality.

  Jane, again, is the source of the sound. Although we haven’t been here that long, she’s already unsteady on her feet and has bumped hard into a shelving unit, knocking several framed photographs to the ground.

  Tyler looks at Jenna and shakes his head.

  “Looks like your girl’s trying to get your attention.”

  Jenna sighs. “Oh, Jane. I better go deal with that before someone ends up with stitches.”

  After she leaves us, Tyler explains.

  “Ex-girlfriend drama.”

  “Jane and Jenna?”

  Tyler nods. “All last year,” he says. “But I think Jenna got tired of”— he nods in the direction of Jane and the broken glass — “that. She can be kind of a mess when she drinks.”

  “Oh.” I’m starting to feel bad that I didn’t know any of this. If I had, maybe I would have steered her away from coming here tonight.

  “Jane’s good people,” Tyler adds. “She’s just a little mixed up. She probably shouldn’t party so much.”