The Hidden Memory of Objects

by Danielle Mages Amato

  It’s him. It’s him. It’s him. The words echoed in my head.

  Tyler’s face blurred, then shuddered like old-fashioned film catching in a projector before it started moving again. He reached into his locker and took out a wooden box, a little smaller and flatter than a shoe box. Abraham Lincoln’s face was carved into the lid.

  Again, darkness. Again, the tidal wave of panic consumed me.

  When the sickly green flashes returned, I saw Tyler, and this time, Bobby Drake was standing beside him. My knees began to tremble, and my legs threatened to give way. Tyler threw back his head and laughed, though I heard no sound.

  For an instant, his features seemed to shift and change, and I thought I saw another face stretch beneath his skin.

  Then the image settled, and he was Tyler again. He opened the wooden box and took out two cigars. Then he reached into his locker and lifted the square of metal that made up the locker floor, putting the cigars underneath. As he slammed the door shut, my knees buckled. I caught myself before I fell, staggering backward a few steps.

  With a bang, the power slammed back on, and the fluorescent lights dazzled my eyes. As my vision cleared, I looked around frantically, hoping to see my brother. Afraid I would see him, because that would mean something was really wrong with me. But the whole area was empty, and the only sound I heard were voices, far away, echoing down the hall.

  My hands shook with the aftermath of adrenaline, and I blew out a shuddery breath. What had just happened? Was that a side effect of the migraine medication? The result of not enough sleep? Maybe Mom had been right. Maybe I should have gotten that CT scan after all. I tilted my head experimentally. It felt foggy and disoriented, but otherwise okay.

  Tyler’s locker stood open in front of me, full of ordinary, comforting things: textbooks, a jacket, a couple of baseballs. But I couldn’t shake the images I’d seen, like that blurry vision of Tyler opening the floor of his locker. I bent down and started dumping his stuff onto the ground by my feet. When the bottom of the locker was clear, sure enough, way at the back, I spotted a tiny indentation in the metal. I inserted my fingernail and pulled, and the floor lifted up. Two cigars sat on the linoleum beneath it, right where Tyler had put them.

  In my hallucination.

  Beside the cigars lay a few more of those pitted metal marbles like the one I’d found in his bedroom, along with a fat roll of cash, wrapped in a rubber band.

  My ears buzzed, and the edges of my vision started closing in. I stumbled and tripped over a stuffed bear, going down hard on my butt and scattering the memorial in all directions.

  Someone rushed over and squatted down next to me. “Crapdogs!” he said. “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know. I think I might be having a stroke?”

  I shook my head to clear it and peered up at Eric Bowling. We’d been friends once, back in junior high, before his dad had gotten sick and he’d missed all that school. When he had finally come back, it had been a whole year since we’d seen each other, and I was kind of afraid to talk to him. I wasn’t sure what to say to someone whose dad had just died. The irony of that wasn’t lost on me now.

  He examined me. “Well, your face doesn’t look droopy or anything, and you’re talking okay. Can you smile?”

  I forced the corners of my mouth upward.

  “I don’t think you’re having a stroke. But you really do look terrible.” I shot him a glare. “No offense!” He reached down and helped me back to my feet. Eric had the look of a seasoned nonathlete, like he’d been working for years to build arms that scrawny, but he was stronger than he seemed. And he had an energy about him, as if motion lines trailed his floppy dark hair and quick hands. “So tell me,” he went on, “have you been experiencing any blackouts or periods of missing time?”

  “I doubt I was abducted by aliens, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “No, seriously, when my grandfather started having seizures, that was one of the first questions they asked him.”

  “Seizures?” I swallowed hard. “No. No missing time.”

  “What about weird smells, like burning rubber? Or maybe oranges?” he asked. “You know, when there aren’t any oranges.”

  I thought about my collapse in Tyler’s bedroom—the lights I’d seen, the smell of plastic. “I’m sure it’s nothing.” I looked him over. “Could you maybe do something for me?”

  “What is it?”

  “Could you look in that locker and tell me if you see cigars?”

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to have tobacco products on school . . .” He looked. “Nope. Nothing there. Were you having some kind of hallucination?”

  “Lift up the floor—it comes out.”

  Eric did as I asked, a look of delight crossing his face. “A secret compartment? Well, that’s awesome. And there they are. Two cigars.” He whistled when he saw the money. “And that’s not all.” He looked up at me. “How did you know they were in there?”

  I let out a breath. I could see the next few weeks stretching out in front of me. There would be more doctors, more tests. And then what? What was routine procedure for this kind of thing? I looked at the cigars, then over at Eric. How weird would this really sound?

  “So before I opened this locker,” I said haltingly, “I had a vision . . . a seizure—whatever you want to call it. I saw my— Well, I saw a lot of things. But I also saw that secret compartment, and those two cigars. And then, when I opened the locker, there they were. For real.”

  Eric let out a slow breath. “Do you think, maybe . . . I mean . . .” He stopped and tried again. “Maybe you came back to school too soon? Because all that grief and stress can really mess you up.”

  My stomach clenched. “Maybe. But that doesn’t explain how I saw something my brother did when I wasn’t even here.”

  Eric’s face brightened. “Wait, check it out, maybe we’re not talking about stress or seizures at all,” he said. “Maybe we’re talking about something else. Maybe we’re talking about”—he punctuated his final word with both hands—“superpowers.”

  “O-o-o-okay.” I took a step away from him. “And on that note, I have to go.” I picked up Tyler’s gym bag, which I had brought to carry his things home in, and quickly dumped the contents of his locker into it. Then I grabbed the cigars, the marbles, and the cash, slammed the locker door, and nodded at Eric. “I appreciate the help.” I started to walk away.

  “Think about it! That’s all I’m saying!” he called after me.

  I waved good-bye without turning around. Note to self, I thought. Never talk to Eric Bowling again.

  The bag full of things from Tyler’s locker never left my side while I suffered through my three morning classes. Finally the bell rang for lunch, and I ducked outside into a wooded spot dotted with picnic tables that were strictly reserved for seniors. Given my newfound celebrity status, no one questioned me. I took out the roll of cash first, my heart heavy in my chest. I couldn’t think of a single reason for Tyler to have this—a single good reason, at any rate. I thought him doing drugs was bad, but was he dealing as well?

  I removed the rubber band that circled the money and discovered a well-worn pink ticket, the kind you might get at a carnival, which read Glen Echo Park: Dentzel Carousel. Good for one ride. The ticket brought back instant memories of summers in the park, watching puppet shows and grinning at my brother from the back of a brightly painted wooden horse. On the other side of the ticket, Tyler had written the name Leigh in black ink.

  I set the ticket aside and counted the money. Nearly four thousand dollars, in hundreds and fifties.

  Anger burned through me. How could Tyler have been acting so normal and yet been hiding all of this? He had always told me to go along to get along, but I thought that meant with strangers or people you didn’t actually like. I never thought he might be playing that game with me.

  Maybe there was some other explanation for this money, something better than my worst-case imaginings. If anyone wou
ld know, it would be Bobby. When the bell rang again, I headed inside to find him.

  I didn’t have long to wait before he appeared from the between-class crowd. Objectively, I’d have to describe Bobby as tall and gorgeous—the kind of gorgeous that knows precisely how gorgeous it is. He wore jeans and a Yale polo shirt, the one that used to be my favorite: a gorgeous deep azure. Yale blue, he called it, as blue as the blood that ran through his family’s four generations of Yalies. He looked straight over my head, and I had to step into his path to get his attention.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Brown.” He stepped neatly around me and kept walking, as if I were the world’s easiest obstacle course.

  I blew out a long breath and considered abandoning this plan altogether. But I forced my shoulders down and my chin up and followed him to his locker, which was right beside Tyler’s. I stood there until he finally looked over at me, running a hand through his mess of curly brown hair. Six months ago, that look would have set my heart racing and scattered my thoughts like loose paper. Six months ago, I was a fool.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  I held up the cigars I had taken from Tyler’s locker. “What are these?”

  Bobby’s eyes sparked. “Yes!” He plucked them from my hand. “Senator Herndon’s Cubans. I thought we were all out.” He pulled a box covered with faded labels out of his locker; the cardboard lid read Paradise in an elaborate, vintage script. He opened the box and put the two cigars inside, beneath a faded black-and-white picture of a naked woman lying in a hammock.

  I did my best to go along, but I couldn’t quite pull it off. “You know, that woman is probably somebody’s grandmother.”

  “Well then, she’s a total GILF.” He traced a finger across the photograph, lingering on the curve of the woman’s rear end.

  I shuddered. My mind shot back all those months, to the night that marked the end of my crush on Bobby. I remembered the party, remembered drinking three—possibly four—glasses of mystery punch. As for the rest, I was grateful for the gaps in my memory. I had a vague recollection of sitting on Bobby’s lap. I remembered the scratch of his jaw against my cheek, the biting scent of his cologne. I wasn’t sure exactly what had happened next. Had I kissed him? Had he kissed me? But the sound of his laughter, the way he’d stood up and let me fall to the ground—those things I wouldn’t forget. “A little advice,” he’d said. “No guy likes it too easy.”

  I shook off those thoughts and tried to focus on the task at hand. “I found some other stuff, in Tyler’s locker.” I took the carousel ticket out of my bag and showed Bobby the writing on the back. “Do you know anything about—”

  He laughed. “That girl was so pathetic.”

  “What girl?”

  “Her dad was a rent-a-cop who used to work here.” He snorted. “She would gladly have given Tyler a ride on her carousel, if you know what I mean.”

  I knew what he meant. “But Tyler didn’t like her?”

  “He liked getting into the school with her dad’s access key.”

  I pulled out the roll of money, shielding it with my body so it wasn’t visible to everyone in the hallway. “When I found the ticket, it was attached to this.”

  Bobby’s face shifted, and for a second, I saw anger in his eyes. “Yeah, that’s mine,” he said, and he reached for the cash.

  I tucked it in my bag before he could touch it. “So where did it come from?”

  “We— I earned it.”

  I gave him a look.

  “That’s all you need to know.” He held up a hand. “Wait, the ticket with her name on it was with the money?” Bobby shook his head, his mouth a thin line. “Oh, Red, you little shit.”

  “But how did he—” I stopped talking as a jolt of pain arced upward from my eye, shot across my skull, and settled behind my ear. I clutched at my head and leaned back against the lockers with a thud. Fear sank its claws into my chest. What was going on? Was something really wrong with me?

  “You okay?” Bobby was standing way too close.

  “Fine.” I scooted away from him. “I’ve got to go.”

  He didn’t try to stop me as I pushed off the lockers and headed for the nurse’s office. “Seriously, though,” he called after me. “That money is mine.”

  I didn’t turn around.

  I told the nurse it was my stomach. I didn’t mention that I probably had a brain tumor, or tell her about the migraine or the weird smells. I didn’t say it was existential angst, brought on by questioning everything I ever knew about my brother. And I didn’t tell her that I was hallucinating things that weren’t real but were somehow . . . true.

  When my dad arrived to pick me up, I dragged myself into the passenger seat, glancing over at him. He looked as bad as I felt. His red hair, darker than Tyler’s, stuck up in thin, crazy tufts in the back, and he wore a Saturday sweatshirt and jeans, even though it was Tuesday.

  “Are you okay, Dad?”

  “That’s supposed to be my line.”

  “I mean, aren’t you teaching today?”

  Dad scrubbed his face with his hand. “I didn’t want to worry you. But I decided I’m not going back to George Mason this semester.”

  “What about your classes? It’s only April.”

  “Some colleagues are covering my classes,” he said. “I tried to go back. But I couldn’t do it. You know Mom; it’s good for her to be at work. Just try to keep her away. But me . . .” He sighed, and the sound set my stomach churning. I thought he’d stayed home with me after my collapse because I was sick, but maybe he’d been there because he was. “I hope I’ll be okay to teach again in the fall,” he said. “I mean, I will. I will be okay.” He looked over at me. “What about you? Is it your head?”

  I couldn’t look him in the eye. “No. It was all . . . too overwhelming, you know?”

  “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  I stared at his tired blue eyes and the one reddish tuft that stuck straight up on top of his head. He looked like a little boy whose parents had dragged him out of bed for school and forgotten to comb his hair.

  Tyler would know exactly what joke to make at this moment. He’d know whether to suggest a run to the batting cages or whether to make Dad his famous three-layer Jell-O surprise. “No. I’m okay.” I rubbed Tyler’s button on the cord around my neck. I wanted to go straight home and hide under my covers forever, but didn’t our family need a Tyler?

  “Hey, Dad? Want to get some coffee at Greenberry’s on the way home?”

  Dad reached over and squeezed my hand.

  I smiled for him and tried to make him laugh with our long-standing joke about the word “macchiato.” But the stone in my chest grew heavier and heavier, and when I finally got back to my room, I slumped into the chair at my worktable, unable to stand.

  I rested my forehead on the rough, paint-stained surface and forced air into my lungs. After a few breaths, I reached for my backpack, digging through it for the notes and cards I’d taken from Tyler’s locker. I tried not to read them, blurring my eyes to everything but the color and shape of the words, but a few stood out: “friend,” “miss,” “soon,” “Tyler.” I pulled out my scissors and started cutting. The shapes looked like flower petals, long and elegant, so I made leaves out of them, coating each piece with watercolors to dim the knife-edged words. By the time I could breathe freely again, I had a tiny bouquet of paper lilies, each one graceful and sorrowful and mine.

  CHAPTER 4

  THAT NIGHT I CURLED UNDER THE COVERS WEARING my warmest flannel pajamas, bone weary and cold all over. My phone chirped, and I brought it into bed with me. Elena had sent a picture of the Goonies movie poster.

  Feel like a watch-along? she wrote.

  We can spend the whole movie texting. . . .

  Sorry, I wrote.

  It’s been a day.

  No apologies, she wrote back.

  What flavor of day?

  You know. The usual.

  Human sacrifice.

&nb
sp; Dogs and cats, living together.

  Mass hysteria.

  Whoa. Ghostbusters day.

  That’s not effing around.

  There will be stories.

  I hope so.

  Later.

  I’ll be here.

  I rested my phone on the pillow beside me and watched the video of me and Tyler that Nathan had sent for maybe the dozenth time. At first, it had seemed so sweet, but the more I watched it, the more it troubled me. I had no idea he’d recorded our guitar lessons. In some shots I’d been wearing school clothes, but in others, I was in ratty pajama bottoms and a T-shirt with no bra. And he’d put me out there for anyone to see, with no warning, without asking. He clearly valued his own privacy, but didn’t he think I deserved the same?

  And when had he even started a YouTube channel? Had he considered himself an amateur filmmaker, or was he just trying to get internet famous like everyone else with a cell-phone camera?

  When the video ended, the screen bounced back to Nathan’s original message, and I could see his picture, small and smiling, beside the link that he had sent. I clicked on the photo, and Nathan’s face filled the screen. I studied the curve of his chin and the shadow in the hollow of his cheek, tinged with a hint of violet.

  How had Nathan known my brother? How well? For how long? I replayed our two short conversations in my mind, wincing at every awkward, rude comment I’d made, and I remembered that he’d asked if Tyler had shown me “the videos.”

  As in more than one.

  I sat up in bed and clicked on Tyler’s YouTube username, TwoRedCents, but I didn’t see any other videos on the channel.

  Well, maybe Nathan had more he could share.

  I sat up and quickly typed out a message. More videos, I wrote, and hit send.

  Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh. No matter what Elena said, I was terrible at thinking first. My fingers practically tripped over one another trying to correct my mistake.

  I mean, are there more videos?

  And if so please send?