Memento Nora

by Angie Smibert

  “I hear you’re not a virgin anymore,” a guy said to me.

  My girls went quiet as I turned to look at him. It was Tom Slayton, captain of the lacrosse team.

  He tapped his temple and grinned. “Had my first experience last year.”

  The girls giggled and said they’d see me in yearbook as they disappeared into the crowded halls.

  I managed a smile.

  “The team is having a party this weekend at my place. Want to come? Your friends are invited, too.”

  Normally I’d have been thrilled. Sophomores never get invited to those parties. And Tom was tall and blond and overall easy on the eyes. But I could still see cast-boy sitting near the windows pretending not to watch me.

  I nodded to Tom.

  “Cool,” he said.

  The first bell rang. I told Tom I’d see him in Spanish.

  I lingered by my locker, debating whether to say something to cast-boy. Finally I wandered over as casually as I could.

  “Hey,” I said. It came out a little squeakier than I intended.

  “You remember me, huh?” he said, gathering up his olive-drab messenger bag with his good hand. “I’m honored.” He didn’t sound it.

  I shrugged and checked the time on my mobile.

  “You’re not going to say anything about the pill, are you?” he asked, staring me down. Suddenly he didn’t seem so sure of himself.

  I shook my head. The second bell rang, and I started off in the direction of my biology class. Then, I’m not sure why, I turned back. “I didn’t take it, either.”

  I’d never seen anyone’s jaw literally drop open before.

  The tardy bell rang. “Shit.” I started to run toward bio.

  I heard wheels drop to the linoleum behind me. Cast-boy rolled up beside me on his skateboard.

  “We should talk. Meet me in the library after school,” he said before he pushed off down the hall. “I’m Micah, by the way, Micah Wallenberg,” he added over his shoulder, right before he almost crashed into Mr. Peters, my geometry teacher.

  “Get off that board, young man,” Mr. Peters said.

  I debated all day about going to see Micah after school. He didn’t exactly fit in with my group of friends. I wouldn’t say there are cliques at Homeland Inc. Senior High. (Technically, we’re Homeland High No. 17, one of the company’s many schools in the Virginia-Maryland-DC area.) Obviously it’s a free country and you can talk to whoever you want. But you are expected to hang out with the kids like you, the ones into the same things, going the same places. My crowd was into yearbook, student council, social clubs, and sports. We were going to Columbia and Stanford and Duke after we got out of here. Micah’s crowd was into skateboarding and piercing their eyebrows. And I had no idea where they were headed.

  I thought about all that as we discussed what events to cover for this year’s book. As I looked at my girls—my funny, glossy-headed girls—bubbling away about the prom (which was only a month away), the fund-raising drives, and class trips, I realized I could never talk to them about what I was supposed to have forgotten.

  After yearbook I called the parentals to let them know I’d be home late.

  Micah sat with his back to the art stacks, his cast propped up on a pile of coffee-table books. I could just see his curly brown head bent over something, his good hand working furiously with a pencil. As soon as I got close to the table, his head popped up and he smiled a quick, happy-to-see-you-showed-up grin. Then he pulled out the chair for me with his good arm. And I could see what he’d been doing. Sketching. Me.

  It was a stylized comic-book exaggeration of me: skinnier and with actual boobs. My brown hair hung down over one green eye. My designer jeans were a little tighter. And I was poised to defend myself from the attack of a band of giant ninja pills.

  “Not bad,” I said. Actually, it was really good. “Did you do one of yourself?”

  He flipped back a few pages. It was him, only more so. The curls were wilder and darker. The glasses were not as Harry Potterish. His goatee wasn’t as penciled in. But he wore the same dark green T-shirt with a big black star on the front, not-too-baggy black jeans, and clown-sized skateboard kicks. In the picture, colored pencils spilled out of the green messenger bag that hung from his side; they were drawing an even more exaggerated caricature of him on the sidewalk.

  He showed me a few other sketches. One was of a Japanese girl with pink spiky hair tinkering with a windmill made out of mannequin parts in a garden of equally crazy-looking sculptures or machines.

  “My friend Winter Nomura,” he said. “I met her in welding class.” She went to our school, but I’d never really paid attention to the faces in his crowd.

  Then he showed me a series of drawings, like panels of a comic strip, of his character getting pummeled under the bleachers by apes in football jerseys. The numbers on the jerseys gave away who they were supposed to be.

  “That was the first memory I was supposed to have erased,” he said. “At least that I remember.” He flipped to the next page. “This one was my own damn fault.”

  The comic strip showed Micah skating through traffic downtown, a spray can in hand, and then getting hit by a big black van at the corner of Market and First.

  He explained that the cop at the scene had convinced his mom that he’d be scarred for life if he didn’t “forget” about this incident. “He probably thought my accident was related to the big bombing up the street.”

  “The bookstore one,” I said, putting it together. “That’s where I was. That’s what I was supposed to forget, too.”

  Micah picked up his pencil. “Tell me about it.”

  I did, and it just sort of flowed out of me, much easier than it had at the TFC. Micah sketched as he listened. I stopped when I got to the part about seeing him in the waiting room.

  “You didn’t really spit out the pill because of me, did you?” he asked. He stopped sketching, and I noticed how brown his eyes were.

  “No,” I said after a few seconds. “It was my mother’s memory.” That was too private to tell anyone, to even say out loud. “Let’s just say she’s earning her frequent-forgetting points. And somebody needed to remember that.”

  Micah looked at me as if I’d said the most profound thing on Earth. “Yeah, they do,” he said finally. He gathered up his sketchbook and pencils, shoving them into his messenger bag with his good hand. Then he leaned over and kissed me on the cheek before grabbing the skateboard he’d stashed under his seat. I was too dumbstruck to say anything. He looked over his shoulder as he stood up.

  “Same time Monday?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  I waited until he left to look around to see if anyone had noticed us. Micah wasn’t really date material, not in my crowd, but I couldn’t help feeling pretty glossy.

  Maybe I needed a new word.

  6

  The Hummingbirds

  Awaken

  Therapeutic Statement 42-03282028-13

  Subject: NOMURA, WINTER, 14

  Facility: HAMILTON DETENTION CENTER TFC-42

  The hummingbirds had been slumbering peacefully in my brain until that day. Velvet tagged along with me to get a book on Jean Tinguely’s work that I had reserved at the library. He created these amazing abstract metal machines that showed how ridiculous everything was.

  “Why don’t you just download this shit?” Velvet whispered as we walked up to the front desk. I didn’t answer her. I had tried to explain before that I liked to touch the pictures. The real sculptures would’ve been even better. But the thing with my parents meant I’d never get an exit visa to go see Tinguely’s work in person. It was all in Switzerland and France.

  Ms. Curtis smiled tightly at us as she handed me two books. I don’t think she knew what to make of my crowd. Velvet could construct a runway-worthy ensemble out of a trash bag and a shoelace—and look darn good in it. Our other friends dressed like the rock stars and artistes they thought they were. My only outward expression of inner non
conformity was my hair. It was pink that day.

  “I thought you might like this one, too,” Ms. Curtis said, tapping the second book.

  The top book was the one I’d ordered; the other was about Alexander Calder. He sculpted mobiles and painted airplanes.

  I took the Calder book. It had a striking red mobile on the cover. Maybe I could make a sculpture driven by the sun, like solar chimes, and they could play something really annoying.

  I looked up. Ms. Curtis had said something that evidently required an answer on my part. I nodded. She continued talking about her trip to the National Gallery over Christmas break with a guy who didn’t appreciate art. He was into music, though, she added, as if that made him acceptable in my eyes. Ms. Curtis, with her cute blonde bob, perfect complexion, and matching sweater set, might not get us; but maybe she wanted to be us—just a little.

  Velvet nudged me. “That can only end badly,” she said as she nodded in the direction of the table by the art stacks.

  My best friend, Micah, and a girl, both with their heads down, almost touching, were working away at something. They were totally absorbed in whatever they were doing—and each other. It was as if they were in their own private bubble.

  And the girl was Nora James.

  Velvet was so right—for so many reasons. This was going to be bad. In my head, the whirring noise, like the running in my dreams, like the beating of hummingbird wings, returned. With a vengeance. Shit. I mumbled a good-bye, grabbed my books, and exited the library, Velvet hot on my heels.

  “I thought you guys were just friends,” she said.

  “That isn’t it.” And she knew it. She knew I was obsessed with someone else.

  Velvet put her arm around me. “Why don’t we try some retail therapy? Thrift shop variety, of course. Cheap but still therapeutic. Or we could dye our hair blue.”

  Velvet smelled like lavender. And she did look like Jet. The hummingbirds settled down to a dull flutter.

  I chose the blue option.

  7

  Minus the Gates

  Therapeutic Statement 42-03282028-11

  Subject: JAMES, NORA EMILY, 15

  Facility: HAMILTON DETENTION CENTER TFC-42

  That evening Dad’s car service took the girls and me to the football game and the lacrosse team party after it. I won’t bore you with party details—those are memories I want to keep, anyway—but let’s just say I doubted Micah would have fit in very well. I told myself as the service dropped me off that I wasn’t going to see him again.

  And I kept thinking that all weekend.

  Then Sunday evening we had a rare occurrence in our house: we all ate dinner together. We are like one of the Behind the Gates families, minus the gates. Everyone is successful. Busy. Off doing their own thing. Dad, aka Ethan Trevor James III, is a partner in Soft Target Security; and he runs some sort of operations center downtown for his biggest customer, TFC. I’d never been beyond the lobby because of the restrictions, but I imagined the people inside staring at banks and banks of monitors, watching every TFC in the world for break-ins or whatever. When he’s not working, which he always is, Dad likes to play golf or have drinks with his clients. They usually live in swanky compounds or high-rise security complexes.

  Mom—Sidney Woolf James—who I’ve probably made sound like a shopaholic, is a real estate attorney. She used to practice some other type of law when I was little, but now she handles the legal stuff on the sale of the pricey houses and lofts that Dad’s clients live in. I think it bores her. She rarely talks about it except to mention something about the house, like it’s a Craftsman bungalow or it used to be a shoe factory back in the day. She likes places with character and history. Places that don’t all look the same, she says. Places where you can see the lives that came before you. We always go on a celebratory shopping spree after a juicy closing.

  So I naturally tuned into the conversation when Mom mentioned she had a closing tomorrow afternoon for a property in Los Palamos. It’s one of those Behind the Gates compounds with its own schools, malls, and even police force. You never really need to leave. And you don’t have to worry about the city curfew as long as you stay in the compound.

  Mom winked at me. I knew she was thinking major shopping trip. Usually that would’ve thrilled me, but this time it made me feel queasy and hot.

  “I have a lot of clients at Los Palamos,” Dad said. “Great golf course. Brand-new mall. Excellent schools.”

  “Zero privacy. Twenty-four/seven surveillance,” Mom answered. “And they’re using that chip that lets them know where you are all the time.” Mom obviously didn’t think this was a good thing. “You can’t turn it off.”

  “Not one car bomb since it opened,” Dad said, looking at me. “Nora, you’d like to live there, wouldn’t you?”

  “It does sound nice,” I answered carefully, looking from Mom to Dad. “But I’d hate to change schools right now.” It was true. I had another two months left of my sophomore year at Homeland. And there was the prom and the yearbook.

  Of course, I was also thinking a move might solve a lot of problems. Micah would be zero temptation there. Maybe the bad dreams would go away. Maybe we would be safer, but I wasn’t sure I could trust Dad anymore.

  “You’ll make great friends there, the right ones,” Dad said as if it were already settled. He turned back to Mom. “There’s a house coming on the market today. The guy’s getting transferred to L.A. You’ll both love it.”

  “Don’t those places have waiting lists?” I asked. One of my friends had moved to a compound last year. Her folks had put their names on the list when she first started school.

  “You didn’t, did you?” Mom asked, glaring at Dad. “You put us on the damn list without asking me. Knowing how I felt. When were you planning on telling me?”

  “When we got to the top of the list.” Dad grinned. “Now.”

  Mom didn’t say anything.

  “So we’re moving?” I asked.

  “Yes, Princess, on the first,” he said. That was less than a month away.

  Dad described the house. Lots of space. A pool in the backyard. A panic room in the basement. My own bathroom. And maybe next year I could even have my own car, he said, only to be driven within the compound. The insurance was so much cheaper inside the gates, he explained.

  He did make it sound pretty glossy. He tried to placate Mom with the promise of a double commission. She was furious, though. And something else. That measuring, all-there look in her eyes reminded me of something I hadn’t seen in a long time. It reminded me of mornings years ago when she’d get ready for court by practicing her remarks on me as I ate my Cheerios. I’d forgotten about that woman. That woman had been fierce.

  “We would’ve gotten a house there years ago if it hadn’t been for your mother’s ‘past,’” he said, his grin colder and thinner.

  “Ethan,” Mom said sharply. But her tone didn’t stop him.

  “And then maybe Nora would never have seen what she saw, never even come close to something like that, just to go shopping.” He spat out the last word, but he looked especially pleased with himself. And with that, the other woman, that other Mom was gone.

  She stared at her plate. He cut into his meat and stabbed a chunk of it into his mouth, clearly enjoying it. The red of the nearly rare meat turned my stomach. I concentrated on my peas, not sure what to make of the situation. Or my new insight into it. How did I not notice all this tension before? Maybe I did but just didn’t take it seriously. Now I could see this tug-of-war going on between them, and it was weighted against her. And the more she lost, the more he held it against her.

  For a few minutes all I heard was the sound of chewing. I closed my eyes, and all I saw was red. And the word memento. That’s when I decided.

  “Uh, I need to stay after school tomorrow to work on a project,” I said without looking up from my plate. “Art history.”

  Dad said he’d send a car to pick me up. In fact, he’d send my own driver
to pick me up every day until we moved, he added. Then he hurried out the door, muttering about meeting a client for drinks.

  The next morning as I picked at my oatmeal, Dad sailed down the stairs. He pecked me on the cheek and slid a brand-new Nomura Pink Ice mobile, all pearly and paper-thin, across the countertop to me.

  “It’s all set up for you, Princess. ID. Allowance. Schoolwork. And just press one for the car service,” he told me. He leaned over toward Mom. She turned to avoid his kiss. He grabbed her toast and headed out the door.

  After breakfast I caught her dabbing makeup on her right cheekbone, and I knew where she’d be going before her closing this afternoon.