“We should do the next issue on your story,” I said as I slid to the ground in front of him, my hand still in his. My momentum carried me right into him, face-to-face. My breath caught as I inhaled him; and before I realized what I was doing (or maybe I did), I leaned in ever so slightly and brushed his lips with mine. He tasted of bread and rosemary. We lingered there a moment—until we heard someone clear her throat.
“Young man—and young lady—you’d better get your butts back to school.” We turned to see Mrs. Brooks, her arms folded. She stood there until we started moving. But as we headed toward the gate, I swore I heard a low, warm chuckle behind us.
“What were you saying?” Micah asked as we wound our way back through the maze of junk to the outer gate.
I had to think for a second. “Your story,” I said. “We should do it next.”
“We can’t mention the Village,” he said, a little panicky. “We’re technically not squatting, but we can’t get Mr. Shaw in trouble with the city. He’s not really supposed to have so many people here.”
“No, I was thinking more about the not-remembering-your-father part,” I said. “It makes your story make sense—just like my mom’s memory made mine make sense.”
“You’re pretty smart for a prep,” he teased, his hand resting on my hip.
We were crossing the pedestrian bridge again. I stopped to read the plaque. The bridge was dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a symbolic (and actual) bridge between neighborhoods. Micah put his arm loosely around me as I read. I think he was about to kiss my cheek when the school bell rang. I pulled away. I’m not sure why. It was like the real world was calling.
“Library. Usual time,” I said over my shoulder as I walked back toward school. I left him standing there.
I tried not to think about his arm around me. Or his lips against mine. Instead I thought about his story. I could see it in my head how I wanted to do it. I started writing it out in English class when I should’ve been taking notes on the history of the Globe Theater. We’d start where we left off, with Micah getting hit by the black van, spitting out the pill at TFC, and then telling me—or my character—later about his father. And vowing never to forget anything ever again.
He was late. I was sitting in his usual place—back to the art stacks, a pile of books in front of me—as I scribbled away. He didn’t say much as he slid into my usual seat. I didn’t look up. I just kept writing. Micah shifted in his seat, and I could feel his uneasiness next to me. He reached for his bag and started to leave.
“Where do you think you’re going?” I asked as I pushed the pad of paper in front of him.
A big smile spread across his lips, and he plunked himself back into the seat. I’d used stick figures to rough out the action. The art was crap, but it was his story. He started sketching immediately.
I noticed Ms. Curtis was watching us more closely than usual. I casually knocked a book off the ever-present stack of coffee-table-sized tomes on our table. Micah took the hint and covered up his sketch pad.
“How are we going to get the comic into the school this time?” I asked as I put a book about medieval churches back on top of the stack. “We’ll all get searched on the way in.” In addition to the usual scans, security had been ransacking kids’ bags this morning.
The students weren’t happy about the new searches. I’d heard kids complaining about it in all my classes.
Maia had told me that one kid made himself a Memento T-shirt. But the guards had been so busy with the bags that they hadn’t noticed what the guy was wearing.
Micah stared at the books in front of us. Then he picked up three of them and took them to the front desk. He checked them out from Ms. Curtis and came back to the table.
“She may not like what I’m going to do to them,” Micah whispered to me as he stuffed the books into his bag.
The next day after school we took a new issue of Memento and three hollowed-out art books to Winter’s garden.
Micah would say he lost them and pay for the books at the end of the school year. He’d cut an eight-and-a-half- by-eleven-inch cavity in the center of each book, leaving enough whole pages at the front and back to pass a casual flip-through. He’d carefully preserved the insides and said he might rebind them or use them in some sort of collage. He’d been meaning to try some mixed-media pieces, anyway, he said.
There was one book for each of us.
He handed Winter a book on kinetic sculptures. “Can I have the insides of this one?” she asked, rifling through the book.
I got the one on medieval churches of Europe. Micah’s was on graphic novels of the twentieth century.
Eager to get started, Micah scanned the original comic and then carefully inspected the stencil.
“Let him do that,” Winter said to me, putting down her book. “I want to show you the solar sails.”
This was a new one, her wanting to show me something. Did that mean she’d decided I was okay? I stopped for a split second. Or did she want to tell me to stay away from Micah? I followed her out to the garden.
The fourth sculpture had progressed from a pile of canvases and circuits to an odd rigging of colorful rectangular sails or curtains. Each color and shape, she said, would play a different note or tone when the sun hit it. Like a solar wind chime.
“It doesn’t seem as disturbing as the other ones,” I remarked. “It’s cool, but . . .”
Then she turned it on. The sounds were these glossy ring tones, slowed down or tweaked out to sound like whispers, haunting whispers of the outside world, those tinkles of annoyingly cheerful sound that remind you that someone can always call you, can always watch you somehow, can always find you.
“It’s perfect,” I said, looking at her. I noticed the dark circles under her eyes, one of which was twitching slightly, as if it were holding back some surge of energy. It took a brilliant, spidery mind to think of this, of everything in this garden.
The music, if you could call it that, began to take on a darker tone as a cloud passed over the sun.
“I’m sorry I brought up your mom the other day,” Winter said, staring at her creation.
“That’s okay,” I replied almost automatically. I hadn’t expected an apology. “She doesn’t remember your parents,” I added quietly.
“But—,” Winter started to say. Then she got it. “Oh.”
There wasn’t much else to say, and that oh hung like a note between us for a long moment.
“We should do your story for the next issue,” I said to break the silence.
She shook her head but kept staring at her solar sails. I didn’t press her. I figured she didn’t want to get her parents in any deeper trouble than they already were.
The music got even creepier in the silence between us.
“Enough of that.” Winter shuddered as she clicked off the sound. But she was smiling.
We stepped back into the gazebo just as Micah was printing off the first test page. Winter and I read it over his shoulder as he held it up. Again, I got that feeling. Like we had something good here. Winter was quiet, her smile gone.
“I didn’t know that about your dad,” she whispered. Then she muttered something about putting more drying agent in the ink and headed into the house.
That night I dreamed about kissing Micah at the prom. His tux was from Goodwill, and it smelled vaguely of old books and rosemary.
17
The All-Devouring “It”
Therapeutic Statement 42-03282028-13
Subject: NOMURA, WINTER, 14
Facility: HAMILTON DETENTION CENTER TFC-42
Step. Whir. Step. Whir.
I saw the figure in black run along the rooftops. Then he grabbed on to this curtain that was hanging there between two buildings; and he started Tarzaning across, handful by handful. Just as he was halfway, he looked down at me. It was Sasuke-san. He smiled. Then I heard a horrendous sound. The fabric ripped under his weight. He grabbed another swath of curtain, but it tore fr
ee as he swung himself in the direction of the other building. Grandfather tumbled toward me.
I woke up in a panic. I ran through the house looking for Grandfather, the step-whir in my head growing louder with each empty room. The sound blurred into the frenzy of hummingbird wings fighting against a strong wind. I found him in my gazebo, a pot of tea in front of him, his head resting on his hand, his eyes closed. He was dressed in black.
“Ojiisan,” I whispered.
“You haven’t called me that since you were a little girl,” he said, his eyes fluttering open.
Ojiisan is about the limit of my Japanese. It means “grandfather.” He’d offered to teach me, but I’d always resisted learning more. I thought if I knew the language, my ojiisan might send me far, far away from him, all the way to Japan, where he thought I’d be safer.
“What’s wrong, Win-chan?” he asked. He poured a cup of tea, chamomile by the smell, and pushed it toward me. “Talk to me.”
Feeling very much like a little girl—and not really minding it—I sat down at the low table in front of my grandfather.
“I dreamed I lost you,” I said in a small voice as I stared into the depths of the teacup. He put his hand over mine. “On the stupid Curtain Cling,” I added, feeling much more my cranky teenage self.
He laughed. The step-whir in my head disappeared, and I noticed his hands weren’t rough like they usually were. He was wearing his gloves, the half-fingered leather, grippy ones. He only wore them for one thing.
“I hope you weren’t patrolling by yourself tonight,” I said, squeezing his hand. I knew Grandfather had been doing the neighborhood watch thing after curfew for a while now. He didn’t like to talk about it.
Grandfather nodded wearily. “You know, you look like your mother,” he said as he peeled off the skintight gloves, changing the subject like always.
“Talk to me, Ojiisan,” I said, pouring him another cup of tea.
“I’m just tired, Win-chan.” He took a long sip of tea. “Tired of watching and waiting. Tired of feeling like there’s nothing I can do.”
I knew he wasn’t talking about patrolling the neighborhood. He was talking about the “it” we never talked about. The big, all-devouring it. The fact that Spring and Brian Nomura are never coming home. No matter what we do. No matter how much money and how many lawyers we throw at the system. It had ground them up. Not even the mighty Nomura Corporation, the biggest mobile company in North America, could buy Mom and Dad out of whatever trouble they were in.
The step-whir was back. I kissed my grandfather on the forehead and told him to go to bed. I had to go do something. Anything. Tinker in my shop. Work on a sculpture. Print more comics. Just like my ojiisan. He worked, patrolled, and ran that damn Sasuke course to escape the all-devouring it of our lives.
Looking back at him, still half dozing at the table, I knew it wasn’t enough for either of us. But what else could we do?
“By the way,” he said, yawning. “My support group wants to talk to you.” He said it as if the thought both amused and exhausted him.
Damn. I thought he’d quit that stupid group. Not long after Mom and Dad disappeared, Grandfather joined this support group for the families of the missing. I thought it was a colossal waste of time. It couldn’t bring my parents back, and there was no way I was going to some touchy-feely, wallow-in-each-other’s-pain group therapy thing. He looked so tired, though, I didn’t have the heart to argue about it then.
“It’s not what you think,” he added.
“We’ll talk in the morning,” I said. My plan, however, was to be out of the house long before he got up. I had shit to do, anyway.
Later, I stuffed the latest issue of Memento into a hollowed-out copy of Kinetic Sculptures of Twentieth-Century Europe.
Not that this will do any good, I thought. Nothing ever changes for the better.
The comic’s pages smelled like a new tattoo.
18
I Wasn’t Worried
Therapeutic Statement 42-03282028-11
Subject: JAMES, NORA EMILY, 15
Facility: HAMILTON DETENTION CENTER TFC-42
The next morning, with a couple hundred freshly inked copies of Memento hidden in hollowed-out library books, we approached the bag search at the security checkpoint into school. The sandy-haired cop—Officer Bell, his tag said—searched my bag personally.
“Medieval Churches?” he asked, an eyebrow arched.
“Art history project,” I said calmly. I waited for him to open it, ready to run if he did. He didn’t.
He put it back in my bag and moved on to the next kid.
I left a stack of papers tucked behind a toilet in the second-floor ladies’ room. And when I bumped into my girls before homeroom, I whispered that I’d heard Memento was back in school. “A brand-new issue. Check the bathrooms.” I assume Micah and Winter did something similar. By Spanish class the school was awash in paper. Our paper. And it was all anybody could talk about. But they didn’t stop with Memento.
“You know, we ought to do something, too,” the kid behind me said to his friend when our teacher left the room. We were supposed to be watching a ’cast about Costa Rica. In Spanish.
“But what?”
“We could boycott TFC,” the girl next to me said.
“Or we could petition to bring back the school paper,” another girl said.
“Or we could plan an epic Senior Prank,” a senior interjected from the back of the room. His friends “oh-yeah”ed in response. One of the guys had on an ugly yellow Homeland Inc. shirt. He and about a dozen other students had worn Memento T-shirts this morning, but the principal confiscated them and made the kids wear Homeland ones instead.
I concentrated really hard on the screen.
Still, no black helicopters or SWAT teams swept down over the school that day. I did see the rent-a-cops searching lockers—and Micah—again, but I wasn’t worried this time.
At least not until I found Officer Bell waiting for Micah and me in the library after school.
19
Hi, My Name
Is Nora J.
Therapeutic Statement 42-03282028-11
Subject: JAMES, NORA EMILY, 15
Facility: HAMILTON DETENTION CENTER TFC-42
At first I didn’t realize it was him. He was sitting in Micah’s usual spot with one of the big coffee-table art books propped up in front of him. One about surrealists, I think. I sat down beside him just as Micah breezed into the library on his skateboard. That’s when the book came down, and the door closed behind Micah.
“I’d like you two to come with me,” Officer Bell said firmly. He looked more annoyed than anything. “And don’t think about skating out of here. I know where you live. Both of you,” he said, looking meaningfully at Micah.
So, I thought, it had finally come. My father would storm into the police station. We’d be expelled or grounded or both. I resigned myself to my fate. And Micah’s. He held my hand as we walked out of the library. I let him. It didn’t matter now what anyone thought about Micah and me.
Officer Bell locked up the library—Ms. Curtis was nowhere in sight—and let us stash our stuff in our lockers. “Leave your mobile,” he added before I closed the door. He directed us out the staff entrance to the parking garage where his car sat idling. No one saw us.
He drove for about ten minutes with the back windows of his patrol car blacked out. Then he let us out in an alley behind a brick building.
“Is this a police station?” I whispered to Micah.
He shook his head. And I knew what he was thinking, what I was now thinking. Detention. The big D variety. It wouldn’t have a neon sign or valet parking. It could be anywhere, look like anything.
We both glanced up and down the alley. No cars. No people. We didn’t have mobiles or any money. And I certainly didn’t know where we were or where else to go but home or school—and as Officer Bell had so kindly pointed out, he knew where we lived.
He guided us to
ward some stairs leading to a basement. Micah squeezed my hand before we started down the steps. A bare bulb hung over a rusty metal door. And on that door was taped a piece of paper that said:
Memory Loss Support Group. 4 p.m.
Micah pulled open the door, and I could smell coffee. Burned coffee. And I could hear the sound of metal clacking against concrete or linoleum.
The cop gently pushed us into the room. It was long and narrow, with a little kitchen at one end. Fluorescent light bounced off freshly waxed floors. The walls were covered with kids’ drawings, everything from colorful construction paper Noah’s arks to macaroni crosses.
Memento Nora Page 8
