I see Elyse at what is clearly the popular table. They’re easy to spot, because the guys are all thick-necked hulks in letter jackets, and the girls are all beautiful, their sunburst-orange cheerleader uniforms showing off tan, sexy limbs. In the center, her back to the wall, Elyse stands out in her white hooded sweatshirt, surrounded by guys and girls who lean eagerly toward her. She spots me and jumps to her feet, slipping away from her entourage to stand by me. “Hey. I can’t talk right now, but I wanted to tell you not to wait for me after school.”
“Hanging with your friends later?” One of them, the tall, dark-haired girl, is still staring after Elyse with a look of concern.
“They’re not my friends,” she reminds me. “And it’s not that anyway. I . . . I seem to have a job of some kind.”
“A job?” I can’t help chuckling. “What exactly do you do?”
She gives me a desperate smile. “Guess I’ll find out soon.”
“It’s cool, my masculinity’s not threatened,” I say. “You being the breadwinner. Me being the eye candy.” I brush her arm, but she tenses.
“Marsh, wait . . . I have to tell you something else.” She lowers her head. “It’s about me, my past.”
“You remembered something?” My heart beats faster with hope.
But she shakes her head, still looking down. “I just put two and two together and figured something out.”
“What?”
“I’m a bad person,” she whispers.
“What are you talking about?” But I know what she’s talking about. Dan. That she had a longtime boyfriend and woke up naked with another guy. Me.
“God, I’m so ashamed.” Her voice is choked with tears. “How could I betray someone like that?”
“Elyse, don’t be so hard on yourself. Whatever you did in the past, there’s bound to be a good explanation for it. When we get our memories back—”
“That’s just it,” she says, cutting me off. “There’s no excuse for what I did. It’s just gross.” She shudders. “It’s just sleazy and wrong.”
“Listen to me. You’re the furthest thing from a bad person. I’ve seen you under pressure. You have amazing integrity.” More integrity than me. I saw this coming after I read his signature in the yearbook and realized they were serious. I should have warned her. I guess I was just hoping their relationship would fade away if I ignored it. And now the tall, dark-haired girl is leaning into the group and saying something, her face animated and conspiratorial, and suddenly all of Elyse’s friends are starting to look over at us and whisper. “We’ll talk later. You should go back now.” Before someone decides she’s acting weird, getting up from the table like that all of a sudden.
“I’m going.” She takes a deep breath, and I can tell she’s battling to compose herself. “Marshall, I need you to do me a favor.”
“Anything.”
“Stay away from me.”
I swallow. The thought of doing what she says makes me feel cold, a coldness that creeps from my fingertips up my arms all the way to my heart. How could I stay away from Elyse? How could we abandon each other to this place? Protecting her has been my purpose, almost from the moment I woke up to this new life. But it’s more than that. I need her in order to survive, need her honesty, like a compass, like a knife, like a lit match in the darkness. Need her rare smiles and rich, low laughter like food. Need her trust, her soft arms around me, like water. Parting ways would feel like a death sentence. “No.” I look her in the eye. “Wait, I take it back—hell no.”
Her eyes flash. “You just said you’d do anything.”
“So I lied.” I throw my hands up. “I’m a liar. I make shit up. You know that. So maybe you lied to someone once in your life too, or maybe not. I don’t care, Elyse. I don’t care about your stupid boyfriend”—much—“or how we woke up together and what it meant or didn’t mean. I just care that you’re the only person who really knows me. If we’re going to get our memories back and make it out of here alive, I need you and you need me. And when I know beyond a doubt that you’re safe, then you can get rid of me, if you want to. Not before.”
“Thank you.” She wipes her eyes. “For the reality check. I’ve been spinning on this, feeling worse and worse about myself all day . . . but somehow you know what to say to make me feel better. I guess you’re the only one who knows me too.”
Somewhere in the middle of this she wanders into my arms and then I’m holding her. I can smell the peaches-and-summer-grass scent of her just like yesterday. It’s like coming home. And I know it doesn’t matter to her if in this high school life she’s royalty and I’m invisible.
Someone’s poking me in the back of the neck, and when I turn my head my vision explodes and there’s laughter all over the cafeteria, and I’m lying in a heap on the ground. I look up to see hairy feet in sandals, muscular calves and thighs like a pair of branches. Dan, riding to his girlfriend’s rescue. My head hurts and my ass hurts. What’s weird is that my right hand’s in my empty pocket, and my left arm’s stretched out in front of me in an odd gesture, middle and forefinger bent like a pair of fangs. Why the hell did I do that instead of trying to defend myself?
“Knock it off, Dan.” I hear Elyse’s strained voice far above my head. “If you want to break up with me, break up with me. You don’t have to—”
“Why in the world would I break up with you?” Dan sounds puzzled. “Hey, Computer Lab, stick to your league, okay?” he says to me, not meanly. “No hard feelings.”
Blood pounds in my temples. Did jock-boy just call me . . . a computer lab? Is he going to hit me again?
But he’s turned to Elyse, who’s frozen to the spot, and jokingly says, “It’s not nice to give nerds false hope.”
A hand reaches out to me, and I grab it, let myself be pulled to my feet by a gangly guy with glasses. “Dude, that was stupid,” he says mildly, like I did something wrong instead of the guy with iron fists. “Welcome back. I knew you’d get sick of homeschooling. Come on, Ruta’s sitting all alone.” Still shell-shocked from the attack, I follow Glasses Guy to the very back table, where a slender, small-boned Indian girl sits tugging nervously on one of her electric curls.
“Marsh!” Electric hair—Ruta—greets me with a round-eyed stare of disbelief. “I haven’t seen you here in ages.”
“What can I say?” Seriously, I’d better think of something. “I missed your nerdy hotness too much to stay away.”
Too much? No. She giggles, lighting up her whole face and revealing a mouthful of braces, the silver, old-fashioned kind. “Jeremy and I missed you too,” she says. “But why were you talking to Elyse Alton?” Enunciating her full name, like she’s a pop star. Maybe she’s jealous?
I grin. “Relax, we’re just friends.”
Wrong answer. Ruta’s brown eyes are suddenly gazing into mine with infinite compassion, compassion bordering on pity, and too late I realize my error: She wasn’t jealous; she was worried about me. Elyse and I are not friends at all. We’re so not friends that if I even try to speak to her, her boyfriend punches me. Heat spreads across my face. Humiliation. “I mean, we could be friends,” I correct myself lamely. “We have friend potential.”
“Yeah, and pigs have flying potential.” Jeremy chortles. “Forget about her, man, we don’t belong with the populars. We’re too smart for them.”
“She ignores you, Marsh.” Ruta’s tiny hand flies to her throat, as if my being ignored hurts her physically. “She’s one of the mean girls. I thought you’d finally gotten over your crush.”
Crush? I crush and she ignores, that’s our relationship? I don’t think so. That doesn’t gel with Elyse being naked in my bed. But if she was my friend—or more—then why would she ignore me at school? I steal a glance at the cool table, where Elyse sits surrounded by football players and cheerleaders. Dan’s orange letter-jacketed arm fits snugly around her shoulder and I can occasionally hear her throaty laugh. Rationally I know she’s trying to act “normal,” helping to keep our secr
et while stealthily gathering information to share with me as soon as we can be alone together. Rationally I get that this cafeteria-table-hierarchy bullshit means nothing to her.
But I guess a punch to the brain stem doesn’t bring out my rational side.
I look back at Ruta and Jeremy. At her thick, earnest eyebrows and giant yellow T-shirt. At his horn-rimmed glasses held together with duct tape, the only thing that stands out on his pasty face. The two of them don’t look all that similar, yet you can tell they belong together. It’s their posture. Shoulders rounded, backs hunched, twitching eyebrows, constantly cringing mouths. If Dan’s body language says royalty, theirs says “kick me.” Is this my league? Are these my friends? All I want to do is go beat up the football player who broke Jeremy’s glasses. I want to shield Ruta from the mean girls. Except that Elyse—my Elyse—is one of those mean girls. How did things ever get so messed up?
“You’re just lucky Dan got distracted,” Jeremy adds, “before he finished kicking your ass.”
“Jer, that’s not nice.” Ruta frowns.
I blink, disturbed at the thought that even my friends assume Dan could kick my ass. Okay, so he caught me by surprise this time, but we’re about the same size and I’m not in worse shape than he is. If I hadn’t been so shocked—and I hadn’t done that weird thing with my left hand—I could have sprung back up and given him a run for his money. But Dan didn’t expect me to hit back. He showed no fear of me at all. Why?
Because I’m nobody at this school.
I’m a loser here.
I’m invisible.
Suddenly I miss Elyse, my friend Elyse, my only actual friend. I miss her with a powerful ache in my chest. Even though I can see her, it feels like she’s slipping away from me. The memory of Elyse waking up in my bed—her blond hair shining in the morning sun—feels painfully distant. Untrustworthy, like maybe it was all a dream.
I know it wasn’t all a dream. At least I’m 99 percent sure. But whatever happened between us in the past, it’s over. (And we don’t even know for sure what did happen.) The present moment, the one where Elyse is popular and I’m invisible, feels inescapably solid. I sink deeper into my seat at the loser table as the cafeteria noise buzzing between me and Elyse echoes through my head.
“Ruta, eat faster so we can go to the computer lab,” Jeremy says.
Ruta gives me a frowny face. “Marsh, did someone throw away your lunch?”
“They’d have to notice him first,” Jeremy reassures her. He’s drinking a Dr Pepper for lunch. Was his food thrown away by bullies?
“I just . . . forgot it,” I lie.
Ruta pushes her sandwich forward across the table. “You can have half my turkey and cheese.”
I swallow. I’m not hungry, but I don’t want to reject this girl’s offer. She looks like too many people have rejected her. I don’t want anyone to ever reject her again. “Sure. Thanks,” I say, and she beams a mouthful of metal at me. It’s still a nice smile.
Hey, at least these two recognized me. Remembered me. That’s something, and it makes me feel grateful to them.
The computer lab is a hot, claustrophobic room with a single open window facing the football field, as if designed to constantly remind the school’s nerds of their inferior status relative to athletes. Three ancient machines are set up side by side, with dot matrix printers between them. Stone age. But internet access is internet access. I take my place between college web-surfing Ruta and Flash-game addict Jeremy and fire up a browser.
Jeremy glances at my screen. “Are you doing homework?” He says it incredulously. Maybe I’m just stereotyping him, but I would have thought a guy like Jeremy approved of homework. Even the nerds in Summer Falls don’t take school seriously.
“Extra credit,” I lie.
“Extra credit for what?”
“Jer,” Ruta admonishes. “Don’t read over people’s shoulders. That’s considered annoying.” She says it so earnestly, like she read it in some self-help book on how to fit in.
To my surprise, Jeremy listens to her. “You’re right, sorry,” he says. “I almost forgot, I have a surprise for you.” He reaches into his backpack and carefully pulls out a rough wooden box, which he presents to her.
“Oh . . . wow.” Ruta touches her cheek, clearly embarrassed. “But you got me a birthday present last week.”
I Google “Eva Moon” again but can’t find any other books by her. Articles, yes, and in some pretty prominent places like Slate.com. But the subjects are all over the place, with no real pattern: the use of divining rods in central Asia, underground nightclubs in Iran, riding the lava flow inside a volcano, a review of Antarctic cruises. Not that this stuff isn’t interesting . . . but I still don’t feel like I have much of a sense of who she was. Or why someone like Joe would care about seeing her notes.
The one message that does come through is that she was fearless. She went everywhere. Every byline uses a different photograph of her: on camelback; in a puffy ski jacket with a mountain background; waving from a kayak; grinning under a spelunker’s hat. In one she’s posing next to a tiger. Really. A tiger. After all that danger and travel, I bet it would have pissed her off royally to know she wound up dying in a harmless-looking tourist trap like Summer Falls. In fact, I’m pissed off on her behalf. She deserved better.
“It’s a just-because present, a music box.” Jeremy opens it, and a miniature baseball player revolves around a platform as “America the Beautiful” plays on a tinny recording. “Because you love going to the baseball games,” he explains. “I made the box out of scrap wood from the old mill.”
“You snuck in there?” Ruta’s jaw drops. “I thought it was boarded up.”
“The back door’s easy to jimmy open,” Jeremy says, obviously proud of himself.
“I can’t believe you went to so much trouble to give me a present.” She sets the box down on the table next to her mouse pad and leans over to give him a hug. “You’re a true friend, Jer.”
But Jeremy ducks the hug attempt. “So, I was wondering,” he says, and spills out the rest in a rushed whisper. “Would-you-go-out-with-me-sometime.”
Oh boy. I stare at my screen, feeling extremely awkward now, wondering if I should leave them alone. But now that I’m online I never want to get offline. The internet’s my only lifeline to the real world.
“We just went to Mollie’s for sundaes yesterday.” She sounds confused, then she cringes. “Oh. You mean . . . on a date? Oh, Jer . . . I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong idea somehow. . . .”
Screw my only lifeline, this scene is none of my damn business. I’m halfway out the door when from behind me Jeremy says in a choked voice, “Forget it. I shouldn’t have asked. Can we just go back to normal now, please?”
“Normal, of course.” Ruta sounds strained.
Man, this sucks. Everyone knows you can’t go back to being best friends after you ask a girl out, and Jeremy and Ruta can’t exactly afford to lose this friendship. They need each other.
I’m hardly even surprised when I hear a gasp for air and turn to see Jeremy crashing to the ground, passed out.
I run over, dive to my knees, and grab Jeremy’s wrist, but I already know his pulse will be fine.
“Marsh, relax, it’s just a heatnap,” Ruta says, sighing. “I feel so awful for hurting his feel—”
And then she does it too. A sharp intake of breath and she falls to the ground.
Zap. The same stinging in my chest, and my vision’s glowing with the now familiar blue light.
Moments later, as suddenly as they fell asleep, Ruta and Jeremy are stirring awake again. Jeremy groans and helps Ruta to her feet. She dusts herself off and smiles at him. He leans toward her smile, a man in love. Full of hope.
“Did the bell ring yet?” she asks.
“No,” Jeremy says, though he couldn’t possibly know any better than she does. I guess he just likes having the answers. He picks up the music box and stares at it. “Huh. What’s this?”
“I don’t know,” she says, sounding intrigued.
“Someone wrote your name on it, Rue.”
“What?” She rushes over, picks up the box, and runs her finger across the smooth lid. “For Ruta,” she murmurs. “That’s so cool . . . I’ve never had a secret admirer!” She slips the box into her bloated green shell of a backpack. Jeremy looks a little discombobulated, maybe even jealous.
But as our trio treks across campus to the art building, Ruta mentions a science fair she’s planning to enter in Eagle’s Point, and Jeremy starts giving her advice on how to present her entry to the judges. The pain and awkwardness between them is gone, as if she never stepped on his heart. And even though I know that every heatnap brings them closer to losing their currently brilliant minds, I’m grateful they don’t have to lose each other. In some small way, it feels like a miracle.
Chapter 21
ELYSE
After school ends, I walk with Carla to the outdoor locker bay and watch her robotically switch out her textbooks for other ones.
“Don’t you need your math book tonight?” she says, gesturing to the locker in front of me.
I stare at the combo, praying for the numbers to magically appear in my mind’s eye. Nothing. Did I ever share my combo with her? I can’t figure out how to ask in a way that’s not suspicious. “I’ll be okay,” I say.
She gives me a funny look. “All right. Well, I’ll be at Mollie’s later if you want to hang out.”
I’m still staring at the combination and willing my subconscious to remember it when Dan sneaks up behind me, his signature move, wrapping his arms around me. This time I recognize the cherry Chapstick scent of his lips on my hair and don’t freak out. Thankfully he doesn’t try to tongue-kiss me again either. “Ready to go?” he says. He’s as bouncy as a golden retriever.
I hate questions like that. What am I supposed to be ready for? It could be anything: an after-school sport we’re both signed up for, the aforementioned nebulous “work” thing . . . or, say, a hiking trip to the waterfall to have sex. I hesitate but feel better when he follows it up with, “Hey, you’re the one who hates being late.” If lateness is an issue, it’s not likely to be something scandalous.
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