Everyone We've Been (24 page)

After me and my parents get back from Overton, I spend the next three hours tearing my room apart. Searching every drawer of my dresser, every corner of my closet, under my mattress, beneath the rug. I throw all my clothes out of my closet and search the pockets of pants I haven't worn in years. Looking for a note, a T-shirt I don't remember, a picture.

A memory.

Bus Boy is one thing: his full-wattage smile, the weird ease I feel around him. And I want to see him, I
like
being with him, but even being with him is so incomplete.

His first name is a start, but with more, I could find
more.
I feel disgusted at myself for ever walking into Overton voluntarily. Why would I do that? What could have happened?

Why would I knowingly rob myself of a life that had real experiences? And if it's true that I did, then I owe it to myself to figure this out, to piece everything together myself.

I could ask Katy to explain it to me, to tell me what happened as
she
remembers it, but I don't want her version of the truth. I don't even know how much I can trust it. I want to find all the pieces that have been lying around me all this time—that must
still
be lying around somewhere—and fit them together to rebuild the scattered fragments of my life.

And I need to do it alone.

I keep searching through everything I own, looking for a clue.

Maybe two initials scribbled on the back of my sneakers, or a name etched into the wall behind my headboard.

I come up empty.

Of course I come up empty.

Did I throw out everything that would remind me of him—of Zach?

There are so many gaps in my life—missing pieces. There always have been.

And I barely even noticed. How is that possible?

It's past nine, late enough that I could conceivably go to sleep, but I'm sick of lying awake at night, tossing and turning.

I want answers.

My mother is upstairs in her room, talking to Bruce on the phone, so it doesn't take much to escape the house unnoticed.

It's dark out, night creeping in where evening was, and though the roads are icy, I drive faster than I need to.

Without having a particular destination in mind, I wind up at this park my parents used to bring Caleb and me to when we were little. I would hang upside down, pretending to be a bat, and stare up at the sky, which was the brightest shade of blue. I'd stay that way till I felt the blood rushing to my head, and then I'd pull myself right-side up, and even without the pumping and swirling of blood between my ears, there was never a doubt in my mind that I was alive.

The park is completely deserted. I climb out of the car, snow crunching underneath my shoes.

The too-small swing is wet, and I wipe it down with my sleeve. It sinks from my weight when I sit. Instead of actually swinging, I just close my eyes and twist and twist around, the chains that hold up the swing wrapping around themselves.

Eyes closed, I spin and spin and spin until my head feels light and my stomach turns. The air is so cold it makes my ears hurt.

I hum a song with a melody that feels like getting lost, every phrase a new path, and none of them lead back home. Then “Air on the G String,” the piece that I think first made me see the boy. In my mind, in the night of my closed eyes, I imagine that I'm playing it instead of humming. Feel the weight of my viola underneath my jaw. My bow, weightless, as much a part of my body as my own fingers.

Zach.

I don't need to say it out loud.

I plant my feet on the ground, pulling myself to a stop, though the world continues to spin around me, the park whirling like a merry-go-round, circling me.

On the first turn, I see a red-haired boy with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jeans.

On the second turn, he grins at me and steals all the night.

On the third turn, I breathe in, adjusting to the still world.

“Are you okay?” he asks as I try to refocus on him.

How are you here? Who are you? Why do I feel this way with you?

“Zach,” I say out loud this time, slowly, matching his face to the sound of his name, the cadence of the person in front of me.

He smiles at me, his gray eyes wide. “That's it. That feels like mine.”

I know he can't really make that call, that it's
my
mind confirming that the face of this boy I'm seeing fits the name I've been given. A flicker, maybe, of my memory.

A wave of loneliness rushes over me then, because there is no Bus Boy. There's only me and my mind and what it's been trying to tell me all this time, without finding the words. The details. The facts.

But the air is still warm with his breath, and his eyes catch the moonlight, twinkling at me. He still
feels
real to me.

This invisible boy is still here, to me.

Even if he's a figment of my imagination.

Even if he is a ghost, gone, just like Rory.

He stretches out his hand, the wind making his hair tickle his forehead. I stick out my hand and let him pull me up from the swing.

Are you dead?
I want to ask, but he can't tell me that. I slip my fingers between his and he squeezes, his palm warm.

You can't be dead.

We sit on a bench, damp with moisture, and I can't stop looking at him. Zach. Memory Zach.

“What?” he asks, quiet in the dark.

“It drives me crazy the way you're dressed,” I say, even though it's the last thing on my mind. “I get that you're not really cold, that you won't die from hypothermia”—
especially if you're already dead
—“but it's still really bizarre that you're wearing that shirt when it's so cold out.”

I unzip my puffy coat and peel it off. Then I hold out the left side to him. “Here.”

One of his eyebrows skitters up, but he takes it, amused. Scoots closer. Closer.

The warmth of his body against mine makes me lightheaded.

I wrap the right side of the coat around me. He pulls his half of the jacket around his body the best he can, which is ridiculous because it is much too small for him, not to mention both of us. But we are sharing it just the same, our bodies pressed close to each other, our breaths loud and warm, indistinguishable.

“Better?” he asks, the hint of a laugh in his voice, but his face is weirdly serious. And his eyes seem glued to my lips.

It makes me self-conscious. It makes me think too much about
his
lips.

“Better,” I whisper, and his face is suddenly even closer than before. He smells like a mix of mint and cigarettes.

“Zach?”

Zach. His name is Zach.
In the car yesterday, Katy didn't talk about him like he was dead. Neither did my parents. He can't be dead.

“Hmm?” he says, still so, so close.

“I want to find you. The real you.”

Once school starts, it gets harder and harder for Zach and me to see each other. Especially since he's just gotten another job, working at the Cineplex at the mall. When we're not at school, he's either working or doing something with Raj, and I'm at orchestra practice or viola lessons or doing something with Katy.

So when Zach tells me his parents are going out of town for the weekend, and Kevin is at work,
and
he doesn't have to be at the store, it feels like fate is screaming at us.

I make up something about going to study at Katy's and then wait outside for Zach's piece-of-shit car. I've grown to appreciate its tacky bright blue color, the way it whines every single time Zach hits the gas.

“Hey, you,” Zach says as I climb into the passenger's seat.

I lean over and kiss him. “Hey, yourself.” A drop of water falls on my chin and I giggle, then brush Zach's wild
and
wet hair up.

The car smells like cologne, and my ears warm as I realize he put some thought into what we'd be doing today. We hadn't
said
it in so many words, but we had both clearly been thinking it. I'd brought a small bag with a toothbrush and hairbrush and makeup and other very important items.

“Where did your parents go again?” I ask Zach.

“To Caldwell. They can't get enough of Russell.” The last time I was over, Zach's mom had insisted Zach show me something of the hours of footage he'd taken of his nephew when they'd gone up to Caldwell the week before. Zach blushed and pulled out his phone, showing me a pink-skinned baby with brown hair.

“He's adorable,” I whispered, staring at the video of a cooing, wriggling newborn. I felt a tug at my chest, an overwhelming desire to reach through the screen and grab hold of Russell's tiny pinkie. I like babies, but the thought of babysitting has always terrified me.
What if I do something wrong? What if something bad happens and there's no one to help me?
Maybe I inherited Mom's slight aversion to little kids, or maybe it's because, being the youngest, I haven't had much experience with them.

Russell
is
adorable, though, if only because I know they have a bunch of good-looking men in their family and he'd have to go seriously wrong to not wind up at Adorable.

We drive the rest of the way to his house, talking about school and his dad's store and the solo Mrs. Dubois gave me a week ago.

“So,” Zach says when his car belches to a stop outside the garage. “What shall we do today?”

One side of his lips is tilted up, his gray eyes warm and twinkling, and I lean over and slide my hand up, up his thigh.

“Oh,”
he says, fully smiling now. “I can get behind that.”

“Oh my God,” I say, laughing, and lean over even more to kiss his neck.

“What? I didn't mean it like
that,
” he says, laughing too. He slides his seat back from the wheel and starts to pull me into his lap, and the idea of doing anything else but
that
seems impossible.

And then there is a loud rap on the driver's window.

Speaking just loudly enough for us to hear with the glass still up, Raj says, “What are we doing today?”