Everyone We've Been (9 page)

“Sensible unfortunate life,” I finish.

“So obviously”—Zach pauses, seeking out the right words—“love is for everyone, even Bigfoot.”

“Two big feet or two Big
foots
might not be a sensible pairing,” I offer.

“Right, because they'd be way more conspicuous that way,” he says.

“But a lone Bigfoot is in for an unfortunate life.”

“Yes,”
Zach says emphatically. “We've mastered the French language in, what, five minutes?” He holds up his hand for a high five and I raise mine to meet it, my palm all nerve endings where it touches his.

“And
this
is why French people hate Americans,” I laugh.

It's actually fairly hard to find something bigger and better than that, but eventually I go with this oval-shaped plastic storage container. Zach is not having any of it.

“I see your random and flimsy bin and I raise you this broom,” he says.

“Um, no way.”

“Why not?” he protests.

“It's not bigger
or
better. It's just longer.”

“I think that counts, Addie.”

“We can't leave here with a broom!”

Finally he relents and then we traipse around the store for several minutes until we find something to Zach's liking. “Yes! My mom has one of these,” he exclaims as he approaches the far end of an aisle. “I think I win with this one. It looks like one thing from afar, but when you get close, when you really look closely, it looks like something else.”

He says this with such drama that I have to laugh.

“It looks like an umbrella, Zach.”

“Wrong,” he says. I'm pretty sure he's not allowed to do this, but he pushes the tag out of the way and opens the umbrella up. It flares out with a swoosh, nearly knocking down some stacks of hangers by us. “It's a
giant-ass
umbrella. Functional, therefore better. And”—he points at the container in the cart—“bigger, therefore bigger.”

A little boy turning in to the aisle where we are points and whispers something to his dad. Zach turns the open umbrella so that it curves away from us, blocking us from the view of the customers, and he grins at me. “Think they can see us?”

We're standing with our backs to a shelf of items, and when he speaks, I realize how close we are to each other. I almost shiver from how silly and light I feel.

“I think we're in their way,” I whisper back, and Zach laughs and closes the umbrella so they can pass. One of the store workers is giving us the eye, and I don't think I can top Zach's item anyway, so we go to the checkout and pay for it.

On the way out, Zach hands it to me. “Yours,” he says.

I shake my head. “You won fair and square. I don't need your pity.”

But he pokes my arm with the knob at the end of it and says, “I'm not pitying you. I'm having too much fun for it to be mundane. So I'm disqualified.”

I don't know if his words land exactly the way he meant them to, because the atmosphere shifts the slightest bit then and I feel myself grinning and he glances away, like he didn't mean to say that. I take the umbrella from him.

“Thanks.”

While we were inside the store, someone stuck a yellow flyer under the wiper:
OVERTON INC.—CUTTING-EDGE NEUROSCIENTIFIC PROCEDURES THAT CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE
. I hand it to Zach, who crumples the piece of paper and tosses it into the nearest garbage can.

As we climb into the car, Zach says, “So we have the first part of Doing Completely Mundane Things Exuberantly down, but we're missing a crucial part.”

“What's that?” I ask.

“The bragging,” he says.

We stay in the parking lot—windows down—while I craft the perfect text to Katy, using the memory of some of her updates as a template.

Just spent an hour shopping and bought nothing but a big-ass umbrella from Two Dollars or Less. Blessed!

Zach is thoroughly impressed when I show him my work, and Katy's response—uncharacteristically fast, considering it's been taking her hours to text back—is great.

??

Huh?

We shake with laughter for a few moments and then I say, “So what's our next mundane thing? Or is one enough for the day?”

“Well, my car is in desperate need of a wash.”

We drive over to the car wash and I help Zach throw out his garbage, then lift up the magazines and DVDs so he can vacuum.

I can't help it. I send Katy another text.

Suds. Water. Everything smells like wax. Best car wash of my life. Life is good.

It is not so far from the truth.

THE FUQ?!!!
she texts back.

Zach and I erupt in laughter and keep working. He refuses to throw out his broken and therefore unwatchable
Mask of Life
DVD in case anything can be done to fix it. My body hums from feeling for the last three hours like it's been struck by lightning, and I'm afraid to breathe too deeply, to make any sudden movements. I think that maybe this is what it's like to feel wide awake.

When I get home, I send Katy another text, and I know before I send it that I'm going to get a response in all caps, though I don't know when, and all I say is,
So…there's this boy.

He's staring at me, forehead creased with a frown.

The boy from the bus.

Bentley Lake is windy today, the grass in the park around it covered with days-old snow. After a big storm like the one we had over the weekend, the snow stays for ages on the ground, except on roads and highways that have been salted and walkways that have been shoveled. Still, it's one of the warmer days we've had in weeks, and people are strolling along the cleared paths around the park. And there he is, sitting on a bench, long legs outstretched, hands tucked into his jeans pockets. No coat or sweater or anything. He's wearing the same black beanie he had on a few hours ago when he showed up outside the music-room window.

And then disappeared.

I tug on my own wool hat, self-conscious and cold, as I triple-check that I'm really seeing him.

I came here to figure out what to do with the fact that I'm going crazy. To decide who to go to since I can't go to my parents. And then to clear my head and simply breathe fresh air for a few minutes.

But, of course, he couldn't let me have that.

He followed me.

Or showed up here.

Or something.

I fix my eyes on him now as I march toward the bench, determined not to let him slip between my fingers again without some serious answers. I'm trying so hard not to blink—in case he vanishes—that my eyes sting a little by the time I reach him.

“Who the hell are you?” I hiss when I'm standing in front of him. I have so many questions that they come bursting right out of me. “What do you want? Why can't anyone else see you? What happened on the bus that night?”

He blinks at me.

“What the hell is going on?”

He doesn't say anything, just keeps looking at me. I am ready to grab him by the shoulders and start shaking him.

“Hello?
Answer me.
”

“I don't know.” He is still frowning, his gray eyes serious as he looks up at me. “I don't even know my own name.”

“What do you mean, you don't know?” I ask, my voice rising. I take a threatening step forward till I'm leaning right over him. “I swear to God, if you don't start talking—if you don't tell me everything right now—I'm…I'm going to the police.”

Instead of calling my bluff—the fact that
I'd
be more likely to end up restrained than him, since he's probably a symptom of my psychosis—he just says, “Addison, if I knew, I would tell you. I promise.”

I breathe deeply as I try to make sense of his words.

The strangest, most frustrating thing happens then. The most terrifying, too, since I've been so sure that if I could only talk to him, if I could only confront him and get him to explain, everything would be fine. But what happens is this: I believe him.

I can
see—
from the earnestness in his eyes, the solemnness of his expression—that he's telling the truth.

It feels like a giant whack to my chest, and I have to sit down on the bench beside him to maintain any semblance of composure. Remind myself to take even breaths, stay calm.

I whirl around to face him. “How do you know my name, then, if you don't remember anything? You just called me Addison! How did you know that?”

“Your brother called you that. That night on your driveway.”

“No, he…”

Wait. He did.

“My friends call me Addie,” I spit.

He pauses a second and then lets it roll slowly off his lips, as if he's trying to see if it sounds like me. Also, there's a bit of a challenge to it, as he's holding my gaze.
“Addie.”

It sounds like a secret, the way he says it.

I lose my train of thought on the way to telling him that he's not my friend.

“So what are you? A ghost? Is that it—are you dead? Or are you some figment of my imagination?”

He laughs then. The full sound sends a wave of warmth up my arms. But it's a short laugh and there's something a little bit sad about it.

And almost immediately he's back to frowning again.

We sit beside each other silently for a few moments. Watching people walking, cars driving by at the edge of the park. “What's wrong?” I ask finally. Grudgingly. It shouldn't matter to me that he looks so unhappy.

“I remember being at your school this morning, and I remember being at the movie theater the other day. Your house and, of course, the bus. But I don't remember anything in between all those things,” he says, staring down at his hands in his lap.

“What does that mean?” I ask.

“It means I don't know how I got off the bus, or if I did.” He runs his hand through the front of his hair, the only part sticking out, his voice thick with distress. “It means I'm only
around
when you are.”

I stare at him silently, watching the cloud his breath makes in the air, and I feel an unexpected twinge for him.

“Maybe it's just a weird type of amnesia,” I offer halfheartedly. It's the best I can do through my own disappointment and fury at…whatever this is. Just then a woman walks up and places her handbag on the space on the bench next to me, then bends down to tie her shoelace. She put her handbag on the space on the bench
where the boy is sitting,
and only the two of us can see that this purple bag is on his lap, and the whole scene is so ridiculous, so insane, that I have absolutely no choice but to burst out laughing, which prompts Bus Boy to also burst out laughing. The woman jerks up at my laughter and looks at me like I'm crazy—
correct
—and then she grabs her bag from the seat and hurries away like I might attack her or make off with her bag or something.

“I'm not sure she even finished tying her shoe,” I say, which elicits another peal of laughter from Bus Boy.

Sobering up, I put my hand close to where her bag was—on his lap—and there's a
human
there. Flesh. Encased in a pair of jeans. I just put my hand on this stranger's lap.

I snatch it back quickly, feeling my ears heat up, and he coughs.

“So I guess you're not entirely human,” I say, even though I can feel his body warmth, see his breath, touch him.

He doesn't answer that. What he says instead is, “When you leave, I'll disappear again. If you forgot about me, I'd probably be gone for good.”

He says it like he's joking, but I can't tell whether it's the slight chill in the air that makes him shiver or a little bit of fear. Even if he
isn't
real, it must feel real to be him.

I wonder if he's right, though. He doesn't always appear when I want him to, but most of the times I
have
seen him, apart from the first night on the bus, it's been because I was thinking about him. If I could just decide to never think of him again, would he be gone? Could it be that simple? But even if I can get rid of him, how do I know he won't show up again someday, unprompted?

“Could you at least
try
to guess at what your name is? Maybe you're someone's ghost and, you know, we could figure out what's happening if we had the details?”

“Maybe I'm a Matthew,” he says.

I face him and try to gauge whether the name fits him.

“Or John?” he offers. “Luke?”

“Are you just naming guys from the Bible now?”

He laughs, sounding more normal than he did a few minutes ago, less sad. “
That
guy looks like a John, though. The one running with his dog.”

I find said man: mid-thirties, winter vest and gray tracksuit, running with the leash of a jittery Jack Russell. “Maybe,” I say.

“And his dog's name could be Apollo.”

“What's that lady's name?” I ask, nodding in the direction of a blond woman walking with a middle-school-age boy.

“Suzanne. Maybe Lorelei.”

I raise an eyebrow at him. “If this is so easy for you, you really should be able to figure out your own name.”

Just try,
I want to beg him.
Please just try.

He shrugs, but there's that layer of sadness again. I shift to get more comfortable on the bench, and he glances up, like he thinks I'm about to leave and he'll disappear again. The tension in his body decreases when he sees that I'm not going yet.

My fingers tingle from the sharp drop in temperature the last couple of minutes, and I rub them together to warm them. It's the kind of chilly that targets the ends of things: the tips of fingers and noses, ears and knees and toes.

“Cold?” he asks.

“No, I'm—”

But he's already leaning toward me, tugging down my hat so it covers better. His fingers brush the tips of my ears, making them warmer than they already are. He doesn't take his hands back immediately, and it's only when I lean away from him, my heart ticktocking in my chest, that he leans back, too.

“Um, thanks,” I say, embarrassed. How is any of what I see or feel real if this—this hearing him breathe out loud, this feeling his fingers on my skin—is not?

“No problem.”

I feel so frustrated I could cry. I am sitting with the very person, the very
apparition,
that has tormented me the past few days, and I still don't know a thing about him, about how he got here, why he's here, and what
I'm
supposed to do about it all.

But the other side of it—the unexpected side—is that I feel bad for
him.
He reminds me, weirdly, of myself when I'm with Katy's friends or people at school, of having a family where no one really looks at each other. It's not the same as being an invisible person. But I think
lonely
feels a lot like not remembering your own name.

So I stay with him for another few minutes, naming more strangers we don't know, until it starts to get a little too cold to be outside and the sun starts to sink in the sky.

He doesn't feel all that much like a stranger. It feels comfortable—normal, even—sitting here with him. Still, I notice all the passersby giving me wary looks as they walk, trying to figure out who I'm talking to. And when I finally stand and say an awkward goodbye to him, I know that this afternoon—the strange comfort and understanding between us—doesn't change anything.

I still have to get help.

I still, in all probability, am bat-shit crazy.