I'll Stop the World (52)

“Sure thing,” he said, hauling himself back up onto the bed. “But first, subject change. Tell me something about your mom.”

That was not what she was expecting. “Why do you want to know about my mom?”

“Because it feels like she’s a big part of why you’re helping me, and why we’re even making this whole stop-the-fire plan.” He shrugged. “Plus, it just seems like you think about her a lot. So I thought you might want to talk about her.”

“Um,” she said, flustered. “I mean, I was only five when she died . . .”

“But you still have some memories of her, right? Or stories your dad told you?” He scratched the side of his head, giving her a crooked smile. “Sorry, am I being too much? Alyssa says I can be a lot.”

“Is Alyssa your sister?”

“My friend,” he said, his cheeks turning slightly pink, making her wonder if this Alyssa was his “friend” in the same way that Noah was hers. “I, uh, don’t have much of a filter. I just say whatever stuff comes into my brain. ADHD thing.”

“What’s ADHD?”

“Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Do you not know what that is here?”

She shook her head. “I know what ADD is.”

“Oh, weird. Okay, well, yeah, it’s basically the same thing. It’s what doctors call an executive function disorder. So it’s like the ringleader in my brain is asleep most of the time, so whatever monkeys or clowns or contortionists feel like performing, they just run onstage and shove out whoever’s already there, since there’s no one to keep everything in order. Or sometimes they perform at the same time. Or maybe they merge into a single act. Just a free-for-all circus.” His arms waved around his head, pantomiming the internal chaos. “No one driving the ship, icebergs everywhere. Fun times.”

Rose laughed. “So your brain is an out-of-control three-ring circus . . . on the Titanic?”

“I’m honestly not entirely sure where I was going with the circus metaphor or the ship metaphor. Both just seemed to work at the time.” He shrugged. “Welcome to my brain.”

“It seems fun.”

“Tell that to my teachers.” He straightened abruptly. “But you were going to tell me something about your mom.”

“Was I? I don’t remember agreeing to that.” Rose couldn’t keep the smile from her face, though. As bizarre as their situation was, it was easy to talk to Justin. She didn’t second-guess everything that came out of her mouth with him. Maybe because he didn’t even first-guess what came out of his.

“Come on. I may never see my mom again either, but all my memories of her kind of suck. Give me a good one instead.”

“Okay, just a minute.” Rose closed her eyes, conjuring a memory. Most of her impressions of her mother were hazy wisps, barely more than a splash of color here, a whiff of scent there. But she had a couple that were solid enough to grab on to, worn soft from years of frequent handling.

“She used to put me on her lap when she played the piano,” she said, the memory spooling out against the backs of her eyelids. “I would put my hands on hers, and close my eyes and let her move my arms up and down the keyboard, and I’d listen to the music and pretend that I was her. That I was the one playing, in the future, all grown up.”

She opened her eyes to find Justin staring intently at her, a smile playing on his lips. Had he moved closer, or had she just gotten so caught up in the memory that she’d forgotten where she was? Slight warmth seeped up the sides of her neck, into her cheeks.

“Do you still play?” he asked.

She shook her head sadly. “I never learned. She had planned to teach me herself. After she died, Dad offered to find me a teacher, but I didn’t want to learn anymore. Dad sold the piano a couple years later.”

“Do you wish he hadn’t?”

She let out a surprised little laugh. She’d never known someone who asked questions the way he did, like they barely had a chance to skip off the surface of his brain before tumbling from his mouth. “Sometimes,” she admitted.

He nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, I think I would, too.”

“Do you believe in fate?” Rose asked, turning his original question back on him.

Justin flopped onto his back, setting the mattress bouncing slightly. Rose’s pencil rolled off her legal pad, onto the comforter. Justin picked it up, twirling it around his fingers. “I don’t know,” he said, staring at the slowly rotating pencil. “If you asked me a couple days ago, I would’ve said no. Now . . . I’m undecided.”

“Really?” Rose was surprised. She would’ve thought that time travel was a pretty compelling argument for believing that there were larger forces at work in the universe.

He looked at her, pointing with the pencil. “I mean, I take it you believe in God, right?”

She nodded. Her parents had attended church only sporadically before her mom died, and then her dad stopped going completely afterward. But later, Rose started attending Sunday school with Lisa, and eventually, when her father and Diane got together, he accompanied them to church, too. Yet faith in God wasn’t something she remembered deciding to have; faith simply felt like something that had always been inside her. She knew some people found it hard to believe in something they couldn’t see or prove, but for Rose, it was impossible not to.