Change Places with Me(41)
Outside homeroom, Selena rushed up to her. “So this Saturday I booked you a DJ! Isn’t that great?”
“Huh?”
“Don’t you remember? You promised. At brunch.” Selena jabbed an elbow into her ribs.
The girl saw that Selena had deep frown lines between her eyebrows. Rose had thought Selena was always cheerful and smiling. “This Saturday?”
Selena narrowed her eyes. “What’s wrong with this Saturday?”
The girl remembered how much Rose had needed to sleep last weekend, all the rest of Saturday and until two o’clock Sunday. With the extra Alitrol she might sleep clear through to Monday. “How about the weekend after? I’ll be ready by then.”
“I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that. This party is on.” She turned around and said over her shoulder, “Here’s your chance to actually get with Nick again. Don’t blow it like last time!”
In the cafeteria, the girl picked up a sesame-seed bagel, oatmeal-raisin cookies in a pack, and pineapple juice sticks.
At the scanner, Cooper had a little glint in his eyes—beautiful eyes, brown with flecks of green. But that unibrow—ugh. “Hey, how you doing? Want to talk later, about what happened at Forget-Me-Not?”
She shook her head. “Nothing happened, as it turned out.”
“Your memory—?”
“Wasn’t tampered with.” Wait, Dr. Star had told her what her new cover story would be. “I mean, I tried Memory Enhancement, but it didn’t work. So that’s the end of that.” She put her money on the counter.
“Are you sure? It really seemed like something happened—”
“I’m totally fine. I don’t have any more pain in my jaw, either.” She’d forgotten all about that, until now. “Turns out I got a shot there. Maybe it went too deep.”
“Ouch.” He made a face. “Hey, we got lucky. This Sunday, Ball of Fire is coming to You Must Remember This.”
For a second she forgot that Ball of Fire was a screwball comedy; it sounded like a plummeting meteor. “Sunday . . . I can’t, I can’t.”
He looked really disappointed. “It’s only playing that one day.”
“I have to sleep—I don’t know for how long.”
“Really? Can’t think of a better excuse?”
“I’m handling it the best I can,” she said, “under the circumstances.”
“What circumstances?”
“Here.” She shoved the money toward him.
“Jeez, Louise, are we having our first fight?”
It sounded exactly like something her dad would’ve said. “It’s not Louise. It was never Louise.”
“I’m kidding. I’m just kidding.” The glint in his eyes grew dimmer.
The girl sat by herself at her old corner table with its view of a brick wall, which darkened within minutes, soaked by a sudden driving rain. The air in the cafeteria changed, too, and got heavy and damp with a smell of leaves and dust. Rain spattered the window. Nobody looked up, but didn’t they understand that something outside had seeped into the inside? She took out her phone, bypassing the ID pic, and went straight to the calculator. It was Monday, noon, so there were now five full twenty-four-hour days until Saturday noon, plus two more hours.
“Good for you—you’re not out with Thing One and Thing Two,” the girl heard over her shoulder, and looked up to see Kim in a football referee shirt. Kim pulled up a chair, opened the girl’s pack of cookies, and helped herself to one. “I ate already but I’m still hungry.” She snapped off a piece of a juice stick and popped it into her mouth. She peered over at the girl’s phone. “New puzzle?”
“I’m counting down,” she said, too quickly.
“To what?”
The girl hesitated. Kim was her friend, her old friend, her new friend, the friend who’d put makeup on her, and why, exactly, had Clara agreed to do that? It had led only to trouble. “Nothing.”
“Counting down to nothing? You realize you’re not making sense.”
“I just have to get through the next few days. Okay? Why is everybody on me about it?”
“Rose, you could tell me, you know. When we were kids, we called each other cross-my-heart friends.”
The girl took a breath. Kim wasn’t making this easy. “Just . . . give me until next week. We’ll do a puzzle. We’ll have lots of fun.”
“Next week?” Kim sounded hurt. “You don’t want to hang out in the meantime?”
“Please. It’s better that way.”
Kim had taken another cookie out of the pack, but she put it back.
CHAPTER 27
In bio lab the girl saw Nick Winter, diagonally in front of her, two tables over. Clara had barely noticed him; Rose had thought he was the most gorgeous thing ever. Now she gave him a steady, intense look that he must’ve felt, because he turned to glance at her. His expression was a complete blank.
He didn’t remember anything at all, she realized—dancing with her, kissing her. Did he even remember the party, or much about his life? If you had no memory, you couldn’t get it enhanced; there’d be nothing to work on. He was still really good-looking, though, even without a memory.