The Leaving(70)

“You can’t be serious.”

“I’m just thinking out loud. People aren’t shaped by conscious memories so much as they are by their overall life experience and bonds. The important thing is arriving at adulthood feeling secure, and even though there are a lot of questions about what happened to you, you seem pretty secure.”

“I have barely suppressed homicidal rage,” Lucas said. “How does that make me secure?”

“Your rage is justified. You’re feeling rage toward someone who did something awful to you, not just some random guy who cut you off on the highway.” A beat. “I really am just trying to help.”

“What’s up with the sign?” He nodded at it.

Sashor turned. “Oh, that.” Then turned back to Lucas. “A memory science in-joke of sorts. And by in-joke, I mean it’s funny to me.”

“I don’t get it.”

“We may not remember this moment,” Sashor said. “And we might be happy we’ve forgotten it.”

“Dancing in your underwear.”

“Exactly.”





AVERY



So she’d been caught. Maybe she’d wanted to be.

“What do you want?” Scarlett demanded.

“Nothing. I just wanted to say hi, I guess. I remember you.”

“Yeah?” Scarlett laughed in disbelief.

Poor choice of words.

Scarlett said, “What do you remember?”

“I guess I remember being sad that you were gone. Maybe in a way even sadder, at first, that you were gone than that my brother was gone. I think I worshipped you. In a kid way, you know. You were always nice to the littler kids. And making up stories about wizards and fairies and stuff. I felt like there was something . . . magical about it. About you.”

“Trust me,” Scarlett said. “There is nothing magical about me at all.”

Avery shrugged and then her phone vibrated and she wanted to take it out, read the text, see if it was from Lucas.

She didn’t want to be rude. She just wanted something more from all this.

“Well,” Scarlett said, “I guess, nice to meet you. Again.”

“Yeah,” Avery said. “Sorry. For the following thing.”

“It’s okay,” Scarlett said. “I hope they find him.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

Scarlett turned to walk away.

No.

No.

No.

“Wait,” Avery called out.

Scarlett turned.

“Do you think he did it? Do you think Lucas killed that guy?”

Something in Scarlett’s eyes turned darker. “Why would you think that?”

“He told me,” Avery said. “That he thinks they’re going to find his prints.”

Scarlett tilted her head, took a step back toward her. “I would say that the Lucas I know would only have done that if his—or our—lives depended on it.”

Avery felt her face tighten into something fake-feeling when she asked Scarlett the question she hadn’t been able to ask Lucas. “Are you a couple or something?”

Scarlett was unflinching. “I think we used to be, yes.”

He’d said he needed to figure it out. With her. But where was Scarlett’s head in all this?

“What about now?” Avery dared, like her life depended on it.





Scarlett


Chambers put the brown paper bag on the dining room table and pulled out a large manila envelope. He slid a stack of photographs out of it, sifted through them as he spoke to Scarlett and her mother.

“All the photos are from an instant camera. I guess Norton didn’t want to risk any of you being recognized if he had prints made somewhere? I’m assuming that’s the reason the blown-up shots didn’t have you all in them, as well.”

He pushed a square photo across the table to Scarlett, who had to move the fabric she’d been cutting, having already ruined some with weird stitches.

She picked it up,

looked—

“That’s me”—



/

/



Maybe twelve years old?

And felt the world t i l t.


And stood there with an ache that made her knees b u c k l e.


Her mother and Chambers were still talking, but she couldn’t process the sounds of their words— they might as well have been speaking


—and then she started to cry.

At first, a leak from the eye.

But . . .

. . . the gap in her teeth where she’d lost one, the ribbon in her hair,

the picture of Rainbow Dash on her shirt, the color of the ice-cream cone in her hands—her favorite, green chocolate-chip mint.

She couldn’t hold back the force of it.


A t s u n a m i o f g r i e f crashing on her shores.

Her mind set about filling in the edges of the photo . . .

Making it bigger . . .

Remembering?


Or making it up?


Did it matter?


How much of anything anyone remembered was real anyway?



Damaged.

Manipulated.

Dinged this way and that.