Huh, why had I done that? So automatic, almost thoughtless.
Now I was teetering on the verge of being on the edge; I went as still as the room as my eyes roved around for the next oddity. What was this, wedged in the upper corner of my door mirror? A ticket stub for a movie I’d never seen. I darted to it. I didn’t remember anything about that movie—the title was in German, I couldn’t even pronounce it.
And here, what was this? A black business card for a dance club called Areacode out in Bushwick. Areacode? I must have gone to that club, right? And it had been memorable enough that I had a souvenir.
The poster tacked to my wall corkboard startled me most.
Whoa, how had I not seen that, first thing? When’d I put that up? I didn’t know any group called Weregirl. I stared. Against a rusted sunburst posed three guys and one girl, all dressed in old-fashioned military jackets.
My heart was pounding. But I hadn’t heard this band’s music. I hadn’t tacked up this poster. Or bought those. Or seen that. Okay, okay, calm down. This must have happened inside the memory sinkhole. The missing weeks. Dr. P and I had shared multiple discussions about this.
It was lettered in retro-typewriter ink along the bottom of the poster, with a list of dates from last winter. WEST TWENTY-FIRST AND SURF AVENUE was circled in blue, for a March 12th concert. Of course, I’d never made it to the show. By March 12th I was at Addington, relearning how to walk and chew food.
Five minutes home and I was unraveling. My armpits damp, my breath shallow. And I hadn’t even left my room.
“Remember your PBR.” I could hear Dr. Pipini’s voice in my ear.
Positioning, Breathing, Relaxation.
Slowly, I unclenched my hands. My back was pinching— I dropped to a hinge, tried to touch my toes. Forced my mouth into a smile—“smiling helps when you feel worst,” Summer always said—and then rolled up.
Okay. I would finish excavating my room later. Now I unzipped my suitcase, which spilled out the time capsule of my convalescence. It was strangely comforting. All the familiar paperbacks that had been lined up on my hospital shelf, along with my textbooks and progress notebooks. Sweatpants and T-shirts, scrubs and Crocs. Get-well cards and stuffed animals and even my temporary teeth—a bridge they’d created for me to use for a couple of months before I got my permanent veneer implants.
The temp teeth had been too fascinatingly ugly not to keep. After a moment’s thought, I placed them on my bureau between my sandalwood jewelry box and the photo I’d framed of my parents from a few Thanksgivings ago.
God, my parents had aged drastically. Because of me. My fault, all my fault.
Downstairs, the doorbell chimed and Mom got it. But I could have guessed who it was. Not ten minutes home, and here was Smarty. I listened to their hushed voices—“Can I see her?” “Yes, of course. Go on up; she’s in her room.” Followed by the soft bound of Rachel Smart’s mismatched—one pink, one red—Converse All Stars on the stairs, before she burst through the door and swept me up into her signature crushing hug.
“Smarty, I can’t breathe! Put me down!” But I was laughing. It felt so good not to be treated like glass, like a patient.
Rachel’s gray wolf eyes swept over me for information as she let me drop. “Ooh. The Hollywood smile. Are they all capped now?”
“Jealous?”
“Maybe. They’re so white. And with the short hair—you definitely look…Okay, let me see how the battle wounds are healing.”
Rachel and I hadn’t known a modest moment between us since the night we both peed my bed during a sleepover playdate back in pre-K. Rachel, just under six feet with a rock star’s hips and a swimmer’s shoulders, was as easy with her own sharp angles as I—seven inches shorter and about the same weight—was usually okay with my curves. And anyway, I was happy to lose my cotton shirtdress. Mom had brought it to Addington because it was one of my faves, bought with my own money at an end-of-summer pop-up-shop sale in the East Village. Happy yellow gerbera daisies printed on thin green cotton.
Except it was a dorky dress. Mom loved it, but I’d been self-conscious in it all day. In the back of my mind was a sticky wriggle of lost memory—I’d been meaning to donate it to Goodwill. Hadn’t I?
The thought, like the pens, like the Weregirl poster, was an itch that I couldn’t find to scratch at.
I stripped to my tank and boy shorts and let Rachel circle me as if I were a used car she wasn’t sure about buying. “Can I touch them?”
“Sure. If you want to.”
I shivered reflexively as Rachel’s index finger traced the six-inch herringbone scar where broken glass had split the skin of my forearm down to my elbow like a hot dog bun to the meat inside. Then around back to the base of my spine, where her fingers found the buried bolt. It was about the size of a couple of D batteries, a result of fusion surgery for traumatic spondylolisthesis. Also known as a fracture-dislocation of the fifth lumbar vertebra.
An injury that, had it occurred one inch higher up my spinal column, would have left me paralyzed.
Her finger next came to the stippled graft along my arm to my elbow. Then moved up and across my forehead. Her face went politely blank as I lifted my overgrown thicket of bangs to reveal my scar. Almost grotesque, I knew. But I also knew Smarty would knee-jerk joke it off. When the going got tense, Smarty got jokey.
“Hear about the dude who lost his left arm and his left leg in the car crash?” The flat of Smarty’s hand pressed against my forehead. As if pushing back the fact of the scar, like the fossil imprint of a lizard that extended from my temple to the arc of my brow.
“Waiting for it.”
“He’s all right now.”
“Ugh. Terrible.”
“Not the worst.” She grinned.
Rachel. Raye-Raye. Smarty. My bestie since before I knew the word bestie. Who’d made the trip to Addington more than a dozen times, and always with treats from the outside world—copies of Elle, smuggled boxes of Little Debbies and Mike and Ikes, new music downloads. Which reminded me.
“Who’s this group Weregirl? You never downloaded me any of that.”
Rachel’s lips thinned as she glanced at the poster. “Sorry. I’m not big on Weregirl. Sorta forgot that you went very fangirl right before the accident.”
“There’s still a lot I don’t remember from right before the accident.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. But I didn’t feel like it was my job to make you remember the stuff that I personally think should have stayed forgotten. Weregirl sucks.” She smirked, joking, but we both knew that my lost memory was a sensitive topic.