Everyone We've Been (33 page)

“Doesn't it seem a bit extreme?” Katy says, and she shivers a little. “They'd be messing with your
brain.
”

“Maybe my brain needs to be messed with,” I mumble, afraid it is true.

I'm lying on my side on my bed, eyes swollen and puffy from crying. Katy is lying on the floor, facing me.

“I want to knock his effing teeth out but I still can't stop thinking about him,” I tell her, feeling myself beginning to tear up again. And then I want to knock my
own
teeth out, because why am I still crying? It's been days since I saw Zach and Lindsay at his father's store. More than two weeks since I first saw them together. Days of my mother worrying, hovering and stone-faced like she's seen a ghost, and even Caleb feeling sorry for me.

And I'm feeling this panic, like I'm falling into a hole that I can't get out of. That I don't know
how
to get out of.

“I must have been wrong about the whole thing. All along, it was probably just in my head.”

Katy shakes her head. “It wasn't in your head. If anything, he led you on. Maybe he led himself on.”

I don't know if it hurts more because being with him made me feel like I'd always wanted to, made me hum with electricity and lightness and life. And maybe most of that wasn't even Zach, not specifically the boy, but the way love pries your eyes open and forces you awake.

“Everything reminds me of him. Food tastes awful. I don't get it,” I sniff. “What does food have to do with him? I didn't eat
because of
him, you know? I was never anything
because
of him.”

“Except a Ciano fan,” Katy points out with a smirk, but gently, like she's been doing since Zach and I broke up.

“Well, maybe that,” I admit, turning onto my back. “God. Why did I date him when he
told
me he was still in love with her? Before anything happened, he told me.”

“Bad move on your part, but still his fault,” Katy says. “Keep your freaking tongue in its trap. It's not a hard concept.”

I stare at the ceiling, the tiny cracks and dips.

“My mom is worried that there's something, you know,
clinically
wrong. Or that there will be soon. Poor appetite, bouts of uncontrollable crying, eternal desire to live in sweats.”
I'm
worried that there's something wrong. I've never felt like this before. I turn to Katy. “What's
your
diagnosis?”

She pretends to think long and hard about it. “Clearly, a Depressive Episode. Unanticipated heartbreak, not otherwise specified. Moderate to severe, but definitely curable.”

“I don't think I've ever heard you give a positive prognosis,” I say, trying to sound lighthearted. But I'm doubting her prognosis. Every cell that zinged with happiness and excitement now throbs with a sharp, awful pain.

I just want it to stop.

“Well, you know, atypical circumstances. You're my badass best friend. And you can do so much better. You're
going
to do so much better. I don't know why you're even entertaining the notion of…what's it called? I've already forgotten the name. The memory sprite thing.”

“Memory splice,” I say, remembering all the pages and pages of information I've read about it. I remember finding the ad on Zach's windshield on our mundane day. Ironic.

The splice means I'll forget everything about Zach. His eyes, his face, his smell. I'll forget filming our movie and falling asleep in his arms and laughing so hard in the park while we got chased by birds. Plus, it seems safe and fast. Legit.

“Addie, I know places where they do
legit
amputations, but it doesn't mean I have to have one. And what about your parents, anyway? They'll never agree to this.”

“They don't necessarily have to know.”

Katy gasps. “How would we manage that?”

“
We
wouldn't, but maybe Beatrice Lane and Kathleen Kelly could.”

“Addie…”

“It's supposed to be super safe. And it's not that expensive—I could cover it with my savings.”

“As in all the money you've been saving up to leave this town? You can't!” Katy sits up and looks me in the eye. “I know it hurts right now, Addie, but are you sure it's worth it? Are you sure it's what you want?”

“If I don't have it…”
I'll be stuck here, trapped reliving the pain and heartbreak and anger over and over again.
It's like something is wrong with my mind.

And I can't imagine running into Zach and Lindsay, seeing them together again.

“You'll be okay. I know you will,” Katy says.

But I don't. I can't remember ever feeling this broken.

“If I could only stop thinking about how hard my heart was beating the first time he kissed me or the way my stomach kept doing somersaults for the first week after. He was the first boy I was with,” I say, swiping my eyes with the back of my hand. “I think I'd feel better if every single thing I ever felt for him or with him wasn't running through my body every second of every day. I wish I'd never met him.”

My heart feels shredded and raw and small.

Maybe I'm not strong enough. Maybe I can't handle the full spectrum of good and bad, the blunt surfaces and sharp edges of life. Of love.

Maybe my mother is right to always be so overprotective.

Maybe the only way to feel better now is to forget.

Mom drives fast—we left my car in the parking lot at Channel Se7en—so we can get there before Overton closes. I'm glad that there's no time to talk more about it. No time to
think
more about it. If I did, I'd doubt myself. I'd hear Zach's words in my mind telling me that erasing him was cowardly. I'd question whether maybe in time I'd be grateful for the pieces of my life I got back—Memory Zach, Rory—and for understanding finally why my family is the way it is. Why
I
am the way I am.

But there's no time for that.

Dr. Overton is finishing with his last patient when we arrive. I fill out a form about my medical history while my mother fills out a consent form. Did they make me fill out something like this the last time I had this procedure? Did I put Katy down for my emergency contact, and did it feel this scary, this strange, signing away part of my life?

I think of Katy.

What will she say when she finds out I did it again?

Will she be disappointed? Angry? Relieved?

And what about Caleb? What about Dad?

What about Zach?

I push them all out of my mind.

An imaging technician comes to get me after I've changed into a green cotton gown.

“First we're going to do what we call a baseline scan,” he says, then explains how the machine works and how I'll be positioned in it. “It tells us what your brain looks like in its neutral state and also lets us double-check that it's safe to perform the procedure. I want you to focus on the pictures that come up on the monitor while we capture the images. Any questions?” I shake my head and then slide into the same donut-shaped machine as last time. This time, the technician pulls down a small white monitor, and pictures of different shapes—chains of triangles and circles and polygons—dance across the screen while the machine purrs quietly. Afterward, I'm sent into a room where a nurse I haven't seen before helps Dr. Overton run the computer, then watches as he puts the electrodes on my head. Mom sits in a tiny attached room, like those for X-ray technicians, watching through the glass, fidgeting like it's the night of the crash and she's in the hospital beside me again.

Did she sit there, too, the first time I was here? When they erased Rory?

“Sleep is our main tool for the consolidation process, so we'll be giving you a sedative and you'll feel fairly groggy afterward.” Dr. Overton goes through a list of things to expect during the procedure, then some side effects: the worst are headaches, a rash from the electrodes, nausea, and drowsiness. I get to go home afterward, but because I've had complications in the past, he's given Mom his number and will be on standby for the next forty-eight hours in case anything goes wrong.

“It's not an invasive procedure, so I truly don't expect any problems,” Dr. Overton says to reassure me.

Finally I am lying on a hospital bed, all hooked up to electrodes, Dr. Overton and the nurse looking at the computer, which shows an active picture of my brain. My fingers tingle with nerves, with fear.

I tell myself I am ready to forget. That I am ready to start again.

“I want you to think of the first thing you remember from that Saturday, the Saturday from the bus,” Dr. Overton says.

I grasp for the moment I woke up the morning of the crash, before I met the boy.

“Just relax. You're doing great,” Dr. Overton encourages in a soft, distracted voice.

“Picking up the cingulate cortex,” the nurse whispers.

“Posterior?” the doctor asks. “Are we getting a read on the hippocampus?” They quietly discuss whatever they're seeing on the screen.

“Doing great, Addie,” Dr. Overton says again, and out of the corner of my eye, I see him nod at the nurse. I'm thinking about packing up my viola case and my mom dropping me at the bus stop the day all this started. And then the nurse wipes something cold on my arm and there's the prick of a needle and everything slowly gets a little blurry.

Dr. Overton says, “I had a Zach once.”

I manage to glance sleepily at him, surprised.

“Her name was Nina. First girl I ever loved,” he says. And I relax again, realizing he's just making small talk. I wish he wouldn't talk about Zach, though. I wish he would talk about something that doesn't matter.

“Shift a little left, Leslie,” he says, peering at the computer screen. Then he keeps talking to the nurse or me or maybe to himself. “I haven't seen her since senior year of high school at
least,
” he says. There seems to be a tinge of sadness in his voice. But I'm feeling so foggy from the procedure that it's hard to say.

“Every now and then, I'll think I see her in the market or at the gym. It's the oddest thing.” He chuckles, and the nurse laughs with him.

“Sometimes I'll think about her, wonder if she looks the same. What she did after college, whether she ever thinks about me, wonders about me.” His voice gets fainter and fainter. “Where she is right now.” He pauses. “And what she's done with her piece of my heart.”