“Well, I guess you were right the first time. I’m not strong enough for the truth.” I burst into tears now, and she wraps her arms around me. Smooths my hair from my face.
“Oh, honey,” she says. “Oh, Addie.”
She’s quiet for a second, tracing circles over my back, and then she says, “You know, you were different after the first procedure.”
I remember that feeling of things vanishing, the feeling of wanting more than I had. Did my mother feel guilty because of what she’d taken away from me or because she was finally sleeping for the first time in months, knowing that I was, too?
“I remember,” I say.
“You know your father won’t support this. You know how he feels about Overton.”
“Well, he’s not here, is he?”
“And what about the side effects from when you erased the boy? That had never happened to a patient before. What if it’s not safe? What if your side effects are even worse this time around?”
“Mom, please,” I say. My mother has always tried to protect me because, I realize now, her biggest fear is that she can’t. So I appeal to the part of her that hopes something else will help me, even if it’s not her. “Thisis the worst thing. Having some of the pieces but not all. Knowing the worst parts and not the best. I don’t want it anymore.Anyof it. I just…I want to be able to move on. I want to forget.”
BEFORE
December
“Doesn’t it seem a bit extreme?” Katy says, and she shivers a little. “They’d be messing with yourbrain.”
“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 myownteeth 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 knowhowto 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 eatbecause ofhim, you know? I was never anythingbecauseofhim.”
“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 hetoldme 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,clinicallywrong. Or that there will be soon. Poor appetite, bouts of uncontrollable crying, eternal desire to live in sweats.”I’mworried that there’s something wrong. I’ve never felt like this before. I turn to Katy. “What’syourdiagnosis?”
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’regoingto 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.
