Remember Me
Chapter One
Retrograde
. . . . .
I wake with his voice in my mind.
. . Bella . .
. . . come back . . .
. . . . stop fighting me . . . .
Panic clogs my throat, although I have no memory or context for the words, which is odd because I usually remember everything. All I know is that I've dreamed of and lost him again. Each time I blink, his image fades farther away, until I'm left staring at the closed curtains across the room. And then I notice that my breathing won't slow down.
When I reach for my water bottle, I knock the lamp over on the bedside table and it falls with a clatter. My fingers are shaking so badly that it's a challenge getting the lid off, and I end up pouring more water on my face than into my mouth. By the time I stop coughing, my panicky fear has given away to anger and a runny nose.
With a cry of rage, I throw the water bottle at the wall. I forgot to recap it, and water splatters against the wall in a kind of Rorschach inkblot. I sniff and wipe my face dry, studying the slowly disintegrating lost and confused girl on the wall.
It's still early. My alarm isn't due to go off for another 40 minutes. I should get up, but I don't. I can't.
It just hurts SO MUCH when I'm awake.
. . .
Ms. Denali asks me to stay after class. My stomach plummets, and I suddenly feel like I'm going to be sick. I knew this was coming, though.
As she passes, Angela shoots me a worried glance. Ben just clenches his teeth and glares at me, and seeing that from him almost makes me feel guilty, but my body won't let me escape. Nausea presses against the back of my throat, so I concentrate on breathing.
Breathe, just breathe. It'll pass.
I watch my fingers caress the cover of my moleskine notebook through tears, hearing the sounds of my departing classmates as if everything is being played in surround sound. Mike is asking Jessica if she'd mind if he wore purple runners to prom, and Emmett is joking about Jasper always pulling his pants all the way down just to pee. There's a scuffle, chair legs scratching across the floor, Emmett's "Ow!" and the sound of giggling.
Oh, that's me. Giggling and almost crying and wishing . . .
I breathe slowly and try to get myself under control as Ms. Denali closes the door firmly. I know why she's asked me to stay, and if she catches me crying, it's going to raise a flag.
"Bella," she says with a sigh as she sinks into the chair in front of me. It's all she says. The minutes stretch, but then she touches me.
My face feels like stone when I meet her eyes.
"What's happened?"
It's my fault, all my fault, but Ben and Angela can still pull it off if they-
I shrug. "Just stopped caring is all."
Bewildered fear is written all over her face. It echoes how I feel, but to a lesser degree. As the days passed, it was just . . . the contest . . . didn't matter as much. Winning didn't seem to matter like it once had.
"You stopped caring about the scholarship," she grinds out.
Every year, the Reading is Fundamental Association held a contest, where teams of three or four students create an illustrated children's story of artistic, instructional, and social value. For the right project, the Association awards $25,000 each year, for four years, to the winners.
I'd gone to Ms. Denali with the idea of a pair of siblings living in a war-torn village in Ukraine, Olena and Danilo, who grow up used to fighting for food and their lives. The siblings scrounge and scrape and manage to build a window box of Gerbera daisies that have begun to wilt. But the two are unwilling to let them die. Using the limited resources of their water and humidity, and their own wills to survive in an area that rarely lets inhabitants beat the odds, they devise ways to keep the flowers alive. The daisies begin to thrive with love and care against the backdrop of squalor and suffering, proving that life is worthwhile and can be beautiful wherever you are. The story, which I'd tentatively titled Worthy, ends when the entire village adopts gardening.
I was the main writer and the floral illustrator. Angela handled the math and science facts, and drew Olena with soulful eyes. Ben took care of the technological part, and habitually gave his Danilo a mohawk. We were going to be unstoppable, Ms. Denali had told us more than once.
"Why? How? This doesn't make sense. You're the one who had the idea to begin with," she says, her words coming fast, then slow. And I understand: she feels like she's been smacked in the stomach by a 2x4. Angela did, too. Ben wouldn't even look at me, unless it was to glare.
I pull my hand away from hers, then cross my arms. "I'm sorry," I say. "I know it's not an excuse, but I don't have any other explanation. I just . . . lost interest."
"You just . . . lost interest," she repeats sotto-voice.
The truth is that I can't concentrate long enough anymore. No matter how hard I try, I can't summon up the early fire I'd felt for two kids fighting for their plants' lives. I mean, come on, they should be concentrating on their own lives. It was just . . . a stupid idea.
"Jasper will take my place," I tell Ms. Denali. "He draws as well as I do. Better, even."
"This was your idea," she grits. "You cannot throw it away."
"Maybe, but it's not just mine anymore," I say, and I can't look at her. Instead, I stare at the yellowish bust of Caesar perched on the edge of her desk. It's plastic, and when Emmet knocked off her desk, it bounced on the floor like a nubby ball. "Can I go now? I'm late for swim practice."
In the silence that follows, I scoot my books and laptop into my bag and stand.
"Is something going on at home?"
My eyes flash to hers in surprise. "What?"
She pushes up from the desk, keeping me from moving forward. "I don't understand, Bella. How can you give up on this? Because something like this isn't something you give up on. You've worked so hard. I don't want you to lose out on this opportunity. I'm telling you, this is a winner. This is your future."
Her stance is that of a Momma Bear. She's ready to go to bat for me, even if she doesn't know where to swing it, or who to swing it at.
I hold her gaze, because I need her to understand that I'm not being traumatized or bullied or whatever at home. I look at her until her own eyes fill with tears.
"It's my decision, only mine," I whisper. "I just can't give this project the attention it deserves anymore, Ms. Denali. And it's not fair to Angela and Ben."
That's all.
She's still shaking her head as I edge toward the door.
"I won't be making any formal written changes for another month," she says. "So you still have plenty of time to change your mind."
"Jasper's already said yes," I tell her. "I notified the contest admins last week."
"Bella," she gasps.
"I'm sorry," I mumble.
I yank the door open, and I'm running down the hallway before I hardly know it.
. . .
I swim with a fire in my belly today; I swim hard and fast, and make Coach Black happy.
It's a trade-off.
. . .
When I was ten or so, I used to fall to asleep with the taste of minty-grape Juicy Juice on my tongue, because Mom said I couldn't have my goodnight drink until after I'd brushed my teeth. She had to do this with me, because I hated naps, bedtime, brushing my teeth and hair; generally anything that meant I had to slow down at all. If I was going to do something I didn't like–especially if that something meant I'd be trapped behind a closed door, away from all of life's technicolor wonderfulness–well, there'd better be a glass of grape juice waiting for me.
Sometimes I drank it sloppily, because it gave me a purple mustache and made Mom laugh. When she was in a happy mood, she'd cuddle with me under the covers. That's when she told me about the first time she'd really noticed my dad.
"He was called up to the front of the room to diagram the Edward Bulwer-Lytton sentence, 'It was a dark and stormy night,'" she said deeply, but she was laughing at the same time she spoke, so it didn't sound all that dark. Or stormy. "Your dad stood up from his desk, took a step, and then crashed to the floor like a sack of potatoes. It was loud, and I remember thinking that his fall just kept going and going. All of those long, dangly limbs of his."
Instead of untying the laces, my dad had slid his shoes off, walked up to the chalkboard in his socks like it was nothing, and diagrammed the heck out of that sentence.
A few days later, she'd asked him to the Sadie Hawkins dance, and that was that.
The little girl in me couldn't imagine the larger-than-life image I had of my dad falling because someone had tied his shoelaces together. Mom was just telling me another tall tale. She was good at that, because she was a librarian, and she told stories to kids two times a week. I had firsthand experience listening to her intractable Cat in the Hat as he argued with a talking fish, her nervous White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, and her sharp-edged Marilla in Anne of Green Gables.
But now I'm 17, and Mom and I don't get along well enough anymore to have before-bed cuddles or walks down memory lane. In fact, the last story she spun for me wasn't fun at all. "If you don't let Jake or Tyler take you to the prom, I'm going to lose the bet with Sue. And if I lose the bet with Sue, I'm taking your car keys away."
I knew the threat was hollow; she'd never take the car keys away for such a reason. But I also knew that if I didn't go to prom, she'd be heartbroken. Mom had a romantic's soul, but she'd had to skip her own prom because she'd been pregnant with me. Apparently just steps away from the side gymnasium entrance to her own prom, her water had broken.
So while the idea of me going to prom made my left eye twitch, I knew she wasn't going to drop the idea. I would have to go in order to keep up the charade that I was a typical teenager mostly concerned about appearance, and what others thought of me. Actually, Mom and Dad made that especially easy for me; if my parents had a fault, it was that they were actually on the edge of a narcissistic relationship only with each other.
"Disgraceful," I once heard Grandma Higgenbotham hiss.
Rosalie was less subtle. She stuck her hand in her mouth and made herself gag.
Alice liked to watch them with her chin propped up on her hands. Her mom was two-years-divorced, but dating her dad again. Kind of a case of can't live with him, can't live without him, and Alice was hoping and praying for a love that beat all the odds.
Privately, I was glad my parents still felt so strongly about each other. It meant that I didn't have to spend time worrying about them, or wondering if they worried about me. Happy, selfish people were less likely to notice the shadows. Not that I lived in the shadows. I didn't. I was on my school's swimming team, I was a creative writing mentor to a small group of freshmen, and I had a 3.8 GPA.
I liked studying, I liked learning. Those activities kept me busy at school or at home, and since I got good grades, I got away with what I needed to. Like lots of sleep, and no job. Boys, parties and dances barely registered, and because of this, Dad turned out to be my most unlikely cheerleader.
"Her job right now is school, Renee. Not late nights stocking the shelves at a grocery store, or hanging out the McDonald's drive-thru window handing out fries and hamburgers."
"Well, how is she supposed to understand the value of earning a dollar then? Or to gain a sense of independence if she can't even buy gas for her car?"
"Allowance. She cooks dinner six nights out of seven. Scrubs both bathrooms. Empties the trash."
"Great. Maybe she should be a hotel concierge," Mom grouched.
"She doesn't ask us for anything. No sassing, no boy trouble-"
Here, Mom had huffed in annoyance, probably because it was one of the ways we could have connected . . .
"You know what a good kid she is, Renee. She's focused on her GPA. We got lucky with Bella."
Mom's sigh, heavy and drawn out. "I just don't want her to miss out on anything."
"Like what? Falling asleep in English Lit? Not being able to concentrate on the Calculus pop quiz?"
Another huff from Mom, then a laugh. "She's us. She's our bullheaded go-getter."
"Bullheaded is right," Dad had grumbled. "Can't get that girl to go fishing with me anymore."
"Sheee, not when we can buy salmon from the grocery store already descaled, cleaned, and seasoned."
Maybe Dad forgot about the time that I'd hooked a worm, and then immediately vomited into the boat between us?
Anyway, I considered myself lucky because my life didn't involve hooking worms on fish hooks, or an after-school job braving the hot oil of a fryer. My after-school schedule meant swim practice until 3:45 on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Even then, I still did my two-hour requisite science and technology studies before I began dinner. Mom got home around 5:30 and usually helped, and when Dad pulled into the driveway twenty minutes later, we were setting the table.
Unless it was football season, in which case we bonded while eating on TV trays in the living room. Those were my favorite times, because Dad ate in fits and starts according to what was going on, and it was hilarious to watch him. If it was a close game, and if me and Mom kept the Budweisers coming, Dad would eat almost a whole bag of raw snack carrots without realizing it.
"Thank God we have two bathrooms," Mom liked to say.
I'm in one of them now, brushing my teeth, and thinking about who I could ask to go to prom with since Mom was insisting that I go.
Not Jake–he wanted to be more than friends. And James was too creepy with all the staring. Maybe Quill?
I spit the toothpaste out, rinse my mouth, then hang my toothbrush back in its holder, ready to do the same thing all again tomorrow. In the mirror, my face is flushed, my eyes bright. I even have a small smile.
It's my favorite time of the day.
Goodnights already said downstairs, I close and lock my bedroom door. It's a soft snick in the quiet.
I pull the piece of canvas across the heavy drawstring above my closed bedroom door, thick, sound-proof, and after a lot of cajoling and crying, finally parent-approved. After all, a light sleeper like me has to get a good night's rest. I also really didn't want anyone to interrupt a dream if I got loud.
I set a 20-minute timer on my phone. Flick the switch on the machine that pours white noise into the space. Walk across the room to push the far window sash down, let the blind drawstrings loose, then light the lavender candles on either side of my bed. Sinking to the floor beside my bed, I lean forward to stretch my back and leg muscles, and I breathe slowly in and out, repeat, repeat, until the timer on my phone pings.
By then, my mind is at ease, my muscles like Legos, all connected and moving toward a singular purpose. I turn off the light and climb into bed, kick the coverlet to the floor, pull the sheets high until they touch my chin. I inhale slowly until I imagine every last one of my lung sacs are round with oxygen.
. . Hold my breath and arch my neck back and exhale . . . until my body grows heavy little by little, from the shoulders down . .
Ohhh yes, this is when the feeling of euphoria kicks in. Just for a nano-second, but it's enough that I do the same breathing exercise again.
Again.
And again.
Falling now, I burrow deeper under the covers, they're heavy and smell like lavender. I hunch my shoulders. The sparks of light come. Soaking into my skin. To the bone. It's so bright and quiet. It blinds and deafens me, but I know what's happening and–
. . . . why it's happening, and I see that those colors and soft edges are flowers unfurling and blooming . . .
And I'm coming, or going, and then he somehow stops it all, and I'm gasping and falling against him. His arms are tight, hard and warm against me, and I'm blinking up at his face.
His beautiful eyes are wide, worried, and dark under thick, furrowed brows. Like he can't decide between being concerned or angry. It registers in my mind in a second, but then he says something.
"I'm sorry about yesterday," he says slowly.
He's sorry?
I can't stop staring at his mouth. Why are his lips pressed so tight together? Why won't he kiss me?
"Sorry about what?" I ask. The words are so hard to get out.
He shakes me gently, and I see a kind of despair in his eyes before he pulls me close again. His fingers are digging into my hip and arm, and I think he's shaking. Is he crying?
I don't understand, but he won't let me go, won't let me see him.
His lips are pressed against my temple, then my ear.
"I don't mean to scare you," he murmurs. "But I just miss you so much."
I feel the same way, but before I can tell him, he's speaking again.
"But you're not ready."
. . . . .
The writing contest idea is based on the Reading is Fundamental winners who came up with the Water Wonders series. If you want to know more, just Google Water Wonders.