31

Jane’s Book of Memory, written in the
days and weeks after the crash

Good news and bad news.

Good news: kids are getting bored with me. A girl I don’t remember says, “Memory back yet?” when I pass her in the hallway between third and fourth period and I cannot tell whether or not she is being mean, or is only interested enough to inquire once a day, or she’s just one of those people who don’t think how what they say affects you. I want to punch her in the face.

Bad news: I have to get rid of Kamala.

Because she is out to get me. I know I sound paranoid. That is not one of the mental conditions I presently have. Although I feel like the world is sometimes keeping a huge secret from me.

“I heard you remembered stuff,” she said to me as we walked to class.

“Who said and what stuff?” I had learned I was often discussed in group texts, studied for any suicidal tendencies or hint that my memories had returned. I guess everyone’s college applications were nearly done and the seniors had time to burn.

“I don’t—” Kamala stopped herself, as if the third word was the magical remember. “Is it true?”

“If it was true, I would say so. I would dance down the hallway.”

This was the wrong thing to say, because of David. I knew it as soon as I said it. It’s like I’ve forgotten common sense.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s OK,” she said. “I know you’re not yourself.” Every time she was nice, it felt like a small, mean shove. No one but me seemed to notice.

So good of you, I saw a passing girl mouth to Kamala. She patted Kamala on the shoulder as if giving her strength. She didn’t even look at me.

“Why are you being my peer helper?” I asked.

“Don’t be ridiculous, of course I was going to help you. We’ve been friends forever, Jane.”

“Have we?”

“Yes.”

“Were we still friends the night of the accident?”

“Why? Are you remembering something?” She stopped, stared at me.

I stopped. “I heard maybe we weren’t as close as we once were.”

Kamala put a gentle hand on my shoulder. “We did have a disagreement when David and I broke up.”

“When…when did you break up?” This was news to me.

“A week before the crash.” With a gentle, understanding smile. It was like seeing a snake on the floor moments before the lights in the room went out.

And then I wondered if that was true. If she said they broke up and then she still acted like my friend, it made her look good. There were no e-mails or texts to me saying, “David and I broke up, Jane, I need ice cream and movie night with you.” I had not seen a single one of those. Weren’t we best friends?

“What did you and I fight about?” David? But we weren’t dating. I didn’t have a boyfriend, Mom and Adam had told me that.

Kamala hugged me, patted my back. “Does any of this matter? I just want you to get better.”

You were his girlfriend. Anyone else could have volunteered, maybe they did.

Here’s the later scene at the counselor’s office:

“Mrs. Coulter, did anyone else volunteer to be my peer helper?”

“Why do you ask? Is there a problem?” I made her nervous. I made everyone nervous. They didn’t know how to act. I was their first amnesiac. It was exhausting for them. I must have kept them searching through reference books and websites, trying to counsel me.

“Kamala is not really trying to help me.”

“But she’s so patient and understanding with you.”

“I think it might be an act.”

It was almost as if I had suggested Kamala was from Mars, or that she had privately shown me superpowers. Mrs. Coulter didn’t believe me but she said, “I’ll talk to her.”

“No. I will. I just wanted you to know my feelings about her. Did anyone else volunteer to help me other than Kamala?”

“Yes. Adam Kessler and Trevor Blinn. Would you like one of them to be your peer?”

I bit my lip. Trevor had stood up for me in a way no one else had. But Adam was a friend who wasn’t particularly close with Kamala and her crowd. She couldn’t exert any influence over him. The drawback was that I didn’t remember Adam before the accident. I had childhood memories of Trevor and Kamala. I knew I had been close to them once. Adam was a blank space. Maybe I needed that; someone who didn’t have years of expectations and history with me. And I could trust him. “Adam, please.”

“All right. I’ll speak to Kamala.”

“No. I will. I’ll tell her.”

Mrs. Coulter bit at her lip and I thought, Are you afraid of her? “It would be better if I could,” Mrs. Coulter said.

“Let me fire her,” I said. There is some social awkwardness tied to amnesia.

“Jane, ‘firing’ isn’t really the word I’d use…”

“I can talk to her. Please let me stand on my own feet.” (Counselors love that phrase.)

And she nodded. I didn’t wait. Everything was being done for me. I’d been led along, docile, trusting. So. Kamala was waiting for me at our first-period class, like I didn’t know how to find my way from the hallway into the room.

“I was worried about you,” she said. “You weren’t waiting for me at the entrance. You know I don’t like to be late.” And she gave me an admonishing kind of smile, the indulgent, patronizing smile that you give a wayward child.

“I no longer need your help,” I said by way of greeting. Her smile stilled and then, for just a moment, hardened into a cruel slash. Like a mask had fallen away for a second.

Then it returned with new energy, a recharged star.

“I’m assigned to be your peer helper,” she said, prim as a grandmother. Now the smile was gentle, and then the bitch dusted my shoulder, like I was a disheveled toddler on the playground. “And that’s what I’m going to be. I’m here for you, every moment, until we get your memory back.” And then she tapped my forehead, still smiling.

I felt my skin blush terribly. I was still recovering. Physically and mentally. I was emotionally arrested—whatever leaps in maturity I’d made in high school were wiped free. Then I was mad at myself for telling her this at the start of the day rather than the end—it was Friday, the weekend could have been a needed break—and also for then not just saying that Adam would kindly take over, Kamala had already done so much, thank you, and been all diplomatic about it. I didn’t know how to do that. “Not anymore. I don’t need one.”

“I don’t think you’re quite yourself, Jane. I don’t think you realize what good friends we’ve been. You need your friends right now.” Her voice lowered. More serious. As if we were still negotiating. If David had broken up with her, had he faced this saccharine resistance? That mask that slipped and showed the snarl? “I’m all that’s keeping the wolves at bay.” She gestured, furtively, at the classrooms behind her. “Without me, they’ll turn on you. It won’t be just snide looks in the hall or people not speaking to you.” The half smile returned. “It will get ugly.”

“Are you threatening me?” And here’s the weird thing: I could hear a little hope in my voice. I wanted her to threaten me. I wanted all the innuendo that lay behind those sugared words and indulgent smiles to break free, like light through a long-shuttered window.

The bell rang. The hallway emptied. Neither of us moved.

She tilted her head slightly, watching me, the smile going into a tremble. “No, I’m not threatening you. Threats are for children.”

And she slammed her head back against the concrete block wall, hard, screaming, “JANE STOP JANE STOP JANE NOOOOOOOOOO!” And she screamed it like she was auditioning for a horror movie.

Need I go on? She collapsed to the floor, sobbing, while I watched her, saying, Oh please, but then it does turn out that when a girl everyone thinks is damaged goods gets accused of assault by the popular brainiac, they tend to believe the ever-smiling, ever-gentle-voiced Kamala.

Thanks to Mom’s epic deer lie and the suicide note, I was what my English teacher called an “unreliable narrator.”

The teacher took me to Mrs. Coulter, hustling me past dozens of staring and whispering students; they took a tearful Kamala to the nurse. Kamala kept crying out, “It’s not Jane’s fault. Is she OK? Is Jane all right? Did she hurt herself, too? Let me see her.” I could hear her plaintive yet calculated cries down the concrete-and-tile hallways, echoing off the shuttered classrooms. Every student and teacher heard my fall from grace, like the frightened animals in Eden.

Slow clap.

Kamala’s parents came. For some reason the Graysons came and talked at me. Yes, at.

“I don’t understand why you would do this, Jane. Kamala has always been your dearest friend. A sister, even, to you,” Dr. Grayson said. She had been a runner-up in a beauty pageant, whatever the big global one was with all the different countries and costumes. I only mention that because she was a very good doctor and much respected, but there was this giant picture of her in her waiting room, in her evening gown and sash, stunning, and it was so unrelated to being a good doctor. I never knew why she needed that picture up in the waiting area, why she needed to remind us all. She was gorgeous and she was brilliant and she felt entitled to give me a lecture. She even took a deep breath before she began.

I tried. I did. I waited for another deep breath. “I didn’t lay a finger on her. She knocked her own head into the wall, she threw herself to the floor. Because she’s mad at me. I won’t let her control me.”

You can imagine how this sounded, in the hush of Mrs. Coulter’s office.

“How could you tell such a lie?” She actually kind of hissed this at me.

Some people, including Kamala’s parents, could not stand for their child to be criticized. Mr. Grayson left to go yell at Mrs. Coulter. I wondered where my mother was. She had been called. She hadn’t responded.

I looked Doctor Beauty right in the eye. “I’m not lying. I think about how she acted when we were kids and maybe I’m seeing it in a new light, all the high school years stripped away when it’s easier to be allied with someone like Kamala, when you’re under her protection. I lost that. I see her for what she is.”

I thought she was going to slap me. She sure thought about it, I could see the decision practically inching across her brain. Please, I thought, do it. Hit me. Then for a moment maybe I’ll be pitied.

But she didn’t.

“We won’t file charges,” Dr. Grayson said. She and Kamala had the same harsh line of mouth that curled into an oh-so-kind smile.

“I would hope not, so she doesn’t end up committing perjury”—well, that was what I thought of saying two hours later. In the office I just stared at my feet and wished I’d died in the crash. It would have been easier, wouldn’t it? She started repeating herself in her outraged lecturing of me, so I interrupted:

“Well, it would be my word against hers. I still have a word, you know.”

She looked at me like I was dirt, and since we were alone, the smile vanished. “A girl who kills a friend when she wants to kill herself.”

“I wasn’t suicidal!”

“How do you even know? You don’t remember.” And that is how you play the trump card, the unanswerable charge, the crime I can never deny. So I was the girl who killed David and attacked Kamala.

They didn’t expel me; the Graysons made this huge show of pleading for mercy for me. Kamala, too. She wrote an editorial to the paper. I bet someone sent it to the Pope, to speed along her sainthood paperwork. It made them look so angelic and wonderful. I didn’t have to bear the stares anymore, the sneers, the dumb questions of did I remember someone or had my memories come back. I finished my last few months working alone with a special-needs teacher, the whole day in an unused classroom. I was done at Lakehaven. I was done.