Never Never

by Colleen Hoover

  “Not feeling too hot,” I grumble in response.

  For a few seconds, the guy doesn’t respond. He just continues to stare at me the same way Charlie was staring at me in class, but with less concern and way more contentment. The guy smirks and pushes off the sink. He stands up straight, but is still about an inch shy of reaching my height. He takes a step forward, and I gather by the look in his eye that he isn’t closing in on me out of concern for my health.

  “We still haven’t settled Friday night,” the guy says to me. “Is that why you’re here now?” His nostrils flare when he speaks and his hands drop to his sides, clenching and unclenching twice.

  I have a two-second silent debate with myself, aware that if I step away from him, it’ll make me look like a coward. However, I’m also aware that if I step forward, I’ll be challenging him to something I don’t want to deal with right now. He obviously has issues with me and whatever it was that I chose to do Friday night that pissed him off.

  I compromise by giving him no reaction whatsoever. Look unaffected.

  I lazily move my attention to the sink and turn one of the knobs until a stream of water begins to pour from the faucet. “Save it for the field,” I say. I immediately want to take back those words. I hadn’t considered he might not even play football. I assumed he did based on his size, but if he doesn’t, my comment will have not made a damn bit of sense. I hold my breath and wait for him to correct me, or call me out.

  Neither of those things happens.

  He stares for a few more seconds, and then he shoulders past me, purposefully bumping me on his way out the door. I cup my hands under the stream of water and take a sip. I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and glance up. At myself.

  At Silas Nash.

  What the hell kind of name is that, anyway?

  I’m staring, emotionless, into a pair of unfamiliar, dark eyes. I feel as though I’m staring at two eyes I’ve never seen before, despite the fact that I’ve more than likely looked at these eyes on a daily basis since I was old enough to reach a mirror.

  I’m as familiar with this person in the reflection as I am with the girl who is—according to some guy named Andrew—the girl I’ve been “banging” for two years now.

  I’m as familiar with this person in the reflection as I am with every single aspect of my life right now.

  Which is not familiar at all.

  “Who are you?” I whisper to him.

  The bathroom door begins to open slowly, and my eyes move from my reflection to the reflection of the door. A hand appears, gripping the door. I recognize the sleek, red polish on the tips of her fingers. The girl I’ve been “banging” for more than two years.

  “Silas?”

  I stand up straight and turn to face the door full-on as she peeks around it. When her eyes meet mine, it’s only for two seconds. She glances away, scanning the rest of the bathroom.

  “It’s just me,” I say. She nods and makes it the rest of the way through the door, albeit extremely hesitant. I wish I knew how to reassure her that everything is okay so she won’t grow suspicious. I also wish I remembered her, or anything about our relationship, because I want to tell her. I need to tell her. I need for someone else to know, so that I can ask questions.

  But how does a guy tell his girlfriend he has no idea who she is? Who he, himself is?

  He doesn’t tell her. He pretends, just like he’s been pretending with everyone else.

  One hundred silent questions fill her eyes at once, and I immediately want to dodge them all. “I’m fine, Charlie.” I smile at her, because it feels like something I should do. “Just not feeling so hot. Go back to class.”

  She doesn’t move.

  She doesn’t smile.

  She stays where she is, unaffected by my instruction. She reminds me of one of those animals on springs you’d ride on a playground. The kind you push, but they just bounce right back up. I feel like if someone were to shove her shoulders, she’d lean straight back, feet in place, and then bounce right back up again.

  I don’t remember what those things are called, but I do make a mental note that I somehow remember them. I’ve made a lot of mental notes in the last three hours.

  I’m a senior.

  My name is Silas.

  Nash might be my last name.

  My girlfriend’s name is Charlie.

  I play football.

  I know what jellyfish look like.

  Charlie tilts her head and the corner of her mouth twitches slightly. Her lips part, and for a moment, all I hear are nervous breaths. When she finally forms words, I want to hide from them. I want to tell her to close her eyes and count to twenty until I’m too far away to hear her question.

  “What’s my last name, Silas?”

  Her voice is like smoke. Soft and wispy and then gone.

  I can’t tell if she’s extremely intuitive or if I’m doing a horrible job of covering up the fact that I know nothing. For a moment, I debate whether or not I should tell her. If I tell her and she believes me, she might be able to answer a lot of questions I have. But if I tell her and she doesn’t believe me…

  “Babe,” I say with a dismissive laugh. Do I call her babe? “What kind of question is that?”

  She lifts the foot I was positive was stuck to the floor, and she takes a step forward. She takes another. She continues toward me until she’s about a foot away; close enough that I can smell her.

  Lilies.

  She smells like lilies, and I don’t know how I can possibly remember what lilies smell like, but somehow not remember the actual person standing in front of me who smells like them.

  Her eyes haven’t left mine, not even once.

  “Silas,” she says. “What’s my last name?”

  I work my jaw back and forth, and then turn around to face the sink again. I lean forward and grip it tightly with both hands. I slowly lift my eyes until they meet hers in the reflection.

  “Your last name?” My mouth is dry again and my words come out scratchy.

  She waits.

  I look away from her and back at the eyes of the unfamiliar guy in the mirror. “I…I can’t remember.”

  She disappears from the reflection, followed immediately by a loud smack. It reminds me of the sound the fish make at Pikes Place Market, when they toss and catch them in the wax paper.

  Smack!

  I spin around and she’s lying on the tile floor, eyes closed, arms splayed out. I immediately kneel down and lift her head, but as soon as I have her elevated several inches off the floor, her eyelids begin to flutter open.

  “Charlie?”

  She sucks in a rush of air and sits up. She pulls herself out of my arms and shoves me away, almost as if she’s afraid of me. I keep my hands positioned near her in case she attempts to stand, but she doesn’t. She remains seated on the floor with her palms pressed into the tile.

  “You passed out,” I tell her.

  She frowns at me. “I’m aware of that.”

  I don’t speak again. I should probably know what all her expressions mean, but I don’t. I don’t know if she’s scared or angry or…

  “I’m confused,” she says, shaking her head. “I…can you…” she pauses, and then makes an attempt to stand. I stand with her, but I can tell she doesn’t like this by the way she glares at my hands that are slightly lifted, waiting to catch her should she start to fall again.

  She takes two steps away from me and crosses an arm over her chest. She brings her opposite hand up and begins chewing on the pad of her thumb again. She studies me quietly for a moment and then pulls her thumb from her mouth, making a fist. “You didn’t know we had class together after lunch.” Her words are spoken with a layer of accusation. “You don’t know my last name.”

  I shake my head, admitting to the two things I can’t deny.

  “What can you remember?” she asks.

  She’s scared. Nervous. Suspicious. Our emotions are reflections of one another, and that’s wh
en the clarity hits.

  She may not feel familiar. I may not feel familiar. But our actions—our demeanor—they’re exactly the same.

  “What do I remember?” I repeat her question in an attempt to buy myself a few more seconds to allow my suspicions to gain footing.

  She waits for my answer.

  “History,” I say, attempting to remember as far back as I can. “Books. I saw a girl drop her books.” I grab my neck again and squeeze.

  “Oh, God.” She takes a quick step toward me. “That’s…that’s the first thing I remember.”

  My heart jumps to my throat.

  She begins to shake her head. “I don’t like this. It doesn’t make sense.” She appears calm—calmer than I feel. Her voice is steady. The only fear I see is in the stretched whites of her eyes. I pull her to me without thinking, but I think it’s more for my own relief rather than to put her at ease. She doesn’t pull away, and for a second, I wonder if this is normal for us. I wonder if we’re in love.

  I tighten my hold until I feel her stiffen against me. “We need to figure this out,” she says, separating herself from me.

  My first instinct is to tell her it’ll be okay, that I’ll figure it out. I’m flooded with an overwhelming need to protect her—only I have no idea how to do that when we’re both experiencing the same reality.

  The bell rings, signaling the end of Spanish. Within seconds, the bathroom door will probably open. Lockers will be slamming shut. We’ll have to figure out what classes we’re supposed to be in next. I take her hand and pull her behind me as I push open the bathroom door.

  “Where are we going?” she asks.

  I look at her over my shoulder and shrug. “I have no idea. I just know I want to leave.”

  This dude—this guy, Silas—he grabs my hand like he knows me and drags me behind him like I’m a little kid. And that’s what I feel like—a little kid in a big, big world. I don’t understand anything, and I most certainly don’t recognize anything. All I can think, as he pulls me through the understated halls of some anonymous high school, is that I fainted; keeled over like some damsel in distress. And on the boys’ bathroom floor. Filthy. I’m evaluating my priorities, wondering how my brain can fit germs into the equation when I clearly have a much larger problem, when we burst into the sunlight. I shield my eyes with my free hand as the Silas dude pulls keys from his backpack. He holds them above his head and makes a circle, clicking the alarm button on his key fob. From some far corner of the parking lot we hear the shriek of an alarm.

  We run for it, our shoes slapping the concrete with urgency, as if someone is chasing us. And they might be. The car turns out to be an SUV. I know it’s impressive because it sits above the other cars, making them look small and insignificant. A Land Rover. Silas is either driving his dad’s car, or floating in his dad’s money. Maybe he doesn’t have a dad. He wouldn’t be able to tell me anyway. And how do I even know how much a car like this costs? I have memories of how things work: a car, the rules of the road, the presidents, but not of who I am.

  He opens the door for me while looking over his shoulder toward the school, and I get the feeling I’m being pranked. He could be responsible for this. He could have given me something to cause me to lose my memory temporarily, and now he’s only pretending.

  “Is this for real?” I ask, suspended above the front seat. “You don’t know who you are?”

  “No,” he says. “I don’t.”

  I believe him. Kind of. I sink into my seat.

  He searches my eyes for a moment longer before slamming my door and running around to the driver’s side. I feel rough. Like after a night of drinking. Do I drink? My license said I was only seventeen. I chew on my thumb as he climbs in and starts the engine by pressing a button.

  “How’d you know how to do that?” I ask.

  “Do what?”

  “Start the car without a key.”

  “I…I don’t know.”

  I watch his face as we pull out of the spot. He blinks a lot, glances at me more, runs a tongue over his bottom lip. When we’re at a stoplight, he finds the HOME button on the GPS and hits it. I’m impressed that he thought to do that.

  “Redirecting,” a woman’s voice says. I want to lose it, jump out of the moving car and run like a frightened deer. I am so afraid.

  His home is large. There are no cars in the driveway as we linger on the curb, the engine purring quietly.

  “Are you sure this is you?” I ask.

  He shrugs.

  “Doesn’t look like anyone is home,” he says. “Should we?”

  I nod. I shouldn’t be hungry, but I am. I want to go inside and have something to eat, maybe research our symptoms and see if we’ve come in contact with some brain-eating bacteria that’s stolen our memories. A house like this should have a couple of laptops lying around. Silas turns into the driveway and parks. We climb out timidly, looking around at the shrubs and trees like they’re going to come alive. He finds a key on his key ring that opens the front door. As I stand behind him and wait, I study him. In his clothes and hair he wears the cool look of a guy who doesn’t care, but he carries his shoulders like he cares too much. He also smells like the outside: grass, and pine, and rich black dirt. He’s about to turn the knob.

  “Wait!”

  He turns around slowly, despite the urgency in my voice.

  “What if there’s someone in there?”

  He grins, or maybe it’s a grimace. “Maybe they can tell us what the hell is happening…”

  Then we are inside. We stand immobile for a minute, looking around. I cower behind Silas like a wimp. It’s not cold but I’m shivering. Everything is heavy and impressive—the furniture, the air, my book bag, which hangs off my shoulder like dead weight. Silas moves forward. I grab onto the back of his shirt as we skirt through the foyer and into the family room. We move from room to room, stopping to examine the photos on the walls. Two smiling, sun-kissed parents with their arms around two smiling, dark-haired boys, the ocean in the background.

  “You have a little brother,” I say. “Did you know you have a little brother?”

  He shakes his head, no. The smiling in the photos becomes more scarce as Silas and his mini-me brother get older. There is plenty of acne and braces, photos of parents who are trying too hard to be cheerful as they pull stiff-shouldered boys toward them. We move to the bedrooms…the bathrooms. We pick up books, read the labels on brown prescription bottles we find in medicine cabinets. His mother keeps dried flowers all over the house; pressed into the books on her nightstand, in her makeup drawer, and lined up on the shelves in their bedroom. I touch each one, whispering their names under my breath. I remember all the names of the flowers. For some reason, this makes me giggle. Silas stops short when he walks into his parents’ bathroom and finds me bent over laughing.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “ I had a moment.”

  “What kind of moment?”

  “A moment where I realized that I’ve forgotten everything in the world about myself, but I know what a hyacinth is.”

  He nods. “Yeah.” He looks down at his hands, creases forming on his forehead.

  “Do you think we should tell someone? Go to a hospital, maybe?”

  “Do you think they’d believe us?” I ask. We stare at each other then. And I hold back the urge once again to ask if I’m being pranked. This isn’t a prank. It’s too real.

  We move to his father’s study next, scouring over papers and looking in drawers. There is nothing to tell us why we are like this, nothing out of the ordinary. I keep a close watch on him from the corner of my eye. If this is a prank, he’s a very good actor. Maybe this is an experiment, I think. I’m part of some psychological, government experiment and I’m going to wake up in a lab. Silas watches me too. I see his eyes darting over me, wondering…assessing. We don’t speak much. Just, Look at this. Or, Do you think this is something?

  We are strangers and there are few words between us.

&nb
sp; Silas’s room is last. He clutches my hand as we enter and I let him because I’m starting to feel light-headed again. The first thing I see is a photo of us on his desk. I am wearing a costume—a too-short leopard print tutu and black angel wings that spread elegantly behind me. My eyes are lined with thick, glittery lashes. Silas is dressed in all white, with white angel wings. He looks handsome. Good vs. evil, I think. Is that the sort of life game we played? He glances at me and raises his eyebrows.

  “Poor costume choice,” I shrug. He cracks a smile and then we move to opposite sides of the room.

  I lift my eyes to walls where there are framed photos of people: a homeless man slouched against a wall, holding a blanket around himself; a woman sitting on a bench, crying into her hands. A gypsy, her hand clamped around her own neck as she looks into the camera lens with empty eyes. The photos are morbid. They make me want to turn away, feel ashamed. I don’t understand why anyone would want to take a photo of such morbidly sad things, never mind hang them on their walls to look at everyday.

  And then I turn and see the expensive camera perched on the desk. It’s in a place of honor, sitting atop a pile of glossy photography books. I look over to where Silas is also studying the photos. An artist. Is this his work? Is he trying to recognize it? No point in asking. I move on, look at his clothes, look in the drawers in the rich mahogany desk.

  I’m so tired. I make to sit down in the desk chair, but he’s suddenly animated, beckoning me over.

  “Look at this,” he says. I get up slowly and walk to his side. He’s staring down at his unmade bed. His eyes are bright and should I say…shocked? I follow them to his sheets. And then my blood runs cold.

  “Oh, my God.”

  I toss the comforter out of the way to get a better look at the mess at the foot of the bed. Smears of mud caked into the sheet. Dried. Pieces of it crack and roll away when I pull the sheet taut.

  “Is that…” Charlie stops speaking and pulls the corner of the top sheet from my hand, tossing it away to get a better look at the fitted sheet beneath it. “Is that blood?”

  I follow her eyes up the sheet, toward the head of the bed. Next to the pillow is a smeared ghost of a handprint. I immediately look down at my hands.