by Sarina Bowen
But I don't remember putting that on. I don't remember if those boots were stiff or comfortable. I don't remember if the collar of that shirt was loose or tight, or how it felt to slip the cotton onto my skin. It's a blank. And when I see that photo, it's like looking at some other guy.
“And after I heard you laugh, I realized who you were. But you recognized me. I know you did. So how could that be?"
I cross my arms in front of my chest. And then I actually flex, like a tool.
But it works. Daphne's eyes dart to my half-naked body. I see her drink in the view of my tattooed biceps and chest. But then her eyes snap upward again, and they narrow. "Answer the question.”
Oh well. I tried. “That's happened before," I admit. "I recognize a face from that time, but I don't know why. It’s…” Maddening. Terrifying. Pick an adjective. “Frustrating. But since you couldn't place me at first, I assumed we'd barely met."
She chews her pink lip. I’d like to cut these questions short and bite it for her. But I can see that she’s wrestling with my story, trying to figure out if she believes me.
“Look, you wouldn’t be the first person to think I was bullshitting you. Why do you think I don’t explain this to people? It sounds bonkers.”
“Sorry,” she says, rubbing a hand across her forehead. “It’s just so weird.”
“Welcome to my world,” I mutter. I’ve spent so much time these past two and a half years straining to remember those missing six months. I’ve visited every page of the USTSA website, squinting at photos of cadets, looking for my own face in those pictures. Looking for anything that’s familiar.
I never found it.
“So what was this accident like?” Daphne whispers. She’s hugging herself now. But she seems to believe me. “It must have been bad.”
“Bear in mind that I don't remember.” I chuckle.
“Right. Sorry.”
“They told my parents that a group of cadets brought me into the ER from an off-campus party. They said I’d climbed a wall on a dare. And then fell off.”
Her perfect eyebrows shoot up. “Because you were drunk?”
“That's what I assume. But there’s no evidence of that. Why else climb a wall, though?”
“Because it’s past curfew?” She shrugs.
“I’d thought of that. But it was Open Weekend.”
“Open Weekend,” she repeats. Then she looks at her hands.
“Apparently it was one of the few times when there was no curfew. But that’s all I’ve got. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to remember what happened. But it hasn’t come back.”
“So…” She lifts her brown eyes to mine. “You’re like a character in Proust, hoping that some small thing triggers your memory?”
“Nah, this is way past Proust,” I grumble. “I’d need to be Marty McFly from Back to the Future.”
She lets out a startled laugh. “So you could go back in time and see what happened?”
“Or tell myself not to climb the damn wall. That’s what McFly was trying to do, right? He wasn’t there to watch. He was there to change the outcome.”
“Yeah, I get it.” Her big brown eyes search mine. “Can I borrow the time machine after you’re done with it? I have a few messes I’d like to clean up, too.”
“Sure, Shipley.”
We’re quiet for a minute, and I close my eyes and try to imagine myself visiting the past. I’ve done this before. I’ve tried meditation, hoping that a memory will surface. I’ve spent many an hour trying to picture myself climbing a wall. I concentrate, trying to imagine the texture of the bricks against my fingertips—and my feet scrambling for purchase as I struggle toward the top.
"Who dared you to climb it?” she asks suddenly, and my eyes snap open. “Don't you want to kick his ass?”
Oh, Daphne. Can’t she see that we’re on the same wavelength? “I would love to kick somebody’s ass,” I admit. “But the Academy wouldn't tell me who I was with.” They remained silent even when my father—an alum—raged at them, begging for information.
Cadets are supposed to know better than to take a dare, they’d said. It was an attempt to shame us into silence.
It worked on my dad. But not on me.
“And you don’t have friends from school who could…” She stops in the middle of the sentence. “Oh.”
I snicker. “Yeah, if I had friends, I’ve forgotten them. And you already know that gets awkward.”
“Wow, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I say immediately. “My life was waylaid for a while there. Look at me now. I’m healthy. I’m fine.” I hold my arms out wide. “Why don’t you come a little closer and let me demonstrate.”
This wins me a rare smile from Daphne. And, man, that smile is something else. I would like to give the word waylaid an entirely new meaning with her.
But then she says, “I think you only hit on me to distract me.”
“No way,” I argue. “I hit on you because I’d like to know how you feel underneath me.”
She smirks and shakes her head.
“Fine, fine. You can ride me instead. I’m flexible on this point.”
But that’s when she gets up and heads for the door. “Night, Rickie. Sorry to keep you up.”
“You can keep me up longer.”
She gives me a wry grin and leaves the room, closing the door behind her.
I get up and lock it again, because I’m funny like that. But it’s a crappy lock. So I’m also tempted to pull the wooden chair out from Dylan’s desk, and lean it against the door, with the back pressed up near the doorknob, as an extra layer of security.
But I don’t do it. The flimsy lock is as much leeway as I’m willing to give my phobia.
I go back to bed and shut off the light.
“Hey McFly!” Daphne shouts to me over the loud beat of live music.
“Hey, Shipley. Happy birthday!”
“Thanks!” She stands on tiptoe to speak into my ear. “I’ve been thinking about you.”
“Yeah?” I give her a hot look. “That’s good news.”
She ignores this blatant come-on and says, “I can’t imagine losing six months of my life. I guess it would be much more inconvenient than forgetting where you put your car, no?”
“Definitely.”
It’s Friday night, and we’re at Dylan and Daphne’s twenty-first birthday party. I’m holding the dregs of a craft beer and tapping my foot to a live band on the back patio at the Gin Mill, a bar owned by Alec, the boyfriend of May Shipley, the twins' older sister.
The good news is that Daphne is no longer avoiding me. The bad news is that she wants to ask a million questions about my head injury, while I’d rather be talking her into bed.
“How about a drink?” I ask, changing the subject.
“Sure, I’ll have a Coke,” she says.
“A Coke. On your twenty-first birthday?”
Daphne crosses her arms and gives me the fierce, laser-beam glare that always gets me hot. “I’m not much of a drinker. Do you have a problem with that?”
“No, no,” I say quickly. “Besides, it looks like Dylan is drinking for both of you.” I point at her twin, who is holding a drink in each hand and dancing to the fiddle music. He’s in pig heaven right now.
"This is amazing," Dylan crows. "I can't believe you got Skunky Town to play at my birthday party."
"You only turn twenty-one once," May yells over the banjos.
"You’re my favorite sister ever. They’re not even from around here," Dylan says, his eyes following every move the fiddle player makes.
"Massachusetts," May's boyfriend, Alec, says. “I’m putting them up at the motor lodge. It wasn’t outrageous.”
Dylan grins, his attention still glued to the band, as it should be. He’s a party boy just like me. Living in the moment is a skill we share.
"Thank you," the guitar player says when the song ends. "And now we'd like to invite Dylan Shipley to the stage to play a song with us. W
here's the birthday boy?"
"Holy shit." Dylan's grin is as wide as his whole face. “I don’t have my fiddle.”
"It's right here!" his mother says, holding up the instrument. Clearly the fix was in.
“This is crazy,” Dylan says, trading two beers for the violin. "Hope I don't humiliate myself."
That's unlikely, since he's an accomplished musician. But also, he wouldn’t care that much if he did screw it up.
"What do you want to play with us?" the front man asks.
"Uh,” Dylan chuckles again. “How about ‘Billy in the Lowground.’”
That song title means nothing to me, but the band just nods. They let Dylan take the lead, and after he tunes up, he tears into a fast-moving fiddle tune. And then they all join in.
The Shipley clan hollers their approval.
This is a killer party by any standard. The patio is decked out with strings of tiny lights that are reflected in the river flowing past us. The place is packed with well-wishers of all ages. In the center of all this mayhem, I feel serene. I've got a cold beer and a belly full of party food.
"My babies are all grown up," Ruth Shipley says, watching her son rock out on the fiddle.
“So grown up," Daphne mutters beside me. “I found his underwear in the hayloft yesterday.”
“So grown up that he can throw his ragers in the meadow legally now,” Griffin adds.
“Oh, hush,” his wife says. “But who is that? Check out your grandpa.”
We all turn to spot Grandpa Shipley right in front of the stage, swing-dancing with a gray-haired woman in a polka-dot dress.
“I don’t recognize her,” Daphne says.
“That's Mabel,” Griffin says. “They met at a poker party last month. This is their third date.”
“Go Grandpa,” I say. “You know what they say about third dates.”
“Oh, stop.” Daphne knocks my arm with her own. “Is your mind always in the gutter?”
“Pretty much.” I don’t add that it’s a recent development for me. And that she’s the one who puts it there. “All right, I’m hitting the bar.” I didn’t drive here, so it doesn’t matter how much I drink. The Shipleys hired a school bus to ferry eight of us from the farm to the Gin Mill just for this special occasion. “One Coke coming up.”
“Thanks.” She nods her exquisite face, and I’m mentally kissing the rise of her cheekbone.
It’ll happen. I’m a patient man.
I head indoors to the bar to pick up two drinks from a friendly Scot named Connor. And when I go back outside, Daphne waves me over to a set of wooden stairs that I hadn’t noticed before. They lead down to the riverbank. But after walking down halfway, Daphne sits down on the stairs. “Have a seat.”
“Yes ma’am.” I follow her to the relative quiet and privacy of this hiding place. We can see moonlight glinting on the surface of the river. It’s very romantic.
“Now I have some more questions,” she says.
Of course she does.
“Did you have a roommate?”
“Your brother is my roommate.”
She rolls her eyes. “I mean before. At macho military college.”
I snort. “There are women there too, you know.” And I guess I should have seen this coming. Daphne is hard on a guy’s ego. People used to compete for a ride on the R-train. Now they just want to hear the morbid details of my head injury.
“But did you? Does your roommate know what happened to you? You must have somebody’s contact information. Was he there? Isn’t your phone full of messages asking you how you’re doing?”
These are all good points. And I probably had plenty of friends at USTSA, because I tend to make friends easily. There’s just one problem. “The rule was that you had to communicate inside the Academy’s own app. It was like WhatsApp, but a private version.”
“Why?” Her forehead gets that crinkle again.
“Security, I think. I still have the email that sent me the link to the app, and my login instructions. They were very clear that it had to be used at all times. And apparently I was a very well-behaved cadet, because all the messages on my phone during that time period are to people I knew outside of school.”
“But it’s still there, right?” she presses. “On the secure app on your phone?”
“It would be. But after I got out of the hospital, I couldn’t log back in again. Once I left school, it was like they slammed the door shut on me.” And that was even before I lawyered up, when my texts were shut off.
“Doesn’t that seem freaky to you?”
“Sure. Although I’d prefer to get our freak on another way.”
She rolls her eyes.
“To answer your question, all I’ve got is my roommate’s name, and an email address for him.” The school had sent it out during the summer, inviting us to contact one another. “His name is Paul Smith.”
She brightens. “Have you called him?”
“Baby girl, I’ve tried. His voicemail says, Mailbox full. And he doesn’t answer his emails. Some of them even bounced.”
“Really?” She sets her Coke down on the stair step. “Isn’t that kind of creepy? Did the zombies get him?”
I shrug, but it’s creepy as fuck. My mother agreed, back when we were all more comfortable talking about it. Lenore thinks so, too. “That’s really just one flower in a big bouquet of creepy. You know what’s also creepy? Hearing that you and I spent six hours in a car together, and not remembering it at all.”
She tilts her head and gives me a look that’s uncharacteristically soft. “I’m sorry if I was bitchy about it.”
“You weren’t. I promise. In fact, go ahead and yell at me some more, so that I have an excuse to distract you with my mouth.”
Her eyes widen. And although it’s fairly dark out here, I swear she’s blushing. At least I hope she is. This is the first time I’ve brought up that kiss.
“Or better yet—I can just kiss you again for funzies.”
She tilts her head back, leaning it against the railing. And I swear she’s giving this thought some serious consideration. “It’s a bad idea, McFly.”
I love the new nickname she’s given me. “How bad?” I have to ask. “Kind of a fan of bad ideas.”
She smiles and shakes her head.
And then we’re interrupted. Because of course we are.
“Daphne,” her sister May says, leaning down to address us in our private little hideout. “Can I see you a moment?”
Daphne actually looks put out by this request, so at least I’m making a little headway.
It’s something. I’ll take it.
Seven
Daphne
For a hot second, my temper flares. The sad truth is that I'm enjoying Rickie's attention. It's a good thing I'm not drinking tonight, so I don't do anything stupid. My sister's interruption is probably well timed.
And when I look up at May, I feel the usual flare of guilt. I haven’t been a good sister. “It's no problem,” I say, scrambling to my feet. "What do you need?"
"Well, it's almost time to cut the cake. But first I need to show you something.”
"Sure. Anything." I cast a quick glance back at Rickie. He gives me a slow nod and then a wink. He looks exceedingly good tonight in a crisp, pink-and-white checked shirt which is open exactly one button further than is polite, giving me an enticing preview of those tattoos I like so much.
Until this very moment I had no idea that a man could make pink-and-white gingham sexy. But here we are. Rickie is a study in contrasts. I never know what he's going to wear or say or do. He drives me crazy. I know I ought to resist the pull. But he does not make it easy.
And now that I know his weird secret, he's even more irresistible. It humanizes him. Maybe I have a vulnerability kink. Although that doesn’t explain how I fell for Reardon Halsey’s charms last year. He's about as vulnerable as a rattlesnake.
May is shooting me sideways glances as I follow her to a corner of the deck. "Okay, I
feel bad interrupting. Are you going to jump on that later?"
"May!"
"Oh please don't sound so shocked. Like the idea never occurred to you? He's smokin’.”
I make a noise of irritation. "He knows it though." And this is the weirdest conversation. May and I aren't close. We never dish about guys.
"He's not creepy, is he?" She gives me a look of alarm as she pulls out her phone.
"No, he's not," I admit. "He's flirty, that's for sure. Really flirty. But..." It's hard to explain Rickie's unusual appeal. Every sexy word that comes out of his mouth is infused with humor. Like he's teasing himself at the same time he's teasing me. As if he doesn’t mind sounding a little ridiculous if he makes his point.
I feel drawn to him, even though I don’t want to admit it. He seems different than other guys.
But, ugh, he's probably not. And it's just my usual stupid crush getting in the way of seeing the world the way it really is. "He's not creepy,” I repeat. “He's fine. And also fiiiine. Good eye candy in the upstairs hallway this summer.”
“Keep me posted," she says, opening up a photo on her phone. “I wanted to show you this project I started. Now let’s see…”
I wait patiently, even though I’m not very interested in all the home decorating projects she’s taken on lately. My sister’s life is coming together in every possible way. Her boyfriend loves her. They own several businesses between them—the bar, May's small law practice, and Alec's growing brewery operation for nonalcoholic beers, which May inspired him to start.
She used to be the fuckup that everyone worried about. Her life was a mess. But now she’s super happy and accomplishing all her goals.
Meanwhile, my life is imploding. Not that I’d tell her about it because we are not close. That’s also my fault. When she was at her lowest, I betrayed her and embarrassed her.
These days we tiptoe around each other. May tolerates me. And I should probably be more grateful.
“Here it is! See? I’m stripping and refinishing this piece of furniture. Look.”
I squint at the screen. “Is that…grandma’s old desk?”
“Yup! Doesn’t the bare wood look great?”