by Adam Silvera
“You’re welcome,” I say. My phone vibrates inside my pocket and I see it’s Genevieve. I screen it. I’ll hit her up before bed.
“I’m serious. You gave me something. Whatever it is, I can’t get it from my missing father, overworked mother, or ex-girlfriend. So maybe you have to help me figure out my true potential.”
I study his room for a moment. This place belongs to someone who lives as many lives as possible. There are unfinished sheets of music, movie scripts. (Later I learn that there’s even an abandoned musical in his closet about a robot that time-travels back to the Mesozoic era to study dinosaurs while singing about surviving without technology.) There are boxes of Legos stacked in the corner, a colorful tower from when he wanted to be an architect and set designer.
It’s like when you’re a kid, and you want to be an astronaut before accepting it might be impossible—even though everyone says nothing’s impossible, and they go so far to pinpoint moments from history to make you feel stupid. But you move on anyway. You know your capabilities and circumstances, so you start thinking that maybe being a boxer would be cool even though you’re too skinny. No problem, you can bulk up. But that all changes when you want to write for the newspaper and dream of having your own column, so you start doing that. And one day when you’re writing someone advice on how to be more organized, you think about piloting a ship into space again.
This is how Thomas lives his life, one misfired dream after the other. That journey may stretch for a lifetime, but even if he doesn’t discover that spark until he’s an old man, Thomas will die with wrinkles he earned and a smile on his face.
“If you help me stay happy so I don’t end up like my dad, you got a deal,” I say.
“Deal.”
9
BEYOND DEAD ENDS
The only thing that sucked about last night was that I never got a chance to call Genevieve back. It’s the first thing I think of when I wake up.
Thomas’s desk chair creaks—the one where he sat last night to show off his “mad origami skills.” (Except when he tried to make a seashell it just looked like crumpled paper.) I sit up and rub my eyes. I can tell it’s early because of the slant of the sunlight through the windows. I can’t believe he’s already awake, hunched over, writing something while quietly tapping his foot; it’s like he’s taking a final exam and doesn’t want me copying off of his test.
“Yo. What are you doing?”
“Journaling.”
“You journal a lot?”
“Pretty much every morning since seventh grade,” Thomas says. “I’m almost done. How’d you sleep? Are my sheets still dry?”
“Fuck you.” My back does hurt a bit, but not so much that I can’t get used to it.
“I left a new toothbrush and towel out for you in the bathroom if you want to wash up before breakfast.” His eyes are still on the page.
“You’re cooking breakfast?”
“Yeah right. I only know how to make toast and Pop-Tarts. We’ll figure something out.” Thomas smiles and returns to journaling.
I have to wait a second before I throw off the covers because of that thing that happens to guys when they first wake up. But he isn’t even looking at me. I hurry out of his room and can only assume his mother’s gone off to work already by the way he’s freely letting me walk around the place. I find the bathroom and take a piss while looking around the shelves piled with clean and fluffy towels. At home, we share the same batch, raggedy and torn, washed at best twice a month. When I’m done brushing, I go back to Thomas’s room, and he’s already gone.
I follow the sound of clattering utensils into the kitchen, stopping once to check out all the photos on the wall. There’s Thomas as a kid playing baseball—the same crazy eyebrows. The kitchen is twice the size of mine. There are red pots and pans hanging from the wall and they look so spotless. There’s a mini TV on top of the fridge, and Thomas has the news playing like a grown man, but he’s not listening because he’s on the phone.
“. . . I can mail those back to you,” he says, pouring Corn Bran into two bowls, handing me one. “No, Sara, I think it’s too soon to meet up . . . Look, I . . .” He looks at the phone before setting it on the counter. “She hung up.”
“Everything okay?”
“She wants every letter and card she wrote to me. I don’t know . . . She’s hoping I’ll reread them or something so I’ll miss her.” He sits down across from me, and shrugs. “Anyway, enough with that. Sorry to report this was the only cereal we had left. I ate all the Lucky Charms the other night, but we have cookies and marshmallows. And a leftover chocolate bunny from Easter we can use. I hope that’s cool.”
The last time I sat down for a meal in a kitchen was at my grandparents’ house, and they’re both dead now. Still, I jump out of my seat and crumble Chips Ahoy into my cereal, and Thomas gives me the biggest smile.
After breakfast, we head out, walking nowhere in particular—in fact, walking away from my block. “So who are your friends around here?” I ask him.
“You,” Thomas says. “And I think Baby Freddy and Skinny-Dave like me just fine.”
“I meant on your block.”
“I know you did. It’s embarrassing. My only friend here is Mr. Isaacs on the first floor. He’s big on cats and obsessed with factories.” He shrugs. “I had to outgrow my friends after they played me.”
I’m a little nervous asking, but I have to. “What’d they do?”
“After what my father did on my birthday, I stopped wanting to celebrate it, but last year my friend Victor kept calling. He was going to throw a party, a night of board games and drinking. I was about to go to Victor’s house, but then he called and canceled last minute to go to some concert with our friends. I thought it was part of some bigger surprise. My phone never rang after that. I was too depressed to drink alone so I just sort of sat in my room and did nothing. They didn’t even bring me back a T-shirt.”
Without knowing Victor, I know he’s an asshole. “You don’t need dickheads like that in your life anyway. They slow you down.”
Thomas stops walking, turns me toward him, and says, “This is what I like about you, Stretch. You care about what happens to you. Everyone else seems resigned to grow up and become nobodies who are stuck here. They don’t dream. They don’t think about the future.”
I have to look away because all this talk of the future shakes me. I massage my scar. “You’re wrong,” I say. Maybe I should turn around and go home so I don’t waste his time. “I thought death was a happy-ending exit strategy. I appreciate everything you’re saying, but—”
“But nothing.” Thomas grabs my wrist. “We all make mistakes. Every wrong job I take is a mistake, but it’s also a step in the right direction. If nothing else, it’s a step away from the wrong one. You would never do that to yourself again, right?” He’s looking at me, forcing me to meet his eyes.
“Never.”
Thomas lets go and keeps walking. “And that alone makes you different.”
We continue down the block in silence until a young woman with a picket sign walks past us in the other direction.
leteo is here today but needs to be gone tomorrow
I chase after her, and Thomas follows. “Excuse me, excuse me. Sorry. What’s with the sign?”
“A girl has gone brain dead because of Leteo,” the woman answers. Her voice is grave, and her eyes look vacant. “She’s the fourth this week. We’re rallying to shut this place down.” The woman sounds proud, self-important. She’s probably also one of those crazy PETA people who throw fake blood at elderly women in fur coats.
“We?”
The woman doesn’t answer. Thomas and I exchange a glance. We follow her. The closer we get to 168th Street, the louder we hear a crowd hidden by buildings. There are cop cars blocking the street, their sirens failing to warn other people away. We round th
e corner, and the street is as crowded as a holiday parade, except instead of character balloons in the air, there are picket signs being raised.
10
AN UNFORGETTABLE RALLY
I’ve seen pictures of the Bronx district Leteo Institute before, but the unhappy rioters add an edge when seeing it up close. You’d think the institute would look more futuristic, like the Apple Store in Manhattan, but honestly, the Museum of Natural History looks more cutting-edge than Leteo does. The building is four floors high with bricks the color of ashes.
Leteo is getting the bad rap of a good morgue with their body count. It’s still strange to me how hospitals never incite this sort of reaction when they’re guiltier of more cases of malpractice. Maybe it’s because Leteo is supposed to only exist in old science fiction shows and this advancement scares people.
A bald guy fills us in on the recent botched surgery. Apparently some schizophrenic girl in her early twenties was having a procedure done to wipe her mind clean of imaginary characters that have shadowed her since childhood. Instead, she never woke up at all, near death but not close enough. Representatives of the institute haven’t come forth with any additional information about the girl’s coma.
A curly-haired woman and an older man are trying to squeeze through the crowd, unsuccessfully. They both have signs:
no miracles for criminals
grief is natural. guilt is deserved.
It doesn’t match the brain-dead bit.
“You did a criminal a favor!” the older man shouts over the crowd, as if someone from Leteo is listening to his complaints in person. “What, you going to save some terrorists next?”
“Excuse me, sir,” Thomas says. “What’s with the signs?”
It’s the woman who answers us. “We’re here to speak out against the car accident, of course.”
“We don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say.
She nudges the man. “Harold, tell these boys about the wreck. You tell it better than I do.”
“You kids should get off your phones and watch the news,” Harold says. I turn to Thomas, who smirks. “A few months ago some yahoo crashed his car and killed his four-year-old son and wife. For some bizarre reason, the hellions at Leteo agreed to wipe the memory of his wife’s and son’s existences after he tried to kill himself in jail.”
“Why would he want to forget his family?” I ask.
“Guilt,” Harold says. “Leteo says he’s able to function better with prison tasks under the belief he killed strangers. Maggie and I believe that is nonsense. That guilt is his to feel.”
“It’s worse than a hit-and-run, truly,” Maggie says. “They view us all as clients, not patients. Big difference.” She turns her back on us and pumps her sign up as high as she can, screaming, “No miracles for criminals! No miracles for criminals!”
Police charge through the crowd in an effort to reach the entrance. Thomas drags me back so we don’t get caught up in any of it. I turn one last time, bumping shoulders with a couple people, and I see a child on a man’s shoulders waving a sign that reads no to tabula rasa. The kid definitely has no idea what it means, but if anyone snaps a photo it’s bound to go viral.
On the other side of the crowd, there are Leteo supporters. Maybe only a fourth of the protesters, but they’re here. They’re probably friends or relatives of forgetters who appreciate how Leteo repairs lives. I half expect Kyle’s parents to be there, though I can’t possibly imagine what sort of sign they would have. Maybe good job on making my son forget his twin. he always wanted to be an only child. No, if they were around here, they’d more likely be inside Leteo to forget Kenneth too; I would if I had to live with someone who had his face and his laugh.
Thomas finally lets go of me when we get to the corner, but we stop and watch as a chant begins: “Never forget! Never forget!”
“I used to think the procedure was the shadiest scam in all of Scamville,” I tell Thomas as we walk home, keeping my voice low as we passed a crowded bus stop—as if the entire country doesn’t know about Leteo. New York hosts three institutes, one here in the Bronx, another in Long Island, and a third in Manhattan. I wonder if there are riots going down in front of the ones in Arizona or Texas, California or Florida. “I know someone who went through it. I don’t know him anymore. I mean, I know him, but he’s different now, you know.”
“Wait, what?”
“Kyle, this kid I grew up with. His twin brother was killed and it was sort of his fault, so he forgot Kenneth ever existed so he could live. I hope he’s doing okay and not having any weird delayed reactions,” I say.
“You don’t see him anymore?”
“Nope. His family moved away before they got it done. I’m not even sure where they went. Baby Freddy’s mom somehow found out about the procedure and our entire block knew by the end of the day. It would’ve been impossible keeping everyone he’s ever met from asking about his twin, so leaving made sense.”
Kyle and Kenneth, the Lake twins. We don’t remember them nearly enough. In every generation on my block, a group of friends loses someone. One of the Big Kids, Benton, drunk-rode his bike into traffic a couple years ago. I don’t know the details beyond that, but I guess it could be said that Kenneth took one for the team. The least we could do is fucking remember him, especially when Kyle can’t.
My heart is racing just thinking about it, the way it pounds when I’m the last one standing in a game of manhunt. “Would you ever do it? The procedure?”
“I have nothing to forget, and I wouldn’t if I did,” Thomas says. “Everyone plays a purpose, even fathers who lie to you or leave you behind. Time takes care of all that pain so if someone derails you, it’ll be okay eventually. You?”
“When you put it that way, I have nothing I’d want erased either,” I say. “Well, maybe clowns. I could go without circus memories.”
“Doctors should work on erasing clowns. Period.”
11
TRADE HANGOUT
I’ve been picking up extra shifts at Good Food’s because Mom’s not feeling well. She’s missed work two days in a row already, and it’s really going to set us back. Mohad even trusted me to close up last night, and all my friends naturally wanted to lock themselves in and have a party with every beer and cigarette and snack available to us. The last thing this family needs is me getting thrown in jail and sued.
It’s my first day off since witnessing the Leteo rally with Thomas, the last time I saw him. I’m meeting him in a bit, but until then I’m chilling with Brendan and Baby Freddy on a staircase. On one of the steps, Brendan is rolling up some weed on top of graph paper and overdue bills.
“I thought your clients do all that themselves.”
“These aren’t for my clients,” Brendan says, licking the tip of his freshly rolled-and-folded blunt. “I’m branching out. I’ll work some corners and colleges and if I roll it myself they won’t realize I’m skimming them twenty percent of what they’re paying for.”
“My boss is looking for another dishwasher,” Baby Freddy says. “If you want to stop dealing.”
“Washing dishes is for spics like you and Skinny-Dave. I’m good.”
“Whatever. Can I get a freebie?”
“You can have half off.” Brendan’s smart. I’ve seen Baby Freddy trying to smoke and it would be a waste of the weed he’s saving from shorting others.
“Kenneth liked to smoke,” I say.
Brendan looks up. “Fucking shame Kenneth’s brother fucked the wrong guy’s sister. A guy with a gun.”
Baby Freddy ignores him. “He loved acting like he was Kyle even though Kyle hated that.”
“Maybe that’s the real reason Kyle forgot about Kenneth,” Brendan says, lighting up the blunt he just rolled and inhaling deeply. “Great, now you got me smoking someone else’s shit.” He tosses all his blunts into a Ziploc bag and sprinkles
the remaining weed in. “Let’s go get a game going. I feel like running.”
“I’m about to link up with Thomas, actually. I’m down when I get back, though.”
“Okay then,” Brendan says.
We all leave the staircase and a security guard sees us with Brendan’s Ziploc bag. He calls us delinquents but carries on. Baby Freddy tells me he’ll see me later. Brendan keeps it moving.
I definitely should’ve left the memories of Kenneth and Kyle dead and buried.
“What should we do?”
“I have this thing I do with Genevieve—”
“If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, that’s off the list,” Thomas says, patting my back.
“Hilarious. No, this isn’t going to sound great either, but we have Trade Dates.”
“Is that where you hang out with another couple and swap girlfriends or something?”
“No. God, why doesn’t anyone get this?” I hate repeating myself almost more than anything in the entire universe, but I tell him what a Trade Date is in the hopes we can do something fun like it, but in a No Homo way. “I was thinking we could go maybe do a Reverse Trade Date—without calling it a Reverse Trade Date or a date at all—where you take me somewhere personal for you and I’ll do the same.”
“Sounds cool. We’ll skip the rooftop since you’ve already been there. Let me think about it. You go first.”
We go to Comic Book Asylum. I tried applying for a job before, but they told me I have to wait until I’m done with school because of some bullshit, like labor laws or something, I don’t remember. I can’t think of a cooler atmosphere to work. “This is the best fucking place ever,” I say as we arrive. “I mean, look at this fucking door. Isn’t this the best fucking door you’ve ever seen?”