Everyone We've Been

by Sarah Everett

  “Who the hell are you?” I hiss when I’m standing in front of him. I have so many questions that they come bursting right out of me. “What do you want? Why can’t anyone else see you? What happened on the bus that night?”

  He blinks at me.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  He doesn’t say anything, just keeps looking at me. I am ready to grab him by the shoulders and start shaking him.

  “Hello? Answer me.”

  “I don’t know.” He is still frowning, his gray eyes serious as he looks up at me. “I don’t even know my own name.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” I ask, my voice rising. I take a threatening step forward till I’m leaning right over him. “I swear to God, if you don’t start talking—if you don’t tell me everything right now—I’m…I’m going to the police.”

  Instead of calling my bluff—the fact that I’d be more likely to end up restrained than him, since he’s probably a symptom of my psychosis—he just says, “Addison, if I knew, I would tell you. I promise.”

  I breathe deeply as I try to make sense of his words.

  The strangest, most frustrating thing happens then. The most terrifying, too, since I’ve been so sure that if I could only talk to him, if I could only confront him and get him to explain, everything would be fine. But what happens is this: I believe him.

  I can see—from the earnestness in his eyes, the solemnness of his expression—that he’s telling the truth.

  It feels like a giant whack to my chest, and I have to sit down on the bench beside him to maintain any semblance of composure. Remind myself to take even breaths, stay calm.

  I whirl around to face him. “How do you know my name, then, if you don’t remember anything? You just called me Addison! How did you know that?”

  “Your brother called you that. That night on your driveway.”

  “No, he…”

  Wait. He did.

  “My friends call me Addie,” I spit.

  He pauses a second and then lets it roll slowly off his lips, as if he’s trying to see if it sounds like me. Also, there’s a bit of a challenge to it, as he’s holding my gaze. “Addie.”

  It sounds like a secret, the way he says it.

  I lose my train of thought on the way to telling him that he’s not my friend.

  “So what are you? A ghost? Is that it—are you dead? Or are you some figment of my imagination?”

  He laughs then. The full sound sends a wave of warmth up my arms. But it’s a short laugh and there’s something a little bit sad about it.

  And almost immediately he’s back to frowning again.

  We sit beside each other silently for a few moments. Watching people walking, cars driving by at the edge of the park. “What’s wrong?” I ask finally. Grudgingly. It shouldn’t matter to me that he looks so unhappy.

  “I remember being at your school this morning, and I remember being at the movie theater the other day. Your house and, of course, the bus. But I don’t remember anything in between all those things,” he says, staring down at his hands in his lap.

  “What does that mean?” I ask.

  “It means I don’t know how I got off the bus, or if I did.” He runs his hand through the front of his hair, the only part sticking out, his voice thick with distress. “It means I’m only around when you are.”

  I stare at him silently, watching the cloud his breath makes in the air, and I feel an unexpected twinge for him.

  “Maybe it’s just a weird type of amnesia,” I offer halfheartedly. It’s the best I can do through my own disappointment and fury at…whatever this is. Just then a woman walks up and places her handbag on the space on the bench next to me, then bends down to tie her shoelace. She put her handbag on the space on the bench where the boy is sitting, and only the two of us can see that this purple bag is on his lap, and the whole scene is so ridiculous, so insane, that I have absolutely no choice but to burst out laughing, which prompts Bus Boy to also burst out laughing. The woman jerks up at my laughter and looks at me like I’m crazy—correct—and then she grabs her bag from the seat and hurries away like I might attack her or make off with her bag or something.

  “I’m not sure she even finished tying her shoe,” I say, which elicits another peal of laughter from Bus Boy.

  Sobering up, I put my hand close to where her bag was—on his lap—and there’s a human there. Flesh. Encased in a pair of jeans. I just put my hand on this stranger’s lap.

  I snatch it back quickly, feeling my ears heat up, and he coughs.

  “So I guess you’re not entirely human,” I say, even though I can feel his body warmth, see his breath, touch him.

  He doesn’t answer that. What he says instead is, “When you leave, I’ll disappear again. If you forgot about me, I’d probably be gone for good.”

  He says it like he’s joking, but I can’t tell whether it’s the slight chill in the air that makes him shiver or a little bit of fear. Even if he isn’t real, it must feel real to be him.

  I wonder if he’s right, though. He doesn’t always appear when I want him to, but most of the times I have seen him, apart from the first night on the bus, it’s been because I was thinking about him. If I could just decide to never think of him again, would he be gone? Could it be that simple? But even if I can get rid of him, how do I know he won’t show up again someday, unprompted?

  “Could you at least try to guess at what your name is? Maybe you’re someone’s ghost and, you know, we could figure out what’s happening if we had the details?”

  “Maybe I’m a Matthew,” he says.

  I face him and try to gauge whether the name fits him.

  “Or John?” he offers. “Luke?”

  “Are you just naming guys from the Bible now?”

  He laughs, sounding more normal than he did a few minutes ago, less sad. “That guy looks like a John, though. The one running with his dog.”

  I find said man: mid-thirties, winter vest and gray tracksuit, running with the leash of a jittery Jack Russell. “Maybe,” I say.

  “And his dog’s name could be Apollo.”

  “What’s that lady’s name?” I ask, nodding in the direction of a blond woman walking with a middle-school-age boy.

  “Suzanne. Maybe Lorelei.”

  I raise an eyebrow at him. “If this is so easy for you, you really should be able to figure out your own name.”

  Just try, I want to beg him. Please just try.

  He shrugs, but there’s that layer of sadness again. I shift to get more comfortable on the bench, and he glances up, like he thinks I’m about to leave and he’ll disappear again. The tension in his body decreases when he sees that I’m not going yet.

  My fingers tingle from the sharp drop in temperature the last couple of minutes, and I rub them together to warm them. It’s the kind of chilly that targets the ends of things: the tips of fingers and noses, ears and knees and toes.

  “Cold?” he asks.

  “No, I’m—”

  But he’s already leaning toward me, tugging down my hat so it covers better. His fingers brush the tips of my ears, making them warmer than they already are. He doesn’t take his hands back immediately, and it’s only when I lean away from him, my heart ticktocking in my chest, that he leans back, too.

  “Um, thanks,” I say, embarrassed. How is any of what I see or feel real if this—this hearing him breathe out loud, this feeling his fingers on my skin—is not?

  “No problem.”

  I feel so frustrated I could cry. I am sitting with the very person, the very apparition, that has tormented me the past few days, and I still don’t know a thing about him, about how he got here, why he’s here, and what I’m supposed to do about it all.

  But the other side of it—the unexpected side—is that I feel bad for him. He reminds me, weirdly, of myself when I’m with Katy’s friends or people at school, of having a family where no one really looks at each other. It’s not the same as being an invisib
le person. But I think lonely feels a lot like not remembering your own name.

  So I stay with him for another few minutes, naming more strangers we don’t know, until it starts to get a little too cold to be outside and the sun starts to sink in the sky.

  He doesn’t feel all that much like a stranger. It feels comfortable—normal, even—sitting here with him. Still, I notice all the passersby giving me wary looks as they walk, trying to figure out who I’m talking to. And when I finally stand and say an awkward goodbye to him, I know that this afternoon—the strange comfort and understanding between us—doesn’t change anything.

  I still have to get help.

  I still, in all probability, am bat-shit crazy.

  BEFORE

  Mid-July

  “You didn’t say she was this tall.”

  It is Saturday morning, two days after our day of mundane things, and Zach’s best friend, Raj, frowns at me like what he means is, You forgot to mention she was a troll.

  “Addie’s not that tall,” Zach says, shooting me an apologetic look, then frowning in Raj’s direction.

  “She’s taller than me!” Raj protests, ignoring the message in Zach’s eyes.

  “So?” Zach asks, exasperated.

  Raj sighs, flopping onto the couch in Zach’s (mercifully) air-conditioned basement. Raj has a round face, brown skin, and straight black hair down to his ears. He’s dressed almost exactly like Zach.

  When I first got here—I biked over and arrived before Raj did—Zach opened the door, out of breath from running up the stairs. We smiled shyly at each other and then Zach said, “My parents aren’t home, but you’ve met my dad. Kevin will come down in a second, and in the meantime, I can introduce you to everyone else.”

  We rounded a corner into the hallway, and Zach stooped down to pet a gray Persian cat slinking along the wall. “This is Macy,” he said. She stared at us, tail raised, with judgmental green eyes.

  “Hi, Macy,” I said.

  “This is Diego Maradona,” he said, pointing up at a framed poster of a soccer player on the wall, next to a picture of two elderly couples I assumed were Zach’s grandparents. The poster had a hard-to-read black signature on it and LA MANO DE DIOS typed underneath it. “The first person my dad would save in case of fire.”

  I laughed. “Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever met a famous person before. Your dad likes soccer?”

  “His parents were first-generation Irish immigrants, so that would be a yes.”

  “My dad is a soccer fan, too. He claims North Americans are the only people on earth who take it for granted.”

  “Hey, now. Mexico appreciates the beautiful game,” Zach said. “And don’t let my dad hear you call it soccer.”

  Dad has tons of stories of growing up playing soccer indoors, on the streets, in random fields with his brother, Uncle Mark, who died before I was born. Their parents let them because that was what they had grown up doing in Vincy. He doesn’t tell me these stories anymore; now we talk about furniture.

  We walked a little farther into an open-plan dining area, and I followed Zach to a rectangular fish tank with a bluey-green tinge and a bevy of plants and rocks on the bottom. He squinted a bit and then pointed to the glass. “There’s Goldie Hawn, Kevin’s fish. My mom named him.”

  An orange tail flicked out from behind a leafy green plant. I imagined it was waving hello.

  “Him?” I asked.

  “Hey, Goldie’s a gender-neutral name for goldfish.”

  We both laughed.

  “So, do you live with anyone who actually talks back to you?”

  “I swear I do,” Zach said. “Kevin’s around somewhere. You’re just early.”

  We went down the stairs off Zach’s kitchen into a living-room area in the basement littered with camera equipment and made small talk while we waited.

  Now, with everyone present, Zach hands me and Raj about ten stapled sheets of paper each. “Here’s the final script. Sorry, we were out of blank paper, so I printed it on lined.” Raj sighs heavily as he receives his. I read the copy Zach emailed yesterday, and on first glance, the opening scene looks exactly the same.

  “Kev!” Zach calls, and I’m shocked when a skinnier version of Zach—precisely the same color hair, but shorter and not as bouncy—appears.

  “This is my brother Kevin,” Zach says.

  Kevin grins at me, a smile from the same family of smiles as Zach’s but—how to put this?—greasier. “Heeeey,” he slurs. His greeting is met with a whack to the back of his head so swift that if I’d blinked, I’d have missed it.

  “He’s fourteen,” Zach says pointedly, and I smile, kind of enjoying Zach’s protectiveness of me, despite being weirded out by his brother’s creepiness.

  “Fifteen almost,” Kevin says, which instantly makes him seem even younger. In trying to bargain for more freedoms, I used to say stuff like that to my mom all the time, and it’s only recently I figured out how dumb it is to remind your parents that you can’t count (nine months is not “almost”) and that you’re Not Even [Insert Age] yet.

  “Nice to meet you,” I tell Kevin, then turn back to Zach. “How many siblings do you have?”

  “Three brothers. Two older—both of them live a few hours away. You have just one older brother, right?” Zach asks.

  I nod. “It must be nice having a big family. I would love that.”

  “Believe me, sometimes I would rather just have one brother.”

  Zach goes to sit on the couch, bits and pieces of camera equipment around him.

  I sit on the other end of the couch from Zach, who says, “So I think we need a schedule for shooting and editing this time.”

  “I think we need to get paid. I won’t work for free like last summer,” Kevin says, flipping through the pages of the script. “Now that I have a real job.”

  “We can’t afford to pay you,” Zach tells him.

  “Then you can’t afford me.” But Kevin stays put, continuing to leaf through the script, and minutes later they’re talking sets and makeup, which it looks like Kevin is in charge of.

  “Why can’t we use the trampoline like last time?” Kevin is arguing.

  “Because,” Zach says patiently, “it was Lindsay’s.”

  There’s a momentary silence before Raj says, “She won’t let you borrow it?”

  “No,” Zach answers in a quiet voice. “She doesn’t want anything to do with”—he hesitates—“us.”

  I could have sworn he was going to say something different.

  “What a bitch,” Kevin says.

  “Shut up, Kevin,” Zach says, his voice even.

  “I’m just saying. If I broke up with you, I would let you borrow the trampoline. She knows we need it. How many films did we let her be in? Beeyotch.”

  “Kevin,” Zach says again.

  “Um,” I say quietly, “who is Lindsay?”

  Heavy silence follows before Raj says, “Zach’s ex.”

  One more beat of silence.

  In it, I cling to the word “ex.” Zach’s ex. On the one hand, it means he doesn’t have a girlfriend now, that our maybe-date the other day still counts as just that. On the other hand…

  “Not my character, Lindy?” I ask.

  “Of course not,” Zach says, glancing at me as if I’ve sprouted a second head.

  “Your character’s a nun,” Raj adds, implying that Lindsay was not, in fact, a nun. “Zach’s quit Lindsay like a bad habit.”

  It’s the first hint of lightness Raj has shown since we met, and he chuckles at his own joke. Kevin roars with laughter, slapping his thigh. “Good one!”

  Zach does not laugh.

  “You know, Mom and I saw her at the mall the other day and we waved and she just kept walking,” Kevin says, shaking his head.

  “Maybe she didn’t see you,” Zach says, eliciting a snort from Raj.

  “Oh, she saw us,” Kevin insists. “Beeyotch.”

  “That seems a little harsh,” I say, surprising myself by s
ticking up for someone I don’t even know. Someone who used to be Zach’s girlfriend. But still. I wouldn’t want people calling me names.

  Raj looks at me, no emotion on his face. “Lindsay’s not a bitch because she doesn’t want to date Zach,” he says. “No one wants to date Zach. She’s a bitch because she’s mean.”

  Zach coughs and steers the conversation back to the script he’s just handed out, but I keep wondering about Lindsay. What she is like, how long they dated (they all seem to know her quite well), whether she was prettier than me or smarter or what.

  The three boys continue to talk, referring to past films and ideas for props and scenes.

  Zach suggests we do a read-through, and I’m really beginning to question whether any of this is a good idea. Raj (Solomon) and I (Lindy) are the leads. Kevin is the Carpenter, and Zach reads the random parts like Stranger 1, Guy with Ax in Head, and Exorcist.

  I feel myself getting nervous as we start reading. Which is so stupid. I’m used to performing in front of rows of people, people trained to hear every note and key change, every mistake. Yet I feel more embarrassed than I can remember feeling for any performance when Zach says, “Okay, Lindy bursts in here.”

  “Um”—I swallow—“did I hear that you were looking for Little, um, Georgia? Georgie. All the children were picked up last Friday.”

  My ears are burning so hard they couldn’t pick up an ounce of sound if they tried.

  Surprisingly, when I glance at Zach, he winks at me. I am not a fool; I know that was possibly one of the worst line readings ever, and I think, Oh God. No way he’d settle for me if Katy was around.

  It occurs to me that my best friend would kick ass at this.

  In the same breath, though, I realize I am glad that Katy isn’t around kicking ass. I’m glad Zach chose me to be in his movie, winked at me. And with that, I continue my wooden line readings.

  To be fair, if I am wood, Raj is metal: “Oh no. My spleen.”

  I giggle quietly to myself and then a little louder when I see Zach’s shoulders shaking.

  When we are done reading, I am feeling a little more confident, Kevin is hitting on me again, and the bar, overall, has been set much lower than I initially understood it to be.