Everyone We've Been

by Sarah Everett

  We kiss like we don’t have enough time in the world. He’s out of breath and I kiss him, filling up his lungs, and then I’m out of breath and we volley the tiny amount of air in this room back and forth and back and forth and somehow it seems to be enough.

  When we stop to catch our breath, I sit up, my legs on either side of him, and he props himself on his elbows while I try to take off his shirt.

  He helps me yank it over his head and then he flicks it away. His lips move all over my neck as he tries to undo the zipper of my dress.

  “Son of a bitch,” he hisses after a few unsuccessful attempts. He pauses for a moment, concentrating hard to get it down, and I laugh.

  He gets it halfway and his hands are like fire on my bare back.

  I climb off his legs and take a step back; he stands, unbuckling his belt. We watch each other as my dress falls past my hips and hits the ground and his jeans fall past his hips and he steps out of them.

  I feel warm everywhere just from his eyes. I feel their fingers travel the length of my body, from my head to the tips of my toes, to my ears and neck and everywhere.

  His face is flushed, too, and I think, I hope, I’m having the same effect on him.

  Zach frowns, looking away suddenly. I crawl into the bed, still in my underwear, while he searches for his wallet on the ground and comes away with a small silver packet.

  He crawls under the covers now, too, and we’re facing each other, breathing on each other’s lips but not kissing.

  His voice hitches like it’s hard to swallow when he says, “You’re beautiful.” And I believe him, because he looks at me as if I am.

  We kiss again, and seconds later, he is on top of me, all our clothes gone now. Nothing between his skin and mine.

  He props his elbows on either side of me.

  “Have you ever, um, done this before?” he asks, even though we’ve already talked about it. I mean, he knows he’s my first real boyfriend; I guess he just wants to be sure.

  “Tons of times,” I joke, and we laugh despite our trembling. Both of us a lot smaller, more fragile, without our clothes on. Zach was with Lindsay for two years, and I know his answer to this question.

  “There was Stu. Kindergarten. He pulled my hair, so that’s one,” I continue, even though I just want to be quiet so this can happen. Shut up shut up shut up, a voice screams in my head, but I’m a prisoner to whatever is happening to my mouth, which won’t stop moving all of a sudden.

  “And then there was, in seventh grade, Grant. Acrobat-Tongue Grant. He had the tongue of a serpent,” I say.

  Zach rumbles on top of me as he laughs, but he’s still holding himself up, leaving only inches between our bodies.

  “There was also Eric Johns and he got to second base and oh God I don’t know why I’m still talking.” I cover my face with my hands.

  Zach laughs and kisses the center of my chest. “I’m not sure I like this Eric Johns.” He looks up at me again. “And after that?”

  The air in the room has shifted again, more serious and so still that I feel like I can hear both our hearts beating.

  “It’s all you,” I say.

  Zach nods and kisses me gently. He is careful and keeps asking if I’m okay, if this is okay, if I’m still okay, and I bite my lower lip, nodding yes, when the truth is that we’re both trembling.

  AFTER

  January

  “It makes zero sense,” I say, “that you are sitting right here and we can’t work out anything else about you.”

  Now that I understand why he’s here, now that I have some sort of lead, I figured I only had to ask the right questions for the rest to become clear. It’s why I haven’t broken and done the obvious thing—ask Katy. I was sure I could piece it together myself. It’s my memory, after all. I knew him—Zach. The name still seems magical after days of not knowing.

  But after an hour of grilling him for information, I’ve learned exactly one thing about him. And it didn’t even come from him; it came from going over and over the details of the night I started seeing him. It came when I remembered what was sticking out of his backpack when he got on the bus.

  A folded tripod.

  His backpack contained camera equipment.

  It is late at night and we are at Jolley’s, an old-timey diner just off the highway. I cradle my cup of coffee, blowing on it while I watch Zach, who’s sitting across the booth from me. As we’ve been talking, I’ve forgotten numerous times that I am the only one who can see him. After a few odd looks from strangers, I’ve started pretending to be on the phone or reading the menu aloud when someone walks by.

  “It seems like I can only tell you what you already know,” he says now, and I roll my eyes. He’s kept repeating that one all night. His explanation for why he knew I’d gotten his name right but couldn’t tell me any more. “You have to find the things they couldn’t explicitly wipe. Like a feeling, things you associate with…the other me.”

  “Uh-huh.” I already tried listening to “Air on the G String” on my phone, and that feeling of recognition, that warmth I got listening to it at the concert the first night I met Memory Zach, came back, assuring me I’m on the right track. But while it might have triggered my memory of Zach the night of the accident, it’s hardly going to give me his last name. I am starting to lose patience with myself now, starting to think I might need to go crawling back to my parents or Katy for answers.

  I’m staring absently over the rim of my coffee mug when I feel Zach’s gaze on me.

  “What?” I ask. I can’t read the expression on his face.

  “What do you think happens when you find him?” he asks, fidgeting with a chip in the wood on his side of the table. “You know, to me?”

  I shrug. “Why would anything happen?”

  Zach nods, seems to shake off his worry, and leans forward. “Okay, go back to the tripod and camera stuff. Can you use it in any way?”

  “Maybe you’re a photographer?” I ask hopefully, and Zach says, “Maybe.”

  I sigh, pretty sure this is what it is like to talk to an amnesiac. Someone who knows absolutely nothing about himself. I push aside the thought that, in some ways, that’s exactly who I am. Who I’ve been.

  “Okay,” I say, and type “Zach Lyndale photographs” into my phone’s browser. Also “photography,” “pictures,” “photos.” “There are a surprising number of Zachs in Lyndale who happen to be photographers. Most of them over the age of fifty.”

  Zach laughs and I am startled again at the warmth in his voice, the fullness of it. I glance up at him, wondering if maybe that was a memory—if, somehow, I am remembering the real him. And I am surprised to find him already watching me, his eyes twinkling. I glance away quickly.

  One thing that is not going to make my life easier?

  Falling in love with the Memory of some boy I used to know. The invisible memory of some boy I used to know. Everything I see him do happens only in my head, and I like him. Tonight, when we were on the bench, our bodies so close it was like we didn’t need the coat at all, it felt like something heavy had lowered itself onto my chest. It was the realization that I was inches from kissing an invisible stranger, and I wished the space between us was less. But more than that, I started to get the sense, to understand for the first time, that I might have loved the real Zach. The breathless, pulsing kind of love that you can’t recover from. The kind you can’t forget.

  So why would I have erased him?

  “What other types of cameras are there?” Memory Zach asks, mercifully drawing me out of my thoughts. It takes a second to remember what we’re talking about.

  “Video,” I say, scribbling down the names of three Zachs I’ve found without pictures who could conceivably be the one I need: Zach Easton, Zach Thomas, and Zack Neil. “Maybe you even sell cameras. Do you sell cameras, Zach?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” he says.

  “But what do you feel?” I intone, making the corners of his mouth tilt up. My st
omach twirls at it and blood rushes to my ears.

  I glance at the screen of my phone again.

  “Okay, let’s try…” I type in “Zach cameras” and get mostly useless hits.

  “Hey!” I say all of a sudden. Someone glances over at me from across the diner, and I duck my head, bringing my voice to a whisper. “What about that job you were ‘working’ at the Cineplex that day? What does that mean?”

  Zach narrows his eyes, thinking. “Camera. Cinema. Movies?”

  I type in “Zach movies Lyndale” and take a sip of my coffee while I wait for the search results.

  “What’s wrong?” Zach asks. I’m frozen, staring at the screen of my phone. “Addie?”

  “I think this is it.”

  It is an article, nearly three years old, about a local fifteen-year-old boy with an interest in filmmaking. Making horror movies.

  “Meridian High School students and best friends Zach Laird and Raj Gupta celebrate after their third-place finish in a national short-film contest,” a caption says.

  What has stolen my breath, though, is the picture. In it, an Indian boy faces the camera, looking very solemn. He’s the boy who bumped into me and couldn’t stop staring at the theater that day. Next to him in the picture—next to Raj—a tall, red-haired boy stares at me with a grin as wide as the sun.

  “Are you sure?” Memory Zach asks, moving around to my side of the table so he can see.

  But I only gape at him, fighting to keep my breath steady and my mind calm, and then stare again at the boy who looks exactly like him. Who is him.

  Zach Laird.

  The name forms in my mind, wrapping around my brain in a way that is familiar and foreign and confuses me.

  I look at the picture again.

  I don’t know the first thing about him, the real him, but the steady ticktock of my chest, the bomb racing to an inescapable explosion, confirms something I haven’t been sure of—only suspected, only feared.

  And it speaks with complete assurance.

  I once loved this boy.

  BEFORE

  Late October

  Zach and I see each other in spurts. For minutes between viola practice and the store and the Cineplex and my dad’s apartment and his trips to Caldwell. Since he’s much busier than I am, I’m usually visiting him at one of his two jobs or at his house.

  So when I stop by at the Cineplex after school one day and one of his co-workers says Zach is taking out the trash, I head outside to the back of the theater and literally pounce on him.

  His back is to me, and when I wrap myself around his waist, he jumps. “Holy shit, you scared me,” he says, turning around to face me.

  I cough and feel my eyes water as he exhales smoke directly into my face.

  “Sorry,” he says, giving me a wide smile. “I was literally plotting ways to kidnap you.” He kisses my top lip.

  I don’t kiss him back, just stay frozen, unable to erase the frown on my face.

  “What’s wrong?” Zach asks.

  “You smell like a chimney.”

  Zach holds his cigarette far away from his body for dramatic effect. With his other hand, he reaches to cover my eyes. “You did not see me smoking.”

  “I smell you smoking,” I retort, taking his hand off my face. “I thought you were quitting. Your dad bought you a CXX.” When it’s all your family has been able to do to keep At Home Movies running the past few months.

  Zach seems surprised, his eyes wider than normal. “I didn’t know it bothered you so much.” He puts out his cigarette.

  “It’s just gross,” I say, wishing we were spending the first time we’ve seen each other in a week making out, but I don’t feel like kissing Zach at all right now. Also, weirdly, I remember what Raj said once: Where there’s smoke, there’s Lindsay.

  He nods, still watching me. “Sorry.” He runs a hand through his hair. “I was really down to two a day, but then with school. And Raj keeps wanting to make something to enter for the Valley Con Short-Film Contest, and I’m avoiding him because that’s all he talks about. I feel like shit.”

  I take a step toward him now, put my hand on his shirt. “Why don’t you want to enter?”

  “I do,” Zach insists. “I just…can’t think of anything good. And then my dad pays eight hundred freaking dollars for a CXX that I can’t use.”

  “Maybe,” I say thoughtfully, “maybe you’re thinking too narrowly. Like, a while ago, I felt so sick of my playing, and then I borrowed some of Katy’s music, transposed it down a fifth, and learned a couple of her pieces. I was pretty bad at them, but it made me feel better.”

  “Addie, you don’t get it.” Zach’s voice is impatient. “I think I just need time or something. I need to figure it out on my own.”

  “It seems like you’ve been having a lot of that,” I say.

  “What do you mean?” Zach frowns.

  “Time on your own. I’ve seen you, like, twice in two weeks?”

  “I’ve been busy with school,” he says.

  “I have school, too. And practice and a bunch of other things.”

  Zach looks like he’s about to protest—he has two jobs and school—but then his face softens. “You’re right. Sorry. What were you saying about trying Katy’s songs?”

  “Maybe do something totally different,” I say, consciously letting the tension slip from my voice and body. I proceed a little more carefully now. “Like, horrodies are great and Ciano is brilliant, but maybe you could try something new?”

  Zach takes a strand of my hair between his fingers. “You think so?”

  “I do.”

  I wrap my arms around his neck and stand on my tiptoes to kiss his chin.

  “Sorry about my cigarette breath,” Zach says, looking into my eyes. And I shrug like it’s no big deal. Truthfully, I’ve started carrying perfume in my purse so I can spray myself after I’m with Zach to prevent my mom from asking questions. Not knowing that he smokes is not going to kill her.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he says, slowly now, glancing above my head. “I just feel…stuck.”

  I wrap my arms around his waist, and our chests heave in sync for a few moments before I put my hand in the back pocket of his jeans and promise, “I’m going to help you.” Then I muse, “How do we unstick you, Zach?”

  AFTER

  January

  I can barely concentrate at school on Monday.

  Between my continuing insomnia and my eventful weekend, my brain feels close to short-circuiting.

  I am so restless, so ready for answers, that it takes everything I have not to tackle Katy for them when I see her. But the one thing I’m sure of, the one thing I know, is that I want answers on my own terms, so I don’t go to her.

  She corners me before orchestra anyway, during the time when she would usually be socializing.

  “Are you mad at me for calling your parents?” she asks, fiddling with the end of her French braid.

  “No.” Yes. No. I don’t know if I care about my parents knowing I chose to have Zach removed from my mind. I care that I did it. That I made that choice. It makes me sick, makes me want to shake myself every time I look in the mirror.

  “Well, then, can we talk?” Katy asks. More softly, she says, “I miss my best friend.”

  I hesitate before nodding.

  For the first time in recorded history, Katy and I skip orchestra and huddle in my car with the heater on.

  “So what are you going to do?” she asks.

  I tell her Caleb told me where Rory was buried and I want to work up the courage to go there soon. I tell her about today’s plan, too—to go to Meridian after school to find the real Zach. Katy’s not thrilled about it, but I think seeing him might bring it all back. It has to. At the very least, I’ll finally understand what happened between us, and I tell myself that knowing how and why might somehow fill up this giant hole that the truth has ripped in my life.

  From the moment I got to school today, I’ve been second-guessing eve
rything. Every weird look or strange conversation I’ve ever had with a person. Is there more I don’t remember? Is there something they know that I don’t?

  Do I know something they don’t? I must have run into people at some point who have had Overton procedures before, too.

  Do people at school know what I’ve done? The thought that they might—that they might have been whispering about me, gossiping about me all these years—is unbearable.

  “Everything is so…”

  “Absolutely shitty?” Katy finishes for me, and as I nod, we both burst into laughter. At this moment. The sheer absurdity of it. Then the laughter morphs into sadness.

  There are people in this town, this stiflingly bland town, who know I had a baby brother. Who have known for years that he’s gone. And I just found out days ago.

  There are people in this town who know all about the first—the only—boy I’ve ever loved, and I just found out his name.

  “You said nobody else knows that I got the second splice?” I ask Katy. Please say nobody else knows.

  “I swear,” she says. “I’d never do that to you.”

  I believe her. I know this is not her fault—she was trying to do what I wanted—but why would she let me go through with it? How could she let me erase such a big part of my life?

  When I ask her that, she says sadly, “I know you want a better reason, but all I have is that it was what you wanted. It was going to help you. It felt, at first, like an adventure. We planned out how we would do it, the IDs, what we would tell different people. We cleaned out your room, removing every single thing that was related to Zach. It felt like this daring, secret thing I got to do with my best friend, and it seemed kind of…”

  “Kind of what?” I push.

  “Special. That you were trusting me to keep this secret for you for the rest of our lives.” She chews on her nail. “That even when we were in college, hopefully both in New York”—in the absence of wood, she knocks on the dashboard—“we would always be linked by this one thing.”

  “I thought you said the other day that you were already keeping a million secrets for your other friends? That you were sick of too many secrets?”