Notes to Self (6 page)

A few minutes before Reno was supposed to pick me up, I opened my computer and checked Facebook. No one had posted much of anything on my wall in the last month, except for Dee and Adam. I had only fifty-seven friends and nothing interesting on my info page except for one kinda cool quote: “If we’re going to walk into walls, I want us running into them full speed.” It was a line from Mom’s favorite old TV show about a fake president.

I clicked on the profiles of people who went to my school, hoping to find a status or comment I’d made that might jumpstart my stupid brain. Nothing. Emily’s page had been taken down. On Reno’s page, all I’d ever posted were links to xkcd cartoons and YouTube videos. He didn’t like Facebook and was always threatening to close his account. Reno was the type who took it seriously when parental types warned that future employers would look at your profile and put your resume in the trash when they saw pictures of you doing body shots or whatever. As if Reno would ever do a body shot.

I thought about Dr. Kline for some reason. I knew he was talking about things like directions to the movie theater and homework assignments and instructions for how to open a locker when he told me to write notes to myself. But I wanted to do more than that. I felt empty. I had no idea who I was. I didn’t remember ever knowing, really.

I clicked on my screen and brought up a blank document. I stared at it for a few moments. The white screen and the blinking cursor stared back at me, daring me to write something true.

I like coffee with hazelnut cream.

It was satisfying, writing it. There was one thing in the world that made sense, finally. I knew how I liked my coffee.

It was something.

I hit enter, ready to add something else. I waited. What did people say when you asked them about themselves?
I suppose most told you what sort of stuff they liked. That’s what I had just done. But if I listed every band I’d ever liked and every food I’d ever enjoyed and every book I’d ever read, would I really know who I was?

I thought about how some of the people at school cultivated a specific oddness, like wearing a newsboy cap every single day or taking their sandwiches apart and rebuilding them in a certain order before taking the first bite. Did they even like their stupid hat or care if every bite tasted the same, or were they just trying to be notable?

I stood and opened the top drawer of my dresser and dug around for a minute. It was full of receipts and old make-up and batteries and a tiny flashlight. I found a small mirror and sat down again, looking at my reflection. I searched my face for something to write about myself, and saw my boring brown hair and my dad’s eyes staring back at me. People always said how much we looked alike, even when I was very small.

I closed my eyes, remembering something from a long time ago.

I wanted to leave. Daddy had been chatting with one of his friends, a bartender inside this cheesy tourist restaurant called Margaritaville, for
ever
. The bartender was getting mad because his boss kept shouting at him that he was getting behind on orders. Daddy was getting mad because I was whining.

“Daddy! I want to touch the
lava
,” I said over and over. The margarita volcano enthralled me. We always played “hot lava” at preschool and now there was real live hot lava right in front of me. Sure, it wasn’t orange, but the green color meant it had to be
mutant
lava. Even better.

“That’s not lava, Peanut. That’s margar-REE-ta.” He held up his glass to show me, but I didn’t understand. It was coming out of a volcano. I
saw
it. “We’ve got to go find your mom. We’re late.”

“I want to touch it!” My kiddie cocktail was long gone and so were my chicken fingers. “
Please
,” I said, like my life depended on it.

“Kev, can my kid touch the volcano before we go?” Dad said, resigned. He downed the last part of his drink and stood up, his eyes a little glassy.

“She can go swimming in it if she wants, man. I’m two seconds away from walking out of here. I’m not kidding.” Kevin the bartender took his nametag off and threw it over his shoulder, not even caring if he hit someone. It landed in a basket of someone’s chips and salsa.

“
Please,
Daddy!” I bounced in my seat then, sensing that the grown-ups were going to let me get my way. You could always tell.

Daddy laughed. “You want to swim in the giant blender?” His eyes were gleaming. There was nothing he loved more then a prank. Especially when it involved ticking off The Man. I never figured out who he meant when he said that. But he said it a lot.

“I do! I do!” I reached toward him and he picked me up. Kevin laughed and let us behind the bar. The next thing I knew, I was waist-deep in cold, green liquid. The restaurant looked so different from that high up. Everyone sitting at the bar and at the tables stopped talking and gawked at me, shocked. At first I felt shy and uncomfortable. It was so cold and my clothes were getting stained fluorescent green. But then I looked at Daddy laughing, and I smiled. I waved to all the people and blew them kisses. They waved back.

Then Mom came in. I could see right away that she was mad at Daddy. He pulled me out of the margarita blender, Kevin was fired, and Mommy bought a towel at the gift shop to dry me off. I was very sticky. No one was laughing, especially not Mom. Instead, the three of us made the long trip back to our car in total silence. We never went back to that place, not even once.

I blinked and looked at the screen in front of me again. I started typing.

I was once a margarita ingredient.

Who else could say that?

The doorbell rang. Reno. I shut my laptop, took a couple of deep breaths, and headed straight for the door. Getting out of there suddenly felt like the best idea ever. “I’m leaving for an hour or two, Mom. With Reno. See you later.”

“Wait!” She stood up from the kitchen table so fast three sheets of paper fluttered to the ground. “Are you sure it’s a good idea? I’m worried it’ll be too loud. Crowded. What if someone bumps you and you fall down?”

“Mom. I’ll be fine. Reno will take care of me. Please.” I held my breath. I didn’t want to stay here, stuck in the apartment all weekend. “And I’ve never seen Fun Towne before.”

She stared at me, her mouth open a little. Then she covered it with her hand and I knew I’d said something wrong.

“What? What’s the problem now?” I grabbed my pink baseball cap off the hook by the door and pulled my ponytail through it to fit it snugly over my head. I wondered if they’d let me wear a cap in school even though it was against the dress code. It would just make me stand out more, though. I’d better not try it.

“Sweetheart, you’ve been to Fun Towne a hundred times,” she whispered. “It’s where you…I thought…”

“Oh. Right. That’s what I meant. I, uh, never mind.” I backed up slowly, praying she wouldn’t change her mind about letting me go.
Why did I say that?
She looked all concerned now. I tried to picture Fun Towne in my mind, but I couldn’t. Was she
sure
I’d been there a hundred times?

She sighed. “Be careful and don’t be gone too long, okay? Here, take my phone. You can call the landline if you need anything.” She wrote the number on a Post-it, and I put it in my pocket. She sat back down and rubbed the back of her neck. Her shoulders hurt constantly from being all hunched over. I nodded and gave her as big a grin as I could manage. Thank God she was letting me go.

Now, where was I going again?

CHAPTER 17

LOST GIRL

“Hey,” Reno said as I shut the apartment door behind me. We both hopped in his dad’s Jeep. “How are you feeling?”

“Not bad. I have these.” I showed him my ridiculously ugly old lady sunglasses.

“Rawrrr,” he said.

“I know. Think I can start a new sophomore trend?” I put them on and made a pouty face like a model. Reno laughed, and I giggled too. It felt good.

When we arrived and got out of the Jeep, I put earplugs in my ears. There was loud music playing and bells were ringing and people were all over. Signs picturing a giant car bumper advertised something called the
Saturday Nite Cruise.
Families swarmed the kiddie rides and teenagers shoved cotton candy in their mouths.

The air was heavy with humidity and oldies blasted from speakers attached to the eaves of roofs:
Today’s music ain’t got the same soul. I like that old time rock and roll.
Every other person wore flip-flops on their feet and sunglasses almost as ugly as mine. There were motorcycles everywhere. A mechanical bull in the center of an intersection of kitschy tourist shops sat motionless, but it was easy to imagine a line of drunken people waiting to ride it. We walked away from the main drag, toward a quieter area near the pizza place.

“I hope this isn’t a bad idea, but I searched online for the newspaper article that appeared the morning after your accident.” Reno reached into a pocket and pulled out his phone. A page from
The Orlando Sentinel
filled the screen.

I snatched it. It was a very short blurb explaining that two girls, names withheld, both aged fifteen, were airlifted from Fun Towne to Florida Hospital at 12:44 a.m. on November 3. According to the article, authorities surmised we had fallen off the maintenance ladder of the Sling Shot from about thirty feet above the ground. We walked over to it and sat on some picnic tables. The Sling Shot ride was painted in rainbow colors and people were lined up to take a turn.

“Do you know where my dad is?” I asked Reno suddenly. I wanted to call him. Shouldn’t he know what had happened to me? I thought about this time he’d shown me how to throw a basketball so that it would go through the hoop—how you were supposed to aim for the backboard. It felt like it could have been three weeks ago.

“Uh, well, he split. He used to work here, you know. He did the sound board for all the bands.” Reno pointed at the bandstand.

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” I nodded, hoping Reno would say more about it.
That’s right. I’ve been coming here ever since I was four.
“So I didn’t know where he went?”

“No. Or if you did, you didn’t say anything to me about it.”

All around me, people were enjoying their weekend. They had no idea that everything could change. They felt safe. Secure. I wanted to crawl back into their world, into
the
world, but I couldn’t. Maybe I’d always be on the outside now, lists and notes and Post-its with phone numbers from my mom falling out of my pocket. Old lady glasses on my eyes and earplugs in my ears. I sighed and sat down on a picnic table. I drew patterns in the gravel with the toe of my sandal.

Guilt surged through my veins as I realized I was still a million times luckier than Emily, who slept in a cold, white room all alone. The pressure on my chest came back and my breathing got shallower. I remembered Emily’s screaming. I forced myself to slow my breathing, to see the blue sky and all the people. The ordinary day.

“Hey,” Reno broke into my thoughts. He tucked his hair behind his ear and reached out, almost touching my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

“I was hoping that being here would make the night of the accident make sense. But it doesn’t. It looks so different in the daytime, anyway.” I hugged my legs to my chest. I closed my eyes for a few moments, trying to picture how high up we’d been. It was a mistake coming here. Everything I'd ever done was a mistake.

Reno stayed quiet for a long time.

“Right before you picked me up I told my mom I’d never been here before. She almost lost it.”

“Really? Does it feel familiar now?”

“Yeah. Yeah, definitely.”
Kind of.
“Hey, when did we become friends? I can’t think of it and it’s been bugging me.”

“It’s a dumb story.” He adjusted his glasses.

“Tell me. Don’t make me beg.” I pretended to punch him in the shoulder a few times until he finally put his arms up in surrender.

He cleared his throat. “Okay, okay. It was at the Mall at Millennia. You’d gotten separated from your mom and I found you hiding in the middle of a rack of clothes. You’d just seen Peter Pan and said you planned to fly away to Neverland to be a Lost Girl as soon as Tinker Bell showed up to sprinkle you with Pixie Dust. I told you there were no Lost Girls, only Lost Boys, and you said you didn’t care about that, you’d be the first one.”

I snickered.

“I thought it was cute. I thought
you
were cute.” Reno blushed. “Even though I was only six. You were five. Anyway, I sat there with you in the middle of that rack of clothes for like an hour and we told made-up stories to each other—it was probably only fifteen minutes, but everything feels like forever when you’re a little kid, you know?—until my parents found us and dragged you to the customer service desk so they could make an announcement on the loudspeaker.”

“But we got to play together again?”

“Not right away. Apparently I’d convinced myself in that fifteen minutes that you were my best friend in the whole wide world, so I got my mom to get your mom’s phone number when she arrived to claim you. She was hysterical. But you said to her, in a very adult voice, ‘Mom, we’re going to Neverland together. Stop crying.’”

“Wow,” I said, mystified. Reno’s blush was gone by then. I smiled at him. “So our moms made sure we got together?”

“No, they totally forgot about it. But when you started kindergarten that fall, it was at my school.”

“I remember that. Did we share our milk?”

“Yeah.”

I looked at Reno. I couldn’t believe he remembered something that had happened so long ago. But even with him beside me, I was most definitely still a Lost Girl.

I shivered in the ninety degree heat.

CHAPTER 18

I WENT TO FUN TOWNE AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS BRAIN INJURY

I had to see Dr. Kline on Monday. First he had me take a bunch of tests. I guess I did okay on them, because he looked happy. After that, we were supposed to chat about my “concerns.” I sat down in the cushy chair in his office and told him that all I could think about was the night of the accident. It was still driving me freaking crazy that I couldn’t remember it.