(Don't You) Forget About Me (25 page)

A choking, aching laugh escapes me. “Yeah, we're friends.”

Foote nods. “Well, good lu—”

I quickly cut him off. “Don't say it. You've given me enough luck already.”

He stares at me, as if trying to figure me out, but with a shake of his head says, “Here's looking at you, kid.”

“Wrong movie,” I answer. “That's
Casablanca
.”

He shrugs and then pulls his hat down low so that it covers his eyes. “The endings are similar, though. He doesn't get the girl either time.” As Foote turns and finally begins to walk away, I stifle the urge to tell him to pretend that Brigid and Spade find the Maltese falcon they'd been searching for and live happily ever after. Except I suddenly recall that when Spade says the line about “the stuff that dreams are made of” he's referring to the Maltese falcon . . . which in the end he finds out is a fake. I can't help but think of Piper then and all the time I've spent searching for her. Even when I finally found her, she wasn't what I'd been looking for. It's looking more and more like I'm not gonna get the girl I'd wanted either.

That's not an ending I'll accept, though, and that's why I watch Foote walk away until he disappears from view, and then with even more dread than the last time, I brace myself to reenter the reformatory.

I RAN (SO FAR AWAY)

Four Years Ago

I CAN'T FORGET YOU, PIPER. BUT SOMETIMES, I CAN'T
really remember you either.

I could keep blaming the forget-me-nots. I could say they help me live with things too painful to remember.

But that's a lie.

The truth is I've always had holes in my memory. Every time I took a secret, I lost something of my own. Not always immediately. Sometimes not until weeks later. It was never anything big. I'd forget what we had for dinner the night before. Once I couldn't remember what color the sky was. Then it got worse. One day I couldn't remember how to get home from school. After that I started to avoid the secrets that clung to everyone I met. It was like trying not to scratch a mosquito bite. It called and you automatically reached toward it, needing to relieve the itch. Slowly, over time, I made a habit of not scratching, of looking away until the urge passed. Except sometimes there was no helping it. Some secrets slipped through the cracks.

When I went to GG, hoping she could explain my memory loss, she called it yin and yang, and said that I would notice the effects of it more and more the older I got. This is the way she explained it to me: She made people see things so lifelike they became real, and, in doing so, bit by bit she lost the ability to see, until she was almost completely blind. Daddy made everyone love him but eventually couldn't feel that emotion himself. And I messed with the minds of everyone around me and slowly lost little pieces of my own.

You knew how it was for me, Piper. Better than anyone. You said we needed to tell our stories, to keep them. Mom had a pile of mix tapes that we slowly recorded over. Each tape was titled with the name of her favorite song in the mix. Years earlier Dad had made Mom put the tapes away; he hated anything that gave her joy that didn't originate from him.

When we found them, she told us she didn't care if we recorded over them. “It's just my old eighties music from when I was a kid,” she'd said dismissively, like she didn't care. But sometimes when we played them back, bits of music played between pauses, and if Mom was anywhere nearby she'd start to quietly sing along.

In some ways, I think those songs were Mom's story. You never knew this, Piper, but sometimes I'd listen to the songs on the tapes before we recorded over them. I thought maybe I'd understand Mom better. You would've laughed at me. And you would've been a little bit mad, too, that I still cared enough to try.

Now I am watching the tiny wheels turn round and round as I tell our story set to Mom's soundtrack.

I started taking the forget-me-nots to forget that I'd forgotten. I wanted to forget to remember. But people don't work that way. We are constantly searching, wanting to fill in the empty places. Wanting answers. The more I forgot, the further I got from the truth, the harder I searched for it. When I started looking for answers, I always started at the same place: your May Day.

When I close my eyes, I am there again. At the bridge watching you run with the train on your heels and Elton determined to save you. He almost had you. Your fingertips touched his. Too late. The train was too swift and unforgiving. It didn't run you over though. You weren't ground to a pulp beneath its wheels of steel. The second the train touched you, you disappeared. You vanished and left Elton clutching only air. If I were him, I'd have stood there gaping while the train ran me down. Not Elton, though. He threw himself over the bridge. Not quick enough to save his legs. The train kept those as a souvenir. But he kept his life.

I wonder what you would think of him now, Piper. Would you love the person he's turned into? He hardly ever mentions you. Acts like you never existed at all. But every time he looks at me, I can feel him thinking about you. It's not even a secret I have to take.

Elton had a close-up of you becoming nothing. I saw it from a distance. Even so, I knew exactly what I'd seen and yet . . . That night, I scrambled down the bank and into the Salt Spring, screaming your name the whole time. Chance found me then; he barked at me from the shore, warning me to come back. He hated the springwater—I knew that—but I was desperate.

“Come on, Chance,” I called to him, patting my legs. “Come here, boy. I need you to find Piper.”

He came then, whimpering the whole time; he swam out toward me and then, with my encouragement, kept going farther out until I couldn't see him anymore. “Good boy. Find Piper. Good boy.” I kept calling, until I couldn't even hear his paddling. That was the last I ever saw of Chance. I think I sent him into the spring not truly hoping he'd find you but as a trade. An offering. Take my dog. Give me back my sister.

I stood there, waist deep in the water, waiting. Finally someone came swimming toward me out of the darkness. I could feel the panic in the way she chopped at the water. It was nothing at all like the calm and deliberate way you swam. Still, I was certain it was you. It had to be you. I grabbed you, pulling you from the water. You struggled, screamed.

“Piper, it's me,” I yelled.

You stopped and looked at me. It wasn't you. It was just a girl. Someone we went to school with. I couldn't even recall her name. “You did this, didn't you?” she asked.

I shook my head, denying it. Not to escape the punishment or the guilt, but because this was yours. Your fourth year. Your place in our twisted history. I couldn't take that away from you.

“No,” I said. “It was Piper.”

She swiped the water from her face, then leaned in closer. “Who the hell is Piper?”

I dove into her head then, digging through it, looking for any bit of you. But she really had no idea who you were. Not your name or your face . . . or anything.

I released her and she fell back into the water. “You're Piper,” I said, even though I knew she wasn't. Even though by then I had a terrible feeling that you were more than simply gone . . . that perhaps you had never existed at all. But I wasn't ready to let you go. I would never be ready to let you go. I needed you to be there then. I wanted her to be you. I made her into you. I didn't mean to.

Or maybe I did.

Reaching into the water, I pulled her back up. I still had the lock of hair you'd given to Elton. It felt like fate, seeing it there clutched in my fist. I grabbed hold of her hand and pressed the tress into her palm, until her fingers closed around it, making it her own.

I looked up to see that the water had filled with boats and searchlights. Rescue. And retribution. I stood there in the water, growing cold, watching. No one looked my way. They rescued some, they pulled others from the water too late. A few were gone, never to be seen again.

And the girl I'd called Piper was packed into the reformatory van. I watched them lead her away. She didn't struggle. Instead she walked, head held high and proud. As they pushed her into the van, she looked back at me. Our eyes met, held. The door slammed between us, but we didn't break eye contact. She pressed her hand to the glass window, and as the van began to move away, I watched her lips form the words
One and the same
.

I raced after it. I couldn't let them take you away. I ran all the way up to the reformatory. I begged them to take me too.

When it became clear that they wouldn't, I went home.

Mom and Dad were waiting up. Mom threw her arms around me, did the whole thank-God-you're-alive thing. Then she asked what happened.

“It was Piper,” I said.

Mom just nodded, like she'd already guessed. Dad frowned and puffed out his chest. Then he did the strangest thing. He wrapped his arms around me and gave me a gigantic, smothering hug. His hand smoothed my hair and his breath was warm in my ear, shushing me as if I were crying. I stood stiff and still in his embrace, waiting for it to be over. He was clumsy, trying to force his way into my heart. When his lips brushed my cheek, I pushed him away.

He looked shocked and then angry and then shocked some more. He came at me again, arms held out, this time ready to strangle me with his love.

Maybe that was when I realized how much you had stood between us. You had shielded me from him. This horrible monster of a man who could make anyone love him but could no longer feel that emotion himself.

I'd wanted you to kill him for a long time, Piper. Even before I was old enough to realize that the time he spent in your bedroom wasn't right. You couldn't do it. You loved him. You hated him too. But in this instance love conquered all—including hate.

I could do it, though. I should've done it a lot sooner.

I told him he should take a walk. I wished you'd sent him off the bridge with the others. Except I wanted him to jump off a higher bridge. I wanted him to fall farther and feel death rushing toward him with no way to avoid it.

Dad left easily. He kissed me on the cheek and for a moment he looked sad. I told him to write. He did. The same day he jumped, he put a postcard in the mail with a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge on it.

After he left, I went up to my room. That was when I found the tape you'd left. It was labeled
DON'T YOU (FORGET ABOUT ME)
. I listened to it once. You said some terrible things, Piper. I can't quite recall what they were right now, but I know it was awful, because I recall the way I had to keep pausing the tape to catch my breath.

I made myself forget, Piper. Before the pills ever arrived, I reached into my head and extracted my own secrets. I didn't destroy them. I hid them in a safe place for later. But when later came, I'd forgotten where I'd put them. I'd forgotten they'd existed at all.

Here's the funny thing: I thought it would be easier that way.

EIGHTEEN

AS I ENTER THE ROOM WHERE I LAST SAW PIPER, THE
tape I listened to from her is at the forefront of my mind, along with the other ones I'd recorded and then done my best to forget—they have finally all come back to me.

Now I understand why everyone calls me the Pied Piper. They think the last fourth year was mine. To them, Piper never existed. Only the people who loved her remember her. Me, GG, Elton, Ozzy, and maybe Mom, too. It's a shockingly short list.

Walking over to the window, I look down at the empty train tracks below. I run my finger along the glass, tracing the bridge. I stop at the exact spot where the train struck Piper. The place where she disappeared. The moment that I lost her. Or the best parts anyway. The bits of herself that she'd built around what everyone else had imagined for her. The Piper in the reformatory is somebody else, Piper's ghost reanimated by my hand and then reimagined by the rats.

Slowly, I turn in a half circle, scanning the room, waiting for Piper to reappear. I can't leave her here. I can't take her out. I can't be part of her plan to fill the reformatory with the innocent. It makes Elton's way of doing things look positively democratic.

And then there's Piper's original plan—destroy the reformatory and everything it stands for. I never really took the plan seriously, and so I never really thought about the consequences. Now, though, I do. What would happen to the old-timers? To the people like Mom who came here because they were sick? To Piper? So many people would be saved, and so many others would be lost.

“The best lack all conviction.” That was another line from that damn poem. If that's true, then I must be the greatest fucking person on the planet 'cause I still have no damn clue what to do.

“Oh, Skylar, how many times must I tell you to leave?” I whirl to face Piper, and in the same moment the ground rumbles beneath my feet, like it did earlier—except a million times worse. It's followed by a horrible cracking noise, like thunder. I run back to the window just in time to see the earth split. Huge chasms appear, snaking every which way for miles in every direction.

This isn't some random event. I know because there are secrets screaming through the air, coming at me from all directions, demanding to be heard. It's not Piper or anything with a human voice.

It's the rats.

Things have been unbalanced for too long, and now a resolution must be found. They must be fed or released.

“Make them stop!” I scream at Piper.

She laughs. “I can't and I wouldn't if I could.”

Another tremor rips through the earth, this time shaking me right off my feet. I lie there for a moment, stunned, until the sound of distant screams reaches me. Pushing myself to my feet, I race back to the window and then peer down to watch Gardnerville get ripped apart.

The worst of it is the trestle bridge. The giant span buckles beneath its own weight, making the metal holding it together scream in agony. As it collapses, bits of split wood spray out. I rub my eyes, unable to believe it could be so easily destroyed.

I spin around to glare at Piper. “You finally beat the bridge. Don't even try and tell me that wasn't you.”

“It might have been my suggestion,” Piper admits with a shrug.

Finally, the earth stops its endless shivering. I fall to my knees, relieved there's nothing more to see. Piper kneels beside me and gently strokes my back.

“There, that wasn't so bad, was it?”

“Not so bad?” I scramble to my feet, wanting to get as far from her as possible. “It's the worst thing I've ever seen.”

“Really?” Piper coldly replies. “Worse than watching the train overtake me?”

“Yes,” I choke out.

“So much for sisterly love.” Piper glides over to the window and looks down. “I've been upstaged by the appetizer. By the time you see the entrée, I fear I'll have completely fallen off your list of horrors.”

I force myself to take one step and then another, until I am at Piper's side, looking out the window once more. At first I am relieved to see no further destruction. No more chaos. It looks like people are already getting out and cleaning things up.

But the longer I look, the more undeniable it becomes that everyone is moving in the same direction; they even seem to be forming a line . . . almost like a parade.

I watch a moment longer, as the head of the growing chain takes a turn that can lead only one place.

It's exactly the way LuAnn had described it: “We'll call it the uprising. It's the way Gardnerville was always meant to be, everyone gathered together in the reformatory.” That was the plan. Days ago, she came right out and told me exactly what was going on. And like an idiot, I stood there thinking, This poor crazy girl, who knows what she's blabbering about?

“You're really bringing them here,” I say, still struggling to believe it.

“Yes,” Piper agrees. “I really am.”

“No,” I answer, vehemently disagreeing with Piper for the first time in my life. “You're not.”

And then we proceed to fight over the fate of Gardnerville in the way that other siblings might squabble over a cherished toy, tugging it back and forth, each of us declaring that it's “mine.”

The difference here, of course, is that the fate of every person in this town is at stake.