(Don't You) Forget About Me (4 page)

But before I can alert Elton, I am thrown back against my seat and then jerked forward again, as the car screeches to a stop.

“Holy shit, you almost hit her,” Foote says.

“She threw herself at the car,” Elton spits back.

I look through the front windshield in time to see the object of their discussion climb onto the hood of the Prius. She deftly slides forward and begins to pound her fists against the glass.

“Cowards. Backstabbers. Traitors,” she screams. I hardly hear her, though, because while the windshield keeps her taunts at a safe distance, her secret slides right through it with ease.

And it is unlike any secret I've heard before, because it sounds like something Piper would say as it loudly declares,
It's time, Pollywog. It's time.

I gasp, but my dry throat interferes again, turning it into a choking sound.

As if it's a signal, the girl's eyes meet mine. And for an instant I could swear it is Piper staring at me. Then the girl is scrambling off the car and into an alleyway, where she disappears from view.

“What did you see?” Elton turns around in his seat and fixes me with what he thinks is a piercing gaze.

I clear my throat and then lie easily. “Nothing. She just got released from the reformatory, right? There's nothing left in there. Nothing that makes sense anyway.”

Elton takes his time thinking this over, letting me sweat. Finally, he nods. “You know Jonathan, right?” he asks. He knows damn well that I do. Jonathan is another one of Elton's henchmen. He's in charge of selling the quints' pills, and I am one of his most regular customers. “That's his sister, LuAnn. She got out of the reformatory a few weeks ago.”

LuAnn. Now I know why the face seemed vaguely familiar. Eight years ago she nearly killed Piper.

“Jonathan mentioned they've been having trouble with her. After that many years inside, you'd think she'd be bedridden, but she gets these manic bursts of energy. Disappears for hours. I should go after her, make sure she gets home okay.” Elton scrubs a palm over his face, suddenly looking less evil and conniving and simply tired and human.

Sometimes I am so used to hating Elton, I forget that the rest of Gardnerville sees him as a hero. After he and Piper had their infamous last rendezvous on the trestle bridge, and he traded in his flesh-and-blood legs for metal ones, Elton started giving speeches about how Gardnerville needed to change. Then he went one step further and told people he knew how to make those changes happen. He promised the people of Gardnerville what they'd always dreamed of: health, long life, and freedom from fear. Four years later he's gone from being a high school teacher to practically running the whole damn town. People act like he's the answer to their prayers, and as long as he keeps delivering on his promises, nobody really cares how he does it.

Sometimes this makes me remember him the way that Piper used to see him, the way she used to love him.

But then Elton ruins it by chucking a plastic Baggie at me. It holds one tiny purple pill.

“Try to wait until you're home or somewhere safe before you take it.”

Elton is right, I should wait, but between the fourth-year whisper and the run-in with LuAnn I am desperate for the forget-me-not's unique brand of oblivion. I open the bag, shake the pill into my mouth, and smile sweetly. “Haven't you heard, Elton? Thanks to you, Gardnerville is now one of the safest places in the world.”

With that parting shot, I push the door open and climb out of the car. I don't make it very far before Foote shows up beside me.

“Let me walk you home.”

“No thanks,” I say. “Getting lost is kinda the whole point.”

“Right,” Foote replies, but he doesn't stop ambling along beside me.

I don't want him there. I don't want him to see me when I trip over my own feet and face-plant because I've forgotten how to walk.

“If you're looking to get laid by a girl who won't remember it the next day, try the park. That's where most of the notters hang out.”

It's a terrible thing to say, but it does the trick. Foote is no longer beside me. I force myself to keep going, to not turn around and apologize. In a few more minutes I'll forget what I said, and who I said it to. And soon thereafter this whole day will be wiped away, like it never even happened.

EVERY ROSE HAS ITS THORN

Four Years Ago

I NEVER FELT LIKE THE ANNOYING LITTLE SISTER
that you didn't want around until you started seeing Elton. He changed everything. He changed you. And since we have always been connected, he changed me too.

Changed for the worse. I want to be clear about that, although I don't know how there could be any doubt. He ruined us. He ruined everything.

Elton had arrived earlier that year, right around the time when Daddy was first beginning to show his age. It wasn't a dramatic change—no graying hair or stomach paunch. There wasn't one specific thing that you could point to, but rather several small cumulative shifts that made him seem older. Daddy no longer looked fresh and young and just barely twenty as he had for at least two decades. Now he looked, not middle-aged exactly, but on the brink of it.

He combated the change by doubling down. More women who weren't Mom. More languid strolls down Main Street, where people had no choice but to love him. More town meetings where Daddy sat at the front of the room like a king holding court, allowing the peasants a chance to kiss his ring.

In response Piper and I started spending less and less time at home. When Daddy was away, it was terrible to listen to Mom wail and moan, sick with missing him. Even worse, though, was when he wouldn't come home for several days. She would go quiet, her cheeks would burn bright pink, and her whole body would radiate heat. You could see the fever on the brink of breaking, but Daddy—using some sort of sixth sense—would return and she would succumb to the love sickness once more.

In warm weather, you and I roamed from one end of town to the other, measuring it with our bare feet. During the sharp winter days, we curled together under a pile of blankets in the shed out back. It also helped when Chance would curl up between us, and his furry body lent us a bit of extra heat. An extension cord gave us a single line of power that we used for a hotplate. We kept warm by filling our stomachs with cans of soup and hot cocoa. Sometimes you'd bring different books from the school library and read them aloud. You loved poetry then and would recite the same ones over and over until we'd both committed them to memory. Your favorite was “Mad Girl's Love Song”
by Sylvia Plath. Do you remember it, Piper? I can't recall much of anything anymore, but that one line that repeated over and over throughout the poem sticks with me: “I think I made you up inside my head.”

The way you said it—sometimes spitting the words out like they were burning your tongue and at other times exhaling them as if you were forming smoke rings that only you could see—still haunts me.

Perhaps it haunted Elton too. You recited that poem for him. You brought him into our little shed, saying there was room for one more, and when it turned out that it was in fact a little too crowded, I was the one who was told to go. It was only pride that kept me from sitting outside the door like Chance did, whining until I was let back in.

You had a crush on Elton before I even knew he existed. Later I learned he was a teacher at the high school and the number-one crush of every girl there. It was hard to believe you were just like the rest of the girls. Although, in the end you weren't. They wanted him, but you actually took him.

Later you told me that on his first day, he had asked you for directions when you were sitting on the front steps reading a book. “Follow me,” you'd said, and he had, chatting with you all the while. He asked what you were reading and you both discussed the poems of Emily Dickinson. “She was so alone and sheltered, you'd think she wouldn't have much to say, but the exact opposite was true,” Elton said, and in that exact instant—between one footstep and the next—you fell in love with him.

I don't know why. It doesn't seem like such a clever thing to say. I would've asked you, but I couldn't because you never told me this story. I took it. Please forgive me, Piper, but I couldn't accept being locked out from so much of your time with Elton. I needed a part of it, even if it wasn't mine to take.

“There it is,” you'd said, pointing to the classroom that would be Elton's.

He didn't move toward it; instead he just smiled at you. “What's your name?”

“Piper.”

“That's perfect. Like the Pied Piper. I'm sure I'm not the first person to say that I'd happily follow you anywhere.”

You laughed and then, because you are fearless, you leaned forward and pressed your lips against his.

He stepped away quickly. “Piper, I'm a teacher.”

“I know.” You shrugged. “But who really cares about that?”

As it turned out, nobody did. They said it was only a five-year difference and what was that anyway? The thinking on the subject was so uniform it was almost like someone had gone around putting that exact thought into every single person's head.

And Elton eventually came around too.

Later, Piper, not so very long after, although so much had changed that it felt like forever, you and I had that big fight.

By then I was so full of jealousy. I had stolen so many secrets of your time with Elton that I had half fallen in love with him too.

An explosion was inevitable.

It came the day you returned home with grass in your hair. I didn't need that to know what you'd done. Before you even entered the house, I was reaching out and reading your secrets as easily as other little sisters crack the cheap locks on a sibling's diary. You could see on my face that I knew how you'd lain naked in the grass with Elton. How when it was over you held hands and stared up into the endlessly blue sky. How he had been gentle and—

You slapped me, knocking every secret out of my head for an instant.

“That's mine,” you hissed, angrier than I'd ever seen you before. “I need something that's just mine and not ours to share.”

I would rather you'd just slapped me again. Or punched me.

“He doesn't love you,” I said. “He says he does, but he doesn't.
I know.
”

You turned white at that last bit. You believed me.

It was a lie, Piper. I admitted it later, but after that you were never quite sure, and then when he got Angie pregnant it seemed to confirm the lie. He had never loved you.

But Piper, Elton did love you and he still does. The thing is, he was afraid of you too. That was where the uncertainty came from—not a lack of love, just an inability to fully understand who he loved and why.

And despite being able to shake every last secret from Elton's brain, I can't say I've ever understood anything about what truly makes him tick—except that.

THREE

A BEEPING NOISE WAKES ME THE NEXT MORNING. IT
takes me a while to realize it's coming from the little black square next to my bed, and several more long moments to remember it's my cell phone, and even longer than that to figure out how to make it stop. Mission accomplished, I flop back into bed and stare up at the ceiling, trying to remember yesterday. Bits and pieces come back to me. I recall something about the train station and a car. Foote. That name attaches itself to a face and a bloodied chest. And that's it; everything else is a blur, a beautiful swirl of images that never completely come together.

It would be scary, except the one thing I know is that I've been here before, and that I want to stay inside this bubble as long as I can. The last thing I clearly remember is diving into the forget-me-not's embrace. Why give myself a headache trying to clear the cobwebs when this is obviously exactly where I wanted to be?

The cell phone beeps at me again. This time when I flip it open, I notice the little message on the screen:
forget-me-nots, 9am
.

A bit of the fog dissipates and I remember. The quints spend their weekends making pills. Monday through Friday from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. the pills are sold to whoever has the cash to pay for them. Usually they sell out by Wednesday, and then everyone who hesitated is stuck waiting for Monday to come around again.

I never hesitate, and take a sick sort of pride in always being the first in line ready to buy.

That's why I drag myself out of bed and pull some clothes on. By the time I'm dressed, my head is a little clearer. I even remember to walk softly and avoid the especially squeaky floorboards so as not to wake Mom and Wills.

At the end of the hall, I turn and step inside Piper's room. She hardly needs any sleep at all, so it's not often that I'm up before her. I grin just thinking of how she'll scream when I jump onto her bed and shake her awake the same way she's done to me.

Then I see the empty bed, neatly made, and my smile fades, forgotten.

Piper is gone.

I half remember writing those exact words on her door with a pink Sharpie pen. When I look, though, there is nothing except a patch of paint that seems a little brighter than the rest. Maybe it was a dream or maybe I had written those words and Mom painted over them, not seeing them as a simple reminder, but instead as some sort of condemnation of her parenting skills.

I linger in the room a moment longer, drifting toward the pile of cassette tapes on Piper's bedside table. Each one has a handwritten label. All song titles, I think. I reach for one, and then jerk my hand back. Something is telling me to leave them be. A few moments later, standing near the front door, I frown down at a small handheld tape recorder sitting on top of my flip-flops. Again, warning bells go off in some distant corner of my mind. Ignoring them, I pocket the recorder and slide my feet into the sandals.

The streets are quiet and I get to the school fairly quickly, only forgetting my way one time. As I cut across the parking lot toward the football field, I see the boys are already gathered for their morning practice.

They lumber around like overgrown babies, sucking water from their sports bottles and dragging their towels behind them like their favorite blankies. Gatorade mixed with a weekly dose of pansies has made them twice the size of your average high school kid.

The coach blows his whistle, and the whole herd of boys visibly startles. One or two run off. The rest manage to resist the flight instinct.

Barely.

Poor boys.

Poor Elton.

He'd wanted to build the football team into something you see in the movies, where the whole town comes out to cheer them on. That had never been our team though. And it wasn't our town either. Besides the obvious problem of finding opponents, there was the bigger issue that football tends to get the boys too excited. That's no good. The last time two boys got excited from a sporting event was a baseball game thirty-two years ago. A bad call led to a fight. Fists flew. One of the boys' fists turned into bricks. He killed three boys from the opposing team and two of his teammates before they could stop him. The victims' mothers could barely identify their dead sons' faces.

Arrogant Elton thought he could get around this type of thing with the help of the quints. Unfortunate side effects and unintended consequences later, he'd gathered enough boys for a team and pumped up their scrawny bodies while at the same time draining every last drop of aggression. He'd created a bunch of overgrown sissies.

If he had any sense, he'd admit it was a failed experiment and shut it down. But then Elton would have to admit to being a person capable of making mistakes, and that is never going to happen.

I turn away from them and begin my climb up the bleacher steps. What the pansies did to those boys should be the type of cautionary tale that would scare me away from putting another forget-me-not into my mouth. It doesn't. Sometimes you make bad choices to keep yourself from making other, even worse ones. Or at least that's what I tell myself.

It's not yet 10:00 a.m., but already the day is disgustingly hot. It's even worse inside the press box. All the windows are fixed closed and the only fresh air comes through the hatch in the roof. Everybody calls it the double-wide 'cause it looks like a trailer perched on top of the stadium stands.

“Whatcha know, pretty thing?” Jonathan Stimple grins so that all I can see are his yellow buckteeth. I'd think he was trying to distract me after I walked in and caught him using the edge of his polo shirt to mop up his sweaty armpits. But no, the guy thinks he's suave in his hand-me-down Lacoste. He doesn't know that Elton only gave him the job of managing the double-wide as a joke, keeping the white trash in a trailer.

Elton. Jonathan. I don't want to think about them. I might start remembering Jonathan puking so hard once in third grade that it came out of his nose. Or the morning I caught Elton leaving a bouquet of fresh-picked wildflowers on our porch. He'd winked at me before walking away. It's better not to think of those things. Not to remember who we'd been, or worse—who we've become.

“Quiet out there today,” Jonathan says casually, like he's just making conversation. Except he isn't the chatty type, and he knows damn well I'm not either. His little rat eyes watch me, wanting some response that I don't care to guess at.

“It's early.”

Jonathan makes a big show of turning to look at the clock on the wall behind him. “Ten to ten's not so early in most places.”

This isn't most places. The words almost come out, but I stop them. If his goal is to get a rise out of me, I'm not biting. “Well, it's a hot day too.” I try to say it pleasantly, but the early hour, the heat, and this conversation make it impossible.

“So you think our luck will hold? You think we can get through the year without a funeral?”

“We'll see,” I say noncommittally, and then move the conversation back to business. “Pills, please.”

“What kind?” Jonathan asks, even though he already knows what I want. He knew it before I walked through the door.

“The usual.” I hold out my hand, a twenty at the center of my palm.

Jonathan takes my twenty but doesn't put any pretty purple pills in its place. “What if I told you prices went up? Just happened last night. Supply and demand, ya know? Ain't inflation a bitch.”

I want to tell him that supply and demand has nothing to do with inflation, but my own grasp of economics is shaky, and besides, the last time I snarked back at Jonathan, he slipped a scarlet runner in with my usual pills. For three days my bones itched so bad the only way to shake them out was to run. I'd finally collapsed in a yard at the other end of town, and crawled under a rosebush. The next morning I woke to find the tread on my Converse sneakers had nearly been worn away.

“How much?” I ask, careful to keep my voice flat and expressionless, not wanting to antagonize him any further.

“Well . . .” Jonathan drawls the word out, as if he's thinking.

Look with your eyes, not with your hands.
My mom would say that whenever I went near any of her little glass knickknacks. Jonathan must've been given the same lesson, 'cause he keeps his arms dangling at his side while his gaze travels my body. His eyes slide up my bare legs, to where the strings on my cut-off jeans tickle my thighs and the tips of the pockets stick out. Then up to the wifebeater. The other girls at school wear them bright white and tight. But mine is the dingy color of something that got washed with a load of black socks, and it hangs loose, dipping into a low U over my flat chest.

Wanting the imaginary groping to end, I reach into my pocket for the tape recorder.

“How much for this?” I ask, slapping it onto the table before I can change my mind. Sweat drips down my forehead and into my eyes, stinging, as Jonathan picks up the recorder and studies it for a moment.

“Old-school,” he comments. Then he hits the Eject button, and pulls out the tape inside. “Heh,” he says, looking at the handwritten label. He holds the tape out to me, sharing the joke. Generous of him.

“‘Don't You (Forget About Me).'” He reads it aloud, just to make sure we're on the same page.

“It's the name of a song,” I explain, not even sure why I bother.

“Ironic,” Jonathan says, jerking his head from the tape to me and back again. Explaining the joke, 'cause I am still staring at him blankly.

It's not that I don't get it, but that I can feel something at the back of my mind, trying to tremble free. Something about that tape is wrong; I just have no idea what that might be.

Popping the tape back into the recorder, Jonathan presses Play. I hold my breath, suddenly afraid of what we'll hear. At first there is only the static hiss as the tape goes round and round and round. Then—

“Skylar, if you're listening to this—” It's Piper's voice.

I snatch the recorder back from Jonathan and eject the tape once more. “You can have the recorder,” I tell him, “but the tape is mine.”

“Chill, Sky, you can keep 'em both. I was just messing with you anyway. We go back a long ways, you seriously think I would do you like that?”

“Whatever,” I say, which seems nicer than laughing in his face.

Jonathan picks up the box that holds the pills, but instead of opening it and handing mine over, he nervously jiggles it so that the pills rattle inside. “Look, I want to make sure there're no hard feelings. Like I said, I was just kidding.”

I don't know why Jonathan suddenly cares so much what I think of him. We are the type of strangers that only a town this small could produce—ones who know personal details of each other's lives going all the way back to kindergarten, but ones who will also not exchange friendly hellos when standing in the same checkout line at Al's Grocery.

“It's forgotten,” I say, and then hold out my hand. “Or at least it will be soon.”

Jonathan hesitates a moment longer, but in the end I am a risk that's easily calculated. The pills make me forget; chances are this conversation will be burned out of my gray matter before the day is even over.

Without another word he counts seven pills and places them in the hollow at the center of my palm. For a moment I stare down at them sadly, wondering why I'd wanted them so badly. Thinking I should throw them back in his face.

They take away sorrow, they take away pain, and they leave great gaping holes in my life. “You'll only remember the good times.” That had been Elton's promise nearly four years ago when he'd pressed that first pill into my hand. Had it all been a lie? Did the pills take the good with the bad? Or is there just not that much good left to be remembered, after all the bad has been whittled away?

Even as my mind runs, my fingers curl inward, covering the pills.

Jonathan's feet shift nervously. I guess he wants me gone.

I linger a moment longer, just long enough to count my pills once more.

“Same time next week,” I promise him.

I grab a candy bar as I walk out the door. One comes free with every purchase. Except it's actually the other way around. Supposedly my twenty paid for the candy, and the pills were the extra. The chocolate is soft and my fingers sink in, crushing the wrapper that reads
THANK YOU FOR SUPPORTING GARDNERVILLE HIGH SCHOOL'S FBLA
. I toss a pill into my mouth and quickly swallow. “Good stuff,” I say. Half serious, half mocking myself.

“Wait!” Jonathan calls only seconds before the door clangs shut between us.

I stand outside, trying to decide whether to ignore him or not.

“Hey, Sky?” Jonathan calls out again.

Damn, he's persistent. Turning, I crack the door with my shoulder, just wide enough to poke my head back in. “Did you say something?”

Jonathan's beady eyes dart back and forth a few times before settling on me. “Yeah,” he says. “Can you . . .” He waves his arm, gesturing for me to come closer.

Reluctantly, I take a step forward, back into the press box. I wish I had waited to take the pill. I have maybe ten minutes before I start feeling its effects and I don't want to be around Jonathan when that happens. “Well?” I prompt him now.

His gaze meets mine for a second before quickly sliding away again. “I know you do some work for Elton, but do you, like, really work for Elton?”

I stare at Jonathan, trying to figure out exactly what he's insinuating. “Well,” I say at last, “I'm not planning on taking Angie's place as his baby mama, if that's what you mean.”

“No, no, no, no.” Jonathan holds both hands out, as if I might come charging at him. “That's not . . . what I meant was . . . do you support Elton? Like, philosophically?”

“What the hell are you talking about, Juh—” His name hovers somewhere between the tip of my tongue and my lips, and it takes me a long moment where my mouth quivers uselessly trying to find it, until at last my slowing memory spits out the necessary information. “Jonathan!”