“She’s cheating on you,” Brian yells after me.
I stop in my tracks.
I slowly turn and face him. He’s standing upright now, and from the looks of his posture, he’s expecting me to hit him. When I don’t, he continues to provoke me.
“With me,” he adds. “More than once. It’s been going on for over two months now.”
I stare at him, trying to remain calm on the outside, but internally, my hands are wrapped around his throat, squeezing the last drop of oxygen from his lungs.
I glance at Charlie. She’s begging me with her eyes not to do anything stupid. I turn back to face him and somehow, I smile. “That’s nice, Brian. You want a trophy?”
I wish I could bottle up the expression on his face and release it any time I need a good laugh.
Once I’m back inside the car, I pull out of the parking lot more dramatically than I probably should. When we’re back on the road, heading toward my house, I finally find it in me to look at Charlie. She’s staring right back at me. We keep our eyes locked for a few seconds, gauging one another’s reaction. Right before I’m forced to look back at the road in front of me, I see her smile.
We both start laughing. She relaxes against her seat and says, “I can’t believe I was cheating on you with that guy. You must have done something that really pissed me off.”
I smile at her. “Nothing short of murder should have made you cheat on me with that guy.”
A throat clears in the backseat, and I immediately glance in the rearview mirror. I forgot all about my brother. He leans forward until he’s positioned between the front and middle seats. He looks at Charlie, and then at me.
“Let me get this straight,” he says. “You two are
laughing
about this?”
Charlie glances at me out of the corner of her eye. We both stop laughing and Charlie clears her throat. “How long have we been together now, Silas?” she asks.
I pretend to count on my fingers when my brother speaks up. “Four years,” he interjects. “Jesus, what’s gotten into the two of you?”
Charlie leans forward and locks eyes with me. I know exactly what she’s thinking.
“Four years?”
I mutter.
“Wow,” Charlie says. “Long time.”
My brother shakes his head and falls back against his seat. “The two of you are worse than an episode of Jerry Springer.”
Jerry Springer is a talk show host. How do I know this? I wonder if Charlie remembers this.
“You remember Jerry Springer?” I ask her.
Her lips are tight, pressed together in contemplation. She nods and turns toward the passenger window.
None of this makes sense. How can we remember celebrities? People we’ve never met? How do I know that Kanye West married a Kardashian? How do I know that Robin Williams died?
I can remember everyone I’ve never met, but I can’t remember the girl I’ve been in love with for over four years? Uneasiness takes over inside of me, pumping through my veins until it settles in my heart. I spend the next few miles silently naming off all the names and faces of people I remember. Presidents. Actors. Politicians. Musicians. Reality TV stars.
But I can’t for the life of me remember the name of my little brother, who is climbing out of the backseat right now. I watch him as he makes his way inside our house. I continue to watch the door, long after it closes behind him. I’m staring at my house just like Charlie was staring at hers.
“Are you okay?” Charlie asks.
It’s as if the sound of her voice is suction, pulling me out of my head at breakneck speed and shoving me back into the moment. The moment where I picture Charlie and Brian and the words he said that I had to pretend didn’t affect me at all.
“She’s cheating on you.”
I close my eyes and lean my head against the headrest. “Why do you think it happened?”
“You really do need to learn how to be more specific, Silas.”
“Okay,” I reply, lifting my head and looking directly at her. “Brian. Why do you think you slept with him?”
She sighs. “You can’t be mad at me for that.”
I tilt my head and look at her in disbelief. “We were together for
four
years, Charlie. You can’t blame me for being a little upset.”
She shakes her head. “
They
were together for four years. Charlie and Silas. Not the two of us,” she says. “Besides, who’s to say you were an angel? Have you even looked through all your own texts?”
I shake my head. “I’m afraid to now. And don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Don’t refer to us in the third person. You
are
her. And I’m him. Whether we like who we were or not.”
As soon as I begin to pull out of the driveway, Charlie’s phone rings.
“My sister,” she says right before she answers it with a hello. She listens quietly for several seconds, eyeing me the entire time. “She was drunk when I got home. I’ll be there in a few minutes.” She ends the call. “Back to the school,” she says. “My alcoholic mother was supposed to pick my sister up after her swim practice. Looks like we’re about to meet another sibling.”
I laugh. “I feel like I was a chauffer in my past life.”
Charlie’s expression tightens. “I’ll stop referring to us in the third person if you stop referring to it as a past life. We didn’t
die
, Silas. We just can’t remember anything.”
“We can remember
some
things,” I clarify.
I begin to head back in the direction of the school. At least I’ll know my way around with all of this back and forth.
“There was this family in Texas,” she says. “They had a parrot, but he went missing. Four years later, he showed up out of the blue—speaking Spanish.” She laughs. “Why do I remember that pointless story but I can’t remember what I did twelve hours ago?”
I don’t respond, because her question is rhetorical, unlike all the questions in my head.
When we pull up to the school again, a spitting image of Charlie is standing by the entrance with her hands crossed tightly over her chest. She climbs into the backseat and sits in the same spot where my brother was just sitting.
“How was your day?” Charlie asks her.
“Shut up,” her sister says.
“Bad, I take it?”
“Shut up,” she says again.
Charlie looks at me wide-eyed, but with a mischievous grin on her face.
“Were you waiting long?”
“Shut
up
,” her sister says again.
I realize now that Charlie is just instigating her. I smile when she keeps at it.
“Mom was pretty wasted when I got home today.”
“What’s new?” her sister says.
At least she didn’t say shut up this time.
Charlie fires a couple more questions, but her sister ignores her completely, giving her full attention to the phone in her hands. When we pull into Charlie’s driveway, her sister begins to open her door before the car even comes to a stop.
“Tell mom I’ll be late,” Charlie says as her sister climbs out of the car. “And when do you think Dad will be home?”
Her sister pauses. She stares at Charlie with contempt. “Ten to fifteen, according to the judge.” She slams the door.
I wasn’t expecting that, and apparently neither was Charlie. She slowly turns around in her seat until she’s facing forward again. She inhales a slow breath and carefully releases it. “My sister hates me. I live in a dump. My mom’s an alcoholic. My father is in prison. I cheat on you.” She looks at me. “Why the hell are you even dating me?”
If I knew her better, I’d hug her. Hold her hand.
Something.
I don’t know what to do. There’s no protocol on how to console your girlfriend of four years who you just met this morning.
“Well, according to Ezra, I’ve loved you since before I could walk. I guess that’s hard to let go of.”
She laughs under her breath. “You must have some fierce loyalty, because
I’m
even beginning to hate me.”
I want to reach over and touch her cheek. Make her look at me. I don’t, though. I put the car in reverse and keep my hands to myself. “Maybe there’s a lot more to you than just your financial status and who your family is.”
“Yeah,” she says. She glances at me and the disappointment is momentarily replaced by a brief smile. “Maybe.”
I smile with her, but we both glance out our respective windows to hide them. Once we’re on the road again, Charlie reaches for the radio. She scrolls through several stations, settling on one that we both immediately begin singing. As soon as the first line of lyrics comes out of our mouths, we both immediately turn and face one another.
“Lyrics,” she says softly. “We remember song lyrics.”
Nothing is adding up. At this point, my mind is so exhausted I don’t even feel like attempting to figure it out at the moment. I just want the respite the music provides. Apparently so does she, because she sits quietly beside me for most of the drive. After several minutes pass, I can feel her look at me.
“I hate that I cheated on you.” She immediately turns up the volume on the radio and settles against her seat. She doesn’t want a response from me, but if she did I would tell her it was okay. That I forgive her. Because the girl sitting next to me right now doesn’t seem like she could be the girl who previously betrayed me.
She never asks where we’re going. I don’t even know where we’re going. I just drive, because driving seems to be the only time my mind settles down. I have no idea how long we drive, but the sun is finally setting when I decide to turn around and head back. We’re both lost in our heads the entire time, which is ironic for two people who have no memories.
“We need to go through our phones,” I say to her. It’s the first thing spoken between us in over an hour. “Check old text messages, emails, voicemail. We might find something that could explain this.”
She pulls her phone out. “I tried that earlier, but I don’t have a fancy phone like yours. I only get text messages, but I barely have any.”
I pull the car over at a gas station and park off to the side where it’s darker. I don’t know why I feel like we need privacy to do this. I just don’t want anyone approaching if they recognize us, because chances are, we won’t know them in return.
I turn off the car and we both begin scrolling through our phones. I start with text messages between the two of us first. I scroll through several, but they’re all short and to the point. Schedules, times to meet up.
I love you
’s and
miss you
’s. Nothing revealing anything at all about our relationship.
Based on my call log, we talk for at least an hour almost every night. I go through all the calls stored in my phone, which is well over two weeks’ worth.
“We talked on the phone for at least an hour every night,” I tell her.
“Really?” she says, genuinely shocked. “What in the world could we have talked about for an hour every night?”
I grin. “Maybe we don’t actually do a whole lot of
talking
.”
She shakes her head with a quiet laugh. “Why do your sex jokes not surprise me, even though I remember absolutely nothing about you?”
Her half-laugh turns into a groan. “Oh, God,” she says, tilting her phone toward me. “Look at this.” She scrolls through her phone’s camera roll with her finger. “Selfies. Nothing but selfies, Silas. I even took
bathroom
selfies.” She exits out of her camera app. “Kill me now.”
I laugh and open the camera on my own phone. The first picture is of the two of us. We’re standing in front of a lake, taking a selfie, naturally. I show her and she groans even louder, dropping her head dramatically against the headrest. “I’m starting to not like who we are, Silas. You’re a rich kid who’s a dick to your housekeeper. I’m a mean teenager with absolutely no personality who takes selfies to make herself feel important.”
“I’m sure we aren’t as bad as we seem. At least we appear to like each
other
.”
She laughs under her breath. “I was cheating on you. Apparently we weren’t that happy.”
I open the email on my phone and find a video file labeled, “Do not delete.” I click on it.
“Check this out.” I lift the armrest and scoot closer to her so she can see the video. I turn the car stereo up so the sound can be heard through Bluetooth. She lifts her armrest and scoots closer to get a better look.
I hit play. My voice comes through the speakers of my car, making it apparent that I’m the one holding the camera in the video. It’s dark, and it looks like I’m outside.
“It’s officially our two year anniversary.”
My voice is hushed, like I don’t want to be caught doing whatever it is I’m doing. I turn the camera on myself and the light from the recorder is on, illuminating my face. I look younger, maybe by a year or two. I’m guessing I was sixteen based on the fact that I just said it was our two-year anniversary. I look like I’m sneaking up to a window.
“I’m about to wake you up to tell you happy anniversary, but it’s almost one o’clock in the morning on a school night, so I’m filming this in case your father murders me.”
I turn the camera back around and face it toward a window. The camera goes dark, but we can hear the window being raised and the sound of me struggling to climb inside. Once I’m inside the room, I shine the camera toward Charlie’s bed. There’s a lump under the covers, but she doesn’t move. I move the camera around the rest of the room. The first thing I notice is that the room on the camera doesn’t look like it would be a room in the house Charlie lives in now.
“That’s not my bedroom,” Charlie says, looking closer at the video playing on my phone. “My room now isn’t even half that size. And I share with my little sister.”
The room on the video definitely doesn’t look like a shared room, but we don’t get a good enough look because the camera points back at the bed. The lump under the covers moves and from the angle of the camera, it looks as though I’m crawling onto the bed.
“Charlie baby,”
I whisper to her. She pulls the covers over her head but shields her eyes from the light of the camera.
“Silas?”
she whispers. The camera is still pointed at her from an awkward angle, as if I forgot I was even holding it. There are kissing sounds. I must be kissing up her arm or neck.