Doors
“Oh, my god,” says Kumar. I turn my head, and he puts his phone screen to my face. It’s a video of a corgi doing a mini obstacle course.
“Oh, my god,” I agree, gasping and laughing. We smile together for a few seconds as the video ends, and then we go back to our phones.
We’ve been lying on his bed, like this, for about an hour now. A 2019, Gen Z stereotype, yes, but Kumar understands that I don’t always have the energy for more. He’s the only friend who’s stuck with me through all of high school, and because of that I’ve called him whenever I’ve done something self-destructive–even the time I crashed my car and lost my license. Aside from my therapist, he’s been my sturdiest emotional support.
It makes me want to fuck him so badly.
I’ve always been into the shy, nice guy type; Kumar is unfortunately so nice, though, that he’s never once hit on me. He’s never even lightly rubbed at the idea of hooking up–not even while drunk. Still, he’s a straight, teenage boy, and so while I’ve never had much self-esteem, I know that I could probably make something happen. The real problem is that deep down, I know I don’t truly want him; I just want to ruin the only friendship I have left.
I’m a self-destructive mess.
There’s also the fact, though, that he and I are leaving for separate cities in a few weeks… and so things might not ever be the same between us, anyway. Maybe if I initiate something, now, he might even come home for Thanksgiving.
No, Adrianna, I think. Control yourself. These thoughts are just a flashing sign toward another damaging path, but you’ve been on such a good one lately. Don’t let yourself swerve.
“It’s after three,” Kumar notices, interrupting my inner slut shaming.
I look at the time on my phone. He’s right.
“Should I ask if we can do it another day?” I grumble. Yesterday, I’d piled together what I want to store at home while I’m gone, and today, my mom and I are bringing that stuff up to the attic. We’re also shopping for new school supplies for me, even though it’s still early to be doing so. I guess coddling’s what you get when you’re an only child (with a tendency to do things like crash cars).
Kumar shrugs, sitting up. “I need to take my sister to the store soon,” he tells me.
I try to gather my energy. I’m jealous because his sister is awesome (seriously: the coddling’s getting to me). “Okay,” I say. I switch my phone to my left hand and then reach out for his arm, using it to pull myself up. He laughs. While he doesn’t have that much muscle, he has just enough that I appreciate the moment that I’m touching him. I also like his dark arm hair and the tattoo on his tricep: a downturned triangle with small lines and hexagons passing through it. I was there with him, when we were sixteen and he saw it in the parlour window; he thought it looked cool, and he just got it on the spot. Ever since then, the shapes on his left arm have been like a flower bush to me, only revealing themselves in the spring and summer–as if they know that they look good.
I realize, then, that that’s going to be Kumar, in general, now that we’re going to separate colleges. I’ll be at Hagerstown Community; he’ll be chasing opportunity right out of Maryland, altogether. The thought of that is really weird to me. While we only really became friends through ninth grade debate club, we’ve always gone to school together. The world’s already started to feel unstable.
As I leave his room, I shout goodbye to his parents and sister (who still think that I’m dating him), and I let myself out. The heat closes in on me as soon as I exit, and the sidewalk blinds me for a second. It smells like burnt tire out here.
The heat over-relaxes my muscles as I walk, and gravity feels even stronger than usual. Kumar and I both live in the suburbs, and my place is only about a ten-minute walk away, usually–fifteen when it’s hot. When I finally open my front door, the air conditioning greets me like a Harlequin lover.
I hear stomping. I go up the stairs and my mom is leaving my room, a cardboard box between her hands. Her frizzy brown hair is in a disorganised bun.
“Hi. I just started,” she tells me. “Did you add to the list?”
I pull the folded paper out of the back of my shorts. Opening it up, I chuckle again at what she’d written. Adrianna College Needs, it says, in smothered ink. The first item: a daily planner. The second: pepper spray. She wants to get me the first thing because I have bad depression, and the second ‘cause I’m a girl. Y’know, equally crippling flaws.
Once Mom is finished looking over my additions to the list, she places it on my desk and grabs the box again. I go into my room, take another, and follow her up the creaky stairs to the attic. It’s dark up here, but even more humid. The dust annoys my nose. There’s furniture, coat hangers, and a couple of old bikes leaning against the bare-wooden walls; in the right corner, a pile of brown boxes has already germinated.
Mom goes to the boxes. She places the newest one down and then picks up another.
“What are you doing?” I ask, following the path that she’s cleared through the dust.
She wipes some sweat off of her forehead with her tiny wrist. “This is a total mess,” she says. “I thought I’d also organize it all so we can actually find stuff later.”
“Oh,” I say, putting my own box down in front of the pile.
“So, I’m gonna bring some of these down to the storage room. But I’ll take care of that; it’s really dirty in there. You just bring everything up from your room.”
I nod. As Mom heads back down the stairs, I decide to look around a little. I never go into the storage room, or up here, and I wonder how old everything is. Some of the boxes at the top of the pile have a lid, and some don’t–like memories shut away and memories not. I read some of the labels. Thesis books. Must be some of Mom’s old stuff. Wedding gifts. I laugh when I see that one. Adrianna Kindergarten. I was five years old just about… seventeen years after my parents’ wedding. Mom was right; there is really no order here.
I use my tiptoes to peek inside of the kindergarten box–because I’m self-absorbed, I guess (Gen Z, remember?). I see a few small, ribbon hair bows: pink, white, and yellow. I smile at how cute they are, and because I faintly remember them. Underneath is a stack of papers, with a little drawing of red flowers at the top. I think I remember that, too–making it in class. My smile grows.
I hear Mom re-emerging up the stairs behind me. “What are you doing?” she asks.
“Just a second,” I say. I plop back down as she returns to her side of the pile. Something else has my attention. The box to the right of Adrianna Kindergarten–marked 3rd Grade–has a lid, but it’s lopsided. It’s like something inside is too big for the box. I lift up the lid, and what I see poking out is even stranger. A golden soccer ball. I squint.
“What is this?” I call to Mom.
“Huh?” she responds. I hear her approach.
“This trophy,” I say. “I never played soccer.”
“Yeah, when you were little,” she says. “You don’t remember?” She grabs the box from in front of me and goes back to the stairs.
I feel a boom in my stomach as my mood falls on its ass. “Right,” I lie. “I remember now.”
And once I’m back down in my room, I text Kumar that it happened again. On Saturday, we lie back down on his bed.
“Did you ask her more about it?” he suggests, once I finish telling him the details. We’re both on our backs, staring at the ceiling. I wonder if the white bumps are moving and distorting for him, too.
“I didn’t want her to think that my brain’s not all there,” I tell him.
“But it’s not,” he says. He reaches over and puts his palm on my face.
“Stop,” I laugh, and he pulls away. He sits up, grinning down at me. He’s got a wide, dimply grin that complements his triangular jaw. “You know what I mean,” I say, and the moment starts to pull itself back together.
“Yeah,” he mumbles.
“Every time I come home from hanging out with you, or come down for dinner,” I continue, “I’m already scared she’s gonna say, like, I’ve changed my mind, you’re not okay enough to go.” My joints take on familiar stiffness as I say it out loud.
“I get it,” he says. He looks down at his bed. I stare as he rubs at the side of his neck. “I was just thinking, maybe if you asked for more details, you could remember something.”
“Except it said third grade,” I tell him. “It’s not like I was too young to remember being on a freaking soccer team. And long enough to get a trophy. I should remember that.” I realize how loud I’ve gotten. I’m sounding desperate, pathetic, like I think that yelling I should remember will magically make it happen.
“Everyone forgets childhood memories,” he says.
“Not this many important things,” I say. “There’s been so many.” Despite trying to calm, I’m still weirdly loud.
Then he looks back at me, sympathy exploding in his eyes. And the moment that we make eye contact, I finally go quiet. I gasp, and it’s tiny in my mouth, but it rumbles down through my insides.
Brown eyes are God tier. Especially his.
But I sit up, and then I look away from him. I draw my eyes over his Gorillaz poster–the cartoony surrealism of it–as I force myself to re-rail my train of thought. “Like, even if you think the soccer thing’s debatable,” I finally say, squeezing at my calves, “What about that hole I made in the wall? Like, that… was so major, and still…”
“Your mom said that just was a dumb accident, though, right?”
I squeeze harder at myself. “Yeah,” I say. But it’s a lie, one of the only lies I’ve ever told him.
Because of the subject matter, I’m still trying my best to look like I’m holding myself together: to look good, or at least presentable, to him. My core’s completely tied up and tight, though; I’m just like a pretty little bow. Meanwhile, I can feel the truth trying to crawl up my throat, and it’s threatening to make me throw up all over the bed.
I sense him take a big breath, lean back on his hands. “You told Lisa about all this, right?” he asks, referring to my therapist, and I nod. “What’d she say?”
“That my parents should understand that depression can sometimes cause memory loss,” I tell him, almost reciting. “And that that doesn’t make me less strong or capable of going to college.”
“There you go,” he says.
“But what if they find out that it could also be my meds? If they stop paying for those, I’m fucked.” I’m already feeling rickety about having to find a new therapist; I’ve had Lisa since I was fourteen. A place called Hagerstown doesn’t sound like the epitome of mental health, either (no offense, Hagerstown).
“So, what are you gonna do?” Kumar asks.
I put my hands in my lap. “I was thinking of asking for her help. To help me remember,” I tell him.
“What? Like hypnosis or something?”
“Yeah. Exactly.”
“That stuff doesn’t work, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“I read about it.”
“What?” I repeat, shaking my head. I pick up my phone and type memory recovery hypnosis into Google.
He’s right. According to the first source, that kind of treatment is usually a scam, and no good psychologist will do it. The ones who do sometimes wrongly convince their patients that they were sexually abused. Uh, no thank you.
I can feel Kumar leaning towards me. I look back up at him and sigh. “So? Believe me now?” he asks, with a proud smile.
“No,” I pout, and I go back to my phone. I go back to the search results and keep scrolling, hoping for an opposing source. Eventually, a video icon catches my attention. It’s an old, wide-eyed, balding man standing just a little too close to the camera. RECOVER YOUR MEMORY WITH CERTIFIED HYNOTHERAPIST HERMAN PAUL, is the title.
“What is this?” Kumar chuckles, leaning in even closer to me.
It takes me a second longer than before to press the link.
“Do you feel like something’s been missing from your life?” the man asks, once the video starts. “Like there’s something you’ve forgotten, and you won’t be happy or successful until you get it back?” The overall quality is poor, and an ugly rainbow effect floats behind him. This must be a commercial from the nineties or something. So, yeah, this man’s methods are probably out-dated; I wasn’t even alive in the nineties. I wonder if he’s dead. “Good news: the answers are all still inside of your brain,” he continues. He still hasn’t blinked. “They’re just hidden behind a door, and you need a licensed hypnotherapist to help you unlock it.”
“Seems legit,” Kumar mumbles.
“Don’t wait another minute,” Herman practically yells. “Call now and I’ll help you unlock your memory and open the door!” A phone number starts to flash on the screen.
“Another minute?” Kumar mocks. “Holy shit, Addie, hurry!”
We lose ourselves to laughter. He puts a hand on my shoulder, like he’s trying to hold onto his sanity. I start to feel like I’m losing mine, as well, but for slightly different reasons.
“Fine. You win,” I say, as we finally start to sizzle down.
“Thank you,” he smiles.
And when he lets go of me, it kind of feels like having a knife pulled out of my body. The feeling his touch gave me was very bad for me, yes, but losing it feels worse–and now I’m bleeding all over his duvet. Somehow, that’s not much better than throwing up.
I lie back down, placing my hands on my stomach and staring at the ceiling again (because what else can I do, at this point?)
“I mean… does it really matter that much, really?” Kumar mutters. I can tell by his voice that he’s treading water, trying to not get too deep. “If you don’t remember?”
At that, my mouth folds in a little. I pause.
“It’s not, like, the actual memories that I care about,” I admit, the words shaking in my throat. “More like… the feeling that my brain is literally falling apart.”
“Right.”
“It’s like I have no control,” I tell him. “My memories are literally part of who I am. And what if there’s way more that I already lost but I don’t know about? What if I lose more?” I realize that my voice sounds punctured, and it’s filling with dread. So, I don’t really care how deep we get; I already feel like I’m drowning.
“You won’t,” Kumar says.
“I might.”
“You can still remember without any hypnosis.”
“I don’t know,” I say. I clench my teeth.
“Really. You can still try and trigger stuff. I read about it. Seeing or hearing things related to the memory can help.” I feel him shift, stare down at me.
“But the trophy didn’t work,” I argue.
“It’s gradual,” he tells me, his voice softening, dropping down onto me like a blanket. He knows how to do that. “And if you try to remember some things, it can train your brain to remember other stuff. Like, trying to remember the soccer thing could help you remember the hole in the wall thing, or reading those books on your shelf.”
“What?” I turn my head to face him.
“And that’s also a really gradual process but at least it’s legit, unlike-”
“Why did you read all this?” I ask, squinting up at him. His face withdraws a bit, and then I know the answer. “Because of me,” I say.
“Well, yeah,” he mumbles. It occurs to me that Kumar could have a tiny crush on me. Or maybe he’s just that great of a person. Either way, he’d be an amazing boyfriend–but since my idiot brain is trying to destroy our relationship, of course I only want to fuck him.
“I can’t ask my parents about anything,” I tell him. I look up back to the ceiling, and it’s like my words fall back down on me and hit my face. I really hate that I can’t talk to them about this. “They can’t know.”
“Who needs them when you have me?” Kumar responds. I can hear him smiling a bit; he’s using his comfort-Addie voice.
It works. And it also turns me on.
I retreat from the feeling. I’m so freaking backwards. It’s really like I’m some insatiable slut, which doesn’t make sense with the rest of my life. They say that it’s the girls with no self-esteem who go after sex, but I’ve never had either. Something about Kumar just gets to me, just pushes my ‘button’, and it’s not normal.
“Wanna go to the soccer field?” he asks, forcing me to regain focus.
I haven’t been to my elementary school, Phillip Ridge, since the night in tenth grade when my group of friends had loitered in the playground. Kumar had left a cigarette butt on the field, and we’d laughed, saying that the kids would be scandalized the next day. I hadn’t remembered anything about soccer, then–but I also hadn’t known that there was anything to remember. I’m hoping that Kumar is right and if I try to remember stuff, now, it’ll help open up my memory to things (help to open the door, if you will).
Kumar and I decide to check the school out, again, since the breeze today makes it bearable outside. He drives us there, and then we walk through the soccer posts in the field, behind the school. Being summertime, the field’s as desolate as my memories of it. I definitely recognize this area–the chipped white paint on the goalposts, the saggy nets, the fake but convincing grass–but I don’t remember ever actually playing out here. That’s except for one time, for gym class: I remember Mr. Gibson explaining that we were being tested. Dylan got pissed at me for not passing the ball. There end my memories of soccer.
“Do you remember me being on the team?” I ask Kumar.
“Sorry. I didn’t pay any attention to that. Or you, back then,” he says. I look at him, and he has a teasing glint in his eye. “Maybe…” He pauses. “Maybe we could try to find someone who was on the team with you, and see if they’d help.”
“Even if that worked,” I say, “I’d rather try other memories first before I tell anyone else I’m a lunatic.”
He laughs.
We reach the playground beside the field and I slump onto one of the swings. As expected, it burns at my unprotected thighs.
Kumar sits on the swing next to me.
“I have memories here,” I tell him. Images of playing jump rope with my girlfriends, of pretending that the slide was a teleporter, of twisting my ankle in a bucket of chalk are all funnelling into my mind. Meanwhile, I’m still staring at the field, trying to focus on it, instead–but it’s rejecting me.
“Uh,” Kumar says. I hear his sneakers twist on the concrete. “Do you remember what the jerseys looked like?”
I bite my lip, thinking. To my surprise, I see a blurry image of a neon jersey on a clothing line. Could this be a flashback?
“Yellow?” I ask.
“Oh,” he says. “I don’t actually know.”
“You’re useful,” I tease, looking over at him. His dark hair is flipping a little in the breeze. I force myself to look away again and harder at the memory.
“Wouldn’t they probably have been the school colors, though?” he mumbles.
I nod. And I realize that the jersey I’m seeing is actually way too big for a nine-year old.
Except… I don’t remember that either of my parents were ever into sports …
I turn my hands hard around the swing chains as my stomach turns. I really am getting worse.
“Hey. You’re trying, and that’s probably still gonna help,” Kumar says, and I realize he’s behind me, now. “For the long term.” I feel his hands on my shoulders, and they give me a different kind of flash–in my stomach and in my loins.
We spend the next half hour or so messing around on the swings and on the playground. We laugh and take pictures. More so than before, I forget about the soccer. From the moment that Kumar pushes me on that swing until the moment I’m asleep, he’s the only thing left on my mind.
As good as it feels, though, I know that my brain is only trying to trick me. These thoughts are no different to the ones that tell me to go outside without sunscreen or to drink with my meds. If I want to keep getting better, I have to resist them.
Thankfully, when I get up the next morning I’m only thinking about breakfast. I find my dad at the table, on his tablet, once I reach the kitchen.
“Hey, bug,” he says.
“Hey,” I say, opening the fridge. “Where’s Mom?”
“At the flea market. Apparently they’re having special deals today.”
I stop in place. Mom doesn’t work anymore, and she’s almost always here. Is this a sign, then? Is it my chance? Dad worries a lot less about me, and so without Mom here, I might be able to sneak a few questions about the past. After yesterday’s failure, I especially need to know that I can remember.
I’m not going to ask about the soccer, though; I have some more biting questions.
“You gonna… get something?” Dad asks, behind me. I realize that my face is cold. I grab the bread and throw the fridge door closed, then take out a piece and drop it into the toaster. I decide to ask everything while I’m eating, just to seem as casual as possible.
“Remember when I made that hole in the wall?” I ask, finally, with all of the breath that I can gather.
It’s been bothering me for two years. The day that I found evidence of the hole was the day I truly realized I had a hole in my brain. Looking for my phone, I’d moved the living room couch and found a square of a different white than the rest of the wall; Mom had explained that I’d gotten frustrated at a game of chess, once, and hurled the wooden board across the room. I went limp when she said it. She seemed confused that I didn’t remember, and so I didn’t ask any more questions.
While Kumar did say it can take time for triggers to bring memories back, it’s been long enough, since that day; I need more information.
“What about it?” Dad replies, after a pause.
I swallow, still thinking up my strategy. I turn to face him. “Did you see it happen?” I ask.
“Uh… yeah,” he says, winding his squarish jaw. He places his tablet on the table. “You had… thrown the board, and…”
“How old was I?” I ask. That fact, I need to know the most, because I’ve had a worry boiling at the back of my brain–something too upsetting to admit, even to Kumar. And now, the questions pop and fizzle extra hard in my mind: had I just been a young child throwing a dumb fit? Or had I been older than that? If I’d been in my teens, that would make the throw more concerning; I could, without realizing it, have become more than self-destructive.
“Uh…” Dad repeats. He’s raking his nails across his cheek, his graying beard. “Sorry. I’m just trying to remember.”
Me too, I think, with an internal sigh. It sort of feels like he doesn’t want me to remember, which makes more suspicious that I’d been on the older side.
I do have a different theory, though, about what’s really packed into his pauses.
Something I do remember well is that teachers (and adults, in general) have always given me uncomfortable, pitiful looks. For the longest time, I didn’t know why; they did it even before my parents figured out that I had mental health problems. Nowadays, I truly believe that they could all sense my issues before those issues ever sprouted. Somehow, they could already see that I was hopeless. And I think that that’s what’s going on here, too. Whether my questions are inconspicuous or not, Dad can still sense that they’re linked to my depression. So, I need to stop, or he’ll figure out what I’m trying to do.
Before I can decide on my next move, though, my toast pops. My heart flinches, and I groan.
But it’s as I go to get a plate that I hear another sound. A crash. The crash into the wall. It’s a stiff, crackling sound.
It’s barely distinguishable, too. I try to play it again and again, in my head, trying to hold onto it, trying to make it louder. Still, it sounds so distant, like a far away memory… like a memory pushed away. And no matter how hard I concentrate, it doesn’t change. It’s not enough.
Frustration starts to take me over–not because I’m remembering my anger in the moment, but precisely because I’m not.
“You must have been… about fourteen,” Dad finally says, and I feel frothing in my stomach. Not only does that age make the act very questionable, it also means that I definitely should remember it.
At this point, I can sense that every new step toward my lost memories will need a ton of work; it’s like my inner self has a ball and chain. But I’m already so, so exhausted, and I’m starting to think that I might need to be locked up, for real. The fact that I’d thrown the board hard enough to make a hole… what if I’d hurt someone? What if I’ve hurt other people, too? Maybe I have; maybe that’s why most of my friends have abandoned me, at this point. In the most literal way possible, I have no idea what I’m capable of.
“What’s made you think of this?” Dad asks as I sit down and start dragging peanut butter across my toast.
I clench my teeth and try to pull an excuse out of the ground. “’Tryna prove to Kumar that he was a worse kid,” I say, with a forced laugh. The lie is, of course, dirt–but Dad nods. I take the excuse to grab my phone, stare downward. Then I create a broody fog around myself, trying to figure out what to do. It takes me a few seconds to notice Kumar has actually texted me.
Fam just left for the market. Wanna play Mario Kart on the big TV?
His words climb from the phone up to my fingertips, making them numb. When Kumar says let’s play Mario Kart, he actually intends to play Mario Kart with me–and if I weren’t sexually frustrated, it’s something that I would love about him. By the time that I swallow down my last piece of toast, however, I’ve decided that I want something different, today.
I go back to my room to get dressed. I douse myself in setting spray, so that my makeup won’t melt in the heat outside (or the heat inside…). Then, I powerwalk to Kumar’s house. My heart is going so hard, at this point, it might pre-emptively burst the buttons in my shirt.
I’d tried to retreat from this outcome. I really had. But, like a tsunami, that’s only made me plunge back onto it, even harder. If I’m going to be out of control, then I might as well own it. I’m done with feeling like I’m drowning; I want to be my own flood.
“Hey,” Kumar says, after opening the door for me. He steps aside, and I enter. “Feeling better?”
“Not really,” I admit, kicking my sandals off and against his wall. “I tried talking to my dad,” I say.
“About what?”
“The wall thing. Didn’t work.”
“Oh,” Kumar says. He has no idea how much his eyes are pulling me into him.
“So, I give up,” I say. I place my arms by my sides and keep them there, firm. “This is too frustrating.”
“But it could still be doing something,” he tries, pinching his face in a little. “And you just-”
“Except I realized that I shouldn’t care,” I say. My knees feel tight, now. My arms are tingling.
“Why not?”
“Because if I don’t have my old memories, I shouldn’t be trying to get them back. I should be making new ones,” I say. I step in an inch closer to him. “Like, I didn’t remember anything yesterday, but I came out with even better memories. With you. I want more of that.” My lips start to feel heavy with the growing weight of my words.
“Well, we’ll keep hanging out this summer,” he says. His smile sneaks up like it’s still unsure of what’s happening.
“Yeah,” I say. My breaths rise and drop like tidal waves. “But if I want true control of my memories, then I need to make the ones I specifically want.”
He’s not dumb. At this point, he understands. He shifts backwards, a little, under the crash of my words.
“You mean…” his voice starts to dwindle.
“Yes.” I say it, and my lips, my body feel lighter again. I’ve done it. I’ve stood in front of him and shed the weight I’ve been carrying for months.
Now, there’s nothing left between us but clothes.
Still, he hesitates. “Addie,” he says, looking my face up and down.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” He looks away, and his eyes float all over the wall. “I just… never thought that this would happen.”
“But have you thought about it?”
He pauses, again. Then, a pulse travels down my body as he nods.
In that moment, though, I do consider turning back. If he’s thought about it, and I’ve thought about it, then it’s practically a shared memory. That’s more than I can say for some of my real past. It’s a shared memory, which means that it’s basically already happened.
Tell that to your vagina, is my next thought.
I take another step forward. I can feel Kumar’s breath on my face, now. It’s warm, cushiony. There’s an underlayer of spice to it, too–but in the sense that cinnamon’s a spice. It’s so him.
“I get it,” I tell him. “Why would you ever think it would happen? All I’ve been is depressing. Our relationship has always just been you comforting me,” I say. I then take his hand, and I place it on the inside of my thigh. “That’s why I have to repay you.” The words are like a sacrilege to say, and it’s exhilarating.
Kumar, on his end, still looks scandalized. His face is spread out, wide, like a person holding out their hands to show their innocence. Here’s the thing about his actual hand, though: it hasn’t moved. I let go of it, and, still, he keeps it on my thigh.
Sure enough, his face starts to melt, to relax under my heat. God, I just want to eat those chocolate brown eyes of his. But they start to eat me up, first. When he finally does move his hand, it’s in a grabbing motion.
He puts his other hand on my cheek, and we start to kiss. It’s a little sloppy, but I’ve wanted him for so long that I actually love the nastiness of it. I wouldn’t have even minded if he still smoked.
He starts to rub at me through my shorts, and I feel my heat there rising. He pulls his mouth away and puts it at my ear.
“Look at you,” he mumbles. “I texted you and you were here, like, right away. And you put my hand on your thigh.” His comfort-Addie voice may have turned me on, but his degrade-Addie voice makes me take off. “What kind of eager little…”
“I know,” I rasp, near silent.
He lets me go. I feel like I’ve been dropped, even though I was standing.
“I’m gonna text my family, make sure they’re gone for a while,” he says. “Go to my room and wait for me.” His words are soaked with lust–almost as much as I am. He turns and goes into the living room, and I hurry down the hall.
Once in his room, I carefully place myself on his bed instead of plopping down, like I usually do. I can’t believe this moment is real, and it’s like I have to be careful with it, or I’ll shatter it. I lie on my back, propping myself up by my elbows on the duvet. I push out my chest. I wait.
I’ve seen this room so many times, from this same vantage point, but my senses are heightened, now, and I see the details again. There’s a band of light shining on the off-white wall, from the window behind me; Kumar told me he installed his blinds a little too low and never bothered to fix them. His small desk, nailed to the wall, is busy with papers. There’s also a tub of protein powder, a box of cat food, his still-unsolved Rubik’s cube. Above it, his posters: Gorillaz, Artic Monkeys, The Beatles.
Then I hear him in the hallway, and my eyes go back to the door. My heart starts, again, to rabidly fuck my chest. It’s a bit intense, actually. It feels like it’s going to explode. I know that I’ve been dying for this, but I didn’t expect to have a real heart attack over it. I realize, too, how fast I’m breathing, but that all the breaths are somehow failing to bring me any air.
When he enters, with intent in his eyes, I feel the bed tip sideways. I clutch the sheets, trying to stay on. I’m seasick. My mind goes black.
“Wait. Are you okay?” I hear, faintly, but I can’t respond.
My mind isn’t black in the passing-out sense. And, for once, it’s not in the empty sense, either. I’ve been trying so hard, lately, to remember, and now, I do. Now, all I see is the memory. I was in my bed and I was in the dark.
“Oh, my god. What’s wrong?” Kumar asks. “Was I too much? Fuck, I’m sorry. I just thought-”
“No,” I groan, once I get some power back. It comes from my core. “It’s okay.” I’m shaking like a terrified cat.
“No. You’re freaking me out,” he says. I feel him sit next to me and put his hand on my shoulder. I start feeling a little more grounded, more pulled together. My brain materializes. Reality starts to fill me up, and my eyes start to get hot. “What happened?” he begs.
But I can’t think about what happened. The memory is too awful. It’s so bright in its horror that I can’t look at it directly. Looking at it would sting.
Living it made me go blind.
“Did you… remember something?” Kumar asks. I realize that I’m crying. I force my head up and down and try to force some air in through my swamped nose. It rattles my lungs, makes my next breaths frantic and unstable. “I’m sorry,” he whimpers, coming in closer to me. “Fuck. It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.”
I turn and hug him, trying to tell him that it’s not.
I realize how blind I’ve been to this memory, until now. And, having been used to that blindness, my small peek at it was so painful that it made my eyes, my mind flood. I can’t look back at it. With another creaky breath, I make the decision that I just can’t.
Instead, I decide to look at the doors. I try to understand the event by looking at the moments in which it entered and exited my life. I remember being happy to see Connor opening my bedroom door, that night. I remember being sad to see him being taken out of our front door, the night after that.
“You know that I admire you a lot,” Kumar says. I stick my face into his chest, getting his shirt wet. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I struggle. My words fight my nausea, also creeping up into my mouth. “It could make me remember.”
I remember more than enough, already. I want to shred this new information back out of my mind, to bring it back to its split, unintelligible state. But what’s done can’t be undone; it won’t go away, no matter how much I beg.
That’s when another question starts to pull at me. What happened on the second night, then? What made Connor get caught? I take just one more peek at my bedroom door, and then it comes back to me. The door. I’d heard the creak, across the hall, and I’d been tough.
“Come on. Open the door,” Connor had urged me. “It’s okay, Addie. Open the door for me.”
“No,” I’d whispered back, into the darkness. “No.” No more.
I’m keeping it locked.
I beg my brain enough, please, as I run back to the present. I lie with Kumar, trying to stop thinking. While I still don’t see the memory, though, I still can’t ignore the angry banging on the other side.
And I realize that for all of these years, this event had been hidden deep in my brain, like food forgotten at the back of a fridge. It had been rotting my mind, slowly, from the inside, without my knowledge. It had taken that smart little girl and made her hate herself. It had made her want to sleep with the boy who’d acted like a brother to her.
A stifling horror latches onto me, in that next moment, because I also realize that I haven’t been pushing Kumar away, at all. I’ve been trying to make him stay.
I let out another muffled cry, and he pets my hair. I try, again, to focus just on him: on his hands in my hair, on the movement of his breathing. After a little while, I start to feel more evened out. I think of the positive; at least I think I know, now, what’s been so wrong with my memory. Repressing this trauma has probably corrupted my ability to remember things, in general. That’s probably what’s been going on with me.
Another horrible thought slices through me, though, a moment later. I let go of Kumar and I sit. I feel groggy.
“Addie?” he says. He puts his hand on my back.
“I have to go,” I pant. I realize that my whole body is sweaty.
“Let me drive you.”
I agree, and we leave right away. When we get to the front of my house, I see my mom approaching from down the sidewalk. I groan. It’s deep and internal.
“I’ll text you, ‘kay?” I tell Kumar.
“Okay,” he says, putting a hand on mine. “I love you.”
“I love you,” I tell him. I do love him–a lot. I’ve been unsure of a lot of things, lately, but not that.
As I step onto the sidewalk, though, I become only focused on my task. I march to my front door like the killer in a horror movie.
“Addie?” my mother calls, from my left. “Are you okay?”
I ignore her. Like the memory, I can’t possibly look at her right now. I climb the porch stairs. Once I’m through the front door, I head to the main stairway.
“Hello? Which one of you is it?” my father calls, from the living room. “Hi?” But I leave his voice behind, too. My chest is burning with dread and lack of air, but I climb as fast as I can. I reach the hallway and go for the storage room across from my bedroom. I open that door. The entire room is a pile of boxes, but I can see parts of the gray walls. My mouth breaks open, trying to let me heave through the thin, piercing air.
I can’t delay for long. I grind my teeth and rake my eyes over the pile, searching for the marking 3rd grade. I knock boxes down, looking. Books and papers and kitchen supplies splash onto the floor, onto my feet, but I don’t feel anything. Soon enough, I see the lopsided lid.
I push it off, and I grab the neck of the golden soccer ball. I pull the trophy up out of the box, then hold it up in front of my face, panting. There are two pairs of stomping behind me, in the hallway, as I read the inscription on the base. I start to cry, again, because it’s exactly as I thought.
Most Player Potential
Phillip Ridge Junior League
1998
Pascale Potvin is an emerging writer from Toronto, Canada. She has fiction
featured New Reader Magazine and The Writing Disorder, plus a film in
distribution by the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. She has just
received her BAH from Queen’s University, and she is working on a budding
book trilogy. Some of her blog pieces about writing can be found at
onelitplace.com, where she works as Assistant, English-French Translator,
and more.