be able to stay upright before I passed out again.
“So you don’t know who you are?” Holden asked.
I shrugged helplessly.
“And you don’t know how you got here?”
I pointed back to what I’d written in the notebook.
Holden sighed. “Okay, so what do you remember?”
I looked at him, frustrated. It was a fair question, but hard to answer. I wrote as fast as I could in the notebook, my hand starting to cramp from the motion.
“Nothing useful. I know we’re on planet Earth. I know where Maine is—never heard of Birch Bay though. I know what a giraffe is, and I know the Pythagorean theorem, and I fucking know the first name of Madame Bovary, but I don’t know who the fuck I am.”
I threw the pen down on the desk and handed the notebook to Holden, then buried my face in my hands. This had to be a dream. A weird hallucination. Something. Shit like this just didn’t happen in real life.
I felt something press on my feet and glanced down to see the cat—Frog, Holden had called him—curl around my ankles, which was how I noticed for the first time that I was shoeless, and that even if he hadn’t undressed me, Holden had taken my shoes off, and lined them up neatly at the end of the bed.
I was wearing green and purple striped socks with pink peonies on them. Though that didn’t tell me anything useful, except that I had excellent taste in socks, and that I could apparently identify peonies on sight.
I was about to bend down to pet Frog when Holden said, “I wouldn’t, if I were you.”
I whipped my head up to see him watching me and the cat. The movement made me dizzy enough to suggest that bending over might not have been a good idea anyway. I stared at Holden in confusion for a moment, until I felt something wet on my toes, and looked down to see that Frog had deposited a chewed-up wad of paper and hair on top of my feet.
“Like I said, Frog’s kind of the worst.” Holden’s voice was rueful.
I shook the glob off my toes, mortally offending Frog in the process, evidently. He hissed, then jumped back up onto the bed, curling himself up into a ball right in the center. Claiming it for himself, it seemed. I motioned for Holden to give me the notebook back.
“Maybe he’s mad that you named him Frog.”
“I didn’t name him,” Holden protested. I cocked my head to the side, waiting for more explanation, and he rubbed a hand over the top of his head. “Someone else did. His full name is The Right Honorable Sir Frogface McFuzzybutt Fluffypants IV. I think Frog is the least offensive part of all of that.”
I wanted to laugh, and wondered, again, what it was that made me trust Holden. Maybe it was his obvious affection for the cat. Even as he badmouthed him, he smiled in Frog’s direction.
“Anyway,” Holden continued, “the point is, if you can’t remember anything, you really need to go see a doctor. And possibly the police. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve looked in the mirror yet—” he pointed to the far corner of the room, to the other side of the bookcase— “but you don’t look great.”
Fear, which had subsided a bit in my gut as Holden talked about Frog, came roaring back at the suggestion that I needed to leave. I didn’t understand it. Logically, I knew Holden was right. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I didn’t want to go anywhere, that it wasn’t safe to leave the house. I shook my head frantically.
Holden gave me a skeptical look. “I know this is probably a freaky experience for you, but you can’t stay here. You have to realize that, right? You could be bleeding internally. You could be on the run from the mob. You could be the mob, for all I know. Or maybe you just fell off a boat somewhere and your family is out searching for you. But we’re not going to figure any of that out if you just stay here.”
I shrank back as he talked. Words like ‘on the run’ and ‘family’ sent shivers down my spine, and I didn’t know why. All I knew was that by the time Holden was done talking, I’d backed myself up against the bookcase again, and I was shaking.
It was unsettling. I didn’t like that I couldn’t control my body’s reactions. Didn’t like