already told you I only remembered our conversation because I have a good memory.”
He turns his head toward me. “How good?”
I turn my head too, meeting his eyes. They’re open, bridges half built and reaching toward me. “I don’t know,” I reply, feeling self-conscious. “I just remember stuff. Grocery lists, the grades I’ve gotten on every exam this year, conversations I had with friends in September. Facts and dates mentioned in class. Like, here, I remember the number of BU applicants last year, from the information session. It’s 62,210.” I gesture vaguely in the air. “Google it.”
He does. It’s quiet for a moment, except for the chorus of drunken guys belting “All the Small Things” coming from below.
“Whoa.” He’s reading from his phone. “Yeah, 62,210.” He returns the phone to his pocket. “That’s incredible.”
“It’s kind of cool, I guess,” I reply. “It’s definitely useful. Except, of course, when I unintentionally memorize conversations with people I’m definitely not into.” I elbow him and earn a laugh, low and soft. “But,” I go on, “having a great memory won’t change the world. It’s not like having a talent for inventing things or creating things. If I could exchange my memory for new ideas, for ingenuity, for dreaming new dreams, I would.”
“I don’t know,” Fitz says beside me. “Memory is more than just useful.”
The declaration hits me with guilty weight. This is a boy whose mother’s memory is going to disappear, and here I am telling him the things I’d trade for mine. I feel insensitive, helplessly ineloquent.
“Because memory is . . . it, right?” he says. “It’s who we are. It’s everything. Everything we love, everything we fear, everything we think is important or necessary or exciting. It all comes from what we remember. The compilation of experiences that constitute a person. Without them, we’re dreaming of nothing, working for nothing. We’re unable to love people because we’re unable to know people. We’re no one.”
“You can’t think that’s true.” I remember working on homework in the restaurant, walking home from school with Matt, smelling tamales from the kitchen on winter nights. They’re not me. Not the entire me. I want the chance to be more than the person I was yesterday, or the day before, or years before. In my family, memories are nothing but reasons to keep me who I’ve been. “Memory is part of who we are. It’s just not everything. We can’t re-create or relive things endlessly. I want my future to be bigger than my past.”
We’re facing each other, neither of us moving. The curiosity in Fitz’s eyes is gone. They’re haunted houses now, darkness behind broken windowpanes. He’s wrong to think memory is everything, but I understand where he’s coming from. While I might resent my family for wanting to tie me to home, I would be terrified to forget them.
I say nothing. I don’t know how to express to Fitz I don’t not understand his fear. I just wouldn’t know how to live with his fear either.
Finally, Fitz turns. He faces the night, his features hardened in contemplation. “Logically, I understand your point. I don’t know—I don’t want to be implacable. I just don’t know if I have the kind of future you do.”
I want to tell him we both can have whatever futures we fight for. My situation is nothing like his, but I have my own forces pushing me not to leave home, forces I’m fighting so I can pursue what I want. I don’t know if he’s ready to listen, though, or if it’s even my place to say.
“Implacable?” I say instead, wanting to ease the heaviness of the conversation. “What’s with the obnoxious vocabulary? First, you use compunctious without flinching. Now implacable? You talk like the thesaurus function on Microsoft Word.”
Fitz laughs, and I feel his relief that I changed the subject. “I like words,” he says simply. He pats his front pocket, where I remember he’s put his book. “It’s why I travel with this.”
“Your book?” Without thinking—because I know what I would and wouldn’t do if I bothered to think—I reach over him. The gesture is not wholly unflirtatious. My chest touches his forearm while I pull the book from his pocket,