Page 34 of Prima
“Fortunately I was young enough that my official schooling hadn’t started yet. Only my mother knew of my literacy, no one else, so no one noticed its loss.”
The sensation around her heart numbs and burns at the same time. “What else have you forgotten?”
“When I was eight, I used my ability again, this time for my brother Eighteen, the Noble Consort’s younger son. Afterwards, not only did I forget Eighteen, I forgot about our cat.”
He scoops up a handful of sand and lets it fall from his grasp. The susurrus of fine sand striking fine sand has never sounded so chilling.
“Her name was Lump and she’d died the year before, but I grew up with her and loved her greatly, according to my mother. And I didn’t forget her right away. Two weeks after I woke up, I said I missed her. A month afterthat, I came across a pencil portrait of Lump. When my mother saw me studying it, she asked if I still missed her badly. But I was only wondering why my mother had taken the trouble to draw this extraordinarily ugly cat. That was when she realized I could no longer recall anything about Lump. When she became convinced that I would have forgotten her too if she hadn’t been a constant in my life.”
“I didn’t forget everything about Lump, though. In that month she first slipped from my memory, I sat by the pond in my mother’s courtyard a great deal, feeling sad for no reason. Later, when my mother pieced together what must have happened, she told me that I used to read there with Lump on my lap.”
At last he turns toward her. “When I send off my mother and my sister, you too might slip from my memory. But maybe I’ll remember this sky.”
She bites her lower lip, hard. “I knew a pretty boy like you would have something wrong with him.”
“A whole day in my company and it’s the first time you think to yourself that something is wrong with me?”
When she doesn’t reply, he adds tentatively, “Maybe we can redo the blessings and you can wish for me not to forget you.”
“We can’t redo the blessings.” New friends sharing a cup for the first time and wishing each other well, that’s the strongest blessing.
She looks up. The sky is so heavy with stars; it’s a wonder they don’t fall in a deluge of brilliance. “I guess if you’re going to forget me, then so be it.”
“I amnotgoing to forget you. I am going to hold onto you tooth and claw,” he says vehemently.
Then the vehemence drains out of his voice, leaving behind only numb resignation. “But that may not be enough when the day comes. With my mother around, she can act as the guardian of my memories. But when she leaves, I won’t even know what I have lost. I’ll be left with this ache where you used to be, wondering what happened and why there are pieces of myself missing.”
* * *
Her incomprehension slowly gives way to a sense of futility. So…they have been doomed from the very beginning.
No,heis not doomed. He won’t remember a thing.
She clutches her head. When complicated, dangerous, melancholy boys tell you to stay the fuck away from them, you sail as if a typhoon is behind you. But she, in her infinite arrogance, had to learn the hard way.
Suddenly, her anger surges like a volcanic eruption, hot enough to melt rocks. “How dare you manipulate me!”
He recoils. “You’re accusing me ofmanipulation?”
“Don’t act so innocent. Whether in offense or in self-defense, everyone who manages to come of age in the Potentate’s Palace is an expert manipulator. Maybe your story is true. Maybe it’s even poignant. But in telling me, you are still maneuvering. You’re putting me not where I’d like to be but where you’d like me to be.”
“Because I want you to remember me? Because I want someone to remember us?”
“We are notus,” she retorts, completely sidestepping the offer she made only minutes ago in the hope of making them intous.
“To me we are, but that’s beside the point,” he says quietly. “You’re right, I do know what manipulation is. I grew up surrounded by every kind of subterfuge and I can sense manipulation like a compass can sense a magnetic field. But I have no more manipulated you than you have manipulated me. And if someone as suspicious as I am can come to see that your lunch invitation was nothing more than a straightforward attempt at seduction, why can’t you see that my invitation tonight was… It was an appeal, to the only other person who might care to hold onto the memory of who we are at this moment.”
Her anger boils over. “You’re a boy I tried to pick up far from home. That’s all you are and that’s all you should be. We have a pleasant time together, we say goodbye, and I don’t think about you again except occasionally and never mention you unless it’s to take part in a drinking game—Drink, unless you’ve also been followed by a stranger who was at least somewhat serious about capturing you for ransom.”
“But—”
“Don’t bring up what I said just now. That resulted from the mistaken idea that we could be in the same place again before too much time passes—within six months, no more than a year. I have not signed up to make you a permanent part of my life in absentia. I am not going to devote myself to this sacred memory of ‘us’ day after day, year after year.”
She can’t bear to think about what life will be like for him, waking up all alone in the wake of his mother and sister’s escape, unable to remember what happened, unable, perhaps, even to remember the ones for whom he’d made the sacrifice.
No, she won’t think about it. Ever.
He flicks the sand from his fingertips. “I was going to say that I’d more be than happy for you to think of me occasionally—and use me once in a blue moon to win a drinking game. I’m not handing you some precious relic. I was just hoping that what matters to me would also matter to you.”
