Free The Half Life of Molly Pierce by Katrina Leno Page A

then, too.”
    He raises one eyebrow and then lowers it. His face is covered with that look. I don’t know what that look means, but to be fair, he’s marginally better at hiding it than everyone else is.
    Marginally.
    He moves a hand. Continue.
    “Sometimes I can’t remember things,” I say. My voice is all wrong. Too quiet. Too angular. The words are hard and the edges are sharp. They hit my teeth and my head aches with the resounding click of them.
    “What kind of things can’t you remember?”
    It seems stupid, right, asking me about what I can’t remember. But it’s like maybe he knows. It’s like maybe he knows that all these things I’ve lost, they’ve started to come back to me.
    “Blocks of time,” I begin. “I’ll be doing something and then a couple hours have passed. Or a couple minutes, even. Or half a day. I’ll sort of . . . wake up, somewhere. With no idea of what I’ve been doing. Where I’ve been.”
    I’m struggling to keep my breathing even. I’ve never spoken this aloud before and it feels like I’m divulging some dirty, awful secret.
    Alex lowers his eyes.
    I’m expecting him to say something, but he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even look at me.
    “Alex?” I say.
    He raises his eyes slightly, not his head. “Yes, Molly?”
    “Did you hear me?”
    “Yes, I did.”
    “And you’re not saying anything. You don’t even look . . . surprised, really. And that boy who got killed, the one who knew my name. I’m remembering things about him. I think I knew him. I think all this time I’m missing has something to do with him.”
    Silence again. Alex gets up. Goes over to the window. Moves the blinds aside and looks out over the parking lot.
    What the fuck is his problem?
    “Alex!” I say, sharply this time. He turns around. Looks at me. “Can you say something? I just told you something sort of . . . I mean, I’m missing time, Alex. For a year. Blackouts. Minutes, hours . . . just gone.”
    I’ve prepared myself for a lot. For disbelief. For doubt. For questions. For hesitations.
    I have not prepared myself for what comes out of Alex’s mouth next.
    “Molly,” he says. “I know.”

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NINE.
    I squeak.
    I mean I actually squeak. I open my mouth to say something and nothing comes out except a pathetic, mouse-like exhalation. I’m looking at Alex like he has two heads, like he just breathed fire, like he sprouted fangs and proclaimed the existence of vampires and then sprinted across the room and tore my jugular out. Like he’s literally dangling my jugular in front of my face. The pendulum on a clock. Swinging it back and forth. My jugular dripping blood onto the carpet, onto my shoes.
    I’m stuck now because I realize I don’t know what a jugular looks like. I’ve always imagined it as a sort of spring, but I doubt that’s right. It’s a vein, isn’t it? Just a normal vein.
    He moves away from the window.
    “Molly, listen,” he begins, wringing his hands in front of him. Is he nervous? He looks nervous. I’m confused. I can’t seem to shut my mouth. “Listen, Molly, there’s a lot we should talk about.”
    “We should talk about . . . a lot. There is a lot we should talk about.” I repeat this sort of like a robot, which to me seems a fair step above rodent.
    “You’ve been missing chunks of time. Ending up in places and not knowing how you got there.”
    “That’s what I just said. I just said that.” Now my voice is hollow. My voice is like a tipped-over tree that’s hollowed out. A family of raccoons lives in my voice.
    “You’ve told me before,” he says gently. He sits down on the desk again. He looks at me.
    “I’ve never told you that before.” The family of raccoons eats garbage for dinner. Garbage for lunch.
    “You have. You just don’t remember,” he clarifies.
    Oh.
    I guess that makes