Free My Name Is Memory by Ann Brashares

thousand years waiting for her and searching for her and trying to hold her close enough for long enough to overcome our first encounter.
    Part of my punishment was that I didn’t see her again for another two hundred years. But when I did, it set the course for the rest of my days.

My Name Is Memory

HOPEWOOD, VIRGINIA, 2006
    LUCY SAT IN her backyard with the thick smell of newly cut grass in her head. It was nearly seven o’clock in the evening but still so hot she was sitting with her feet in a pot filled with cold water.
    Now that she was grown up and fresh off the wonders of Jefferson’s gardens on campus, she could see that this yard was nothing special. But when she was small it had been her pleasure dome. From her earliest memory she’d loved digging in the grass and making puddles with the hose. As with clay, she yearned to get her hands dirty. It was a tactile pleasure and another of her small-bore rebellions.
    She’d made a vegetable garden in fifth grade and produced her own cucumbers, but the rabbits and deer got to it after seventh grade, when she’d spent a July in Virginia Beach with Marnie’s family.
    She’d planted her raspberries in ninth grade. Her mom complained about the rotten compost Lucy amassed and the fact that the canes took over the entire back of the yard. It was true that Lucy was generous to fertilize and slow to prune. But they had fresh sweet raspberries all through the late summer and fall, not to mention raspberry jam and raspberry sauce and frozen raspberries the rest of the year. “You pay four dollars for a stinky little half-pint of them in the supermarket, and compared to ours they have no taste at all,” her mother acknowledged with a certain amount of pride.
    Lucy’s first act of landscape design had been their swimming pool when she was sixteen. The neighbors on both sides and in back of them had built pools, and her father had proclaimed they would build one, too. She’d made hundreds of drawings of it in her sketchbook. She didn’t want a big bright turquoise rectangle like the neighbors had. She designed a small pool in the shape and color of a pond with a natural bank of grass and flowers that went right up to the water. You wouldn’t even see any concrete unless you peered over the edge. She’d tried to figure out the kinds of materials they would need, investigated the drainage issues, priced it all to the best of her ability, and written out her order for the nursery.
    But the time for the pool was never now. She’d pestered her dad year after year, presenting him with new and refined drawings until one night she saw him writing checks at the dining-room table and realized he was still paying off Dana’s hospital bills. She didn’t say anything more about it after that. And anyway, she told herself, a built pool would never have turned out as good as the one she’d imagined.
    This summer Lucy had been eager to get home from school to her room and her raspberries and her nothing-special yard. She’d been feeling anxious since the end of the semester, sleeping little and badly, and waking up from terrible dreams. She’d told her mom it was the stress of exams. She had chasing dreams, burning dreams, beating dreams, and the wracking and crying dreams, which often featured the absurd Madame Esme trading off with Dana. And Daniel was a presence, seen or felt, in nearly every one. Lucy’s body ached from the strain of them.
    She’d hoped that being home would soothe her and bore her, as it usually did. She thought if she just changed the rhythm of her nights and days, the dreams would stop. And here she was at home, and exams were over and Madame Esme was far away, but the dreams persisted. She couldn’t leave her brain at school. That was the problem. If she could have, she might have enjoyed a perfectly happy summer vacation.
    She heard the screen door open and turned to see her mom. She had her pink suit on.
    “Did you show a house?” Lucy asked.
    “I