Free My Name Is Memory by Ann Brashares Page A

had that open house on Meadow.”
    Lucy could see the sweat seeping into circles under the arms of her mother’s pink linen jacket. “How’d it go?”
    “I laid out food and flowers and cleaned that dump up myself. Four brokers showed up, not a buyer in sight, and those vultures had the nerve to eat my snacks.” Her tone was so dramatic Lucy wanted to laugh, but she didn’t.
    “I’m sorry to hear it.”
    Her mother hated being a realtor. She said she’d prefer to sell underwear at Victoria’s Secret, but her father thought that was unseemly for a graduate of Sweet Briar College. Lucy always had the feeling her mother couldn’t rebel against her native prissiness, so her daughters did it for her.
    “Well.” She surveyed Lucy’s sundress. “Are you going out?”
    “Kyle Farmer is having a party.”
    “Kyle from chorus?”
    “Yep. That one.”
    “Fun. I’m glad you are going to see your old friends.”
    Her mother took so much heart from simple social interactions that Lucy felt bad she didn’t have more of them, or at least make it seem like she did. She wondered if she should have stayed in Charlottesville for the summer with Marnie and spared her mother her true mood. She mostly avoided parties of old high school people. They had a depressing air of unearned nostalgia. Kind of like reunions but premature, where no one had gone out and done anything yet. But tonight she had a motive. Brandon Crist was going to be there, and he was the closest thing to a friend Daniel ever had at that school.
    “Can I use your car?” she asked.
    Her mother nodded, but her face showed reluctance. “You need to help pay for gas this summer, okay?”
    “I know. I’ll fill it up. I put in two applications today.”
    “Good girl.” Her mom always wanted to be pleased. She didn’t want to give Lucy a hard time. Dana had broken her so hard that Lucy’s shortcomings were almost like gifts.

My Name Is Memory

PERGAMUM, ASIA MINOR, 773
    I
’m skipping ahead to one of my most consequential lives, which was my seventh, and it began in Pergamum in Asia Minor in roughly the year 754 by our modern calendar. You’ve heard of Pergamum, probably. It was a great city once, though past its prime by the time I was born there. It was one of the loveliest places I’ve ever grown up.
    It grew famous as a Hellenistic city with a giant and magnificent acropolis and a massively steep theater seating ten thousand bodies. It transitioned easily into a Roman town when they gave themselves to the empire without much incident in the second century B.C. It had one of the great libraries of the ancient world, with more than two hundred thousand books. Parchment was invented there after one of the Ptolemys stopped exporting papyrus from Egypt. If you know your ancient history, you know it was the library that Mark Antony gave to Cleopatra as a wedding gift.
    A few of the glories of the city stood intact in my childhood, though some had crumbled, and most of the temples and shrines had been wrecked or converted to Christian churches by then. The marketplace stayed almost the same.
    When I lived there you could see the Aegean from our doorstep. Now the city overlooks a valley fifteen flat miles inland from the sea. I went back there a few lives ago, when the German archaeologists were just getting going on it, and saw the ruins of the old city again. I knew the columns. I knew the blocks of stone under my feet. I had touched those very ones before. I felt closer to them than I feel to most other human beings. We stood still while the world changed shape around us.
    I’m not often nostalgic anymore. There’s too much behind me. I know that gradual change is the easiest to take, and the giant leaps and losses can overwhelm you. My home and every trace of my life and family from that time were long erased. But that wasn’t what got to me. It was the look of that ancient city, once mighty and perched on a sea of commerce pushed farther and deeper