Free The Memory Jar by Elissa Janine Hoole Page A

down.
    I pick up my phone from the edge of the table, contemplating it in my hand. I’m not sure I’m ready to face turning it back on. I need to text Dani to come get me, though, so after a moment, I power it up and brace myself for a barrage of pro-life texts. No surprise, there are three new texts, again each from a different number, and each gives me a hollow thud in my stomach. I don’t even bother trying to call them back.
    By the time I grab my comb and a ponytail holder, brush my teeth, and scrub the sleep out of the corners of my eyes, Dani’s here. I loop my backpack over my shoulder, grab my hastily packed paper-bag lunch, and step into my boots. Dani touches the horn, twice, to let me know she’s waiting, and I wrap my scarf around my mouth before opening the door. The wind is icy, and my eyelashes freeze instantly. The kid is warm inside me, I guess, but the ordinary acts of wrestling the awkward garage door and navigating the treacherous stairs down to the street feel like some kind of high-pressure test. I don’t like this feeling, this lack of my usual invincible comfort. I don’t like this.
    â€œWhatcha got?” says Dani, pulling my lunch out of my hand and unrolling the top. “So awesome.” She tosses her hand-sewn, quilted lunch bag into my lap. “I’ve had to eat that shit for two whole days, thanks to you.”
    Dani’s mom Janie is a mommy blogger and her mom Fran is this super-vegetarian or whatever, and every day since Dani started preschool, her moms have photographed her lunches, categorized the contents, and posted recipes for all the healthy whole foods they’ve cleverly cut into intricate shapes and packaged in fancy, segmented, pastel containers. “Your food is good,” I say, and it’s true. Her lunches are filled with things like homemade frozen kale and apricot smoothies and organic tomato soup in an adorable anime thermos. I get maybe a slab of bologna on white bread with ketchup and ripple chips from a big cardboard box. Sometimes an orange or a banana, depending on when payday was.
    â€œI can’t eat it once there’s a picture of it online,” she says, already pulling open the foil wrapper on my Pop-Tart and stuffing part of one in her mouth. “How can I eat it when the entire Internet is watching, thinking, This is what Dani eats for lunch . Here’s the adorable note her moms wrote to her. See how they reference that fight they all had two nights ago, which Janie completely documented online in ridiculous fucking detail so the whole world could chuckle at her life? Here’s the whole wheat pancake sandwich, filled with the homemade raspberry jam that the whole Internet knows Dani helped Fran make last summer.” She finishes wolfing down the first Pop-Tart and pulls away from the curb. “So you’re alive and stuff, you asshole. I was so worried.”
    I can’t help smiling. “I love you too.” She turns away from the road long enough to make crazy eyes at me. It’s a little weird about the lunch pictures, but I think Dani’s moms’ blog is pretty great. They’ve written all about the adoption, from the very beginning of the mountain of paperwork to Dani’s first airplane ride home clutching Neep in her tiny brown hands to the lunch she took this morning, I suppose.
    â€œSo … ” Dani trails off, but I know what she’s asking, or rather, I know she’s asking everything at once.
    â€œHe’s the same. Everything’s the same.” Everything except the stupid icy sidewalk, which was trying to kill me, and my stomach, which can only tolerate pure grease. “I still can’t remember anything.”
    She drives in silence all the way to Gordon High, then slows down but doesn’t turn into the parking lot. Her old hatchback rattles past the entry and she sneaks a look at me beneath her long lashes. “Are they expecting