The Forgetting Test

The alarm went off in the middle of Mr. Okafor's memory quiz.

Not a drill. Nobody knew that yet. Just the long flat scream of the bell and four hundred kids pouring out the doors into the gym, because it was raining and the field was a swamp.

Maya was still holding her quiz. Half the answers were blank. She'd gotten to question six, which asked you to list everything you ate for breakfast, when the bell went.

Soren found her near the climbing ropes. His face was doing the thing it did when something wasn't working.

"What did you have for breakfast?" he asked.

"What?"

"Breakfast. The quiz question. I can't remember mine."

Maya opened her mouth. Closed it. She'd eaten breakfast. Obviously she had. But the memory was a smooth wall with no handle on it.

"I had," she said. "I had. Hold on."

Nothing.

The gym was loud and warm with wet jackets. Somebody said they could smell smoke from the science wing. Somebody else said it was just toast. A teacher with a clipboard was counting heads and getting the number wrong twice.

"This is weird," Soren said. "I remember everything else. I remember the smell of the eraser. I remember Mr. Okafor saying memory is reconstruction, not recording. I remember you cracked your knuckles on question four. But the actual breakfast is just. Gone."

Maya looked at him. That was the thing about Soren. He noticed the part that wasn't working before he noticed anything else.

"Wait," she said. "Say that again. What do you remember really clearly?"

"The alarm. The second it went off. I could draw the exact spot on the wall where the light was flashing. I could draw your face."

"Right now. Right when we got scared." Maya's hands had gone still. "That part is sharp. The breakfast part is fog."

"Yeah."

"Soren. What if it's the same thing doing both."

He stopped. "Doing what both."

"Making this minute sharp. And eating the breakfast."

He didn't answer right away. That was the other thing about Soren. He didn't pretend to follow when he didn't. He turned it over.

"You're saying the fear is the eraser," he said slowly. "And the same fear is the pen."

"I'm saying when the bell went, something switched on in our heads. And the thing it switched on is good at writing down right now and bad at reading back then."

A kid near them was crying a little. A teacher crouched down to her. The rain hammered the high windows.

Soren had his notebook out. His pen was already moving, but not the way it usually did. He wasn't recording the science. He was testing the thing.

"Okay," he said. "Quiz. Easy stuff. Capital of France."

"Paris."

"My birthday."

"March. The twelfth."

"Your locker combination."

Maya's mouth opened. The fog again. The numbers were in there. She used them every single day. Twice a day. And right now her brain handed her absolutely nothing.

"I," she said. "I can't."

"You can't get your own locker combination." Soren's voice wasn't teasing. It was amazed. "You've opened that thing a thousand times."

"It's not gone," Maya said. "I can feel it's not gone. It's behind something."

"Behind the fear."

"The fear is standing in front of the door."

They looked at each other. The gym roared on around them, four hundred wet scared kids, and the two of them stood very still in the middle of it like the only quiet thing.

"My grandmother," Soren said. "She always says she remembers exactly where she was standing when she heard some news. Bad news, years ago. The light in the room. The cup in her hand. But she can't tell you a single ordinary thing about the day before it."

"Because the day before was just a day," Maya said. "And then something switched on."

"And it wrote the bad minute in permanent marker."

"And smeared everything it tried to read at the same time." Maya pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead like she could feel the chemistry happening in there. Maybe she could. Something was happening in there. "That's so unfair," Soren said, and then he laughed, surprised at himself. "No. It's not unfair. It's smart. Whatever it is. It's saving the dangerous stuff and dropping the breakfast because the breakfast doesn't matter when there's a fire."

"It decided for us," Maya said. "Without asking. It already decided what we're allowed to keep."

That was the part that got her. Not the forgetting. The fact that something inside her had reached in, fast and silent, and chosen. This minute, yes. This minute, save it forever. The breakfast, no. The locker, not now. Some chemical with no name she knew yet had made the call before she'd noticed it was even happening.

Soren had gone quiet too. He wasn't writing.

"Maya. In ten years." He said it carefully. "In ten years I think we're going to remember this. The gym. The ropes. The rain. Your face right now."

"And not what we had for breakfast."

"Not in a hundred years."

She felt it then, the strangeness of it, like the floor of the gym had dropped two inches. Right now, while they stood here, their own heads were sorting this exact second into the permanent pile. They were making the memory of making the memory. The thing that would survive was being chosen and burned in at the very moment they were standing inside it.

"It's writing us down," Maya whispered. "Right now. We're watching it write us down."

The alarm cut off. The sudden silence was huge.

A teacher's voice rose up, calling that it was clear, it was a burnt-out motor in the science wing, everybody back inside, single file.

Nobody moved for a second. Four hundred kids stood in the ringing quiet.

Maya reached over and gripped Soren's wrist, the one with the pen still in its hand, and held on, fixing the moment in place on purpose, as if she could help it along.