As I Wake by Elizabeth Scott Page A

and hug me. In the end, she settles for squeezing one of my hands, gently, and saying, “Anything, okay?”
    Anything. Tell me why I’m here. Tell me where I came from. Tell me why I remembered you, but a different you.
    Tell me who I am.
    I get up, head for the front door. Jane comes out from the kitchen, hand over the phone. “Ava?”
    “I need to—I want to go out,” I say.
    “Out?” Jane says, worry in her voice. “But what if the boy from before . . . ? You have to stay on the porch, all right, Ava? And you should leave the front door open too. You have to stay safe.”
    I nod and walk outside. Jane sounds so scared.
    I look back in the open door. Jane is peering into the hallway, glancing at me as she talks on the phone.
    She hadn’t said anything as the security guard walked us out of the bathroom, and when he asked her, gently, if she knew “the young man,” she shook her head, looked bewildered and terrified.
    “Why did he come here?” she’d said. “What did he—why did he come after Ava?”
    When she said that, I wondered what had happened to her Ava. Why she—I—whoever I was—woke up knowing nothing.
    What if it wasn’t an infection no one had noticed?
    What if it was something else?
    Jane had asked me if I knew him—Morgan—on the way home, her hands holding the steering wheel so tight they were stone-white, bloodless looking.
    “I—I’ve never seen him here,” I said, because I hadn’t—not here, not in this place—and I didn’t think what was in my strange, empty but not empty head would count.
    But it did. It does.
    “I was so scared,” Jane said. “I can’t bear another—I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
    Now I look at her, watching me, and wave, to show I am all right. That I am here. She relaxes, a little, and after a few minutes, turns away frowning and holding the phone like she can only hear it twisted a certain way, walking back into the kitchen as she does.
    I look around. The lawn; the grass I stood on that first night, it still looks the same. The street still looks the same. It looks like the moment when I realized I didn’t know where I was. That I don’t know who I am.
    My skin goes cold suddenly, goose pimples rolling up my arms, and I watch a car turn into the driveway, rolling to a stop just out of sight of the front door. Just out of sight of Jane.
    I start to turn to call her, but then the car door opens and Clementine gets out. My heart starts to beat fast, skipping and stuttering in my chest, and when I try to look away from her, I can’t.
    When she smiles at me, the goose bumps grow sharper, and a chill races up my spine.
    “Stopped by to give you this,” she says, and hands me a box with a pie in it.
    I turn away and she leans over, places it next to me on the steps. She smells strange. Cold. I didn’t know cold had a smell but it does, a bitter chill that makes my insides sting.
    “You look tired,” she says. “Has anything . . . stressful happened to you today?” There is a note of something in her voice, under the sugar-sweet softness of her tone.
    She sounds . . . worried.
    I look at her now, watching her face. “Like remembering who I am?”
    “Well, that’s a given. You’re supposed to do that, right?” Clementine says with a smile that pulls at something inside of me. That reminds me of something. Someone—
    I don’t know.
    I can’t remember, and my head is starting to ache again.
    “Why are you making my head hurt?”
    Clementine blinks at me, looking surprised, but then says, “Headaches are normal for people who’ve—”
    “It only happens when I think about certain things. People.”
    “That shouldn’t be happening,” she mutters, but before I can ask her what she means, Jane says, “Clementine?” coming to the door. “I thought I heard a car. What are you doing here?”
    “I just stopped by to see how Ava is,” Clementine says, picking up the pie and giving it to Jane.
    “You shouldn’t have done