Burn by Monica Hesse Page A

armchair, twisting it between her fingers. “Learn stuff like that?”
    â€œI said things, not memories.” Rowena spotted a few dirty dishes on Warren’s kitchenette, efficiently sweeping them up on her way out the door. “Those old memories are gone for good.”
    Rowena left and Lona didn’t know where to begin. She hadn’t talked to Fenn since their fight last night. He’d gone to bed without saying good night for the first time she could remember. She’d thought about knocking, but what would she say? And now she felt unfinished, like something was missing, like her house key or her wallet, but what was missing was the sense of peace she usually got from thinking about Fenn.
    Now she was cracking up and the only person who might be able to explain what was happening was the man in front of her. And right now all he wanted to do was take off his shoes.
    Lona kneeled on the carpet next to him. It smelled antiseptic and musty. “Warren?”
    â€œShoes off.” He pointed at her feet. “You shoes.”
    â€œWarren, I need to talk with you about something.”
    â€œYou shoes.”
    She was wearing lace-up boots, good for cold weather, bad for this children’s game. She unknotted the bows and yanked the boots off, lining them up next to Warren’s sneakers. “Okay. My shoes are off. Just like yours. We both took our shoes off.”
    â€œNow on.” He picked up his right tennis shoe and crammed his toes into it, using his index finger as a shoehorn against his heel.
    â€œWarren, I had a dream that you were in yesterday. Do you know what a dream is? Warren?”
    His tongue protruded from his mouth as he triumphantly shoved his foot in the rest of the way and sealed the two Velcro straps down on his foot, neatly parallel, like the “equals” sign in a math equation.
    â€œIn the dream, you were coming to find me. Except I wasn’t me. You were coming to find someone else
.
”
How would that explanation make sense to him? It barely made sense to her.
    â€œStory?” Momentarily bored with the shoe game, Warren trundled to the shelf. He picked up a book Lona hated. It was about a marching band, and on every page, squishy rubber buttons that looked like clown noses simulated the noises of the instruments. It was loud and irritating, becoming completely insufferable after more than one reading. A few visits ago, she’d tried to stuff it behind other books on the shelf. He must have found it.
    â€œLet’s not do that story now. Let’s—”
    He shook the book open to a random page, blasting a screeching saxophone with the palm of his hand. With his other hand, he palmed through to a different page, beating down on the tuba button.
    â€œWarren, please, I need to talk—”
    Now he was pulsing both buttons at once. Her head throbbed from the noise. He raised his hand above his head and slammed it down onto the red-orange clown nose. The tuba emitted a wet, noisy wheeze. He’d crippled the soundbox.
    â€œWarren!”
    Before she could stop herself, she violently wrenched the book out of his hands and flung it across the room. “Stop it, Warren. This is
important
. I need to
talk
to you.”
    His mouth gaped open in a silent grimace, tears squeezed out of the corners of his eyes. She’d made him cry.
    â€œWarren, I didn’t mean—” She reached toward him but he fearfully burrowed further in the corner.
    Lona tried to calm herself. The Architect had been in her dream. This man was not him. She needed to keep reminding herself of that. This man wore his skin and shuffled around in his body, but it wasn’t him. The man from Lona’s dream didn’t exist anymore.
    Lona sunk to the carpet, folding her legs in, making herself small and unassuming. “I wish,” she said softly, “that I had some shoes with Velcro on them.”
    Warren peeked out from around the corner.