My Name Is Memory by Ann Brashares Read Free Book Online Page A

remember?” Lucy asked. It was a voice she hardly recognized. It escaped from some part of her, she couldn’t tell where, airy and thin and hissing like a leak.
    “You were supposed to remember . . . him.” Esme said it loudly and with indignation. “You were supposed to remember how you loved him. He said he would come back, and you promised you would remember him.”
    Esme’s head was almost vibrating, and though she held Lucy’s hands, Lucy had the distinct feeling the rest of the girl’s body was going somewhere else.
    “In the war. You took care of him. He couldn’t breathe. You knew he was dying. He didn’t want to leave you, but you said you would never forget. You forget and he remembers. He told you what he was. He trusted you. You know, don’t you?”
    Lucy felt herself recoiling. She felt bitten and criticized. “I don’t know.” This girl had circumvented Lucy’s defenses.
    “You know what he is. You understand.”
    “I don’t. What is he?”
    “Please. You are Sophia, and he needed you.”
    “Stop! Who is Sophia? Why do you keep talking about her?” It’s what Daniel had done, too. It had scared her then as it did now.
    “I’m talking about you.”
    “No, you’re not. I’m Lucy,” she said hotly. She’d once seen a movie about a girl with a split-personality disorder. The way Esme talked, it was as though there were somebody else inside Lucy listening and even responding, and the thought of it terrified her.
    “Now you are Lucy. But before.”
    “Before what?”
    “You should find him if you can.”
    “How can I find him? I talked to him once. I don’t even know him.”
    “Yes, you do. Don’t tell me that lie.”
    Lucy yanked her hands away. “Can you stop this, okay?” Lucy heard the tears of her own confusion, the sound of herself betraying herself. Since when did a psychic scold you? She wrapped her arms around her body. She had to stick together.
    Esme opened her eyes and looked at Lucy as though surprised to see her there. She blinked a few times. She and Lucy stared at each other as strangers. “You should find him because he loves you,” Esme said faintly, coming back in stages.
    It was worse with Esme’s eyes open and fixed on her. Lucy didn’t want the words to land where they landed. But they did.
    “I don’t even think about him anymore,” Lucy said, half hoping Esme would be willing to make a deal and forget everything that had just happened. It was weird for both of them, she knew. And Lucy had yet to pay her.
    Esme looked at her with a sharp reproach. She didn’t look like a twenty-something-year-old person with too much green eye shadow and a desire for her payment. She looked like the oldest judge in the world. “How can you even say that?”
    Lucy shook her head. She wished she weren’t crying. She wished she could keep pretending that she had no fear and no faith in any of it.
    “I don’t know,” she said, and she really didn’t.

My Name Is Memory

NICAEA, ASIA MINOR, 552
    I
    told you about the girl in the village near Leptis in North Africa in my first life. My second life started roughly thirty-one years later in another part of Anatolia. Lives tend to cluster, you know. This second life was uneventful in external ways, but in my mind it was extraordinary. It started normally enough. I didn’t know yet what I was.
    But as soon as I was old enough to think—or old enough to remember the thoughts—I thought of the girl in the little thatched house. I saw her face in the doorway. Later I saw the flames and I understood what was happening to her and what I had done.
    I thought of her every time I closed my eyes. I screamed at night. I cried in my dreams. I began to think of her in the daytime, too. I was probably only two or three years old and not old enough to understand my guilt or shame or the significance of her face to me. But I experienced the pure horror of it every day, almost as if it were happening to me.
    I had a kindhearted