The Girl Who Was Supposed to Die by April Henry Page A

heads toward the door.
    I set down my mug. If it isn’t, what will I do? I look around. There’s a door for the bathroom, but that’s about it. No back entrance. Even Audrey must come in the front. My breathing speeds up. I have the gun, but could I really use it?
    Before I completely hyperventilate, Ty sticks his head in the door and gives me an all-clear sign. He calls a good-bye to Audrey. I nod at her as I follow him out the door.
    It takes about twenty minutes to walk to the library. Thankfully, Ty doesn’t suggest we try to skateboard. I watch every car that drives by. Whenever we pass a store window, I look at the reflections to see if anyone is behind us. But all I see are normal people. Men in pickup trucks, women in minivans. A lady jogging with a black Lab. A guy wearing a neon green windbreaker and riding a bike.
    The second floor of the library has rows and rows of computers. Ty drags over a second chair so that we can sit together in front of a computer in a far corner.
    â€œFirst, let’s see if we can figure out why you can’t remember,” Ty says in a low whisper. He puts his fingers on the keyboard. “Then we’ll work on what it is you’re not remembering.”
    â€œWhy and what? You forgot the who, when, where, and how.” I start out half joking, but by the time I finish my sentence, our task seems impossible.
    Ty squeezes my shoulder. “We’ll get there. One step at a time.” He turns back to the computer. In the search box, he types in “sudden memory loss.” More than 17,000 results. He follows a link to a medical site, skims a few lines, clicks back, selects another link, and then repeats the process, clicking back and forth almost faster than I can follow. Most of the sites are filled with medical jargon.
    He pauses on one site. “Your head wasn’t bruised or cut. And you said you haven’t been having headaches.” His voice is low, like he’s talking to himself. “But if it’s not from a blow to the head, then what is it?”
    He clicks on another link that leads to a site about brain tumors. I freeze. Could that be it? But Ty is running his finger down the list of symptoms, shaking his head.
    He moves on, checking out more links, as I try to keep up, my eyes scanning hundreds of words. I keep getting stuck on symptoms and diagnoses. I’m not running a fever. I’m not sleepy. I’m probably not an end-stage alcoholic.
    Then he stops on a page. “Look at this.”
    In a rare and poorly understood form of amnesia called dissociative fugue, some or all memories of a person’s identity become temporarily inaccessible. In the fugue state, which can last several hours or even several years, individuals forget who they are. They don’t remember their names or anything about their former lives, nor do they recognize friends or family.
    Unlike most forms of amnesia, dissociative fugue has no known physical or medical cause. Rather, it is thought to be precipitated by an emotionally traumatic event, an event so painful the mind seems to shut down and erase everything, like a failed computer hard drive.
    During the fugue state, memories that occurred before the event cannot be retrieved. But unlike a computer whose unsaved information is lost forever, most patients suffering from dissociative fugue eventually recover their “lost” memories. Typically this happens just as suddenly as the memories disappeared.
    Ty turns to me. “Maybe that’s what you have.”
    It’s already clear that something bad happened to me. Whatever it was, it was bad enough to push restart on my brain. Does that mean it has to have been even worse than the things that have happened since? I pulled a gun on Officer Dillow. I left Brenner to die in the quiet woods. But I remember those things.
    Ty is still waiting, watching me with his dark eyes. I give a small nod.
    â€œSo something bad happened