Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac Read Online Free PDF

obsolete brain and an obsolete heart. I could hear my dad’s breathing, but he didn’t say anything and I still couldn’t bear to look at him. I closed my eyes.
    “Naomi?” Dad said after a while. “Are you sleeping?”
    I kept my eyes closed and let him think that I was.
    He kissed me on my forehead. “I’ll never leave you, kid.” He wouldn’t have said this if he’d thought I was awake.

2
    BY MONDAY MORNING, THE DOCTORS HAD DETERMINED that I couldn’t remember most things after sixth grade, which I’d pretty much known since that first conversation with Dad, and they sent me home.
    No one knew anything really. I was a bona fide medical mystery. In their genius opinion, the head trauma wasn’t severe enough to have caused the kind of amnesia I had, so they said I was probably repressing , or some such crap. Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure it was the fall down the stairs.
    They said my memory might come back or it might not. And in any case, we should all act as if it wasn’t going to. There wasn’t anything to be done anyway. In a couple of weeks, there would be more pictures of my brain that probably wouldn’t show anything. Therapy, maybe.
    “Rest,” they said.
    “And then?”
    “Resume ‘normal’ life as much as possible,” they said. “Go back to school when you’re ready.”
    “Maybe it’ll help you remember,” they said. “But then again, maybe it won’t.”
    “The human brain is mysterious,” they said.
    “Good luck to you,” they said, handing me a sample-size bottle of Excedrin and an excuse note from gym; and Dad, a bill as thick as a National Geographic.
    I scanned the hospital parking lot for our car, which in my last recollection had been a silver SUV (Mom’s) or a red truck (Dad’s). I didn’t see either. “Dad, you think it’s a bad sign that I don’t know which car is ours?”
    “I don’t believe in signs,” Dad said as he pointed to a compact white vehicle that was wedged between two other compact white vehicles.
    “You’re joking. You loved that truck!”
    Dad muttered something about the new one being more fuel-efficient. “It’s covered in the memoir,” he added.
    It was, though I wouldn’t find this out for many months. He wrote about the truck on page ninety-eight of his book. He claimed to have sold it because it reminded him of Mom. He didn’t mention a thing about fuel efficiency. It was funny how Dad was more honest in a book that anyone in the world could pick up and read than he could be talking to me. Or maybe it was sad. One or the other. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.
    I got into the passenger’s seat and put on my seatbelt. Just as we were pulling away, Dad’s cell phone rang, and he asked me did I mind if he took it. I said it was fine; after the doctors’ near constant interrogation, I appreciated not talking.
    “Yes. Hello. Me too. I’ve been meaning to call you…” Dad said stiffly to someone. He seemed embarrassed to be talking in front of me.
    “Who is it?” I whispered.
    “No one. Work,” he mouthed to me. He rolled his eyes and slipped on a headset.
    I decided I’d misread his tone and turned my concentration to the view outside. The trees were still green, but you could feel that summer was over. It made me think of a day I could remember, and how it had definitely been summer then. I didn’t necessarily remember the trees, but I remembered the air that day. It had that fresh-cut-lawn smell, where it feels like all of nature is just sighing with relief. My parents and I had left for Iceland about a week later.
    I wondered if Mom was having her affair even then. She must have been. She had said that her daughter was already three. My mother’s daughter. My sister. I couldn’t think about that yet.
    Out the car window Tarrytown looked familiar enough. I noticed a new subdivision of houses and a new McDonald’s. The place where they used to sell apple cider and doughnuts had been torn down. But basically, nothing