Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac Read Online Free PDF Page B

much had changed, and this was reassuring.
    All of a sudden, Dad turned onto a street I didn’t recognize. Even though Dad was still on the phone, I asked him where we were going.
    Dad hung up before answering. “We moved,” he said simply. “I should have mentioned it before, but there were so many things. I’ll add it to the list when we get home. We’re almost there.”
    His list was turning out to be a complete waste.
    Dad informed me that they had sold our house after the divorce. He had bought a different house about a half mile from our old one. He mentioned that the new house was “larger” (why we needed a larger house when fewer people lived in it was beyond me) and “closer to school” and “besides, we hadn’t lived all that long in the other house anyway, not like Brooklyn.”
    The new house was much more modern than our old house had been. The back wall looked like it was made entirely from glass, and it was incredibly drafty inside. Our old house had been two stories with all these strangely shaped rooms and narrow flights of stairs. I think it had been built in 1803 or something. The new house was, well, new. It was on one level, and seemed more, I guess you might say, organized, if you were being kind. Sterile, if you weren’t.
    There were a few artifacts from the old house, but not many. At a glance I recognized a clay planter in front of the fireplace, a small braided rug near the laundry room, a cast-iron umbrella stand. They all looked awkward and out of place, like orphans.
    “What do you think?” Dad smiled. I could tell he was proud of his house.
    I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I told him it was nice. Truly, there was nothing much to say. It was all very beige. The sofa was beige. The stain on the wood floor was beige. The walls were beige. What in the world can you say about beige?
    To Mom, any reasonably flat or bare surface was a potential canvas, and she had always been painting and changing the colors of our walls. Our house smelled of paint, but also of all her other projects. Like melted crayons and clay and weird incense and glue and newsprint. Like people lived there and things were happening there. Like home. This new house smelled like…synthetic citrus. “Dad, what’s with the weird orange scent?”
    “Just something the housekeeper uses. I didn’t like it at first, but now I’m kind of used to it. It’s organic.” Dad sighed and then he clapped his hands together. “Okay, I assume you’ll be wanting the official grand tour.”
    “Could we do it after lunch maybe?” I told Dad I was really tired, and he led me down the hall to “my room.”
    “Look at all familiar?” he asked.
    Unlike the rest of the house, my room did share some similarities with the bedroom I remembered. The furniture, for one, was exactly the same. I practically wanted to hug my wicker dresser or, like, give my desk chair a massage.
    I told Dad I wanted to be alone. He had just been standing there, and I sensed he needed to be told to leave. Dad nodded and said that he had some work to do, but that his office was down the hall if I wanted him.
    “Oh hey, you’ll need this!” Dad called just as he was about to go. He took the list out of his pocket. It was on five sheets of paper and one hundred eighty-six items long.
    “It was lonesome here without you, kid,” he said. He kissed me on the forehead to the right of my injuries. I closed the door behind him, and then I went to sleep.
    Dad woke me for lunch and again for dinner, but the meals made no impression. I didn’t really wake until around eight that night. I was alone for the first time in what felt like years, but had really been almost no time at all.
    At the hospital I had basically avoided mirrors. It was easy. I just slipped past them, holding my breath as if there were a ghost in the room.
    Partially I think it was because I didn’t want to see my injuries. It probably sounds like vanity, but it wasn’t. In my