Danica Denton looked at me, the gnat on the windshield of her existence, and liked what she saw.
My knee buckled, and I tensed it to keep from toppling. Old friends. She’s the one who’d used the term, not me. Add to that she’d been the one who’d always defined me as her enemy in the past. But … if she’d forgotten my wrongs, was I still officially her enemy?
I was here to right those wrongs, to clear up old feelings.
But if old feelings had evaporated with a bump on her head—did I need to bring them up now? She might regain her memories at some point and hate me all over again, or she might not. Through years of business experience, I’d learned to spot an opportunity for what it was. And this one was massive.
Again, I found myself shifting my weight—but this time, it was as if I straddled two paths, with a gulf between them.
Path A, tell Danica what she has really thought of me all my life and tell her I was here to apologize.
Path B, smile and play along. See where things go, play it all by ear, hope for the best.
“Old friends.” I smiled. “Or new ones, if that’s how we should define it.” Absolutely, we should define it that way. I flashed her my best smile.
Danica blushed. She blushed! Then, she offered her hand. “Nice to meet you, Jeremy Hotston, my new friend.”
I took her hand, small but strong, and encased it in my own. Zings flew up my arm and pierced my heart. “I have a great feeling about this friendship.” I grasped her hand a little longer, pressing it with what I hoped was meaning. “Let’s just start fresh, if that’s okay with you.”
“It’s our only option.” She reclaimed her hand, but she placed it against the side of her face, which was decidedly no longer pale. “Thank you for the flowers. It’s a lot of flowers.”
Four bouquets, one for each time I’d totally humiliated myself while trying to impress her. Best laid plans and all that. But it didn’t begin to cover the dozens of other times I’d only partially humiliated myself around Danica, the girl who’d stood up for me when I first moved to Wilder River. Thereafter, it seemed, I’d ticked her off every single time we interacted.
It killed me to think back.
But now—here was the opportunity. Golden, glinting in the sun. Danica couldn’t think back on all those times. I really had been handed a clean slate and a fresh start with her.
“Sit down, please.” Danica indicated a stiff vinyl club chair that looked easy to disinfect. “I haven’t had much company today, and it turns out I hate TV.”
“I know.” I laughed. “You always hated TV. You said it was fake, and sometimes you wanted to reach inside and strangle the actors for whatever was going on.”
Her eyes grew wide. “That describes my feelings exactly! What else do you know about me?”
What didn’t I know? I’d been a student of Danica Denton for all my youth. “As a kid you loved riding your bike up steep hills just so you could coast down. You liked the wind to be fast to lift your hair, which you thought was too heavy for regular breezes.”
She touched her hair. “It’s really thick, isn’t it? I bet it’s hard to manage.”
“You manage it beautifully.” I looked at my lap. Human nature didn’t respond well to fanboy behavior. I’d have to rein in my gushing compliments. Play it cool, as if this were a standard negotiation. “But you’re right. It did get unruly.”
She frowned. “What else?”
I made a list. She liked her grilled cheese sandwiches slightly charred; thank you notes—both given and received; that boy band from Australia, but only their second album. I hummed a few lines of their biggest hit.
“I remember that!” She joined in on the second half of the verse, singing pretty badly. “That’s so weird. I can remember a stupid song about dancing on an upside-down cow trough, but I couldn’t remember my own great-grandmother’s name without help. Apparently it’s my middle name.” She sighed and fell back against her pillow. “It’s discouraging.”
“What do they say about your chances of remembering?”
“Fifty-fifty.”
That low. Wow. I put up my emotion shields. “Do you know how the accident happened?”
She described her attempt at a leap between the uneven bars, and how she’d landed directly on top of her head. “Or so they tell me.”
Oh, right. She couldn’t remember anything. “Sounds painful.”
She rubbed the side of her head. “At least they said no kids were watching at the time. It happened during off hours between classes. Did you know I’m a gymnastics instructor? Apparently, I own a gym called Constant Energy Gymnastics and teach a hundred kids tumbling and floor routines and balance beam every week.” She shrugged. “Some of the kids came in and brought me pictures and cards they’d drawn for me.” She frowned.
“I take it you didn’t remember any of them by sight.”