Prologue
I don’t keep many secrets, but the ones I do have are hidden underneath a loose floorboard next to my bed.
There are over-the-top diary entries and poems about my deepest crushes—the ones only Carmen knew about. A valentine Adam Gurner gave me in the third grade that I’ve looked at so many times, I could practically forge his signature. A wrapper from the field trip where Adam offered me a piece of gum. When I got to high school, my secret stash became a little more interesting. There’s a birthday card from my first and only boyfriend for my sixteenth birthday signed Love, Pete. Every time I look at it, I remember how Carmen squealed because that was the closest thing either of us had heard to I love you.
These are just a few of the mementos I keep in my secret hiding place. No one even knows about the loose floorboard in my room, including my parents, because I hide it under a big fuzzy rug. Whenever I look inside the pocket in my floor, it’s a little bit like looking inside my heart. Each item by itself may seem insignificant—but that’s the point.
You see, I believe that everyone gets a love story—but you never know when it’s going to happen. Like maybe you’ll randomly bump into someone at a concert when the band is playing your favorite song. Or maybe you’ll lock eyes with some cute stranger across a crowded room. I’m not sure about love at first sight—my mom says true love takes time. But what I do imagine is that you can look back to the moment you met someone you love and think, yeah, I should’ve known then. Because all of your favorite things about them were true then too, staring at you right in the face…and you remember how your heart was beating out of your chest. So you decide that it was love—the beginning of it—and you just didn’t know that yet. Sometimes I think I keep things as simple as a gum wrapper in case these small moments are just the start of something real. Then I can look back and remember everything.
That’s what I thought anyways…until I had no recollection. There are three things stashed in my hiding place that I don’t remember saving:
A dried rose
A Polaroid of me next to a lamppost, looking at the photographer with the biggest smile I’ve ever seen on my face.
A bronze key
When I look at these three things, I think maybe I do have more secrets than I thought—even from myself.
Last year I was in an accident coming home from the Valentine’s Day Dance at school. It was late at night and snowing the kind of snow that sticks immediately but not bad enough that people say to stay off the streets. I slid off the road on black ice into a tree. But I don’t remember this. All I know is what my friends and family have told me and the details that pop up when you google Ella Fitzpatrick.
When I used to search my name to see what college admissions might find, only articles of me volunteering would appear. Now the first thing that comes up in the search engine before I even finish typing is Ella Fitzpatrick accident.
I cringe every time.
Because the thing is, when people see the articles, they must see a tragedy. But it wasn’t. Not really.
Whenever I feel sorry for myself, I remember I’m lucky for so many reasons. This isn’t one of those stories where there was a drunk driver involved or someone with me in the passenger seat died; I’m lucky that Carmen was able to raise money on a GoFundMe account so my family could pay the overwhelming medical bills. Most of all, I’m lucky that my brain bleed stopped when it did.
I even consider myself incredibly lucky for the little things. I’m lucky that I was sixteen and a minor so my picture wasn’t plastered on the news. I’m lucky that the accident happened in February, and after my recovery six months later, I was able to make up missed work during summer school so I didn’t fall behind. I’m lucky that when I asked to see Pete at the hospital, he came without question even though I had broken up with him three weeks before the accident.
Why couldn’t I remember breaking up with him? Well, there were a lot of things I couldn’t remember after the accident, like those three items I stored underneath the floorboard.
But I’m also lucky when it comes to my memory loss. Doctors have told me that amnesia is really rare, but when it happens people lose large amounts of time. Years. But I only lost a mere two and a half months. Seventy-seven days. Eleven short weeks of my life.
Still, I want to remember. Only whenever I think back to Valentine’s Day, my brain feels like it has been bitten into like the end of a lollipop.
But this isn’t a tragic story about the eleven weeks I lost.
It’s about the eleven paper hearts I discover a year later.
Chapter 1
It’s the first Friday of February and I know three things.
One, Valentine’s Day decorations are already up all over school. Red and pink streamers are hung from the ceilings every year to make it feel like love really is in the air. But to me, it screams that love can be torn down at any second.
Two, I miss the days when teachers made everyone from the weird kid that picks his nose in the back of the classroom to your first Top-Secret Crush buy you a valentine. Even though their moms would just buy a pack of generic cards from Target and scribble their names at the bottom, it was something. Now that I don’t have a boyfriend, who knows what I’ll be getting.
Three, I know my new animosity for Valentine’s Day really has nothing to do with these things and everything to do with what happened this time last year.
But I brush that thought aside harder than I brushed the knots out of my hair this morning to make it perfectly straight. Today I’m wearing a printed skirt with a cropped sweater and matching tights. I try to look my best even when I’m not feeling it, which is probably why my friends never know when something is bothering me.
We’re huddled together in line for the paper hearts the student government is selling as a fund-raiser for the Valentine’s Day Dance. There’s a table set up outside the gymnasium, which is the perfect spot because it’s where people always hang out before homeroom. A long line has formed from the gym entrance to the boys’ locker room around the corner.
There’s a part of me that’s super proud of the turnout. The paper hearts were my idea in ninth grade when I first joined student government’s planning committee. We were trying to think of something original to sell other than carnations to raise money for the Valentine’s Day Dance. I thought of love letters immediately. There’s something about them that feels so perfectly nostalgic. From there, I thought of selling paper cutouts in the shape of hearts people could write messages on, which would then be passed out around school during the weeks leading up to the dance. You can decorate them and write anything you want to. People mainly send short but sweet ones to their friends. Other times if you’re in a relationship you might send a more thoughtful one to show how much you care. What’s more romantic than telling someone how you feel?