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dabbing makeup on her right cheekbone, and I knew where she’d be going before her closing this afternoon.
     
    And I knew where I’d be.
     

Free Speech and
All That
     
    Therapeutic Statement 42-03282028-11
Subject: JAMES, NORA EMILY, 15
Facility: HAMILTON DETENTION CENTER TFC-42
     
    Micah sat in the same spot near the art section, hunched over his sketch pad, a stack of books blocking what he was drawing.
     
    “I didn’t think you were coming,” he said, peeking over the books.
     
    “Me neither.” I wondered if they were the same books that had been there Friday.
     
    He pulled out my chair for me again and then slid his sketch pad in front of me. My story was all there. Almost. The comic was eight boxes, or what he called “panels,” stacked in tiers on a regular sheet of paper. The first panel, the biggest one, showed a body splatting to the pavement at my feet. The next showed me waking up in a sweat. The graffiti. TFC. Him with his cast. Spitting out the pill. It was all there. The fat black pen strokes pinned the action to the crisp white page. It was in black and white, no color at all, but it seemed realer, not so cartoony that way. He hadn’t put the words in yet, but the action told the story. It was odd, like seeing myself from a distance. Not a bad odd, though. It was as if I were far enough away to see the whole story and not get hung up on a scene.
     
    “You said someone needs to remember,” he said. “I was thinking maybe we could do it with a comic book. Okay, more like a comic strip. With our stories. And maybe other kids could tell us their memories before they get erased.”
     
    I didn’t look up at him, although I could feel how close he was and how much he wanted to do this. I stared at the section of the comic where I was in the treatment room. Micah didn’t include Mom’s memory because I hadn’t told him what it was. In the frame, I just hid the pill under my tongue. (I spit it out in the last frame.) But something wasn’t quite right.
     
    “Do you ever dream about getting beat up or the van hitting you?” I asked him, but I was really thinking about the comic strip.
     
    “Yeah.” He shrugged. “My dreams aren’t as bad as they used to be. Drawing helps, I think.”
     
    “It doesn’t make sense.”
     
    He looked confused, and I couldn’t blame him. My brain doesn’t always follow a straight line.
     
    “What I did.” I pointed to the treatment room panel. “It doesn’t make sense—as a story—unless you know what my mother’s memory was.”
     
    He nodded thoughtfully. Then I told him. And I told him she was probably there at the TFC now.
     
    Micah looked like someone had punched him in the gut. It was actually kind of sweet.
     
    “Wow.” He let out a long breath and touched my hand.
     
    Then he ripped off a clean sheet of paper and handed me a pencil.
     
    “You write. I’ll draw,” he said firmly.
     
    We sat there, quiet, our heads together, our pencils moving across paper as if we were channeling something, until my mobile buzzed to tell me the car service was outside waiting for me.
     
    “What are we going to call this?” he asked as I helped him stuff everything into his bag. He banged his bum arm against the table in the process.
     
    I tapped his cast and turned to leave. “ Memento , of course,” I said over my shoulder. He wasn’t the only one who could make an exit.
     
    I didn’t have the dream that night.
     

     
    Later that week, after we had a solid first draft together, it occurred to us that we might need to disguise ourselves. I didn’t want my friends or family to figure out it was me. He was sure SWAT teams and black helicopters would drag us away if we didn’t cover our tracks.
     
    We talked about several ways to do this. He even tried making our characters into animals. I thought it would be too cutesy until he showed me this old graphic novel about the Holocaust, where the Jews were mice and the Nazis were pigs.