Painfully, Kane remembered that phase. He did not remember Ursula during it, before or after. She had been cut from his memory entirely. How was that possible?
“I cursed you? Like, with magic?”
“Yeah, I guess. That was the goal, but it wasn’t the real stuff or anything.”
“The real stuff?”
Ursula let out a tight laugh. “Did you find my note?”
“Your note?”
“It was with the box I dropped off at the hospital? They said no visitors except family, so I left it at the desk.”
There had been many gifts and flowers. Sophia had diligently brought them all home from the hospital, and Kane had diligently shoved them all into the trash.
“I missed it. Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. It was dumb.” She sounded relieved, but after a beat of silence her tone turned hesitant. “Look, Kane, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you when I saw you on the path. I’ve replayed that night like a million times in my head, and I mess it up every time. When you didn’t recognize me I just…I don’t know. I panicked. I heard the rumors that your memories got messed up, but I thought maybe when you saw me…”
Her voice failed her. She swallowed.
“I shouldn’t have left you like that. I just didn’t want to confuse you even more.”
“I’m not confused.”
The air between them tensed.
“Okay. I’m sorry.”
Kane sighed. In his head he watched Ursula running into the night. He replayed it again and again. The steeliness, the concealed anguish. It had seemed so odd then, but he understood it now. Like thick mist, pity threatened to blot out Kane’s determination. The familiar urge to retreat pulled at him. To sink into the limbo, where no one could find him. But he darted away from the urge like a fish sliding up from the darkness, toward sunlit waters; he needed to see this through.
“Listen,” he said. “It’s not just you, okay? Other stuff is foggy. I’m not sure how much I’ll get back. Or when.”
“Okay.”
“And I might never remember our friendship fully.”
“Okay.”
“Or at all.”
“Okay.”
“Can you say something other than ‘okay’?”
Ursula smiled. “This is sort of stupid, but I brought something for you.” She pulled a plastic container from her bag. “Close your eyes.”
Kane did. Ursula placed something cool and smooth into his hands.
“Okay, you can look.”
At first he mistook them for flat dolls of some sort. One had a tuft of brown hair, the other had red hair. They smiled wanly at Kane while he tried to figure out what strange, occult talisman he’d just been handed.
“I couldn’t get your boots as detailed as I would have liked,” said Ursula, pointing to the brown-haired one, “But I got some tips from this baking blog, and I think I could do the laces with a finer piping tool.”
“Oh!” Kane was holding cookies. Two incredibly detailed, frosted sugar cookies, made to look like him and Ursula.
“You made these?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’ve just been carrying them around?”
“Ha. No. You and I are good friends with the lunch ladies. They let me keep them in the cafeteria freezer. I just grabbed them.”
“But…why do this?”
Ursula’s smile turned bashful. “I needed to do something, I guess. And I…I missed…” A sad pain rose in Ursula’s voice. “We used to have this joke with my dad about how we wished we could live as cookie people in the cookie kingdom and… Actually it’s hard to explain.”
She didn’t bother. She shook herself and said, “And I wanted to try out this new recipe. They might suck, just warning you.”
“They look too good to eat.”
“Oh, please. I have like, hundreds more. Here.” She took one cookie, snapped off the leg, and handed it over. They both took a bite.
“It’s…” Kane’s eyes widened.
Ursula was the first to spit it out. “Oh, God, these are awful.”
Willfully, Kane swallowed.
“Oh, God!” Ursula snatched it from Kane, staring at the cookie faces as though they could tell her what was wrong with them. They kept their secret.
“I knew I shouldn’t have tried a new recipe on something so important. I’m so sorry, Kane. Oh my God I’m so embarrassed, this is so embarrassing, you must think I’m like trying to poison you.”
“Relax, Urs,” Kane said. “It’s cool. They still look good.”
Her face turned wondrous. “You called me Urs. That’s what you used to call me.”
It hadn’t been on purpose. Kane shrugged uneasily, feeling no more familiar toward her than before.
Ursula joined him on the table. Sparrows quizzically circled the fallen crumbs. Ursula snapped off bits of cookie anatomy and tossed them to the birds.
“You don’t even like sugar cookies,” she confessed.
Kane held very still. This was true. He thought sugar cookies were for people who had never tasted actual happiness, but he wasn’t about to tell Ursula that.
“Like, the last time I made sugar cookies, you told me that sugar cookies were for people who had never tasted actual—”
“Stop.” Kane couldn’t take hearing his own memories repeated to him. The taut feeling in his heart threatened to snap right there, like a piano string ripping through him.
The silence eased him, but then made it worse. He needed to at least give her the chance.
“Actually, it would help if you told me about us, I think.”
“Hmm, okay.” Ursula handed Kane what was left of his cookie. “Well, for one we used to sit out here in the mornings, and you’d toss food to the birds. I used to hate it, to be honest. Like I was absolutely scared of birds. All birds. And I used to get so mad that you would try to get them to come closer, but then one day you showed up with bread crumbs and showed me how you can sort of conduct them if you throw crumbs to one side, then the other.” She demonstrated this by tossing a handful of cookie bits to one side of the courtyard. The flock burst into a wheeling arc that plummeted through the bright air. She did it again, to the other side, and the birds flowed like water.
“I love that,” Ursula said. “We used to do this a lot, even during summer break. Wherever we went we’d always feed the birds. I miss it.”