Summer school is definitely not like real school. Serious school. The kind of school I used to attend. Until I learned that this was the best option for completing my graduation requirements, I had no idea that my high school even had a summer program. Most of the people here, I’ve never met before. Like Beats headphones boy, who, according to Jane, got suspended for throwing a chair in his history class and then missed a month of school because his parents sent him to one of those military-style boot camps. And Sydney and April, the two girls who had babies last semester.
But Jane, I know. Or at least know of. In school or out, she’s the kind of person who is impossible not to notice. One, because she’s loud. Jane is not shy about voicing her opinion, even when nobody has technically asked for it. And two, she always looks kind of fabulous. Like today, in her sleeveless black T-shirt, Doc Marten boots, retro-red lipstick, and very short shorts that I’d never be allowed to leave the house in.
Jane tells me that an F in trigonometry has foiled her graduation plans this year — a fact that she attributes to her trig teacher, Ms. Hines, “being a total bitch.” I’m dubious about this. Unless Ms. Hines has had a lobotomy since I had her my junior year for the honors course, “total bitch” is not how I’d describe her. She used to give us multiple chances to make test corrections and kept candy on her desk for anyone willing to volunteer to work out a problem on the whiteboard. Mainly, I just think that Jane hates math. Or maybe school in general.
I turn my chair in her direction. “You’re buying me lunch?”
She nods. “Your lunch wishes will be my command.”
Another difference between summer school and real school is that previously, Jane would probably have had zero interest in hanging out with me. In real school, we did not swim in the same circles. Jane was not on the honors track. We didn’t have any classes together. Nor did we ever encounter each other at any of the extracurricular activities that normally kept me and most of my friends busy until well after dinner most nights: sports, student government, music lessons, Math Club, Community Service Club, fill-in-the-blank-with-whatever-might-look-good-on-a-college-admissions-application Club. I don’t think Jane does clubs. In fact, she probably didn’t even know who I was before I became famous (at school anyway) for getting a new heart.
Jane, on the other hand, was kind of famous before I was. Or maybe infamous is more accurate. For telling Mr. Hoffman to “fuck off” in front of her entire history class when she got into an argument with him about the pros and cons of socialism. (I heard this from Mia Ryan, the most reliable conduit for school gossip.) For spray-painting a magnificent, albeit unauthorized, mural honoring Frida Kahlo on the school’s football scoreboard. (It was homecoming weekend, so everybody saw that one.) For organizing a huge beach party that resulted in about forty kids missing school during the final day of STAR testing. (I was not invited but did hear about it for days after.) There are plenty more Jane-related rumors, but these I can’t verify: That she is the reason why Dave Rubin broke up with Mindy Pierson, and why Lisa Tan broke up with Becca Strauss. That she’s the one who stole and then sold the answer key to the tenth-grade geometry final. That she’s the person to go to if you want to buy weed. Whether any of this is true or not, Jane doesn’t seem to care what people think about her one way or the other. Nor does she seem to care about always having the right answer or getting straight As. In other words, she’s everything I’m not. Or that I didn’t used to be.
At the moment, however, she is at least attempting to pass trig.
“Let me see the math,” I say.
She slides her chair next to mine and hands me her assignment. Intricately drawn Japanese anime characters run up and down the borders of the worksheet. They all have speech bubbles above their heads with the same words inside: “Trig blows!”
I look over her half-hearted attempts at working out the assignment and see immediately where she’s screwing up.
“Okay, you can’t get that answer because cosine has no meaning on its own. You always need to find the cosine of an angle.”
She looks unsure. “Umm . . . okay.”
“So if the cosine of x is equal to one, you need to find a value for x so that once you take the cosine of the value, you get one.”
“You get one.” Jane buries a hand in her platinum pixie haircut and nods in the way that people do when they don’t want to admit they have no idea what you are talking about.
“Look at the graph of the cosine function . . . you have seen a graph like this before, right?” I glance at Jane. She’s reading the results of my Google search.
“Jane. Are you even listening?” I ask, though it’s clear that she’s not. She seems to have issues with focus.
“What are you doing, some kind of report?” she asks.
“No, just research.”
“About your heart?”
I still haven’t told anybody about what happened at the beach on Wednesday or about any of the other stuff that’s been freaking me out recently: The gaps in my memory. The nightmares. The feeling of not being able to reengage with my old life. But Jane is not my worrywart mom. And she’s not Emma, who would probably just think that I’d lost it. Maybe it would be a bit of a relief to tell somebody. At least some of it.
“I’m looking for some background on transplant recipients. About side effects from surgery, that kind of thing,” I tell her.
“Like what kind of side effects?” she asks.
“I’m not really sure what I’m looking for . . . I’m just curious about what other patients have experienced.”
“Move over.” Jane nudges me sideways and leans in closer to study my screen. After a few minutes, her eyes bug out.
“Holy shit, is this for real?” She nods toward the monitor. “This cellular memory thing? People can inherit their donor’s abilities and memories and stuff?” She stares at me. “Oh my god, is that happening to you?”
“Jane, no,” I say, already feeling like it may have been a mistake to invite her in to all this. Especially when I’m reading random, highly unscientific heart transplant theories on the internet. “It’s not physiologically possible. Memory is a function of the brain. The heart is an organ that pumps blood. You can’t acquire neurological processes through a heart. Just because some woman took a community center painting class does not mean she inherited anyone else’s memories.”
“But it says here that even cells in your heart include your entire genetic code. So wouldn’t that mean that maybe a transplanted organ could transfer some of your donor’s, like, memory cells to you and, then, voilà, you can paint?”
I shake my head. Where to even start? “First of all, there’s no such thing as a ‘memory cell.’”
Jane squints at me.
“So, since your transplant, have you picked up any new food preferences or hobbies? Anything that you didn’t do before?”
Well, of course, I think. There are tons of things that are different since my transplant. They’re different because I nearly died and had major, life-altering surgery. I did start eating meat again, but that was just for the protein, not because I have any new “food preferences.” And, yes, I’ve taken up surfing. But for all I know, my donor could have been a vegetarian who didn’t even know how to swim.