Page 17 of 16 Forever

“Right, yeah.” I stare forward into nothing as I aggressively sip the remnants of my milkshake, enjoying the abrasive slurping sound it makes once there’s nothing left.

“So much has changed,” I say.

“I know.”

“Like, everything.”

“Yeah.”

“Except me.”

Lincoln scrunches up his mouth and blinks several times, like he’s about to cry. “Look, CT.” He reaches across the table and accidentally knocks over my empty milkshake glass. “Oops.” He picks it back up, but I reach out and knock it over again. “We’ll figure this out.”

“How? I mean, that’s a nice thought, but, like, how will we do that? Do we even know why this is happening?”

Lincoln stares at the table for a long moment. He wipes at his eyes with his fingers, clearly wishing he still had his napkin.

“Dad is looking into more doctors,” he says finally. “He’s not giving up. And Mom and I aren’t either. I don’t think you’ll be stuck like this forever, Carter. I really don’t.”

“You said you were ready to be my forty-five-year-old dad,” I say, wrestling with the knot in my throat.

“That was just a joke,” Lincoln says with barely credible conviction.

“But it’s possible this is my eternal reality, right? Everyone feeling bad for me, constantly explaining all the shit I don’t remember, politely informing me that, sorry, they don’t hang out in parking lots anymore. Does this even count as a life? What the fuck is the point?”

I pick up the milkshake glass and thunk it down loudly on the table right as our server is reaching out to clear it.

“Oh, so sorry,” she says, flinching backward. “Are you done with that?”

“Not yet,” I say.

I hold tight to my empty glass.

Lincoln

The First Loop

Watching you wake up on your seventeenth birthday fully believing that it was your sixteenth was an incredibly unpleasant experience.

The night before, you and I had gotten in a fight, and, as happened sometimes, I was so annoyed and pissed off that I was fully prepared to ignore/avoid you as much as possible that morning, birthday be damned.

So imagine my surprise when you acted as if that fight had never happened.

I thought you were gaslighting me, which only made me angrier.

But you had no idea what I was talking about and, it soon became clear, you thought Mom, Dad, and I were playing some weird prank where we were pretending it was your seventeenth birthday instead of your sixteenth.

You’ve always been desperate for us to be the kind of family who revels in pranking each other. But, alas, we are not. Dad tries sometimes, but mostly it’s just you.

So it was kind of funny for a minute when you thought this was us finally pranking you. Then it got weird. Dad was confused, and Mom started getting angry, and she told you to stop joking around, and you said you would stop whenwestopped. And then Mom said she didn’t like your attitude, that you were probablytired from being out the night before, which confused you and pissed you off because you said youweren’tout the night before.

That’s when I realized you looked a little different. Like, younger somehow.

And eventually it became clear: You truly thought you were turning sixteen. And you didn’t remember anything from the night before, oranyof the nights from the past year. Mom started crying, and Dad did too. I didn’t. I just felt, like, shocked.

It was a big, hot, scary mess.

And so was the rest of that year.