Page 66 of 16 Forever

Layla! Hi! Carter Cohen here. How are you? I hope great. As I’m sure you know, I’ve had this weird disorder since our junior year, where I keep regressing back to age sixteen and forgetting everything that happened the previous year. It’s fairly horrible! But I recently learned that you and I were a thing that year before this happened. And I heard the way I ended things was, shall we say, NOT SO NICE. I have no memory of this (how convenient, right??) but hearing about it made me feel bummed. So I was hoping we could talk at some point if you’re down. Hope all else is good for you. Your life seems pretty cool!

I press Send.

You hold my fate in your hands, Layla Banerjee.

I hope you respond.

I stare at my message for a while, trying to will those threeI’m typingdots into existence below it.

They don’t appear. But a thought does instead, something that’s been bothering me since Maggie told me we’d dated.

I call Lincoln.

“Hello, brother,” he says, the world moving behind him as he walks. “Mind if we make this a call instead of a FaceTime?”

“Sure, sure.” We switch to audio only. I hear loud voices in the background. Laughter. Singing. “Is this not an okay time?”

“Yeah, yeah, I can talk a sec. Just leaving a cappella.”

“Noice! Is Terrell with you?”

“He is.”

“Tell him I said hey.”

“Carter says hey,” he says. “Terrell says hey back. So what’s up?”

“I know that Maggie and I dated. Despite the fact that youpretended Maggie and I never dated.”

There’s a pause on Lincoln’s end of the line, filled with two guys harmonizing a lyric of some song I don’t recognize.

“I’m sorry I lied to you, CT,” my brother says finally. “Maggie didn’t want me to tell you. I was trying to protect her. And you too.”

“I guess I get it,” I say. “It just feels freaky.”

“No kidding. I despised having to do that.”

I scroll over to Insta to see if Layla’s written back. She hasn’t.

“So is that why you told me Maggie was annoying?” I ask.

Lincoln laughs. “Yeah, I’m sorry. She told me to say that. Like, I had texted with her asking what I should do if you started asking me about her because I didn’t want to lie to you. And she said, ‘Just say you’ve heard I’m really annoying!’ So I panicked and did that.”

“That’s actually hilarious.”

“It is,” Lincoln agrees. “But I’m sorry. I never really know how to handle those conversations. What the right thing to do is.”

I lie back in bed, staring at the off-white ceiling. “Anyway,” I say, “Maggie doesn’t want to be with me again. Because it’s too hard to start over.”

“Ah, sorry.”

“It’s not a big deal. I mean, I don’t even know her. We’ve talked like twice.”

“Right. But. I get that it might feel shitty.”

“You sound like my therapist.”

“I try.”