Hope, Levy, Marc [good summer reads TXT] 📗

was even more realistic than the last time she’d seen it, and she shivered despite herself.

“Where’s Luke?” she asked as they stepped into their lab.

“Tyla.”

“Who’s Tyla?”

“The girl he spent the evening with. And the whole night, by the looks of it.”

“Are we talking about the same Luke? How did he meet her?” Hope asked. “Isn’t Tyla kind of a weird name?”

“I’ll let him tell you all about it. And I think it’s pretty.”

“It sounds like a fish. ‘I’ll have the steamed Tyla, please!’”

“You’re not jealous, are you?”

“Of Luke? You have got to be kidding me . . .”

“Of Tyla. You used to be the only girl in the gang.”

“What a load of crap,” Hope snorted, although deep down she knew Josh was right. There was a new girl in town, and she didn’t like it.

“Then I guess I’m kidding! So anyway, want to see our stroke of genius?”

“Are things serious with the new girl? I was only gone two weeks.”

“It was serious with us right from the very first night . . .”

“Okay, okay,” Hope sighed. “I guess I am a little jealous. But not of Luke.”

“If you say so.” Josh leaned over the screen to draw her attention to it.

The first few images showed sections of a brain, which Hope assumed came from a PET scan. Colored parts sprang to life, with the words “Actions” and “Cognition” rolling by in one corner.

“Whose brain is that?”

“How do I look?” Josh laughed.

“Yours? I get it.” Hope nodded. “You were bored without me, so to take your mind off me, you fooled around with a scanner. That’s the last time I leave you alone for so long.”

“We weren’t allowed to use a human guinea pig, so one of us had to volunteer. But you’re wrong: I didn’t use a scanner.”

Hope was confused.

“We attached hundreds of electrodes to my head and spent hours recording my brain’s electric activity, while Luke tried to stimulate my memory using shared memories. Then we encoded the data and sent it to a calculator that reassembled what you see on this screen.”

“So these are digital depictions of your memory?” Hope asked, visibly stunned.

“Yes. They’re not quite perfect yet. But they’re there. As I said, it required hours of recordings for just a handful of transcribed seconds, but the results are there. Fragments of my memory are now stored on a hard drive, and we can display them in images. One day, we might be able to fully decrypt them, re-creating everything I’ve seen, reproducing all the sounds I’ve ever heard, replicating my senses and potentially even my feelings.”

“And where am I in all these colors?” Hope asked. She leaned closer into the screen.

“There.” Josh pointed. “Look. See where it’s all mixed up?”

Hope turned to Josh and threw her arms around him, kissing him hard.

“I can’t believe you two losers managed without me.”

“Hope! The camera!” Josh whispered, raising his eyes to the blinking red light on the wall.

Hope gave it the finger before kissing him even harder.

“So I’m messed up, is that right?”

Tyla brought with her a housing problem. Although a small living room separated the two bedrooms, it was hard to imagine how the four of them would be able to enjoy any privacy in such a tight space.

According to Luke, Josh and Hope had already maxed out their evening credit limit, and now it was his turn. Hope began scouring Craigslist for apartments and dragging Josh along to viewings. But behind every tantalizing ad was a deeply disappointing reality.

Josh resolved to find more tutoring clients so that they would have more money to spend on rent, and in the meantime, they tried to stick to a schedule: Hope would spend the night with him on even days, and Tyla with Luke on odd days. The atmosphere was tense.

Tyla exuded a lavish sensuousness that Hope found almost vulgar. From the clothes she wore to the way she held herself, she was the embodiment of titillation, and Hope wondered what exactly a man as cerebral as Luke could possibly see in a woman like her. The clearness of it all added to her tension.

One morning, Hope nudged Josh awake.

“How would you feel about giving Luke the apartment to himself for an entire weekend in exchange for his car?”

“Luke!” Josh called out. “How would you like the apartment to yourselves all weekend?”

“I’d be down for that!” Luke’s voice carried through the wall.

“Deal! We’ll take your car. There.” Josh turned to Hope. “Where should we go?”

“Cape May.”

“What’s in Cape May?”

“For two weeks now, I’ve been trying to remember the name of the perfume my mom used to wear. It’s been driving me crazy.”

“Couldn’t you just ask your dad?”

“That’s off limits.”

“And the only place to get this perfume is Cape May?”

“All my childhood memories were made there. I want to share them with you.”

Luke had only just woken up, but Hope could already hear Tyla start to moan, and the look she shot Josh was clear as day. Stuffing their things into a bag, they left the apartment and swung by Hope’s room at the dorm. She grabbed a few bits and pieces, and they hit the road.

They arrived in Cape May at noon, pulling into town under a relentless sun. They continued on to the foot of a dune that gazed out over the Atlantic. The beach was almost deserted, stretching out as far as the eye could see.

Hope and Josh dove into the waves, feeling the full force of the ocean tide drawing them back to the beach time and time again.

The hours slipped by in a sweltering blur, finally giving way to a balmy evening. They stepped back into their clothes, and Hope took Josh to the neighborhood where she had grown up.

The sandy streets were lined with little wooden houses, the more modest of them topped with asphalt, and the others with wooden shingles.

Before the front doors were little square patches of garden planted with flowering trees, the colorful petals contrasting with the crimson of the setting sun.

Hope