Wonderland

❄B69❄ Wonderland

Chapter Sixty-Nine

Brayden's POV

Wonderland

5 years later

If you told me five years ago that I would be working at Microsoft, in their Xbox department, I would've just laughed at you.

No, just kidding.

I wouldn't have, because I always knew I was destined to program Xboxes. I mean, who in his or her right mind would give up on a shot to hire someone as smoking hot and intelligent as me?

I graduated from the University of Washington two years ago, and I started interning for Microsoft's Xbox department when I was just nineteen. Before I even graduated, I was hired.

Now don't get me wrong—I love my job—but sometimes, working as a software development engineer makes me want to tear my fucking hair out. The only perk was that I got to work at home sometimes (and the pay—let's not forget about that), but the pressure to finish projects can be a real bitch.

The only thing keeping me sane was Heather. I asked her to move in with me as soon as I moved into my first personal apartment in Redmond. I don't think I've ever been so proud of myself. The feeling of having your own place is just fucking miraculous, especially when you get to share it with someone you love.

Mr. Forde was pretty reluctant at first, because this was the first time in many years that Heather left his little house in Rutland, but he trusted me, and he trusted that I would take good care of her.

There were some things about Washington that she didn't forget. When I took her down to the UW for a visit, she could still recall many things about it, but anything further than the UW, it would just escape her like water.

Whenever I had the day off, I'd take her somewhere fun. I'd snap photos of us and print them out later on in the night to put in our scrapbook. Heather looks through it almost everyday, to the point where it's become a ritual for her. I learned from Esmond that anterograde amnesia victims could remember habits, because our habits are stored in the part of our brain that deals with procedural memories.

Nevertheless, it always puts me in a bright mood when she pulls out our scrapbook and asks me to go through it with her. She doesn't remember anything in the scrapbook, and sometimes, she thinks I'm lying when I tell her that we've been to Mt. St. Helens, or Disneyland, or Oregon...

In the past five years since I've started scrapbooking, I've already gone through eight different scrapbooks—and each scrapbook had around a hundred pages to them. I built a bookshelf to hold them, and it's sitting in our bedroom.

"It's been nearly six years, Brayden," Bridget said one day, when she was visiting me. "When are you gonna put a ring on her?"

I stopped writing in my scrapbook and looked up to face her. Her blonde hair was up in a ponytail, and she wore a loose yellow dress in the hopes of concealing her bulging stomach. We were both sitting on my bed in my bedroom.

At only twenty-four years old, Bridget was already expecting baby number two with my brother. She was supposed to enroll in grad school to get her Ph.D. in bioengineering a few years ago, but that was until she wound up pregnant at twenty-two, three months before she graduated with a Bachelor's degree in bioengineering. Then, ten months later, baby number two was in the expectance.

I'm actually not too surprised. My brother loves kids—there's a reason why he's a pediatrician. And Bridget's adamant about getting four kids out of her before she turns thirty. She's really paranoid about getting pregnant after turning thirty. All because Esmond said something about how unhealthy it would be to have babies after your thirties.