Blank Slate Kate

Chapter 5

"Get it?"

I eye the computer. "I think so." I used the Internet a bit at school, but it sure looks different now. Jake has to go to work at the bar, so he gave me a quick technology lesson so I can play with his computer and find out what I've missed in the last fifteen years.

"Okay. I'll be back at three in the morning. I have my keys so keep the door locked, and go to sleep whenever you want."

I look up at him and smile. "Thank you. Are you sure about the couch thing?"

After we went back to Hannah's just long enough for me to get my coat and Jake to tell her he believed me and that should be good enough for her, we left without another word to her and came back to his apartment. He made me another hot chocolate, and while I sat drinking it he threw out the nasty rug from his bedroom, then laid out a blanket and pillow for himself at the end of the couch and changed his bedsheets so tonight I can sleep in his room alone. He did it all so matter-of-factly that I couldn't be embarrassed, although I still feel bad he'll be on the lumpy couch.

He nods. "Gotta be a good host."

"You are. No question. And you order great pizza. I'm stuffed."

He smiles and pats my shoulder. "Good. Take it easy. And send me an email if you need me." After explaining email earlier, he helped me make an account so I can send him emails on his iPhone.

Maybe I'll look up iPhones first. Every time he lets me play with his I want one more.

Jake leaves, locking the apartment door behind him, and I turn back to the computer.

After a few minutes I realize that researching iPhones only makes me wish I had the money for one, so I decide not to do that any more. I have bigger questions anyhow.

I type in my own name and begin skimming through the results. Most of the Kate Andersons I see live in the United Kingdom or Australia, but adding 'Toronto' to my search doesn't get me any further. I go through about ten pages of results and don't see anything that seems like it applies to me. I guess my name's too common. I try my brother too, and my parents, but nobody with their names in Toronto looks to be them.

It's disappointing, but I try to push it aside and move on to searching for 1996. I find a site with a detailed timeline, and to my surprise I do remember a lot of that year. Not all, of course, since things like a huge snowstorm in the eastern United States wouldn't have made much difference to a seventeen-year-old in Toronto, but a lot of the early part of the year. The chess computer beating the human champion, then losing to him in a rematch. Alanis Morissette winning a Grammy for my favorite album, the angst-filled "Jagged Little Pill". An awful thing in Scotland where a man walked into a school and killed sixteen little kids and a teacher. I remember that being only a few days ago, and I hope nothing else like it has happened since.

But nothing on the timeline for the rest of the year rings a bell. There was a bombing at the Olympics that year, and I'm sure I would have remembered that but I don't. I also don't know anything about Princess Diana getting divorced, and I loved her so I think I should. There's some ditzy-looking band called the Spice Girls, none of whose songs I remember. A quick click on one of their videos suggests I'm lucky.

My memories seem to stop right around March 1996. Weird.

Knowing I probably won't remember anything after that date but still wanting to learn what's happened, I find pages for each year I've lost.

It doesn't take long before I'm sobbing. Diana killed in a car crash. The Columbine massacre. Space shuttle Columbia blowing up when it returned to Earth. Earthquakes and hurricanes and floods and epidemics. As if all that weren't bad enough, I'm completely unable to take in the horror of the September eleventh attacks in New York and the awful war afterward. Years and years of suffering for so many people.