Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz (books to read for teens txt) 📕

send me a few snaps of the festivities!’ She has never missed his birthday before, but her cousin is getting married in Maine, and really, her own mother missed almost every birthday she ever had, and she turned out just fine, didn’t she?

I am in the kitchen, listening through the wall to this woman’s nervous chitter. I never meet with the clients—‘We don’t want any unnecessary questions,’ Noah said when I first started working—but I feel like I could match owner to dog all the same; it’s as if the animal becomes a mirror of the person, picking up all their quirks and emotional ticks. Franklin for instance, is watchful. Attentive from a distance like Noah is, and then he will surprise me with a gesture that feels like affection. A wet nose against my ankle, or a nudge of his head against my leg. Just a brief touch, and then he’s back to his side of the room. Lucy Lutens’ dog is definitely not fine. Donut is skittery with other dogs, and resentful of me, as if it’s my fault whenever Lucy leaves him. He sits at the door after she goes, little whining noises trembling out of his body, and when he has convinced himself she is never, ever coming back he puts his face against his paws and refuses to look at me for the rest of the day.

Noah says dogs produce the same kinds of emotions us humans do, but they think like a three or four-year-old at best. ‘Imagine yourself at your most vulnerable,’ he once explained. ‘When you feel more than you can ever make sense of feeling. That’s a dog’s reality, every day.’

It makes me think about what I was like at four years old. I don’t remember being in my own skin, looking out at the world, but I do sometimes see myself at that age. I think you generally experience memories in this way, from the outside in, like your old life is a movie you once starred in. But sometimes something bad happens, something bad enough to make it feel like you’re perpetually looking out from that bad thing, living inside it, instead of watching the movie version. Then, it gets hard to tell what’s real and what’s not. Noah said you can try to tap those kinds of memories out, shake them loose, ‘But wouldn’t that just leave you with a body full of holes?’ I asked him, and he laughed at that, but not unkindly, and the next day he left a book about something called EFT on my pillow. Unfortunately, the book had a picture of a nebula on its cover, so I put the book in my closet, cover facing the floor, and never looked at it again.

Anyway, nothing so bad happened to me at four years old. Not that I know of, and I feel certain I would remember. Something better to think about: could you match the kid to the mom, the way I can match dog to owner? How did that small girl mirror her mother back then? Was I always looking for someone to love me, pay attention to me, see me? It is strange that I cannot really know this baby Alice. My clear memories—moving so often, starting at yet another school, the men always hovering—it’s an older Alice who experienced those things, stored them up. Was little Alice waiting at locked doors, too? Pining like Donut does, for a woman who always, eventually, came back?

Sometimes I wish Noah didn’t tell me all the things he tells me.

Only sometimes.

‘I’ve never had a birthday party,’ I confess when Lucy finally leaves, Donut collapsing into grief at the door. ‘My mother liked to pretend birthdays never happened.’

If this surprises Noah, he doesn’t show it. I think I would be surprised if someone told me they’d never had a birthday party. I might even be a bit sad about it. But he merely shrugs.

‘Would you like to have one?’

‘A birthday paaaaarty?’

‘Yes, Alice. A birthday paaaaarty. Would you like to have one? Not experiencing something doesn’t necessarily equate to a desire for that experience.’

I have come to appreciate the way Noah makes things I’ve never even considered seem obvious. I guess that’s why I never feel offended when he talks to me this way.

I think about his question for a minute, really think about it.

‘I would,’ I finally answer, as new visions, possibilities bubble to the surface. ‘I would like to have a birthday party at the very top of the Chrysler Building. I would wear a silver dress, and I would serve Manhattans in fancy glasses, and there would be balloons filled with glitter everywhere. People would pop them over me as I walked past, so that I would be super shiny, all night long.’

‘Specific,’ he says, with that small smile of his, before turning back to the day and the dogs. Leaving my birthday fantasy to glimmer, and then fade. But not before I’ve preserved the idea of it, like a memory of something that actually happened.

It is a measure of Noah’s growing affection that he resists the urge to tell me how the insides of the Chrysler Building spire are in fact nothing more than a mass of concrete and electrical wires, an ugly series of crawl spaces that look nothing like its glittering façade. Nor does he mention the fact that, technically, I have no friends in New York City. No one to invite to my party. So that any balloons tied to the maze of rough cement inside the spire would remain intact, untouched, as I walked underneath them. Glitter floating inside, and me on the outside, looking up, looking in.

A nice but preposterous idea. Girls like me don’t get fancy birthday parties. I turned eighteen years old on an interstate bus. The click of numbers on a clock, and I was born this many years ago. Never knowing what my mother thought as we were wrenched apart for the