Forget Tomorrow - Pintip Dunn Page 0,2

country has ever seen. Right?”

Something I can’t identify passes over his face. And then he says, “Right. I have so many medals, I need to build an addition to my house in order to display them.”

He wasn’t kidding, something inside me yells. He’s trying to tell you something.

But if Logan’s one of the anomalies I’ve heard rumors about—the ones who receive a bad memory, or worse, no memory at all—I don’t want to know about it. We haven’t been friends for half a decade. I’m not going to worry about him just because he’s deemed me worthy of his attention again.

Suddenly, I can’t wait for the conversation to end. I reach for Jessa’s hand and connect with her elbow. “Sorry,” I say to Logan, “but we need to get going.”

Jessa hands him the bouquet of leaves, and I tug her away. We are almost out of earshot when he calls, “Callie? Happy Memory’s Eve. May the joy of the future sustain you through the trials of the present.”

It’s the standard salutation, spoken the day before everyone’s seventeenth birthday. In the past, Logan’s address would have filled my cheeks with warmth, but this time his words only send a chill creeping up my spine.

We walk into the house to the smell of chocolate cake. My mother’s in the eating area, her dark brown hair twisted into a bun, still wearing her uniform with the ComA insignia stitched across the pocket. She’s a bot supervisor at one of the agencies, but she gets paid by the Committee of Agencies, or ComA, the governmental entity that runs our nation.

We drop our school bags and run. I hug my mother from behind as Jessa attacks her legs. “Mom! You’re home!”

My mother turns. Powdered sugar clings to her cheek, and chocolate frosting darkens one eyebrow. The red light that normally blinks on our Meal Assembler is off. Actual ingredients—packets of flour, a small carton of milk, real eggs—lay strewn across the eating table.

I raise my eyebrows. “Mom, are you cooking? Manually?”

“It’s not every day my daughter turns seventeen. I thought I’d try making a cake, in honor of my future Manual Chef.”

“But how did you…” My voice trails off as I spot the small rectangular machine on the floor. It has a glass door with knobs along one side, two metal racks, and a coil that turns red when it’s hot.

An oven. My mother bought me a functioning oven.

My hand shoots to my mouth. “Mom, this must have cost a hundred credits! What if…what if my memory doesn’t show me as a successful chef?”

“It wasn’t easy to find, I’ll give you that.” She takes off the rag around her waist and shakes it. A cloud of flour puffs into the air. “But I have complete faith in you. Happy Memory’s Eve, dear heart.”

She hoists Jessa onto her hip and pulls me into a hug so that we are in a circle of her arms, the way it’s always been. Just the three of us.

I have few memories of my father. He is not so much a gaping hole in my life as he is a shadow who lurks around the corner, just out of reach. I used to pester my mom for details, but tonight, on the eve of my seventeenth birthday, the heavy knowledge of him is enough.

My mother begins to clear the ingredients off the table, the bare, gleaming skin of her wrist catching the light that emanates from the walls. She doesn’t have a tattoo. Future memories didn’t arrive systematically until a few years ago, and my mother wasn’t lucky enough to receive one.

Maybe if she had, she wouldn’t have lost her job. My mother used to be a medical aide, but as more and more applicants came with memory chips showing futures as competent diagnosticians, it had only been a matter of time before she got downgraded to bot supervisor. “You can hardly blame them,” she had said with a shrug. “Why take a risk when you can bet on a sure thing?”

We sit down to a dinner usually reserved for the New Year. Everything has the slightly plastic taste of food prepared in the Meal Assembler, but the spread itself is unrivaled by the best manual cooking establishments. A whole roast chicken, its skin golden brown and crispy. Mashed potatoes fluffy with butter. Sugar snap peas sautéed with cloves of garlic.

We don’t talk through most of dinner—can’t talk, our mouths are so full. Jessa savors the snap peas like they