“Oh yeah, I read that story.” As I recalled, we never find out what’s behind the door the guy was told to choose—a man-eating tiger, or the beautiful girl—because the story ends just as he opens it. I remember wanting to reach through the pages and wring the author’s neck.

“But if it’s the tiger,” said the twin in the back, “you’ve gotta ask yourself . . . is it alive, or is it dead?”

“If it’s Schrödinger’s tiger, then it’s both,” said the twin next to me.

“Yeah,” I said, catching on, and proud of myself for it. “But only until you open the door. And if it’s not dead, then you are.”

Schrödinger, if you didn’t know, was a scientist who mathematically proved that a cat inside a box is both dead and alive at the same time, until you open the box. I had argued in class that Schrödinger was wrong—because if the box started to smell like dead cat, you didn’t have to open it to know.

I drove into a neighborhood where the streets wove and meandered like they had all the time in the world to get where they were going. Lawns were huge, and trees were lush. I remembered each house I passed, but only once I saw it. That’s the way it seemed to work—memories had to be triggered. Then we came to a guard gate, marking the entrance to a gated community.

“Bet you live on the other side of the gate,” one of the twins said to me.

“Yeah, I do,” I told him, knowing for a fact that I did, but still unable to picture the house itself.

“You can just drop us off here,” the one next to me said. So I pulled over and they got out.

“We’ll see you around,” said one.

“Yeah. Thanks, Ash,” said the other, then they hopped on their boards and rode off.

Only much later did I realize that I had never told them my name.

3

Coke and Crayolas

Here’s what I know:

We live in a huge house in a fancy gated neighborhood. That’s because my father got a full football scholarship to Notre Dame, then was drafted by the Dallas Cowboys and was a lineman for six years, before a busted hip ended his career. He never quite became a household name, but he made a lot of money in those six years, which he used to start a successful chain of vitamin shops. Now, instead of selling automotive parts that people don’t need at inflated prices, he sells vitamin supplements that people don’t need at inflated prices, and makes a whole lot more money doing it.