Parallel

me.”
    “Just go to practice,” she urges. “Act like you know what you’re doing and get into the boat.”
    “Why would I do that?”
    “Because I think there’s a decent chance that the moment you get out there, you’ll realize that you do know what to do. But since you don’t remember learning how to do it, the only way to know for sure is to put you in a circumstance where your procedural memory will be forced to kick in.”
    “My what?”
    “Procedural memory. The type of memory that lets you do something without consciously thinking about it, like swimming or driving a car,” she explains. “Which is different from declarative memory, which lets you consciously recall facts and events. Don’t you remember AP Psych?”
    “You’re seriously asking me that right now?”
    “The point is, by the time your parallel gets to where you are right now, she’ll have both an unconscious, procedural memory of how to cox a boat—well enough to be on a Division I team, no less—and a set of conscious, declarative memories associated with doing it. We know you don’t have the conscious memories yet, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have the unconscious ones.”
    “Are you getting off or not?” a gruff voice barks. I jerk up. The bus driver is turned around, looking at me expectantly. I’m the only one still on the bus, which is now stopped in front of a sprawling wooden complex. I nod distractedly and stand up.
    “Are you listening to what I’m saying?” Caitlin asks.
    “Yes. Procedural and declarative memories. Got it.” I sling my bag over my shoulder and hurry toward the impatient bus driver. “Sorry,” I mumble on my way past him.
    Kids in sweats and Windbreakers mill around the boathouse, looking purposeful and busy. A group of guys in spandex carry a boat painted in Yale blue over their heads, while two middle-aged men wearing matching white visors—coaches?—consult wooden clipboards. Waves lap against the deck in a steady rhythm as people perform their various tasks. Things are orderly here. Organized. I breathe in the calm. My life may be chaotic, but this crew practice is not.
    “Abby!” The girl from the bus is standing at the boathouse door, which is framed on each side by a row of fiberglass oars. The entrance cuts through the building and opens onto an expansive deck overlooking the silver blue of the Housatonic River. “Want me to wait for you?” she calls.
    “No, that’s okay!” I yell back. “I’ll be in in a minute.” The girl nods and disappears inside. “So what am I supposed to do?” I ask Caitlin. “Just hop in the boat and hope it all comes back to me?”
    “Pretty much.”
    “And if it doesn’t? If I make a total fool of myself?”
    “Feign amnesia.”
    “Funny,” I retort. The deck is beginning to clear. “Okay, if I’m going to this practice, I need to go now.”
    “Go,” Caitlin urges. “Consider it research.”
    Despite the very real risk that this will result in my looking like a complete idiot in front of the entire crew team, I have to admit I’m curious.
    “Fine. I’ll go.”
    “Yay!”
    “Wish me luck,” I say, not optimistic that I’ll have any.
    “Who needs luck?” Caitlin replies. “You’re a freak of nature. You’re the definition of luck!”
    I hang up on her and head inside the boathouse.
    What happens on the water is beyond surreal. One minute, I’m sitting at the stern of a wobbly wooden boat, facing eight excessively tall female rowers (seriously, one of them is six foot two and the shortest is five foot ten), waiting for our stone-faced head coach to blow his whistle, praying that I’ll somehow be able to fake it when he does.
    Half a second later, autopilot kicks in, and I’m steering the boat and barking into my headset like a pro. For the first few minutes, I struggle to get the calls out fast enough. But once I’m in a rhythm on the water, my motions become instinctive, and it stops being so much work. It’s unnerving how natural it feels. Unnerving, but ridiculously cool. The cox is literally the boss of the boat—it’s my job to decide where we go and how quickly we get there. A task the planner in me was made for.
    As we’re running through our second warm-up drill, my mind wanders back to the night that got me here. Ilana’s party. The terrible music, the crowded living room, the mini barrel of artificially sweetened punch. Standing in the street in front of that unfinished house, willing that guy