Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

1

IF THINGS HAD BEEN DIFFERENT, I’D BE CALLED Nataliya or Natasha, and I’d have a Russian accent and chapped lips year round. Maybe I’d even be a street kid who’d trade you just about anything for a pair of blue jeans. But I am not Nataliya or Natasha, because at six months old I was delivered from Kratovo, Moscow Oblast, to Brooklyn, New York. I don’t remember the trip or ever having lived in Russia at all. What I know about my orphanhood is limited to what I’ve been told by my parents and then by what they were told, which was sketchy at best: a week-old baby girl was found in an empty typewriter case in the second-to-last pew of an Eastern Orthodox Church. Was the case a clue to my biological father’s profession? Did the church mean my birth mother was devout? I’ll never know, so I choose not to speculate. Besides, I hate orphan stories. They’re all the same, but most books are bursting with them anyway. You start to think everyone in the whole world must be an orphan.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know I was adopted. There was never a dramatic “we have something to tell you” talk. My adoption was simply another fact, like having dark hair or no siblings. I knew I was adopted even before I knew what that truly meant. Understanding adoption requires a basic understanding of sex, something I would not have until third grade when Gina Papadakis brought her grandparents’ disturbingly dog-eared copy of The Joy of Sex to school. She passed it around at lunch and while most everyone else was gagging with the realization that their parents had done that to make them (so much hair, and the people in the drawings were not one bit joyful…), I felt perfectly fine, even a little smug. I might be adopted, but at least my parents hadn’t degraded themselves like that for my sake.

You’re probably wondering why they didn’t do it the old-fashioned way. Not that it’s any of your business, but they tried for a while without getting anywhere. After about a year, Mom and Dad decided that, rather than invest about a billion dollars on fertility treatments that might not work anyway, it would be better to spend the money helping some sob story like me. This is why you are not, at the very moment, holding in your hands the inspiring true account of a Kratovan orphan called Nataliya, who, things being different, might be named Nancy or Naomi.

Truth is, I rarely think about any of this. I’m only telling you now because, in a way, I was born to be an amnesiac. I have always been required to fill in the blanks.

But I’m definitely getting ahead of myself.

When he heard about my (for lack of a better term) accident, my best friend, Will, who I’d completely forgotten at the time, wrote me a letter. (I didn’t come across it immediately because he had slipped it inside the sleeve of a mix CD.) He had inherited a battered black typewriter from his great-uncle Desmond who’d supposedly been a war correspondent, though Will was unclear which war it had been. There was a dent on the carriage return that Will theorized might be from a ricocheting bullet. In any case, Will liked composing letters on the typewriter, even when it would have been much easier to send an e-mail or call a person on the phone. Incidentally, the boy wasn’t antitechnology; he just had an appreciation for things other people had forgotten.

I should tell you that the following dispatch, while being the only record of the events leading up to my accident, does not really convey much of Will’s personality. It was completely unlike him to be so formal, stiff, boring even. You do get some sense of him from his footnotes, but half of you probably won’t bother with those anyway. I know I didn’t. At the time, I felt about footnotes nearly the same way I did about orphan stories.

Chief:

The first thing you should know about me is that I remember everything, and the second thing is that I’m probably the most honest person in the world. I realize that you can’t trust anyone who says that they’re honest, and knowing this, I wouldn’t normally say something like that about myself. I’m only telling you now because it’s something I feel you should know.

In an attempt to make myself useful to you,

I have assembled a timeline of the events leading up to your accident, which you may or may not find helpful, but you will find below.

6:36 p.m. Naomi Porter and William Landsman, Co-editors of the national-award-winning¹ Thomas Purdue Country Day School yearbook, leave the offices of The Phoenix.²

6:45 p.m. Porter and Landsman arrive at the student parking lot. Porter realizes that they have left the camera back at the office.

6:46 p.m. Discussion³ ensues regarding who should have to return to the office to retrieve the camera. Landsman suggests settling the matter with a coin toss,⁴ a proposition which Porter accepts. Landsman says that he will be heads, but Porter states⁵ that she should be heads. Landsman concedes, as oft happens. Landsman flips the coin, and Porter loses.

6:53 p.m. Landsman drives home; Porter returns to The Phoenix.

7:02 p.m.⁶ (approx.) Porter arrives at the Phoenix office where she retrieves the camera.

7:05 p.m. (approx.) Porter falls down the exterior front steps at school. Porter strikes head on bottom step, but manages to hold on to the camera.⁷ Porter is discovered by one James Larkin.⁸

As I mentioned to you, I am always available to answer any other questions as they might arise.

I remain your faithful servant,

William B.⁹ Landsman

P.S. Apologies for the “I” [i] key. Hopefully, you’ve figured out by now that the thing that resembles a trident is actually the letter “I.” There’s a defect in my typewriter such that every time capital “i” is pressed, “U” comes down with it.

Of course, I didn’t remember any of this. Not the coin toss. Not the camera. Certainly not my best friend, the veracious William Blake Landsman.

The first thing I remembered was “that cat” James Larkin, though I didn’t even know his name at the time. And I didn’t remember all of James, James proper. Just his voice, because my eyes were still closed and I guess you’d call me asleep. Or half-asleep, like when your alarm clock sounds and you manage to ignore it for a while. You hear the radio and the shower; you smell coffee and toast. You know you will wake; it’s only a question of when, and of what or who will finally push you into day.

His voice was low and steady. I’ve always associated those types of voices with honesty, but I’m sure there are loads of low-pitched liars just waiting to take advantage of easy prey like me. Even semi-conscious, I lapsed into my prejudices and decided to trust every word James said: “Sir, my name is James Larkin. Unfortunately her family is not here, but I am her boyfriend, and I am riding in this ambulance.” I didn’t hear anyone argue with him. His tone did not allow for discussion.

Someone took my hand, and I opened my eyes. It was him, though I didn’t know his face.

“Hey there,” he said softly, “welcome back.”

I did not stop to consider where I had been that required welcoming. I did not even ask myself why I was in an ambulance with a boy who said he was my boyfriend but whom I did not readily recognize.

As ridiculous as this might seem, I tried to smile, but I doubt if he even saw. My attempt didn’t last that long.

The pain came. The kind of pain for which there is no analogy; the kind of pain that allows for no other thought. The epicenter was concentrated in the area above my left eye, but it barely mattered; the waves through the rest of my head were almost worse. My brain felt too large for my skull. I felt like I needed to throw up, but I didn’t.

Without my having to tell him, James asked, “Could someone please give her some drugs?”

An EMT shone a light in my eyes. “Not until she’s seen a doctor, maybe even had a CT scan. But it’s terrific news that she’s already up. Just five more minutes, okay, Naomi?”

“Just five more minutes until what?” I asked, trying to sound patient. Until Christmas? Until my head exploded?

“Sorry. Until we’re at the hospital,” said the EMT.

At this point, the pain in my head was so strong that I wanted to weep. I probably would have, too, but it occurred to me that crying might actually make me feel worse.

“Are you positive she can’t have any drugs?” James yelled.

“Distract her. Tell her a joke or something. We’re almost there,” was the EMT’s annoying, unhelpful reply.

“I don’t think that’s gonna do it,” James retorted.

“Laughter’s the best medicine,” said the EMT. I believe this may have been his idea of a joke, but it did nothing for my headache.

“Complete and utter…” James leaned in closer to me. He smelled like smoke and laundered sheets left to dry in the sun. “…bullshit, but would you like a joke anyway?” he asked.

I nodded. I really would have preferred drugs.

“Well, I can only think of one, and it’s not that good. Certainly not analgesic good. So…okay, this man goes to a psychiatrist and says, ‘My wife’s insane. She thinks she’s a chicken.’ And the doctor goes, ‘Well, why don’t you just commit her?’ And the man says—”

Just as he was about to reveal the punch line, a particularly impressive wave of pain pulsed through my head. My nails dug into James’s palm, piercing his skin, making him bleed. I couldn’t speak, so I tried to telegraph my apology with a look.

“No worries,” James said, “I can take it.” He winked at me.

In the emergency room, a doctor with eyes so bloodshot they made me tired just looking at them asked James how long I had been passed out, and he replied twenty-one minutes, he knew exactly. He’d seen it happen. “At Tom Purdue, there’re these steps out front. One second, she’s walking down them and the next, she’s flying headfirst toward me, like a meteor.”

“Is it strange that I don’t remember that?” I asked.

“Nope,” said the doctor. “Perfectly ordinary to forget incident-associated narrative for a time.” She shined a light in my eyes, and I flinched.

At some point, another doctor and a nurse had joined the party, though I couldn’t have told you when with any confidence. Nor can I recall much about them as individuals. They were an indistinct blur of pastel and white uniforms, like chalk doodles on a sidewalk in the rain.

The second doctor said that she had to ask me a couple of questions, general ones, not about the accident.

“Your full name?”

“Naomi Paige Porter.”

“Where do you live?”

“Tarrytown, New York.”

“Good, Naomi, good. What year is it?”

“Two thousand and…2000, maybe?”

Even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t right. Because if it was 2000, I would have been twelve, and I knew for sure I wasn’t twelve. I didn’t feel twelve. I felt…I couldn’t say the exact number, but I just knew I felt older. Seventeen. Eighteen. My body didn’t feel twelve. My mind didn’t feel twelve either. And there was James, James proper—James looked at least seventeen, maybe older—and I felt the same age as him, the same as him. I looked from doctor to doctor to nurse: poker faces, every one.

One of the doctors said, “Okay, that’s fine for now. Try not to worry.” This made me worry, of course.

I decided that the best thing for me to do would be to go home and sleep it off. I tried to sit up in the gurney, which made my head throb even more intensely than it had been.

“Whoa, Naomi, where you going?” the nurse said. He and James gently pushed me back into a horizontal position.

The doctor repeated, “Try not to worry.”

The other doctor paraphrased, “Really, you shouldn’t worry.”

As they walked across the ER to some other patient, I heard the doctors muttering to each other all sorts of worrisome phrases: “mild traumatic brain injury” and “specialist” and “CT scan” and “possible retrograde amnesia.” I have a tendency to deal with things by not dealing with them at all, so instead of demanding that someone immediately tell me what was wrong, I just listened until I couldn’t hear them anymore and then decided to concentrate on matters more tangible.

James always said how ugly he was, but I think he must have known that he wasn’t. The only bad thing anyone could have said about him was that he was too skinny, but never mind that. Maybe because I couldn’t seem to remember anything else, I felt like I needed to memorize every single thing about him. His fraying white dress shirt was open, so I could see that he was wearing a really old concert T-shirt—it was faded to the point that I couldn’t even tell what the band was. His boxers were sticking out over his jeans, and I could make out they were a dark green plaid. His fingers were long and thin like the rest of him, and a few of them were smudged with black ink. His hair was damp with sweat, which made it even darker than usual. Around his neck was a single leather rope with a silver ring on it, and I wondered if the ring was mine. His collar had gotten half turned up. I noticed blood on his lapels.

“There’s blood on your collar,” I said.

“Um…it’s yours.” He laughed.

I laughed, too, even though it made my brain beat like a heart. “In the ambulance…” For whatever reason, the phrase in the ambulance embarrassed me, and I had to rephrase. “In the van, you said you were my boyfriend?”

“Hmm, I hadn’t known you were listening to that.” He had this funny smile on his face and he shook his head a couple of times, as if in conversation with himself. He let go of my hand and laid it on the gurney. “No,” he said, “I just said you were my girlfriend so they would let me ride with you. I didn’t want you to be alone.”

This was disappointing news, to say the least.

There’s a joke about amnesiacs, which always reminds me of meeting James. It’s not exactly a joke, but more a “funny” slogan you’d wear on a T-shirt if you were a) an amnesiac, and b) extremely corny, and c) probably had issues in addition to amnesia, like low self-esteem or the need to give “too much information” or just plain bad taste in clothes. Okay, picture a really cheap, fifty-percent-polyester jersey with a white front and red sleeves. Now add the words “Hi, I’m an amnesiac. Have we met before?”

“You know something funny?” I said. “The first thing I thought about you was what an honest voice you had, and it turns out you were lying to me.”

“No. Not to you. Only to some jerk in a uniform,” he corrected. “If I’d been thinking at all, I would have said you were my sister. No one would have even questioned that.”

“Except me. I don’t have any siblings.” I tried to make a joke of it. If given the choice, I preferred being his imaginary girlfriend to being his imaginary sister. “Are we friends, at least?”

“No, Naomi,” James said with the same little smile, “can’t say that we are.”

“Why not?” He seemed like the kind of person it might be nice to be friends with.

“Maybe we ought to be” was all he replied.

It was and it wasn’t a satisfactory answer, so I tried a different question. “Before, when you were shaking your head, what were you thinking?”

“You’re really gonna ask me that?”

“You have to tell me. I might die, you know.”

“I didn’t take you for the manipulative kind.”

I closed my eyes and pretended to pass out.

“Oh, all right, but that’s awful low,” he said with a resigned laugh. “I was wondering if I could get away with letting you think I was your boyfriend. And then I decided that would definitely be the wrong thing to do. It wouldn’t be fair—you don’t even know what year it is, for God’s sake. A good relationship is not built on lies and all that crap.

“And well, I also wondered if it would be wrong to kiss you—not on the mouth, maybe on your forehead or hand—while I had the chance, while you were still thinking you were mine. And I decided that would be very, very wrong and probably uncomfortable later on. Plus, a girl like you probably does have a boyfriend—”

I interrupted. “You think?”

James nodded. “Definitely. I don’t give a damn about him, but I didn’t want to compromise you…or take advantage. I decided that if I ever kissed you, I’d want your permission. I’d want—”

At that moment, my dad came into the ER.

James had been leaning over the side of the gurney railing, but he stood up straight like a soldier to shake Dad’s hand. “Sir,” he said, “I’m James Larkin. I go to school with your daughter.” But Dad pushed right past James to get to me, and James was left with his palm in the air, and I saw the four puncture wounds my nails had made from grabbing him so tight.

The doctors returned then, followed by a nurse, a specialist, and an orderly who began wheeling me away without even bothering to tell me where, and then I really had to throw up, and I didn’t want James to have to watch that (I didn’t want him to leave either), and somehow James slipped out without my seeing, which is something I would later find out he had a talent for.

Once I was admitted into a room, Dad passed the time by asking me if I was okay. “You okay, kid?”

“Yes, Dad.”

Five seconds later, “Kiddo, are you okay?”

In an amazing display of restraint, I managed to reply Yes, Dad three more times even though I had no earthly idea if I was. On the fifth or sixth time, I finally just snapped, “Where’s Mom?” She was better than Dad in these types of situations.

“In the city,” he said. He kept pacing the room and looking up and down the hallway. “Christ, is anyone ever going to help us?”

“Is she working?” Mom was a photographer and she sometimes had to go into New York City for that.

“Working?” Dad repeated. His head was sticking out the door like a turtle, but he pulled it back inside so that he could look at me. “She’s…She…Naomi, are you trying to worry me?”

“Dad, are you screwing with me?” Knowing my dad, this was not an unlikely scenario.

“Screwing with you?”

I assumed he hadn’t liked my use of the word screw, though Dad was not normally the sort of parent who cared much about swearing. He always said that words were words and the only reason to ever eliminate any of them was if they were either hurtful (and you weren’t meaning to be) or inexpressive. I figured that the anxiety of the situation must be getting to him, so I rephrased. “Sorry. Playing with me, whatever.”

“Are you screwing with me?” Dad asked.

“So you can use screw and I can’t? That doesn’t seem fair,” I protested.

“I don’t give a damn if you use the word screw, Naomi. But is that what you’re doing?”

“I’m not screwing with you! Just tell me where Mom is.”

“In N.Y.C.” It sounded like slow motion. EHNNNNN. WHYYYYY. SEEEEE. “New York—”

“City. Yes, I know what N.Y.C. stands for. But why?”

“She lives there. Since the divorce. You can’t have forgotten that.”

I’m sure you’ve already figured out that I had.

Everyone always says how much I look like her—my mom, I mean—which is ridiculous because she is half-Scottish and half-Japanese. We both have light blue eyes though, so I guess this accounts for the misunderstanding. No one ever says I look like Dad, which is ironic because he is actually part Russian. The rest of him is French, and all of him is Jewish, though he’s not observant. All this makes everyone sound much more interesting than they are—my mom’s really just a California girl, and my dad was born in D.C., and they met in college in New York City, where we used to live until I was eleven. If you’re a wine-drinking type, you might have heard of them. They wrote a series of travel memoirs/coffee table books called The Wandering Porters Do…and then fill in the blank with the exotic locale of your choice, somewhere like Morocco or Tuscany. My mom took the pictures, and my dad wrote the text, except for the occasional footnote by Mom. Her footnotes were usually something mortifying, like “2. At an Edam cheese factory, Naomi vomited in an enormous wooden clog.” Or “7. Naomi was particularly fond of the schnitzel.” As for my contribution, I made a series of increasingly awkward appearances in their author photo on the back jacket flap above the caption “When not wandering, Cassandra Miles-Porter and Grant Porter live in New York with their daughter, Naomi.”

That’s what popped into my head when Dad said they were divorced—all those Wandering Porter books and me as a kid on the back flap. In a strange way, I didn’t feel like their divorce was happening to me, certainly not the “me” in that moment, the person lying in the hospital bed. It was happening to that little girl on the book jackets. I felt sad for her, but nothing yet for myself.

“Did it just happen?” I asked.

“Did what just happen?”

“The divorce.”

“It’s been two years, eleven months, but we’ve been separated close to four years now,” Dad said. Something in his tone told me he probably knew the precise number of days, too. Maybe even minutes and seconds. Dad was like that. “The doctors, they said you weren’t sure of the year before, but…Well, do you think this is part of the same thing?”

I didn’t answer him. For the first time, I allowed for the possibility that I had forgotten everything from the last four years.

I tried to remember the last thing I could remember. This turns out to be an incredibly difficult task because your brain is constantly making new memories. What came to mind was uselessly recent: my blood on James’s collar.

I decided to make a more specific request of my brain. I tried to remember the last thing I could about my mother. What came to me was her “Sign of the Times” show, which was an exhibition of her photographs at a Brooklyn gallery. She picked me up on the last day of sixth grade, so that she could give me a private showing before anyone else got there. The show had consisted of her pictures of signs from around the country and the world: street, traffic, restaurant, township, movie theater, bathroom, signs that were painted over but you could still make them out, signs handmade by homeless people or hitchhikers, etc. Mom had this theory that you could tell everything about people (and civilization in general) from the kinds of signs they put up. For example, one of her favorite pictures was of a mostly rusted sign in front of a house somewhere in the backwoods. The sign read NO DOGS NEGROS MEXICANS. She said that, regardless of the rust, it had communicated to her clear as anything “to take the picture quick and get the hell out of town.” Most of her exhibit was more boring than that, though. As we were leaving, I told her I was proud of her because that’s what my parents always said to me whenever they came to see a dance recital or attended a school open house. Mom replied that she was “proud of herself, too.” I could remember her smiling just before she started to cry.

“So is Mom on her way, then?” I asked Dad.

“I didn’t think you’d want her here.”

I told him that she was my mother, so of course I wanted her.

“The thing is”—Dad cleared his throat before continuing—“I have called her, but since you haven’t really spoken to each other for a while, it didn’t seem right that she come.” Dad furrowed his brow. I noticed that he had less hair on his head than my brain was telling me he ought to have. “Do you want me to call her back?”

I did. I longed for Mom in the most primitive way, but I didn’t want to seem like a baby or not like myself, whatever that meant. And Mom and I not speaking? It seemed so unbelievable to me and like more than I could even begin to figure out in my current state. I needed time to think.

I told Dad that he didn’t need to call Mom, and his brow unfurrowed a wrinkle or two. “Well, that’s what I thought,” he said.

About a minute later, Dad clapped his hands together before taking his pad and pencil out of his back pocket. He always carried them in case he should be inspired. “You should make a list of everything you don’t remember,” he said, holding the pencil out to me.

Although my dad writes mainly books for a living, what he loves writing most are lists. Groceries, books he’s read, people he’s angry at, the list goes on. If he could write lists for money instead of books, I think he’d be a happier person overall. I once said that to him, and he laughed before replying, “What do you think a table of contents is, kid? A book is just a very detailed and elaborate list.”

My father is one of those people who believe that anything can be accomplished, the ills of the world cured, so long as it’s written down and assigned a number. Maybe it’s genetic, because I am most definitely not one of those people.

“So how about it?” Dad was still holding the pencil out to me.

“If I can’t remember it in the first place, how’ll I remember to put it on the list?” I asked. It was the most absurd thing in a day of absurd things, as ridiculous as asking a person who has lost her keys where she had last seen them.

“Oh. Good point.” Dad tapped on his head with his pencil. “Brain’s still working better than your old man’s, I see. How about, as you hear things you don’t remember, you tell me, and I’ll write them down for you?”

I shrugged. At least it would keep Dad occupied.

“Things Naomi has forgotten,” he said as he wrote. “Number one, Cass’s and my divorce.” He held up the paper to show me. “Just seeing it written down, doesn’t that make it all so much less frightening?”

It didn’t.

“Number two,” he continued. “Everything after Cass’s and my divorce. So that would be 2001, right?”

“I don’t know.” I knew Dad was trying to be helpful, but he was really starting to annoy the crap out of me.

“Number ten. Your boyfriend, I’m assuming?”

“I have a boyfriend?” I thought of what James had said.

Dad looked at me. “Ace. He’s still away at tennis camp.” He made a note.

My dad was up to nineteen (“Driver’s Ed? No. Driving? Maybe.”) when a nurse came into the room to wheel me away for my first of many tests. I remember feeling relieved that I didn’t have to hear twenty.

I was in the hospital for three more nights. A rotating coven of evil nurses would wake me up every three hours or so by shining a flash-light in my eyes. This is what they do when you’ve had a head trauma: all you want to do is sleep, and no one will let you. Besides not sleeping, the rest of my time was occupied with taking boring tests, ignoring my father’s incessant list-making, and wondering if James Larkin might take it upon himself to visit.

He didn’t.

My first visitor was William Landsman. Visiting hours began at eleven o’clock on Fridays, and Will showed up at 10:54. My dad had gone outside to make a few phone calls, so there was no one around to even tell me who this teenage boy in the maroon smoking jacket was. “Nice save, Chief!” Will said as he entered the room.

I asked him what he meant, and he explained about my rescue of the yearbook camera. “Not a scratch on it. Really going above and beyond the call of duty there,” he added.

Despite his questionable clothing choices, Will was not the least bit fussy or wimpy. When I asked him about the jacket, he claimed to wear it ironically, “as a way to entertain myself in the face of the daily monotony of school uniforms.” He was compactly built, about my height (five feet seven inches), but solid-looking. He had wavy chestnut hair and dark blue eyes, sapphire or cerulean, a deeper shade than either mine or my mother’s. His eyelashes were very long and looked as if they had been coated with mascara even though they hadn’t been. On that day he had light dark circles under his eyes, and his cheeks were flushed. If he seemed loud or cavalier about my condition, I suspect now that it was a way of masking his concern for me. In any case, I liked him immediately. He felt comfortable and broken-in like favorite jeans. It probably goes without saying that James had had the opposite effect on me in the brief time that I had known him.

“Are you Ace?” I asked, remembering what Dad had said about my having a boyfriend.

Will removed his black rectangular-framed glasses and wiped them on his pants. I would later learn that removing his glasses was something Will did when embarrassed, as if not seeing something clearly could in some way distance him from an awkward situation. “No, I most definitely am not,” he said. “Ace’s about six inches taller than me. And also, he’s your boyfriend.” A second later, Will’s eyes flashed something mischievous. “Okay, so this is deeply wrong. I want it on the record that you are acknowledging that this is deeply wrong before I even say it.”

“Fine. It’s wrong,” I said.

“Deeply—”

“Deeply wrong.”

“Good.” Will nodded. “I feel so much better that you don’t remember him either. By the by, your man’s a dolt not to come.”

“Dolt?” Who used dolt?

“Tool. No offense.”

“Leave. Right now,” I said in a mock stern tone. “You go too far insulting Ace…What’s his last name?”

“Zuckerman.”

“Right. Zuckerman. Yeah, I’m really outraged about you insulting the boyfriend I don’t remember anyway.”

“You might be later and if that’s the case, I take it all back. Visiting hours only started a minute ago, so he’ll probably still come,” Will said, by way of encouragement I suppose.

“Dad said he was still at tennis camp.”

“If it were my girlfriend, I would have come back from tennis camp.”

“Who’s your girlfriend?” I asked.

“I don’t have one. I was speaking hypothetically.” Will chuckled and then stuck out his hand for me to shake. “Introductions are in order. I am William Landsman, the Co-editor of The Phoenix. Incidentally, you’re the other Co-editor. Your dad said you might have forgotten some things, but I didn’t think it was possible I might be one of them.”

“Are you that memorable?”

“Pretty much. Yes.” He nodded decisively.

“And humble.” I didn’t need to remember him to know exactly how to tease him.

“And also your best friend, if you haven’t already figured it out.” Will cleaned his glasses again.

“Really? My best friend wears a smoking jacket?” I nodded. “That’s very interesting.”

“It’s ironic. Seriously though, you can ask me anything. Honest to God, Chief, I know everything about you.”

I looked in his eyes, and I decided to trust him. “How does my face look?” Since they’d stitched up my forehead, I’d been basically trying to avoid my reflection.

He examined me from both sides and then from the front. “A little swollen around your left eye and cheekbone, but most of it’s covered by the tape and gauze.”

“Look under the gauze, will you?”

“Chief, I am not looking under the gauze for you! It’s completely unsanitary and probably against the rules! Do you want me to get kicked out of here and not be able to visit you?”

“I want a report before I have to see it for myself. I want to know if I’m, like, disfigured.” I tried to say this casually, but I was scared. “Please, Will, it’s important.”

Will sighed heavily before grumbling, “I said I’d tell you anything, not that I’d do anything. I want it on the record that I, William Landsman, did not want to do this, and am furthermore not trained for medical procedures.” He went into my room’s doll-house W.C. and washed his hands before returning to my bedside. He placed his left hand gently on the right side of my face before using his right hand to slowly remove a section of surgical tape from the left side near my hairline. “Tell me if I’m hurting you. Even a little.” I nodded.

When one of my hairs got pulled in the tape, I winced what I thought was imperceptibly, and Will stopped. “Am I hurting you?”

I shook my head. “Go on.”

Ten seconds later he had removed enough of the tape so that he could lift up the gauze and look under it. “There are nine stitches, and a raised knob right below that, probably the size of a brussels sprout, and a larger bruise spread out across your forehead. None of it looks permanent. You’ll probably have a tiny scar from the stitches.” He refastened the gauze as delicately as he had removed it. “You’re still insanely, unfairly, torturously beautiful, and that’s the last I’m gonna say about it, Chief.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“You are welcome,” he said jauntily. “Glad to be of service.” He tipped an imaginary hat. “Don’t think I’m unaware that you were really just fishing for compliments.”

“Yup, you see right through me,” I said.

Will leaned in close and whispered, “Come on, admit it. You really do remember me. All this amnesia crap is so you can get a break from The Phoenix.”

“How’d you know? I just didn’t want to hurt your feelings, Landsman.”

“That’s real considerate of you.”

“So, what’s my boyfriend like?” I asked him.

“Let’s see. Ace Zuckerman is an awfully good tennis player.”

“You’re saying you don’t like him.”

“As he’s not my boyfriend, I don’t think I’m technically required to, Chief.”

“What about James Larkin?”

“James Larkin. Larkin comma James. Yeah, we haven’t really met him yet. He’s new this year, which is unusual for a senior. I think he might have gotten kicked out of his last school or something.”

“A delinquent?” That was interesting…

Will shrugged. “I only met him this morning when he dropped off the camera at The Phoenix and he was polite as anything. FYI, the kid is nothing like Ace Zuckerman.” He paused. “Or me.” He reached into his messenger bag and pulled out his laptop. “You have your headphones with you, right?”

I shook my head. “I’m not sure.”

“You always do. Where’s your bag?”

I pointed to the closet in the corner of the room. Will opened the door and started digging through my backpack, which probably should have bothered me, but it didn’t. It seemed like someone else’s bag anyway. He pulled out an iPod, presumably mine, then plugged it into his laptop. “When I heard from your dad, I decided to make you a mix. Don’t worry. I burned it for you, too.” He handed me a CD and a playlist entitled Songs for a Teenage Amnesiac, Vol. I. “It’s not one of my best. Some of the selections are a little broad,” he continued, “but I was under time constraints. I promise that Volume II will be better, as it is with, for example, the second record of the Beatles’ White Album or the Godfather movies.”

Will handed me my headphones and put away his laptop. He started speaking really fast. “It’s hard to make a good mix. You don’t want anything too cliché, but you don’t want to make the songs too obscure either. Plus, you can only fit about nineteen tracks on a CD, and you want each one to say something different, and you want a balance of slow and fast songs, and then there’s the added pressure of making sure each track organically leads to the next. Plus, you’ve got to know the person for whom the mix is intended really well. For example, on yours each of the songs means something. Like the first one is sort of how we met freshman year. I thought it might jog your memory.”

I read the CD liner. “‘Fight Test,’ the Flaming Lips?”

“Yeah, I was on the fence between that and ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Part I.’ And also ‘To Whom It May Concern’ by John Wesley Harding. I eliminated that one first ’cause I had another of his songs I wanted to use and it’s bad form to duplicate artists. The one I used instead is called ‘Song I Wrote Myself in the Future,’ and it’s the next to last track.”

I was about to ask him how we had met, but I was interrupted by the arrival of someone who made me forget the mix and William Landsman for the time being.

“Hi, Mrs. Miles,” Will said to my mother.

“Hello there,” she replied uncertainly.

Will laughed. “We’ve never met before, but I’ve seen your picture. I’m William Landsman, Will.”

“Could we have a moment alone?” my mother asked Will.

Will looked at me. “You’ll be okay?”

I nodded.

“I should be getting back to yearbook anyway,” Will said.

“There’s yearbook in the summer?” I asked.

“It never quits.” He took my hand in his and shook it rather formally. “I’ll call you,” he promised. “Don’t forget to charge up your cell phone.”

After Will closed the door, neither my mother nor I spoke.

My mother is beautiful, and since I’m adopted you can know I’m not saying that as some sort of backhanded way of telling you how pretty I am. Besides, everyone says so. And she isn’t beautiful in any of the clichéd ways. She’s not tall and skinny and blond with big boobs or something. She’s little and curvy with wavy light brown hair halfway down her back and almond-shaped ice blue eyes. It felt like I hadn’t seen her in forever. I almost started to cry, but something kept me from doing it.

Mom, however, did not hold back. She burst into tears almost as soon as she got to my bedside. “I told myself I wasn’t going to do that,” she said. She mock-slapped herself across the face before taking my hand.

“Where were you?” I asked.

“Your dad told me not to come, that you didn’t want me. But how could I not come?” She looked at my face. “Your poor head.” She ever so gently stroked my brow, and then she leaned over to hug me. I pulled away. I needed to know a few things first.

“You and Dad are divorced.”

She nodded.

“But why?”

Dad came into the room then. His voice was hard as bricks. “Yes, tell her, Cass.”

“I can explain.” Mom’s eyes started to tear again. “You were twelve when I ran into Nigel. It was just by chance.”

“Who’s Nigel?”

“Her high school boyfriend,” Dad answered for her.

“Just by chance,” Mom repeated. “I was waiting for the subway, and it was the most random thing in the whole—”

I told her that I didn’t want a story, only facts.

“I…” she began again. “This is so hard.”

I told her that I didn’t want adjectives and adverbs, only nouns and verbs. I asked her if she could handle that. She nodded and cleared her throat.

“I had an affair,” she said.

“I got pregnant,” she said.

“Your dad and I divorced,” she said.

“I married Nigel and moved back to the city.”

“You have a three-year-old sister.”

“Sister?” It was a foreign word on my tongue, gibberish. Sisters were something other people had, like mono or ponies.

“But I thought you couldn’t have children,” I said.

Dad whispered to my mother something about how he had been trying to break this to me slowly, how I had already been through a lot. He had never mentioned my sister or Mom’s pregnancy, which seemed odd, especially when you consider all his list-making. I wondered what else he’d been holding back.

“Sister?” I repeated. It felt even more made up the second time.

“Yes. Her name is Chloe.”

“Are we close?” I asked.

“No,” Mom said. “You refuse to see her.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“It’s probably a lot to hear all at once,” Dad said.

“How are you feeling, cupcake?” Her voice was high and whispery. She sounded like she was floating away.

How did I feel? “About what? Which part?”

“About everything I’ve just told you, I suppose.”

What I felt was that all of these were very good reasons for us not to be speaking. It was one thing for Mom and Dad to have gotten divorced, but for Mom to get together with her high school boyfriend and have an affair and a daughter and a whole new family…“I feel like”—her eyes were wide and expectant—“I honestly feel repulsed. I honestly feel like you’re a slut.”

“Naomi,” Dad said.

“What?” I asked. “She is. Women who cheat on their husbands and get pregnant are sluts. Why don’t you add that one to your list, Dad?”

Mom stood up and started backing away from my bed, not quite able to look me in the eye. “I understand,” she said, “I understand. I understand.” Finally, Dad said that he thought she should go, which was funny because she seemed to be heading in that direction already.

“What happened to the Wandering Porters?” I asked after Mom had left.

“They wander no more.” Dad tried to make a joke out of it. “The last book was Iceland. Do you remember that summer we went to Iceland?”

I did. We had left right after Mom’s show, which may have even made it my last memory. I was twelve, and it had pretty much been fifty degrees all summer long, the coldest summer of my life. My mom and I used to say that it was the summer without any summer.

“What do you do now?” I asked.

“Your mom still takes pictures. I still write books. We just don’t do it together. And the Wandering Porters are still in print mostly.”

“What are your new books about?”

“Um…well, the last one was about…I’m not good at describing. It was about lots of things really,” Dad said. “But the jacket copy said it was about ‘the end of my marriage as seen through the prism of larger world events.’”

I interpreted. “It’s about the divorce?”

“Basically. You could say that. Yes.”

I asked him if I had liked it. He said that I hadn’t even read it, but that the reviews had been pretty decent.

“Maybe I should read it now?” I said. “If my memory doesn’t come back.”

“Yeah, you could just skip through the parts about the Middle East,” Dad suggested. “There’s quite a bit about that, too. Not that you shouldn’t be informed, but even I think it gets a little dry. Naomi, are you crying?”

I guess I was. “I’m sorry,” I said. I turned onto my side, away from Dad. I didn’t want him to watch me cry. In all likelihood, the reason he hadn’t already told me about Mom and Chloe was because he hadn’t wanted to discuss it himself.

Whenever Dad said anything serious, he would usually undercut it with a joke. That was his style. When he and my mom used to throw parties, he always had a funny story and could make everyone else laugh. My dad certainly wasn’t what anyone would call shy, and yet he was. By himself, he was always a bit stingy with saying certain things. Like, he rarely said “I love you.” I knew that he did love me. He just didn’t say it a whole lot. My mom was the one with all the “I love you’s.” But I understood what Dad was like because I was like that, too. This was why I couldn’t look at him.

“Why are you crying, kiddo? Is it your head?”

The doctors had told us that people with head injuries could be emotional, but it wasn’t that. It was just…everything.

“It wasn’t entirely your mother’s fault. Mainly hers, but…” Dad laughed. “I’m kidding. Mostly.”

I felt so alone.

“What is it? Please, tell your old man.”

“I feel like an orphan.” I was sobbing to the point that Dad couldn’t understand me the first time and I had to repeat myself. “I’m an orphan.”

It probably won’t make any sense, but it was like my mother was less my mother than she had been before. Or maybe that I was less her child now that she had a new one. I was a vestigial daughter: an obsolete girl with an obsolete brain and an obsolete heart. I could hear my dad’s breathing, but he didn’t say anything and I still couldn’t bear to look at him. I closed my eyes.

“Naomi?” Dad said after a while. “Are you sleeping?”

I kept my eyes closed and let him think that I was.

He kissed me on my forehead. “I’ll never leave you, kid.” He wouldn’t have said this if he’d thought I was awake.

2

BY MONDAY MORNING, THE DOCTORS HAD DETERMINED that I couldn’t remember most things after sixth grade, which I’d pretty much known since that first conversation with Dad, and they sent me home.

No one knew anything really. I was a bona fide medical mystery. In their genius opinion, the head trauma wasn’t severe enough to have caused the kind of amnesia I had, so they said I was probably repressing, or some such crap. Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure it was the fall down the stairs.

They said my memory might come back or it might not. And in any case, we should all act as if it wasn’t going to. There wasn’t anything to be done anyway. In a couple of weeks, there would be more pictures of my brain that probably wouldn’t show anything. Therapy, maybe.

“Rest,” they said.

“And then?”

“Resume ‘normal’ life as much as possible,” they said. “Go back to school when you’re ready.”

“Maybe it’ll help you remember,” they said. “But then again, maybe it won’t.”

“The human brain is mysterious,” they said.

“Good luck to you,” they said, handing me a sample-size bottle of Excedrin and an excuse note from gym; and Dad, a bill as thick as a National Geographic.

I scanned the hospital parking lot for our car, which in my last recollection had been a silver SUV (Mom’s) or a red truck (Dad’s). I didn’t see either. “Dad, you think it’s a bad sign that I don’t know which car is ours?”

“I don’t believe in signs,” Dad said as he pointed to a compact white vehicle that was wedged between two other compact white vehicles.

“You’re joking. You loved that truck!”

Dad muttered something about the new one being more fuel-efficient. “It’s covered in the memoir,” he added.

It was, though I wouldn’t find this out for many months. He wrote about the truck on page ninety-eight of his book. He claimed to have sold it because it reminded him of Mom. He didn’t mention a thing about fuel efficiency. It was funny how Dad was more honest in a book that anyone in the world could pick up and read than he could be talking to me. Or maybe it was sad. One or the other. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

I got into the passenger’s seat and put on my seatbelt. Just as we were pulling away, Dad’s cell phone rang, and he asked me did I mind if he took it. I said it was fine; after the doctors’ near constant interrogation, I appreciated not talking.

“Yes. Hello. Me too. I’ve been meaning to call you…” Dad said stiffly to someone. He seemed embarrassed to be talking in front of me.

“Who is it?” I whispered.

“No one. Work,” he mouthed to me. He rolled his eyes and slipped on a headset.

I decided I’d misread his tone and turned my concentration to the view outside. The trees were still green, but you could feel that summer was over. It made me think of a day I could remember, and how it had definitely been summer then. I didn’t necessarily remember the trees, but I remembered the air that day. It had that fresh-cut-lawn smell, where it feels like all of nature is just sighing with relief. My parents and I had left for Iceland about a week later.

I wondered if Mom was having her affair even then. She must have been. She had said that her daughter was already three. My mother’s daughter. My sister. I couldn’t think about that yet.

Out the car window Tarrytown looked familiar enough. I noticed a new subdivision of houses and a new McDonald’s. The place where they used to sell apple cider and doughnuts had been torn down. But basically, nothing much had changed, and this was reassuring.

All of a sudden, Dad turned onto a street I didn’t recognize. Even though Dad was still on the phone, I asked him where we were going.

Dad hung up before answering. “We moved,” he said simply. “I should have mentioned it before, but there were so many things. I’ll add it to the list when we get home. We’re almost there.”

His list was turning out to be a complete waste.

Dad informed me that they had sold our house after the divorce. He had bought a different house about a half mile from our old one. He mentioned that the new house was “larger” (why we needed a larger house when fewer people lived in it was beyond me) and “closer to school” and “besides, we hadn’t lived all that long in the other house anyway, not like Brooklyn.”

The new house was much more modern than our old house had been. The back wall looked like it was made entirely from glass, and it was incredibly drafty inside. Our old house had been two stories with all these strangely shaped rooms and narrow flights of stairs. I think it had been built in 1803 or something. The new house was, well, new. It was on one level, and seemed more, I guess you might say, organized, if you were being kind. Sterile, if you weren’t.

There were a few artifacts from the old house, but not many. At a glance I recognized a clay planter in front of the fireplace, a small braided rug near the laundry room, a cast-iron umbrella stand. They all looked awkward and out of place, like orphans.

“What do you think?” Dad smiled. I could tell he was proud of his house.

I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I told him it was nice. Truly, there was nothing much to say. It was all very beige. The sofa was beige. The stain on the wood floor was beige. The walls were beige. What in the world can you say about beige?

To Mom, any reasonably flat or bare surface was a potential canvas, and she had always been painting and changing the colors of our walls. Our house smelled of paint, but also of all her other projects. Like melted crayons and clay and weird incense and glue and newsprint. Like people lived there and things were happening there. Like home. This new house smelled like…synthetic citrus. “Dad, what’s with the weird orange scent?”

“Just something the housekeeper uses. I didn’t like it at first, but now I’m kind of used to it. It’s organic.” Dad sighed and then he clapped his hands together. “Okay, I assume you’ll be wanting the official grand tour.”

“Could we do it after lunch maybe?” I told Dad I was really tired, and he led me down the hall to “my room.”

“Look at all familiar?” he asked.

Unlike the rest of the house, my room did share some similarities with the bedroom I remembered. The furniture, for one, was exactly the same. I practically wanted to hug my wicker dresser or, like, give my desk chair a massage.

I told Dad I wanted to be alone. He had just been standing there, and I sensed he needed to be told to leave. Dad nodded and said that he had some work to do, but that his office was down the hall if I wanted him.

“Oh hey, you’ll need this!” Dad called just as he was about to go. He took the list out of his pocket. It was on five sheets of paper and one hundred eighty-six items long.

“It was lonesome here without you, kid,” he said. He kissed me on the forehead to the right of my injuries. I closed the door behind him, and then I went to sleep.

Dad woke me for lunch and again for dinner, but the meals made no impression. I didn’t really wake until around eight that night. I was alone for the first time in what felt like years, but had really been almost no time at all.

At the hospital I had basically avoided mirrors. It was easy. I just slipped past them, holding my breath as if there were a ghost in the room.

Partially I think it was because I didn’t want to see my injuries. It probably sounds like vanity, but it wasn’t. In my opinion, wounds are like water set to boil—they heal best left unwatched.

But every now and again I would accidentally catch a glimpse of myself. In a glass on my food tray, in the lenses of a doctor’s spectacles, in the window at night before all the lights were turned out. For a moment, I would not even realize who I was looking at, and, instinctively, I would turn away. It is rude to stare at strangers and that is what I was to myself. I did not know the girl in the glass nor did she know me.

Now that I was finally alone, I felt braver. I decided that it was time to reacquaint myself with myself. The meeting couldn’t be put off any longer.

The first thing I did was remove all my clothes and examine my body in the mirrored closet door.

It was what I had been expecting. Even though I had lost four years of memories, I had never actually thought that I was twelve. I’m not saying that it’s like this for other people, but this is how it was for me. I instinctively knew I was older. And although my body was surprising in certain ways, it looked more or less how I felt inside, so it was okay.

My face was a bit more shocking to me, and not because of my injuries either—Will’s description had been accurate on that front, and the whole mess was already changing colors, which I interpreted as healing. My face was strange because it looked like someone I knew, a cousin maybe, but not me. My hair was about the same length, halfway down my back, but it might have been highlighted, I wasn’t sure. My jaw was narrower; my nose, sharper.

“Hello,” I greeted myself. “I’m Naomi.” The girl in the mirror didn’t seem convinced.

“Anything you have to say for yourself?” I asked.

She stared at me blankly and said nothing.

I decided that mirrors were completely useless.

I found a T-shirt in my bureau and put it on.

I opened my closet door. The person who lived in my room (for I could not quite think of her as me yet) was incredibly organized. It was as if she had been preparing for just such an occasion.

I looked at my clothes. Several school uniforms: dark gray wool kilts, white dress shirts, maroon ties, various hoodies, and V-neck sweaters. Gym clothes. Tennis whites. All of it neatly pressed, folded, or hung. In a zipped garment bag was a black velvet dress for a formal I could not recall having attended. I decided to put it on, just to see what it looked like. The dress was a little tight around my breasts. Evidently, I had grown since I had last worn it. I didn’t bother zipping it all the way up.

I ran my hands along my hips. The fabric was silky and plush.

I wondered if I had worn my hair up or down. I wondered if I had liked how I looked on that night and what my date had thought of me, if he’d said I was the most beautiful girl in the world. I wondered who my date had been, if it had been that Ace guy or someone else. I wondered if I had really liked the person or if I’d just gone to have someone to go with. I wondered if he had brought me a corsage and, if he had, what kind it had been. Had he known that I don’t like roses? And if he’d brought roses, had I had to pretend to like them so that I wouldn’t hurt his feelings? Maybe I hadn’t gone with a boy at all? Maybe I’d just gone with a group of girls? Or a group of friends. Did I even have a group of friends?

Maybe I’d worn that dress somewhere else entirely? I wondered…

On the bookshelf under my window were four school yearbooks, one for each year beginning with seventh grade. I flipped through the books, but they didn’t really tell me much. Teams competed in sports. Sometimes they won, and other times they lost. Some kids joined clubs; others didn’t. Some got taller. Some got smarter; a few got dumber and, either way, most managed to graduate. All yearbooks told the same story anyway.

I read through every single signature of every single one: Have a great summer. Don’t forget me. Keep in touch. I wondered why anyone bothered signing at all. The only interesting signature was Will’s, and it wasn’t really a signature. On the inside back cover of both my ninth- and tenth-grade books, he had drawn a very neat box around the perimeter. Above both boxes were the words “This page is reserved for William B. Landsman to do with what he will.” He hadn’t yet used it.

I wondered…

When I looked in the index of my most recent yearbook (tenth grade) under my name, I found only three mentions. The first was my class photo. That year, my hair looked very light on top, maybe blond, though I couldn’t truly tell. All the underclassman portraits were black-and-white, so when I say my hair was blond, really what it looked was light gray. The second was the varsity tennis team photo. I wasn’t even in that one, though—it just had my name and the caption “Not Pictured.” I wondered what I had been doing instead. The third mention was on the yearbook masthead. I had been photo editor, which might have explained why I wasn’t in any of the pictures.

It had always been the same with Mom—both in the Wandering Porter books and in our family albums. Because she was a photographer, she was never in the pictures, and whenever anyone tried to take her picture, she would get really uncomfortable. I put the yearbooks back on their shelf. Maybe I was like my mother, the girl behind the camera?

I wondered…

I went through the drawers of my nightstand. The most interesting thing I found was a plastic compact containing birth control pills, which meant I was either a) having sex with someone (!?!), or b) on the pill for some other reason. The second most interesting thing I found was a leather diary. This might have beat the birth control pills for the official title of Most Interesting Thing in Naomi’s Nightstand, had it not been a food diary detailing every single thing I’d eaten for the last six months. Sample entry:

August 4

1 Bagel with Cream Cheese, 350 calories

18 Mini Pretzels, 150 Calories

2 Diet Cokes, 0 Calories

1 Banana, 90 Calories

7 Reese’s Pieces, 28 Calories

GRAND TOTAL

618 Calories

Every entry after that was the same way. Page after page of it. Sometimes there would be a if I thought I had eaten too much, or a if I was neither here nor there about my eating for the day. It went all the way until the day before my injury. I tried to toss the useless artifact in the trash, but I missed. I felt disgusted. I mean, really, what sort of person keeps a food diary?

I wondered if the former Naomi Porter had been, in all likelihood, a complete and total jerk, someone that I probably wouldn’t have even wanted to know.

I wondered…

I went through my backpack. I suppose I could have done this at the hospital, but I never had. I looked at my driver’s license. It had been issued nine months prior on my sixteenth birthday. I was wearing my school uniform, and in the picture I was smiling so big you could see that I still had braces. I ran my tongue over my teeth—smooth and no metal. Orthodontia—one thing I could be glad to have forgotten. As I returned the license to my backpack, I wondered if I still knew how to drive.

Also in my bag was my cell phone, which was dead, so I plugged it into the charger and turned it on.

I wanted to call someone, but I didn’t know who, so I started scrolling through all the numbers in the address book. I didn’t recognize about half the names. I thought about calling Will—maybe he would know about the birth control pills?—but I decided against it. Even if he was my “best friend,” he was still a boy and I didn’t want to ask him about that sort of thing.

Suddenly, I wanted to call my mom. Not because I thought she would know about the pills, I just missed her. I missed her like a reflex, even though I knew that it was just some trick of my undependable brain. Some stupid, vestigial part. The way humans have appendixes, even though they’re pointless and mainly just a pain in the butt and people never even think about them unless they have to have them removed.

I didn’t really want to talk to her, but I picked up the phone and dialed anyway. Of course I made sure to block the number in case she had caller ID or something. I knew I’d probably hang up, but I needed to hear her voice. Even if it was just her saying “Hello, who is this?” or breathing.

“Hi there,” squeaked a precocious little voice, “you are speaking to Chloe Fusakawa, and I have just learned how to answer the phone.”

This was my sister. I hadn’t been prepared for that, and for a second, I couldn’t speak.

“Helloooooooo…Is anyone there?”

“It’s Nomi,” I managed to say.

She giggled. “No me. No me is a funny name. It sounds like nobody. Hi, Nobody. Do you like to read?”

“Yes.”

“Have you read Goodnight Moon?”

“Yes.” My mother had read it to me when I was little.

“That is my seventh favorite book. It used to be fifth, but it is now too easy. It’s still good. They have your name in it. There is a part that goes ‘Goodnight, Nobody,’ and this is my second favorite part of my seventh favorite book.”

I heard my mother’s familiar voice in the background. “Is someone on the phone, Chloe?”

“It’s Nobody!” Chloe yelled.

“Then hang up the phone, sweetie! It’s time for your bath!”

“I have to go now,” Chloe said. “Bye-bye, Nobody. Call again, ’kay?”

“Okay.”

I hung up the phone and felt lonelier than ever.

All I wanted to do was sleep.

Which was what I did.

For about a week, maybe two.

It was easy to lose track of time.

3

I WOKE SUDDENLY: THREE SHARP TAPS ON MY window. I was startled because my old bedroom had been on the second floor. In other words, no one could knock on the window unless they had superpowers, like the ability to fly.

I sat up in bed and pulled back the curtain. It was dark outside, but I could still recognize Ace Zuckerman. I had seen his picture in my wallet and on my desk and in the yearbook and other places, too. In the flesh, though, he looked about as opposite of James as it gets. The contrast between my “boyfriend” and my “pretend boyfriend” was almost comical.

Ace was wearing jeans, like James had been, and a warm-up jacket. On Ace, though, everything was really filled out. I didn’t have to see it to know that underneath his jacket was certainly not a faded concert T-shirt. Ace’s hair was light brown and sort of shaggy. He was muscular. And handsome, I suppose, though in an almost cartoonish way. Everything about him seemed too broad, too big. If someone had asked me right at that moment, I would have said, “Definitely not my type.”

I opened the window, and he swung himself over the frame. He moved like an athlete, and he knew to throw his legs way out in front of him so they wouldn’t hit the bookshelf under my window. The casual grace of his movements alerted me to the fact that he had entered my room that way many times before.

The first thing he did was kiss me. On the lips. And he didn’t ask my permission either.

I couldn’t recall him ever having kissed me before.

I actually couldn’t recall anyone ever having kissed me before.

So, in a way, this was my first kiss.

He tasted like Gatorade (could have been worse I suppose), and his tongue was dull, directionless, and too much in my mouth. The nicest thing I can say about it was that it ended quickly.

He pulled away, but was still sitting on the side of the bed. “You really don’t remember me, do you?”

“No, but I know who you are. You’re my…” He looked at me hopefully, but I couldn’t bring myself to say the word. “My…”

“Boyfriend,” he finished. “Ace.”

“Yes, my boyfriend.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t come earlier. It’s just…I was away at tennis camp. I’m a counselor this year and…”

“Really, you play tennis? I do, too.” I was just making conversation. I already knew that, of course.

“I know you do. That’s how we met. You’re good.” All of a sudden, he smacked himself in the head, and the violence of it actually scared me. “I choked! I should have left camp early. I should have come!”

“It’s fine, Al.”

“The name’s Ace,” he whispered.

“I know that.” I had no idea why I had called him Al. I knew his name, but I think I had been momentarily stunned by the self-flagellation.

He cleared his throat and changed the subject. “Here, I brought you something. I was at the camp Pro Shop, and I guess these reminded me of you.” He took a pair of white terry cloth tennis wristbands out of his pocket.

I wondered what about me screamed tennis sweatbands to him. Had he meant them as a joke? I could tell by his mouth—a thin pink line of determined patience and anticipation—that he hadn’t.

It certainly wasn’t the most romantic gift ever, but you know, it was obvious the guy meant well, so I put the wristbands on.

“Looks nice,” he said. “With your, um, pajamas.”

I walked over to my closet mirror under the pretense of looking at my wristbands, but what I actually did was study Ace’s reflection. I was trying to figure him out, and sometimes it’s easier to do that when people don’t know that you’re looking at them. I watched him watching me. His eyes were tired, and he seemed pleased that I was wearing his gift. Maybe there was something wistful in his look, maybe it was the pills in my drawer (duh), but all of a sudden I realized that I was probably having sex with him. I also decided I didn’t want to have that conversation just yet; it was difficult to predict where such a conversation might lead.

Instead, I turned away from the mirror, walked across my bedroom, and kissed him again, like maybe I could figure things out that way. His lips were soft, but his chin was sandpaper against my face, even though I hadn’t seen any hair on it. After about ten seconds, which seemed like way too many, I pulled back. “So, thanks for these,” I said. I didn’t know how to break it to Ace that the doctors said I had to refrain from all sports for the next couple of months. “Do I, um, play much tennis this time of year?”

“You start practicing in early spring,” he reported. “But you’ll definitely get a lot of use out of them then. I was thinking long-term, I guess.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “about the way I came in. I shouldn’t have kissed you. I should have let you kiss me. I definitely shouldn’t have used tongue. I, well, I panicked. I choked. I’m not usually a choker. Not on the courts. Not off them either.”

I told him it was okay, that these were confusing times or something like that. Then I said I had a headache, and he took that as his cue to leave the same way he’d come.

I closed the curtains. I was about to take off the wristbands when Dad knocked softly at the door. “Oh, you’re awake? I was just planning to slip out.” I looked at the clock; it was already 9:30 p.m.

“Where?” I asked.

“Just to get some coffee. We’re all out, and I’m probably going to be up late working,” he said. “Do you need anything?”

I told him that I didn’t.

“I’ll be back in a half hour,” he said. “Nice wristbands, by the way.”

I listened to him close and lock the front door.

I listened to him back down our driveway.

Our house was so quiet.

I took off the wristbands.

Even though I was still drained, I couldn’t fall back asleep.

I decided to put on my headphones and listen to Will’s mix.

The first song was, of course, “Fight Test.” I remembered Will saying that it had something to do with how we met. So I decided to call him.

“Hallelujah, your phone’s back on,” he said. “I wanted to call, but my mom said I should let you rest.” I let him ramble on about the yearbook and the letter he’d written me and some research he’d done on the Internet about amnesia and whatever else popped into his head.

“So, how’d I meet you anyway?” I asked him when he’d finally paused for a breath.

“I know this is gonna be hard to believe, but you didn’t like me straightaway.”

“No?” I said in mock incredulity.

“Indeed, my friend. I grew on you. I’m like that. I’m a grower. But officially, we met the first day of ninth grade in an informational meeting for The Phoenix, but you know we didn’t meet that day, not really. We just saw each other and exchanged names and went on about our business. The first time I really met you was about a month later. They had taught us how to lay out pages on the computer, and I was watching you work over your shoulder, which is something you despise though I didn’t know it at the time—”

I interrupted, “Actually, that’s something everyone despises.”

“Right, that’s good advice there, Chief. I’ll make a note. Back to how we met, you pasted a picture of the cheerleading team onto the page and it was starting to look really nice, but it made the copy shift so that only the first line of the caption paragraph was left on the bottom, what they call—”

“An orphan, I know.” I didn’t know how I knew, but I did.

“Hey, you remember! That’s a good sign. I said to you, ‘Sucks about the orphan.’ And you turned around and gave me a look like you wanted to kill me. You thought I was talking about you being adopted—”

“You know about that?”

“I’m telling you I know everything about you,” Will said. “Unfortunately, not at the time, though. So I repeated the thing about the orphan, and you said, ‘Screw you,’ and it might have gone on like that forever except that I finally said, ‘I’m talking about the copy.’ And then you laughed and said, ‘Yeah, I think I’ll make the picture a little smaller to get rid of it.’ That’s how we met. And about a month or so later, after we knew each other better, you mentioned you were adopted, which cleared everything up enormously.”

“’Cause before you were just thinking I was a bitch?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“What does the song have to do with us meeting though?” I asked.

“Well…” Will cleared his throat. “I guess, on some level, it’s about the difficulty of modern communication. Like I said, I didn’t have that much time to put together a proper mix. But I always think of you and meeting you when I hear it. Don’t you do that? Don’t you hear a certain song and associate it with a person? They don’t even have to know you’re doing it.”

“Sometimes maybe.”

“And my dad really liked that song, too. He was a big fan of the Flaming—”

I yawned. I couldn’t help myself. “I’m sorry. You were saying? Your dad…”

“Oh hey, you should get to sleep, Chief. You can call me again tomorrow, if you want, if you’re feeling up to it.”

“Hey, Will, can I ask you another question?”

“Anything.”

“Would you say that I was really into Ace?”

“I truly doubt if I’m the best person to answer that.”

“Who else, then?” I asked.

Will sighed. “Honestly, I would say that you were. Not that I’ve ever understood his appeal, but there you go.”

“Why, though? Why him and not somebody else?” I really wanted to know.

I heard Will take a drink of water before he answered. “I’m not in your head, so I’m only theorizing here. I think you like being seen around with a good-looking jock. I hope that doesn’t sound too mean.”

“So you think I’m shallow?” I countered.

“I didn’t say that. I think you’re the swellest gal around, but I also think you’re human. And you go to a school where it’s not entirely a bad thing to have a boyfriend like Ace.”

I wondered…

All this speculation was exhausting. “Night, Will,” I said.

“Good night, Chief. Say, do you think you’ll be able to come back to school with everyone else after Labor Day?”

“I don’t know when I’ll be back. I’m still pretty tired.”

“Well, take it easy, okay? I’ll pick up your schedule and all your assignments, so you don’t have to worry about any of that.”

“Thanks.”

I got under the covers and listened to that song again. I fell asleep before it was over.

I slept for the next thirteen hours straight. I didn’t even hear my dad come home.

The day before I was to return to school, I told Dad I wanted to figure out if I still knew how to drive.

“You sure you’re ready?”

I wasn’t necessarily, but it didn’t seem particularly appealing to have my dad driving me everywhere either.

“It’s only been about three weeks, kid. I’m just not sure it’s safe.”

But I had to start figuring these things out, you know?

We went out to the car. I put the key in the ignition and turned it. The movement seemed familiar enough.

I was about to step on the gas when Dad said, “You need to shift the car into reverse.”

“Oh, right,” I said as I did it.

I was about to step on the gas for the second time when Dad said, “You’ll want to look in the rearview mirror to see who’s coming. Then over your shoulder to check the blind spot.”

“Right. Right.” The road was empty in both directions.

I started to back up the car. I had just eased my bumper out of the driveway when a horn blasted three times. I slammed on the brakes as an SUV raced by, barely missing us.

“Moron!” Dad yelled, though surely no one could hear him except me. “A lot of people speed through this area. Don’t worry about it.”

But I was worried about it. I didn’t feel at all confident that I knew how to drive anymore. “I should know how to do this!” I banged my fist on the dashboard. Of all the things that had happened, this struck me as particularly humiliating. I felt childish and helpless and weak and stupid and suffocated. I hated that Dad or anyone else had to watch me be so pathetic. I needed to get the hell out of that car.

I didn’t even turn off the ignition. I just slammed the door and ran straight to my room.

Dad followed me. “Naomi, wait! I want to talk for a second!”

I turned slowly. “What?”

“I’m…You’ll drive when you’re ready. We can try again next week. No rush.”

Dad’s eyes were bloodshot. He looked like he hadn’t been sleeping, and he never slept much to begin with. “You look kind of tired, Dad.”

Dad sighed. “I stayed up late watching a nature program. It was about lemmings. You know how people used to think they all committed suicide when the population got too big?”

“Sort of.”

“Turns out they have really bad eyesight.”

“Since when do you watch those?” I asked. My dad was not really a “nature” guy.

Dad shook his head. “Not sure. Since the divorce, I guess. I’ll drive you to school tomorrow, okay?”

I hadn’t been dreading school, but only because I hadn’t been thinking about it.

In the hospital, they had tested my cognitive skills and concluded that my brain was, aside from the memory loss, normal. Whatever normal meant. (Or as Dad had joked, “No more weird than it was before.”) I could remember math and science, but had forgotten entire books I had read and most of history, world and, of course, personal. I still had the ability to learn new things, and everything before seventh grade, so, all things considered, it could have been far worse. Some people with head traumas end up having months or even years of physical therapy where they have to be taught everything all over again—reading, writing, talking, walking, even bathing and going to the bathroom. Some people end up with their heads shaved or having to wear a helmet. I’m sure either would have gone over really well at my high school.

The main thing that worried me about school was not the work, but the kids. To look at me, no one would even think anything much had happened—all I had were bruises and some stitches—but inside, I felt different. I worried about not recognizing people and not acting the right way. I worried about having to explain things when I barely understood them myself. I worried about everyone staring at me and what they would say. This was why I’d tried not to think about school at all.

The next morning at Tom Purdue, most of the kids who were getting dropped off looked young, like freshmen or sophomores. Sitting in the passenger seat of Dad’s car, I felt more than a little melancholy that I hadn’t driven myself.

“You ready?” Dad asked.

“No,” I replied.

I had written my schedule on my hand the previous night; I had a map of the school; I knew the combination to my locker; Dad had called all my teachers. Why was it so hard to open the car door?

Dad pulled a small, rectangular black box out of his jacket pocket. “Your mom wanted me to give this to you. It came last Friday.”

“I don’t want anything from her,” I said.

“Fine by me. I’m just the messenger,” Dad said.

Attached to the box was a gift card in her distinctive, artistic scrawl: “Cupcake, Dad said you could use these. Have a good first day back. I love you, Mom.” But I wasn’t her cupcake or anyone else’s, and I hated being bribed. I didn’t even care what was inside the box. I wouldn’t like it on principle.

Then again, it’s really difficult to resist opening a present once it’s already right there on your lap.

So I lifted the lid. Inside was an extremely expensive-looking pair of silver-framed sunglasses.

I looked at Dad. “You told her about the light?”

“She’s still your mother, kid.”

A “fun” side effect of my accident was that I felt like I was living in the North Pole. Everything seemed incredibly bright (like I imagine the polar caps probably are in person) and I was usually freezing, even though it was still September. I guess this sort of thing can happen with head injuries. As it was explained to me, the wires in your brain have to reroute, and sometimes they send out incorrect or too much information. The upshot was that I was cold when it was warm and weirdly sensitive to light, even when it really wasn’t all that bright.

Despite this, I was still going to toss Mom’s present out the window onto the school driveway. I wanted someone to run over them with a car.

It was probably a reflex more than anything, but I made the mistake of putting them on.

The morning was bright—whether it was uncommonly so, I could not say for certain—and my head did throb less behind the lenses. When I looked in the passenger mirror, I saw that they also had the considerable merit of covering most of what was left of the bruising and even some of the scar that had formed over where my stitches had been.

I’ll admit it. What truly sold me was completely shallow. I felt the tiniest bit cool.

Maybe it was because she was an artist, but my mom had good taste. I had to give her that. The woman always knew exactly what a person should wear.

“You look good, kid,” Dad said.

I ripped the note in half, handing that and the box to him. “Would you mind throwing these out for me?”

I pushed the car door open and got out of Dad’s car. I left the sunglasses on. Just because my mom was a gigantic slut was no reason to pass up a perfectly good pair of shades.

4

PEOPLE WERE EITHER STARING AT ME OR AVOIDING my gaze entirely. I was glad for the sunglasses because no one knew which way I was looking. I thought I heard kids whispering my name, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Maybe I didn’t even want to know what they were saying. Maybe they weren’t saying anything. Maybe it was all in my head.

I hadn’t mentioned to Will or Ace that I was coming back to school that day. I hadn’t wanted to make a big deal of it. Walking up the steps of Tom Purdue, I sort of wished I had told someone.

Once I was inside the main hallway, I scanned the crowd for a familiar face—James, Will, Ace—but I didn’t see anyone I knew. Kids and even a few teachers said hello to me. I smiled in return. I had no idea who any of them were.

We had moved to Tarrytown the year I turned twelve. I had gone to Tarrytown Elementary for sixth grade before switching to Tom Purdue for junior and senior high. Unfortunately, that’s where my memory stopped. All these people were strangers to me. I felt like the new girl. Actually, it was worse than that. I’d been the new kid before, and at least then everyone knows where you stand. They know they don’t know you.

I walked down the hallway to where my locker supposedly was, number 13002. I tried the combination that Will had given me in the packet with my schedule and assignments, but it didn’t work. I tried it again. Still nothing. In frustration, I banged on the locker with my fist. Someone tapped me on the shoulder.

“You have to make an extra clockwise turn before stopping at the final number,” said a very pale girl with dyed cranberry-red hair. She had on black worker boots with her kilt, and I could see rainbow-striped socks barely peeking out over the top of the boots.

I took her advice and the locker opened. “Thanks,” I said.

“No problem, Nomi.”

The girl looked familiar, though I couldn’t quite place her at first.

“I know you,” I said. She had been in my class at Tarrytown Elementary. Back then, Alice Leeds had had long blond hair that she often wore parted in braids. “Alice?” I asked.

“I didn’t know if you’d remember me. Everyone’s heard about your head.”

I explained how I could remember everything before seventh grade, which included Mrs. Bloomfield’s sixth-grade class.

“Are we still friends?” I asked her.

“Mmm, not so much. We sort of drifted, I guess.” Alice shrugged. “See you around,” she said as she left.

“See you.”

I was wondering if we’d had a falling-out or if it was like she said, we’d just “drifted,” when the bell rang. I tossed a bunch of books inside the locker and slammed it shut. I looked down at my hand where I had written “Precalculus, Mrs. Tarkington, 203.”

When something happens, by which I mean something big like illness or death, there are some people who prefer to act as if nothing has happened. My homeroom and precalculus teacher, Mrs. Tarkington, was one of those people. While I didn’t necessarily want anyone making a fuss, it was even more awkward when there was no mention at all.

Although all my teachers had been informed of my condition, Mrs. Tarkington did not waste time asking how I was or anything like that. She did not feel the need to tell me where my seat was either. A friendly boy with round glasses whispered to me, “Naomi Porter. We sit alphabetically. You’re behind me. Patten, Roger.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I sat down, and he turned over his shoulder and shook my hand. “We’re also on yearbook together. I’m not a creative like you; I just sell the ads in the back. Landsman got everyone up to speed on your condition. We were going to send a card, but luckily you got back pretty fast. Awesome glasses—”

“Mr. Patten, why do I hear whispering during the morning announcements?” Mrs. Tarkington asked.

“Sorry,” I mouthed.

Roger smiled and shrugged.

As for the work, it was the beginning of the school year, so the class was still reviewing algebra II and trigonometry. Luckily, I remembered both.

Less luckily, I had somehow left my math book in my locker. Mrs. Tarkington lent me a spare, but you could tell it really put her out.

At the end of the class, Mrs. Tarkington pulled me aside. “Miss Porter, I let you get away with it today,” she said, “but it is not acceptable to wear sunglasses in the classroom.”

I tried to explain about the wires in my brain and all that, but you could tell she thought it was just an excuse. Maybe it partially was, but I still wanted to wear my sunglasses. I felt safer behind them. She waved her hand to dismiss me. “Don’t do it again.”

American history was second period, and none of it was particularly familiar. But then, it didn’t seem like anyone else knew much more than me. Plus, it was all written down in the book, so I didn’t think it would take much doing to catch up.

I got lost going to third period, English, because it was held in a room just off the school library that wasn’t indicated on the map. When I finally got there, Mrs. Landsman embraced me as if I were her long-lost daughter. I took that to mean we were close.

“Naomi Porter, we were so worried about you!” Her hold was surprisingly tight for such a small woman, and Mrs. Landsman couldn’t have been more than five feet one; I’ve been five feet seven since I was twelve, but with this little woman wrapped around my waist, I was suddenly very conscious of my height. She had Will’s bright blue eyes, crooked smile, and pale skin. Unlike Will, her hair was reddish blond and it rained down to her waist: long, straight, and parted in the middle. She had the kind of gossamer doll face where you could tell it would be incredibly easy to hurt her feelings. The nameplate on her desk said her first name was Molly, and the name suited her: girlish, but old-fashioned; sweet and open like an apple.

“Will didn’t mention you were coming back today!”

I confessed that I hadn’t told him.

She wagged her finger at me. “My dear, he’s going to be absolutely outraged!” All of Mrs. Landsman’s sentences were whispery confessions ending in exclamation points. “He stayed home sick today—his stomach again—poor boy, he works too hard, but I have half a mind to call him right now!”

Mrs. Landsman embraced me again before directing me to a seat near the front of the classroom. “Please do let me know if I can help you with anything. Anything at all!”

Mrs. Landsman had begun the year with a drama unit, and the class was in the middle of reading Waiting for Godot aloud. All the parts had been divvied up during my absence, so I only had to listen to the other people read. The role of Estragon was read by a long-legged blond girl named Yvette Schumacher who was wearing maroon platform Mary Janes with kneesocks that had embroidered red hearts on them—in a school with uniforms, you spend a lot of time looking at the footwear for clues. I knew Yvette because she had also been in my sixth-grade class, along with Alice from the hallway. The role of Vladimir was played by Patten comma Roger from my precalc class.

Maybe if I had started the play from the beginning it would have been more interesting or made more sense. But without context or knowing the story, it was difficult even to know what the play was about. Were the main characters in love or just friends? It was hard to tell.

I tried to concentrate, but even when I was a little kid I hadn’t particularly liked being read to. As soon as I learned how, I always preferred to do it myself. Plus, the language in the play was so circular that I found it extraordinarily difficult to follow out loud.

The next thing I knew, Mrs. Landsman was gently shaking me.

“Naomi, poor darling, wake up!”

The classroom was empty, and for a moment I forgot where I was. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize, dear. You can read the play later. It’s fifty-something years old and will certainly keep until tomorrow. You looked so peaceful. I was considering letting you sleep even longer. Would you like to go to the infirmary for a quick rest?”

I really was exhausted, but I knew I’d better keep plowing through my schedule. It wasn’t going to get any easier. “That’s a really nice offer, but I should go,” I said reluctantly.

“If you’re sure…” Mrs. Landsman studied me with concern. “I think of you like one of my own, dear,” she said. “I’ll write you a note. What’s your next class?”

I checked my hand. “Physics with Dr. Pillar.”

“He’s a lovely gentleman. One of my favorites!” As I was six inches taller than her, Mrs. Landsman had to reach up to put her arm around my shoulders. My dad and I weren’t much in the way of huggers, but it felt nice to be touched by someone who wasn’t either a doctor or trying to get in my pants. It felt nice to be mothered.

“You may want to stop in the washroom. A little bit of your schedule seems to have transferred to your face,” she said.

In the girls’ bathroom, I examined myself in the mirror. The backward stamp of my schedule was indeed on my right cheek. The soap was the rough, powdery kind you only ever find in schools. It was crap for cleaning. I had to basically rub my face raw to remove my schedule, and in the process of doing that, I smudged the part that was written on my hand.

When I finally got to physics the lights were off because the class was in the midst of watching a DVD: an introduction to subatomic particles and string theory. I handed Dr. Pillar my note, and he smiled and pointed me to a desk.

I took off my sunglasses and watched the movie. It was actually very relaxing. The narrator had one of those silky PBS type voices, and there was quite a bit of New Age and Philip Glass-y music to accompany the images, which were a combination of talking-head interviews featuring very nerdy adults in lab coats and short-sleeved polyester dress shirts, and computer simulations of stars and planets, forming and breaking apart and forming again. It was sort of beautiful. All those stars and planets, they reminded me of something…

Of being in an air-conditioned planetarium.

The air was stale like a library, but also sweaty like the sea…

Me in a flimsy white tank top.

With goose bumps on my arm.

Seventies rock.

A boy with sweaty hands.

This feeling…

Like anything might happen.

I wondered if this might be an actual memory, and if it was an actual memory, was it mine? Or was it something from a book I might have read or a movie I might have seen? Even when my brain had been perfectly functional, I had done that. Taken stories from books and sort of conflated them with actual events. Not lying exactly, though some might call it that. More like borrowing. It is hard to explain just what I mean unless you’re the type of person who does it, too.

I turned my attention back to the program. One of the physicists in the program was saying something about how when scientists first started studying the universe, it was like being in a room in the dark. But now with the new theories, they realized it wasn’t a room, but a house. Not any old house either, but a mansion with an infinite number of rooms to stumble through. I was imagining these scientists groping around in this darkened mansion. I don’t know why but I pictured the scientists as a group of drunken women, like they’d just come from a frat party. “Oh hey,” one would say to the other, “does anyone remember how in the hell we got in here in the first place?” They were still trying to get out when I fell asleep for the second time that morning.

Luckily, I woke up on my own this time, which was good. I didn’t want to be known as “that chick who’s always falling asleep in class.” (There’s always one; you know who you are.)

The doctors had said that head traumas can cause exhaustion for “a while.”

“How long is a while?” I asked.

“Ballpark?”

“Ballpark.”

They nodded and whispered to each other. “Indefinitely” was their very helpful reply.

“Miss Porter.” Dr. Pillar stopped me on the way out. He had a perfectly round face and was bald with a woolly strip of jet black hair above his ears and neck, like a pair of headphones that had slipped off his head. “Your papa. He calls to say that your math and science skills are hunky-dory, yes?” He had a strange, stilted way of forming sentences and an equally strange accent that I couldn’t quite place, but had a hint of Dracula in it.

“You are one year ahead in math and science, so this is very good, yes? But I prepare for you a dossier with chemistry and mathematics necessary for mastery of physics.” He handed me a large heavy envelope, crammed with papers.

In other words, a review. I thanked him. It was nice to know that the school was not peopled entirely with Mrs. Tarkingtons.

“It is interesting, this. Why you have lost some things and not others…” He studied me, much like you would expect a lab technician to watch an ape. “Maybe it is because you place different things in different areas of brain? We know nothing about brain, yes?”

It had certainly seemed that this was the case.

“And four years, is it? This is very odd. Maybe it is puberty onset that alters the place in which you are storing long-term memories? So you have everything before puberty, but nothing after?”

I wasn’t sure what he was trying to say, but I really did not want to discuss puberty with Dr. Pillar.

“Perhaps a traumatic event from your youth that you have been very much longing to repress?”

“Um…perhaps.”

“Forgive me. I like to make theories for what cannot be readily explained. It is my nature. Do you have any theories about your memory loss, Miss Porter?”

“I lost a coin toss and I fell down the stairs. Bad luck and clumsiness?”

“Or, perhaps, randomness and gravity. In this respect, you are walking physics experiment, yes?”

That was certainly one way to put it.

Fifth period was lunch, and Ace was waiting for me outside physics to lead me to our place in the cafeteria.

“You didn’t say you were coming today!” He hugged me and lifted my backpack from my shoulder.

“It’s fine, Ace. I can carry it myself.”

“I want to,” he insisted.

We sat with a group of about twenty kids at a long benchlike table. It was a mix of boys and girls, and I recognized some of them from my classes and a few others from elementary school. Our table was, by far, the noisiest one in the place. You could tell that the kids I ate with considered themselves to be the celebrities of the school. It was like they were putting on a show of having lunch as opposed to actually eating it.

A curly-haired blonde named Brianna introduced herself and then said, “I just want you to know how brave I think you are. What happened to you is so, so tragic. Isn’t she so brave?”

I didn’t feel at all brave. Even though her words were ostensibly addressed to me, she seemed to be talking to Ace or the table at large or the whole school.

She took my hand in hers. “It’s strange because you look like yourself, and yet you’re so different, Naomi.”

“Different how?” I asked.

Brianna didn’t answer. She had finished talking to me and was on to the next person.

Four or five of the people sitting nearest to me also introduced themselves. Some of the girls spoke too loudly, as if I were deaf. Others wouldn’t quite look me in the eye. And then everyone just resumed The Lunch Show and ignored me, which was fine. I figured out pretty early on that these were Ace’s friends, not mine. I wondered where James Larkin sat—I hadn’t seen him yet. Or Will.

“Does Will usually eat with us?” I asked Ace.

“Why would you want to know about that?”

His reaction surprised me. “Did I say something wrong?”

“No…I know Landsman’s your friend, but I just don’t get that little dude at all.” Ace shook his head. “He eats in the yearbook office. You sometimes eat there, too.”

In addition to being loud, the cafeteria was kept at near-arctic temperatures, as if the administration was afraid our food might start to spoil while we were in the process of eating it. I actually started to shiver. On the way in, I had noticed kids eating in the courtyard. I said to Ace, “It’s such a nice day, maybe we could eat outside?”

Before Ace could say anything, Brianna answered, “Um, I guess we could, but we always eat in here.” Then Brianna and a girl whose name I couldn’t remember giggled, like I had suggested we eat on Mars.

“It’s true,” Ace said with a shrug.

So I shivered through another ten minutes of lunch before telling him that I needed to get something from my locker.

“Do you want me to come with you?” Ace asked.

I shook my head and told him I was fine.

But I didn’t go to my locker. I was simply tired of being cold. I walked out into the courtyard, but fall was near and it felt even colder to me out there.

I wandered behind the school. On the boundary between the athletic fields and the rest of campus was a greenhouse.

I tried the door and found that it was unlocked. It seemed somewhat less cold in there so I sat on a cement bench, in front of what appeared to be a cruel experiment with sunflowers—seven of the plants were mostly dead, but one was thriving. I wondered what the live one was being fed, or if it had just been more of a survivor to begin with.

I was still contemplating that eighth sunflower when a familiar deep voice said, “You’re shivering.”

It was James. I decided not to turn around and look at him yet. I didn’t want to reveal how pleased I was to see him again, especially considering that he hadn’t visited me in the hospital or at home.

“Maybe a little,” I replied casually. “Is it cold in here, by the way? I have trouble telling.”

“Not to me,” James said, emerging from behind an orange tree with an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips. He placed the cigarette in his back pants pocket. “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t cold to you.” He took off his jacket, which was brown corduroy with a sheepskin collar, and handed it to me. “Here.”

I put the jacket on. It smelled like cigarettes and paint. “You smoke?”

“Now and then. Mainly to keep myself out of worse trouble.”

For additional warmth I slipped my hands into his jacket’s pockets. I could feel keys, a bottle of pills, a lighter, a pen, a few slips of paper.

“Suppose I should have cleared out my pockets before lending my jacket to a girl,” he said. “What’s in there anyway?”

I gave him my report.

“Nothing too controversial, right?”

Depends on what the pills are for, I thought. “Depends on what the keys are to,” I said.

He laughed at that. “My mom’s house. My car, which is, at the moment, in the shop.”

Distantly, I heard the bell ring.

“You’re still shivering,” James said. He loosened his tie and took off his dress shirt. He had a T-shirt underneath. “Put it on under the jacket. You’ll be warmer.”

“Won’t you get in trouble?” The dress code at Tom Purdue was pretty strict.

He said he had another shirt in his locker. His arms were slim and muscular, but not like a guy who worked out. I noticed a two-inch horizontal scar across his right wrist. I wasn’t sure, but it looked like the kind of mark you’d get from trying to off yourself. He saw me looking at it. He didn’t cover it up, but he didn’t choose to explain it either.

The bell rang again. “You’re going to be late,” he said.

I looked at my hand. Sixth period was French III in Room 1—, the number had gotten smudged during the course of my morning ablutions. I held out my hand for James to read. “You wouldn’t happen to know where this is, would you?”

He held my hand like a book. After he’d read it, he closed his hand around my palm and offered to take me himself.

I liked the way his hand felt over mine. It might have been my imagination but I thought I could still feel the faintest of scabs on his palm from where I’d grabbed him so hard three weeks ago.

He dropped my hand almost as soon as he grabbed it. When he spoke, his voice was hard and businesslike. “Come on. We’ll be late.”

I had barely kept up with him as he led me through the halls, but then, at the French classroom door, he lingered. I thought he might say something to me. All he wanted was his jacket. “My jacket,” he said, rather testily for a person who had been so quick to take it off in the first place. I removed the jacket and was about to take off his shirt, too, but he repeated the thing about having another. “You should really dress more warmly,” he said before rushing off without a single glance over his shoulder. I stood there, cold again, and feeling bad that I hadn’t had time to thank him for his help at the hospital.

I had forgotten nearly all of French, which actually made my French class unintentionally fascinating.

“Bonjour, Nadine,” said Mme Greenberg in New York–accented French.

One thing that had never been in question was my name. “Sorry,” I said, “My name is—”

“En français? Je m’appelle…”

“Je m’appelle Naomi. Uh…Non, Nadine. Nadine, non.”

“Ici, nous employons les noms français, Nadine.”

“Oui,” I said. Fine, if she wanted to call me Nadine, whatever. It sounded like the name of a comment dit-on? French prostitute, but whatever. En anglais, I asked the boy sitting behind me what in the hell she was talking about. Apparently, we had all been assigned French names, which struck me as incredibly idiotic. If I ever went to Paris, people weren’t going to all of a sudden start referring to me as Nadine.

Seventh period was gym, which I was, of course, excused from, and had been told to use for study hall until I could rejoin. I spent the period sleeping.

Last period was Advanced Photography Workshop. The teacher’s name was Mr. Weir. He didn’t look all that old to me (he might have still been in his twenties, though I’ve never been good at guessing ages), but he was completely bald. Whether it was elective baldness or compelled, I couldn’t determine. He was wearing a T-shirt and a pin-striped blazer. When I came into the room, he introduced himself. “I’m your favorite teacher, Mr. Weir. Fierce shades.” I liked him immediately. “You sit over there,” he said helpfully, pointing me to a table in the back.

Advanced Photography Workshop was for kids who’d taken two years of other photography courses, which I had (although I couldn’t remember them, of course). The main point of the class was to do one big independent project. It was basically supposed to be a series of pictures that told a story, preferably a personal one, and our whole grade was based eighty percent on the one assignment, and twenty percent on everything else, which, from what I could tell, mainly came down to class participation. It seemed like a breeze to me, the fat on the rest of my schedule, something I could put off while getting caught up with my more academic subjects.

On my way out of the classroom, Mr. Weir asked if we could talk. “I don’t know if I should mention this to you, but you came to see me in the summer before your accident. You told me you wanted to drop this class.”

“Why?”

“You said something about commitments to yearbook, but I’m not really sure. That may have been an excuse, so as not to hurt my feelings. Of course, you can still drop the class if you want, but I’d be happy to have you.”

I asked him if he knew what I’d been planning to take instead, but he didn’t. The one class I had actually liked (and that seemed like a small time commitment) I hadn’t even wanted to take. Who could make sense of any of it?

At least the day was over. Each period had required me to be a slightly different person, and that was exhausting. I wondered if school had always felt this way and whether it was like this for everyone.

I decided to go to the bathroom. Not because I actually had to go, I just wanted to be alone.

I was sitting in the stall when I heard Brianna come in.

She was talking to someone.

She was talking to someone about me. “Oh, I know, it was so awkward at lunch,” I heard her say. “I mean, she looks the same, but she’s not all there. She used to be so…” She sighed. “But now…” Her voice trailed off. “So tragic. So, so tragic. And you know who I feel really awful for? Ace.”

She was an idiot, but I didn’t necessarily want to confront her either. What would I say? Besides, she was probably right. I stayed in the stall until she had left.

To tell you the truth, I found the whole thing pretty depressing.

I was still sitting there when my cell phone rang. I hadn’t even realized it was on. I looked at the display. It was Will.

“Don’t tell me you’re at school,” he said.

“Unfortunately,” I answered.

“Now I’m pissed. My mother called me, but I didn’t believe her. Why didn’t you mention you were coming today? I would have definitely gone to school.”

“Your mom said you were sick.”

“Nothing that major.” He said he’d had an ulcer when he was younger and now he had “this stomach thing” that sometimes acted up, so he’d stayed home. “But I would have shown up for you, Chief. And I’m here now anyway.”

“If you’re not feeling well, shouldn’t you still be at home?”

“I never miss yearbook,” he said. “You don’t either. Where are you? I’ll come get you right now.”

“Sure, Will. I’m in the ladies’. Come on in.”

“Um…you’re not serious?”

“No. I’m not.”

Will laughed. “Right. How about I meet you at yearbook, then? It’s the classroom next door to Weir’s. By the way, you should call your dad to let him know you’re with me.”

“Hey, Will?” I asked.

“What?”

“How come I was going to drop photography?”

“Photography. Photography. Okay, I think you said it was because you thought that the big project was going to take up too much of your time. Also, you didn’t think it was right for your grade to be based on a personal story. I think you thought it left too much to chance. And…that’s it, I think.”

I could tell he was leaving something out. My dad always says to listen for the pauses when you want to know if someone’s hiding something. I asked Will if there was anything else.

“Well. I’m theorizing here. But the first two years of photography are more technical. Like which cameras to use and lighting and processing and Photoshop. But advanced is more creative, more like what your mom does, if you know what I mean. So maybe that was the problem?”

I didn’t say anything, but it sounded like truth. “I’ll see you upstairs,” I said.

The staff cheered for me when I entered the room and everyone sang “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and shook my hand and patted me on the back, like I was some kind of hero. Someone held up a camera that turned out to be the camera, and said that I should have my picture taken with my old nemesis. They rounded up yet another camera, and I pretended to be having a fistfight with the camera, which made everyone laugh. I felt a little overwhelmed and maybe even touched, because it was clear how much these people really did like me, as opposed to the ones I had to eat with in the cafeteria.

All that was wonderful, until I started to realize what the actual business of yearbook entailed. It amounted to a succession of group photos, selling advertisements, and going to conferences about (you guessed it) yearbooks. All this required an endless series of meetings and debates. I wondered why in the world it could possibly take so much time, money, and effort to slap two hard covers around a stack of photographs.

The meeting lasted until around seven o’clock at night. There were photos to approve and copy to edit and schedules to arrange. On the way out, I asked Will how many times yearbook met each week. He laughed and said, “You’re joking, right? We meet every day. Some weekends, too.”

I did the math. That amounted to twenty (plus) hours a week of yearbook.

Seven hundred and twenty hours a school year—not including weekends or yearbook conferences.

Any way you looked at it: a hell of a lot of time.

I hoped that I would get my memory back, so that I would remember what I had liked about yearbook in the first place. I didn’t want to let all these nice people down.

In the car on the way home, Will couldn’t stop talking yearbook. The guy was obsessed, and I guess with seven hundred twenty hours a year, you’d have to be. I mainly found myself ignoring him. I’d nod every now and again and that seemed to be all the response that was required on my part.

I wanted to ask him why he (I) liked yearbook so much, but I thought it might hurt his feelings.

“You’re awfully quiet,” he said.

I told him I was tired, which I was.

“I’ve been talking too much,” he said. “I guess I just got excited that you were back. It’s not anywhere near as much fun without you, Chief.”

We were halfway to my house and stopped at a red light when I spotted James Larkin walking along the sidewalk. It had started drizzling, and even with whatever strangeness had passed between us in the greenhouse, I felt like we should offer him a ride. I asked Will if he would mind pulling the car over, and he replied, “The chap looks like he wants to be by himself.”

I reminded him how much James had helped me in the hospital, and how I had never had a chance to really thank him. “Plus,” I added, “he was nice enough to return the yearbook camera.” I knew that last part would definitely get Will. He sighed like it was really putting him out and muttered something about it “costing a lot of money to keep starting and stopping the car all over the place.” So I told him he could just drop me off, that I’d walk the rest of the way home. “Yeah right, I’m really going to leave my injured friend in the rain,” he said. “I don’t have all day to chauffeur you and your buddies around.”

I got out of the car and called James’s name. “Do you need a ride?” He turned real slow, and for a second after he saw me I was pretty sure he was just going to keep right on walking. Finally, he ambled over to Will’s car. He didn’t look all that enthusiastic about seeing me again. I was starting to wonder if I had hallucinated the boy I had met in the hospital.

“Still cold?” he asked politely.

“A little,” I replied. “Your shirt’s in my locker.”

James shrugged.

I was about to say how I’d been hoping we’d run into each other again when Will decided to get out of the car. Will edged himself between James and me and stuck out his hand. “Larkin, nice to see you, and thanks again for dropping off the camera. Naomi’s the other editor of the yearbook, not that you asked.”

“I did not know that,” James said. His mouth threatened to smile for a second. “Well, it was…good seeing you both.”

“The thing is,” I said, “I was sort of hoping I’d run into you again. I didn’t get a chance to thank you for all your help at the hospital—”

James cut me off. “Really. Don’t mention it,” he said. He stuck his hands in his coat pockets and turned to walk away.

“Wait!” I called out. “Can’t we at least give you a ride?”

Will pinched me on the arm and muttered, “He doesn’t want a ride.”

But Will shouldn’t have worried, because James just shook his head. “It’s not raining that hard.”

We got back in the car, and Will started chattering about yearbook again. “It would be really great, for once, to have some decent artists on staff.”

“Is he an artist?”

“Who?”

“James.”

“I think he does something with video, I’m not sure. The point is, all the good ones go over to newspaper or lit mag or even drama, but none of them ever want to work yearbook. And it’s so stupid when you think about it. ’Cause no one’s even gonna see the lit mag or the newspaper like a week after it comes out. But everyone’s gonna have their yearbook when they’re really old. You know? Hey, Chief?”

“What?” We were stopped again at that same light, and I was watching James cross the street.

“Forget it,” Will said.

“What’s his story?” I asked.

“How am I supposed to know?”

“Aren’t you supposed to know everything? He was kind of rude, don’t you think?”

Will shrugged. “No, he just didn’t want a ride.”

At that moment two things happened. The traffic light turned green, and it began to pour. “I suppose we should offer him a ride. Again.” Will sounded about as unenthusiastic as it is possible for a person to sound. He drove up alongside James.

“James!” I leaned over Will and yelled through the driver-side window.

“I don’t mind the rain!” he yelled. His hair was already soaked.

“James,” I said, “get in the car, would you?”

We locked eyes for a second. I raised my eyebrow. He shook his head the tiniest bit.

“I’m fine,” James repeated.

“But it’s storming,” I protested.

“Listen, Larkin, she’s not gonna give up, and I’m wasting gas. Just get in already,” Will barked.

James obeyed Will.

“Thanks,” James said to Will.

“Where to, sir?” Will asked.

“Just my home, I guess,” James said. He gave a few directions, and Will indicated that he knew where that was. In the rearview mirror, I watched James take off his jacket, which had gotten wet. I could see that leather cord with the ring on it again.

Will had noticed the ring, too, and he asked, “What’s the ring?”

“Oh, it’s my brother’s,” James said, slipping the ring under his T-shirt.

“Why isn’t he wearing it then?” Will asked.

“I guess that’d be”—he paused to dry off his hair on his shirt—“’cause he’s dead.”

“Hey,” Will said, “I’m really sorry about that, man.”

James shrugged and said something about it having happened a long time ago. It was clear to me that he didn’t want to talk about it, so I changed the subject. “I’ve been thinking. You never came to visit me in the hospital.”

“Yeah…I meant to. But I don’t really love hospitals.”

“I was waiting,” I said, turning around to look at him through the gap between the headrest and the front seat. “And you could have visited me at home, too.” My sunglasses slipped down the bridge of my nose a bit, and James reached into the gap to push them back up. He let his finger lightly graze the space above my brow before returning his hand to his lap.

“Does it still hurt?” James asked.

“Not too much,” I said.

“Do you remember what happened?” he asked.

“Nope, she doesn’t know anything past sixth grade,” Will answered for me, which was annoying. He was behaving rather badly.

I turned back around. “That’s not entirely true. I do still remember math and science.”

“What more is there in life?” Will quipped.

“I’ve just forgotten everything else,” I continued. “I’m basically a blank slate.”

James laughed. “Lucky girl.”

“I don’t see what’s so lucky about it,” Will grumbled.

“Aren’t there things you’d rather forget?” James asked him.

“No,” Will said. “There are not. If I were Naomi, I’d be screaming mad.”

“Well, are you?” James asked me.

I thought about it for a second before shaking my head. “Not really. There’s nothing I can do about it, is there?”

James nodded. “That’s an awfully mature attitude. I still get plenty pissed about things I can’t do anything about.”

Like what? I wondered, but didn’t say. “Besides, my memory might still come back.”

James’s house was on its own private road. The house was gray stone and not really a house at all. A mansion, I suppose. It would have seemed larger had it not been in the middle of an even more expansive lot. It reminded me of estates I’d seen in France when my parents had “wandered” there the summer I was seven. I didn’t even know they had such houses in North Tarrytown.

James had no neighbors, and even though it was already evening, there wasn’t a single light on that I could see. It seemed lonely. I wondered how many people lived there.

Despite Will’s plaintive looks, I got out and walked James to his door. The knocker on the door was an enormous iron lion’s head. Its nose and eye were badly dented. It reminded me of myself.

“I probably would have freaked out if you hadn’t been there. I didn’t get a chance to tell you before.”

“I’m glad I could help,” he said.

“I wanted to call you, but I didn’t know your number or anything. So, well, thanks, I guess.” I reached out to shake his hand.

“How formal,” he said. He surrounded my palm with his other hand before gently squeezing it.

We seemed frozen in that handshake, and then Will honked the car horn.

“I think your friend wants to go,” James said. He let my hand drop and said coldly, “I should go, too. Thank him for the ride.”

I decided not to take James’s sudden changes in temperature personally. Some people were like that. He’d been kind to me when I’d needed someone and to expect anything more would be unreasonable. I’d thanked him now and that was enough. Besides, I already had a boyfriend.

As he was pulling out of James’s driveway, Will asked me, “What the heck took so long?”

I said how I’d just been thanking James again, and Will said, “That kid’s a strange duck.”

I asked him what specifically he meant.

“Well, and I don’t know if this is true, but when he transferred here, they said it was because he went crazy over some girl at his old school.”

I asked him what specifically he meant by crazy.

“Like stalking her and making threats. That kind of crazy. I heard the girl had to get a restraining order or something,” Will informed me.

James didn’t seem the type to me. If anything, he was overly respectful. Plus, he had that trustworthy voice. “How do you know it’s true?” From what I could tell, everyone at school just liked to talk crap about everyone else.

“Do you want to know what his nickname was at his old school?”

I rolled my eyes.

“Crazy James.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked him.

“Duh, it means he’s”—he twirled his finger in a circle around his ear in the universal sign of psychotic—“crazy. Loco.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s not even a real nickname. It’s his name and an adjective.” Will was being so childish.

Will shrugged, as if to say, Don’t blame me.

“You made up the whole thing with the nickname, didn’t you?”

“No, of course not!” Will sighed. “Maybe. But the point is, it could have been his nickname. It was for illustrative purposes. All the other stuff was totally, totally true, Chief.”

We got to my house and Will patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry if all the yearbook stuff seems overwhelming at first. I’ll pick up the slack until you’re feeling completely up to snuff, okay?”

Will was fond of old-lady phrases like up to snuff, which probably would have amused me if I hadn’t been feeling pretty annoyed with him at this point. “Thanks. Say, Will, why do we like yearbook so much anyway?”

About a million colors passed over Will’s face. He began by sighing and that turned into a laugh. His brow furrowed for a second, and then his blue eyes seemed to cloud, like he might cry. He didn’t cry though.

“Is it a hard question?” I asked.

“No. It’s probably ludicrous…I just hoped it might be something you would remember on your own. I know it might seem lame to some people, but we both really believe in what we’re doing. I’d say you even more than me. To us, it’s not just a book with a bunch of pictures. It’s an icon, a symbol. It gives the younger kids an ideal to aspire to, and the older ones who’ve graduated something to hold on to when the world is hard. We both really believe that it can define the school and the way people see the school. A good high school yearbook can make a better school. And better kids. And a better planet. And a better universe. We write the story of the year. If you think about it, it’s a huge responsibility.”

“Good speech,” I said sincerely.

“I’ve given better. We used to always talk about all the things we would do when we were finally running the show. How we’d really include everybody in the yearbook, and make it democratic and personal at the same time. How we’d make sure it wasn’t just pictures of the popular people and the athletes and the kids who were friends with people on the staff. You’re all three, by the way.”

“I am?” I knew the athlete part to be right, but I hadn’t felt at all popular in my one day at Tom Purdue.

“Sad, but true. The only thing we ever worried about was which one of us would be made editor, because there was just one editor. By the time it came to interview last year, we had come up with a plan to apply together, to be co-editors, even though it was entirely unprecedented and fairly controversial, us being juniors and all. That’s how we became the first co-editors in the history of The Phoenix.

“And now we are running the show. Pretty cool, right?”

I nodded, but, truthfully, I had found Will’s whole speech disheartening. I could see and hear his conviction and, in contrast, I felt none of that. Maybe I had in the past, but I didn’t anymore.

When we reached my house, Will got out of the car and walked me to the door. Like his mother, he hugged me surprisingly hard, then he patted me on the back twice to indicate that the hug was over. “Okay, Chief.” He did this comical salute with his hand before returning to his car.

I was about to unlock my front door when I realized I didn’t have any idea where I’d put my keys. I rang the doorbell, and about five seconds later Dad answered.

“I lost my keys,” I started to say at the same time Dad said, “You forgot your keys this morning.”

Dad asked me how my first day back had been, but I wasn’t in any mood to talk. I told him I had a headache and went to my room to lie down.

Dad must have let me sleep, because I didn’t wake up until my phone rang around nine-thirty that night.

“I’ve been thinking about your question. And I thought of another reason I like yearbook so much,” Will said.

“Okay.”

“You know that we both joined the staff in ninth grade, right? But what I didn’t mention to you was the year before ninth grade had been pretty rough for both of us. You had the thing with your mom. I had some…family stuff, too. Well, I think yearbook sort of saved me. It gave me something to do every day instead of just, well, fixating, I guess. And for me at least, yearbook is sort of inseparable from you. You really are my best friend in the whole world, Chief.”

I could hear all sorts of things in his voice. Tenderness. Worry. Love even. How odd to be someone’s best friend and not really know them at all. I couldn’t come up with anything to say, so I waited for him to speak again.

“I’ve been feeling sort of bad about this evening. I think I might have been, for lack of a better term, an ass,” Will said finally.

“You were, but I forgive you,” I said just before hanging up.

It was late and I was starving. I hadn’t eaten anything at lunch and I’d slept through dinner. I walked down the hall to Dad’s office. If I haven’t mentioned it before, Dad’s sort of a gourmet. All the years he and Mom had been wandering, he’d also been collecting recipes for the books. The only thing my mom knew how to make was dessert.

His office door was closed. I was about to knock but I could hear he was on the phone with someone. I didn’t want to interrupt him—Dad hated that—so I loitered in the hallway outside his door and waited for him to be finished. I wasn’t meaning to eavesdrop, at least not at first.

“…looks normal, but I’m worried, babe,” he said. Silence, and when I next heard him his voice was muffled. “…psychotherapy…”

I wondered who Dad was talking to about me. Mom, maybe? But he wouldn’t be calling her “babe”…

“…break it slowly. Everything in its time.”

Break what slowly? Was I still the subject? I tried to listen more closely, but he moved somewhere else in the room where I couldn’t hear him at all. The next time I heard him he was laughing. It was definitely not my mother. “Caracas!” he said. “I wish I could…”

Dad had always traveled a lot for his job; in addition to the books he wrote with Mom, he wrote articles for travel and men’s magazines. I concluded he was probably talking business. It made me resentful, actually. I hated being small talk, just another one of his stupid anecdotes. To tell you the truth, I didn’t care who he was talking to. I didn’t want to be anyone’s topic of discussion.

As I stalked back to my bedroom, I vowed to be less anecdote-worthy. That way, people wouldn’t talk about me over late-night phone calls or in the goddamn bathroom at school.

As much as it was in my control, I would be normal.

By the end of the week, I had obtained a doctor’s note permitting the sunglasses, and I gleefully presented it to Mrs. Tarkington. “Well, it’s certainly not orthodox,” she said, but she wasn’t the type to argue with something on hospital letterhead.

Other than that, I occasionally got lost; I occasionally heard people talking about me; I occasionally told them to go screw themselves. Under my breath, of course—I was normal. In order to tolerate our arctic cafeteria, I brought a couple of extra sweaters. I let Ace hold my hand in the hallways. I never went back to the greenhouse.

On Saturday night, my campaign for normalcy continued when I went with Ace to a party that a tennis buddy from another school was hosting. Ace didn’t bother to introduce me to the friend—maybe I already knew him?—and I never figured out who he was on my own either.

For all practical purposes, Ace abandoned me nearly as soon as we arrived. He became enmeshed in an elaborate drinking game that involved shots, dice, quarters, darts, a bull’s-eye, and chest bumping. Although I watched the game for about fifteen minutes, I came out with no sense of the rules or how the winner was determined. I suppose it was like any drinking game. Last man standing.

I’m not being fair. Ace did ask me a couple of times if I was having a good time. I lied and told him I was. To tell you the truth, I was glad that he was occupied because, aside from tennis, I hadn’t been able to figure out one thing that we had in common. If our conversations were a play, they would have been like a high school version of Waiting for Godot:

Ace: Do you remember that time Paul Idomeneo got really stoned and jumped off the roof onto his dad’s trampoline?

Me: No.

Ace: Well, it was pretty awesome.

Me: Sounds amazing.

Ace: Yeah, that kid was hard-core as hell. So, do you remember that time…

(And repeat. Endlessly, endlessly repeat.)

I suppose he was trying to be helpful, telling me little things that might jog my memory. Unfortunately, Ace had no sense of what would interest me, and I was too embarrassed/polite/normal to question him about anything important, like, for example, What do I see in you? From the stories he told, our relationship had consisted largely of a bunch of parties where people acted like jerks interspersed with the occasional game of tennis.

I probably should have broken up with him. I didn’t, though, mainly for two reasons: one, I didn’t want to end it if it turned out that I really did love him (and I still held out some hope that my feelings would all eventually come back to me); and second, I’m a little ashamed to say, though it was probably the more important one, being with Ace made school easier. He protected me from those nasty lunch girls. Despite my memory being gone, I wasn’t a moron. With my multiple sweaters and not knowing who anyone was, I knew how I looked to people, and I knew how vulnerable my situation at school was without Ace to define me socially. Being with him went a long way in my campaign for normalcy.

Ace brought me a beer, which he opened for me. “I had to go to the fridge to get this. The ones in the coolers were all hot. Having a nice time?”

I smiled and nodded and watched him walk away.

But I wasn’t having a nice time, and looking around the place, I wondered if anyone there was. Because everyone looked a little miserable just below the surface, even Ace with his inexplicable game.

I’m pretty sure the doctors had mentioned something about avoiding alcohol and it turned out to be very good advice. Another one of the “fun” side effects of my injury was that I couldn’t hold liquor at all. Halfway through my first beer, I was starting to feel ever so slightly smashed. I decided to go look for a place to lie down. I made my way to a bedroom on the second floor, but it was occupied by other partygoers.

I wanted Ace to drive me home, but I couldn’t find him anywhere. It was probably just as well. The last I’d seen him, he’d been pretty wasted and not in the greatest vehicle-operating condition.

I made my way out to the front lawn. I really wanted to get home. Unfortunately, the party was about twenty miles from Dad’s house, so I couldn’t walk. As I stood there puzzling it out, I started to have that déjà vu feeling. Had I been to this house before? Had I been in this situation? Might my memory be coming back? It wasn’t any of those things, of course. The only reason it felt like déjà vu was because it was the most clichéd situation in the world—I was the star of a driver’s ed video on designated drivers.

I called Will on my cell phone to see if he would pick me up, but he wasn’t answering. I left him an incoherent, rambling, probably embarrassing message. I was too drunk to worry that my English teacher might be the recipient.

Reluctantly I called Dad at home, though I knew he wasn’t likely to be there. He’d gone out with Cheryl and Morty Byrnes, travel writers who used to be Dad’s and Mom’s friends, but now were just Dad’s. I had commented that it was strange, because Cheryl Byrnes had really been Mom’s friend in the first place. Dad’s response was that “In situations of infidelity, the cheated-on always gets all the mutual friends.”

Dad didn’t pick up the home phone so I dialed his cell. I cleared my throat and tried to make myself sound less drunk.

“Naomi,” Dad answered, worried.

“Daddy,” I said, and then I completely ruined my plan to sound less intoxicated by starting to cry.

“How much did you drink?”

“Just the one, I swear. I thought one would be okay.”

I managed to explain to Dad where I was and he said he’d come and get me.

While I was waiting for Dad to pick me up, Will called me back.

Will also offered to drive me home, but I told him it was too late, I’d already called Dad.

“Where was Ace in all of this?” Will asked icily.

“The game,” I answered.

“What game?”

“The rules to the game were unclear.”

“Chief?”

“Oh, Will,” I said. “Silly, silly Will. I have to wait for my daddy now.”

“Honestly, Naomi. You aren’t supposed to drink after a head trau—”

I hung up on him. The phone rang again, but I ignored it. I couldn’t talk to anyone. I lay down on the sidewalk and concentrated on not throwing up. I set my purse on top of my stomach, like a flag so that Dad could locate me, or a grave marker, if he didn’t.

I must have passed out because the next thing I knew Dad was helping me into the backseat of his car.

While I waited for him to get back in, I noticed that the car smelled like flowers. I was wondering what the scent was when I became aware that a red rose was floating just below the passenger-seat headrest. I wondered if I was having a vision. After some woozy contemplation, I figured out that the rose was attached to a dark-haired woman’s bun.

“You’re not Cheryl and Morty,” I said, pointing my finger at her.

The woman shook her head. “No. I am not Cheryl-Ann Morty.” She had a Spanish accent of some kind, and she sounded amused. “Who is this Cheryl-Ann Morty?”

“Do I know you?” I asked her, but by then my dad was in the car. “Naomi, this is my friend, Rosa Rivera,” he said.

“You were supposed to be out with Cheryl and Morty,” I said, wagging my finger at him. “Why aren’t you out with Cheryl and Morty?”

“Yeah, and you’re not supposed to drink until you’re twenty-one,” Dad replied. “And especially not in your condition.”

“One beer! Barely one. Oh, that’s…” But I didn’t complete the thought, because I passed out in Dad’s car.

I don’t remember when we dropped Rosa Rivera off or how I got into the house. I do remember throwing up on Dad’s beige floors.

“I’m never drinking again,” I said to Dad as he held my hair back while I threw up in the bathroom.

“Well, I’d say that’s probably wise. At least for the time being.”

“Who was that woman?”

“Like I said, her name is Rosa Rivera. She’s a tango dancer.”

I didn’t find any of that particularly illuminating, but I was too screwed up to make him elaborate.

“She smelled like roses,” I said about ten minutes later when we were back in the kitchen, where Dad was making me take two aspirins. “I don’t have any friends who smell like roses. I don’t have any friends at all.”

“That’s not true, kid.”

The home phone rang. Dad answered it. Still standing, I set my pounding head on the kitchen counter. The porcelain tiles felt refreshing.

“That was Ace. He was really worried about you. He said you disappeared,” Dad reported.

“True,” I said. “True, true.”

“I read him the riot act anyway.”

“Daddy, I need to go to bed now.”

My cell phone rang. It was Will. I handed it to Dad. “Tell him I’m okay, wouldja?”

“Hello, Will…Yes, Naomi’s fine. Except for being grounded for the next week, she’s fine.”

“I’m punished?” I asked after he’d hung up.

“Well, mainly you’re punishing yourself, but I thought I ought to add a little something. So you’ve got to stay in for the next week. Seems parental, don’t you think?”

My head was pounding. “Could you start by sending me to my room?”

“Good idea, kid. Let’s go.”

Around three a.m., there were three rapid taps on my window. It was Ace. He asked me if it was okay if he came in; I flipped on the light, wincing at the brightness, and got out of bed to unlock the window.

This time when he vaulted himself over my shelf, he knocked my dictionary off. It hit the floor with a booming thwack. “Oops,” he said.

I hoped the noise hadn’t woken Dad.

“Where’d you go?” he asked. “I was worried.”

“Where’d you go?” I asked.

“We were just out back in the pool. All you had to do was look.”

“You abandoned me.” I had a headache and I was in no mood to be questioned by Ace. “I was totally alone. Did I seem like I was having a good time to you?”

“But, Naomi!” Ace protested. “You said that you were.”

I had said that. It was true. I had observed Ace to be a very literal person, so arguing with him was probably pointless. Instead, I told him that I didn’t feel well, which was also true.

“Go back to bed,” Ace whispered. “I don’t want to disturb you.”

I did, and I thought Ace might leave, but instead he sat in my desk chair. “Can we, maybe talk? Just for a little bit?” he asked.

I wasn’t really up for more conversation with Ace, but I guess I felt sorry for the guy. I turned onto my side and asked him what he wanted to talk about.

“Do you remember that time we were at my cousin Jim Tuttle’s house in Scarsdale?”

“No,” I replied. I stifled a yawn and prepared myself for another one of Ace’s fascinating drinking stories.

“We were coming back from sectionals. You still had on your tennis whites. Your hair was in a ponytail. I love your hair that way. You reached up and took my face in your hands and you kissed me. I was totally blown away. We weren’t going out then. I didn’t even know you liked me. You were the first brainy girl who’d ever shown any interest.”

“Brainy girl?”

“One who reads and stuff, not just for school. I liked that about you. We never had classes together or anything. But I’d seen you around, and I always thought a smarty like you’d go for a guy like Landsman.” Ace paused to look at me.

“He’s just my friend.”

“When you kissed me that first time, you were still wearing your tennis wristbands. I took them off of you and set them on Jim’s couch. We forgot all about them. That’s why I got you another pair. I, uh, realized my gift must have looked pretty lame to you if you didn’t know the context.”

I nodded. Something about his story had put a lump in my throat. It might have been the way he told it more than the story itself, or I might have been weakened by my emerging hangover. In any case, I was somehow granted a solitary moment of X-ray vision and what I saw was this: Ace was probably as frustrated with me as I was with him, and the only thing stopping him from breaking up with me was that he was, when it came down to it, pretty decent.

He knelt down beside my bed. His breath was bittersweet with alcohol. For a second, I worried I might throw up again, but the feeling subsided.

I took his face in my hands, the way he had described, and I kissed him.

Ace started stroking my hair (which was pleasant, but not romantic—it made me feel like a well-behaved lapdog), and he whispered so low I could barely hear him. “I don’t want to pressure you. I don’t want to be, you know, that guy who pressures you. Do you think we might have sex again someday?”

Without even thinking about it, I sat up in bed and pushed his hand away. “No.”

He replied, “I didn’t mean tonight necessarily.”

I hadn’t meant just tonight either, but I didn’t say that. I told him that I’d gone off the pill, which I had.

Ace smiled all dopey and drunk. “Maybe we could do it at homecoming?”

“Homecoming?” I asked.

“Yeah. It’s in three weeks. We’re still going, right?” Ace explained that we had planned to before my accident.

I said yes. I mean, why not? I didn’t remember ever having been to a homecoming dance.

Ace fell asleep on my bedroom floor. I couldn’t, so I just lay in bed staring at him. He reminded me of a six-foot-four baby—he had long downy eyelashes and was drooling. It was more than just physically, though. Sleeping on my floor, he seemed somehow undefined and vulnerable. I even felt a certain tenderness for him. I wondered if that was the same as love.

When I awoke the next morning, Ace was gone. Actually, I should say afternoon. Dad had let me sleep in until around two before knocking on my door. “I’m making eggs.”

I informed him that I couldn’t eat anything, but Dad insisted it would make me feel better.

“Last night, I don’t know if you remember, my little lush, but I was kind of out with someone…” Dad blurted out in the middle of pouring me orange juice.

“The woman with the flower in her hair?” I asked.

Dad nodded. “It was a date.”

“Yeah. I figured that out on my own,” I said.

“Smart girl.” Dad started fussing with the eggs. They had started out as a goat cheese omelet but had ended up scrambled.

“If you play with them too much, they won’t turn out,” I pointed out to him.

“It’s good advice. I’m the one who always says that.” Dad beat the half-cooked eggs furiously. “Maybe I ought to start over?”

“Taste the same either way,” I said. “This woman…is she someone Cheryl and Morty set you up with?”

“No,” Dad said.

“Were you even out with Cheryl and Morty last night?”

“Not exactly.”

I raised my eyebrow at him. “Jesus, Dad, were you lying to me?”

I thought about Dad saying he was getting coffee and his strange, secret phone calls. In other words, it wasn’t his first date with the flower woman. He obviously had been seeing her since before my accident. “You’ve been hiding this from me since I got out of the hospital, haven’t you? Why would you do that?”

“It looks bad. I know how it looks, but in my defense, I wanted to break things to you slowly. You had so much to take in with your mom, the divorce, having a sister and everything. I didn’t want to add to your load.”

“But you lied to me! What makes you think I’d even care if you had a girlfriend?”

“She’s not just my girlfriend.”

“What do you mean?”

For the longest time, Dad wouldn’t answer me or look at me. The only sound in the kitchen was the hissing eggs, which were getting good and burned. I hadn’t had much of an appetite for them to begin with.

“I’m getting married, kid,” Dad said. He looked up at me guiltily.

Dad was getting married.

“She’s a dancer. How ’bout that?”

Aside from the flower, I hadn’t gotten much of a look at her in the car. In my head, I pictured the exotic kind. You know, a stripper, probably my age, with DDD breast implants and a fake tan, so I insisted he clarify. “What kind of dancer?”

When he said tango, I was slightly relieved. “She’s traveled the world. She’s won just about every award a professional tango dancer can win.” He sounded the way he did when I’d brought home a particularly good report card. Proud, I guess. “Now she mainly teaches here and in the city.”

He told me they’d met a year ago. He’d had to take dance lessons for an article he had been writing for a men’s magazine. When everyone partnered up, he’d been the odd man out. “She had to take pity on your old man,” he said.

“Do I like her?” I asked.

Dad cleared his throat. “It’s been difficult for you. With Mom. And everything.”

That meant I didn’t like her.

“But maybe your injury could be an inadvertently fortuitous event?” Dad said. “A good thing. A new start.”

A new start? That kind of talk didn’t sound like my dad at all. There was nothing good about what had happened to me. Except maybe meeting James, and that had turned out to be a pleasant but anomalous event that had momentarily distracted me from how much everything else sucked.

“There’s nothing good about this,” I yelled. I grabbed Dad’s keys off the kitchen island and ran out the door and straight into his car, which was parked in the driveway. I didn’t necessarily plan to try driving again; I just wanted to be alone. I couldn’t be in the same physical space with Dad.

Sitting in the driveway, I really wished I could go somewhere. Anywhere.

Dad came out about a minute later. He must have tended to the incinerated eggs first. I pressed the button that locked all the doors, so he couldn’t get in the car.

“Naomi.” His voice was muted through the window. “Please let me in.”

I put my brain-damaged head on the steering wheel. It made the horn beep, but I didn’t mind. I just let it blare. The horn was screaming for me and saying all the curse words that were running through my head. It was so satisfying that I sat like that for a few minutes. I would have let it go on even longer except my head started to throb from the racket.

“Naomi,” Dad said after the noise had stopped.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I yelled.

“This has gone badly. It was a stupid way for me to tell you about my getting married,” Dad’s voice was still tinny and distant through the glass. “And that crap I said about your head injury being a good thing. Of course I don’t think that.”

“Just go away!”

“Please let me in, kid. I feel like an asshole standing out here like this. At least roll down the window a little.”

Dad was trying. He always tried.

Every year for my birthday, my dad gave me a single book. He always put a lot of thought into the selection. It was a big deal to him, because books in general are a very big deal to him. When Dad says he’s going to church, he actually means that he’s going to a library or a bookstore. For my third birthday, he gave me Harold and the Purple Crayon; for my tenth, Holes; for my twelfth, the last birthday I could remember, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. He would inscribe the books, too. The messages were long and detailed, sometimes sentimental and usually funny. This was how he talked to me. This was how he told me the important things.

I didn’t unlock the door, but I pressed the button that lowered the window.

“What book did you get me for my sixteenth birthday?” I asked.

“Why are you thinking about that?”

“I don’t know. I just am.”

“Possession by A. S. Byatt.”

I couldn’t remember having read it, which of course didn’t mean that I hadn’t. I asked him why he had chosen that one.

“It’s about a lot of things, but mainly it’s a love story. I was worried that you had gotten a bit, well, cynical with everything that had happened between your mother and me. I wanted to remind you about romance. It was probably a stupid notion. A sixteen-year-old who’s not an expert on romance ought to be brought to a lab and dissected.” Dad laughed. “I was considering Jane Eyre, but I know how you feel about orphan stories.”

“What’s her name again?” I asked finally. Something to do with flowers, or had she just smelled like them?

“Rosa Rivera,” he said.

“Do I call her Rosa?” I asked.

“No, you call her Rosa Rivera. Everyone does.”

“Why?”

“I always assumed it was because of the enticing alliteration of her first and last names.” I couldn’t tell if he was serious.

“What do you call her?”

“My darling, mostly,” he said with tender notes I’d never heard him use before. “Sometimes my love.”

I studied my dad. He was like an alien version of himself. I wondered how long he’d been this way.

When I was back inside, I called Will. He was my only source of reliable information, though I was starting to question how reliable anyone was. Ask two people to tell you anything, you’ll get two versions. Even easy things like directions, let alone important or semi-controversial topics like why a fight started or what a person was generally like. If you don’t know something for yourself, you just can’t be sure.

“Did you know my dad was getting married?”

“Of course. In June,” Will answered. “And nice talking to you, too.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded.

“Well, it’s not exactly your favorite subject. And I assumed your dad would have covered that.”

“Why don’t I like her?” I asked him.

“Basically, you think she’s fake and trying to be your mother,” Will said. “Something along those lines. And you said she smelled funny, like an old lady. One time, she bought your dad a gray fedora for his birthday. You thought it made him look, uh, effeminate, and then you donated it to Goodwill without telling him. To this day, I don’t think he knows what happened to it.”

“I gave away my dad’s hat?” What a weird thing for me to do.

“Well, you really were not fond of that fedora,” Will answered. “Your dad would probably look better in a bowler.”

“Do you like her?” I asked him.

“I’ve only met her once, but she seemed all right. She’s not gonna be my stepmother, though.”

“But my dad…” It was hard to talk about Dad this way. “He really loves her, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, Chief, I suspect he does.”

On Wednesday, Dad suggested we go to Rosa Rivera’s house in Pleasantville for dinner. Since our meeting (reunion?) seemed unavoidable, I agreed. Besides, I was grounded anyway.

When she answered the door, the first thing I noticed was that she definitely looked older than Dad. She had her black hair in a tight bun and was wearing her work clothes, which consisted of black tights, a black leotard, a black shawl tied around her waist, and high-heeled shoes. Pretty much everything she wore was black except for her lipstick and the rose tucked behind her ear, which were both a dramatic crimson. Dancing had given her really excellent posture. I stood up straighter just looking at her.

She greeted me before she even greeted Dad. “Naomi,” she said, throwing her arms around me and kissing me on both cheeks. “How are you, my baby?” She didn’t have much of an accent, but all her y’s came out sounding like j’s—How are joo?

I thought about the question. “Cold,” I said finally.

“Come inside, and I will try to warm you up.”

Her place was the opposite of Dad’s house. It was bursting with color, almost as if she had been given a mandate to use every crayon in the Crayola box at least once: turquoise walls, a fuchsia velvet sofa, a golden chandelier with midnight blue crystals, black-and-white-checkered marble floors, and red roses everywhere.

“Will you live here?” I asked Dad.

“It hasn’t all been settled yet, but I think she’ll probably move in with us.”

I wondered what Dad’s beige house would look like after they were married.

While Rosa was in the kitchen getting me a cup of tea, I examined the many framed photographs that were scattered about the room. One was of my dad and her. A few were of Rosa Rivera at dancing competitions. She also had three or so pictures of herself pregnant, presumably with the subjects of the bulk of the photos: two girls at many different ages doing the usual sorts of childhood activities.

“Those are her twin daughters, Frida and Georgia,” Dad said. “They’re both in college now.”

“How old is Rosa Rivera anyway?” I whispered to Dad.

“Forty-six,” Rosa Rivera answered as she came into the room with a teapot on a tray. “Your father is my younger man. He is six years my junior.” Yunior. “My first husband was thirty years older than me, so it all works itself out, yes?” Jes.

She set the tray on an enormous lime-green hassock and joined me at the fireplace, where she put her arm around my shoulders. It was just the way she was—always kissing and touching you. My instinct was to move away, but for some reason I didn’t.

With her other hand, she pointed to one of the dance competition photos. “This was my husband. He was also my dance partner for fifteen years.”

“What happened to him?”

“He died,” she said, blowing a kiss to the photograph.

“You really like pictures of yourself pregnant,” I commented.

“It is true. Some people do not like it, but I loved being pregnant. I would not have minded being pregnant even more than I was, but my job made this difficult.” Yob.

I thought of my mother and how she had never been pregnant with me.

“You are shivering,” Rosa Rivera said to me. She put her hands around mine. “They are like ice!” she said, more to Dad than me.

“She’s been that way since she got out of the hospital,” Dad told her.

Rosa Rivera left the room and came back with a rainbow-striped silk scarf. It must have been twelve feet long. She was able to drape it loosely around my neck five times. It smelled like her.

“Better?” she asked.

“Warmer, at least.”

“It suits you,” she said.

I didn’t think so, but whatever.

“You will take it when you leave.”

“I couldn’t,” I said. It must have been really expensive. I didn’t want her damn scarf anyway.

Rosa Rivera shrugged her super-straight shoulders. “I give everything away. I believe, Naomi, that your possessions possess you, do you know?”

I wasn’t sure.

Dad went into the kitchen to make the salad, leaving Rosa Rivera and me alone.

I looked at her and wondered what I hadn’t liked about her before. I decided to ask. “My dad says we don’t get along,” I said.

Rosa Rivera smiled at me conspiratorially. “Possibly. But I am an optimist, and I always believed you would come round.”

She was wrong. I hadn’t yet, and I didn’t like her telling me that I had. I didn’t want optimism; I wanted honesty. I unlooped the scarf from around my neck.

“Naomi,” Rosa said, “I know this all must be very frightening for you.” She put her hand on my arm, but I shook her off.

“What the hell would you know about it?” I asked.

I didn’t wait for her reply. I just left her standing in her Technicolor living room, still reaching out her hands to me.

In the car on the way back, Dad was unusually quiet, and I suspected that Rosa had probably told him about my walking out on her before dinner.

He didn’t say anything until we were back on our street. “Why didn’t you let Rosa Rivera give you that scarf?” he asked.

I told him how it wasn’t my style.

“Thought it looked nice on you, kid.”

“Honestly, Dad,” I said, “it’s hard enough figuring out anything about myself without other people dictating my taste to me.”

“I’m sure it is. But in any case, that wasn’t what I was saying. I think I was talking courtesy, if you know what I mean?” All this was said casually.

He turned into our driveway. “Because sometimes, when someone wants to give you a gift, the best thing to do is accept it. Just an infinitesimal something I’ve learned that I thought I’d pass on to you.”

I remembered how Dad, when he was still married to Mom, was always returning the presents she’d get him. Even if it was small, like a sweater. I used to think, just keep the stupid sweater, Dad. She obviously wanted you to have it. But my dad had been raised without much money, so he could be kind of strange around presents. Obviously, Mom knew his history, but even as a little kid, I could tell all his returning hurt her feelings.

I wondered if Rosa had felt that way when I tore that scarf off.

The worst of it was, what did I really know about my taste anyway? It had been a nice scarf and I had been cold, and if I was honest, maybe I had only been using that taste excuse as a way to hurt her feelings.

“Rosa wanted me to apologize to you,” Dad said before we got out of the car.

“For what?”

“Something about your amnesia. Something about her saying she knew how you felt.”

I nodded.

“But Sonny, her husband who died? He had Alzheimer’s disease. Do you know what that is?”

I nodded again.

“So Rosa Rivera has had some experiences with memory loss. I think that’s all she was trying to say. It probably came out wrong. It’s sometimes hard to talk to—It’s sometimes hard to talk. She didn’t ask me to tell you any of this. I just thought you should know.”

For a second, I felt like a jerk. Then I exploded at Dad. “I don’t see what any of that has to do with me! Not to mention, you lied to me. Not to mention I obviously didn’t like Rosa Rivera before, so why are you expecting me to like her any better now?”

“Well, Naomi, you were being ignorant then, so I had rather hoped you’d prefer to be enlightened now.”

“I’ll stick with ignorant, thanks.” I tried to say this as dryly as possible.

Dad turned off the ignition, but he didn’t move to get out of the car. “I banged my head. That doesn’t make me a different person. And it doesn’t mean I’m going to like your goddamn fiancée either.”

Dad shook his head and he looked as sad as I’d ever seen him. “You’re just like me, kid, and it worries the crap out of me right now. Because with the current state of things, it’s not necessarily a good thing to be like us. You’re going to need to let people in.”

I didn’t say anything.

Dad got out of the car. “Don’t forget to lock the door when you come in.”

That night in my bedroom, I took out my sophomore yearbook for the first time since I’d been back to school. I had originally been intending to look through it for inspiration for my photography project proposal, which was due the next day. Instead, I found myself turning to my class picture.

There she was with her light gray hair and her dark gray lips upturned into an impenetrable grin. I wished that she could talk and tell me everything she had ever felt or thought or seen.

“What were you like?” I asked her. “Were you happy? Or were you smiling because they told you to?”

I looked at myself in my closet mirror and tried to arrange my features like the girl in the yearbook. I didn’t quite have the trick of it yet.

I brushed some strands of hair in front of my face, the way the girl in the yearbook had worn hers. It looked wrong, though I couldn’t say exactly why at first. I studied myself some more before deciding that the pieces of hair in the front had gotten too long.

I took a pair of scissors from my desk drawer and cut a few pieces on each side of my head. The easy swish of the blades against my hair was satisfying.

I looked in the mirror to check my work. I hadn’t cut it evenly, so I took a little more off on each side.

Then, a little more.

As I cut, it occurred to me that it might be pointless to even try to look like the girl in the yearbook. It might be easier to be somebody completely different instead.

I cut pieces from the back and the front, until all that survived was a choppy short mane. With each piece, I felt like I was getting rid of someone’s expectations of me: goodbye, Mom, Dad, Will, Ace, those kids at lunch, my teachers, everyone. I felt giddy and light, like I might even start to float away. It was the end of normal.

The girl in the yearbook would never have had short hair.

I set the scissors on my desk, gathered up the strewn clippings as best I could, and then I fell quickly, peacefully asleep. I didn’t even take off my clothes or turn off the light.

When my alarm went off the next morning, I jumped out of bed without even looking in the mirror. I had actually forgotten all about my hair until I was in the shower. Little pieces slipped through my fingers like sand before they washed down the drain.

When I saw myself in the bathroom mirror, I felt sort of elated. It seems strange to say even now, but I finally recognized the person in the mirror as the person inside my head.

“Your hair!” Dad said when I came into the kitchen for breakfast. “What happened?”

I told him that nothing had happened. I had simply decided to cut it. I didn’t ask him what he thought either.

“If I’d known you wanted to cut it, I could have taken you somewhere to get it done.”

When I sat down at the table, Dad stood so that he could better appraise my mane from an overhead angle.

“It’s not bad. It’s cool actually. Kind of punk rock,” Dad said finally, gently tousling my hair. “I barely recognize you, kiddo.”

That hadn’t been the point, of course. Maybe just an amazing perk. If no one recognized me, they wouldn’t be upset when I didn’t recognize them either.