Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

5

THE REVIEWS WERE MIXED.

Ace walked right past me in the hallway. I had to call his name, and when he saw me he looked confused and betrayed, like Bambi when his mother bites it in the movie. “I liked it long,” he said finally. Then he kissed me. “It’s going to take some getting used to.” When we stopped kissing, I noticed that Will was staring at us from across the corridor.

I waved at him.

“Jesus, I thought Zuckerman was cheating on you, Chief,” Will called.

“He’d love that,” Ace muttered under his breath.

Will walked up to me and tousled my hair. “You look like you just got out of prison.”

“How’d you know? That’s exactly what I was going for,” I said.

Will looked at me and nodded. “I like it,” he declared after a moment’s consideration. The first bell rang, so we all scattered to our lockers and classes.

“I just want you to know that I think your hair is complete genius,” Alice Leeds, the girl who had helped me open my locker, said to me as I was fishing out my precalculus book.

“Thanks.”

As her locker was only two to the left of mine, I usually saw her several times a day. After third period, Alice brought up my hair again. “It’s weird, but I can’t stop thinking about your hair. It intrigues me. It’s like you have nothing to hide behind anymore.”

“Um, okay.”

At lunch, Alice came up to my table in the cafeteria and handed me a flyer. “I know you’re big into yearbook, but I’m directing this play. Come audition, if you want.”

I looked at the paper, which announced auditions for the Thomas Purdue Country Day School’s production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. “Oh, that’s not really my type of thing,” I demurred.

“Have you ever been in a play before?” she asked.

“Not since second grade. I played the dual roles of Corn and Plymouth Rock in the school’s Thanksgiving pageant. I was pretty awesome.”

“Well, if you’ve really never been in a play, how do you know for sure that it’s not your thing?”

By now, Alice was starting to attract the attention of the other people at Ace’s table.

“Yeah, Nomi, how do you know?” asked that awful Brianna-girl. Since that first day, she hadn’t spoken to me at all unless it was to say something nasty. She really let loose when Ace wasn’t there, which he hadn’t been that day on account of making up a Spanish test.

“You’re right. I don’t know. I’ll see you there, Alice.” I wasn’t really going to go. I only said I would because Brianna was being such a jerk.

Alice smiled at me and nodded.

“Nice gloves,” Brianna called to Alice as she walked away. Alice was wearing black lace gloves with the fingers cut off. “You better watch out. I heard she’s a total lezzie,” Brianna whispered.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Your hair,” she said, sweet as vomit. “It might give some people the wrong idea.”

“Your comments might give some people the wrong idea, too,” I said even sweeter. I picked up my tray and left. I decided to tell Ace I wasn’t ever going to eat with those people again.

Somehow, that day managed to become the best one of school so far. It made me cheerful not to be recognized. I went through my classes in a sort of happy fog and by the time eighth period rolled around, I had completely forgotten about my Advanced Photography Workshop project proposal. Mr. Weir had already given me two other extensions, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t come up with an idea. I was probably going to have to drop the class after all.

“So what’s it gonna be, Naomi?” Mr. Weir asked.

“Well, it’s still in progress,” I said, looking around the classroom desperately. Student and professional artwork covered almost every space. In the uppermost corner of the room was a picture from an ultrasound machine. “Maybe something to do with pregnancy?” I suggested.

“Good, but how is that a personal story?” Mr. Weir asked.

“Well…” I tried to improvise. “I’m adopted…and my sister isn’t…Is there anything there?”

Mr. Weir thought about it for a second and then nodded. “Maybe. I’d need to hear a bit more first.”

I wouldn’t have gone to the audition except that I ran into Alice Leeds at our lockers. “Want to walk down with me?” she asked.

And I would have probably said no to that, too, except that idiotic Brianna was watching us from across the hallway. “Sure,” I said loudly enough for her to hear. “Let’s go.”

Alice appraised me over her glasses. “You definitely shouldn’t audition for Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. Not with yearbook. Those roles rehearse every day.”

“Um, okay.”

“I think you might make a good Hamlet…I like the idea of a girl Hamlet, don’t you?”

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?” I watched her make a note on a legal pad and wondered when I could slip out of the theater without her seeing.

At that point, we were inside the theater, and Alice turned her attention to organizing the auditions. I probably could have left, but something kept me there. With its dingy red velvet seats and its scuffed wooden stage, the theater reminded me of a foreign country. It was like all of a sudden discovering that Prague or Berlin was in the middle of my high school. The room was overflowing with nervous energy and excitement, and I guess I wanted to see how it would all turn out.

Before the auditions, Alice made a speech, a few words about the play and her “vision” for it. I liked how passionate she was about things, and somehow she made me forget that I had intended to leave.

As I was at the top of Alice’s list, I was the first to read. I guess because I didn’t much care whether I was cast or not, it was pretty painless. I even got a few laughs. Whether they were a result of my incompetence or my comedic skills, I couldn’t have told you.

I rushed up to the yearbook room. By that time, I was about twenty-five minutes late, and yearbook was in full swing. Without even talking to Will or anyone else, I set down my bag and went immediately to work going through the foreign language clubs’ group photos.

“I like that one,” Will said, pointing to a picture of the Spanish Honor Society in sombreros. “Better than just a bunch of kids standing around.”

I nodded. I had already selected that one myself.

“Maybe all the foreign language club group photos could have themes? Like French in berets?”

“Oui. Eating French toast.”

“And French fries. Very culturally sensitive and subtle.”

“Or how about the sign-language club dressed up like Helen Keller?” I joked.

“Or the Latin club in a graveyard. You know, ’cause it’s a dead language?”

I rolled my eyes.

“Yeah, that last one’s too gimmicky. I like Helen Keller, though. Why don’t you get on that, Chief? How exactly does one dress up like Helen Keller anyway?”

“Blindfolds? Ear muffs?” I shrugged and went back to going over the pictures.

“Why were you late?” Will asked.

I was about to tell him the story, pass it off like a big joke, but at the last second I didn’t. Even though he hadn’t been anything but nice, I wanted it to be my own secret, something Will didn’t know about me. I doubted I would even get cast in the play anyway, but I wasn’t ready to laugh about it yet either. “Mr. Weir kept me after class,” I lied.

“Still haven’t come up with your project?”

I shook my head.

Sunday night around nine, a girl called me on my cell. Her voice was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. “Cookie,” she said, “what’s the story? Are you in or are you out?”

“In, I guess?” In my opinion, it is always better to be in if someone gives you the choice. But actually I had no idea what the girl was talking about.

“Cookie, do you even know who this is?”

“No,” I admitted, but that had been happening to me pretty much all the time. I was learning to go with whatever.

“It’s Alice Leeds, the director of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and I need to know if you’re my pretty girl Hamlet,” she said.

“But, Alice, I don’t really know the first thing about acting.”

Alice didn’t care. “These drama kids have so many bad habits, which I need to break them of anyway. You’re a virgin, and that’s what I like about you. So come be in the play, dolly, it’ll be divine, I swear.”

Even though I knew Will would probably murder me, I found myself saying yes.

Play rehearsals started the following Monday, which gave me many opportunities to confess to Will. I didn’t. Instead, I told him that Dad was now making me see a therapist every Monday and Wednesday after school (I was already wasting my time with that every other Tuesday night), and that he shouldn’t expect me until around five on either of those days.

Rehearsals began with everyone in the cast saying their name and the part they would be playing. Next, Alice introduced the crew, which included her assistant, a wardrobe girl (Yvette Schumacher, Estragon from English), the lighting and scenic designers, and others. The very last person Alice introduced was James Larkin, who was designing the video installation to accompany the play and who took no notice of me at all. I wasn’t completely sure what “designing the video installation” meant, but I had no intention of asking him either. James had made it perfectly clear that whatever had happened between us in the hospital was just about him being a Good Samaritan, nothing more.

We read through the play. I had more lines than I had been expecting.

After that, Yvette measured me for my costume. While she worked, I watched Alice and James having a discussion across the theater. “That new guy is scorching,” Yvette said. “Totally Alice’s type. I should be jealous.”

“Jealous of James?” I asked.

“No, silly, Alice,” she said. “She’s my”—she lowered her voice—“girlfriend, but she likes boys, too. I don’t know why I’m whispering. It’s not exactly a secret.”

Of course, everything was a secret to me.

“How long have you and Alice been together?” I asked.

“Just since the beginning of last summer. She’s been my best friend since third grade, but it was extremely tortured for a while. It took us forever to admit anything to each other.”

Rehearsal was over just before six. As I was walking out, Alice called me over. “Naomi, cookie, come and meet James!”

James said, “We’ve met before.” He studied me. “Her hair was different then.”

At his mention of my hair, I felt self-conscious and reached up to play with it.

“Don’t listen to him. It’s brilliant,” Alice said. “I never would have thought of you for the part if you hadn’t done it. She looks just like that actress from the French movie, I can’t remember her name.”

“Jean Seberg,” James said. “A bout de souffle. In English, Breathless. Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. 1960. The film that started the nouvelle vague. My second favorite Godard film. It’d probably be my favorite Godard except that it’s everyone’s favorite, so my first is 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her.”

“James is a movie buff,” Alice reported, despite it being perfectly evident.

“And Jean wasn’t French, she was American,” James said. “Not to mention, your hair is darker than hers. Incidentally, I didn’t say it was different in a bad way.” He cocked his head lazily and squinted at me. “I like it better now.”

“Well, now that that’s out of the way,” Alice said, clapping her hands. “You’ll be working together.” She explained that it was her intention that Hamlet’s story be an important part of the video projections. “You both should get started as soon as possible,” Alice said.

James asked me if I needed a ride. He suggested we sort out our schedules on the way home. His car was out of the shop.

Even though I’d been planning to go upstairs to The Phoenix to work, I found myself saying yes.

During the short ride to my house, we figured out that Saturday afternoon was the best time for both of us (he worked Saturday and Sunday nights), and before I knew it, he was pulling into my driveway.

“Hey,” I said, “how did you know where I lived?”

“That is a good question,” he said.

I waited for him to continue, but he didn’t, so I asked him why it was a good question.

“The thing is, I looked it up. I thought I might stop by your house to see how you were doing.”

“But you didn’t?”

“Guess not.”

I considered saying how I wished he had, but then Ace’s face popped into my head. For better or worse, Ace was still my boyfriend, so it didn’t seem right for me to be flirting with some other guy, particularly one who ran as hot and cold as James.

Instead, I told James that I would see him on Saturday and got out of the car.

Later that night, I was on the phone with Ace. “But what about homecoming?” he asked. The dance was also that Saturday, and we had planned to go with Brianna and her boyfriend, Alex. Alex had been one of Ace’s best tennis team buddies before he graduated and went to NYU.

I assured him that it was fine. “I’ll be done with play stuff around five.” I decided not to mention James.

“Is that gonna give you enough time?” Ace asked.

“What do you know about it?” I countered.

“I do have a sister, Naomi. All that girl stuff takes serious prep.”

“How long does it take to put on a dress?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t know. What about your makeup? Your nails?”

“You worried I’m gonna be ugly, Ace?” I teased him.

“Guess you won’t be needing much time for your hair.”

“Ha,” I said.

James picked me up on Saturday at noon. When I got outside, I could see that Yvette was sitting in the front seat of his mom’s station wagon, and in the backseat was a suitcase full of period costumes. I hadn’t known she was coming.

Once I was in the car, Yvette turned around to look at me. “James and Alice thought it would be cool if you played Ophelia and Hamlet in the projections, so I’ve got costumes for both. And a wig for the Ophelia part.”

We drove to a park a couple of towns over in Rye. And James videoed me standing on a rock in a Hamlet costume, and then lying soaked in a river as Ophelia, and the day pretty much went like that until a ranger came to kick us out of the park because we didn’t have the proper permits for shooting video. James reasoned with the guy and said since we were students we didn’t need permits, and the ranger said we could stay fifteen minutes longer. This was fine with me; I was completely freezing and had been all day. Even though I hadn’t complained, James remembered about my being cold and made sure that Yvette covered me up with a coat whenever we weren’t shooting. James was really professional that way. I’d seen my mom at work, and he reminded me a little of her.

Back in the car, Yvette said she had to go get ready for homecoming. She was going with Alice and a group of girls from drama. James said he would drop her off first and me second. On the way to her house, Yvette teased James about not going to homecoming. “Just about everybody in the play asked him, you know. Girls and boys,” she said to me.

James laughed. He said that not everyone had asked him and that he had to work anyway.

When we reached Yvette’s house, James and I helped her take all the costumes inside. She kissed James on the cheek. My involuntary and embarrassing reaction was to wonder if I could get away with doing that same thing when we got to my house.

Yvette kissed me on the cheek, too. “Maybe I’ll see you tonight, doll,” she said.

On the drive to my house, James asked me if I was going to the dance that night. I told him that I was, “With Ace.”

“Ah yes, the jock. Good name for a tennis player, Ace is.”

“Unless you’ve got a run of bad serves,” I joked.

James didn’t laugh, but then it hadn’t been much of a joke, I suppose.

About a minute later, he said, “You were good out there today. Really game and relaxed. You made things easy for me. You’re amazing at keeping still.”

I laughed. “What can I say? It’s a gift.” I told him how my mom had been a photographer, so I had spent most of my life posing for one thing or another.

“Had been?”

“Well, still is. But we’re not really speaking at the moment.”

He didn’t push me to say anything more about my mother, which I appreciated. “I don’t know a thing about acting, so that probably accounts for my relaxation,” I said.

“Maybe you should just accept the compliment,” he said.

But I’d never been much good there. At least not that I could remember. “Where do you work?” I asked.

He told me that he worked at the community college as an AV specialist, which basically meant projecting movies and videos for their adult education classes. “Pays pretty well, and my dad thinks I ought to have a job. I get to watch a lot of things I wouldn’t otherwise get to see.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, over the summer, there was this class on Swedish cinema, so I’ve pretty much watched everything Bergman ever did. Do you know who Ingmar Bergman is?”

I shook my head.

“He’s this brilliant director. His films are mainly about sex and memory. You’d probably find them interesting with…well, everything that’s happened to you,” he said. “And now there’s this class about the films of Woody Allen, so I’ve been watching a lot of his, too. I like him, but not as much as Bergman.”

“I love Woody,” I said. “My parents used to always rent all his movies when I was little. I especially love Hannah and Her Sisters and The Purple Rose of Cairo.” I was glad that there were some things I could still remember liking.

“Maybe you could come down sometime and watch a couple?” he suggested. “I could get you in. Not that it’s any big thing. You could bring your jock.” I’m pretty sure he was teasing me with that last part, but his deadpan made it hard to tell.

By then, he was pulling into my driveway. I told him that I doubted that Ace even liked Woody.

“Probably not,” he said. “Have a good time at your dance, Naomi.”

I wore the black velvet dress from my closet because I hadn’t had time to buy anything else. (Maybe the truth was that I hadn’t made time to buy anything else.) At the very least, I couldn’t remember having worn it before.

“Even better than last year,” Dad said when I came downstairs.

When he came to pick me up, Ace didn’t mention my having worn the dress before. He just kissed me on the cheek. “You look nice.”

Ace drove us all to the dance. I sat in front with him, and Brianna sat in the backseat with Alex, who, despite being Ace’s good friend, turned out to be a complete dick. I actually felt sorry for Brianna, which was saying something. The boy was drunk before we even left for the dance, and he kept trying to kiss her and paw her. I kept hearing her say, “No, Alex. No. Just wait, would you?” and other things like that. Ace turned up the radio, I think, to give them privacy, but maybe he was simply tired of listening to Brianna’s protests.

Finally, I turned around and said, “Look, Alex, hold off for fifteen minutes, will you? She wants to look nice for her picture, okay?”

“Naomi, it’s fine,” Brianna said icily.

I tried to make a joke of it. “She probably spent the last ten years getting ready.”

I think I heard Alex mumble something about “immature high school kids,” but I wasn’t sure.

The rest of the car ride was completely silent. I could tell Brianna, Ace, and that tool Alex were all pissed at me. I didn’t care about Brianna or Alex, but I felt somewhat bad about Ace. I started to regret having said anything in the first place. I mean, a girl like Brianna could take care of herself.

Inside the dance, they named the homecoming king and queen, and I saw one of the freshman staffers from yearbook taking pictures. I could tell that the pictures weren’t going to turn out well. For one, the angle was too low, which would give everyone double chins, and for two, he wasn’t getting any sort of variety. I went over to him and told him to stand on the table. He did. Then he thanked me and said that he was getting better stuff. He showed me a few in his camera’s digital monitor. I took off my heels and got on the table and shot a couple of frames myself. It was the most fun I’d had all night. I started to hypothesize that maybe the reason I had gotten so involved with yearbook was because I had liked taking pictures. Maybe it had been that simple. I wondered if it was all that simple—if my memory never came back, maybe it was as easy as asking myself what I liked and what I didn’t like.

When I turned to get off the table, Will was standing under me. “Can I help?” he asked, offering me his hand.

I accepted it. It’s difficult to get off a table in a dress.

“I didn’t think you were coming.”

“I wasn’t planning on it. I despise these things. Patten got sick, so I had to cover the photo keychain booth.” The photo keychain booth was one of yearbook’s many fundraisers. “Your dress—” Will began.

“I know, I know. It’s the same one I wore last year.”

“If you’d let me finish, I was going to say that it looks better with your hair that way,” he said. “You clean up good, Chief.”

“Thanks.” I slipped my heels back on, and I was now looking down at Will a spike’s worth. “I like your suit,” I told him.

“Had to improvise.” He was wearing an emerald velvet suit and a paisley shirt. He was the only person dressed even remotely that way. “Get any good homecoming court pictures?” he asked.

I rolled my eyes. “Just your usual thrill of victory, agony of defeat.”

“Ah, youth. Bittersweet. Fleeting,” he wisecracked.

“Exactly.”

“I watched you, though,” Will said, looking me right in the eye. “You looked really, really…happy up there.”

I had been happy, but I didn’t like the way Will was looking at me. No, looking isn’t the right word. Seeing. I wasn’t comfortable with how much Will saw. He made me feel transparent when I was still opaque to myself.

He said he’d tried calling me that afternoon, but that my phone had been off. I was about to make up yet another lie when Ace was suddenly by my side. “Will,” Ace said.

Will nodded. “Zuckerman.”

“Been harassing my girl?” Ace said, putting his arm around me.

I knew that objectively speaking there was nothing wrong with Ace calling me “his girl,” and yet the arm offended me. It seemed over the top. “Just yearbook business,” I said.

“Right. Always with the yearbook business,” Ace said in a nasty tone that perplexed me.

“Yeah, how else are we going to preserve your glory years, Zuckerman?” Will asked.

I felt like I didn’t know quite what was going on between Ace and Will. Somehow, it made me long for James.

“So, Will, you mind if I take my girl for a dance?”

“She doesn’t like to dance,” Will said under his breath. Then he excused himself. I didn’t see him for the rest of the night.

After the dance, Brianna and Alex decided to get a ride home with someone else, so Ace and I were alone in the car. I thought he was just driving me back to my house, but instead he took me to his.

He said his parents had gone to Boston for the weekend and that we had the run of the place.

He asked me if I wanted a drink, and I declined. I had been avoiding alcohol since his friend’s party, which seemed like something he might have guessed.

He led me to his room, which was tidy and preppy like the rest of the house, and like Ace himself, for that matter. The wallpaper was plaid, and vintage wooden tennis rackets hung from the wall. I looked at his bookshelves, and other than school books all he had were athletes’ memoirs and a set of leather-bound classics. He had one picture of us taped to the wall by his bed. We were both dressed for tennis. The picture was out of focus, but I could see my hair was in a ponytail, the way Ace had said that he liked me best.

I sat down on his bed: an old, spring-loaded mattress that sounded like it was wheezing. Ace sat down next to me—squeak—and kissed me on the mouth. He still tasted like Gatorade even though I knew for a fact he hadn’t had any for at least the last five hours.

“Do you remember what happened here a year ago?” he asked.

Duh, I had amnesia. “No,” I said.

So he told me. At last year’s homecoming dance, Ace and I had “put one over the net”—i.e., we had done it for the first time. We had “played several sets” since then, but had mutually agreed to sit out the “summer season” for reasons which Ace chose not to specify. It was his idea that we should celebrate our anniversary with a “rematch.” I’m not sure if nerves were the reason for Ace’s lame sports/sex metaphors, but it was starting to put the whole tennis wristbands debacle into pathetic perspective.

I told him that I still hadn’t started up with the pill again, and he said, “That’s okay. I’ve come equipped.” He whipped out a pack of condoms from the nightstand like a sports manager providing balls for the team. His hands were so quick—I barely saw him open or close the drawer—I got a sense of what he was probably like on the courts.

I felt oddly numb about the whole thing. My thinking was along the lines of Well, I’ve done it before. Might as well get it over with and do it again.

Ace started to unzip my dress, but he couldn’t get the zipper down. “This is stuck,” he said.

“Well, don’t break it,” I protested. “I need to be able to put it back on.”

At that moment, his one-hundred-year-old basset hound came into the room to say hello. “Get, Jonesy,” Ace said. “Get!”

Jonesy didn’t want to go. He mounted Ace’s right leg and started humping it. Ace kept shaking his leg at Jonesy, but the dog would not be deterred. “Get, get!” Ace stood up and pushed Jonesy from the room, but I could still hear the dog’s howls outside the door.

I started to laugh. It struck me as humorous that something Ace didn’t want his dog to do was something he desperately wanted me to do.

“Where were we?” Ace asked.

The whole thing was absurd.

Since I couldn’t remember the “real” first time I’d lost my virginity, this would have become my de facto first time. I wanted a better story than I did it with this boy who I wasn’t very into and who had mysterious Gatorade breath; in his room decorated with sports equipment; at least he was nice enough to provide condoms and get his ancient, horny dog to leave us alone. Put it that way, and I couldn’t help but wonder how I’d let it get so far in the first place.

“Ace, I’m not going to have sex with you,” I said. I reached over my shoulder and zipped my dress back up without any problems.

“Is it the howls? I can put the dog in the yard,” Ace said. “Just hold on a second. I can get him to stop. Bad Jonesy! Bad dog.”

I told him that it wasn’t about the dog.

“Well, what is it then?” He walked over to his bedroom window. His back was toward me, and I couldn’t see his face.

“I…I just don’t know,” I said. “The truth is, I don’t even know you. I don’t even know what we have in common.”

“There’s lots of stuff,” Ace said.

“Tell me, then. I’d really like to know.”

“Tennis. School.” Ace sighed. He wouldn’t turn back around. “I love you, Naomi.”

“Why?”

He shrugged violently. “Jesus, I don’t know. Why does anyone like anyone? Because you’re super-hot?”

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

“I’m asking you. I mean I’m telling you. I don’t know. You’re confusing me.” Ace turned around and looked at me helplessly, hopelessly. “Because you’re good at school, but can also hold a drink. Because we used to talk about stuff. I don’t know. I just did.”

“Did or do?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Did in the past, or do in the present?”

“Do! I meant do. Isn’t that what I said?” He collapsed onto his bed, so that he was staring up at his ceiling. The box spring squeaked in agony, which started Jonesy barking again. I opened Ace’s door, and Jonesy ran in. Luckily, Jonesy wasn’t in the mood for sex anymore either. He wanted cuddling and intimacy. He jumped onto the bed and lay down next to Ace.

“But honestly, you’ve been acting so weird lately,” Ace said quietly.

Maybe because I can’t remember anything? I thought bitterly.

“Like yelling at Alex in the car, what was that about? And now you’re in this play? And your hair!”

It was the first he’d mentioned it since the day I’d cut it. I had no idea he was still thinking about it. “What about my hair?” I asked. Not because I cared, but because I was sort of curious.

“I loved it long.”

It was the second time he’d used the word love all night, but it was the only time I believed him.

“I’m not used to it this way,” he continued. “I honestly don’t even know what to think.”

“Say what you mean, Ace.”

“I hate your stupid hair,” he said, his voice rusty with truth, bitterness, feeling. Everything else he’d said the whole time we’d been together had sounded merely confused or frustrated, but this was different. This was unmistakable. This was passion! It was what was missing from every other element of my relationship with Ace. It was what I’d heard when Alice spoke about the play, or Will about yearbook, or Dad about Rosa Rivera. It was what I’d heard when James had said he’d wanted to kiss me in the hospital.

For the record, I didn’t know boys could care so much about hair. Maybe this was asking too much, but I wanted someone who felt as strongly about the rest of me. Poor Ace. The boy had been in love with a haircut.

I knew what I had to do.

“I think we should take some time off. From each other, I mean,” I said. Then I tried to make a joke. “Give my hair some time to grow.”

Ace didn’t laugh. “Are you saying you want to break up?” he asked. Did I detect a hint of relief in his voice?

“Yes.”

“But that’s not what I want!” Ace protested a little too adamantly. “I want you to get your memory back and for everything to be like it was.”

“Well, maybe that will happen. But in all likelihood, it won’t. And you’ll be in college next year anyway, so this was bound to happen sooner or later,” I reasoned.

“Is it Will?” Ace asked.

This annoyed me. It only confirmed how much Ace didn’t know me. If anyone, it was James, and it wasn’t even James. It was no one. Or, more to the point, no one except Ace. “Will’s my friend, which is more than I can say for you.”

Ace closed his eyes. “This wasn’t the way I saw tonight going.”

I asked him if he could drive me home. When we got to my house, he walked me to the door. I kissed him on the cheek.

“I know this is probably dumb, but I feel like I’m never going to see you again,” he said.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Ace. I’ll see you at school,” I replied, but of course I knew exactly what he had meant.

“What I said about your hair…” he began.

“It’s okay. You were being honest.”

By the following Tuesday, everyone at school seemed to know about our breakup. The story got back to me that Ace had dumped me because I was a “prude” in bed since the accident and “not entirely there,” both of which had some basis in truth while not conveying the essential nature of what had happened. I didn’t know if Ace spread these rumors or if they were just the idle speculation of my peers. People like Brianna, who’d had it in for me even more since I’d tried to stand up for her in the car. She could really let loose now that Ace was no longer required to defend my honor.

I would have understood if it had been Ace—maybe he was saving face, or maybe that was how he actually saw things? In any case, I did not go out of my way to set the record straight. People could think what they wanted to. Screw them.

6

I STILL HADN’T TOLD WILL ABOUT THE PLAY. Maybe it was because I felt like I was betraying him; maybe it was plain cowardice. I was late to yearbook about half the time and I let him think I was either with tutors or at the doctor. If my chronic tardiness annoyed him, Will was too much of a friend to let on.

He probably wouldn’t have found out about it at all, if Bailey Plotkin hadn’t shown up to photograph rehearsals. Bailey was the arts photographer for The Phoenix, the same position I’d held my freshman year, according to that year’s masthead. If I’d been paying any attention to yearbook matters, I might have guessed someone from the staff would eventually come.

Bailey was a mellow person in general, and he didn’t appear particularly surprised to see me. “I didn’t know you were in the play, Naomi. Cool,” was pretty much all he said about the matter. Still, I knew I had to tell Will, and preferably before he saw the pictures.

I went to the yearbook office as soon as rehearsal was over, and Will barely glanced up at me when I came into the room. He asked me if I’d had time to look over the cover mock-ups. I hadn’t, so I went to do that. The cover Will liked was all white with just the words The Phoenix in raised black text, all caps, right justified, halfway down the page. It was extremely plain and not the sort of thing you usually see on a high school yearbook. He had mentioned that it was a reference to an album or a book, but I hadn’t been paying enough attention. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it yet.

For the next two hours until yearbook was over, Will said nothing to me about the play. He was all business the whole time: very polite questions and no wisecracks. This was unlike him and only confirmed my belief that he already knew but was waiting for me to bring it up.

At the end of the meeting, I asked him for a ride home. “So that we can talk,” I added. He was quiet on the walk out to the parking lot. It was the end of October and I felt a chill, but it wasn’t from the weather. That fall had been particularly mild, and I was wearing a hoodie and a parka besides. I think the chill might have been something like déjà vu. I felt as if I had taken this very same walk before. Of course, I had. I had gotten many rides from Will since I’d been back at school, but there was something specifically familiar that I couldn’t quite identify.

“Are you cold?” he asked me when we were halfway to the parking lot. “I should have offered you my gloves.”

I shook my head. Will was always so concerned about me—even now, when he likely knew I’d been lying to him for weeks. It made me feel like the smallest person in the world.

When we got to the car, he stood there for a second without unlocking the doors.

“So?” I said.

“So, you’re the one who wanted to talk, Chief.”

“Well, um, in the car’s fine,” I said.

“I’d rather hear it here,” Will said.

I told him. “I’m in the play. I don’t know why I didn’t mention it before. That thing about the additional therapy was a lie.” I glanced over the roof of his car to see his reaction. He didn’t have one really, so I rambled on. “It happened almost by accident,” I continued, “but it’s only another two weeks, and then I’ll be back full-time.”

Will nodded for a second before replying, “You had sure as hell better comp me, Chief.” He loosened his school tie and then he laughed, so I asked him what was funny. “The thing is, I’d been afraid you were going to quit.”

“Why?”

“For the last couple of weeks, we’ve barely spoken. At least now I know there was a reason.”

I assumed he meant the play.

“And your heart hasn’t really been in it for a while. It’s only natural that I wondered. I want you to know I would probably have understood if you had quit with everything that’s happened to you, but I’m relieved that you didn’t.”

Will unlocked the doors to his car and we got in.

“The play…is it fun?” he asked me.

“Yeah, it is,” I admitted.

“I’m glad.” Will nodded and then he started the car.

When he got to my house, he asked if he could come in. He said he hadn’t seen my dad in a while.

I asked him why in the world he wanted to see my dad.

“Well, I really like his books. We’re pals, Grant and me.”

I told him that Dad was probably writing.

“Come on, Chief,” he said. “I haven’t been over to your house in eons.”

We went inside, but Dad wasn’t even there. Instead of leaving, Will sat down at the kitchen table. “I heard you and Zuckerman broke up,” he said.

“Yeah.” I didn’t really want to talk about it with Will, but he wasn’t taking the hint.

“Why?” Will asked.

“Because he hated my hair,” I said.

“I always thought he was a dick,” Will said.

“A dick?”

Will blushed for a second. “Maybe not a dick, but not good enough for you.”

“He’s okay.”

“Is there somebody else?” Will asked. He took off his glasses and wiped them on his pants.

“Nope,” I said. “I’m not planning on it either.”

He said he didn’t believe me.

“Well, you can believe what you want. But I’ve got enough on my plate without a boy.” Then I told Will I needed to study, which was true.

I’d finally gotten him to the front door when he spun around and said, “You know how I call you ‘Chief’?”

I nodded.

“Didn’t you ever wonder what you call me?”

“Uh, ‘Will’?”

“No, what you used to call me.”

I hadn’t.

“Coach. You know, short for co-chief. You could call me that again if you wanted to, Chief. If it ever should happen to just pop into your head.”

“Coach,” I said. Despite the fact that he couldn’t have been less athletic, the nickname suited him well. A good nickname tells you something about the person it belongs to, and it was so with this one. In all he did, Will was fiercely loyal, a good motivator, intelligent, passionate, and thoughtful. He was everything a coach ought to be. “It’s a good name for you,” I said. “I wish I’d thought to ask you about it before.”

“There are all sorts of things I could tell you,” he said, “if you ever wanted to know them.”

The play opened the second weekend in November. Each of the cast members was allotted four tickets. I gave one to Will and two to Dad, who gave one to Rosa Rivera. I thought about giving my last ticket to Mom, but my part wasn’t all that big for her to bother driving in from the city. Plus, I didn’t have enough tickets for Nigel and their kid anyway.

The show ran for only two nights, so in a way it wasn’t all that different from yearbook—a lot of effort for not much product. But, well, I think it was a good play. That must count for something. Will, his mother, Dad, and Rosa Rivera came on the second night, and everyone told me it was a good play, and that I was good in it. I was really only in a couple of scenes. To commemorate the occasion, Will made me a new mix CD, Songs for Acting Like You’re at Your Therapist When You’re Really Just Acting (“Hilarious,” I said), which he gave me after the show was over; I hadn’t finished listening to his last mix yet. Dad said how he liked the video installation part that James had done. The footage had looked pretty amazing projected—you would never have known that we shot it at a park in Rye. James had treated the footage so that it looked like an old silent movie. All black-and-white and faded and flickery.

The cast party was at Alice’s house. Or behind Alice’s house by her pool. It being November, the pool was covered over with a green vinyl tarp.

Yvette hugged and congratulated me. In return, I told her how amazing the costumes had looked. “Have you seen James?” she asked.

“Why?”

“I didn’t get a chance to tell him how beautiful his images were. Best part of the play. Don’t tell Alice,” she whispered.

I swore that I wouldn’t.

I hadn’t encountered James since that day at the park. He didn’t need to go to actor rehearsals, and at the few rehearsals he did attend, he was occupied with technical matters. Truthfully, I had been too busy to care. Besides, I was past expecting that anything might happen between us.

Alice came up to me next. “Where’s your cocktail, cookie?” This was the drama crowd—while there was no beer, there was plenty of harder stuff.

“I’m abstaining,” I said.

“Do you have a problem with drinking?” Alice asked me.

“Yes. I have no tolerance to an embarrassing degree.” No one really wants to hear about your medical problems at a party.

Alice laughed. “Sounds like it’d be fun to get you liquored up, cookie.”

I just shook my head.

Alice kissed me on both cheeks and told me she was so proud of me. And then the guy who had played Guildenstern called her. “Who do you think is cuter? Rosencrantz or Guildenstern?” Alice asked. “I simply can’t decide who I prefer.”

“What about Yvette?” I asked her.

“Yvette, Yvette, sweet Yvette.” Alice sighed heavily. We both turned to watch Yvette, who was laughing with another girl in the play. “We are in high school, and that means I don’t have to marry anybody.”

My curfew was midnight, and I was about to get a ride home with the doomed Yvette, who like most doomed people seemed to have no clue, when someone tapped me on the shoulder. “Hey, Hamlet,” James said.

“You’re late,” I replied.

He shrugged. “I didn’t think I was going to come.” He took a cigarette out of his jacket and lit it.

“Aren’t you gonna offer me one?” I asked.

“I would, but I didn’t think you smoked.”

“Still, it’s nice to be asked. Courtesy, you know?”

“Truthfully”—James inhaled deeply, and his gray eyes were lit by the flame from his cigarette—“truthfully I don’t want to be the guy who ruins your pretty pink lungs.”

It sounded an awful lot like flirting. I’d been down that road with James before, and it never led anywhere.

I said that I had to go home. He offered to drive me, but I told him that Yvette was driving me. “In case I don’t see you again,” I said, “I just wanted to say that I thought the installation was beautiful.”

James tossed off my praise. “Yeah, turned out pretty decent. I’m only doing this play thing to have something extra to put on my college applications in case my first choice doesn’t work out.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter why,” I said. “It was beautiful anyhow.” I turned to leave.

He finished his cigarette in a single inhale. “Wait a second. Don’t I get to compliment you, too?”

I shook my head and told him it was too late for that. “I’d probably assume it was in response to mine.”

“I was afraid of that,” he said.

“It was nice seeing you, James.” I pointed him in the direction of the drinks and the partygoers with curfews later than mine.

“I don’t drink. I mean, I used to. But not anymore,” he said. “And besides, the person I came to see was you. You remember that class I told you about?”

I did.

“They’re showing Hannah and Her Sisters on Tuesday night. You said that was one of your favorites, right?” he said. “It’s cool if you bring the jock, too. Do you have a piece of paper?” I held out my hand, palm facing out, and he took a black Sharpie from his pocket and wrote the screening information on my palm.

I had no intention of going. The play had made me fall farther behind in my schoolwork, and I had yearbook, and James did not seem like a good bet for a boyfriend or even a friend, not that I was looking for either. In fact, I tried to wash his note from my hand that night before bed, but those Sharpies really have staying power, even on skin. Tuesday rolled around, and as I could still see it, ever so slightly, I decided what the hell.

Dad dropped me off, and he told me to call him when the movie was done. It was a pain not to be able to drive myself places, but I didn’t really have time to take driving lessons until the summer.

It seemed to me that every senior citizen in Tarrytown was there. Having seen the movie before, I didn’t have to pay too much attention to it, which was lucky, because the old people made quite a lot of noise unwrapping candies and whispering to each other, What did she just say? I found myself thinking of the last time I’d seen it with Mom. Mom’s favorite part was when this guy tells this woman (not Hannah, one of the sisters) to read a certain page of a book because it had a line of poetry on it that reminded him of her. The line was “No one, not even the rain, has such soft hands,” or something like that, and it always made Mom cry. I wondered if Nigel had done stuff like that for Mom, and if that’s why she’d left Dad for him.

The movie ended, and I decided to wait for James to come out of the projection booth, just to be polite.

When he finally emerged, he asked me how I had liked seeing the movie again.

I guess I was still thinking about Mom, because I found myself telling him all about Dad and Mom and Nigel. How I kind of wished Mom had seen the play, because she really got a kick out of that sort of thing. How I kind of wanted to see her, but I didn’t know how to do it without making a big production of it. The horrible name I’d called her the last time I’d seen her—

James cut me off. “None of that matters. If you want to see her, you should go. Take off and do it. Don’t wait.” He started talking about his brother, and then he cut himself off, too. “Oh, you don’t want to hear all my sad stories. I can’t even bear to tell them anymore. Screw the past, right?”

Screw the past. It made me so happy to hear someone say that. I felt lighter, like when I first cut my hair.

His gray eyes clouded for a moment, and then he laughed. “Say, Naomi, there’s something real serious I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said, his voice suddenly filled with gravity again.

“What?”

He grinned. “Whatever happened to that shirt I lent you?”

The dress shirt was hanging in my closet at home. “I washed it,” I told him. “Come get it now, if you’d like.”

Dad was locked away in his office working when we got there.

“Do you want to meet my dad?” I whispered.

“I’ve already met him,” James reminded me. “In the hospital.”

“Right. I’m sure he’d like to thank you, though.”

“Next time,” James said shyly. “I don’t always go over so well with people’s parents.”

I led James to my room and located his shirt in the back of my closet. As I handed it to him, my hand brushed up against his forearm, but James didn’t seem to notice.

“Thanks,” he said.

We were both standing in the entrance to my closet, which was a walk-in. James was looking around when he said, “What is that?” He pointed to a stack of CliffsNotes on the top shelf.

“I know. It’s very scandalous. In my defense, I can’t remember buying them.”

James set down his shirt and took the top booklet off the stack. “Slaughterhouse Five. For God’s sake, who buys CliffsNotes to Slaughterhouse Five.”

“Apparently that was the kind of girl I was.”

“The very bad kind,” James said. He picked up his shirt and moved to leave my closet.

James had run hot and cold in the months since I had met him, so I’m not exactly sure what possessed me to do what I did next. They say that people who have had brain injuries sometimes suffer from strange emotional outbursts, and I guess this would qualify. “Do you remember what you asked me back at the hospital?”

He didn’t answer.

“When my dad came in?”

He still didn’t answer.

“About kissing me and if you had permission?”

“Yeah,” he said in a low voice, “I remember.”

“Well, you would have had it.” I took a deep breath, and then I added, “I’m not with Ace anymore.”

He took my hand in his and said, “Naomi, don’t you think I knew that?”

Then I kissed James, or he kissed me.

(Who knows how these things start?)

And then I kissed James again, or he kissed me again.

(And if you don’t know who started it, it’s hard to know what came next.)

And I and him, and him and me.

(I will always remember that he tasted like cigarettes and something passing sweet, which I could not quite identify.)

Andiandhimandhimandme.

(And so on.)

It might have gone on like that forever except that Dad knocked on my door. “Kiddo?”

James and I broke apart, and I told Dad to come in.

“I didn’t know you had company,” Dad said.

“I don’t, not really. James just stopped by to pick something up, and I didn’t want to bother you if you were working. You met James at the hospital, remember?” I went on and on. Even though we hadn’t been doing it or anything, I knew that that kiss was written all over my face. Also, I couldn’t stop smiling.

Dad nodded distractedly. “Oh hey. Yeah.” Dad reached over to shake James’s hand. “Thanks for all your help, son.”

James nodded. “My pleasure. Well, I’ve got my shirt.” James held up the shirt, presumably for Dad’s benefit. “Guess I’ll be on my way. See you in school, Naomi.”

“I’ll walk you out,” I said.

As I walked James to the door, he whispered to me, “Is that gonna cause trouble for you?”

“My dad’s cool.” I really didn’t care if it did anyway. “Whenever I break one of Dad’s rules, I can always claim amnesia.”

“I believe you used it with the CliffsNotes, too,” James pointed out. “But—”

“Don’t deny it, Naomi. It really is a good, all-purpose excuse. Robbed a bank? ‘But, officer, I didn’t remember I wasn’t supposed to rob banks.’ I wish I could use that one, too.”

“What would you use it for?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Things. Mainly things I’d done in the past, but you never know what might come up.”

At the door, he kissed me again.

When I got back to my room, Dad was waiting for me. Of course, he wanted to know if I was seeing James, but I wasn’t sure of the answer to that yet. “Not technically.”

“He’s very handsome, and he looks older than you, if I’m not mistaken. Both of which do not exactly recommend him to me, your dear old dad. I assume you know what you’re doing though.”

I nodded.

“In any case, I came to talk to you about the wedding.” He said that they were planning to have it at a hotel on Martha’s Vineyard the second weekend of June. It would just be me and him; Rosa Rivera and her two daughters, her sister, and her brother; Dad’s mother, my grandmother Rollie; and “significant others of the aforementioned.” He said Rosa Rivera wanted me to be a bridesmaid along with her two daughters, which struck me as ridiculous.

“But, Dad, I barely know the woman!”

“You’d be doing it for me, too.”

“Not to mention who’ll be left to watch the wedding if nearly everyone’s a bridesmaid?”

Dad said that wasn’t the point.

“It wasn’t that long ago you were lying to me about even having a girlfriend, and now you want me to be in your wedding. It seems fast and unfair, and…”

“And?” Dad prompted. “And what?”

I thought of when James had said “screw the past,” how right that had felt. I was moving forward with James, and Dad was moving forward with Rosa Rivera, and screw whatever had come before. I was going to be all about now, about am, about present tense. “Tell Rosa Rivera I’m happy to be her bridesmaid.”

Dad’s stunned look was pleasurable in and of itself. “I thought we were in for the long haul on this one, but I guess not. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled, but why the sudden change of heart?”

I felt reckless and happy, so I kissed my father on the cheek. “Oh, Dad, what possible difference can why make anyway? Just go with it.”

My phone rang. It was Will, so I told Dad I had to take it. Dad just nodded. I could tell he was still dazed by my turnabout. I vowed to do it more often.

“You sound different,” Will said skeptically. “Your voice is all full of…I don’t know what.”

I laughed at him. I liked being unpredictable, unreadable.

“It’s that cat James,” he said simply.

This seemed to come out of nowhere. I hadn’t mentioned James to Will since that day we picked him up. “Sort of,” I admitted. “What makes you say that?”

“I have eyes, Chief. I saw your play. I read the program. If you’re in love, I’m happy for you. You don’t have to hide it. He certainly seems more interesting than Zuckerman.”

“I’m not in love,” I said finally. “I like him.”

“There’re those rumors about him—”

I interrupted. “I don’t care about any of that. It’s in the past.” It was my new philosophy. It had to be.

“I heard he used to be an addict and that he got thrown out of his old school and sent to—”

“Did you hear me? I said I don’t care.”

“I’m not gossiping,” Will said. “I’m only watching out for my friend. Personally, I think it’s better to know more than less. I’m not saying you should listen to any of the crap the kids at Tom Purdue say, but it might be worth addressing with James—”

“Christ, Will, would you stop being such an old man? You’re worse than my father,” I snapped. “I haven’t even gone on a date with James yet.”

“Sorry,” he said coolly.

“Why are you calling anyway?” I snapped again.

“I don’t remember,” he said after a pause. “I’ll see you at school.” He hung up the phone.

I was thinking how Will pulled things backward when what I needed was to be in this moment, now, when my phone rang again. I didn’t recognize the number, but I picked up anyway.

It was James.

“Did you get in trouble?”

“Not really.”

“Good, because I was thinking I could take you out this Saturday.”

Saturday was my seventeenth birthday. I had planned to go out with Dad for dinner, but I could always cancel that. I had dinner with Dad all the time.

“Sounds like a plan,” I said.

Dad gave me my present right before James was set to pick me up.

That year, the book he gave me was blank. The cover was made from taupe suede, and a leather cord wrapped around it so that it could be tied shut. The edges of the pages were gilded. He inscribed it “Write your life. Love, Dad.” For a variety of reasons, the gift offended me, and I briefly considered throwing it in the trash before just deciding to bury it under my bed among the dust, widowed socks, and other lost things.

Dad asked me what I thought of his selection.

“I would have preferred a novel,” I said.

“You didn’t like it?”

“I think it’s in somewhat bad taste to give an amnesiac a blank book.”

Of course, that was what I wanted to say. What I actually said was “It’s nice, but I doubt I’ll have much time for writing in it.” This was true enough, too.

Dad smiled and said, “You will. And you’ll want to.”

That seemed unlikely. Writing has always seemed such a backward activity to me, and that was most definitely not the direction I wanted to go. When my parents were still the Wandering Porters, I thought of summer as the living time; the rest of the year was the backward time, the writing time.

The doorbell rang, and it was James. He was wearing his corduroy jacket even though it was too light for the season. He was so handsome I nearly wanted to swoon. The word swoon had never even popped into my head before I saw him that night, let alone as something that I might do.

He smelled like soap with only the faintest hint of cigarettes. He was holding a wrapped CD, which he handed to me.

“How’d you know it was my birthday?” I asked.

“I didn’t. This was sitting on your doorstep. Happy birthday anyway. What is it?”

I tore open the paper. “Just a mix from my friend.” The CD liner read: “Songs for a Teenage Amnesiac, Vol. II: The Motion Picture Soundtrack, Happy 17th Birthday. I Remain Your Faithful Servant, William B. Landsman.” There wasn’t even a playlist; he must have run out of time when he was putting it together. I tossed the thing on the bench in the hallway.

“We could listen to it in my car,” James suggested.

“Okay.” I shrugged. Will usually had good taste in music, and the songs wouldn’t mean anything to me anyway.

James put the CD in the car player, but no sound came out. “This player’s old, and it can be a little spastic with home-burned stuff.” James popped the CD out and handed it back to me. I thought about throwing it out the window; I was still pissed at Will from yesterday. Instead, I just slipped it in my purse.

James hadn’t mentioned where we were going, and as part of my new life philosophy I hadn’t asked.

“Aren’t you curious where I’m taking you?” he said in that low voice of his.

“No, I trust you.”

We were stopped at a red light. He turned to stare at me. “How do you know I’m trustworthy?”

“How do I know that you aren’t?”

James abruptly pulled the car into another lane. “We’re going to California, right this instant.”

I didn’t blink.

“If I drove you to the airport and told you to get on a plane to California, you’d follow me.”

“Why not?”

“Unfortunately, I’m only taking you to dinner, Naomi. Maybe a movie. If I’d known it was your birthday, I would have planned something more exciting.”

But just being with James was exciting. I liked that his past was as much a mystery as mine. I liked that he might do anything at any moment. I liked that he didn’t expect me to behave any specific way. I liked that he believed me when I said I would take off and go to California.

“Maybe I’ll have to take you to California sometime?”

“What’s in California?”

“Kick-ass waves. I’m an amateur surfer and the Atlantic don’t really cut it,” he said. “My dad is, too. He lives in L.A.”

“Are you from there?”

“The thing is, I’m not really from anywhere, you know what I mean?”

I did.

“But yeah, I lived there for a while. Until I came here to live with my mom and my grandfather, and…I’d like to go back there for school. To the film program at USC, if I get in.”

On the way to the restaurant, it had started to snow.

By the time the movie was over, the town was a different place, the negative image of itself. I felt almost newborn myself, like it was my first winter ever.

“I wonder if there’s enough snow on the steps at school for us to go sledding,” James said.

We left his car at the movie theater and walked over to Tom Purdue, which was about a mile away. I was freezing, but I didn’t care. I bet the weather was worse in Kratovo.

We trudged across the campus to the entrance of Tom Purdue. We stood at the bottom of the steps, which were entirely blanketed by snow.

“This is where we met,” I pointed out.

“The lengths a girl will go to to meet a boy,” he deadpanned. “We need sleds.”

I told him I didn’t know where we could find any.

“No, like cafeteria trays or garbage can lids or something. Unfortunately, school’s closed.”

Luckily, I had my yearbook keys. I ran inside and located two plastic lids right in the front hallway.

“Let’s go,” I said. I didn’t bother to mention to James that I was supposed to be avoiding sports on account of my head. I didn’t really care.

My first few times down the hill I couldn’t really control the “sled,” and I got sent down at strange angles.

James was better than me. He showed me how to position my body and back so that I was in the middle and leaning forward. My next attempts were better.

“Who needs the Pacific?” he yelled.

We sledded down the steps until eleven-thirty. It was like meeting him over and over again.

We sledded until I couldn’t even make one more trip up the stairs. My cheeks were flushed, my lips were chapped, and every part of me was wet or sticky with snow. I was so cold, I was past feeling cold at all. I lay down in the snow at the bottom of the stairs. I felt like I was becoming an ice person and that when it became warm again, I would probably melt and disappear.

James kept sledding even after I had stopped. He went up and down five or six more times before parking himself at my feet. For the longest time he only looked at me.

“Lying there, you look like an angel,” he said softly.

I didn’t speak.

“Funny thing is, I don’t believe in angels.”

He offered me his hand, and we walked back to my house in the bright, early hours of Sunday.

He kissed me when we got to the door, and even though it was late, I invited him inside. Dad had gone out with Rosa Rivera, and for all I knew he was probably snowed in somewhere or other. James was shivering nearly as much as me at this point.

I brought him some clothes from Dad’s closet and he changed into them. “I’ll get my dad to drive you to your car when he gets back.”

James nodded and sat down at our kitchen table.

“Seventeen,” he said. “You’re still a baby.”

“Why? How old are you?”

“I’ll be nineteen in February.”

“That’s not that old.”

“Feels plenty old to me sometimes,” he said. “I was held back a grade.” He shrugged.

I smiled at him. “I’ve heard the rumors about you, you know?”

“Oh yeah, like what?”

I listed the most interesting ones: 1) he used drugs, 2) he went crazy over some girl at his old school, and 3) he had tried to kill himself and had been in a hospital.

James ran his fingers through his hair, which was still damp from the snow. “All true. Technically, the drugs were prescribed. And technically, I may have tried to kill myself twice, but basically all true. Does it matter?” His voice had changed. “Think. Think before you answer. It’s allowed to matter.”

I told him that it didn’t.

“I would have told you, but it’s not something I like to talk about when I first meet someone, or ever, and also…” His eyes were turned toward the window, but I could tell he was really watching me. “I wanted you to like me.”

“Why?”

“You seemed like a person who it might be nice to be liked by. I haven’t thought that about anybody for a while.” I had thought the same thing about him.

I put my arm around him. Neither of us moved or spoke for the longest time. “I can leave now,” he said, “and then we could just go on from there. Friends, maybe?”

I took his face in my hands and I told him none of it mattered to me at all.

That’s when he told me everything. For a guy who said “screw the past,” James certainly had a lot of it.

It had all started the year his brother died of lung cancer. James was fifteen. Sasha was eighteen, the same age James was now.

The night before Sasha’s funeral, James swallowed an entire bottle of a prescription his brother had been taking. They thought James was trying to kill himself, but he hadn’t been. He had just wanted something that would help him sleep through the night. In a weird way, James said it made him feel closer to Sasha, having his brother’s pills inside.

James’s mom found him, and he had his stomach pumped. They sent him to his first doctor, who gave James his first antidepressant. He was supposed to go to therapy, but he never went. The drugs screwed with his head, made him feel kind of numb, which James said was all right by him.

Things were good for a while, only insofar as they weren’t too bad. By then James was sixteen, and he had met Sera. James said that they told each other they were in love, but looking back, he said they hadn’t been. Puppy love, if anything, he said. He might have only said this so as not to hurt my feelings.

At some point, he realized that the drugs weren’t working anymore. He started feeling jumpy all the time. Kids were looking at him funny; he was pretty sure they were talking about him, too. James cursed out one of his teachers. Sera broke up with him.

He stopped taking the pills to try to get Sera back, but she’d started going out with this other guy.

One night, he crawled into her bedroom window. She wasn’t there. James said he was so lonely, he had just wanted to be with her things. He saw a packing knife on her desk, and it suddenly seemed like a really good idea to slit his wrists.

After that, things got hazy.

In the hospital, they said Sera’s mom was the one who had found him. James still felt bad about this. Sera’s mom was a nice lady, he said. Sera, too, for that matter. James saw now that none of it had been her fault.

James was sent to the East Coast, where his mom lived. He was in an institution for about six months, which was not something he liked to talk about. When he got out, his parents said James could go back to his old school in California, but he didn’t see the point. James was eighteen by then, and had been held back a year, and anyone who remembered him at his old school thought he was crazy.

That’s when James met me. That day, he’d only been there to drop off his old school records. He hadn’t been planning or wanting to meet anyone. If he hadn’t stopped for a smoke, he wouldn’t have met me at all. He patted the pocket where he kept his smokes. “Always knew these would be the death of me.” He smiled when he said this.

My phone rang. It was Dad; he said he was staying at Rosa Rivera’s for the night on account of the snow.

“My dad can’t get back tonight,” I said to James.

“I should probably walk then. I don’t want my mother to worry.”

“Call her,” I told him. “Let her know you’re staying with friends.”

“I don’t lie,” he said, shaking his head.

“Are you saying we’re not friends?”

“I’m saying we’re not just friends.”

“Still, you can’t go out in this.”

“My mother worries,” he repeated. It was like that day in Will’s car when James hadn’t wanted a ride even though it was pouring. He had a stubborn, tough, even masochistic streak, and he insisted that he leave then. All I could do was stand at the window and watch as he disappeared into that whitewashed night.

7

OF ALL THE STUPID THINGS TO BE FAILING, I WAS failing photography.

The last school day before Thanksgiving, Mr. Weir held me after class. I knew what he wanted to talk about. I still hadn’t turned in a project proposal, and the semester was more than half over. Most of the classes were structured very loosely, with Mr. Weir showing slides of work by famous photographers like Doisneau or Mapplethorpe and us discussing them. The rest of the time we’d critique each other’s work, though I hadn’t brought in anything to critique all semester. Whenever Mr. Weir asked about my project (about once a week or so), I’d just B.S. something or other. The nature of the class made it easy to get away with doing nothing.

Mr. Weir handed me a slip. “I’m sorry to have to do this right before the holiday, Naomi,” he said. “I’ve got to give this to anyone who is in danger of receiving a D or below. It requires a parent’s signature.”

“But, Mr. Weir, I thought our grade was based on the one big project.”

“Yes, that’s why I’m giving this to you now. You still have time to make it work.”

James was waiting for me outside of Weir’s class.

“Wondering if you need a ride?” he asked.

I had yearbook, of course.

“Do you have to?” James asked. “Everyone’s gone for the holiday already.”

Actually, there was tons of work to do in yearbook, not to mention that Will was pissed at me already. It had started just after my birthday.

“Did you get my mix?” he’d asked.

“Which one?”

“The one for your birthday.”

“Yeah, but I haven’t had time to listen to it yet.”

“Well, that’s rude,” he’d said finally. “I spent a lot of time on that.”

But what I had thought to myself at the time was: How much time could he have possibly spent? The kid gives me a mix like every freaking week.

Anyway, Will had been pretty icy to me since then, but I hadn’t had time to deal with him.

“So,” James was saying, “why don’t I just take you out for coffee before you go to yearbook? I’ll have you back by three-thirty, I swear.”

James was wearing this black wool peacoat, which he looked particularly tall and handsome in. Some girls like suits or tuxedos; I’m a sucker for a guy in a great coat. I knew I couldn’t refuse him. Plus, after my talk with Mr. Weir, I really needed to get out of school.

We drove into town. James had a cup of black coffee and I had a glass of orange juice, and then we took our drinks outside and walked down the main strip of town. Even though the day was gray and moist, it was nice to be outside instead of where I was supposed to be: cooped up in that yearbook office where every part of me felt dried and tired, my hands always covered with these oppressive little paper cuts.

“I don’t want to go back to yearbook,” I said.

“So don’t” was James’s reply.

“I don’t just mean today. I mean ever.”

“So don’t,” he repeated.

“It’s not that easy,” I said. “People are counting on me.”

“Honestly, Naomi, it’s only a stupid high school yearbook. It’s just a bunch of pictures and a cover. They make a million of them every year all around the world. I’ve been to three different high schools, and the yearbooks always look more or less the same. Trust me, the yearbook will get published with or without you. They’ll find someone else to do your job.”

I didn’t reply. I was thinking how if I quit yearbook, I’d have more time for everything else: school, my photography class that I could no longer drop, therapy, and James, of course.

“It’s three-thirty,” James said after about ten minutes.

I told him I wanted to keep walking awhile, which we did. We didn’t say much; above all, James was good at keeping quiet.

James dropped me off at school around five.

Since it was the night before the holiday, I knew most of the kids would be gone early. Except, of course, for Will.

From the beginning, the conversation did not go well. I tried to be nice. I tried to explain to Will about my schoolwork and my photography class. I tried to tell him how he could run the whole show without me, that he already had been anyway. Will wasn’t hearing any of it, and before too long I found myself making some of James’s points, which had made so much sense when I was outside in the daylight.

“It’s just a stupid yearbook.”

“You don’t think that!”

“It’s just a stack of photos in a binder!”

“No, this is all wrong.”

“You said you’d understand if I had to quit!”

“I was being polite!” He was silent for a moment. “Is this because of James?”

I told him no, that I’d been unhappy for some time.

Will wouldn’t look at me. “What is so great about him? Explain it to me.”

“I don’t have to justify myself to you, Will.”

“I really want to know what is so f’n great about him. Because from my point of view, he looks like the moody guy on a soap opera.”

“The what?”

“You heard me. With all his moping around and his brooding and his cigarettes and his cool haircut. What does he have to be so upset about?”

“For your information, not that it’s any of your business, he has someone in his family who died.”

“I was there when he said it, remember! And hey, let’s throw a goddamn parade for James. Lots of people have people in their families who died, Naomi. I’d wager everybody in the whole damn world has people in their families who’ve died. But not all of us can afford to go around screwing things up all the time. Not all of us have the luxury of being so exquisitely depressed.”

“You’re being a jerk. I don’t see why you’re attacking James just because I don’t want to be on yearbook!”

“Do you actually think you’re in love with him?” Will laughed. “’Cause if you do, I think you lost more than your memory in that fall.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that you’re acting like a dope. The Naomi I knew honors her commitments.”

“Get it through your head. I’m not her anymore. I’m not the Naomi that you knew.”

“No shit!” he yelled. “The Naomi I knew wasn’t a selfish bitch.”

“I hate you,” I said.

“Good…I h-h-ha…Good!”

I started to leave.

“No, wait—”

I turned around.

“If you’re really quitting, you need to give me your office keys.”

“Right now?”

“I want to make sure you don’t steal anything.”

I took them out of my backpack and threw them in his face.

Sometimes these things take on a momentum of their own. I had gone in there just to quit yearbook, but I had ended up quitting Will, too. Maybe it had been naive to think it could have gone any other way.

When I got outside, James was waiting for me.

“Thought you might need a ride,” he said.

“But not home. Somewhere I haven’t been before.”

He drove me to the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, which seemed a strange place to take a girl, but I went with it.

“There’s a particular grave I want you to see,” he said.

“You’ve been here already?”

James nodded. “I’ve been to a lot of cemeteries. Sera and I went to Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris and we saw Oscar Wilde’s at Père-Lachaise, too. Wilde’s was covered in lipstick prints.”

I asked him how he’d gotten into visiting graveyards.

“Well…when my brother died, I guess. I liked thinking of all the others who had also died. It seemed less lonely somehow. Knowing that there are more of them than us, Naomi.”

He took me to the grave of Washington Irving, who wrote the novella The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I don’t know what kind of rock the headstone was made from, but at this point it was white from time. The stone was so worn away you could barely make out the inscription. It was a simple tombstone, just his name and dates.

“Most famous people tend to go that way, no epitaphs,” James said. “That’s what I’d do.”

“You’ve thought about it?”

“Oh, only a little,” he said with a wry grin.

It was pleasant in the graveyard. Silent. Empty and yet not empty. It was a good place for forgetting things. My phone rang. It was Will. I turned it off.

“That story reminds me of you,” he said.

I didn’t necessarily take that as a compliment. We had read Sleepy Hollow in Mrs. Landsman’s class around Halloween. It was something of a tradition in Tarrytown, where the book is set. (Technically, North Tarrytown, where James lived, was the true Sleepy Hollow.) It was about “the ghost of a Hessian trooper whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during the revolutionary war” and who was said to “[ride] forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head.”

“You think of me as a headless horseman?” I asked.

“I think of you as a person on a quest,” James said.

“What does that mean?”

He was standing behind me, and he put his arms around me. “I think of you as someone who is figuring things out under difficult circumstances. Despite the fact that I am falling in love with you, I think that I am likely to be a brief chapter in this quest. I want you to keep sight of that.”

He had never said “love” before, and I suppose it should have thrilled me. The fact that the “love” was in a clause took a bit away from the moment, though. I asked him what he was really saying.

“I want you to know that I don’t expect anything from you.” James took my hand and turned me around, so that we were looking eye to eye. “I need to take pills to keep me steady,” he said, “but you make me feel the opposite. I worry about that. I worry for you. That’s why I fought this. You. Us. I’m not even sure I trust myself with anybody now, but…

“If things start to go bad…I mean, if I start to go bad, I want you to break up with me. I won’t fight you on it. I promise.”

“What if I fight you? Aren’t I allowed to do that?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Promise me you won’t, though.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You have to, otherwise we can’t be together. I swear to God, I’ll end it right now. If I get sick again, I don’t want you to come visit me or even think about me. I want you to forget we ever met. Forget me.”

I knew that would be impossible, but I crossed my fingers and told him I would.

I spent Thanksgiving alone with Dad. Rosa Rivera had gone to Boston to spend the day with her two daughters. James went to L.A. to see his father.

My dad cooked way too much too-rich food; we ate nearly nothing, and then Dad drove the rest over to a local food bank.

My mother called my cell phone in the afternoon while Dad was out. I had been ignoring her thrice-weekly messages since September, but I was feeling pretty blue that Thanksgiving so I picked up.

“Hi,” I said.

“Nomi,” she said, shocked at getting me. “I was just going to leave a message.”

“I can hang up and then you can still do that.”

Mom didn’t say anything for a moment. “How are you?”

“I’m good,” I said.

“Did you get the coat I sent you for your birthday?”

“I’m wearing it right now.” It was red with tortoiseshell buttons and a hood. I felt like Little Red Riding Hood in it, but it was warm.

“Your dad likes the house pretty frigid.”

“He’s getting better. It’s not his fault; it’s me. I’m always cold.”

“I know. Dad told me.”

“I should go. I have some schoolwork to do.”

“Okay. I love you, Nomi.”

“I should go.”

“Okay. Oh wait, I actually had a reason for calling…”

“Yeah?”

“Dad said you were having some trouble in photography. I could help. I do that, you know.”

“It’s not trouble. I just have to turn in this assignment. I…I really have to go.”

“Thanks for picking up,” she said.

We said goodbye and I hung up the phone. I didn’t want her goddamn help. She was always trying to find ways to insinuate herself back into my life.

And yet, I wondered…

If I had forgiven Dad for lying to me about Rosa Rivera, why couldn’t I seem to do even half that for Mom?

When it came down to it, I didn’t even know why I was in a fight with Mom. I knew the reasons, yes, but the fight itself was just a story I had been told.

I was thinking about calling Mom again when Dad came home.

He turned on the television and started watching a program about the meerkat. “The meerkat,” said the narrator, “is one of the few mammals other than humans to teach their young. Watch the adult parent show its child how to remove the venomous stinger from the scorpion before eating it.”

“Sweet, right?” Dad said.

“What are you planning to teach me?” I asked Dad.

An ad came on and Dad pressed mute on the television. “Unfortunately, your old man is pretty unskilled. I know a bit about cooking and travel. And a very little bit about writing and animals, but other than that, you’d be better off with a meerkat for a pop, I suspect.”

We watched three more nature programs in a row—one on pandas (cute to look at, but basically jerks), one on eagles, and another on bobcats. The one we were currently watching was called Top Ten Smelliest Animals, which was pretty much Dad’s ideal program, combining list-making and nature as it were.

During another ad I asked Dad, “Is this how you spent a lot of time before you met Rosa Rivera?”

He pressed mute again. “Yeah, I was pretty bad there for a while,” he admitted.

I considered this.

“What’s Mom’s husband like?”

Dad nodded and then nodded some more. “He’s in building restoration. Nice guy, I think. Nice-looking. There’re probably better people to sing his praises than me.”

“And Chloe?”

“Smart, she says, but then you were, too. Cass and I, we pretty much thought you were the best little kid in the world, you know? We always said it was a good piece of luck, you getting left in that typewriter case.”

I nodded.

“Will coming by today?” Dad asked.

I shook my head. I hadn’t told Dad about quitting yearbook or our fight.

“You’re not spending as much time with him these days,” Dad said.

“I think we’re growing apart,” I said.

“Happens,” Dad said. “He’s a good egg, though. Takes care of his mom since his father died. Hard worker. Always been a good friend to you.”

“Will’s father died?” I asked. He had never mentioned it.

“Yes, that’s why they moved to Tarrytown. His mother wanted a good school where she could get free tuition for Will by teaching.”

I nodded.

The program came on again and Dad turned up the volume.

Since it was Thanksgiving, I thought about calling Will on the phone and making up with him, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Our fight didn’t even have a scab yet, and in my mind he’d said worse things to me than I had to him.

When James got back on Saturday afternoon, he said he had an idea for my photography project. At his dad’s in California, James had noticed all these old cameras. He asked his dad if he could have them, and his dad said sure, because what else was there to do with a bunch of old cameras anyway. They were a pain really—you didn’t want to throw them out because of their perceived value, so they basically ended up taking up space.

“So, it’s supposed to be a personal story, right?” James asked. “My idea is that we go back to those steps at Tom Purdue with my dad’s old cameras and throw them down the steps, simulating your own journey two and a half months ago. In theory, the camera will take the picture either en route or at the point of impact. It’ll be an exercise in point of view. Does that sound like something Weir would like?”

“Sounds perfect.”

“We’re gonna need more cameras, though,” James said.

On Sunday morning we went in search of cheap cameras to throw down the stairs. The first place we went was the local pharmacy, where we bought five disposable cameras of various makes for around ten bucks apiece and fifteen rolls of film. James tried to pay, but I wouldn’t let him. It was my project after all.

We also went to a vintage electronics and repair store in downtown Tarrytown where we found four cameras in a dusty metal trash bin for five bucks apiece. We hoped they would still be functional, but we wouldn’t know until we saw the film.

The owner of the store kept looking at me strangely as I was paying. James had gone outside for a smoke.

“The record player,” he said finally. “You never came for it.”

“What record player?”

“You paid to get one fixed around the beginning of August, but you never came to pick it up.”

The owner ran into the back room and came out with a record player. The base was cherry with a pattern of swirls carved into the side. It was pretty, I guess, though I couldn’t imagine why I’d been getting one repaired. I didn’t have a single record.

My name was taped to the front: NAOMI PORTER.

Clearly, it was mine. I wondered what it was for.

“Use it in good health,” said the storekeeper.

When I got outside, James looked at me curiously. “Impulse buy?” he asked as he helped me put the record player in the backseat of his car.

We spent the rest of the afternoon throwing cameras down the steps of Tom Purdue. Some of them had timers, which we could set prior to throwing them. With others, we’d press the button and throw the camera really fast to get the shot in midair. Still others were total Hail Marys and we hoped they’d land on the button and take a picture as they hit the ground. I had no idea what sort of images we were getting, but at least it was fun.

On the second-to-last camera, James cut his thumb on one of the shattered lenses. He didn’t even realize it until I pointed it out to him. “How could you not notice?” I asked him.

James laughed. “I’m used to bleeding for you.” He held up his palm. I kissed it, right in the middle. I was about to move from palm to mouth when I saw Will watching us from the front doors of the school. When he caught my eye, he came outside really fast and started heading down the stairs.

“Hello, Naomi,” he said. “Larkin.”

“Hi,” I said.

“Working on the weekend?” James asked Will.

“Never stops,” Will said stiffly. “You’re bleeding, Larkin.”

“I blame her,” James said.

“Naomi,” Will said softly, “do you really think you should be running up and down these stairs without a helmet?”

“A what?” James asked.

“You know, for her head. If she reinjured herself—”

I cut him off. “I’m fine, Will.”

Will just nodded. “See you around. Naomi. James.” He nodded again as he said each of our names and then he was gone.

“It’s lucky he didn’t see us sledding.” James touched my forehead. “You’d look pretty cute in a helmet actually.”

Because he was cut, I tried to send James home without me, but he wouldn’t go. He insisted on helping me pick up the camera carcasses, which I was against. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I had a tendency to let other people clean up my messes. I’m trying not to be that way anymore.”

I pointed out that this wasn’t his mess; it was mine.

“Still,” said James. By then, the blood was practically pouring from his thumb. I wondered if he needed stitches.

“You wouldn’t be abandoning me if you stopped to get a Band-Aid, you know.”

I didn’t have time to develop the film in the school’s lab until the following Wednesday.

There wasn’t much to look at. A few shots of sky. Some concrete. A lot of black. Still, the point wasn’t always that the pictures be pretty, was it? Sometimes it was about the process, like with Jackson Pollock paintings. As I made enlargements of the photos, I hoped that Mr. Weir would see it that way.

Mr. Weir hated my project. “It’s an interesting gimmick, but it wasn’t the assignment. Your assignment was to tell a personal story in pictures.”

“This is a personal story.” I defended my project. “This is exactly what happened to me.”

“Naomi, don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that this isn’t personal. It’s simply that the assignment counts for your whole grade, and I’m expecting something deeper.”

When the bell rang, I took my pictures with me and stuffed them in my locker.

“What did Weir think?” James asked. He was standing behind me at my locker.

“He didn’t get it.”

Blank-slate time all over again.

Saturday afternoon, James, Alice, Yvette, and I took the train into the city to see a show. We hadn’t decided what we would see, and when we got there most everything was sold out. There were a couple of tickets left for the Rockettes’ Holiday Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall, so we went to that, despite the fact that Alice found it “degrading to women” and James found it “campy.”

Even if you have no interest in lines of aging showgirls wearing too much makeup kicking up their legs, there’s something impressive about it. Something spectacular. It’s like a sicko cloning experiment.

At intermission, James went outside for a smoke, and I went to the bathroom. Alice and Yvette remained in the theater to argue about whether the show was “objectifying women” (Alice) or “celebrating their athleticism” (Yvette). I didn’t necessarily think the two positions were irresolvable.

There was a long line outside the bathroom. I wondered if I would make it through before the show started again. Not that it mattered. The spectacular didn’t have a story you had to follow—it was just a bunch of women standing in a row.

Someone placed a hand on my shoulder.

“Naomi Porter?”

I turned around. It was a Japanese guy, maybe in his thirties. He was wearing expensive black glasses, a Rolling Stones T-shirt, a red hoodie, charcoal pin-striped pants, and black Converse sneakers. He was holding the hand of a little girl in a gray dress with hearts on it and pink sneakers, Converses like her dad’s.

“You probably don’t remember me,” he said. “I’m Nigel Fusakawa.”

The name was familiar.

“Cass’s husband,” he added. “Everyone calls me Fuse.”

He stuck out his hand, and without thinking I shook it.

“She was supposed to come today, but she has a bit of a cold.”

I nodded.

“Could you do me a favor?” he asked. “I’m here by myself. Would you mind taking Chloe to the bathroom?”

“I—”

“It would really help us out.”

I looked at the little girl. She was sweet, shyer in person than she had been on the phone. Besides, none of what had happened was her fault. I nodded toward Fuse. We were about to enter the interior part of the bathroom, and I took Chloe’s hand.

“What’s your name?” she squeaked.

“I’m Nomi,” I said.

Her eyes grew very wide. “Nobody?”

“Sure, whatever.”

I let her go first. “Do you need any help?”

“No, I’ve been doing this myself forever,” she informed me. I wondered how long forever was. A year? Six months? “I could have gone in here myself, but my daddy doesn’t want me to get raped.”

“Raped?” I nearly burst out laughing. Did she even know what that meant?

“That happens all the time in bathrooms,” she informed me seriously.

She had Mom’s blue eyes and Fuse’s black hair. She was cute. She remembered to wash her hands without my prompting.

“Daddy says you’re my sister,” she said as we were on the way out.

What was I going to do? Tell her it wasn’t true? “Yeah,” I said.

“I don’t want to be anyone’s sister,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because I want to be the only one.”

“You’ll still be the only one,” I said.

She pursed her tiny rosebud mouth. She didn’t look at all convinced.

Fuse was waiting for us right outside the door. “Thanks for saving me from having to be the only man in the women’s room.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“Naomi,” Fuse asked, “I hope this isn’t too forward, but why don’t you come over to our apartment after the show? We live about twenty blocks up from here, and I know Cass would be so, so, so psyched to see you. Chloe and I would be glad to have you, too.”

“I’m…I can’t…I’m with friends,” I said.

“Bring them along. Really. Please. Cass would kill me if I didn’t try to get you up to our house. She’s really missed you. I know, trust me I know, things have been hard between you, but it’s nearly Christmas, and what luck us running into you, and isn’t that the coat she sent you for your birthday?”

I nodded. This guy knew so much about me without my knowing a thing about him.

“I helped her pick it out. She’d be really glad to see you in it. Did you get the pictures from your friend?”

I had no idea what he was talking about. “What pictures?”

“Nothing. I…I must have gotten confused. We’ll meet you right here by the bathroom, okay? The Radio City Music Hall ladies’ room. It’s our special place,” he said with a wink.

The guy sounded sort of desperate, and the little girl was staring at me. The whole situation was starting to get incredibly awkward. A light flashed indicating that intermission was over.

“Please come. I know you weren’t planning to run into us; I know this isn’t how you were thinking you would spend your day. But now we have and it’s lucky, I think. Please, Naomi.”

He was begging. I didn’t want the little girl to have to watch her father beg, so I found myself saying yes.

During the second half of the show, the kicking had lost its novelty for me and the women’s identical painted-on smiles were giving me a headache. It occurred to me that if any of the Rockettes got sick or even murdered, no one would notice. They’d just bring on an identical replacement, smack on some lipstick, and the show would go on without any noticeable decrease in quality. Somewhere, some poor Rockette would be dead and buried, and the only people who would notice or care at all would be her family. The thought made me depressed as anything.

I whispered to James that I needed to leave, and he told Alice and Yvette. “It’s her head,” he said. It was my built-in, all-purpose excuse.

“Do you want us to come with you, cookie?” Alice whispered sympathetically.

“No, watch the rest of the show,” I whispered back. “We’ll take the train back early.”

I didn’t tell James about running into Fuse and Chloe. When we got outside I said, “I couldn’t be in there anymore, you know?”

“Sure,” he said.

“I don’t feel like going back yet, though.” I was too wound up from running into my mother’s new family.

James didn’t ask me why, only what I wanted to do instead. I couldn’t think of anything—most of the things I knew were in Brooklyn—so I told him that we should just ride the subways for a while.

We rode all the way down to the South Ferry stop and then all the way up to Van Cortlandt Park and then back to Grand Central. It took three hours total.

We didn’t really talk much during that time. We watched people get off and on the train. There were lots of shopping bags owing to the time of year, and the people carrying them all seemed tired to me, but warily optimistic. It put me in mind of Fuse asking me over to Mom’s house. I wondered how long he and Chloe had waited by the restroom at Radio City Music Hall.

“I have this sister…” I said to James right before we were about to get off the subway.

“You never said.”

“Well, she’s not technically related to me, so…” All of a sudden, it seemed too difficult to explain. Where would I start? From the typewriter case in Moscow Oblast? It would be a very long story. “She’s almost four,” I said. “Roughly the same number of years I lost, you know? Like, if you could take all that time and make a person, it would be her.”

“But you can’t do that.” James shook his head. “My brother,” he began before shaking his head again. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Please, say it.”

“Sasha lived eighteen years on this earth, and all that time didn’t add up to a damn thing. What that time is to me now, is a hole. I…I wish he’d never been born or that I’d never been born. I can’t talk about this.”

He kissed me then and I suppose I was glad for the distraction.

By the time we had gotten on the Metro North Railroad back to Tarrytown, it was pretty late. Having gotten a ride from Alice that morning, we had to call James’s mom, Raina, to pick us up at the train station.

Raina smelled like cigarettes and perfume, and she had this way of looking like she hadn’t seen James in years. “Is everything okay? What happened to the friend who drove you? I didn’t know you were going to be so late,” she said. “I thought the play was a matinee.” Even though she looked on the young side, she was all mom when it came to James.

“It’s fine, Ma. It’s…nothing,” James said. “Ma, this is my friend, Naomi. You remember her? She was in that play I worked on.”

She appraised me, and then we shook hands.

“Raina,” she said.

“Nice to meet you.”

She nodded. “I like your hair.”

Raina dropped me off at my house first. James walked me to my door.

“Sorry about my mom,” he said. “She’s really protective.”

I said something about that just being the way parents were.

“No, it’s not like that,” James said. “Raina’s protective because I’ve given her reason to be. I’ve spent most of my teen years a complete and utter disaster. She’s already lost so much. I guess she’s always on the lookout for signs that I might turn bad again.” His voice made a strange tremor over the word bad, and it made me want to kiss him, so I did.

I loved kissing him. I loved the way his mouth felt on mine. His lips were supple, but always a little chapped. The cigarettes (and the peppermints he ate to cover them up) made him taste bittersweet. But I wondered if all this kissing was a bad habit with him and me. The thing we did with our mouths instead of talking.

The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas always passes in about a minute. Before I knew it, James was leaving for Los Angeles to visit his father again, and Dad and I went to Pleasantville to spend the holidays with Rosa Rivera and her twin daughters, Frida and Georgia (aka Freddie and George), who she referred to as “the girls.”

Although they were identical twins, Freddie and George did not look at all alike. George competed on her university’s bodybuilding team, and she was packed with muscles. Freddie was petite, like Rosa. Neither was shy about asking a lot of questions, as I would find out seated between them at dinner.

“Mom said you lost your memory?” George began.

I nodded.

“Our dad had Alzheimer’s, did Mom say?” Freddie asked.

“I heard,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“It sucked,” George said. “It turned him into a total asshole.”

“George!” Rosa Rivera yelled across the table.

“What? It did.”

“But that’s not what she has,” Freddie said. “Mom said she only forgot the last four years?”

“Well, those years suck anyway,” Freddie said. “Do you remember, George?”

“Man, we had those, like, mullets in seventh grade. What was Mom thinking?”

Freddie shook her head. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be known as the mullet twins?”

“I wish I could forget it,” George said.

I laughed. “By the way, have we met before?” I asked.

“Yeah, we didn’t really like you.”

“We pretty much thought you were a typical snotty teenager.”

“Kind of a jerk.”

“Georgia and Frida Rivera!” Rosa Rivera yelled across the table. “That is not polite.”

“What? We did. She’s not offended.”

I wasn’t. I appreciated their honesty.

“You seem okay now, though.”

For Christmas, Rosa Rivera gave me a pair of fur-lined gloves, and my dad gave me a memoir about climbing Everest. My mother sent me things to help with my photography class: monographs by Cindy Sherman, Rineke Dijkstra, and Diane Arbus, and a new camera, which I left in the box. It was lucky my project with James had already turned into a bust, otherwise that shiny new camera might have found itself taking a trip down the stairs. James bought me two goldfish in a heart-shaped glass bowl with a castle in it. We named them Sid and Nancy. They both died before break was over.

8

I WAS IN JAMES’S ROOM, LYING NEXT TO HIM IN bed. At Tom Purdue, there’s a one-week reading period during January before exams where classes don’t meet and you just review. I was studying physics; James was studying me. “I don’t like to feel so crazy about someone,” he said. “I don’t like to feel like my happiness is so tied up in another person.”

I said not to worry.

James sat up in bed and said, “No, I’m serious. Today, I almost forgot to take my pill. The way I feel about you…sometimes it scares me.”

I started kissing him all over. Not just on the mouth—in my opinion, the mouth gets too much attention. There are a million equally interesting and lovely spaces to put lips to. I kissed him on the crease behind his knee. I kissed him on the small of his back, which was narrow but surprisingly muscular. I kissed him on the round bone that stuck out from the ankle; I don’t know what that’s called. I kissed him on his eyebrows, which were dark and well forested and just a hair or two shy of a unibrow. I kissed him on his wrist, right on top of that two-inch horizontal scar.

He pulled his wrist away from me.

“Don’t,” I said.

He laughed. “God, I was so stupid back then.”

“Do you mean for trying to kill yourself?”

He laughed a little longer, and a little more sadly somehow. “No. I just meant that if you’re slitting your wrists, you’re supposed to do it vertically, not horizontally. If you cut horizontally, you don’t bleed enough. The wound begins to heal on its own.”

My worst subject, aside from photography, was French. I had to study like a fiend just to pass, and even then I didn’t know as many vocabulary words as required for the most elementary conversations.

As luck would have it, James was a whiz at French. The private school he had gone to in California started teaching the subject nearly simultaneously with English. He would sometimes help me study by having conversations with me en français where he would introduce new words that I hadn’t yet covered.

We were in his car when he asked me, in French, “Do you blame Will Landsman or the stairs for your accident?”

I had to ask him to translate, because stairs was outside of my limited vocabulary. Accident, however, was not.

Once he’d translated, I replied without really thinking, “Ni l’un ni l’autre. L’appareil-photo,” meaning “Neither, I blame the camera.”

James laughed. “Hey, that was good.”

The strange thing was I hadn’t known I knew the words for “neither” or “camera” until I said them.

We were driving to his job at the community college (he was doing American Cinema that semester), and I remember looking at the trees and knowing that they were arbres.

That the road was route.

And the sky, ciel.

And marble.

And coin toss.

And coffee cup.

And the French words for everything under the sun.

I was about to tell James that my French had, unexpectedly, seemed to return, when I realized that it was not alone.

I remembered everything.

Everything everything.

Starting with that day.

Will and I had been arguing about who should have to go back to the office to get the camera.

Will removed a quarter from his pocket, and without even asking he announced that I would be tails and he, heads.

So I joked, “Who made you God?”

“Naomi,” he asked, “are you saying you’d prefer to be heads?”

I wasn’t necessarily saying that—I didn’t really care either way—but my friend (and co-editor) could be efficient to the point of dictatorial, and as his co-editor (and friend), I thought that this was something he needed to work on. “People appreciate being asked,” I said. “As a courtesy, you know?”

Will sighed. “Heads or tails?”

I called heads just as he threw the coin. It was, in some respects, a decent throw—high enough that I momentarily lost track of it, though this might have been an illusion caused by the silver against the twilight. High enough that I wondered if Will, who was not known for his athletic prowess, would actually manage to catch it. He didn’t. The coin landed with an undignified plop in a puddle seven feet over, on the border between the student and faculty parking lots. We raced over to verify the results. I was fast from tennis and I got there first. Through the murky water I could make out the hazy outline of an eagle.

“Should have stuck with tails, Chief,” he said, fishing George Washington out of the puddle.

“Yeah, yeah.”

We parted by shaking hands, which was how my colleague and I always said goodbye.

I trudged across the faculty parking lot and across the school’s two athletic fields—our paltry marching band (twenty-three members) was practicing on one, and our paltry football team (average height: five feet eight inches) on the other.

I trudged up the hill that began at the lower-school (grades 7–9) buildings and peaked at the upper school (10–12) in an impressive display of topographical symbolism.

I trudged up the twenty-five marble steps that led to the entrance of the main building; the brick, banklike structure people thought of when they thought of Tom Purdue, largely because it was on the cover of all the brochures. At this point, it was nearly seven o’clock and the halls were empty, the way you’d expect them to be at nearly seven o’clock. I unlocked the door to The Phoenix—no one was there since school hadn’t even started—and retrieved the camera, which was new enough that we hadn’t even had time to buy a carrying case or a strap yet.

In the time all this took, it had officially become dark, and I was ready to be home. I jogged out of the building and down the marble stairs.

People said I had tripped—as in Did-you-hear-what-happened-to-Naomi-Porter-she-tripped-going-down-the-stairs-and-her-brain-exploded—but that wasn’t what happened.

Think about it. I was not an eighty-year-old woman with a creaky hip, and at that point I had been climbing those Tom Purdue steps for almost four years: seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth grades. I knew how they felt when they were slick with rain. I knew how they felt when wearing heels and a formal dress. I knew how they felt in the middle of winter, coated with salt.

Those steps could not have been more familiar to me, so that’s why it was impossible that I could have tripped.

What really happened was that someone had left a Styrofoam coffee cup on the steps. In the darkness I didn’t see it, so I kicked the cup and whatever was inside spilled out. I remember slipping a bit on the liquid and that’s when I lost my grip on the camera. In that split second before diving down the stairs, my only thoughts were for the camera, and how it had cost The Phoenix a heck of a lot of money, and how much I wanted to catch it before it hit the stairs.

I didn’t trip or fall—tripping and falling are accidents.

I dove—diving is intentional. Idiotic, yes, but also intentional.

Diving is a leap of faith plus gravity.

I had been throwing myself toward something.

Maybe away from something else.

I had kissed Will the night before.

Actually, he had kissed me, but I hadn’t stopped it.

It had happened quickly; we were covering the Science Club’s back-to-school trip to the planetarium. I had always teased Will about his obsessive coverage of academia. Will’s “Nerd Inclusion Campaign” I called it, even though that was probably mean, and let’s face facts, we were both kind of nerds ourselves. In any case, we decided to stay for the star show.

So we kissed. I think we had both been tricked by the air-conditioning and the darkness and all those treacherous fake stars.

That kiss had probably been more about my ambivalence toward Ace than any romantic notions I had had about Will. Besides, I hadn’t met James yet.

In all these months, Will had never mentioned it, though. I suppose it didn’t matter anyhow. I was with James now, and Will and I weren’t even friends.

Sitting in James’s car, I took off my sunglasses even though we were in the midst of a brilliant, white January sunset.

We were stopped at a traffic light when James said to me, “You’re awfully quiet.”

I nodded blankly and tried to smile. I felt like if I spoke, I might have an aneurysm.

“You aren’t wearing your sunglasses,” he said.

“Oh…” I put them back on. Then I kissed James on the mouth, probably too hard.

I decided that I wouldn’t tell him or anyone else about my remembering. In a way, none of it mattered. None of it changed anything.

This was what I told myself.

I looked at James. I looked at him and felt grateful again that he’d been the one at the bottom of the stairs. It could have been anyone.

For obvious reasons, my exams went much better than expected, my French exam particularly. I did so well that Mrs. Greenberg decided to base my grade solely on the final. She was a tough teacher, but always, always fair. “You have had much to deal with, Naomi,” she said in French, “but you have studied hard and come out beautifully.”

I understood her perfectly and expressed my gratitude in French.

At his request, I went to see Mr. Weir on the last day of finals. “Congratulations. You have eighteen more weeks to dazzle me,” he said. Instead of failing me, he was giving me an incomplete. Incidentally, if I’d had my memory back in September, I definitely would have dropped that class. His was the worst kind of elective—the kind with the potential to bring down your GPA.

When I got back home that night, Dad was in his study working.

I quietly took the car keys off the hook by the kitchen door and went for a drive.

It felt good to be behind the wheel again.

I didn’t drive anywhere in particular. I stayed in my neighborhood, making enough right turns so that I ended up back where I started.

When I was about seven years old, I got lost in a museum. My parents had been researching their third or fourth Wandering Porters book, the one in the South of France. I had thought I was with my mother, but I hadn’t been. I had been mistakenly following a woman with a camera bag that looked like hers. When the woman turned, I realized my error and began to cry.

The woman looked at me and although she did not speak English (I don’t think she was French either), I managed to detect the question “…Maman…?”

I nodded miserably and pointed to the camera.

“L’appareil-photo?”

I nodded even more miserably. As it happened, my mother entered the gallery then, and I was found.

For many years, l’appareil-photo was the only French word I had.

I don’t know why my memory came back that day in James’s car—maybe there was some medical explanation having to do with synapses and neurons—just as I don’t know for certain why it left in the first place.

All I knew was that I missed my mother.

9

I DIDN’T WANT TO TELL ANYONE ABOUT THE END OF my amnesia, and the effort of keeping track of what I was and wasn’t supposed to remember was exhausting me to where I began to forget insignificant things. Like my history book. The first day of the new semester, I lost mine. I thought it might have been in James’s car—we had passed many enjoyable hours in there. I walked over to James’s house to see if I could look around.

James was at work, so the car wasn’t even there. I asked Raina if I could go look in his room, and she said to “be her guest.” Raina had not been particularly warm, but James said it wasn’t about me and I shouldn’t take offense.

I looked under James’s bed. Improbable as it may seem, my book was there: the mythic first place I had looked. As I was taking it out, my eyes alighted on something else.

It was a still-sealed envelope from the University of Southern California, where James had applied early. It was postmarked December 13. James had left it unopened for seven weeks. It seemed a little, for lack of a better word, crazy. I mean, I knew that he had really wanted to go to the film program there, but was he so afraid of not being accepted that he wouldn’t even open the envelope?

The right thing would have been to leave it there, but I didn’t do that. I picked it up and put it in my pocket. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it, but I couldn’t bear the thought of it lying there under his bed.

He called me after work that night. He said that Raina had mentioned my visit and that he was sorry he’d missed me.

I told him that I’d been looking for my book when I’d accidentally stumbled upon the letter.

James grew deathly quiet.

“I could open it if you want,” I said.

He didn’t say anything.

“Are you that afraid of not getting in?”

He told me to mind my own goddamn business, and then he hung up on me. You could say that that was our first fight. He had never even raised his voice to me before. I suppose he was right to yell at me.

At school the next day, I didn’t see him until lunch. I handed him the still-unopened letter and apologized if I had violated his privacy.

James took the letter. Without a word, he opened it. It was an acceptance. He set it on the ground, as if he couldn’t care less. It started to blow away, so I put my boot heel on it.

“It’s great news,” I said. “It’s what you wanted.” I hugged him, but his posture was rigid. “What is it, Jims?”—that was my nickname for him—“Why aren’t you happier?”

James explained, in an odd, low voice, “I hadn’t been afraid that I wouldn’t be accepted. I’d been afraid that I would.”

I deluded myself into thinking he was talking about me—how we’d just met and now we’d be on two separate coasts or something like that.

By the time lunch ended, the coolness between us hadn’t quite thawed.

After school, I was taking books from my locker when Ace Zuckerman came up to me. I hadn’t spoken to him for months other than an occasional nod in the hallway. As I was still preoccupied with James and the whole acceptance business, I wasn’t in the mood to talk to him now either.

Ace was captain of the tennis team that year, and he wanted to know if I was going to go out for it.

I said that I hadn’t planned on it.

Ace was outraged. In addition to hair, the guy was incredibly passionate about tennis. “Well, you’re a great player, and it would be a real shame for you not to play because of me.”

“You?” I laughed. “Don’t flatter yourself. I just don’t want to play tennis anymore.”

“You love tennis, Naomi. How can you not remember that?” Ace was standing really close to my face when, suddenly, something pulled him away. It was James, his eyes wild and blazing.

“Get the hell off of her!”

I tried to tell James that Ace and I had only been discussing tennis, but it was too late. These things tend to take on a momentum of their own.

Although James was wiry, he was not weak. He pulled Ace off of me and threw him against a locker. He punched him.

Ace hit him back, but mainly just to get James to stop attacking him. “You tool,” Ace said. “We were only talking about tennis.”

As I was trying to pull James off of Ace, James accidentally elbowed me in the eye. I knew without even seeing it that there was going to be a bruise.

Out of nowhere, Will Landsman got between Ace and James. I didn’t even know he was in the hallway. “Everybody calm down,” Will yelled. “You’ve just elbowed Naomi, you jerks!” Will shoved James with both his palms.

At this point, the assistant headmaster came out of her office to break it up.

James got a five-day suspension, and Ace, because he hadn’t started it, three. Will and I both got one day of detention each, even though we’d only been bystanders. When I got home, my dad was pissed. He worried that my head couldn’t take any more trauma.

“Who started it?” Dad demanded.

“I don’t know.” Of course it had been James, but I didn’t want to tell him that. I repeated what I had thought at the time, “These things take on a momentum of their own.”

Will and I served our detention together the next afternoon. We had to go pick up trash around the football field.

“This sucks. I was trying to break it up. I shouldn’t even be here,” he said.

“Who asked you to get involved? I was handling it.”

“Nice shiner,” Will muttered. “I have a million things to do. I’ve got to lock all the club pages. I have to decide who I’m sending to Philadelphia for Nationals. And, as you know, we are understaffed.”

“We all have things to do,” I said.

“What do you have? A packed schedule of hanging out with your exquisitely moody boyfriend?”

I didn’t say anything. He was trying to pick a fight.

When I’d first heard about our detention, I had been thinking about taking the opportunity to make up with him. I had even been thinking about giving him that record player. When I got my memory back, I had remembered it was for him. Will had this huge collection of albums that he had inherited from his dad, only he never played them. He kept them hung on the wall, like posters. He’d never even had a record player. In any case, I had originally intended it as an “editor-to-editor, back-to-school” gift.

Looking at him, I could tell that too much had happened. We were past apologies and record players.

We didn’t speak for the rest of the afternoon.

James’s birthday was the Saturday before Valentine’s Day. He hadn’t told me—he was not big on birthdays—but I had seen it on his college forms.

I wanted to do something really nice for him because he seemed a little down.

I got Dad’s permission to take him to the Hyde Park Drive-in in Poughkeepsie, which is about a seventy-minute drive from Tarrytown. They were having an Alfred Hitchcock festival, and James was such a movie buff.

It was a great day; the weather was really warm for February. We stayed to see two Hitchcock movies, Vertigo and Psycho (“Are you trying to tell me something?” James joked). Afterward we had dinner at a Friendly’s, and everything was great until on the way home when James’s car ran out of gas.

Honestly, I didn’t think it was that big of a deal.

“We’ll just call your mother,” I said.

“I can’t. I can’t. She’s already thinking I’m unstable because of the fight and the weirdness around the college letter. I can’t give her one more thing. I can’t.” He was panicking.

“I’ll call my dad.” Unfortunately, Dad wasn’t home and his cell phone was off. Even before I dialed, I remembered that he was at one of Rosa Rivera’s tango exhibitions. Then I called Alice. She wasn’t picking up either.

James finally agreed to phone his mother, who wasn’t home anyway.

My dad got home around one a.m. and agreed to meet us with the fuel. We weren’t far from Tarrytown. By then I was freezing. I was still disproportionately affected by cold, and James was worried about me. There was this raging look in his eyes, like he wanted to punch something. “I can’t goddamn believe I forgot to fill up the tank,” he said.

He looked at me. “You’re shivering.”

“Jims,” I said through chattering teeth, “I’m fine.”

“I can’t be trusted with anyone.”

“That’s not true. I’m just cold. I’m not going to die. Things happen.” I put my hand on his shoulder, but he shook me off.

His reaction seemed so out of proportion to the situation. We were only forty-five minutes from home for God’s sake. I’m ashamed to say it, but I was a little embarrassed to see James so—I really hate to say this—weak.

When Dad showed up, he didn’t seem all that mad about it, but it’s hard to tell with my dad sometimes. When we got back to my house, he asked to speak with James outside.

I stood at the window and listened to him.

Dad gave James a speech about how I was still “delicate” (which made me sound edible or like a glass figurine), and that James needed to be more responsible with me if he was going to keep seeing me. While I knew that James was already aware of everything Dad had said, I also knew that Dad needed to say it.

“Naomi,” Dad said when he came back inside, “I’m worried, kid. James seems a little out of control.”

“He’s fine,” I insisted, a little too adamantly, I suspect. “He’s under stress from all the college stuff.”

Dad looked me in the eyes. “I want you to know that I trust you.”

James had been planning to go visit USC for a tour on the Thursday after his car ran out of gas. He called me the night before he was scheduled to leave.

“I don’t know if I can go,” he said.

I asked him why not.

“I don’t feel right.”

“Jims, your car broke down. It was no big deal. Nothing’s happened.”

“It didn’t break. It ran out of gas because I forgot to fill it.”

“That could happen to anybody—”

“And it’s not just that. There was that fight and getting suspended. And…and I got fired from my job, I didn’t want to tell you, I’d missed too much work.”

“What do I care about your job? You were going to have to quit in a couple of months anyway.”

“My mom’s worried, and even you seem different. The way you looked at me on Sunday night. I’ve seen girls look at me that way before. I didn’t like to see it from you.”

“The way I looked at you was only worry because you seemed upset. And I’m not different,” I insisted. “I love you. Look, if you get there and you’re miserable, I’ll come. I promise.”

“Your dad would never let you.”

“I won’t tell him. I’ll make something up, I swear. I’ll tell him I’m going to a yearbook conference or to visit my mom or something.”

“You’d do that for me?”

“Christ, Jims, I threw myself down a flight of stairs just to meet you, didn’t I?” It was a joke between us, but he didn’t laugh.

“Okay,” he said finally. “Okay, but I’m holding you to that.”

I didn’t hear from him for about a day, but I figured that was probably a good thing. It meant he was busy and having a good time. He called me Friday night.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“I need you to come.”

“What’s wrong?”

He hadn’t even gone down to USC yet. It sounded like all he’d done since he’d gotten to California was sit in his dad’s house. “I’m just having a little trouble getting started is all.”

But it was more than that. There was something in his voice that scared me. “Are you all right?” I asked.

He didn’t answer my question. “Here’s the thing,” he said. “I looked it up. You can fly out of JFK tomorrow morning. I’d pay for the ticket. All you’d have to do is come.”

I found myself saying yes. I threw a couple of T-shirts, my laptop, a few randomly chosen CDs (I’d misplaced my iPod), my headphones, and another pair of jeans into my backpack.

I knocked on Dad’s door; he was on the phone, but he got off right away.

Despite the fact that I had been lying for a month, I am not a good liar. My stories are too elaborate and I forget them halfway through; I stammer; I sweat; I smile too much; I don’t make eye contact; I make too much eye contact. On this day, I was just right. “Dad,” I said, “I forgot to tell you that I’m supposed to go to a yearbook conference in San Diego tomorrow. I’ll be back Tuesday.” I was glad I hadn’t ever told him about quitting yearbook.

Dad didn’t even blink. “Do you need any money? A ride to the airport?”

I took the money; I got a ride from Alice and Yvette. Alice had just broken up with Yvette for the second time since the play had ended.

“Cookie, are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“He sounded bad, Alice.”

“If he sounded bad, maybe you should have called his mother?” Yvette suggested.

“She just makes things worse,” I said.

When we got to the airport, Alice got out of the car to hug me. “Listen, cookie, we love James, too, but do any of us really know him even?”

“I do!”

“Okay, okay, if you’re sure.”

“Call us when you get there, Nomi,” Yvette said from the car.

I was anxious as hell while I was waiting to get on the plane.

My anxieties flipped between ten or so major issues, many of which also fell under the subheading “if the plane crashes”:

1) I hadn’t ever flown alone before.

2) If the plane crashed, Dad wouldn’t even know I was on it since he thought I was going to San Diego for a yearbook conference.

3) If the plane crashed, Dad’s last thoughts about me would be that I was a liar.

4) I didn’t pack enough clothes, especially socks and underwear.

5) If the plane crashed, I still wouldn’t be speaking to my mother.

6) If the plane crashed, there was a sister who would never know me.

7) James.

8) If the plane crashed, I would still be in a fight with Will.

9) If the plane crashed, I would never “dazzle” Mr. Weir. I would be “incomplete” for all eternity.

10) I hadn’t brought anything to read.

I figured I could fix the last one at least, so I went into the nearest airport bookstore.

On a table toward the middle of the store, they had Dad’s book, which was just out in paperback. Out Wandering: A Memoir. I turned the book over and read the copy. “From the celebrated writer who along with his wife, Cassandra Miles-Porter, brought you the bestselling Wandering Porters travel series comes this deeply personal memoir about the end of his marriage, as seen through the prism of world events…” blah, blah, blah “…how he and his daughter managed to find peace of mind even while…” blah, blah, blah “…and in some ways, we are all out wandering…” blah, blah, blah. It sounded dreadful. I read Dad’s bio at the bottom. “Grant Porter lives with his daughter, Naomi, in Tarrytown, New York.” I added a couple phrases of my own, “his daughter, Naomi, who is a low-down, rotten liar and who has been lying to him for weeks.”

As a pointless act of contrition, I brought the book to the counter, and with the money the author himself had just given me, I bought a copy.

I landed in California around ten in the morning. Even though he had arranged my flight, James was two hours late picking me up.

He hugged me hard when he saw me.

“Jims, you were supposed to be here two hours ago.”

“Traffic,” he said with a vague wave of his hand. “It’s just L.A. I’m so goddamn happy that you’re here.” And he did look happy, better than before he’d left. His eyes were bright.

We got in the car; I had been planning what I would say to him since we’d gotten off the phone. The idea was to move James in positive directions; the dangerous thing, in my mind, was inertia. “So I thought we could maybe start with taking a campus tour?”

“Is that what you want to do?” he asked.

“Well, I’ve never seen USC before, and isn’t that kind of the point of why you’re here?”

“I…I guess so. I thought we could go to the beach, maybe go surfing. I’ve been wanting to take you surfing as long as I’ve known you. We could take the tour tomorrow, right? I think I’d prefer that.”

“Okay,” I said.

So we drove to the beach, but on the way I started feeling a little queasy. By the time we got there, I was really ready to get out of the car.

“Christ,” James said right after he’d parked.

“What is it?”

“I should have picked up the surf gear from my dad’s before we came here.”

“It’s fine. Let’s just sit awhile, okay? I’m feeling kind of green, you know?”

James sat down next to me on the beach, but I could tell he was feeling antsy. He kept drawing these circles in the sand with his right index finger. Finally he jumped up. “Why don’t I drive back to my dad’s house, and you wait here? I’ll come back with the gear and lunch, too.”

“How long will you be?”

“Probably about an hour.”

I agreed. I’d been traveling for hours, and I was in no mood to get back in that car.

The beach was deserted, and it was a little too cold for beach-goers. The air was crisp and salty. The sand was different from the kind you find on the East Coast: softer, but also firmer somehow. I fell asleep.

I only awoke because a couple were having a picnic on the sand near me. It seemed odd that they would have chosen to be so close to me when they could have sat anywhere, but whatever. He was about forty-five and she was probably ten years younger than that. The guy had gone all-out. He had brought the bottle of wine, the checkered blanket, a stereo with some guy singing opera, roses, and a picnic basket. It was kind of sweet, really. You could tell he’d put a lot of effort into it.

“Sorry,” she called out to me, “did we wake you?”

I shook my head. “It’s fine. Would you happen to have the time?” I’d left my backpack in James’s car.

“About four,” she called.

“Thanks.” James had been gone for about two and a half hours.

Maybe he’d just gotten stuck in traffic again? He couldn’t call me; no one could. My phone was in my backpack in his car.

I decided not to panic. I would just lie back down on the beach and wait it out. I really wished I’d taken my bag, because at least then I would have had my headphones.

Another two or so hours later, it was dark, the picnickers were packing up to leave, and James was still not there. “Can we offer you something to eat?” the man called out to me. I figured he probably thought I was a street kid. “We brought way more than we could ever finish.”

I shook my head. I wasn’t at all hungry. I was too worried about James to be hungry. “I’m fine. I’m just waiting for someone.”

The man nodded at me sympathetically. “You shouldn’t keep a lady waiting,” he said.

“Damn right,” the woman said.

Still, before they left, the woman gave me the remains of their Caesar salad and half a carton of strawberries. “Just in case he’s too much longer, right?”

I didn’t touch the food. Looking at it made me want to weep.

I was terrified for James, of course, but thoughts of self-preservation began to creep into my brain. I wondered what I should do if James never came back. Who should I call? Alice, maybe? My mother? Not Dad. He’d worry too much. And I couldn’t bear telling him I’d lied. Maybe Will? Then I started to wonder where the nearest phone was. I didn’t even know that much about my location. Somewhere on the Pacific coast near L.A., I reckoned. That narrowed it down to roughly a thousand different places.

Just as I was about to enter all-out panic mode, James appeared. He was carrying a paper bag from a burger place.

“It got cold,” he said. “So I had to throw out the first bag and get another.”

I didn’t even eat hamburgers, but I guess he didn’t know that. I jumped up and hugged him and kissed him all over his face.

“I’m sorry,” he said. Even in the dark, I could tell his eyes were bloodshot. “I…I tried to call you. Your phone was off.”

“It was in your car,” I said.

“Oh, right.”

“Looks like you already ate,” he said, pointing to the picnic remains.

“Some people felt sorry for me,” I said. “They thought I was homeless.”

“Are you mad?” James asked. “Please don’t be mad.”

“Only the smallest amount. Mainly, I was scared for you.”

James sat down on the beach next to me. After a while, I sat down, too.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m such a goddamn loser.”

“No, you’re not,” I said.

“I am. I am. I am.”

“James, don’t say that,” I said.

He pulled up his knees and set his head on them so that I couldn’t see his face.

“James, would you look at me?”

But he wouldn’t. It was awkward, but I tried to put my face under his so that he would have to look at me. He still wouldn’t move. I kissed the back of his neck. Then I kissed his arm.

After a while, he raised his head. He’d been crying.

“What happened anyway?” I tried to say this gently, but an array of other emotions was diluting my intent.

“I was driving to my dad’s in Westwood to get the gear. And I happened to notice this cemetery, so I decided to stop. Marilyn Monroe’s buried there. I’d been there before, but this time when I went I noticed how pink the marble on her grave is because people kiss it and touch it so much, you know…And that made me depressed as hell. My brother’s buried like a mile from there in this other cemetery. No one ever kisses and touches his grave, because no one gives a crap about him, do you know? He was just some kid who died. And it’s gonna sound so screwed up, but I drove over to his grave next. I couldn’t even find it at first. I’d forgotten where it was. It’s way in the back. And I started kissing it, and touching it to try to change the color of the stone…I knew it was crazy even while I was doing it, but I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately. He was never even as old as I am now, how messed up is that? It makes me crazy sometimes.

“This thing I have…this depression…I can see it coming on. It’s like when you’re surfing. You want to stay on the crest of the wave as long as possible, but the nature of waves is that they always come back down.”

I put my arm around him. James felt so small to me. “I love you,” I said.

James laughed, which was horrible. “I can’t help but wonder if you’d still say that if you could remember everything. If you were in your right mind.”

I could have told him then, but it didn’t seem the place. “Don’t you love me?” I asked.

“I do.”

“Let’s get out of here, okay?”

When we got to the car, James looked really tired, so I suggested that if he gave me directions, I could drive.

“I thought you didn’t remember how,” he said.

“I remembered,” I answered. He didn’t question me beyond that.

James’s dad’s house was the California equivalent of James’s mom’s house. Roomy, empty. His dad was away somewhere. “On business,” James said.

“Have you been here by yourself the whole time?”

James shrugged.

I made eggs, but James didn’t really eat anything. He didn’t say much the whole evening. I could tell he was thinking about something, and I didn’t want to disturb him. Still, I felt like each second he didn’t speak became an inch between us.

Around ten, he said he was going to bed. I followed him into his room.

I kissed him.

“I need to get some sleep,” he said. “I haven’t slept in days and days.”

“Why not together?” I asked. I knew it was probably pathetic, but I was trying to pull him back to the surface. I loved him even more now that he seemed so vulnerable. Maybe I loved him more because he needed me.

James shook his head. “Naomi,” he said sweetly. “Naomi…I wish I could.”

He took my hand. His grip wasn’t very strong at all. He led me into one of the guest rooms.

“Good night,” he said, and then he closed the door.

I hadn’t turned on my phone since boarding the plane.

There were twenty-eight messages. I was just about to check them when the phone rang. It was Dad. I knew the jig was up.

“Hello,” I said.

Here’s how it played out:

He’d been trying to phone me all day.

He got worried when I didn’t pick up.

He called Will.

He wasn’t there, but he got Mrs. Landsman.

Mrs. Landsman didn’t know anything about a conference in San Diego. Furthermore, she told him I’d quit yearbook months ago.

He called James’s mom.

She said that James was in California.

“I just want to know one thing, is that where you are?”

“Yes,” I said, and then I started to cry. It was the tension of the day more than the trouble I was in. It was the sound of my dad’s voice. It was lying, not just to Dad but to everyone. It was wondering how I’d let everything get so screwed up. With James and Mom and Will and Dad and school and yearbook and tennis and even poor Ace. It was all the things I hadn’t said, but couldn’t and wanted to. They constricted my throat to where the only thing to do was cry or choke. It was that half-eaten carton of strawberries and the coin toss that I’d lost and being abandoned in a typewriter case and then again by my own crazy, beautiful, treacherous, wall-painting mother. It was my sunglasses, which I’d left on the beach that day. The sun had gone down and I hadn’t needed them anymore. It’s when you don’t need something that you tend to lose it.

It was James. Of course it was James. He had said I’d looked at him “funny,” but I had eyes: he was looking at me that way, too.

Dad booked me on a flight that left at noon the next day, the first one he could find.

In the morning, James looked better. “Maybe I just needed a good night’s sleep?”

I told him my dad had found out and that I had to go home.

“I know,” he said. “Raina called me. Your dad probably hates me now.”

“You’re not the one who lied,” I said.

On the way to the airport, James took a detour. He drove to USC, where we took the tour.

“It’s a step,” I said.

“An infinitesimal one,” he added. “I still have a lot to work out.”

I held his hand the whole time. It was a really beautiful campus, and the sun was out so bright and lovely, it could almost make you forget things.

At the airport, he kissed me, but I tasted goodbye in it.

“I’ll see you when you get back to school on Tuesday,” I said. “Assuming my dad ever lets me out of my room again.”

A security officer yelled at James to move his car, so he had to go. Part of me was scared I’d never see him again.

When I got to the doors of the terminal, I realized that I had left my dad’s book in James’s car.

10

ON THE FLIGHT BACK, I ALTERNATED BETWEEN WORRYING about James and worrying about the trouble I was in, probably about seventy-five percent in the James direction. In lieu of thinking, I would have preferred to be sleeping, but planes are one of the noisiest “in theory quiet” places on earth, and I couldn’t.

I put on my headphones and placed a CD in my laptop’s drive. I hadn’t really noticed what I was packing when I’d left the house, but I’d managed to grab not one but two of Will’s stupid mixes. The first one I put in was the one he’d made me when I’d lied to him about the play, but something about it made me anxious. (Maybe it was the song choice; he had, after all, been pissed at me at the time.) So I put in a different one instead, the one from my birthday, Songs for a Teenage Amnesiac, Vol. II. A prompt came up on my computer, asking me if I wanted to launch the DVD player.

I clicked yes.

It was a movie, no more than fifteen minutes long.

To call it a movie would probably be an exaggeration. It wasn’t in the least professional, not like James’s video installations for the play, for example. It was a simple slideshow, set to the Velvet Underground song “That’s the Story of My Life.” He’d added some text, but mainly it was pictures.

It was all the years I had missed. He had gotten whatever videos and images he and the school and even Mom (yes, he had contacted my mother) possessed, and he had edited them together chronologically.

There I was.

There I was graduating from the lower school at Tom Purdue. I’m easy to spot. I’m the tallest girl in the picture.

And Mom giving birth to Chloe. My sister. I knew I hadn’t been there that day, and yet it was undeniable: there I was.

And moving with Dad to the new house—our whole life in boxes. And Ace pulling my ponytail on the tennis courts. And me taking a picture of someone taking a picture of me. It was Will—of course it was Will—I could see him dimly reflected in my camera lens.

And in that black formal dress. My hair had been dirty blond, but you could see the roots even then.

Nothing all that thrilling, I guess, but there I was.

There I was, there I was.

As soon as it was finished, I played it again.

And then, I played it again.

How surreal to see my whole life, as compiled by Will, from a plane ten thousand feet in the air.

He’d obviously done it before I had my memory back—he still didn’t know I had my memory back. It must have taken him a lot of time to assemble. It was probably the nicest, most thoughtful gift anyone had ever given me, and I hadn’t even bothered to look at it for three months. No wonder he’d been mad at me. I was a jerk, unworthy of the effort.

I spent the next three hours feeling horrible. I tried to use the phone on the back of the seat to call Will, but I couldn’t get it to work.

As soon as the plane landed, I turned on my cell, but the battery was dead. I knew that Dad would be waiting for me outside the security checkpoint, and that would effectively mark the end of my freedom for some time. I stopped at the nearest pay phone. I didn’t have any change, so I had to call Will collect.

“I have Naomi Porter on the line. William Landsman, will you accept charges?” asked the operator.

“Why not?” was Will’s reply. “Well, what do you want?”

“I’m sorry about having to call collect,” I began. “My phone died.”

“Fine.”

“I…I got your birthday present. I mean, I got it before, but I hadn’t watched it until today. I just wanted to say that it meant a lot to me.” The words weren’t coming out right. They sounded so stiff and not at all what was in my heart.

“Well…Well, that’s fine. Do you need something else? I’m on my way out actually.”

“Will, I—”

“What?” he snapped. “I’m going out with Winnie.”

“Yearbook Winnie? Winnifred Momoi from yearbook?”

“Yes, Winnie Momoi. I’ve been seeing her since the beginning of the semester. You’re not the first person in the world to have a significant other.”

“Goodbye, Coach.”

“See you.” He hung up the phone first.

I went out into the lobby to meet Dad. I felt like the sole of a very old shoe.

The first thing Dad did was hug me, and the second thing he did was ask me for my cell phone.

“It’s dead,” I told him as I handed it over.

“It’s staying that way, kid.” He put my phone in his pocket. “I’ve never had to really punish you before, and I’m not even sure I know how to do it.”

“Phone’s probably a good start,” I said.

“And no regular phone either, or not much.” Dad took my backpack and didn’t speak to me again until we were in the car.

On the highway Dad elaborated on his plans for my punishment. He told me I was “seriously grounded” for at least the next month. “What’s a serious grounding entail anyway?” Dad asked.

“Not sure,” I said.

“Not going out with James or anyone else, I think,” Dad said. “Also, I want you home immediately after school, and I’ll drive you there and pick you up, too.”

“I could walk and save you the bother,” I said.

“No, this is part of the trust thing. You see, I don’t trust you anymore.”

It stung, but I deserved it.

“Why didn’t you tell me you’d quit yearbook?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“What am I supposed to do with you, Naomi? I never thought I’d see the day that you’d run off to California without telling me. That’s after-school special stuff.”

“I know.”

“Can you tell me anything that will help explain this?”

“I was worried about James,” I began. “I could tell he was in a bad place…”

“Why didn’t you come to me? Didn’t you think I would help?”

“It wasn’t just James, Dad. It was me, too…”

I told Dad everything.

I told him about remembering everything.

“Aw, kid,” he said, “why didn’t you say?”

“I guess my life seemed to be going one way, and it seemed too difficult to think about starting all over again or going backward. And I…I didn’t want to lose James.” I didn’t add that I felt like now I had anyway.

“I’m not sure I understand. Why would you have lost James?” Dad asked quietly.

“Because…maybe it won’t make any sense to you, but not having pasts was something we had in common.” It hurt me to even say this next part. “I think it might have been one of the main reasons he liked me.”

“I doubt that very much.” Dad smiled for a second and then he sighed. “You can drive again?”

I nodded.

“Shame about you being grounded, then.”

I didn’t talk to James until Tuesday night, when he got back to Tarrytown. I probably wouldn’t have even gotten to talk to him then except that Dad had left me alone for about ten minutes, so that he could go get coffee.

We didn’t discuss L.A. or anything that had happened there. To tell you the truth, I was overjoyed just to hear from him. I had been worried he might not make it back from California at all.

He didn’t say anything at first, but I knew it was him.

“I can’t stay on the phone long, Jims,” I said finally. “I’m not even supposed to be on the phone now.”

He apologized and then he got even quieter—so quiet, I could hear Raina watching TV in her bedroom, and the fridge making ice, and Raina’s cat, Louis, lapping water from his bowl. When James did finally speak, his voice was so strange. He asked me, “What do you know about yourself for certain?”

I said, “My name.” I laughed to let him know I was done discussing the matter.

He must have taken it like a dot-dot-dot instead of the period I had intended, because he continued, “Besides your name. Besides your name, besides the facts, what do you know about yourself to be true, essentially true?”

Normally, I liked his…I guess you’d call it philosophy, but on this night it was sort of scaring me.

I told him that I loved him, because it was all I could think to say. “I wonder,” he said. “I just really wonder. If you knew everything, would you still feel the same?”

I should have just confessed that I did, in fact, know everything, but I didn’t.

Then he said, “How do you know that being in love with me wasn’t some grand mental delusion?”

I felt insulted, like he was saying that everything that had happened between us didn’t count for anything. I took it the wrong way, and I didn’t say what I wish I had said, something like, “Love is love. It’s not about knowing, and besides, I know everything I need to know anyway.”

Instead, I told him I had to go; Dad would be back any minute, and I was in so much trouble already.

Then in a clear, strong, reassuring voice, he said he loved me, too (that too still smarts), and that he’d see me in school the next day, which ended up being a lie.

At lunch, I called his cell phone from the school pay phone. Raina answered. “Naomi,” she said, “I was about to call you. It’s been a hectic day.” Her voice was scratchy and raw, as if she’d been up all night talking.

“Is something the matter with James?” Given James’s history, all manner of horrific possibilities came to mind.

“No,” she said. “No, he’s fine.”

Then she told me. James had voluntarily decided to go back to Sweet Lake, which was the Albany mental health facility he’d been in a year ago.

“Why?” I asked. “He was fine.”

“I think that he was feeling a bit overwhelmed” was all she said at first.

“He was fine.”

“And he basically is fine, but he didn’t want things to get bad. They have before for him, you know. It’s good, honey, he’s trying to be responsible.” She said that it might only be for a couple of days, and that he was in the transitional facility, not the full-on psych ward or something. The difference was that at the transitional facility, he could still keep up with his schoolwork and make phone calls. “It’s really just a house, Naomi,” she said. “He’ll probably call you in a couple of days once he’s settled in.”

I was numb, but underneath that numbness was an indignant little tumor. I couldn’t believe he would take off without even telling me himself.

A week passed without any word from James.

I decided that if he wouldn’t call me, I would call him. There were things he should know and things I needed to say. So whenever Dad was working or out, I would phone Sweet Lake.

I called him maybe thirty times over the next three days, but he never called me back. There wasn’t a direct line to his room or anything. Eventually, I put it to the receptionist point-blank, “Is he getting my messages?” The receptionist sighed or sniffed very heavily—over the phone, this sounds like the same thing—and replied, “Yes. He’s getting your messages, but sometimes a patient doesn’t feel up to returning a call.”

Screw that. I would go see him myself.

I hadn’t forgotten my promise to him. I hadn’t forgotten his “rules.” But I didn’t want him locked up without knowing the truth: I hadn’t been with him because I was delusional or an amnesiac. I had loved him. I think I really had.

And screw James. They were his rules, not mine.

Not to mention, I’d had my fingers crossed.

I knew Dad wouldn’t let me drive up to Albany by myself and especially not to visit James.

I called Will. “Coach,” I said. I knew I was laying it on a bit thick with the “coach” bit, but I needed Will to be in as good a mood as possible.

“What do you want?” Will asked.

“So the thing is,” I said, “I sort of need you to drive me to Albany tomorrow.”

“Why in God’s name would I do that?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” And I didn’t. It had basically been a Hail Mary. I’d been a jerk to Will. So I told him goodbye and I started to hang up the phone.

“Wait a second. I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it yet.”

“Okay.”

“What’s in Albany?”

I told him.

He lowered his voice. “Honestly, Naomi”—he’d stopped calling me Chief ever since I’d quit yearbook, and now that I had my memory back and could remember what good friends we’d been, it stung—“don’t you think I have better things to do on a Saturday than drive you to see your crazy boyfriend?”

“Yes. I’m sure that you do.” I wanted to add that James wasn’t crazy, but I knew by Will’s question that he was coming round.

“I have a yearbook to run. By myself, I might add.”

“I know.”

“And a girlfriend now.”

“Yes.” I’d seen him and Winnie Momoi. Everyone said how cute Winnie and Will were together. Even their names were alliterative.

“Well, I just wanted to make sure you appreciated that my whole life doesn’t revolve around you anymore,” he said. “You’ll pay for gas. And meals. And incidentals.”

“Incidentals? Like what?”

“Like…like sundries and vitamins and pens. Like I don’t know like what. I was just on a rhetorical roll. Incidentally, how long does it take to get to Albany?”

“Two hours, I think.”

“Okay, that’s two CDs. I gotta get started on a mix for tomorrow. Because even though I’m driving you, I’m still not speaking to you, Naomi.”

I decided not to point out the obvious: that he was, in fact, speaking to me.

I heard him flipping through his CDs in the background. “Songs for Visiting Naomi’s Crazy Boyfriend in Albany.” Will and his mixes.

“Catchy title,” I told him.

“I’m gonna fill it with all the famously mad and/or suicidal recording artists. Jeff Buckley. Elliott Smith. Nick Drake. And maybe a couple love songs, too. But the really, exquisitely tortured kind.”

“There’s one other thing,” I told Will. “I need you to call my dad and tell him that it’s something I have to do for yearbook.”

“Christ, Naomi, I am not going to lie for you.”

“Please, Will…He’ll believe you. I can’t go otherwise.”

“He knows you quit,” Will said after a moment.

“I know. Just say it’s something I committed to before that only I can do.”

“I’ll think about it. I’m not promising anything. Not to mention, I don’t like the idea of lying to your dad.”

That night, Will called my dad and told a very short story about my having agreed to photograph the Special Olympics.

Dad didn’t question Will. Everyone knew that William Blake Landsman was no liar. Besides, I think Dad could tell I needed to get out of the house.

We left at noon on Saturday. Mainly I pretended to sleep in the car. I was too nervous to even talk to Will.

When we got there, Will told me he would wait in the car.

“I need you to come in with me,” I said.

“Why? Are you scared?”

“No…well, I think there’s a small chance that he might not want to see me, so I need you to give your name at the desk.”

“He doesn’t know you’re coming?” Will was incredulous.

“Not exactly,” I admitted.

“Congratulations. This sounds exceedingly well planned,” Will said as he opened his door.

I had expected a prison, but Sweet Lake reminded me of Thomas Jefferson’s house, Monticello, where I had taken a field trip in fourth grade. Or maybe it looked like a very large B&B.

Visiting hours on Saturday lasted from noon to seven. I had called ahead. It had been that same receptionist, and I’m pretty sure he recognized my voice because he said, “You do know that patients have the right not to see someone.”

Will gave his name at the desk, and then we went to wait in the visiting room.

“Will,” James said, coming through the door. “Is something wrong with…?” Then he saw me. At first, I thought he was going to walk right back through those doors the same way he’d come, but he didn’t.

He walked to the sofa where Will and I were. After a while, James sat down, but he wouldn’t look at me.

When he finally did look at me about five minutes later, it was not in a very pleasant way at all. “So?” he said.

I had rehearsed what I wanted to say ever since I’d decided to come. I took a deep breath.

I thought about asking Will to leave, but I didn’t. “I think you”—I turned to James; I didn’t care if he wanted to look at me or not—“have gotten the idea that if I could remember everything, I wouldn’t want to be with you. And since that is the case, I shouldn’t be ruining my life by being with you in the meantime when you’re so…flawed. Is that right?”

He nodded and muttered under his breath, “Something like that.”

“Well, here’s the thing. I haven’t been an amnesiac since January. I love you now. It’s not gratitude or amnesia. It’s love. And I know you’re screwed up. Everyone is screwed up. I don’t care.”

“You’re a goddamn liar,” James said.

“I can’t believe it,” Will said. “How could you not say?”

I looked at Will.

“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

His face was flushed. “I’ll wait for you by the car,” he said. And then he left.

James didn’t speak to me for a long time. Finally, he said, “Let’s go outside. I can’t be in here anymore.”

It was a nice day, and I don’t mean that it was sunny either. It was humid and not too cool, like winter was getting annoyed with itself and wanted it to be spring just as much as everyone else. We sat down at a picnic table.

I remember wanting to touch him, but not feeling like he would let me. Eventually he took my hand. “It’s cold,” he said. He cupped his hands, which were dry and warm, around mine.

“Sometimes,” he said after a while, “I was sort of jealous of your amnesia, I know how crazy that probably sounds. Because for so long in my life, I just wanted to forget everything that had ever happened to me…

“After my brother died, it became real easy to picture myself dying young. But recently I’ve realized that I’m probably not going to unless I do something to make that happen. I know this probably seems evident to you, but it’s, well, it’s news to me. And if I’m not going to die young, that means I’m stuck with the consequences of my actions. That means I have to figure things out, do you know?”

I did.

“Because now, I’m older than my brother ever was. And I’m going to go to college, which is something that he never did. The way I see it, now’s a really good time for me to get a handle on all of this.

“As for you…well, I just don’t want you to turn into another Sera,” he said. “But you make things difficult for me.

“I wish we’d met some other time,” James said. “When I was older and had my shit together. Or younger, before everything got so messed up.

“Someday,” he said, “we’ll run into each other again, I know it. Maybe I’ll be older and smarter and just plain better. If that happens, that’s when I’ll deserve you, Naomi. But now, at this moment, you can’t hook your boat to mine, ’cause I’m liable to sink us both.”

I promised to leave him alone until he got out. And then I couldn’t help it, I asked him when that might be. I’m ashamed to reveal this, but I might have been thinking a little about junior prom in May.

He said that since he was just in the “transitional” program, he was doing his schoolwork over e-mail and that he hoped to be back for graduation, maybe sooner, but he wasn’t sure.

“I’m…well, I’m glad to see you, but I’m embarrassed that you’re here in a way,” he said. “I kind of wanted you to think I was perfect.”

I told him that I knew he wasn’t perfect.

“Yeah, but I wanted you to think that I was.”

We sat on that picnic table for a really long time, until the world became darker and darker. For a second I wished that time might stop, and it might stay twilight forever. Maybe I could live my whole life on this park bench with James, who I loved, next to me.

The sun went down.

Visiting hours were over.

I kissed him goodbye, and Will and I drove back home.

Will didn’t talk to me for the first hour and a half on the way back, and when he finally did speak, it was only to alert me to the fact that he wanted to stop at a diner.

“I just want to remind you that I am at liberty to order whatever I want on the menu,” he said.

All he ordered was a patty melt and a chocolate milk shake, which was lucky because I only had forty bucks on me and that had to get gas, too. I didn’t feel like eating, so I just watched him.

“So…so…if you’ve had your memory back all this time, does that mean you remember everything?”

I looked at him. “Yes.”

“Everything everything?”

I was pretty sure he was thinking of that time he and I had kissed, but I didn’t necessarily want to talk about it just then. “Yes.”

Will nodded and ate a couple of French fries.

“But that day I made you go back for the camera? Normally, I would have just gotten it myself. I was only being so difficult because I didn’t want you to think that things had changed between us. I guess I was overplaying the friends thing.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said. “I was the one who tripped.”

Will nodded. “I was hurt,” he said. “That day, I can truly say I was hurt. I was in love with you, and the next day you acted like us kissing was no big thing.”

“Will…” I sighed. “Of course, it was a big thing. How could it not have been? You’re my best friend, right?”

“I know I should have said something, right then in the parking lot, but by the time I had a chance, you’d forgotten everything. Me entirely. Then you quit yearbook. You met James. It was all too late. But the worst of it is, somewhere in there…somewhere after you and that idiot Zuckerman broke up, maybe I had a chance? But I didn’t say anything then either.

“But I don’t love you anymore,” he said firmly.

“Will.”

“I don’t love you so much.”

I couldn’t figure out anything to say. In a way, I sort of wished I was in love with him instead of James, because it would have been easier on everyone.

11

THE FOLLOWING WEEK, I GOT A POSTCARD FROM JAMES.

First off, the picture made me laugh, but he probably knew that it would. Big-eyed, cherubic, blond cartoon toddlers (were they brother-sister, or were they more?) on the beach, and the caption at the bottom, Wish You Were Here…Albany, NY. Are there even beaches in Albany? And considering where here was for him, I doubt he actually wished I was there.

Then I flipped the postcard over and read his personal message, which was only two words long and had no signature. “Forget me,” he wrote. That was it, that was all.

It seemed like the worst possible thing a person who knew me at all would ask.

Yes, I would leave him alone.

No, I would not forget him. It wasn’t his choice.

The only person I wanted to talk to about all this was Will.

I tried him on the phone, but he wasn’t picking up. I ran to school—the exertion felt strangely good—and he was still in the yearbook office, but he was talking to Winnie Momoi. I didn’t want to go in and interrupt, so I waited in the hallway for him or Winnie to leave. I guess he must have seen me through the window on the yearbook door. He came outside like fifteen seconds later, and I burst into tears, even though I could see Winnie watching us curiously.

I could tell he wanted to ask me what was wrong, but he didn’t. He put his arm around me, and we started walking out to his car.

The only thing he said to me was “You’re not wearing your coat.” He went back into the office and returned with his coat (this crazy orange suede one with a lamb’s wool collar) and he told me to put it on. I did. It must have weighed about sixty pounds. It was huge on him, so I was basically drowning in it.

He drove me home.

“It’s really over,” I said.

“I know,” Will said.

“I’m such a jerk,” I said.

“No, you’re not, Chief. You’re great.”

Somehow Will calling me great started me crying all over again. I didn’t feel at all great.

I wasn’t crying for James, though. I think I was crying for how much he didn’t know me and how much I didn’t know him and how I’d acted like such an idiot. How messed up it was that I didn’t feel like I could even tell him when I got my memory back.

I was crying a little for the boy I had wanted him to be and the boy he hadn’t turned out to be.

And I was crying for gravity. It had sent me down the stairs, and I’d thought that meant something, but maybe it was just the direction that all things tend to flow.

My heart was a little broken (is there such a thing?), but I still had to go to school. I buttoned my dress shirt over it and my winter coat, too. I hoped it didn’t show too much.

A sort of funny thing happened the next afternoon. I was standing at my locker talking to Alice when Will’s Winnie confronted me.

Winnie had long dark hair that reminded me of my mom’s, and made me miss my old hair a little. My hair was starting to look like crap by the way—it wasn’t short enough to be short or long enough to be anything else. I hadn’t considered how long it would take to grow out when I’d cut it in the first place.

Back to Winnie. She was five inches shorter than me, but that didn’t stop her from getting right up in my face. “Look, Naomi,” she said, “he was in love with you. We know it. Everyone knows it. But Will is a person of value, and you threw him out when you had James, so now you should just leave him alone.”

“Gauntlet thrown,” said Alice. She let out a low-pitched whistle.

I was shocked. Winnie had always seemed so sweet and like the least likely person ever to confront you in a hallway with a “stay away from my man” speech.

I told her that Will and I “are just friends and barely that.”

Winnie narrowed her eyes at me before storming off.

“Cookie, do you need me to kick her butt?” Alice asked. “We’re about the same height, but I’m fiercer than I look.”

I shook my head. Even though Winnie was being absurd and I could have used a friend at that particular moment, I decided to keep my distance from Will. I needed his friendship, but I wasn’t sure that I deserved it.