Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

12

I WAS STILL GROUNDED, NOT THAT IT MATTERED anyway. I didn’t have anywhere I wanted to go.

To pass the time, I studied, I tried to come up with a new photography project, I ran laps around my neighborhood.

I read my dad’s book in its entirety. It was much the way the jacket described it, but there was this one part where he talked about how he had been “emotionally unfaithful” to Mom even before the split. He wrote how he was always flirting, always wanting people to like him, even needing their kid (me) to love him more. He wrote, “At times, it must have been exhausting to be my wife.” It was strange to know that my dad had such thoughts.

I listened to music. I went through all of my own CDs first. Then I listened to the CDs Will had made for me, and when I was done with those, I listened to them again. It was a completely different experience, listening to his mixes with my memory back. All the songs meant a little something to me. They were a sort of shorthand between us, a common language that I never could have guessed at. The last song of the first one he’d ever given me (Songs for a Teenage Amnesiac, Vol. I) was called “I Will.” It was sweet and old-fashioned, kind of like him.

About a month into my punishment, Dad got tired of seeing me mope around the house. “I’m letting you out this weekend, kid.”

I asked him if that meant the grounding was over.

“Nope,” he said. “But I am packing you off to your mother’s.”

I could have argued, I suppose. I could have put up a fuss, but what was the point? I knew this visit was long overdue.

When I got to her apartment, my mother answered the door. She said she’d sent Fuse and Chloe away for the day so it would just be us.

She smiled very casually. “I thought we could talk about your photography project today. Tell me what it’s supposed to be.” Her wording seemed a bit canned, like she’d been practicing it for days. Her nervousness touched me, I guess.

We went into Mom’s studio and she showed me pictures, her own and other people’s, and we tossed some ideas back and forth.

One of Mom’s personal albums was a pregnancy album. She had taken a single picture of herself each and every day for eight months. Beginning with the day she found out “for certain” from the doctor, she had fastened one of her cameras to a tripod and positioned it in front of a burgundy velvet wingback chair. I remembered the chair from my old house because Dad had always hated it. Also, Mom happened to be sitting in it now as I looked at the album.

Every picture was the same composition—my mother in the chair—except her clothing changed and her bump got bigger. Here and there, you would find one with Fuse’s hand on Mom’s belly. There were 225 pictures total. If you stacked them in a pile and shuffled through them really fast, it was a cartoon flip book where nothing much happened aside from the miracle of human life, if you’re into that sort of thing…

The last one showed a gray sky, with my mother wearing blue jeans and a white V-neck undershirt that I guessed belonged to Fuse. Her expression wasn’t one of the obvious ones like happy or sad—it fell somewhere between greeting a person you haven’t seen in a long time and stifling a yawn, but it really wasn’t either. You’d probably have to see the picture to know what I meant.

Mom came to look at the album over my shoulder. “These are from ages and ages ago. Before you were even born.”

“It’s not Chloe, then?” I asked, surprised.

Mom shook her head. There was a faraway look in her eyes. “Your dad and I, we lost that one.”

I had never known that. I had thought they couldn’t get pregnant. It occurred to me how it was funny all the things you don’t know about someone, even someone you live with. How, in a way, the story of that baby was the beginning of my story, wasn’t it? Though I never would have known it looking at the pictures, and no one else would ever have known it either. Not unless there’d been a footnote.

That was when I had an idea for my photography project.

Each picture in my series would be a footnote to the next. In other words, all the images would be footnoting each other. The photos would explain each other through other photos.

The first picture I took was a restaging of my “birth.” I got a typewriter case from a thrift store and lugged it back to my mother’s apartment in New York City. Chloe, although she was not a baby, played the part of me. She couldn’t fit in the case, so she stood on top of it.

The next picture I took connected mainly to Chloe. It was a photo of Chloe and me in Mom’s velvet chair. I meant that one to represent how we were related, but only through the chair, not by blood. In the front of the frame, I staged it so that you could see Mom’s back and a camera tripod.

I took one of a camera sitting at the bottom of the stairs at Tom Purdue. It rained that day, which made the image even more perfect. At first, I thought that one was about James, but I think it might have been about me.

I took one at that same park in Rye I’d visited with James. I put a typewriter in the middle of a field and a typewriter case as far away as I could while still keeping the two objects in the same frame. This one was about Will, I suppose. Or you could read it as a footnote to the typewriter case picture.

I staged about twenty-five more pictures. It took the better part of the next month, but I was happy with the results.

When I presented my project in Mr. Weir’s class the next week, I was scared at first; those photo kids could be tough.

“When I was younger,” I began, “my parents wrote these books. My dad wrote all the text, and my mother took all the pictures, but she also wrote the occasional footnote. That’s the only time I’m ever really mentioned in these books. That, and the picture on the back flap. I call my project ‘Footnotes from a Lost Youth,’ but I’m still playing with the title. It might be a little pretentious…”

Mr. Weir gave me a B. “It would have been an A-,” he said, “but I had to deduct for lateness.” He also put up my pictures in the school’s gallery. It was odd to have something so personal out there in that way, but the good thing about art is that no one necessarily knows what you mean by it anyway.

Dad and Rosa Rivera came. So did Alice and Yvette and all the kids I’d been in the play with.

Will came to see my pictures, too. I don’t know when, but one day a mix CD showed up in my mailbox, Footnotes from a Lost Youth. The first track was “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Part I,” the same one he’d been considering all those months ago. I felt forgiven. I called to thank him, but he wasn’t home.

Even Mom and Fuse came in from the city to see my pictures.

They took me out to dinner afterward. Of all things, what we talked about was how they had met.

The first time was in high school, which I had already known.

Fuse said that the second time was twenty years later on a subway platform in Brooklyn. Mom had been waiting to go to her photography show and Fuse had been waiting on the opposite subway platform to go to Manhattan to meet with clients. Just before Mom’s train got there, Fuse wrote his phone number on a sheet of looseleaf paper and held it up so she could see it, but he had no idea if she would write it down or call or what. Then Mom’s train pulled out of the station. She was still standing there, fishing through her bag. She yelled across the platform, “I couldn’t find a pen.” Then Fuse pointed up, meaning that they should meet outside the train station.

“So, depending on how you look at it, our love story took twenty years or thirty seconds,” Mom joked.

“It was very fast or very slow,” I said.

“Love stories are written in millimeters and milliseconds with a fast, dull pencil whose marks you can barely see,” Fuse said. “They are written in miles and eons with a chisel on the side of a mountaintop.”

“Honey,” Mom said with amusement in her voice, “that’s awfully poetic.” She coughed. “Pretentious.”

“It’s the philosophy major in me.” Fuse blushed.

The next week, I went to take down my pictures from the school gallery. When I got to the one of me and Chloe in the chair, it put me in mind of the difference between her origins and mine.

For Chloe, Mom had gone through pain, sweating, and thirty-five extra pounds. But at least she’d only had to travel a couple of blocks from her apartment to the hospital.

For me, she had filled out many forms, crossed her fingers, paid fifteen thousand dollars, overcome a language barrier, and dealt with opportunistic Russian bureaucrats. After all that, she got to sit for thirty hours in coach.

The delivery was different, but the result was basically the same. It was like Fuse had said: a love story in millimeters or a love story in miles.

13

ACE APPROACHED ME AGAIN ABOUT JOINING THE TENNIS team. His mixed doubles partner, Melissa Berenboim, had torn her ACL. She was out for the last three games of the season, and he needed a replacement quickly. “We never thought we should play together while we were going out, but I figured it’s fine now,” he said.

“What about our fight and everything else?”

“I thought you might say that, but first and foremost, I have to be a good captain to my team, and what is good for the team is me finding a replacement for Missy. Naomi, there are way, way, way more important things than whatever stupid stuff happened between you and me.”

“Like?” I was curious what Ace would say.

“Like tennis. And strong knees.”

“I’m warning you, I’m totally out of practice.”

“I’ll whip you right back into shape, Porter.”

The truth was, I’d wanted to go back to the team for a while. I wasn’t the greatest player in the world, but I loved playing. Ace had known that about me.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

Actually, Ace was a great doubles partner: not selfish, not trying to go for every shot, instinctively knowing when I could reach the ball and when I couldn’t. We were a good team. We won more than we lost, which was saying something considering how little practice time we’d had.

We enjoyed each other on the court, too. Like if the score was forty–love, Ace might make a joke and say something like, “Forty—and maybe it’s love, but probably not if she dumps you on homecoming night.”

“Ha,” I said.

One day I wore those tennis sweatbands on the court. I held up my wrists and said to him, “Notice anything special about me?”

Ace whistled and said, “The guy who got those for you must have been some romantic.”

It was all sort of corny, but we amused each other. It was easy to remember why I had liked him in the first place.

We were in the athletic department van on the way back from a match when Ace said to me, “I heard about James.”

“Yeah,” I said, hoping he would leave it at that.

“Maybe you could go up to visit him?”

I told him that I already had, but that we were basically taking some time off from each other.

Ace nodded. He said, “I can tell that you really love him. I know what you look like when you’re in love. I know you.”

Then Ace apologized. “When we broke up, I might have said some things that weren’t very nice about you. I’m sorry for that.”

Of course, I had forgiven him ages ago. I told him I was sorry, too. “Things hadn’t been going well for a while, had they? Even before my accident, I mean?”

Ace smiled that dopey grin of his and just shook his head.

The third week of May, I was helping Alice paint the sets for her new play, a production of Hamlet, when James sauntered into the theater.

I hadn’t known he’d be back that day.

James was still handsome as ever. Less emaciated and that was good. He asked me if I wanted to go get coffee somewhere. I told him I had to finish painting first, which I did.

At the coffee shop, he told me about Sweet Lake, and I told him about my pictures.

He told me he had quit smoking, and I told him I was letting my hair grow out.

He told me how he’d made friends with a girl called Elizabeth while he was away, and I told him how I had sent Chloe an Emily Dickinson poem last week.

“Which one?” he asked.

“‘I’m Nobody.’ It’s sort of a nickname she has for me. We read it in Mrs. Landsman’s class, so I photocopied it and sent it to her. When I was a kid, I always loved getting stuff in the mail, didn’t you?”

James nodded.

Soon after, we ran out of things to talk about.

Our moment had passed somehow. I was different. He was, too. Without our “madness” (how else to put it?) to unite us, there wasn’t anything much there. Or maybe too much had happened in too short a time. It’s like when you take a trip with someone you don’t know very well. Sometimes you can get very close very quickly, but then after the trip is over, you realize all that was a false sort of closeness. An intimacy based on the trip more than the travelers, if that makes any sense.

Whatever it was, I knew he felt it, too.

He drove me back to my house.

“You still have paint on your palm,” he observed. “Like mine, the first time we met.”

“Except that was your blood, Jims,” I pointed out. “This’ll just wash out, you know?”

“True, true. But it healed pretty quick actually.” He kissed me on my cheek.

I went to prom by myself, but I ended up hanging out with Yvette and Alice.

The first person I ran into was Ace. His new girlfriend was a tennis player from another school. Ace introduced me in the following way: “This is Naomi Porter, my ex-girlfriend and current mixed-doubles partner.”

“Probably more information than you needed,” I said to Ace’s girlfriend, rolling my eyes.

Will was there with Winnie. He was wearing a powder blue tuxedo, and she looked teeny tiny in a matching powder blue vintage tulle dress with a full skirt. (Personally, I’m too tall for most vintage clothes.) It was a lot of blue, but they looked adorable. Will and I never got a chance to talk. At one point, he winked at me from across the room; I winked back.

He was a good boyfriend to her. He brought her punch, made sure she had a seat when she wanted one, and watched her purse when she went to the ladies’ room.

He was a good boyfriend to her as, in some universe elsewhere, he might have been to me.

14

ROSA RIVERA, MY DAD, AND I WERE WATCHING A nature program. Dad still watched them, though he watched fewer now, and when he did, it was with Rosa Rivera or me.

In any case, this particular one was about porcupines. So the guy porcupine will sing a song if he wants to mate, and if the lady porcupine’s not in the mood or would prefer a different porcupine, she pretends not to hear him before running away. And sometimes he’s completely the right porcupine, but she’ll run away anyway because she’s not ready. But if he’s the porcupine for her and the timing’s right, they stand up and face each other, eye-to-eye and belly-to-belly. They really take the time to see each other.

“This is so sweet,” Rosa commented. “He is showing her the respect. Why don’t you do that to me?” She turned Dad to face her, porcupine-style.

“After the staring has continued an appropriate time,” the TV narrator went on, “the male porcupine covers the female from tip to toe with his own urine.”

“Please do not ever do that to me, darling,” Rosa told Dad.

“His own urine?” Dad asked. “Isn’t that redundant? Who else’s urine might he be using?”

The TV narrator advised “never getting too near porcupines mating,” which seemed like sound, if obvious, advice to me.

I didn’t hear what happened after the urination because my cell phone rang, so I went into the dining room to answer it. It was Will’s girlfriend, Winnie.

“I was wondering if you’d heard from Will,” she said stiffly.

I hadn’t spoken to him since lunchtime, which wasn’t particularly uncommon since I wasn’t on yearbook anymore and we didn’t have any classes together. He’d sometimes call me at night, but just as often not. “No,” I said. “Why?”

“No one’s heard from him since the ambulance came. We thought he might call you.”

“Winnie, what are you talking about? What ambulance?”

“You haven’t heard, then?” she asked.

Obviously. Why do people always ask that? I said, “No, Winnie. Please tell me.”

It had started after school at The Phoenix. First he had had a coughing fit and then he said he was having trouble breathing. He tried to continue working, though everyone could tell he wasn’t himself. Then he passed out. He woke up right before the ambulance got there. Winnie said that he told everyone to keep working, and that nobody should come with him in the ambulance, and that he’d call with instructions later that night. “Isn’t that so like Will?” Winnie asked. “Only he never called in with instructions, which is completely not like him, and now everyone’s freaking out. I should have gone with him. I can’t get Mrs. Landsman on the phone.” Her voice was small. “Do you think he’s dying, Naomi?”

“I’m sorry, Winnie, I have to get off the phone now. I’ll call you if I hear anything.” My hands were shaking.

Dad muted the porcupine program and called out from the living room. “Is everything okay?”

I took a deep breath. I dialed Will’s home number, but no one picked up.

“Is everything okay?” Dad had come into the dining room.

“It’s Will,” I told Dad. “They…” I cleared my throat. “They took him away in an ambulance. He’s sick. We have to go to the hospital.”

Dad looked at his watch. “I’m sure it’s nothing serious. Besides, it’s nearly ten o’clock, Naomi. They won’t let you visit him until tomorrow anyway.”

“I have to know what’s wrong.” I started heading toward the door.

“Wait!” Dad said. “I’ll call the hospital first.”

While Dad found the number to the hospital and called it, I thought of how Will knew everything about me, and how if he were gone, part of me would be missing forever. I wondered if the person who really loves you is the person who knows all your stories, the person who wants to know all your stories.

Dad hung up the kitchen phone and said, “They have a William Landsman, but of course they wouldn’t tell me anything about his condition. We can’t ring his room because it’s too late. But if he has a room, he’s definitely not dead, Nomi.”

“What if he’s dying, Dad? I’m going down there.”

Dad sighed. “It’s ten o’clock. Visiting hours are over. Besides, it’s storming out.” There was a particularly brutal late spring downpour going on outside with wind, lightning, and all the special effects.

“Maybe his mom will be in the waiting room? And she could tell us what happened,” I argued.

Dad looked me in the eye. “Okay,” he said finally, grabbing his keys off the dining room table. “Rosa, we’re going out for a bit.”

In our rush we had forgotten umbrellas, and Dad and I got completely soaked on the walk from the parking lot to the hospital.

When we got there, the waiting room of the pediatrics unit was completely empty. I whispered to Dad that he should ask the nurse behind the desk if she could tell us about Will’s condition. I figured they’d be more likely to respect an adult than a teenage girl. But when the nurse asked if Dad was Will’s guardian, Dad shook his head no, like a goddamn idiot.

I burst into tears. My dad could be so annoying.

The nurse looked at me curiously. “I recognize y’all. Head trauma in August, am I right?”

I nodded.

“I pretty much have a photographic memory for faces,” she reported. “How you been, hon?”

“Mainly good. Except my friend Will might be dying and no one will tell me anything,” I said.

“Oh, honey, he ain’t dying. He just has”—she lowered her voice to a whisper—“pneumonia is all. A bad case. His lung collapsed, but he’s sleeping now. And I didn’t just say that.”

I leaned across the desk and kissed her once on each of her cherubic peach cheeks, even though getting physical with total strangers was not my thing at all.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you, thank you.”

“My pleasure,” she said. “And I didn’t just say that, either.”

“Could I leave a note to let him know I was here?”

“Sure thing, honey.” She handed me a piece of hospital stationery.

I didn’t know what to write. My heart had been bursting with so many things, and yet, when it came time to put any of them on paper, I couldn’t. Finally I wrote the following lines:

Dearest Coach,

I’ll see you tomorrow, if you’ll have me.

Yours,

Chief

I handed the note to the nurse. I saw her read it before folding it in half and writing Will’s name across the other side. “Visiting hours start at eleven,” she said.

I remembered how Will had gotten there at 10:50 when it was me in the hospital, and I vowed to do the same.

In the car on the way home, Dad kept stealing sidelong glances at me. “Is something going on between you and Will?”

“No.” I shook my head. I wondered if I had said too much in my note. What the hell had I meant by if you’ll have me? Of course he’d have me. It was a hospital. You got visited by whoever showed up. What was Will, who analyzed everything, going to make of my stupid note? “No,” I said firmly.

“You sure?”

“I’m sorry, Dad. I have to make a call,” I said by way of changing the subject, but also because I actually did. I dialed Winnie’s number. “Winnie? This is Naomi Porter. He’s going to be fine,” I said.

I knew Dad wouldn’t give me permission to skip two periods of school, so I didn’t ask. Instead, I forged a note claiming a doctor’s appointment (and wasn’t that partially true, really? I was going to a hospital after all…).

In the elevator I thought about the note I had left for Will the night before and how it contained the three most ill-conceived sentences in the history of the world. Why had I written “Dearest Coach”? The “dearest” seemed ridiculously sentimental in the morning. We were talking about Will here. And “Yours, Chief”? Would he think I was saying that I was his and he was mine? Which, incidentally, I had been, but I didn’t want him to know that yet.

I tried to put it out of my mind. And maybe he hadn’t gotten it anyway? It hadn’t exactly been sent registered mail or something.

When I got to his room, he was sitting up in bed with his laptop on his food tray. He was wearing hospital pajamas with his smoking jacket over them, and he looked like himself, but very pale. He smiled at me, and I suddenly felt shy around him.

“Hey there” was all I could manage to say. I didn’t make eye contact either. I had my eyes focused on the foot of the bed. Then I decided that this was idiotic, so I looked at him as unsentimentally as possible. “Well, what happened to you?”

I moved over to his bedside and Will told me. He’d been feeling bad for a while, but he’d ignored it, thinking it was stress or just the flu or what have you. And yesterday, all of a sudden, he passed out. “They have no idea how I managed to take it so long,” he said almost proudly. “My lung had collapsed, it was so packed with bacteria.”

“Lovely,” I said.

“Isn’t it though? It was much more complicated than your average pneumonia.”

“You could never be simple,” I said.

We went on like that for a while, not saying all that much. If Will had gotten my note, he didn’t mention it or didn’t think it was anything to remark on. I didn’t bring it up either.

Yet, inside me, things were different. It was like that physics DVD I’d watched about string theory way back when. Do you remember? The one with the scientists groping around in the dark. I had thought the way I felt about Will was just a room, but it had turned out to be a mansion. He had turned out to be the mansion. Now that I knew that, it was difficult to go back to the way things had been.

At the end of my visit, Will told me he needed to talk about something serious. I thought to myself, Here it comes. My stupid note.

All he said was “I need you to do me a really important favor.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Do you want me to get your assignments or something?”

He shook his head. “No, Winnie’s doing that. I want you to run yearbook for me while I’m away. You know as much as me, and I’ll probably be out of school for at least the next two weeks. Plus, the book’s done. Only distribution and the end-of-year inserts and things like that. Stuff you could do sleepwalking, Chief.”

“Sure thing, Coach,” I said. “Just put me in the game.”

So that’s how I went from Ex-Co-editor to Interim Editor-in-Chief of The Phoenix.

There were a few people on the staff who were not exactly happy to see me back. They rightfully thought of me as a traitor and a deserter. But most of the staff understood that I was filling in for Will because he had asked me to do it. They didn’t necessarily throw a parade, but out of respect for him they respected me.

Will sent me almost hourly e-mails. As his mother had banned him from the phone for the first several days of his recuperation, I went to see him every night with updates and to ask advice, even though it wasn’t the sort of work that required much input. It was mainly just accounting and distribution, as Will had said. But he was crazy over that sort of thing.

His seventeenth birthday was June 5.

I did the best I could to wrap the record player, but I hadn’t done that great a job and the arm was poking out. I lugged it out to the car, then drove over to the apartment he shared with his mom. Winnie was there, as were Mrs. Landsman and a few people from the staff.

It was a pretty tame birthday party. I was glad of it. He had only been out of the hospital about a week, and I still worried about him. Winnie gave him a straw hat with a black-and-white band that was without question something Will would wear; Mrs. Landsman gave him a pair of binoculars. He left my gift for last, but he kept making jokes about it, like “I wonder what that is…Could it be a toaster? A tennis racket?”

When he finally ripped the paper off, he said, “Of course you know I’m perfectly shocked.”

“I would have found a box, but I didn’t think you could handle too much excitement, Landsman.”

Winnie put her arm around Will’s shoulders. “Now we have something to play all those records on, baby.”

I tried to smile at Winnie, but it stuck in the middle somewhere. “I should go,” I said.

“No,” Will said, “don’t go yet. This is great, Chief.” He hadn’t called me that in such a long, long time. “When’d you get this?”

“Months ago. Before everything. When Dad first started dating Rosa Rivera, I mentioned to her about your record collection, and she showed up with this crazy old record player. Rosa Rivera’s always trying to give stuff away.”

“So, it’s a re-gift?” Winnie asked.

“No, I had to get it fixed. I was planning to give it to you at the start of the school year—you know, as a way to celebrate us being editors of The Phoenix—but the guy at the store had to order a part, and it took longer than I’d hoped. By the time it was finished, I’d forgotten I’d dropped it off in the first place. I only got it back because I happened to be in that same store last November to pick up something else and the store owner recognized me. But then, I didn’t even know who it was for.”

“You couldn’t guess it was me? Who else has vinyl?”

“At the time, I’d forgotten about your record collection. When I remembered, you and I were not exactly speaking.”

“That’s an amazing story,” Mrs. Landsman said. “So much misdirection, rather like a Shakespearean comedy.”

Will put on the hat that Winnie had bought him. “Looks good, baby,” she said. I didn’t like the way she called him baby. Not to mention, if she’d been so concerned about him, why hadn’t she noticed that he’d been sick all that time? Maybe I wasn’t being fair. I often had such thoughts when I was around Winnie and Will.

“I should go,” I said.

“Won’t you stay for some cake, Naomi?” Mrs. Landsman asked.

I shook my head. “There’re a couple things I have to do for yearbook tonight. Tomorrow’s the day the book’s supposed to arrive at school.” D-Day, we called it.

“I should be there for that, Ma,” Will said.

“You’re staying right here,” Mrs. Landsman said.

“But, Mrs. Landsman…” Will protested, like a student asking for a better grade.

I shook Will’s hand and wished him a happy birthday.

He called me later that night.

“I really loved your gift,” he whispered so that his mother wouldn’t hear. She had set a phone curfew for him of nine o’clock while he was recuperating, and it was already ten-thirty.

“I’m glad.”

“You know those records were my dad’s.”

“Yes, Will.” Of course I knew that; I knew everything about that boy. “But my thinking was…It was so long ago…My thinking was that maybe you ought to take them off the wall and play them once in a while?”

Will didn’t say anything for a minute. “Winnie br—”

At that moment, Mrs. Landsman came on the line. “William Blake Landsman, you are supposed to be asleep.”

“Ma!”

“Hi, Mrs. Landsman,” I said to my English teacher.

“Hello, dear. Tell my son that he needs to get off the phone, would you?”

What could I do? Certainly I had an interest in whatever Will was planning to tell me about Winnie, but the woman would be grading my final in less than two weeks. “You should rest, Will.”

“Thank you,” said Will’s mother. “Now tell Naomi goodbye and hang up the phone, William.”

“Good night, Chief,” he said.

The next day was chaotic with the arrival of the books. When I opened the first cardboard box, I felt sadness that Will wasn’t there. It had been his baby after all, and it didn’t seem right that I should be the first one to see the book, certainly not without Will. No one had loved this yearbook more than he, and all his work had made this beautiful thing that people would have forever. The book was all white. In the lower right-hand corner it said The Phoenix in a very simple black Arial type font, and on the spine was a small silver bird coming out of a silver flame. The inside papers were gray, and on the upper left-hand corner of the interior front cover the school’s name and date were printed. It was simple and elegant; we had begun the design months, even years earlier, before we had even been co-editors.

Of course, I had to call Will. “I only have a minute. It’s about to get crazy here.”

“I know,” he said wistfully. “I was thinking about walking down—”

“Don’t you dare!”

“Well, I decided against it. Even if I did make it there, my darling mother would probably murder me. How does it look?”

“It’s gorgeous,” I told him. “I’m so proud of you. I’ll come to you as soon as we’re done getting the books out.”

“I’m glad you’re there.” Will coughed, but even his coughs were sounding so much better. “I was just thinking…isn’t it lucky that we decided to become co-editors? If one takes a blow to the head, the other can fill in. If the other’s lung spontaneously collapses, the one can fill in. It’s a perfect system when you think about it.”

I laughed. “Hey, Will, I could give the book to Winnie. She’ll probably get to you before me. You know how it is on D-Day.”

“No, I’d rather you brought it, Chief,” he said.

“Or your mom, if you’d prefer. I can send Patten or Plotkin to drop it off in her classroom.”

“No,” he insisted, “it should be you.”

I didn’t get over to Will’s house until seven-thirty, and by then I was spent. “He’s waiting for you,” his mother said. She made me promise to leave by nine, so that Will could get his rest. “You look like you could use some, too,” she said.

I went into Will’s room.

The walls were still lined entirely by his dad’s record collection. The record player was sitting on the bureau.

“Okay,” Will said, “let’s have it.”

I handed him the book; he started flipping through each and every page. He was lying on his stomach on his bed, and I lay down next to him the same way so that I could look at it, too. We would complain about a typo here or the way a picture had printed there, but it wasn’t the type of thing anyone except us would even notice. The last thing we looked at was the cover.

“I think we were right to go with the all-white, don’t you?”

I nodded. “I love it. Everyone at school did, too.”

“You haven’t forgotten our joke, have you?” Will smiled at me.

I hadn’t. The title in the corner was printed so that it almost looked like a textual orphan. “The orphan,” I said.

“Exactly.” His voice changed a little. “You won’t have forgotten the White Album either?”

Our reference in coming up with the whole design had been the Beatles’ White Album, which had been Will’s dad’s favorite record. I scanned Will’s walls to locate it—he arranged his albums alphabetically by title—but there was a gap in his collection where it ought to have been.

“Where’d it go?” I asked.

He said he’d taken it down, that he wanted it to be the first record he’d played on his new (old) record player. “I was waiting for you to get here.”

The album was two records long, and he set it on the turntable on side three (or side one of the second record). He put down the needle.

We listened for a while and kept flipping through the book, occasionally making a comment to each other about something or other.

“I really wish my dad could have seen this,” Will said. He took off his glasses and wiped them on his pants.

The second to last track on the third side was called “I Will.” When it came on, I pointed out to him how it had been the final song of the first mix he’d made me after my accident. “Had you been trying to remind me about the cover?” I asked.

“Sort of,” he said shyly with that funny crooked smile of his, “but I’d been mainly trying to remind you about me. I, Will, you know?”

“If you had ever signed my yearbook instead of just leaving that big old blank box, that probably would have done the trick, too,” I said.

“S’pose.”

“Why didn’t you anyway?”

“Too much to say,” Will said with a decisive nod of his head. “Too much to say with none of the right words to say it. I’d rather just pick the perfect song to do the work for me.”

It was such a sweet, sad song with such sweet, sad lyrics. Old-fashioned a little, but also timeless. I wanted to hear it again nearly as soon as it was over, but by that time it was nine o’clock. I shook Will’s hand—was it my imagination or did he hold it longer than was strictly necessary?—then I drove myself home.

By Thursday, most of the yearbooks had been distributed. For the first time in over a week, I had time to go eat with Alice and Yvette, who were back together again.

“We love the book, cookie,” Alice said.

“It’s mainly due to Will,” I said.

“Well, tell him we love the book when you see him,” she said.

I said that I would.

“Did you hear that Winnie Momoi broke up with him?” Yvette asked.

“While he’s been sick? Did you know about this, cookie?” Alice looked at me.

I shook my head and concentrated on chewing my sandwich.

“Yeah,” said Yvette, “she’s in my math class, and she was crying all day on Monday.”

“Why was she the one crying if she broke up with him?” Alice asked.

“Guilt, maybe? You cry every time you break up with me, Ali.”

“Touché,” said Alice, and then she changed the subject. “I hate the word touché, don’t you? I can’t imagine what possessed me to say it. It sounds like tushy, or something you say while eating cheese.”

“Actually, it’s a fencing term,” Yvette said. “You’d know if you ever came to my matches.”

“I come to your matches!” Alice said. “I’ve been to at least three.”

“Two!”

Their fights often started like this and went on for days. I ignored them and thought about Will instead. I had seen and called him over ten times since Monday, and he had never mentioned anything about Winnie to me. I wondered what had happened between them, but I didn’t really feel like it was my place to ask. If he wanted to talk to me about it, I figured that he would. These days, I was careful around Will, and he was careful around me.

Even if we never got together in a romantic way, I loved him. I guess I always had. To tell you the truth, the knowledge was something of a burden.

I remembered those porcupines I’d been watching with Dad the night I thought Will might be dying. Not the part about the urinating. The part where they looked each other in the eye. Will and I weren’t there yet. (Personally, I hoped never to get to the peeing stage.)

I stopped by Will’s house after school to tell him I wouldn’t see him for the next three days—I was taking off Friday to go to Martha’s Vineyard for Dad’s and Rosa Rivera’s wedding. I knew that Will had gotten used to my coming around every day, but I chose my words deliberately. I didn’t want him to think that I had any expectation that he would care that I was leaving. I also didn’t want to pull another disappearing act on him.

“Your dad’s wedding,” he said. “It sure came up fast, didn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, why didn’t you invite me, Chief?” He said this in a cheerful way where I couldn’t tell if it was a serious request.

“Well…you’ve been sick, so I doubt your mother would have let you go.”

“True, true.”

“And also”—I didn’t know I was going to say this until I did—“there’s Winnie.”

Will cleared his throat. “Yes, Winnie.” His voice was amused. He looked me in the eye, and I looked back. “She broke up with me. I thought you might have heard by now.”

“I hadn’t heard it from the source, so I didn’t put too much stock in the story.”

“She said I wasn’t a very good boyfriend.”

“I doubt that. You always seemed attentive to me.”

“Oh, it wasn’t that. I’m a genius with birthdays, and I always do what I say I will. You know that. The thing was, she suspected I was in love with someone else.”

I took a deep breath and raised my right eyebrow. “Scandalous,” I managed to say.

Will’s mother got home then—since Will had been sick, she was always buzzing around him.

“Ma, can I go to the Vineyard for Naomi’s dad’s wedding?” Will called out.

“Absolutely not.”

“I didn’t invite him,” I called to her.

“I knew you wouldn’t,” Mrs. Landsman said. “But that son of mine.”

On the ferry ride to the Vineyard, Dad and I sat in the middle of a long pewlike bench with roughly a million sweating people on it. Rosa was on the deck with Freddie and George. Dad has always gotten seasick on decks, so I was keeping him company in the cabin. It had occurred to me that this was the last time it would be me and him for a very long while. Maybe Rosa, Freddie, and George were thinking the same thing when they’d decided to stay outside.

The day was bright and wet, and my clothes were sticking to me. I was seriously considering abandoning Dad for the deck (last time alone be damned), which at least had the benefit of a breeze, when he asked me if I was looking forward to the wedding. I told him I was. I said how much I liked Rosa Rivera and all the sorts of things I knew it would make him happy to hear.

“You seem a little flushed, though,” he said.

I said I was just hot.

It was noisy and crowded in the cabin, in other words not a great place to talk about serious things, but Dad persisted. “How’s James?” Dad asked.

Truthfully, I hadn’t thought of James at all. I hadn’t had time—not with Dad’s wedding and Will’s sickness and Will and my photography and tennis and yearbook.

It was strange, really. A couple months ago, I had thought I couldn’t live without him.

Apparently, I could.

That I could forget him so easily, more than the loss of James himself, made me melancholy, I guess. I wondered if Mom had felt that way about Dad when she met Nigel again. I wondered if my biological mother had felt that way about my biological father, and even about me when she’d had to give me up.

“I don’t see him much,” I said to Dad finally.

“It happens, baby.” Dad nodded and patted me on the hand, and then he read my mind. “You forget all of it anyway. First, you forget everything you learned—the dates of the Hay-Herran Treaty and the Pythagorean theorem. You especially forget everything you didn’t really learn, but just memorized the night before. You forget the names of all but one or two of your teachers, and eventually you’ll forget those, too. You forget your junior year class schedule and where you used to sit and your best friend’s home phone number and the lyrics to that song you must have played a million times. For me, it was something by Simon & Garfunkel. Who knows what it will be for you? And eventually, but slowly, oh so slowly, you forget your humiliations—even the ones that seemed indelible just fade away. You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. Who went to a good college. Who threw the best parties. Who could get you pot. You forget all of them. Even the ones you said you loved, and even the ones you actually did. They’re the last to go. And then once you’ve forgotten enough, you love someone else.”

I must have started to cry because Dad held out his sleeve for me to wipe my eyes on, which I did. It wasn’t anything in particular that Dad had said, but it was like he’d read my mind and put words to all the things that had been brewing inside me for so long. We were so much alike really.

I wanted to tell him how I was in love with Will, but it was Dad’s weekend (and me not a particularly confessional sort of person under any circumstances) and maybe he already knew it anyway. Besides, it seemed silly after we’d just been talking about James. I didn’t want to be the kind of girl who always needed to be in love with someone.

So all I said was “I’m really happy for you, Dad.”

Rosa Rivera had no use for the color white—not in decorating and certainly not in weddings. “I am not young or a virgin,” she had declared, “and I have already worn a white dress once. This time, I will wear red.” The only white she wore on her wedding day was a white ribbon that she tied around her waist like an afterthought and the roses that she wore in her hair.

“But, Mama, aren’t white roses bad luck?” George had asked her.

Rosa Rivera said she didn’t know and she didn’t care to know.

She didn’t much care what us bridesmaids wore either. “You girls wear the white if you like. You are young, and it will set me off nicely, I think?” It was a suggestion more than an order. (Then again, most everything Rosa Rivera said about anything sounded interrogative.) Freddie and George decided to honor their mother’s request as she had made so few, and we wore three nonmatching white dresses. Dad followed the trend with a beige suit that he had bought the summer we had wandered Tuscany. He either didn’t care to remember or just plain didn’t care that my mother had picked it out for him. A footnote to the day might tell that story: suit picked out by ex-wife.

The week before the wedding, I had heard Dad speaking to the wedding officiant on the phone. “Hmmph,” he said when he hung up, “they want me to decide between ‘I will’ and ‘I do.’ I didn’t know there was even an option. Which do you prefer, kid?”

“Pretty much everybody says ‘I do,’ right?” I said.

Dad nodded. “That’s what I thought.”

“But then again, maybe ‘I will’ is nicer. It has the future in it. ‘I do’ just has the present.”

“You make a good point there,” Dad said. “How’d you get so smart?”

I shrugged. “Probably all that time conjugating verbs for French.”

“Not to mention I’ve already said ‘I do,’ so maybe this time I should try something else.”

They said their “I will’s” by the beach at sunrise, both Rosa’s and Dad’s favorite time of day. Rosa was a rooster and Dad was a vampire, but somehow they managed to overlap for a couple of hours every morning.

I was happy for Dad, but I also felt like I was losing him. I was that baby in the typewriter case all over again. Maybe this was just life? One orphaning after the next. They should tell you when you’re born: have a suitcase heart, be ready to travel.

I was feeling rather sorry for myself when Rosa threw her bouquet. I hadn’t even noticed until the flowers were already heading my way. My instinct has always been to dive and catch, and this is what I did.

“You’re next,” said Freddie.

“Not so fast,” Dad said. “She’s only seventeen.” He appealed to Rosa like a put-upon father in a sitcom. “Maybe you should throw that again?”

I threw the bouquet to my grandmother Rollie, who was sleeping in a beach chair. Rollie didn’t like to have to get up before noon if she could help it. She woke when the bouquet hit her lap. “Oh crap, not again,” she said. She had already been married four times, so she tossed the bouquet in the sand as if it were on fire.

“Does no one want my bouquet?” Rosa asked. Her tone seemed to be joking, but I detected some degree of offense.

I thought of that time I hadn’t taken Rosa Rivera’s scarf and what Dad had said. I didn’t want her to have hurt feelings on her wedding day, so I retrieved the bouquet from the sand. “I do,” I said. “I want it.”

As we were walking back into the hotel for breakfast, Dad whispered in my ear, “Don’t worry. I know what you meant to say was ‘I will.’ As in, in the future. In the distant, distant future.” He winked at me conspiratorially, and I didn’t feel like an orphan anymore.

“Who’s Martha?” I whispered from the bathroom of the hotel room I was sharing with Rosa Rivera’s two daughters, who were already asleep. I didn’t have to say what I was talking about. It was eleven, and I hoped Will would be awake.

“Hold on,” he said, “I’ll look it up.”

I heard him breathing lightly and the rapid clack of his fingers on the keyboard. “She was the mother and daughter of the white person who discovered the island. They had the same name, and they both died,” Will reported. “The natives called it something else, of course.”

“Stupid white people,” I said.

“Good night, Chief.”

“Night, Coach, and thanks,” I said.

There was a pause where neither of us hung up the phone. It might have been five seconds; it might have been five minutes. I couldn’t say for sure.

“How was the wedding?” he asked.

“I don’t know. It all sort of blended together. You have to take a ferry to get here and I practically felt like an immigrant. I was the tired, the poor…” I whispered.

“The huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” he continued.

“Exactly. Rosa was pretty. Dad was so happy. I was presentable. It rained all last night, and the humidity made it so I didn’t have to press my dress.”

“Did you take pictures?”

“No. I thought about it, but it suddenly seemed like too much bother to take my camera out of my purse. There were other people taking pictures anyway.”

“Why aren’t you sleeping?” he asked.

“I can’t. My iPod died this morning, and Freddie snores.”

“When will you be back?”

“Around nine.” Will offered to pick me up. I told him that he needed his rest.

“It’s just a drive, not a marathon,” he said.

“I’d like that,” I said, “but Dad left his car at the airport, so I have to drive it home.” Rosa and Dad were leaving from Boston for their honeymoon. They were going to Bali, one of the few places he and Mom hadn’t wandered.

“Drive safely,” he said.

“I will.”

I felt brave in the darkness, lying on the cool tile floor of the hotel bathroom. “You know something stupid? I really missed you this whole weekend, Landsman. I’ve gotten used to seeing you every day.”

He didn’t say anything for a little while.

“I missed you, too,” he said. “I wish I could have come.”

15

WHEN I GOT BACK ON SUNDAY NIGHT, THERE WAS A minor yearbook crisis. The grandmother of the girl who was supposed to photograph graduation died, so she couldn’t be at the ceremony Monday night. I had to go in her place.

I was taking crowd shots when I spotted Raina through my camera viewfinder. She was sitting with James’s grandfather and a man who turned out to be James’s dad. She was fiddling with her camera, and she must have seen me looking at her because at the same time that I took her picture, she took mine. We both lowered our cameras and exchanged a weary sort of smile.

The band started to play the graduation march, a song which I’ve always found seriously depressing. It’s easy to imagine pallbearers carrying coffins to “Pomp and Circumstance,” and even more so when it’s performed by Tom Purdue’s out-of-tune high school band. They should play something more cheerful. Something like “Higher Ground” by Stevie Wonder. Or if it was serious, maybe “Bittersweet Symphony” by the Verve. Will would probably have a million better suggestions than any of mine.

I’d photographed two previous graduations, and they had all looked pretty much the same: same navy blue gowns, same hats, same auditorium. We practically could have used last year’s pictures without anyone having been the wiser. It was a cheat anyway—the ones I was taking wouldn’t get published until the next year’s Phoenix.

After the ceremony, I heard Raina call my name. “Naomi, come pose for a picture!”

I turned around and there was James, of course. He looked tall in his cap and gown. I thought about waving and not going over, but it seemed impolite.

“James, put your arm around Naomi. Now smile, you two. It’s a great day!”

Something happened with the camera, which was an old-fashioned film one with an enormous flash. James’s dad said he wasn’t sure if the picture had taken, would we mind posing again? We smiled a second time, and that time I’m pretty sure the picture took. James’s dad said he would send me a copy, but no one ever did.

James looked at the yearbook camera, which was still hanging around my neck. He ran his finger across the lens cap and asked me if it was “the same camera.” I nodded. James picked it up in his hand and tossed it shallowly in the air. “Hardy little bastard,” he commented just before he caught it. It was true. That camera had withstood a lot. Gravity. A trip down a flight of stairs. It had lasted a whole school year. Longer than James’s and my entire relationship, not to put too fine a point on it.

I raised the camera and took James’s picture.

We shook hands. I congratulated him again.

He was just one of one hundred fifty seniors whose pictures needed taking, and I had to get back to work.

On the walk home I called Will. “Songs for a High School Graduation,” I said. “You know, instead of ‘Pomp and Circumstance.’ Discuss.”

“‘My Back Pages’ by Bob Dylan,” he said.

“‘Friends Forever,’ Vitamin C,” I suggested.

“Maybe a little cliché. ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ by the Verve. You know, they never made a dime off that song, ’cause of a dispute involving the sampling of the strings.”

“I already thought of that one. That and ‘Higher Ground’ were the first two on my list.”

“Red Hot Chili Peppers or Stevie Wonder?”

“The latter, but you could really use either, right?”

“‘Song I Wrote Myself in the Future.’ John Wesley Harding.”

“You used that one on my second or third mix tape,” I reminded him. “I thought you didn’t like to repeat.”

“I don’t,” he conceded. “But the last time I used it, it wasn’t a commentary on the educational system, so it’s different. Also, ‘Ghost World’ by Aimee Mann.”

“I don’t know that one.”

“You’d like it. I ought to play it for you sometime.”

It went on like this for the whole walk home. It was dark out by now, and it was as if Will and I were alone in the universe.

“‘At Last.’ Etta James.”

“Clever.”

“‘Teenage Spaceship’ by Smog.”

“Or ‘Teenage Wasteland.’”

“It’s actually called ‘Baba O’Riley’ after composer Terry Riley.”

“I always forget that. But how about ‘Race for the Prize,’ the Flaming Lips?”

And then, up the path to my house.

“…Bob Marley, is it? There’re covers, too. Or is his the cover?”

Down the hallway.

“The tempo’s probably a bit erratic for marching, Naomi…”

I stopped in the kitchen to get myself a glass of water.

“…haven’t been enough fast ones. You don’t want to get bogged down in slow songs. Maybe Fatboy Slim’s ‘Praise You’ or ‘Road to Joy’ by Bright Eyes?”

In my room.

“That Whitney Houston song they used to use for that ad with the kids in the Special Olympics. What the heck’s it called?”

I was lying on my bed.

“I’m so tired,” I said.

“That’s not what it’s called.”

“No, I meant that I’m exhausted.”

“Well, you ought to go to bed, Chief.”

“I’m in bed, but I don’t want to stop talking,” I told him.

“Okay. When you’ve been silent for more than five minutes, I’ll know to hang up. Your cell phone’ll time out after thirty seconds anyway.”

We kept naming songs…

“‘Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.’”

“‘The Only Living Boy in New York.’”

“Too elegiac?”

“That’s what’s good about it for a graduation, I think.”

…until I was asleep.

Ten months and one or two lives later, I was back where I started: alone again at The Phoenix at around seven on a Wednesday. There’s not much to do yearbook-wise for the couple of weeks after the books have been distributed. I was thinking how unnaturally quiet and lonely the office was without anyone in it when my phone rang. It was Will.

“Are you at the office?”

“Just locking up,” I told him.

He said that maybe I could stop by later, and then he hung up quickly, uncharacteristically so.

When I got outside, Will was at the top of the stairs, grinning sweet and crooked, like a swung dash. It was the first time he’d been on campus for three weeks, and he looked thin, but much better than that day when I’d seen him at the hospital. Arguably, his pants on this day looked worse: they were plaid “old man” pants, probably borrowed from his grandpa. He was better off in school uniform pants. But what could you do? That was my Will.

“Hey there! Why didn’t you come up to the office?” I called to him.

“The front door was locked, and you have my keys. I decided to wait for you here.”

I jogged over to him. “To what do I owe this honor?”

“A long time ago, I used to go to school here. I even used to be the editor of the yearbook.”

“Nope,” I said, furrowing my brow. “Can’t say I recall.”

He offered me his arm. “I’ve heard these stairs can be troublesome,” he said.

“I think I can make it down unassisted.”

“Just take my arm, Chief. It’s safer. Don’t you think that between us we’ve had quite enough calamity for one school year? If you fell…”

I interrupted him. “I didn’t fall. I dove.”

“Fine. Have it your way. Dove. In either case, I don’t think I could bear you forgetting me all over again.” He turned me toward him, so that we were looking eye to eye. When he spoke, his voice was low. “Take my arm, Naomi. I’d offer to carry your books, but I doubt you’d let me.”

I laughed at him and linked my arm through his. We were the exact same height, and his arm fit well in mine.

We walked slowly out to the parking lot, where Will’s car was parked. I was mindful of Will’s health, but also it was probably the nicest hour of the nicest day of the year. Seventy-three degrees, and the sun was just going down, and the air was thick with grass and a hint of sunblock and something in the distance, something sweet and delicious that I couldn’t quite identify yet.

I don’t remember who it was, but one of us finally said to the other, “Isn’t it funny that all those months ago we flipped a coin so that we wouldn’t have to take this very same walk?”

One or the other of us replied, “And now I wouldn’t mind if it were even farther, if we could just go on like this forever.”

For the longest time after that, neither of us said anything. I was unaccustomed to his silence, but I didn’t mind it. I knew near everything about him, and he knew near everything about me, and all that made our quiet a kind of song.

The kind that you hum without even knowing what it is or why you’re humming it.

The kind that you’ve always known.