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 loos
ely, 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, o
nly 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.”