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.
r /> “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 k
nowledge 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.”