I got out of the car and called James’s name. “Do you need a ride?” He turned real slow, and for a second after he saw me I was pretty sure he was just going to keep right on walking. Finally, he ambled over to Will’s car. He didn’t look all that enthusiastic about seeing me again. I was starting to wonder if I had hallucinated the boy I had met in the hospital.
“Still cold?” he asked politely.
“A little,” I replied. “Your shirt’s in my locker.”
James shrugged.
I was about to say how I’d been hoping we’d run into each other again when Will decided to get out of the car. Will edged himself between James and me and stuck out his hand. “Larkin, nice to see you, and thanks again for dropping off the camera. Naomi’s the other editor of the yearbook, not that you asked.”
“I did not know that,” James said. His mouth threatened to smile for a second. “Well, it was…good seeing you both.”
“The thing is,” I said, “I was sort of hoping I’d run into you again. I didn’t get a chance to thank you for all your help at the hospital—”
James cut me off. “Really. Don’t mention it,” he said. He stuck his hands in his coat pockets and turned to walk away.
“Wait!” I called out. “Can’t we at least give you a ride?”
Will pinched me on the arm and muttered, “He doesn’t want a ride.”
But Will shouldn’t have worried, because James just shook his head. “It’s not raining that hard.”
We got back in the car, and Will started chattering about yearbook again. “It would be really great, for once, to have some decent artists on staff.”
“Is he an artist?”
“Who?”
“James.”
“I think he does something with video, I’m not sure. The point is, all the good ones go over to newspaper or lit mag or even drama, but none of them ever want to work yearbook. And it’s so stupid when you think about it. ’Cause no one’s even gonna see the lit mag or the newspaper like a week after it comes out. But everyone’s gonna have their yearbook when they’re really old. You know? Hey, Chief?”
“What?” We were stopped again at that same light, and I was watching James cross the street.
“Forget it,” Will said.
“What’s his story?” I asked.
“How am I supposed to know?”
“Aren’t you supposed to know everything? He was kind of rude, don’t you think?”
Will shrugged. “No, he just didn’t want a ride.”
At that moment two things happened. The traffic light turned green, and it began to pour. “I suppose we should offer him a ride. Again.” Will sounded about as unenthusiastic as it is possible for a person to sound. He drove up alongside James.
“James!” I leaned over Will and yelled through the driver-side window.
“I don’t mind the rain!” he yelled. His hair was already soaked.
“James,” I said, “get in the car, would you?”
We locked eyes for a second. I raised my eyebrow. He shook his head the tiniest bit.
“I’m fine,” James repeated.
“But it’s storming,” I protested.
“Listen, Larkin, she’s not gonna give up, and I’m wasting gas. Just get in already,” Will barked.
James obeyed Will.
“Thanks,” James said to Will.
“Where to, sir?” Will asked.
“Just my home, I guess,” James said. He gave a few directions, and Will indicated that he knew where that was. In the rearview mirror, I watched James take off his jacket, which had gotten wet. I could see that leather cord with the ring on it again.
Will had noticed the ring, too, and he asked, “What’s the ring?”
“Oh, it’s my brother’s,” James said, slipping the ring under his T-shirt.
“Why isn’t he wearing it then?” Will asked.
“I guess that’d be”—he paused to dry off his hair on his shirt—“’cause he’s dead.”
“Hey,” Will said, “I’m really sorry about that, man.”
James shrugged and said something about it having happened a long time ago. It was clear to me that he didn’t want to talk about it, so I changed the subject. “I’ve been thinking. You never came to visit me in the hospital.”
“Yeah…I meant to. But I don’t really love hospitals.”
“I was waiting,” I said, turning around to look at him through the gap between the headrest and the front seat. “And you could have visited me at home, too.” My sunglasses slipped down the bridge of my nose a bit, and James reached into the gap to push them back up. He let his finger lightly graze the space above my brow before returning his hand to his lap.
“Does it still hurt?” James asked.
“Not too much,” I said.
“Do you remember what happened?” he asked.
“Nope, she doesn’t know anything past sixth grade,” Will answered for me, which was annoying. He was behaving rather badly.
I turned back around. “That’s not entirely true. I do still remember math and science.”
“What more is there in life?” Will quipped.
“I’ve just forgotten everything else,” I continued. “I’m basically a blank slate.”
James laughed. “Lucky girl.”
“I don’t see what’s so lucky about it,” Will grumbled.
“Aren’t there things you’d rather forget?” James asked him.
“No,” Will said. “There are not. If I were Naomi, I’d be screaming mad.”
“Well, are you?” James asked me.
I thought about it for a second before shaking my head. “Not really. There’s nothing I can do about it, is there?”
James nodded. “That’s an awfully mature attitude. I still get plenty pissed about things I can’t do anything about.”
Like what? I wondered, but didn’t say. “Besides, my memory might still come back.”
James’s house was on its own private road. The house was gray stone and not really a house at all. A mansion, I suppose. It would have seemed larger had it not been in the middle of an even more expansive lot. It reminded me of estates I’d seen in France when my parents had “wandered” there the summer I was seven. I didn’t even know they had such houses in North Tarrytown.
James had no neighbors, and even though it was already evening, there wasn’t a single light on that I could see. It seemed lonely. I wondered how many people lived there.
Despite Will’s plaintive looks, I got out and walked James to his door. The knocker on the door was an enormous iron lion’s head. Its nose and eye were badly dented. It reminded me of myself.
“I probably would have freaked out if you hadn’t been there. I didn’t get a chance to tell you before.”
“I’m glad I could help,” he said.
“I wanted to call you, but I didn’t know your number or anything. So, well, thanks, I guess.” I reached out to shake his hand.
“How formal,” he said. He surrounded my palm with his other hand before gently squeezing it.
We seemed frozen in that handshake, and then Will honked the car horn.
“I think your friend wants to go,” James said. He let my hand drop and said coldly, “I should go, too. Thank him for the ride.”
I decided not to take James’s sudden changes in temperature personally. Some people were like that. He’d been kind to me when I’d needed someone and to expect anything more would be unreasonable. I’d thanked him now and that was enough. Besides, I already had a boyfriend.
As he was pulling out of James’s driveway, Will asked me, “What the heck took so long?”
I said how I’d just been thanking James again, and Will said, “That kid’s a strange duck.”
I asked him what specifically he meant.
“Well, and I don’t know if this is true, but when he transferred here, they said it was because he went crazy over some girl at his old school.”
I asked him what
specifically he meant by crazy.
“Like stalking her and making threats. That kind of crazy. I heard the girl had to get a restraining order or something,” Will informed me.
James didn’t seem the type to me. If anything, he was overly respectful. Plus, he had that trustworthy voice. “How do you know it’s true?” From what I could tell, everyone at school just liked to talk crap about everyone else.
“Do you want to know what his nickname was at his old school?”
I rolled my eyes.
“Crazy James.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked him.
“Duh, it means he’s”—he twirled his finger in a circle around his ear in the universal sign of psychotic—“crazy. Loco.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s not even a real nickname. It’s his name and an adjective.” Will was being so childish.
Will shrugged, as if to say, Don’t blame me.
“You made up the whole thing with the nickname, didn’t you?”
“No, of course not!” Will sighed. “Maybe. But the point is, it could have been his nickname. It was for illustrative purposes. All the other stuff was totally, totally true, Chief.”
We got to my house and Will patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry if all the yearbook stuff seems overwhelming at first. I’ll pick up the slack until you’re feeling completely up to snuff, okay?”
Will was fond of old-lady phrases like up to snuff, which probably would have amused me if I hadn’t been feeling pretty annoyed with him at this point. “Thanks. Say, Will, why do we like yearbook so much anyway?”
About a million colors passed over Will’s face. He began by sighing and that turned into a laugh. His brow furrowed for a second, and then his blue eyes seemed to cloud, like he might cry. He didn’t cry though.
“Is it a hard question?” I asked.
“No. It’s probably ludicrous…I just hoped it might be something you would remember on your own. I know it might seem lame to some people, but we both really believe in what we’re doing. I’d say you even more than me. To us, it’s not just a book with a bunch of pictures. It’s an icon, a symbol. It gives the younger kids an ideal to aspire to, and the older ones who’ve graduated something to hold on to when the world is hard. We both really believe that it can define the school and the way people see the school. A good high school yearbook can make a better school. And better kids. And a better planet. And a better universe. We write the story of the year. If you think about it, it’s a huge responsibility.”
“Good speech,” I said sincerely.
“I’ve given better. We used to always talk about all the things we would do when we were finally running the show. How we’d really include everybody in the yearbook, and make it democratic and personal at the same time. How we’d make sure it wasn’t just pictures of the popular people and the athletes and the kids who were friends with people on the staff. You’re all three, by the way.”
“I am?” I knew the athlete part to be right, but I hadn’t felt at all popular in my one day at Tom Purdue.
“Sad, but true. The only thing we ever worried about was which one of us would be made editor, because there was just one editor. By the time it came to interview last year, we had come up with a plan to apply together, to be co-editors, even though it was entirely unprecedented and fairly controversial, us being juniors and all. That’s how we became the first co-editors in the history of The Phoenix.
“And now we are running the show. Pretty cool, right?”
I nodded, but, truthfully, I had found Will’s whole speech disheartening. I could see and hear his conviction and, in contrast, I felt none of that. Maybe I had in the past, but I didn’t anymore.
When we reached my house, Will got out of the car and walked me to the door. Like his mother, he hugged me surprisingly hard, then he patted me on the back twice to indicate that the hug was over. “Okay, Chief.” He did this comical salute with his hand before returning to his car.
I was about to unlock my front door when I realized I didn’t have any idea where I’d put my keys. I rang the doorbell, and about five seconds later Dad answered.
“I lost my keys,” I started to say at the same time Dad said, “You forgot your keys this morning.”
Dad asked me how my first day back had been, but I wasn’t in any mood to talk. I told him I had a headache and went to my room to lie down.
Dad must have let me sleep, because I didn’t wake up until my phone rang around nine-thirty that night.
“I’ve been thinking about your question. And I thought of another reason I like yearbook so much,” Will said.
“Okay.”
“You know that we both joined the staff in ninth grade, right? But what I didn’t mention to you was the year before ninth grade had been pretty rough for both of us. You had the thing with your mom. I had some…family stuff, too. Well, I think yearbook sort of saved me. It gave me something to do every day instead of just, well, fixating, I guess. And for me at least, yearbook is sort of inseparable from you. You really are my best friend in the whole world, Chief.”
I could hear all sorts of things in his voice. Tenderness. Worry. Love even. How odd to be someone’s best friend and not really know them at all. I couldn’t come up with anything to say, so I waited for him to speak again.
“I’ve been feeling sort of bad about this evening. I think I might have been, for lack of a better term, an ass,” Will said finally.
“You were, but I forgive you,” I said just before hanging up.
It was late and I was starving. I hadn’t eaten anything at lunch and I’d slept through dinner. I walked down the hall to Dad’s office. If I haven’t mentioned it before, Dad’s sort of a gourmet. All the years he and Mom had been wandering, he’d also been collecting recipes for the books. The only thing my mom knew how to make was dessert.
His office door was closed. I was about to knock but I could hear he was on the phone with someone. I didn’t want to interrupt him—Dad hated that—so I loitered in the hallway outside his door and waited for him to be finished. I wasn’t meaning to eavesdrop, at least not at first.
“…looks normal, but I’m worried, babe,” he said. Silence, and when I next heard him his voice was muffled. “…psychotherapy…”
I wondered who Dad was talking to about me. Mom, maybe? But he wouldn’t be calling her “babe”…
“…break it slowly. Everything in its time.”
Break what slowly? Was I still the subject? I tried to listen more closely, but he moved somewhere else in the room where I couldn’t hear him at all. The next time I heard him he was laughing. It was definitely not my mother. “Caracas!” he said. “I wish I could…”
Dad had always traveled a lot for his job; in addition to the books he wrote with Mom, he wrote articles for travel and men’s magazines. I concluded he was probably talking business. It made me resentful, actually. I hated being small talk, just another one of his stupid anecdotes. To tell you the truth, I didn’t care who he was talking to. I didn’t want to be anyone’s topic of discussion.
As I stalked back to my bedroom, I vowed to be less anecdote-worthy. That way, people wouldn’t talk about me over late-night phone calls or in the goddamn bathroom at school.
As much as it was in my control, I would be normal.
By the end of the week, I had obtained a doctor’s note permitting the sunglasses, and I gleefully presented it to Mrs. Tarkington. “Well, it’s certainly not orthodox,” she said, but she wasn’t the type to argue with something on hospital letterhead.
Other than that, I occasionally got lost; I occasionally heard people talking about me; I occasionally told them to go screw themselves. Under my breath, of course—I was normal. In order to tolerate our arctic cafeteria, I brought a couple of extra sweaters. I let Ace hold my hand in the hallways. I never went back to the greenhouse.
On Saturday night, my campaign for normalcy continued when I went with A
ce to a party that a tennis buddy from another school was hosting. Ace didn’t bother to introduce me to the friend—maybe I already knew him?—and I never figured out who he was on my own either.
For all practical purposes, Ace abandoned me nearly as soon as we arrived. He became enmeshed in an elaborate drinking game that involved shots, dice, quarters, darts, a bull’s-eye, and chest bumping. Although I watched the game for about fifteen minutes, I came out with no sense of the rules or how the winner was determined. I suppose it was like any drinking game. Last man standing.
I’m not being fair. Ace did ask me a couple of times if I was having a good time. I lied and told him I was. To tell you the truth, I was glad that he was occupied because, aside from tennis, I hadn’t been able to figure out one thing that we had in common. If our conversations were a play, they would have been like a high school version of Waiting for Godot:
Ace: Do you remember that time Paul Idomeneo got really stoned and jumped off the roof onto his dad’s trampoline?
Me: No.
Ace: Well, it was pretty awesome.
Me: Sounds amazing.
Ace: Yeah, that kid was hard-core as hell. So, do you remember that time…
(And repeat. Endlessly, endlessly repeat.)
I suppose he was trying to be helpful, telling me little things that might jog my memory. Unfortunately, Ace had no sense of what would interest me, and I was too embarrassed/polite/normal to question him about anything important, like, for example, What do I see in you? From the stories he told, our relationship had consisted largely of a bunch of parties where people acted like jerks interspersed with the occasional game of tennis.
I probably should have broken up with him. I didn’t, though, mainly for two reasons: one, I didn’t want to end it if it turned out that I really did love him (and I still held out some hope that my feelings would all eventually come back to me); and second, I’m a little ashamed to say, though it was probably the more important one, being with Ace made school easier. He protected me from those nasty lunch girls. Despite my memory being gone, I wasn’t a moron. With my multiple sweaters and not knowing who anyone was, I knew how I looked to people, and I knew how vulnerable my situation at school was without Ace to define me socially. Being with him went a long way in my campaign for normalcy.