Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

by Gabrielle Zevin

  I ran my hands along my hips. The fabric was silky and plush.

  I wondered if I had worn my hair up or down. I wondered if I had liked how I looked on that night and what my date had thought of me, if he’d said I was the most beautiful girl in the world. I wondered who my date had been, if it had been that Ace guy or someone else. I wondered if I had really liked the person or if I’d just gone to have someone to go with. I wondered if he had brought me a corsage and, if he had, what kind it had been. Had he known that I don’t like roses? And if he’d brought roses, had I had to pretend to like them so that I wouldn’t hurt his feelings? Maybe I hadn’t gone with a boy at all? Maybe I’d just gone with a group of girls? Or a group of friends. Did I even have a group of friends?

  Maybe I’d worn that dress somewhere else entirely? I wondered…

  On the bookshelf under my window were four school yearbooks, one for each year beginning with seventh grade. I flipped through the books, but they didn’t really tell me much. Teams competed in sports. Sometimes they won, and other times they lost. Some kids joined clubs; others didn’t. Some got taller. Some got smarter; a few got dumber and, either way, most managed to graduate. All yearbooks told the same story anyway.

  I read through every single signature of every single one: Have a great summer. Don’t forget me. Keep in touch. I wondered why anyone bothered signing at all. The only interesting signature was Will’s, and it wasn’t really a signature. On the inside back cover of both my ninth- and tenth-grade books, he had drawn a very neat box around the perimeter. Above both boxes were the words “This page is reserved for William B. Landsman to do with what he will.” He hadn’t yet used it.

  I wondered…

  When I looked in the index of my most recent yearbook (tenth grade) under my name, I found only three mentions. The first was my class photo. That year, my hair looked very light on top, maybe blond, though I couldn’t truly tell. All the underclassman portraits were black-and-white, so when I say my hair was blond, really what it looked was light gray. The second was the varsity tennis team photo. I wasn’t even in that one, though—it just had my name and the caption “Not Pictured.” I wondered what I had been doing instead. The third mention was on the yearbook masthead. I had been photo editor, which might have explained why I wasn’t in any of the pictures.

  It had always been the same with Mom—both in the Wandering Porter books and in our family albums. Because she was a photographer, she was never in the pictures, and whenever anyone tried to take her picture, she would get really uncomfortable. I put the yearbooks back on their shelf. Maybe I was like my mother, the girl behind the camera?

  I wondered…

  I went through the drawers of my nightstand. The most interesting thing I found was a plastic compact containing birth control pills, which meant I was either a) having sex with someone (!?!), or b) on the pill for some other reason. The second most interesting thing I found was a leather diary. This might have beat the birth control pills for the official title of Most Interesting Thing in Naomi’s Nightstand, had it not been a food diary detailing every single thing I’d eaten for the last six months. Sample entry:

  August 4

  1 Bagel with Cream Cheese, 350 calories

  18 Mini Pretzels, 150 Calories

  2 Diet Cokes, 0 Calories

  1 Banana, 90 Calories

  7 Reese’s Pieces, 28 Calories

  GRAND TOTAL

  618 Calories

  Every entry after that was the same way. Page after page of it. Sometimes there would be a if I thought I had eaten too much, or a if I was neither here nor there about my eating for the day. It went all the way until the day before my injury. I tried to toss the useless artifact in the trash, but I missed. I felt disgusted. I mean, really, what sort of person keeps a food diary?

  I wondered if the former Naomi Porter had been, in all likelihood, a complete and total jerk, someone that I probably wouldn’t have even wanted to know.

  I wondered…

  I went through my backpack. I suppose I could have done this at the hospital, but I never had. I looked at my driver’s license. It had been issued nine months prior on my sixteenth birthday. I was wearing my school uniform, and in the picture I was smiling so big you could see that I still had braces. I ran my tongue over my teeth—smooth and no metal. Orthodontia—one thing I could be glad to have forgotten. As I returned the license to my backpack, I wondered if I still knew how to drive.

  Also in my bag was my cell phone, which was dead, so I plugged it into the charger and turned it on.

  I wanted to call someone, but I didn’t know who, so I started scrolling through all the numbers in the address book. I didn’t recognize about half the names. I thought about calling Will—maybe he would know about the birth control pills?—but I decided against it. Even if he was my “best friend,” he was still a boy and I didn’t want to ask him about that sort of thing.

  Suddenly, I wanted to call my mom. Not because I thought she would know about the pills, I just missed her. I missed her like a reflex, even though I knew that it was just some trick of my undependable brain. Some stupid, vestigial part. The way humans have appendixes, even though they’re pointless and mainly just a pain in the butt and people never even think about them unless they have to have them removed.

  I didn’t really want to talk to her, but I picked up the phone and dialed anyway. Of course I made sure to block the number in case she had caller ID or something. I knew I’d probably hang up, but I needed to hear her voice. Even if it was just her saying “Hello, who is this?” or breathing.

  “Hi there,” squeaked a precocious little voice, “you are speaking to Chloe Fusakawa, and I have just learned how to answer the phone.”

  This was my sister. I hadn’t been prepared for that, and for a second, I couldn’t speak.

  “Helloooooooo…Is anyone there?”

  “It’s Nomi,” I managed to say.

  She giggled. “No me. No me is a funny name. It sounds like nobody. Hi, Nobody. Do you like to read?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you read Goodnight Moon?”

  “Yes.” My mother had read it to me when I was little.

  “That is my seventh favorite book. It used to be fifth, but it is now too easy. It’s still good. They have your name in it. There is a part that goes ‘Goodnight, Nobody,’ and this is my second favorite part of my seventh favorite book.”

  I heard my mother’s familiar voice in the background. “Is someone on the phone, Chloe?”

  “It’s Nobody!” Chloe yelled.

  “Then hang up the phone, sweetie! It’s time for your bath!”

  “I have to go now,” Chloe said. “Bye-bye, Nobody. Call again, ’kay?”

  “Okay.”

  I hung up the phone and felt lonelier than ever.

  All I wanted to do was sleep.

  Which was what I did.

  For about a week, maybe two.

  It was easy to lose track of time.

  3

  I WOKE SUDDENLY: THREE SHARP TAPS ON MY window. I was startled because my old bedroom had been on the second floor. In other words, no one could knock on the window unless they had superpowers, like the ability to fly.

  I sat up in bed and pulled back the curtain. It was dark outside, but I could still recognize Ace Zuckerman. I had seen his picture in my wallet and on my desk and in the yearbook and other places, too. In the flesh, though, he looked about as opposite of James as it gets. The contrast between my “boyfriend” and my “pretend boyfriend” was almost comical.

  Ace was wearing jeans, like James had been, and a warm-up jacket. On Ace, though, everything was really filled out. I didn’t have to see it to know that underneath his jacket was certainly not a faded concert T-shirt. Ace’s hair was light brown and sort of shaggy. He was muscular. And handsome, I suppose, though in an almost cartoonish way. Everything about him seemed too broad, too big. If someone had asked me right at that moment, I would have said, “Defin
itely not my type.”

  I opened the window, and he swung himself over the frame. He moved like an athlete, and he knew to throw his legs way out in front of him so they wouldn’t hit the bookshelf under my window. The casual grace of his movements alerted me to the fact that he had entered my room that way many times before.

  The first thing he did was kiss me. On the lips. And he didn’t ask my permission either.

  I couldn’t recall him ever having kissed me before.

  I actually couldn’t recall anyone ever having kissed me before.

  So, in a way, this was my first kiss.

  He tasted like Gatorade (could have been worse I suppose), and his tongue was dull, directionless, and too much in my mouth. The nicest thing I can say about it was that it ended quickly.

  He pulled away, but was still sitting on the side of the bed. “You really don’t remember me, do you?”

  “No, but I know who you are. You’re my…” He looked at me hopefully, but I couldn’t bring myself to say the word. “My…”

  “Boyfriend,” he finished. “Ace.”

  “Yes, my boyfriend.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t come earlier. It’s just…I was away at tennis camp. I’m a counselor this year and…”

  “Really, you play tennis? I do, too.” I was just making conversation. I already knew that, of course.

  “I know you do. That’s how we met. You’re good.” All of a sudden, he smacked himself in the head, and the violence of it actually scared me. “I choked! I should have left camp early. I should have come!”

  “It’s fine, Al.”

  “The name’s Ace,” he whispered.

  “I know that.” I had no idea why I had called him Al. I knew his name, but I think I had been momentarily stunned by the self-flagellation.

  He cleared his throat and changed the subject. “Here, I brought you something. I was at the camp Pro Shop, and I guess these reminded me of you.” He took a pair of white terry cloth tennis wristbands out of his pocket.

  I wondered what about me screamed tennis sweatbands to him. Had he meant them as a joke? I could tell by his mouth—a thin pink line of determined patience and anticipation—that he hadn’t.

  It certainly wasn’t the most romantic gift ever, but you know, it was obvious the guy meant well, so I put the wristbands on.

  “Looks nice,” he said. “With your, um, pajamas.”

  I walked over to my closet mirror under the pretense of looking at my wristbands, but what I actually did was study Ace’s reflection. I was trying to figure him out, and sometimes it’s easier to do that when people don’t know that you’re looking at them. I watched him watching me. His eyes were tired, and he seemed pleased that I was wearing his gift. Maybe there was something wistful in his look, maybe it was the pills in my drawer (duh), but all of a sudden I realized that I was probably having sex with him. I also decided I didn’t want to have that conversation just yet; it was difficult to predict where such a conversation might lead.

  Instead, I turned away from the mirror, walked across my bedroom, and kissed him again, like maybe I could figure things out that way. His lips were soft, but his chin was sandpaper against my face, even though I hadn’t seen any hair on it. After about ten seconds, which seemed like way too many, I pulled back. “So, thanks for these,” I said. I didn’t know how to break it to Ace that the doctors said I had to refrain from all sports for the next couple of months. “Do I, um, play much tennis this time of year?”

  “You start practicing in early spring,” he reported. “But you’ll definitely get a lot of use out of them then. I was thinking long-term, I guess.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “about the way I came in. I shouldn’t have kissed you. I should have let you kiss me. I definitely shouldn’t have used tongue. I, well, I panicked. I choked. I’m not usually a choker. Not on the courts. Not off them either.”

  I told him it was okay, that these were confusing times or something like that. Then I said I had a headache, and he took that as his cue to leave the same way he’d come.

  I closed the curtains. I was about to take off the wristbands when Dad knocked softly at the door. “Oh, you’re awake? I was just planning to slip out.” I looked at the clock; it was already 9:30 p.m.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Just to get some coffee. We’re all out, and I’m probably going to be up late working,” he said. “Do you need anything?”

  I told him that I didn’t.

  “I’ll be back in a half hour,” he said. “Nice wristbands, by the way.”

  I listened to him close and lock the front door.

  I listened to him back down our driveway.

  Our house was so quiet.

  I took off the wristbands.

  Even though I was still drained, I couldn’t fall back asleep.

  I decided to put on my headphones and listen to Will’s mix.

  The first song was, of course, “Fight Test.” I remembered Will saying that it had something to do with how we met. So I decided to call him.

  “Hallelujah, your phone’s back on,” he said. “I wanted to call, but my mom said I should let you rest.” I let him ramble on about the yearbook and the letter he’d written me and some research he’d done on the Internet about amnesia and whatever else popped into his head.

  “So, how’d I meet you anyway?” I asked him when he’d finally paused for a breath.

  “I know this is gonna be hard to believe, but you didn’t like me straightaway.”

  “No?” I said in mock incredulity.

  “Indeed, my friend. I grew on you. I’m like that. I’m a grower. But officially, we met the first day of ninth grade in an informational meeting for The Phoenix, but you know we didn’t meet that day, not really. We just saw each other and exchanged names and went on about our business. The first time I really met you was about a month later. They had taught us how to lay out pages on the computer, and I was watching you work over your shoulder, which is something you despise though I didn’t know it at the time—”

  I interrupted, “Actually, that’s something everyone despises.”

  “Right, that’s good advice there, Chief. I’ll make a note. Back to how we met, you pasted a picture of the cheerleading team onto the page and it was starting to look really nice, but it made the copy shift so that only the first line of the caption paragraph was left on the bottom, what they call—”

  “An orphan, I know.” I didn’t know how I knew, but I did.

  “Hey, you remember! That’s a good sign. I said to you, ‘Sucks about the orphan.’ And you turned around and gave me a look like you wanted to kill me. You thought I was talking about you being adopted—”

  “You know about that?”

  “I’m telling you I know everything about you,” Will said. “Unfortunately, not at the time, though. So I repeated the thing about the orphan, and you said, ‘Screw you,’ and it might have gone on like that forever except that I finally said, ‘I’m talking about the copy.’ And then you laughed and said, ‘Yeah, I think I’ll make the picture a little smaller to get rid of it.’ That’s how we met. And about a month or so later, after we knew each other better, you mentioned you were adopted, which cleared everything up enormously.”

  “’Cause before you were just thinking I was a bitch?”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “What does the song have to do with us meeting though?” I asked.

  “Well…” Will cleared his throat. “I guess, on some level, it’s about the difficulty of modern communication. Like I said, I didn’t have that much time to put together a proper mix. But I always think of you and meeting you when I hear it. Don’t you do that? Don’t you hear a certain song and associate it with a person? They don’t even have to know you’re doing it.”

  “Sometimes maybe.”

  “And my dad really liked that song, too. He was a big fan of the Flaming—”

  I yawned. I couldn’t help myself. “I’m sorry.
You were saying? Your dad…”

  “Oh hey, you should get to sleep, Chief. You can call me again tomorrow, if you want, if you’re feeling up to it.”

  “Hey, Will, can I ask you another question?”

  “Anything.”

  “Would you say that I was really into Ace?”

  “I truly doubt if I’m the best person to answer that.”

  “Who else, then?” I asked.

  Will sighed. “Honestly, I would say that you were. Not that I’ve ever understood his appeal, but there you go.”

  “Why, though? Why him and not somebody else?” I really wanted to know.

  I heard Will take a drink of water before he answered. “I’m not in your head, so I’m only theorizing here. I think you like being seen around with a good-looking jock. I hope that doesn’t sound too mean.”

  “So you think I’m shallow?” I countered.

  “I didn’t say that. I think you’re the swellest gal around, but I also think you’re human. And you go to a school where it’s not entirely a bad thing to have a boyfriend like Ace.”

  I wondered…

  All this speculation was exhausting. “Night, Will,” I said.

  “Good night, Chief. Say, do you think you’ll be able to come back to school with everyone else after Labor Day?”

  “I don’t know when I’ll be back. I’m still pretty tired.”

  “Well, take it easy, okay? I’ll pick up your schedule and all your assignments, so you don’t have to worry about any of that.”

  “Thanks.”

  I got under the covers and listened to that song again. I fell asleep before it was over.

  I slept for the next thirteen hours straight. I didn’t even hear my dad come home.

  The day before I was to return to school, I told Dad I wanted to figure out if I still knew how to drive.