Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

by Gabrielle Zevin

  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.