Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

by Gabrielle Zevin

  On the ferry ride to the Vineyard, Dad and I sat in the middle of a long pewlike bench with roughly a million sweating people on it. Rosa was on the deck with Freddie and George. Dad has always gotten seasick on decks, so I was keeping him company in the cabin. It had occurred to me that this was the last time it would be me and him for a very long while. Maybe Rosa, Freddie, and George were thinking the same thing when they’d decided to stay outside.

  The day was bright and wet, and my clothes were sticking to me. I was seriously considering abandoning Dad for the deck (last time alone be damned), which at least had the benefit of a breeze, when he asked me if I was looking forward to the wedding. I told him I was. I said how much I liked Rosa Rivera and all the sorts of things I knew it would make him happy to hear.

  “You seem a little flushed, though,” he said.

  I said I was just hot.

  It was noisy and crowded in the cabin, in other words not a great place to talk about serious things, but Dad persisted. “How’s James?” Dad asked.

  Truthfully, I hadn’t thought of James at all. I hadn’t had time—not with Dad’s wedding and Will’s sickness and Will and my photography and tennis and yearbook.

  It was strange, really. A couple months ago, I had thought I couldn’t live without him.

  Apparently, I could.

  That I could forget him so easily, more than the loss of James himself, made me melancholy, I guess. I wondered if Mom had felt that way about Dad when she met Nigel again. I wondered if my biological mother had felt that way about my biological father, and even about me when she’d had to give me up.

  “I don’t see him much,” I said to Dad finally.

  “It happens, baby.” Dad nodded and patted me on the hand, and then he read my mind. “You forget all of it anyway. First, you forget everything you learned—the dates of the Hay-Herran Treaty and the Pythagorean theorem. You especially forget everything you didn’t really learn, but just memorized the night before. You forget the names of all but one or two of your teachers, and eventually you’ll forget those, too. You forget your junior year class schedule and where you used to sit and your best friend’s home phone number and the lyrics to that song you must have played a million times. For me, it was something by Simon & Garfunkel. Who knows what it will be for you? And eventually, but slowly, oh so slowly, you forget your humiliations—even the ones that seemed indelible just fade away. You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. Who went to a good college. Who threw the best parties. Who could get you pot. You forget all of them. Even the ones you said you loved, and even the ones you actually did. They’re the last to go. And then once you’ve forgotten enough, you love someone else.”

  I must have started to cry because Dad held out his sleeve for me to wipe my eyes on, which I did. It wasn’t anything in particular that Dad had said, but it was like he’d read my mind and put words to all the things that had been brewing inside me for so long. We were so much alike really.

  I wanted to tell him how I was in love with Will, but it was Dad’s weekend (and me not a particularly confessional sort of person under any circumstances) and maybe he already knew it anyway. Besides, it seemed silly after we’d just been talking about James. I didn’t want to be the kind of girl who always needed to be in love with someone.

  So all I said was “I’m really happy for you, Dad.”

  Rosa Rivera had no use for the color white—not in decorating and certainly not in weddings. “I am not young or a virgin,” she had declared, “and I have already worn a white dress once. This time, I will wear red.” The only white she wore on her wedding day was a white ribbon that she tied around her waist like an afterthought and the roses that she wore in her hair.

  “But, Mama, aren’t white roses bad luck?” George had asked her.

  Rosa Rivera said she didn’t know and she didn’t care to know.

  She didn’t much care what us bridesmaids wore either. “You girls wear the white if you like. You are young, and it will set me off nicely, I think?” It was a suggestion more than an order. (Then again, most everything Rosa Rivera said about anything sounded interrogative.) Freddie and George decided to honor their mother’s request as she had made so few, and we wore three nonmatching white dresses. Dad followed the trend with a beige suit that he had bought the summer we had wandered Tuscany. He either didn’t care to remember or just plain didn’t care that my mother had picked it out for him. A footnote to the day might tell that story: suit picked out by ex-wife.

  The week before the wedding, I had heard Dad speaking to the wedding officiant on the phone. “Hmmph,” he said when he hung up, “they want me to decide between ‘I will’ and ‘I do.’ I didn’t know there was even an option. Which do you prefer, kid?”

  “Pretty much everybody says ‘I do,’ right?” I said.

  Dad nodded. “That’s what I thought.”

  “But then again, maybe ‘I will’ is nicer. It has the future in it. ‘I do’ just has the present.”

  “You make a good point there,” Dad said. “How’d you get so smart?”

  I shrugged. “Probably all that time conjugating verbs for French.”

  “Not to mention I’ve already said ‘I do,’ so maybe this time I should try something else.”

  They said their “I will’s” by the beach at sunrise, both Rosa’s and Dad’s favorite time of day. Rosa was a rooster and Dad was a vampire, but somehow they managed to overlap for a couple of hours every morning.

  I was happy for Dad, but I also felt like I was losing him. I was that baby in the typewriter case all over again. Maybe this was just life? One orphaning after the next. They should tell you when you’re born: have a suitcase heart, be ready to travel.

  I was feeling rather sorry for myself when Rosa threw her bouquet. I hadn’t even noticed until the flowers were already heading my way. My instinct has always been to dive and catch, and this is what I did.

  “You’re next,” said Freddie.

  “Not so fast,” Dad said. “She’s only seventeen.” He appealed to Rosa like a put-upon father in a sitcom. “Maybe you should throw that again?”

  I threw the bouquet to my grandmother Rollie, who was sleeping in a beach chair. Rollie didn’t like to have to get up before noon if she could help it. She woke when the bouquet hit her lap. “Oh crap, not again,” she said. She had already been married four times, so she tossed the bouquet in the sand as if it were on fire.

  “Does no one want my bouquet?” Rosa asked. Her tone seemed to be joking, but I detected some degree of offense.

  I thought of that time I hadn’t taken Rosa Rivera’s scarf and what Dad had said. I didn’t want her to have hurt feelings on her wedding day, so I retrieved the bouquet from the sand. “I do,” I said. “I want it.”

  As we were walking back into the hotel for breakfast, Dad whispered in my ear, “Don’t worry. I know what you meant to say was ‘I will.’ As in, in the future. In the distant, distant future.” He winked at me conspiratorially, and I didn’t feel like an orphan anymore.

  “Who’s Martha?” I whispered from the bathroom of the hotel room I was sharing with Rosa Rivera’s two daughters, who were already asleep. I didn’t have to say what I was talking about. It was eleven, and I hoped Will would be awake.

  “Hold on,” he said, “I’ll look it up.”

  I heard him breathing lightly and the rapid clack of his fingers on the keyboard. “She was the mother and daughter of the white person who discovered the island. They had the same name, and they both died,” Will reported. “The natives called it something else, of course.”

  “Stupid white people,” I said.

  “Good night, Chief.”

  “Night, Coach, and thanks,” I said.

  There was a pause where neither of us hung up the phone. It might have been five seconds; it might have been five minutes. I couldn’t say for sure.

  “How was the wedding?” he asked.

  “I don’
t know. It all sort of blended together. You have to take a ferry to get here and I practically felt like an immigrant. I was the tired, the poor…” I whispered.

  “The huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” he continued.

  “Exactly. Rosa was pretty. Dad was so happy. I was presentable. It rained all last night, and the humidity made it so I didn’t have to press my dress.”

  “Did you take pictures?”

  “No. I thought about it, but it suddenly seemed like too much bother to take my camera out of my purse. There were other people taking pictures anyway.”

  “Why aren’t you sleeping?” he asked.

  “I can’t. My iPod died this morning, and Freddie snores.”

  “When will you be back?”

  “Around nine.” Will offered to pick me up. I told him that he needed his rest.

  “It’s just a drive, not a marathon,” he said.

  “I’d like that,” I said, “but Dad left his car at the airport, so I have to drive it home.” Rosa and Dad were leaving from Boston for their honeymoon. They were going to Bali, one of the few places he and Mom hadn’t wandered.

  “Drive safely,” he said.

  “I will.”

  I felt brave in the darkness, lying on the cool tile floor of the hotel bathroom. “You know something stupid? I really missed you this whole weekend, Landsman. I’ve gotten used to seeing you every day.”

  He didn’t say anything for a little while.

  “I missed you, too,” he said. “I wish I could have come.”

  15

  WHEN I GOT BACK ON SUNDAY NIGHT, THERE WAS A minor yearbook crisis. The grandmother of the girl who was supposed to photograph graduation died, so she couldn’t be at the ceremony Monday night. I had to go in her place.

  I was taking crowd shots when I spotted Raina through my camera viewfinder. She was sitting with James’s grandfather and a man who turned out to be James’s dad. She was fiddling with her camera, and she must have seen me looking at her because at the same time that I took her picture, she took mine. We both lowered our cameras and exchanged a weary sort of smile.

  The band started to play the graduation march, a song which I’ve always found seriously depressing. It’s easy to imagine pallbearers carrying coffins to “Pomp and Circumstance,” and even more so when it’s performed by Tom Purdue’s out-of-tune high school band. They should play something more cheerful. Something like “Higher Ground” by Stevie Wonder. Or if it was serious, maybe “Bittersweet Symphony” by the Verve. Will would probably have a million better suggestions than any of mine.

  I’d photographed two previous graduations, and they had all looked pretty much the same: same navy blue gowns, same hats, same auditorium. We practically could have used last year’s pictures without anyone having been the wiser. It was a cheat anyway—the ones I was taking wouldn’t get published until the next year’s Phoenix.

  After the ceremony, I heard Raina call my name. “Naomi, come pose for a picture!”

  I turned around and there was James, of course. He looked tall in his cap and gown. I thought about waving and not going over, but it seemed impolite.

  “James, put your arm around Naomi. Now smile, you two. It’s a great day!”

  Something happened with the camera, which was an old-fashioned film one with an enormous flash. James’s dad said he wasn’t sure if the picture had taken, would we mind posing again? We smiled a second time, and that time I’m pretty sure the picture took. James’s dad said he would send me a copy, but no one ever did.

  James looked at the yearbook camera, which was still hanging around my neck. He ran his finger across the lens cap and asked me if it was “the same camera.” I nodded. James picked it up in his hand and tossed it shallowly in the air. “Hardy little bastard,” he commented just before he caught it. It was true. That camera had withstood a lot. Gravity. A trip down a flight of stairs. It had lasted a whole school year. Longer than James’s and my entire relationship, not to put too fine a point on it.

  I raised the camera and took James’s picture.

  We shook hands. I congratulated him again.

  He was just one of one hundred fifty seniors whose pictures needed taking, and I had to get back to work.

  On the walk home I called Will. “Songs for a High School Graduation,” I said. “You know, instead of ‘Pomp and Circumstance.’ Discuss.”

  “‘My Back Pages’ by Bob Dylan,” he said.

  “‘Friends Forever,’ Vitamin C,” I suggested.

  “Maybe a little cliché. ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ by the Verve. You know, they never made a dime off that song, ’cause of a dispute involving the sampling of the strings.”

  “I already thought of that one. That and ‘Higher Ground’ were the first two on my list.”

  “Red Hot Chili Peppers or Stevie Wonder?”

  “The latter, but you could really use either, right?”

  “‘Song I Wrote Myself in the Future.’ John Wesley Harding.”

  “You used that one on my second or third mix tape,” I reminded him. “I thought you didn’t like to repeat.”

  “I don’t,” he conceded. “But the last time I used it, it wasn’t a commentary on the educational system, so it’s different. Also, ‘Ghost World’ by Aimee Mann.”

  “I don’t know that one.”

  “You’d like it. I ought to play it for you sometime.”

  It went on like this for the whole walk home. It was dark out by now, and it was as if Will and I were alone in the universe.

  “‘At Last.’ Etta James.”

  “Clever.”

  “‘Teenage Spaceship’ by Smog.”

  “Or ‘Teenage Wasteland.’”

  “It’s actually called ‘Baba O’Riley’ after composer Terry Riley.”

  “I always forget that. But how about ‘Race for the Prize,’ the Flaming Lips?”

  And then, up the path to my house.

  “…Bob Marley, is it? There’re covers, too. Or is his the cover?”

  Down the hallway.

  “The tempo’s probably a bit erratic for marching, Naomi…”

  I stopped in the kitchen to get myself a glass of water.

  “…haven’t been enough fast ones. You don’t want to get bogged down in slow songs. Maybe Fatboy Slim’s ‘Praise You’ or ‘Road to Joy’ by Bright Eyes?”

  In my room.

  “That Whitney Houston song they used to use for that ad with the kids in the Special Olympics. What the heck’s it called?”

  I was lying on my bed.

  “I’m so tired,” I said.

  “That’s not what it’s called.”

  “No, I meant that I’m exhausted.”

  “Well, you ought to go to bed, Chief.”

  “I’m in bed, but I don’t want to stop talking,” I told him.

  “Okay. When you’ve been silent for more than five minutes, I’ll know to hang up. Your cell phone’ll time out after thirty seconds anyway.”

  We kept naming songs…

  “‘Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.’”

  “‘The Only Living Boy in New York.’”

  “Too elegiac?”

  “That’s what’s good about it for a graduation, I think.”

  …until I was asleep.

  Ten months and one or two lives later, I was back where I started: alone again at The Phoenix at around seven on a Wednesday. There’s not much to do yearbook-wise for the couple of weeks after the books have been distributed. I was thinking how unnaturally quiet and lonely the office was without anyone in it when my phone rang. It was Will.

  “Are you at the office?”

  “Just locking up,” I told him.

  He said that maybe I could stop by later, and then he hung up quickly, uncharacteristically so.

  When I got outside, Will was at the top of the stairs, grinning sweet and crooked, like a swung dash. It was the first time he’d been on campus for three weeks, and he looked thin, but much better
than that day when I’d seen him at the hospital. Arguably, his pants on this day looked worse: they were plaid “old man” pants, probably borrowed from his grandpa. He was better off in school uniform pants. But what could you do? That was my Will.

  “Hey there! Why didn’t you come up to the office?” I called to him.

  “The front door was locked, and you have my keys. I decided to wait for you here.”

  I jogged over to him. “To what do I owe this honor?”

  “A long time ago, I used to go to school here. I even used to be the editor of the yearbook.”

  “Nope,” I said, furrowing my brow. “Can’t say I recall.”

  He offered me his arm. “I’ve heard these stairs can be troublesome,” he said.

  “I think I can make it down unassisted.”

  “Just take my arm, Chief. It’s safer. Don’t you think that between us we’ve had quite enough calamity for one school year? If you fell…”

  I interrupted him. “I didn’t fall. I dove.”

  “Fine. Have it your way. Dove. In either case, I don’t think I could bear you forgetting me all over again.” He turned me toward him, so that we were looking eye to eye. When he spoke, his voice was low. “Take my arm, Naomi. I’d offer to carry your books, but I doubt you’d let me.”

  I laughed at him and linked my arm through his. We were the exact same height, and his arm fit well in mine.

  We walked slowly out to the parking lot, where Will’s car was parked. I was mindful of Will’s health, but also it was probably the nicest hour of the nicest day of the year. Seventy-three degrees, and the sun was just going down, and the air was thick with grass and a hint of sunblock and something in the distance, something sweet and delicious that I couldn’t quite identify yet.

  I don’t remember who it was, but one of us finally said to the other, “Isn’t it funny that all those months ago we flipped a coin so that we wouldn’t have to take this very same walk?”

  One or the other of us replied, “And now I wouldn’t mind if it were even farther, if we could just go on like this forever.”