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.