Everything everything.
Starting with that day.
Will and I had been arguing about who should have to go back to the office to get the camera.
Will removed a quarter from his pocket, and without even asking he announced that I would be tails and he, heads.
So I joked, “Who made you God?”
“Naomi,” he asked, “are you saying you’d prefer to be heads?”
I wasn’t necessarily saying that—I didn’t really care either way—but my friend (and co-editor) could be efficient to the point of dictatorial, and as his co-editor (and friend), I thought that this was something he needed to work on. “People appreciate being asked,” I said. “As a courtesy, you know?”
Will sighed. “Heads or tails?”
I called heads just as he threw the coin. It was, in some respects, a decent throw—high enough that I momentarily lost track of it, though this might have been an illusion caused by the silver against the twilight. High enough that I wondered if Will, who was not known for his athletic prowess, would actually manage to catch it. He didn’t. The coin landed with an undignified plop in a puddle seven feet over, on the border between the student and faculty parking lots. We raced over to verify the results. I was fast from tennis and I got there first. Through the murky water I could make out the hazy outline of an eagle.
“Should have stuck with tails, Chief,” he said, fishing George Washington out of the puddle.
“Yeah, yeah.”
We parted by shaking hands, which was how my colleague and I always said goodbye.
I trudged across the faculty parking lot and across the school’s two athletic fields—our paltry marching band (twenty-three members) was practicing on one, and our paltry football team (average height: five feet eight inches) on the other.
I trudged up the hill that began at the lower-school (grades 7–9) buildings and peaked at the upper school (10–12) in an impressive display of topographical symbolism.
I trudged up the twenty-five marble steps that led to the entrance of the main building; the brick, banklike structure people thought of when they thought of Tom Purdue, largely because it was on the cover of all the brochures. At this point, it was nearly seven o’clock and the halls were empty, the way you’d expect them to be at nearly seven o’clock. I unlocked the door to The Phoenix—no one was there since school hadn’t even started—and retrieved the camera, which was new enough that we hadn’t even had time to buy a carrying case or a strap yet.
In the time all this took, it had officially become dark, and I was ready to be home. I jogged out of the building and down the marble stairs.
People said I had tripped—as in Did-you-hear-what-happened-to-Naomi-Porter-she-tripped-going-down-the-stairs-and-her-brain-exploded—but that wasn’t what happened.
Think about it. I was not an eighty-year-old woman with a creaky hip, and at that point I had been climbing those Tom Purdue steps for almost four years: seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth grades. I knew how they felt when they were slick with rain. I knew how they felt when wearing heels and a formal dress. I knew how they felt in the middle of winter, coated with salt.
Those steps could not have been more familiar to me, so that’s why it was impossible that I could have tripped.
What really happened was that someone had left a Styrofoam coffee cup on the steps. In the darkness I didn’t see it, so I kicked the cup and whatever was inside spilled out. I remember slipping a bit on the liquid and that’s when I lost my grip on the camera. In that split second before diving down the stairs, my only thoughts were for the camera, and how it had cost The Phoenix a heck of a lot of money, and how much I wanted to catch it before it hit the stairs.
I didn’t trip or fall—tripping and falling are accidents.
I dove—diving is intentional. Idiotic, yes, but also intentional.
Diving is a leap of faith plus gravity.
I had been throwing myself toward something.
Maybe away from something else.
I had kissed Will the night before.
Actually, he had kissed me, but I hadn’t stopped it.
It had happened quickly; we were covering the Science Club’s back-to-school trip to the planetarium. I had always teased Will about his obsessive coverage of academia. Will’s “Nerd Inclusion Campaign” I called it, even though that was probably mean, and let’s face facts, we were both kind of nerds ourselves. In any case, we decided to stay for the star show.
So we kissed. I think we had both been tricked by the air-conditioning and the darkness and all those treacherous fake stars.
That kiss had probably been more about my ambivalence toward Ace than any romantic notions I had had about Will. Besides, I hadn’t met James yet.
In all these months, Will had never mentioned it, though. I suppose it didn’t matter anyhow. I was with James now, and Will and I weren’t even friends.
Sitting in James’s car, I took off my sunglasses even though we were in the midst of a brilliant, white January sunset.
We were stopped at a traffic light when James said to me, “You’re awfully quiet.”
I nodded blankly and tried to smile. I felt like if I spoke, I might have an aneurysm.
“You aren’t wearing your sunglasses,” he said.
“Oh…” I put them back on. Then I kissed James on the mouth, probably too hard.
I decided that I wouldn’t tell him or anyone else about my remembering. In a way, none of it mattered. None of it changed anything.
This was what I told myself.
I looked at James. I looked at him and felt grateful again that he’d been the one at the bottom of the stairs. It could have been anyone.
For obvious reasons, my exams went much better than expected, my French exam particularly. I did so well that Mrs. Greenberg decided to base my grade solely on the final. She was a tough teacher, but always, always fair. “You have had much to deal with, Naomi,” she said in French, “but you have studied hard and come out beautifully.”
I understood her perfectly and expressed my gratitude in French.
At his request, I went to see Mr. Weir on the last day of finals. “Congratulations. You have eighteen more weeks to dazzle me,” he said. Instead of failing me, he was giving me an incomplete. Incidentally, if I’d had my memory back in September, I definitely would have dropped that class. His was the worst kind of elective—the kind with the potential to bring down your GPA.
When I got back home that night, Dad was in his study working.
I quietly took the car keys off the hook by the kitchen door and went for a drive.
It felt good to be behind the wheel again.
I didn’t drive anywhere in particular. I stayed in my neighborhood, making enough right turns so that I ended up back where I started.
When I was about seven years old, I got lost in a museum. My parents had been researching their third or fourth Wandering Porters book, the one in the South of France. I had thought I was with my mother, but I hadn’t been. I had been mistakenly following a woman with a camera bag that looked like hers. When the woman turned, I realized my error and began to cry.
The woman looked at me and although she did not speak English (I don’t think she was French either), I managed to detect the question “…Maman…?”
I nodded miserably and pointed to the camera.
“L’appareil-photo?”
I nodded even more miserably. As it happened, my mother entered the gallery then, and I was found.
For many years, l’appareil-photo was the only French word I had.
I don’t know why my memory came back that day in James’s car—maybe there was some medical explanation having to do with synapses and neurons—just as I don’t know for certain why it left in the first place.