“I do.”
“Let’s get out of here, okay?”
When we got to the car, James looked really tired, so I suggested that if he gave me directions, I could drive.
“I thought you didn’t remember how,” he said.
“I remembered,” I answered. He didn’t question me beyond that.
James’s dad’s house was the California equivalent of James’s mom’s house. Roomy, empty. His dad was away somewhere. “On business,” James said.
“Have you been here by yourself the whole time?”
James shrugged.
I made eggs, but James didn’t really eat anything. He didn’t say much the whole evening. I could tell he was thinking about something, and I didn’t want to disturb him. Still, I felt like each second he didn’t speak became an inch between us.
Around ten, he said he was going to bed. I followed him into his room.
I kissed him.
“I need to get some sleep,” he said. “I haven’t slept in days and days.”
“Why not together?” I asked. I knew it was probably pathetic, but I was trying to pull him back to the surface. I loved him even more now that he seemed so vulnerable. Maybe I loved him more because he needed me.
James shook his head. “Naomi,” he said sweetly. “Naomi…I wish I could.”
He took my hand. His grip wasn’t very strong at all. He led me into one of the guest rooms.
“Good night,” he said, and then he closed the door.
I hadn’t turned on my phone since boarding the plane.
There were twenty-eight messages. I was just about to check them when the phone rang. It was Dad. I knew the jig was up.
“Hello,” I said.
Here’s how it played out:
He’d been trying to phone me all day.
He got worried when I didn’t pick up.
He called Will.
He wasn’t there, but he got Mrs. Landsman.
Mrs. Landsman didn’t know anything about a conference in San Diego. Furthermore, she told him I’d quit yearbook months ago.
He called James’s mom.
She said that James was in California.
“I just want to know one thing, is that where you are?”
“Yes,” I said, and then I started to cry. It was the tension of the day more than the trouble I was in. It was the sound of my dad’s voice. It was lying, not just to Dad but to everyone. It was wondering how I’d let everything get so screwed up. With James and Mom and Will and Dad and school and yearbook and tennis and even poor Ace. It was all the things I hadn’t said, but couldn’t and wanted to. They constricted my throat to where the only thing to do was cry or choke. It was that half-eaten carton of strawberries and the coin toss that I’d lost and being abandoned in a typewriter case and then again by my own crazy, beautiful, treacherous, wall-painting mother. It was my sunglasses, which I’d left on the beach that day. The sun had gone down and I hadn’t needed them anymore. It’s when you don’t need something that you tend to lose it.
It was James. Of course it was James. He had said I’d looked at him “funny,” but I had eyes: he was looking at me that way, too.
Dad booked me on a flight that left at noon the next day, the first one he could find.
In the morning, James looked better. “Maybe I just needed a good night’s sleep?”
I told him my dad had found out and that I had to go home.
“I know,” he said. “Raina called me. Your dad probably hates me now.”
“You’re not the one who lied,” I said.
On the way to the airport, James took a detour. He drove to USC, where we took the tour.
“It’s a step,” I said.
“An infinitesimal one,” he added. “I still have a lot to work out.”
I held his hand the whole time. It was a really beautiful campus, and the sun was out so bright and lovely, it could almost make you forget things.
At the airport, he kissed me, but I tasted goodbye in it.
“I’ll see you when you get back to school on Tuesday,” I said. “Assuming my dad ever lets me out of my room again.”
A security officer yelled at James to move his car, so he had to go. Part of me was scared I’d never see him again.
When I got to the doors of the terminal, I realized that I had left my dad’s book in James’s car.
10
ON THE FLIGHT BACK, I ALTERNATED BETWEEN WORRYING about James and worrying about the trouble I was in, probably about seventy-five percent in the James direction. In lieu of thinking, I would have preferred to be sleeping, but planes are one of the noisiest “in theory quiet” places on earth, and I couldn’t.
I put on my headphones and placed a CD in my laptop’s drive. I hadn’t really noticed what I was packing when I’d left the house, but I’d managed to grab not one but two of Will’s stupid mixes. The first one I put in was the one he’d made me when I’d lied to him about the play, but something about it made me anxious. (Maybe it was the song choice; he had, after all, been pissed at me at the time.) So I put in a different one instead, the one from my birthday, Songs for a Teenage Amnesiac, Vol. II. A prompt came up on my computer, asking me if I wanted to launch the DVD player.
I clicked yes.
It was a movie, no more than fifteen minutes long.
To call it a movie would probably be an exaggeration. It wasn’t in the least professional, not like James’s video installations for the play, for example. It was a simple slideshow, set to the Velvet Underground song “That’s the Story of My Life.” He’d added some text, but mainly it was pictures.
It was all the years I had missed. He had gotten whatever videos and images he and the school and even Mom (yes, he had contacted my mother) possessed, and he had edited them together chronologically.
There I was.
There I was graduating from the lower school at Tom Purdue. I’m easy to spot. I’m the tallest girl in the picture.
And Mom giving birth to Chloe. My sister. I knew I hadn’t been there that day, and yet it was undeniable: there I was.
And moving with Dad to the new house—our whole life in boxes. And Ace pulling my ponytail on the tennis courts. And me taking a picture of someone taking a picture of me. It was Will—of course it was Will—I could see him dimly reflected in my camera lens.
And in that black formal dress. My hair had been dirty blond, but you could see the roots even then.
Nothing all that thrilling, I guess, but there I was.
There I was, there I was.
As soon as it was finished, I played it again.
And then, I played it again.
How surreal to see my whole life, as compiled by Will, from a plane ten thousand feet in the air.
He’d obviously done it before I had my memory back—he still didn’t know I had my memory back. It must have taken him a lot of time to assemble. It was probably the nicest, most thoughtful gift anyone had ever given me, and I hadn’t even bothered to look at it for three months. No wonder he’d been mad at me. I was a jerk, unworthy of the effort.
I spent the next three hours feeling horrible. I tried to use the phone on the back of the seat to call Will, but I couldn’t get it to work.
As soon as the plane landed, I turned on my cell, but the battery was dead. I knew that Dad would be waiting for me outside the security checkpoint, and that would effectively mark the end of my freedom for some time. I stopped at the nearest pay phone. I didn’t have any change, so I had to call Will collect.
“I have Naomi Porter on the line. William Landsman, will you accept charges?” asked the operator.
“Why not?” was Will’s reply. “Well, what do you want?”
“I’m sorry about having to call collect,” I began. “My phone died.”