Of course, I had to call Will. “I only have a minute. It’s about to get crazy here.”
“I know,” he said wistfully. “I was thinking about walking down—”
“Don’t you dare!”
“Well, I decided against it. Even if I did make it there, my darling mother would probably murder me. How does it look?”
“It’s gorgeous,” I told him. “I’m so proud of you. I’ll come to you as soon as we’re done getting the books out.”
“I’m glad you’re there.” Will coughed, but even his coughs were sounding so much better. “I was just thinking…isn’t it lucky that we decided to become co-editors? If one takes a blow to the head, the other can fill in. If the other’s lung spontaneously collapses, the one can fill in. It’s a perfect system when you think about it.”
I laughed. “Hey, Will, I could give the book to Winnie. She’ll probably get to you before me. You know how it is on D-Day.”
“No, I’d rather you brought it, Chief,” he said.
“Or your mom, if you’d prefer. I can send Patten or Plotkin to drop it off in her classroom.”
“No,” he insisted, “it should be you.”
I didn’t get over to Will’s house until seven-thirty, and by then I was spent. “He’s waiting for you,” his mother said. She made me promise to leave by nine, so that Will could get his rest. “You look like you could use some, too,” she said.
I went into Will’s room.
The walls were still lined entirely by his dad’s record collection. The record player was sitting on the bureau.
“Okay,” Will said, “let’s have it.”
I handed him the book; he started flipping through each and every page. He was lying on his stomach on his bed, and I lay down next to him the same way so that I could look at it, too. We would complain about a typo here or the way a picture had printed there, but it wasn’t the type of thing anyone except us would even notice. The last thing we looked at was the cover.
“I think we were right to go with the all-white, don’t you?”
I nodded. “I love it. Everyone at school did, too.”
“You haven’t forgotten our joke, have you?” Will smiled at me.
I hadn’t. The title in the corner was printed so that it almost looked like a textual orphan. “The orphan,” I said.
“Exactly.” His voice changed a little. “You won’t have forgotten the White Album either?”
Our reference in coming up with the whole design had been the Beatles’ White Album, which had been Will’s dad’s favorite record. I scanned Will’s walls to locate it—he arranged his albums alphabetically by title—but there was a gap in his collection where it ought to have been.
“Where’d it go?” I asked.
He said he’d taken it down, that he wanted it to be the first record he’d played on his new (old) record player. “I was waiting for you to get here.”
The album was two records long, and he set it on the turntable on side three (or side one of the second record). He put down the needle.
We listened for a while and kept flipping through the book, occasionally making a comment to each other about something or other.
“I really wish my dad could have seen this,” Will said. He took off his glasses and wiped them on his pants.
The second to last track on the third side was called “I Will.” When it came on, I pointed out to him how it had been the final song of the first mix he’d made me after my accident. “Had you been trying to remind me about the cover?” I asked.
“Sort of,” he said shyly with that funny crooked smile of his, “but I’d been mainly trying to remind you about me. I, Will, you know?”
“If you had ever signed my yearbook instead of just leaving that big old blank box, that probably would have done the trick, too,” I said.
“S’pose.”
“Why didn’t you anyway?”
“Too much to say,” Will said with a decisive nod of his head. “Too much to say with none of the right words to say it. I’d rather just pick the perfect song to do the work for me.”
It was such a sweet, sad song with such sweet, sad lyrics. Old-fashioned a little, but also timeless. I wanted to hear it again nearly as soon as it was over, but by that time it was nine o’clock. I shook Will’s hand—was it my imagination or did he hold it longer than was strictly necessary?—then I drove myself home.
By Thursday, most of the yearbooks had been distributed. For the first time in over a week, I had time to go eat with Alice and Yvette, who were back together again.
“We love the book, cookie,” Alice said.
“It’s mainly due to Will,” I said.
“Well, tell him we love the book when you see him,” she said.
I said that I would.
“Did you hear that Winnie Momoi broke up with him?” Yvette asked.
“While he’s been sick? Did you know about this, cookie?” Alice looked at me.
I shook my head and concentrated on chewing my sandwich.
“Yeah,” said Yvette, “she’s in my math class, and she was crying all day on Monday.”
“Why was she the one crying if she broke up with him?” Alice asked.
“Guilt, maybe? You cry every time you break up with me, Ali.”
“Touché,” said Alice, and then she changed the subject. “I hate the word touché, don’t you? I can’t imagine what possessed me to say it. It sounds like tushy, or something you say while eating cheese.”
“Actually, it’s a fencing term,” Yvette said. “You’d know if you ever came to my matches.”
“I come to your matches!” Alice said. “I’ve been to at least three.”
“Two!”
Their fights often started like this and went on for days. I ignored them and thought about Will instead. I had seen and called him over ten times since Monday, and he had never mentioned anything about Winnie to me. I wondered what had happened between them, but I didn’t really feel like it was my place to ask. If he wanted to talk to me about it, I figured that he would. These days, I was careful around Will, and he was careful around me.
Even if we never got together in a romantic way, I loved him. I guess I always had. To tell you the truth, the knowledge was something of a burden.
I remembered those porcupines I’d been watching with Dad the night I thought Will might be dying. Not the part about the urinating. The part where they looked each other in the eye. Will and I weren’t there yet. (Personally, I hoped never to get to the peeing stage.)
I stopped by Will’s house after school to tell him I wouldn’t see him for the next three days—I was taking off Friday to go to Martha’s Vineyard for Dad’s and Rosa Rivera’s wedding. I knew that Will had gotten used to my coming around every day, but I chose my words deliberately. I didn’t want him to think that I had any expectation that he would care that I was leaving. I also didn’t want to pull another disappearing act on him.
“Your dad’s wedding,” he said. “It sure came up fast, didn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, why didn’t you invite me, Chief?” He said this in a cheerful way where I couldn’t tell if it was a serious request.
“Well…you’ve been sick, so I doubt your mother would have let you go.”
“True, true.”
“And also”—I didn’t know I was going to say this until I did—“there’s Winnie.”
Will cleared his throat. “Yes, Winnie.” His voice was amused. He looked me in the eye, and I looked back. “She broke up with me. I thought you might have heard by now.”