I looked at my clothes. Several school uniforms: dark gray wool kilts, white dress shirts, maroon ties, various hoodies, and V-neck sweaters. Gym clothes. Tennis whites. All of it neatly pressed, folded, or hung. In a zipped garment bag was a black velvet dress for a formal I could not recall having attended. I decided to put it on, just to see what it looked like. The dress was a little tight around my breasts. Evidently, I had grown since I had last worn it. I didn’t bother zipping it all the way up.
I ran my hands along my hips. The fabric was silky and plush.
I wondered if I had worn my hair up or down. I wondered if I had liked how I looked on that night and what my date had thought of me, if he’d said I was the most beautiful girl in the world. I wondered who my date had been, if it had been that Ace guy or someone else. I wondered if I had really liked the person or if I’d just gone to have someone to go with. I wondered if he had brought me a corsage and, if he had, what kind it had been. Had he known that I don’t like roses? And if he’d brought roses, had I had to pretend to like them so that I wouldn’t hurt his feelings? Maybe I hadn’t gone with a boy at all? Maybe I’d just gone with a group of girls? Or a group of friends. Did I even have a group of friends?
Maybe I’d worn that dress somewhere else entirely? I wondered…
On the bookshelf under my window were four school yearbooks, one for each year beginning with seventh grade. I flipped through the books, but they didn’t really tell me much. Teams competed in sports. Sometimes they won, and other times they lost. Some kids joined clubs; others didn’t. Some got taller. Some got smarter; a few got dumber and, either way, most managed to graduate. All yearbooks told the same story anyway.
I read through every single signature of every single one: Have a great summer. Don’t forget me. Keep in touch. I wondered why anyone bothered signing at all. The only interesting signature was Will’s, and it wasn’t really a signature. On the inside back cover of both my ninth- and tenth-grade books, he had drawn a very neat box around the perimeter. Above both boxes were the words “This page is reserved for William B. Landsman to do with what he will.” He hadn’t yet used it.
I wondered…
When I looked in the index of my most recent yearbook (tenth grade) under my name, I found only three mentions. The first was my class photo. That year, my hair looked very light on top, maybe blond, though I couldn’t truly tell. All the underclassman portraits were black-and-white, so when I say my hair was blond, really what it looked was light gray. The second was the varsity tennis team photo. I wasn’t even in that one, though—it just had my name and the caption “Not Pictured.” I wondered what I had been doing instead. The third mention was on the yearbook masthead. I had been photo editor, which might have explained why I wasn’t in any of the pictures.
It had always been the same with Mom—both in the Wandering Porter books and in our family albums. Because she was a photographer, she was never in the pictures, and whenever anyone tried to take her picture, she would get really uncomfortable. I put the yearbooks back on their shelf. Maybe I was like my mother, the girl behind the camera?
I wondered…
I went through the drawers of my nightstand. The most interesting thing I found was a plastic compact containing birth control pills, which meant I was either a) having sex with someone (!?!), or b) on the pill for some other reason. The second most interesting thing I found was a leather diary. This might have beat the birth control pills for the official title of Most Interesting Thing in Naomi’s Nightstand, had it not been a food diary detailing every single thing I’d eaten for the last six months. Sample entry:
August 4
1 Bagel with Cream Cheese, 350 calories
18 Mini Pretzels, 150 Calories
2 Diet Cokes, 0 Calories
1 Banana, 90 Calories
7 Reese’s Pieces, 28 Calories
GRAND TOTAL
618 Calories 
Every entry after that was the same way. Page after page of it. Sometimes there would be a 
if I thought I had eaten too much, or a 
if I was neither here nor there about my eating for the day. It went all the way until the day before my injury. I tried to toss the useless artifact in the trash, but I missed. I felt disgusted. I mean, really, what sort of person keeps a food diary?
I wondered if the former Naomi Porter had been, in all likelihood, a complete and total jerk, someone that I probably wouldn’t have even wanted to know.
I wondered…
I went through my backpack. I suppose I could have done this at the hospital, but I never had. I looked at my driver’s license. It had been issued nine months prior on my sixteenth birthday. I was wearing my school uniform, and in the picture I was smiling so big you could see that I still had braces. I ran my tongue over my teeth—smooth and no metal. Orthodontia—one thing I could be glad to have forgotten. As I returned the license to my backpack, I wondered if I still knew how to drive.
Also in my bag was my cell phone, which was dead, so I plugged it into the charger and turned it on.
I wanted to call someone, but I didn’t know who, so I started scrolling through all the numbers in the address book. I didn’t recognize about half the names. I thought about calling Will—maybe he would know about the birth control pills?—but I decided against it. Even if he was my “best friend,” he was still a boy and I didn’t want to ask him about that sort of thing.
Suddenly, I wanted to call my mom. Not because I thought she would know about the pills, I just missed her. I missed her like a reflex, even though I knew that it was just some trick of my undependable brain. Some stupid, vestigial part. The way humans have appendixes, even though they’re pointless and mainly just a pain in the butt and people never even think about them unless they have to have them removed.
I didn’t really want to talk to her, but I picked up the phone and dialed anyway. Of course I made sure to block the number in case she had caller ID or something. I knew I’d probably hang up, but I needed to hear her voice. Even if it was just her saying “Hello, who is this?” or breathing.
“Hi there,” squeaked a precocious little voice, “you are speaking to Chloe Fusakawa, and I have just learned how to answer the phone.”
This was my sister. I hadn’t been prepared for that, and for a second, I couldn’t speak.
“Helloooooooo…Is anyone there?”
“It’s Nomi,” I managed to say.
She giggled. “No me. No me is a funny name. It sounds like nobody. Hi, Nobody. Do you like to read?”
“Yes.”
“Have you read Goodnight Moon?”
“Yes.” My mother had read it to me when I was little.
“That is my seventh favorite book. It used to be fifth, but it is now too easy. It’s still good. They have your name in it. There is a part that goes ‘Goodnight, Nobody,’ and this is my second favorite part of my seventh favorite book.”
I heard my mother’s familiar voice in the background. “Is someone on the phone, Chloe?”
“It’s Nobody!” Chloe yelled.
“Then hang up the phone, sweetie! It’s time for your bath!”
“I have to go now,” Chloe said. “Bye-bye, Nobody. Call again, ’kay?”
“Okay.”
I hung up the phone and felt lonelier than ever.
All I wanted to do was sleep.
Which was what I did.