Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac (18 page)

I DIDN’T WANT TO TELL ANYONE ABOUT THE END OF
my amnesia, and the effort of keeping track of what I was and wasn’t supposed to remember was exhausting me to where I began to forget insignificant things. Like my history book. The first day of the new semester, I lost mine. I thought it might have been in James’s car—we had passed many enjoyable hours in there. I walked over to James’s house to see if I could look around.

James was at work, so the car wasn’t even there. I asked Raina if I could go look in his room, and she said to “be her guest.” Raina had not been particularly warm, but James said it wasn’t about me and I shouldn’t take offense.

I looked under James’s bed. Improbable as it may seem, my book was there: the mythic first place I had looked. As I was taking it out, my eyes alighted on something else.

It was a still-sealed envelope from the University of Southern California, where James had applied early. It was postmarked December 13. James had left it unopened for seven weeks. It seemed a little, for lack of a better word, crazy. I mean, I knew that he had really wanted to go to the film program there, but was he so afraid of not being accepted that he wouldn’t even open the envelope?

The right thing would have been to leave it there, but I didn’t do that. I picked it up and put it in my pocket. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it, but I couldn’t bear the thought of it lying there under his bed.

He called me after work that night. He said that Raina had mentioned my visit and that he was sorry he’d missed me.

I told him that I’d been looking for my book when I’d accidentally stumbled upon the letter.

James grew deathly quiet.

“I could open it if you want,” I said.

He didn’t say anything.

“Are you that afraid of not getting in?”

He told me to mind my own goddamn business, and then he hung up on me. You could say that that was our first fight. He had never even raised his voice to me before. I suppose he was right to yell at me.

At school the next day, I didn’t see him until lunch. I handed him the still-unopened letter and apologized if I had violated his privacy.

James took the letter. Without a word, he opened it. It was an acceptance. He set it on the ground, as if he couldn’t care less. It started to blow away, so I put my boot heel on it.

“It’s great news,” I said. “It’s what you wanted.” I hugged him, but his posture was rigid. “What is it, Jims?”—that was my nickname for him—“Why aren’t you happier?”

James explained, in an odd, low voice, “I hadn’t been afraid that I wouldn’t be accepted. I’d been afraid that I would.”

I deluded myself into thinking he was talking about me—how we’d just met and now we’d be on two separate coasts or something like that.

By the time lunch ended, the coolness between us hadn’t quite thawed.

After school, I was taking books from my locker when Ace Zuckerman came up to me. I hadn’t spoken to him for months other than an occasional nod in the hallway. As I was still preoccupied with James and the whole acceptance business, I wasn’t in the mood to talk to him now either.

Ace was captain of the tennis team that year, and he wanted to know if I was going to go out for it.

I said that I hadn’t planned on it.

Ace was outraged. In addition to hair, the guy was incredibly passionate about tennis. “Well, you’re a great player, and it would be a real shame for you not to play because of me.”

“You?” I laughed. “Don’t flatter yourself. I just don’t want to play tennis anymore.”

“You
love
tennis, Naomi. How can you not remember that?” Ace was standing really close to my face when, suddenly, something pulled him away. It was James, his eyes wild and blazing.

“Get the hell off of her!”

I tried to tell James that Ace and I had only been discussing tennis, but it was too late. These things tend to take on a momentum of their own.

Although James was wiry, he was not weak. He pulled Ace off of me and threw him against a locker. He punched him.

Ace hit him back, but mainly just to get James to stop attacking him. “You tool,” Ace said. “We were only talking about tennis.”

As I was trying to pull James off of Ace, James accidentally elbowed me in the eye. I knew without even seeing it that there was going to be a bruise.

Out of nowhere, Will Landsman got between Ace and James. I didn’t even know he was in the hallway. “Everybody calm down,” Will yelled. “You’ve just elbowed Naomi, you jerks!” Will shoved James with both his palms.

At this point, the assistant headmaster came out of her office to break it up.

James got a five-day suspension, and Ace, because he hadn’t started it, three. Will and I both got one day of detention each, even though we’d only been bystanders. When I got home, my dad was pissed. He worried that my head couldn’t take any more trauma.

“Who started it?” Dad demanded.

“I don’t know.” Of course it had been James, but I didn’t want to tell him that. I repeated what I had thought at the time, “These things take on a momentum of their own.”

Will and I served our detention together the next afternoon. We had to go pick up trash around the football field.

“This sucks. I was trying to break it up. I shouldn’t even
be
here,” he said.

“Who asked you to get involved? I was handling it.”

“Nice shiner,” Will muttered. “I have a million things to do. I’ve got to lock all the club pages. I have to decide who I’m sending to Philadelphia for Nationals. And, as you know, we are understaffed.”

“We all have things to do,” I said.

“What do you have? A packed schedule of hanging out with your exquisitely moody boyfriend?”

I didn’t say anything. He was trying to pick a fight.

When I’d first heard about our detention, I had been thinking about taking the opportunity to make up with him. I had even been thinking about giving him that record player. When I got my memory back, I had remembered it was for him. Will had this huge collection of albums that he had inherited from his dad, only he never played them. He kept them hung on the wall, like posters. He’d never even had a record player. In any case, I had originally intended it as an “editor-to-editor, back-to-school” gift.

Looking at him, I could tell that too much had happened. We were past apologies and record players.

We didn’t speak for the rest of the afternoon.

James’s birthday was the Saturday before Valentine’s Day. He hadn’t told me—he was not big on birthdays—but I had seen it on his college forms.

I wanted to do something really nice for him because he seemed a little down.

I got Dad’s permission to take him to the Hyde Park Drive-in in Poughkeepsie, which is about a seventy-minute drive from Tarrytown. They were having an Alfred Hitchcock festival, and James was such a movie buff.

It was a great day; the weather was really warm for February. We stayed to see two Hitchcock movies,
Vertigo
and
Psycho
(“Are you trying to tell me something?” James joked). Afterward we had dinner at a Friendly’s, and everything was great until on the way home when James’s car ran out of gas.

Honestly, I didn’t think it was that big of a deal.

“We’ll just call your mother,” I said.

“I can’t. I can’t. She’s already thinking I’m unstable because of the fight and the weirdness around the college letter. I can’t give her one more thing. I can’t.” He was panicking.

“I’ll call my dad.” Unfortunately, Dad wasn’t home and his cell phone was off. Even before I dialed, I remembered that he was at one of Rosa Rivera’s tango exhibitions. Then I called Alice. She wasn’t picking up either.

James finally agreed to phone his mother, who wasn’t home anyway.

My dad got home around one a.m. and agreed to meet us with the fuel. We weren’t far from Tarrytown. By then I was freezing. I was still disproportionately affected by cold, and James was worried about me. There was this raging look in his eyes, like he wanted to punch something. “I can’t goddamn believe I forgot to fill up the tank,” he said.

He looked at me. “You’re shivering.”

“Jims,” I said through chattering teeth, “I’m fine.”

“I can’t be trusted with anyone.”

“That’s not true. I’m just cold. I’m not going to die. Things happen.” I put my hand on his shoulder, but he shook me off.

His reaction seemed so out of proportion to the situation. We were only forty-five minutes from home for God’s sake. I’m ashamed to say it, but I was a little embarrassed to see James so—I really hate to say this—weak.

When Dad showed up, he didn’t seem all that mad about it, but it’s hard to tell with my dad sometimes. When we got back to my house, he asked to speak with James outside.

I stood at the window and listened to him.

Dad gave James a speech about how I was still “delicate” (which made me sound edible or like a glass figurine), and that James needed to be
more responsible
with me if he was going to keep seeing me. While I knew that James was already aware of everything Dad had said, I also knew that Dad needed to say it.

“Naomi,” Dad said when he came back inside, “I’m worried, kid. James seems a little out of control.”

“He’s fine,” I insisted, a little too adamantly, I suspect. “He’s under stress from all the college stuff.”

Dad looked me in the eyes. “I want you to know that I trust you.”

James had been planning to go visit USC for a tour on the Thursday after his car ran out of gas. He called me the night before he was scheduled to leave.

“I don’t know if I can go,” he said.

I asked him why not.

“I don’t feel right.”

“Jims, your car broke down. It was no big deal. Nothing’s happened.”

“It didn’t break. It ran out of gas because
I
forgot to fill it.”

“That could happen to anybody—”

“And it’s not just that. There was that fight and getting suspended. And…and I got fired from my job, I didn’t want to tell you, I’d missed too much work.”

“What do I care about your job? You were going to have to quit in a couple of months anyway.”

“My mom’s worried, and even you seem different. The way you looked at me on Sunday night. I’ve seen girls look at me that way before. I didn’t like to see it from you.”

“The way I looked at you was only worry because you seemed upset. And I’m not different,” I insisted. “I love you. Look, if you get there and you’re miserable, I’ll come. I promise.”

“Your dad would never let you.”

“I won’t tell him. I’ll make something up, I swear. I’ll tell him I’m going to a yearbook conference or to visit my mom or something.”

“You’d do that for me?”

“Christ, Jims, I threw myself down a flight of stairs just to meet you, didn’t I?” It was a joke between us, but he didn’t laugh.

“Okay,” he said finally. “Okay, but I’m holding you to that.”

I didn’t hear from him for about a day, but I figured that was probably a good thing. It meant he was busy and having a good time. He called me Friday night.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“I need you to come.”

“What’s wrong?”

He hadn’t even gone down to USC yet. It sounded like all he’d done since he’d gotten to California was sit in his dad’s house. “I’m just having a little trouble getting started is all.”

But it was more than that. There was something in his voice that scared me. “Are you all right?” I asked.

He didn’t answer my question. “Here’s the thing,” he said. “I looked it up. You can fly out of JFK tomorrow morning. I’d pay for the ticket. All you’d have to do is come.”

I found myself saying yes. I threw a couple of T-shirts, my laptop, a few randomly chosen CDs (I’d misplaced my iPod), my headphones, and another pair of jeans into my backpack.

I knocked on Dad’s door; he was on the phone, but he got off right away.

Despite the fact that I had been lying for a month, I am not a good liar. My stories are too elaborate and I forget them halfway through; I stammer; I sweat; I smile too much; I don’t make eye contact; I make too much eye contact. On this day, I was just right. “Dad,” I said, “I forgot to tell you that I’m supposed to go to a yearbook conference in San Diego tomorrow. I’ll be back Tuesday.” I was glad I hadn’t ever told him about quitting yearbook.

Dad didn’t even blink. “Do you need any money? A ride to the airport?”

I took the money; I got a ride from Alice and Yvette. Alice had just broken up with Yvette for the second time since the play had ended.

“Cookie, are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“He sounded bad, Alice.”

“If he sounded bad, maybe you should have called his mother?” Yvette suggested.

“She just makes things worse,” I said.

When we got to the airport, Alice got out of the car to hug me. “Listen, cookie, we love James, too, but do any of us really know him even?”

“I do!”

“Okay, okay, if you’re sure.”

“Call us when you get there, Nomi,” Yvette said from the car.

I was anxious as hell while I was waiting to get on the plane.

My anxieties flipped between ten or so major issues, many of which also fell under the subheading “if the plane crashes”:

I figured I could fix the last one at least, so I went into the nearest airport bookstore.

On a table toward the middle of the store, they had Dad’s book, which was just out in paperback.
Out Wandering: A Memoir.
I turned the book over and read the copy. “From the celebrated writer who along with his wife, Cassandra Miles-Porter, brought you the bestselling
Wandering Porters
travel series comes this deeply personal memoir about the end of his marriage, as seen through the prism of world events…” blah, blah, blah “…how he and his daughter managed to find peace of mind even while…” blah, blah, blah “…and in some ways, we are all out wandering…” blah, blah, blah. It sounded dreadful. I read Dad’s bio at the bottom. “Grant Porter lives with his daughter, Naomi, in Tarrytown, New York.” I added a couple phrases of my own, “his daughter, Naomi, who is a low-down, rotten liar and who has been lying to him for weeks.”