Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac(18)

I didn’t feel at all brave. Even though her words were ostensibly addressed to me, she seemed to be talking to Ace or the table at large or the whole school.

She took my hand in hers. “It’s strange because you look like yourself, and yet you’re so different, Naomi.”

“Different how?” I asked.

Brianna didn’t answer. She had finished talking to me and was on to the next person.

Four or five of the people sitting nearest to me also introduced themselves. Some of the girls spoke too loudly, as if I were deaf. Others wouldn’t quite look me in the eye. And then everyone just resumed The Lunch Show and ignored me, which was fine. I figured out pretty early on that these were Ace’s friends, not mine. I wondered where James Larkin sat—I hadn’t seen him yet. Or Will.

“Does Will usually eat with us?” I asked Ace.

“Why would you want to know about that?”

His reaction surprised me. “Did I say something wrong?”

“No…I know Landsman’s your friend, but I just don’t get that little dude at all.” Ace shook his head. “He eats in the yearbook office. You sometimes eat there, too.”

In addition to being loud, the cafeteria was kept at near-arctic temperatures, as if the administration was afraid our food might start to spoil while we were in the process of eating it. I actually started to shiver. On the way in, I had noticed kids eating in the courtyard. I said to Ace, “It’s such a nice day, maybe we could eat outside?”

Before Ace could say anything, Brianna answered, “Um, I guess we could, but we always eat in here.” Then Brianna and a girl whose name I couldn’t remember giggled, like I had suggested we eat on Mars.

“It’s true,” Ace said with a shrug.

So I shivered through another ten minutes of lunch before telling him that I needed to get something from my locker.

“Do you want me to come with you?” Ace asked.

I shook my head and told him I was fine.

But I didn’t go to my locker. I was simply tired of being cold. I walked out into the courtyard, but fall was near and it felt even colder to me out there.

I wandered behind the school. On the boundary between the athletic fields and the rest of campus was a greenhouse.

I tried the door and found that it was unlocked. It seemed somewhat less cold in there so I sat on a cement bench, in front of what appeared to be a cruel experiment with sunflowers—seven of the plants were mostly dead, but one was thriving. I wondered what the live one was being fed, or if it had just been more of a survivor to begin with.

I was still contemplating that eighth sunflower when a familiar deep voice said, “You’re shivering.”

It was James. I decided not to turn around and look at him yet. I didn’t want to reveal how pleased I was to see him again, especially considering that he hadn’t visited me in the hospital or at home.

“Maybe a little,” I replied casually. “Is it cold in here, by the way? I have trouble telling.”

“Not to me,” James said, emerging from behind an orange tree with an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips. He placed the cigarette in his back pants pocket. “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t cold to you.” He took off his jacket, which was brown corduroy with a sheepskin collar, and handed it to me. “Here.”

I put the jacket on. It smelled like cigarettes and paint. “You smoke?”

“Now and then. Mainly to keep myself out of worse trouble.”

For additional warmth I slipped my hands into his jacket’s pockets. I could feel keys, a bottle of pills, a lighter, a pen, a few slips of paper.

“Suppose I should have cleared out my pockets before lending my jacket to a girl,” he said. “What’s in there anyway?”

I gave him my report.

“Nothing too controversial, right?”

Depends on what the pills are for, I thought. “Depends on what the keys are to,” I said.

He laughed at that. “My mom’s house. My car, which is, at the moment, in the shop.”

Distantly, I heard the bell ring.

“You’re still shivering,” James said. He loosened his tie and took off his dress shirt. He had a T-shirt underneath. “Put it on under the jacket. You’ll be warmer.”

“Won’t you get in trouble?” The dress code at Tom Purdue was pretty strict.

He said he had another shirt in his locker. His arms were slim and muscular, but not like a guy who worked out. I noticed a two-inch horizontal scar across his right wrist. I wasn’t sure, but it looked like the kind of mark you’d get from trying to off yourself. He saw me looking at it. He didn’t cover it up, but he didn’t choose to explain it either.

The bell rang again. “You’re going to be late,” he said.

I looked at my hand. Sixth period was French III in Room 1—, the number had gotten smudged during the course of my morning ablutions. I held out my hand for James to read. “You wouldn’t happen to know where this is, would you?”

He held my hand like a book. After he’d read it, he closed his hand around my palm and offered to take me himself.

I liked the way his hand felt over mine. It might have been my imagination but I thought I could still feel the faintest of scabs on his palm from where I’d grabbed him so hard three weeks ago.