Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac(20)

“I never miss yearbook,” he said. “You don’t either. Where are you? I’ll come get you right now.”

“Sure, Will. I’m in the ladies’. Come on in.”

“Um…you’re not serious?”

“No. I’m not.”

Will laughed. “Right. How about I meet you at yearbook, then? It’s the classroom next door to Weir’s. By the way, you should call your dad to let him know you’re with me.”

“Hey, Will?” I asked.

“What?”

“How come I was going to drop photography?”

“Photography. Photography. Okay, I think you said it was because you thought that the big project was going to take up too much of your time. Also, you didn’t think it was right for your grade to be based on a personal story. I think you thought it left too much to chance. And…that’s it, I think.”

I could tell he was leaving something out. My dad always says to listen for the pauses when you want to know if someone’s hiding something. I asked Will if there was anything else.

“Well. I’m theorizing here. But the first two years of photography are more technical. Like which cameras to use and lighting and processing and Photoshop. But advanced is more creative, more like what your mom does, if you know what I mean. So maybe that was the problem?”

I didn’t say anything, but it sounded like truth. “I’ll see you upstairs,” I said.

The staff cheered for me when I entered the room and everyone sang “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and shook my hand and patted me on the back, like I was some kind of hero. Someone held up a camera that turned out to be the camera, and said that I should have my picture taken with my old nemesis. They rounded up yet another camera, and I pretended to be having a fistfight with the camera, which made everyone laugh. I felt a little overwhelmed and maybe even touched, because it was clear how much these people really did like me, as opposed to the ones I had to eat with in the cafeteria.

All that was wonderful, until I started to realize what the actual business of yearbook entailed. It amounted to a succession of group photos, selling advertisements, and going to conferences about (you guessed it) yearbooks. All this required an endless series of meetings and debates. I wondered why in the world it could possibly take so much time, money, and effort to slap two hard covers around a stack of photographs.

The meeting lasted until around seven o’clock at night. There were photos to approve and copy to edit and schedules to arrange. On the way out, I asked Will how many times yearbook met each week. He laughed and said, “You’re joking, right? We meet every day. Some weekends, too.”

I did the math. That amounted to twenty (plus) hours a week of yearbook.

Seven hundred and twenty hours a school year—not including weekends or yearbook conferences.

Any way you looked at it: a hell of a lot of time.

I hoped that I would get my memory back, so that I would remember what I had liked about yearbook in the first place. I didn’t want to let all these nice people down.

In the car on the way home, Will couldn’t stop talking yearbook. The guy was obsessed, and I guess with seven hundred twenty hours a year, you’d have to be. I mainly found myself ignoring him. I’d nod every now and again and that seemed to be all the response that was required on my part.

I wanted to ask him why he (I) liked yearbook so much, but I thought it might hurt his feelings.

“You’re awfully quiet,” he said.

I told him I was tired, which I was.

“I’ve been talking too much,” he said. “I guess I just got excited that you were back. It’s not anywhere near as much fun without you, Chief.”

We were halfway to my house and stopped at a red light when I spotted James Larkin walking along the sidewalk. It had started drizzling, and even with whatever strangeness had passed between us in the greenhouse, I felt like we should offer him a ride. I asked Will if he would mind pulling the car over, and he replied, “The chap looks like he wants to be by himself.”

I reminded him how much James had helped me in the hospital, and how I had never had a chance to really thank him. “Plus,” I added, “he was nice enough to return the yearbook camera.” I knew that last part would definitely get Will. He sighed like it was really putting him out and muttered something about it “costing a lot of money to keep starting and stopping the car all over the place.” So I told him he could just drop me off, that I’d walk the rest of the way home. “Yeah right, I’m really going to leave my injured friend in the rain,” he said. “I don’t have all day to chauffeur you and your buddies around.”

I got out of the car and called James’s name. “Do you need a ride?” He turned real slow, and for a second after he saw me I was pretty sure he was just going to keep right on walking. Finally, he ambled over to Will’s car. He didn’t look all that enthusiastic about seeing me again. I was starting to wonder if I had hallucinated the boy I had met in the hospital.

“Still cold?” he asked politely.

“A little,” I replied. “Your shirt’s in my locker.”

James shrugged.

I was about to say how I’d been hoping we’d run into each other again when Will decided to get out of the car. Will edged himself between James and me and stuck out his hand. “Larkin, nice to see you, and thanks again for dropping off the camera. Naomi’s the other editor of the yearbook, not that you asked.”