Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac(33)

I laughed. “What can I say? It’s a gift.” I told him how my mom had been a photographer, so I had spent most of my life posing for one thing or another.

“Had been?”

“Well, still is. But we’re not really speaking at the moment.”

He didn’t push me to say anything more about my mother, which I appreciated. “I don’t know a thing about acting, so that probably accounts for my relaxation,” I said.

“Maybe you should just accept the compliment,” he said.

But I’d never been much good there. At least not that I could remember. “Where do you work?” I asked.

He told me that he worked at the community college as an AV specialist, which basically meant projecting movies and videos for their adult education classes. “Pays pretty well, and my dad thinks I ought to have a job. I get to watch a lot of things I wouldn’t otherwise get to see.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, over the summer, there was this class on Swedish cinema, so I’ve pretty much watched everything Bergman ever did. Do you know who Ingmar Bergman is?”

I shook my head.

“He’s this brilliant director. His films are mainly about sex and memory. You’d probably find them interesting with…well, everything that’s happened to you,” he said. “And now there’s this class about the films of Woody Allen, so I’ve been watching a lot of his, too. I like him, but not as much as Bergman.”

“I love Woody,” I said. “My parents used to always rent all his movies when I was little. I especially love Hannah and Her Sisters and The Purple Rose of Cairo.” I was glad that there were some things I could still remember liking.

“Maybe you could come down sometime and watch a couple?” he suggested. “I could get you in. Not that it’s any big thing. You could bring your jock.” I’m pretty sure he was teasing me with that last part, but his deadpan made it hard to tell.

By then, he was pulling into my driveway. I told him that I doubted that Ace even liked Woody.

“Probably not,” he said. “Have a good time at your dance, Naomi.”

I wore the black velvet dress from my closet because I hadn’t had time to buy anything else. (Maybe the truth was that I hadn’t made time to buy anything else.) At the very least, I couldn’t remember having worn it before.

“Even better than last year,” Dad said when I came downstairs.

When he came to pick me up, Ace didn’t mention my having worn the dress before. He just kissed me on the cheek. “You look nice.”

Ace drove us all to the dance. I sat in front with him, and Brianna sat in the backseat with Alex, who, despite being Ace’s good friend, turned out to be a complete dick. I actually felt sorry for Brianna, which was saying something. The boy was drunk before we even left for the dance, and he kept trying to kiss her and paw her. I kept hearing her say, “No, Alex. No. Just wait, would you?” and other things like that. Ace turned up the radio, I think, to give them privacy, but maybe he was simply tired of listening to Brianna’s protests.

Finally, I turned around and said, “Look, Alex, hold off for fifteen minutes, will you? She wants to look nice for her picture, okay?”

“Naomi, it’s fine,” Brianna said icily.

I tried to make a joke of it. “She probably spent the last ten years getting ready.”

I think I heard Alex mumble something about “immature high school kids,” but I wasn’t sure.

The rest of the car ride was completely silent. I could tell Brianna, Ace, and that tool Alex were all pissed at me. I didn’t care about Brianna or Alex, but I felt somewhat bad about Ace. I started to regret having said anything in the first place. I mean, a girl like Brianna could take care of herself.

Inside the dance, they named the homecoming king and queen, and I saw one of the freshman staffers from yearbook taking pictures. I could tell that the pictures weren’t going to turn out well. For one, the angle was too low, which would give everyone double chins, and for two, he wasn’t getting any sort of variety. I went over to him and told him to stand on the table. He did. Then he thanked me and said that he was getting better stuff. He showed me a few in his camera’s digital monitor. I took off my heels and got on the table and shot a couple of frames myself. It was the most fun I’d had all night. I started to hypothesize that maybe the reason I had gotten so involved with yearbook was because I had liked taking pictures. Maybe it had been that simple. I wondered if it was all that simple—if my memory never came back, maybe it was as easy as asking myself what I liked and what I didn’t like.

When I turned to get off the table, Will was standing under me. “Can I help?” he asked, offering me his hand.

I accepted it. It’s difficult to get off a table in a dress.

“I didn’t think you were coming.”

“I wasn’t planning on it. I despise these things. Patten got sick, so I had to cover the photo keychain booth.” The photo keychain booth was one of yearbook’s many fundraisers. “Your dress—” Will began.

“I know, I know. It’s the same one I wore last year.”

“If you’d let me finish, I was going to say that it looks better with your hair that way,” he said. “You clean up good, Chief.”