Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac(34)

“Thanks.” I slipped my heels back on, and I was now looking down at Will a spike’s worth. “I like your suit,” I told him.

“Had to improvise.” He was wearing an emerald velvet suit and a paisley shirt. He was the only person dressed even remotely that way. “Get any good homecoming court pictures?” he asked.

I rolled my eyes. “Just your usual thrill of victory, agony of defeat.”

“Ah, youth. Bittersweet. Fleeting,” he wisecracked.

“Exactly.”

“I watched you, though,” Will said, looking me right in the eye. “You looked really, really…happy up there.”

I had been happy, but I didn’t like the way Will was looking at me. No, looking isn’t the right word. Seeing. I wasn’t comfortable with how much Will saw. He made me feel transparent when I was still opaque to myself.

He said he’d tried calling me that afternoon, but that my phone had been off. I was about to make up yet another lie when Ace was suddenly by my side. “Will,” Ace said.

Will nodded. “Zuckerman.”

“Been harassing my girl?” Ace said, putting his arm around me.

I knew that objectively speaking there was nothing wrong with Ace calling me “his girl,” and yet the arm offended me. It seemed over the top. “Just yearbook business,” I said.

“Right. Always with the yearbook business,” Ace said in a nasty tone that perplexed me.

“Yeah, how else are we going to preserve your glory years, Zuckerman?” Will asked.

I felt like I didn’t know quite what was going on between Ace and Will. Somehow, it made me long for James.

“So, Will, you mind if I take my girl for a dance?”

“She doesn’t like to dance,” Will said under his breath. Then he excused himself. I didn’t see him for the rest of the night.

After the dance, Brianna and Alex decided to get a ride home with someone else, so Ace and I were alone in the car. I thought he was just driving me back to my house, but instead he took me to his.

He said his parents had gone to Boston for the weekend and that we had the run of the place.

He asked me if I wanted a drink, and I declined. I had been avoiding alcohol since his friend’s party, which seemed like something he might have guessed.

He led me to his room, which was tidy and preppy like the rest of the house, and like Ace himself, for that matter. The wallpaper was plaid, and vintage wooden tennis rackets hung from the wall. I looked at his bookshelves, and other than school books all he had were athletes’ memoirs and a set of leather-bound classics. He had one picture of us taped to the wall by his bed. We were both dressed for tennis. The picture was out of focus, but I could see my hair was in a ponytail, the way Ace had said that he liked me best.

I sat down on his bed: an old, spring-loaded mattress that sounded like it was wheezing. Ace sat down next to me—squeak—and kissed me on the mouth. He still tasted like Gatorade even though I knew for a fact he hadn’t had any for at least the last five hours.

“Do you remember what happened here a year ago?” he asked.

Duh, I had amnesia. “No,” I said.

So he told me. At last year’s homecoming dance, Ace and I had “put one over the net”—i.e., we had done it for the first time. We had “played several sets” since then, but had mutually agreed to sit out the “summer season” for reasons which Ace chose not to specify. It was his idea that we should celebrate our anniversary with a “rematch.” I’m not sure if nerves were the reason for Ace’s lame sports/sex metaphors, but it was starting to put the whole tennis wristbands debacle into pathetic perspective.

I told him that I still hadn’t started up with the pill again, and he said, “That’s okay. I’ve come equipped.” He whipped out a pack of condoms from the nightstand like a sports manager providing balls for the team. His hands were so quick—I barely saw him open or close the drawer—I got a sense of what he was probably like on the courts.

I felt oddly numb about the whole thing. My thinking was along the lines of Well, I’ve done it before. Might as well get it over with and do it again.

Ace started to unzip my dress, but he couldn’t get the zipper down. “This is stuck,” he said.

“Well, don’t break it,” I protested. “I need to be able to put it back on.”

At that moment, his one-hundred-year-old basset hound came into the room to say hello. “Get, Jonesy,” Ace said. “Get!”

Jonesy didn’t want to go. He mounted Ace’s right leg and started humping it. Ace kept shaking his leg at Jonesy, but the dog would not be deterred. “Get, get!” Ace stood up and pushed Jonesy from the room, but I could still hear the dog’s howls outside the door.

I started to laugh. It struck me as humorous that something Ace didn’t want his dog to do was something he desperately wanted me to do.

“Where were we?” Ace asked.

The whole thing was absurd.

Since I couldn’t remember the “real” first time I’d lost my virginity, this would have become my de facto first time. I wanted a better story than I did it with this boy who I wasn’t very into and who had mysterious Gatorade breath; in his room decorated with sports equipment; at least he was nice enough to provide condoms and get his ancient, horny dog to leave us alone. Put it that way, and I couldn’t help but wonder how I’d let it get so far in the first place.