Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac(41)

“Maybe I’ll have to take you to California sometime?”

“What’s in California?”

“Kick-ass waves. I’m an amateur surfer and the Atlantic don’t really cut it,” he said. “My dad is, too. He lives in L.A.”

“Are you from there?”

“The thing is, I’m not really from anywhere, you know what I mean?”

I did.

“But yeah, I lived there for a while. Until I came here to live with my mom and my grandfather, and…I’d like to go back there for school. To the film program at USC, if I get in.”

On the way to the restaurant, it had started to snow.

By the time the movie was over, the town was a different place, the negative image of itself. I felt almost newborn myself, like it was my first winter ever.

“I wonder if there’s enough snow on the steps at school for us to go sledding,” James said.

We left his car at the movie theater and walked over to Tom Purdue, which was about a mile away. I was freezing, but I didn’t care. I bet the weather was worse in Kratovo.

We trudged across the campus to the entrance of Tom Purdue. We stood at the bottom of the steps, which were entirely blanketed by snow.

“This is where we met,” I pointed out.

“The lengths a girl will go to to meet a boy,” he deadpanned. “We need sleds.”

I told him I didn’t know where we could find any.

“No, like cafeteria trays or garbage can lids or something. Unfortunately, school’s closed.”

Luckily, I had my yearbook keys. I ran inside and located two plastic lids right in the front hallway.

“Let’s go,” I said. I didn’t bother to mention to James that I was supposed to be avoiding sports on account of my head. I didn’t really care.

My first few times down the hill I couldn’t really control the “sled,” and I got sent down at strange angles.

James was better than me. He showed me how to position my body and back so that I was in the middle and leaning forward. My next attempts were better.

“Who needs the Pacific?” he yelled.

We sledded down the steps until eleven-thirty. It was like meeting him over and over again.

We sledded until I couldn’t even make one more trip up the stairs. My cheeks were flushed, my lips were chapped, and every part of me was wet or sticky with snow. I was so cold, I was past feeling cold at all. I lay down in the snow at the bottom of the stairs. I felt like I was becoming an ice person and that when it became warm again, I would probably melt and disappear.

James kept sledding even after I had stopped. He went up and down five or six more times before parking himself at my feet. For the longest time he only looked at me.

“Lying there, you look like an angel,” he said softly.

I didn’t speak.

“Funny thing is, I don’t believe in angels.”

He offered me his hand, and we walked back to my house in the bright, early hours of Sunday.

He kissed me when we got to the door, and even though it was late, I invited him inside. Dad had gone out with Rosa Rivera, and for all I knew he was probably snowed in somewhere or other. James was shivering nearly as much as me at this point.

I brought him some clothes from Dad’s closet and he changed into them. “I’ll get my dad to drive you to your car when he gets back.”

James nodded and sat down at our kitchen table.

“Seventeen,” he said. “You’re still a baby.”

“Why? How old are you?”

“I’ll be nineteen in February.”

“That’s not that old.”

“Feels plenty old to me sometimes,” he said. “I was held back a grade.” He shrugged.

I smiled at him. “I’ve heard the rumors about you, you know?”

“Oh yeah, like what?”

I listed the most interesting ones: 1) he used drugs, 2) he went crazy over some girl at his old school, and 3) he had tried to kill himself and had been in a hospital.

James ran his fingers through his hair, which was still damp from the snow. “All true. Technically, the drugs were prescribed. And technically, I may have tried to kill myself twice, but basically all true. Does it matter?” His voice had changed. “Think. Think before you answer. It’s allowed to matter.”

I told him that it didn’t.

“I would have told you, but it’s not something I like to talk about when I first meet someone, or ever, and also…” His eyes were turned toward the window, but I could tell he was really watching me. “I wanted you to like me.”

“Why?”

“You seemed like a person who it might be nice to be liked by. I haven’t thought that about anybody for a while.” I had thought the same thing about him.

I put my arm around him. Neither of us moved or spoke for the longest time. “I can leave now,” he said, “and then we could just go on from there. Friends, maybe?”

I took his face in my hands and I told him none of it mattered to me at all.

That’s when he told me everything. For a guy who said “screw the past,” James certainly had a lot of it.

It had all started the year his brother died of lung cancer. James was fifteen. Sasha was eighteen, the same age James was now.