Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac(49)

I said not to worry.

James sat up in bed and said, “No, I’m serious. Today, I almost forgot to take my pill. The way I feel about you…sometimes it scares me.”

I started kissing him all over. Not just on the mouth—in my opinion, the mouth gets too much attention. There are a million equally interesting and lovely spaces to put lips to. I kissed him on the crease behind his knee. I kissed him on the small of his back, which was narrow but surprisingly muscular. I kissed him on the round bone that stuck out from the ankle; I don’t know what that’s called. I kissed him on his eyebrows, which were dark and well forested and just a hair or two shy of a unibrow. I kissed him on his wrist, right on top of that two-inch horizontal scar.

He pulled his wrist away from me.

“Don’t,” I said.

He laughed. “God, I was so stupid back then.”

“Do you mean for trying to kill yourself?”

He laughed a little longer, and a little more sadly somehow. “No. I just meant that if you’re slitting your wrists, you’re supposed to do it vertically, not horizontally. If you cut horizontally, you don’t bleed enough. The wound begins to heal on its own.”

My worst subject, aside from photography, was French. I had to study like a fiend just to pass, and even then I didn’t know as many vocabulary words as required for the most elementary conversations.

As luck would have it, James was a whiz at French. The private school he had gone to in California started teaching the subject nearly simultaneously with English. He would sometimes help me study by having conversations with me en français where he would introduce new words that I hadn’t yet covered.

We were in his car when he asked me, in French, “Do you blame Will Landsman or the stairs for your accident?”

I had to ask him to translate, because stairs was outside of my limited vocabulary. Accident, however, was not.

Once he’d translated, I replied without really thinking, “Ni l’un ni l’autre. L’appareil-photo,” meaning “Neither, I blame the camera.”

James laughed. “Hey, that was good.”

The strange thing was I hadn’t known I knew the words for “neither” or “camera” until I said them.

We were driving to his job at the community college (he was doing American Cinema that semester), and I remember looking at the trees and knowing that they were arbres.

That the road was route.

And the sky, ciel.

And marble.

And coin toss.

And coffee cup.

And the French words for everything under the sun.

I was about to tell James that my French had, unexpectedly, seemed to return, when I realized that it was not alone.

I remembered everything.

Everything everything.

Starting with that day.

Will and I had been arguing about who should have to go back to the office to get the camera.

Will removed a quarter from his pocket, and without even asking he announced that I would be tails and he, heads.

So I joked, “Who made you God?”

“Naomi,” he asked, “are you saying you’d prefer to be heads?”

I wasn’t necessarily saying that—I didn’t really care either way—but my friend (and co-editor) could be efficient to the point of dictatorial, and as his co-editor (and friend), I thought that this was something he needed to work on. “People appreciate being asked,” I said. “As a courtesy, you know?”

Will sighed. “Heads or tails?”

I called heads just as he threw the coin. It was, in some respects, a decent throw—high enough that I momentarily lost track of it, though this might have been an illusion caused by the silver against the twilight. High enough that I wondered if Will, who was not known for his athletic prowess, would actually manage to catch it. He didn’t. The coin landed with an undignified plop in a puddle seven feet over, on the border between the student and faculty parking lots. We raced over to verify the results. I was fast from tennis and I got there first. Through the murky water I could make out the hazy outline of an eagle.

“Should have stuck with tails, Chief,” he said, fishing George Washington out of the puddle.

“Yeah, yeah.”

We parted by shaking hands, which was how my colleague and I always said goodbye.

I trudged across the faculty parking lot and across the school’s two athletic fields—our paltry marching band (twenty-three members) was practicing on one, and our paltry football team (average height: five feet eight inches) on the other.

I trudged up the hill that began at the lower-school (grades 7–9) buildings and peaked at the upper school (10–12) in an impressive display of topographical symbolism.

I trudged up the twenty-five marble steps that led to the entrance of the main building; the brick, banklike structure people thought of when they thought of Tom Purdue, largely because it was on the cover of all the brochures. At this point, it was nearly seven o’clock and the halls were empty, the way you’d expect them to be at nearly seven o’clock. I unlocked the door to The Phoenix—no one was there since school hadn’t even started—and retrieved the camera, which was new enough that we hadn’t even had time to buy a carrying case or a strap yet.

In the time all this took, it had officially become dark, and I was ready to be home. I jogged out of the building and down the marble stairs.