Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac(62)

The next picture I took connected mainly to Chloe. It was a photo of Chloe and me in Mom’s velvet chair. I meant that one to represent how we were related, but only through the chair, not by blood. In the front of the frame, I staged it so that you could see Mom’s back and a camera tripod.

I took one of a camera sitting at the bottom of the stairs at Tom Purdue. It rained that day, which made the image even more perfect. At first, I thought that one was about James, but I think it might have been about me.

I took one at that same park in Rye I’d visited with James. I put a typewriter in the middle of a field and a typewriter case as far away as I could while still keeping the two objects in the same frame. This one was about Will, I suppose. Or you could read it as a footnote to the typewriter case picture.

I staged about twenty-five more pictures. It took the better part of the next month, but I was happy with the results.

When I presented my project in Mr. Weir’s class the next week, I was scared at first; those photo kids could be tough.

“When I was younger,” I began, “my parents wrote these books. My dad wrote all the text, and my mother took all the pictures, but she also wrote the occasional footnote. That’s the only time I’m ever really mentioned in these books. That, and the picture on the back flap. I call my project ‘Footnotes from a Lost Youth,’ but I’m still playing with the title. It might be a little pretentious…”

Mr. Weir gave me a B. “It would have been an A-,” he said, “but I had to deduct for lateness.” He also put up my pictures in the school’s gallery. It was odd to have something so personal out there in that way, but the good thing about art is that no one necessarily knows what you mean by it anyway.

Dad and Rosa Rivera came. So did Alice and Yvette and all the kids I’d been in the play with.

Will came to see my pictures, too. I don’t know when, but one day a mix CD showed up in my mailbox, Footnotes from a Lost Youth. The first track was “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Part I,” the same one he’d been considering all those months ago. I felt forgiven. I called to thank him, but he wasn’t home.

Even Mom and Fuse came in from the city to see my pictures.

They took me out to dinner afterward. Of all things, what we talked about was how they had met.

The first time was in high school, which I had already known.

Fuse said that the second time was twenty years later on a subway platform in Brooklyn. Mom had been waiting to go to her photography show and Fuse had been waiting on the opposite subway platform to go to Manhattan to meet with clients. Just before Mom’s train got there, Fuse wrote his phone number on a sheet of looseleaf paper and held it up so she could see it, but he had no idea if she would write it down or call or what. Then Mom’s train pulled out of the station. She was still standing there, fishing through her bag. She yelled across the platform, “I couldn’t find a pen.” Then Fuse pointed up, meaning that they should meet outside the train station.

“So, depending on how you look at it, our love story took twenty years or thirty seconds,” Mom joked.

“It was very fast or very slow,” I said.

“Love stories are written in millimeters and milliseconds with a fast, dull pencil whose marks you can barely see,” Fuse said. “They are written in miles and eons with a chisel on the side of a mountaintop.”

“Honey,” Mom said with amusement in her voice, “that’s awfully poetic.” She coughed. “Pretentious.”

“It’s the philosophy major in me.” Fuse blushed.

The next week, I went to take down my pictures from the school gallery. When I got to the one of me and Chloe in the chair, it put me in mind of the difference between her origins and mine.

For Chloe, Mom had gone through pain, sweating, and thirty-five extra pounds. But at least she’d only had to travel a couple of blocks from her apartment to the hospital.

For me, she had filled out many forms, crossed her fingers, paid fifteen thousand dollars, overcome a language barrier, and dealt with opportunistic Russian bureaucrats. After all that, she got to sit for thirty hours in coach.

The delivery was different, but the result was basically the same. It was like Fuse had said: a love story in millimeters or a love story in miles.

13

ACE APPROACHED ME AGAIN ABOUT JOINING THE TENNIS team. His mixed doubles partner, Melissa Berenboim, had torn her ACL. She was out for the last three games of the season, and he needed a replacement quickly. “We never thought we should play together while we were going out, but I figured it’s fine now,” he said.

“What about our fight and everything else?”

“I thought you might say that, but first and foremost, I have to be a good captain to my team, and what is good for the team is me finding a replacement for Missy. Naomi, there are way, way, way more important things than whatever stupid stuff happened between you and me.”

“Like?” I was curious what Ace would say.

“Like tennis. And strong knees.”

“I’m warning you, I’m totally out of practice.”

“I’ll whip you right back into shape, Porter.”

The truth was, I’d wanted to go back to the team for a while. I wasn’t the greatest player in the world, but I loved playing. Ace had known that about me.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”