Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac(65)

“Could I leave a note to let him know I was here?”

“Sure thing, honey.” She handed me a piece of hospital stationery.

I didn’t know what to write. My heart had been bursting with so many things, and yet, when it came time to put any of them on paper, I couldn’t. Finally I wrote the following lines:

Dearest Coach,

I’ll see you tomorrow, if you’ll have me.

Yours,

Chief

I handed the note to the nurse. I saw her read it before folding it in half and writing Will’s name across the other side. “Visiting hours start at eleven,” she said.

I remembered how Will had gotten there at 10:50 when it was me in the hospital, and I vowed to do the same.

In the car on the way home, Dad kept stealing sidelong glances at me. “Is something going on between you and Will?”

“No.” I shook my head. I wondered if I had said too much in my note. What the hell had I meant by if you’ll have me? Of course he’d have me. It was a hospital. You got visited by whoever showed up. What was Will, who analyzed everything, going to make of my stupid note? “No,” I said firmly.

“You sure?”

“I’m sorry, Dad. I have to make a call,” I said by way of changing the subject, but also because I actually did. I dialed Winnie’s number. “Winnie? This is Naomi Porter. He’s going to be fine,” I said.

I knew Dad wouldn’t give me permission to skip two periods of school, so I didn’t ask. Instead, I forged a note claiming a doctor’s appointment (and wasn’t that partially true, really? I was going to a hospital after all…).

In the elevator I thought about the note I had left for Will the night before and how it contained the three most ill-conceived sentences in the history of the world. Why had I written “Dearest Coach”? The “dearest” seemed ridiculously sentimental in the morning. We were talking about Will here. And “Yours, Chief”? Would he think I was saying that I was his and he was mine? Which, incidentally, I had been, but I didn’t want him to know that yet.

I tried to put it out of my mind. And maybe he hadn’t gotten it anyway? It hadn’t exactly been sent registered mail or something.

When I got to his room, he was sitting up in bed with his laptop on his food tray. He was wearing hospital pajamas with his smoking jacket over them, and he looked like himself, but very pale. He smiled at me, and I suddenly felt shy around him.

“Hey there” was all I could manage to say. I didn’t make eye contact either. I had my eyes focused on the foot of the bed. Then I decided that this was idiotic, so I looked at him as unsentimentally as possible. “Well, what happened to you?”

I moved over to his bedside and Will told me. He’d been feeling bad for a while, but he’d ignored it, thinking it was stress or just the flu or what have you. And yesterday, all of a sudden, he passed out. “They have no idea how I managed to take it so long,” he said almost proudly. “My lung had collapsed, it was so packed with bacteria.”

“Lovely,” I said.

“Isn’t it though? It was much more complicated than your average pneumonia.”

“You could never be simple,” I said.

We went on like that for a while, not saying all that much. If Will had gotten my note, he didn’t mention it or didn’t think it was anything to remark on. I didn’t bring it up either.

Yet, inside me, things were different. It was like that physics DVD I’d watched about string theory way back when. Do you remember? The one with the scientists groping around in the dark. I had thought the way I felt about Will was just a room, but it had turned out to be a mansion. He had turned out to be the mansion. Now that I knew that, it was difficult to go back to the way things had been.

At the end of my visit, Will told me he needed to talk about something serious. I thought to myself, Here it comes. My stupid note.

All he said was “I need you to do me a really important favor.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Do you want me to get your assignments or something?”

He shook his head. “No, Winnie’s doing that. I want you to run yearbook for me while I’m away. You know as much as me, and I’ll probably be out of school for at least the next two weeks. Plus, the book’s done. Only distribution and the end-of-year inserts and things like that. Stuff you could do sleepwalking, Chief.”

“Sure thing, Coach,” I said. “Just put me in the game.”

So that’s how I went from Ex-Co-editor to Interim Editor-in-Chief of The Phoenix.

There were a few people on the staff who were not exactly happy to see me back. They rightfully thought of me as a traitor and a deserter. But most of the staff understood that I was filling in for Will because he had asked me to do it. They didn’t necessarily throw a parade, but out of respect for him they respected me.

Will sent me almost hourly e-mails. As his mother had banned him from the phone for the first several days of his recuperation, I went to see him every night with updates and to ask advice, even though it wasn’t the sort of work that required much input. It was mainly just accounting and distribution, as Will had said. But he was crazy over that sort of thing.

His seventeenth birthday was June 5.

I did the best I could to wrap the record player, but I hadn’t done that great a job and the arm was poking out. I lugged it out to the car, then drove over to the apartment he shared with his mom. Winnie was there, as were Mrs. Landsman and a few people from the staff.