Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac (12 page)

Back in the car, Yvette said she had to go get ready for homecoming. She was going with Alice and a group of girls from drama. James said he would drop her off first and me second. On the way to her house, Yvette teased James about not going to homecoming. “Just about everybody in the play asked him, you know. Girls
and
boys,” she said to me.

James laughed. He said that not
everyone
had asked him and that he had to work anyway.

When we reached Yvette’s house, James and I helped her take all the costumes inside. She kissed James on the cheek. My involuntary and embarrassing reaction was to wonder if I could get away with doing that same thing when we got to my house.

Yvette kissed me on the cheek, too. “Maybe I’ll see you tonight, doll,” she said.

On the drive to my house, James asked me if I was going to the dance that night. I told him that I was, “With Ace.”

“Ah yes, the jock. Good name for a tennis player, Ace is.”

“Unless you’ve got a run of bad serves,” I joked.

James didn’t laugh, but then it hadn’t been much of a joke, I suppose.

About a minute later, he said, “You were good out there today. Really game and relaxed. You made things easy for me. You’re amazing at keeping still.”

I laughed. “What can I say? It’s a gift.” I told him how my mom had been a photographer, so I had spent most of my life posing for one thing or another.

“Had been?”

“Well, still is. But we’re not really speaking at the moment.”

He didn’t push me to say anything more about my mother, which I appreciated. “I don’t know a thing about acting, so that probably accounts for my relaxation,” I said.

“Maybe you should just accept the compliment,” he said.

But I’d never been much good there. At least not that I could remember. “Where do you work?” I asked.

He told me that he worked at the community college as an AV specialist, which basically meant projecting movies and videos for their adult education classes. “Pays pretty well, and my dad thinks I ought to have a job. I get to watch a lot of things I wouldn’t otherwise get to see.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, over the summer, there was this class on Swedish cinema, so I’ve pretty much watched everything Bergman ever did. Do you know who Ingmar Bergman is?”

I shook my head.

“He’s this brilliant director. His films are mainly about sex and memory. You’d probably find them interesting with…well, everything that’s happened to you,” he said. “And now there’s this class about the films of Woody Allen, so I’ve been watching a lot of his, too. I like him, but not as much as Bergman.”

“I love Woody,” I said. “My parents used to always rent all his movies when I was little. I especially love
Hannah and Her Sisters
and
The Purple Rose of Cairo.
” I was glad that there were some things I could still remember liking.

“Maybe you could come down sometime and watch a couple?” he suggested. “I could get you in. Not that it’s any big thing. You could bring your jock.” I’m pretty sure he was teasing me with that last part, but his deadpan made it hard to tell.

By then, he was pulling into my driveway. I told him that I doubted that Ace even liked Woody.

“Probably not,” he said. “Have a good time at your dance, Naomi.”

I wore the black velvet dress from my closet because I hadn’t had time to buy anything else. (Maybe the truth was that I hadn’t
made
time to buy anything else.) At the very least,
I
couldn’t remember having worn it before.

“Even better than last year,” Dad said when I came downstairs.

When he came to pick me up, Ace didn’t mention my having worn the dress before. He just kissed me on the cheek. “You look nice.”

Ace drove us all to the dance. I sat in front with him, and Brianna sat in the backseat with Alex, who, despite being Ace’s good friend, turned out to be a complete dick. I actually felt sorry for Brianna, which was saying something. The boy was drunk before we even left for the dance, and he kept trying to kiss her and paw her. I kept hearing her say, “No, Alex. No. Just wait, would you?” and other things like that. Ace turned up the radio, I think, to give them privacy, but maybe he was simply tired of listening to Brianna’s protests.

Finally, I turned around and said, “Look, Alex, hold off for fifteen minutes, will you? She wants to look nice for her picture, okay?”

“Naomi, it’s fine,” Brianna said icily.

I tried to make a joke of it. “She probably spent the last ten years getting ready.”

I think I heard Alex mumble something about “immature high school kids,” but I wasn’t sure.

The rest of the car ride was completely silent. I could tell Brianna, Ace, and that tool Alex were all pissed at me. I didn’t care about Brianna or Alex, but I felt somewhat bad about Ace. I started to regret having said anything in the first place. I mean, a girl like Brianna could take care of herself.

Inside the dance, they named the homecoming king and queen, and I saw one of the freshman staffers from yearbook taking pictures. I could tell that the pictures weren’t going to turn out well. For one, the angle was too low, which would give everyone double chins, and for two, he wasn’t getting any sort of variety. I went over to him and told him to stand on the table. He did. Then he thanked me and said that he was getting better stuff. He showed me a few in his camera’s digital monitor. I took off my heels and got on the table and shot a couple of frames myself. It was the most fun I’d had all night. I started to hypothesize that maybe the reason I had gotten so involved with yearbook was because I had liked taking pictures. Maybe it had been that simple. I wondered if it was
all
that simple—if my memory never came back, maybe it was as easy as asking myself what I liked and what I didn’t like.

When I turned to get off the table, Will was standing under me. “Can I help?” he asked, offering me his hand.

I accepted it. It’s difficult to get off a table in a dress.

“I didn’t think you were coming.”

“I wasn’t planning on it. I despise these things. Patten got sick, so I had to cover the photo keychain booth.” The photo keychain booth was one of yearbook’s many fundraisers. “Your dress—” Will began.

“I know, I know. It’s the same one I wore last year.”

“If you’d let me finish, I was going to say that it looks better with your hair that way,” he said. “You clean up good, Chief.”

“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.

“Ace, I’m not going to have sex with you,” I said. I reached over my shoulder and zipped my dress back up without any problems.

“Is it the howls? I can put the dog in the yard,” Ace said. “Just hold on a second. I can get him to stop. Bad Jonesy! Bad dog.”

I told him that it wasn’t about the dog.

“Well, what is it then?” He walked over to his bedroom window. His back was toward me, and I couldn’t see his face.

“I…I just don’t know,” I said. “The truth is, I don’t even know you. I don’t even know what we have in common.”

“There’s lots of stuff,” Ace said.

“Tell me, then. I’d really like to know.”

“Tennis. School.” Ace sighed. He wouldn’t turn back around. “I love you, Naomi.”

“Why?”

He shrugged violently. “Jesus, I don’t know. Why does anyone like anyone? Because you’re super-hot?”

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

“I’m asking you. I mean I’m telling you. I don’t know. You’re confusing me.” Ace turned around and looked at me helplessly, hopelessly. “Because you’re good at school, but can also hold a drink. Because we used to talk about stuff. I don’t know. I just did.”

“Did or do?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“
Did
in the past, or
do
in the present?”

“Do! I meant do. Isn’t that what I said?” He collapsed onto his bed, so that he was staring up at his ceiling. The box spring squeaked in agony, which started Jonesy barking again. I opened Ace’s door, and Jonesy ran in. Luckily, Jonesy wasn’t in the mood for sex anymore either. He wanted cuddling and intimacy. He jumped onto the bed and lay down next to Ace.

“But honestly, you’ve been acting so weird lately,” Ace said quietly.

Maybe because I can’t remember anything?
I thought bitterly.

“Like yelling at Alex in the car, what was that about? And now you’re in this play? And your hair!”

It was the first he’d mentioned it since the day I’d cut it. I had no idea he was still thinking about it. “What about my hair?” I asked. Not because I cared, but because I was sort of curious.

“I loved it long.”

It was the second time he’d used the word love all night, but it was the only time I believed him.

“I’m not used to it this way,” he continued. “I honestly don’t even know what to think.”