Gabrielle Zevin: Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

Back to Winnie. She was five inches shorter than me, but that didn’t stop her from getting right up in my face. “Look, Naomi,” she said, “he was in love with you. We know it. Everyone knows it. But Will is a person of value, and you threw him out when you had James, so now you should just leave him alone.”

“Gauntlet thrown,” said Alice. She let out a low-pitched whistle.

I was shocked. Winnie had always seemed so sweet and like the least likely person ever to confront you in a hallway with a “stay away from my man” speech.

I told her that Will and I “are just friends and barely that.”

Winnie narrowed her eyes at me before storming off.

“Cookie, do you need me to kick her butt?” Alice asked. “We’re about the same height, but I’m fiercer than I look.”

I shook my head. Even though Winnie was being absurd and I could have used a friend at that particular moment, I decided to keep my distance from Will. I needed his friendship, but I wasn’t sure that I deserved it.

I WAS STILL GROUNDED, NOT THAT IT MATTERED anyway. I didn’t have anywhere I wanted to go.

To pass the time, I studied, I tried to come up with a new photography project, I ran laps around my neighborhood.

I read my dad’s book in its entirety. It was much the way the jacket described it, but there was this one part where he talked about how he had been “emotionally unfaithful” to Mom even before the split. He wrote how he was always flirting, always wanting people to like him, even needing their kid (me) to love him more. He wrote, “At times, it must have been exhausting to be my wife.” It was strange to know that my dad had such thoughts.

I listened to music. I went through all of my own CDs first. Then I listened to the CDs Will had made for me, and when I was done with those, I listened to them again. It was a completely different experience, listening to his mixes with my memory back. All the songs meant a little something to me. They were a sort of shorthand between us, a common language that I never could have guessed at. The last song of the first one he’d ever given me ( Songs for a Teenage Amnesiac , Vol. I) was called “I Will.” It was sweet and old-fashioned, kind of like him.

About a month into my punishment, Dad got tired of seeing me mope around the house. “I’m letting you out this weekend, kid.”

I asked him if that meant the grounding was over.

“Nope,” he said. “But I am packing you off to your mother’s.”

I could have argued, I suppose. I could have put up a fuss, but what was the point? I knew this visit was long overdue.

When I got to her apartment, my mother answered the door. She said she’d sent Fuse and Chloe away for the day so it would just be us.

She smiled very casually. “I thought we could talk about your photography project today. Tell me what it’s supposed to be.” Her wording seemed a bit canned, like she’d been practicing it for days. Her nervousness touched me, I guess.

We went into Mom’s studio and she showed me pictures, her own and other people’s, and we tossed some ideas back and forth.

One of Mom’s personal albums was a pregnancy album. She had taken a single picture of herself each and every day for eight months. Beginning with the day she found out “for certain” from the doctor, she had fastened one of her cameras to a tripod and positioned it in front of a burgundy velvet wingback chair. I remembered the chair from my old house because Dad had always hated it. Also, Mom happened to be sitting in it now as I looked at the album.

Every picture was the same composition—my mother in the chair—except her clothing changed and her bump got bigger. Here and there, you would find one with Fuse’s hand on Mom’s belly. There were 225 pictures total. If you stacked them in a pile and shuffled through them really fast, it was a cartoon flip book where nothing much happened aside from the miracle of human life, if you’re into that sort of thing…

The last one showed a gray sky, with my mother wearing blue jeans and a white V-neck undershirt that I guessed belonged to Fuse. Her expression wasn’t one of the obvious ones like happy or sad—it fell somewhere between greeting a person you haven’t seen in a long time and stifling a yawn , but it really wasn’t either. You’d probably have to see the picture to know what I meant.

Mom came to look at the album over my shoulder. “These are from ages and ages ago. Before you were even born.”

“It’s not Chloe, then?” I asked, surprised.

Mom shook her head. There was a faraway look in her eyes. “Your dad and I, we lost that one.”

I had never known that. I had thought they couldn’t get pregnant. It occurred to me how it was funny all the things you don’t know about someone, even someone you live with. How, in a way, the story of that baby was the beginning of my story, wasn’t it? Though I never would have known it looking at the pictures, and no one else would ever have known it either. Not unless there’d been a footnote.

That was when I had an idea for my photography project.

Each picture in my series would be a footnote to the next. In other words, all the images would be footnoting each other. The photos would explain each other through other photos.

The first picture I took was a restaging of my “birth.” I got a typewriter case from a thrift store and lugged it back to my mother’s apartment in New York City. Chloe, although she was not a baby, played the part of me. She couldn’t fit in the case, so she stood on top of it.

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.