Gabrielle Zevin: Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

ROSA RIVERA, MY DAD, AND I WERE WATCHING A nature program. Dad still watched them, though he watched fewer now, and when he did, it was with Rosa Rivera or me.

In any case, this particular one was about porcupines. So the guy porcupine will sing a song if he wants to mate, and if the lady porcupine’s not in the mood or would prefer a different porcupine, she pretends not to hear him before running away. And sometimes he’s completely the right porcupine, but she’ll run away anyway because she’s not ready. But if he’s the porcupine for her and the timing’s right, they stand up and face each other, eye-to-eye and belly-to-belly. They really take the time to see each other.

“This is so sweet,” Rosa commented. “He is showing her the respect. Why don’t you do that to me?” She turned Dad to face her, porcupine-style.

“After the staring has continued an appropriate time,” the TV narrator went on, “the male porcupine covers the female from tip to toe with his own urine.”

“Please do not ever do that to me, darling,” Rosa told Dad.

“His own urine?” Dad asked. “Isn’t that redundant? Who else’s urine might he be using?”

The TV narrator advised “never getting too near porcupines mating,” which seemed like sound, if obvious, advice to me.

I didn’t hear what happened after the urination because my cell phone rang, so I went into the dining room to answer it. It was Will’s girlfriend, Winnie.

“I was wondering if you’d heard from Will,” she said stiffly.

I hadn’t spoken to him since lunchtime, which wasn’t particularly uncommon since I wasn’t on yearbook anymore and we didn’t have any classes together. He’d sometimes call me at night, but just as often not. “No,” I said. “Why?”

“No one’s heard from him since the ambulance came. We thought he might call you.”

“Winnie, what are you talking about? What ambulance?”

“You haven’t heard, then?” she asked.

Obviously . Why do people always ask that? I said, “No, Winnie. Please tell me.”

It had started after school at The Phoenix . First he had had a coughing fit and then he said he was having trouble breathing. He tried to continue working, though everyone could tell he wasn’t himself. Then he passed out. He woke up right before the ambulance got there. Winnie said that he told everyone to keep working, and that nobody should come with him in the ambulance, and that he’d call with instructions later that night. “Isn’t that so like Will?” Winnie asked. “Only he never called in with instructions, which is completely not like him, and now everyone’s freaking out. I should have gone with him. I can’t get Mrs. Landsman on the phone.” Her voice was small. “Do you think he’s dying, Naomi?”

“I’m sorry, Winnie, I have to get off the phone now. I’ll call you if I hear anything.” My hands were shaking.

Dad muted the porcupine program and called out from the living room. “Is everything okay?”

I took a deep breath. I dialed Will’s home number, but no one picked up.

“Is everything okay?” Dad had come into the dining room.

“It’s Will,” I told Dad. “They…” I cleared my throat. “They took him away in an ambulance. He’s sick. We have to go to the hospital.”

Dad looked at his watch. “I’m sure it’s nothing serious. Besides, it’s nearly ten o’clock, Naomi. They won’t let you visit him until tomorrow anyway.”

“I have to know what’s wrong.” I started heading toward the door.

“Wait!” Dad said. “I’ll call the hospital first.”

While Dad found the number to the hospital and called it, I thought of how Will knew everything about me, and how if he were gone, part of me would be missing forever. I wondered if the person who really loves you is the person who knows all your stories, the person who wants to know all your stories.

Dad hung up the kitchen phone and said, “They have a William Landsman, but of course they wouldn’t tell me anything about his condition. We can’t ring his room because it’s too late. But if he has a room, he’s definitely not dead, Nomi.”

“What if he’s dying, Dad? I’m going down there.”

Dad sighed. “It’s ten o’clock. Visiting hours are over. Besides, it’s storming out.” There was a particularly brutal late spring downpour going on outside with wind, lightning, and all the special effects.

“Maybe his mom will be in the waiting room? And she could tell us what happened,” I argued.

Dad looked me in the eye. “Okay,” he said finally, grabbing his keys off the dining room table. “Rosa, we’re going out for a bit.”

In our rush we had forgotten umbrellas, and Dad and I got completely soaked on the walk from the parking lot to the hospital.

When we got there, the waiting room of the pediatrics unit was completely empty. I whispered to Dad that he should ask the nurse behind the desk if she could tell us about Will’s condition. I figured they’d be more likely to respect an adult than a teenage girl. But when the nurse asked if Dad was Will’s guardian, Dad shook his head no, like a goddamn idiot.

I burst into tears. My dad could be so annoying.

The nurse looked at me curiously. “I recognize y’all. Head trauma in August, am I right?”

I nodded.

“I pretty much have a photographic memory for faces,” she reported. “How you been, hon?”

“Mainly good. Except my friend Will might be dying and no one will tell me anything,” I said.

“Oh, honey, he ain’t dying. He just has”—she lowered her voice to a whisper—“pneumonia is all. A bad case. His lung collapsed, but he’s sleeping now. And I didn’t just say that.”

I leaned across the desk and kissed her once on each of her cherubic peach cheeks, even though getting physical with total strangers was not my thing at all.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you, thank you.”

“My pleasure,” she said. “And I didn’t just say that , either.”

“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.