Gabrielle Zevin: Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“Okay. When you’ve been silent for more than five minutes, I’ll know to hang up. Your cell phone’ll time out after thirty seconds anyway.”

We kept naming songs…

“‘Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.’”

“‘The Only Living Boy in New York.’”

“Too elegiac?”

“That’s what’s good about it for a graduation, I think.”

…until I was asleep.

Ten months and one or two lives later, I was back where I started: alone again at The Phoenix at around seven on a Wednesday. There’s not much to do yearbook-wise for the couple of weeks after the books have been distributed. I was thinking how unnaturally quiet and lonely the office was without anyone in it when my phone rang. It was Will.

“Are you at the office?”

“Just locking up,” I told him.

He said that maybe I could stop by later, and then he hung up quickly, uncharacteristically so.

When I got outside, Will was at the top of the stairs, grinning sweet and crooked, like a swung dash. It was the first time he’d been on campus for three weeks, and he looked thin, but much better than that day when I’d seen him at the hospital. Arguably, his pants on this day looked worse: they were plaid “old man” pants, probably borrowed from his grandpa. He was better off in school uniform pants. But what could you do? That was my Will.

“Hey there! Why didn’t you come up to the office?” I called to him.

“The front door was locked, and you have my keys. I decided to wait for you here.”

I jogged over to him. “To what do I owe this honor?”

“A long time ago, I used to go to school here. I even used to be the editor of the yearbook.”

“Nope,” I said, furrowing my brow. “Can’t say I recall.”

He offered me his arm. “I’ve heard these stairs can be troublesome,” he said.

“I think I can make it down unassisted.”

“Just take my arm, Chief. It’s safer. Don’t you think that between us we’ve had quite enough calamity for one school year? If you fell…”

I interrupted him. “I didn’t fall. I dove.”

“Fine. Have it your way. Dove . In either case, I don’t think I could bear you forgetting me all over again.” He turned me toward him, so that we were looking eye to eye. When he spoke, his voice was low. “Take my arm, Naomi. I’d offer to carry your books, but I doubt you’d let me.”

I laughed at him and linked my arm through his. We were the exact same height, and his arm fit well in mine.

We walked slowly out to the parking lot, where Will’s car was parked. I was mindful of Will’s health, but also it was probably the nicest hour of the nicest day of the year. Seventy-three degrees, and the sun was just going down, and the air was thick with grass and a hint of sunblock and something in the distance, something sweet and delicious that I couldn’t quite identify yet.

I don’t remember who it was, but one of us finally said to the other, “Isn’t it funny that all those months ago we flipped a coin so that we wouldn’t have to take this very same walk?”

One or the other of us replied, “And now I wouldn’t mind if it were even farther, if we could just go on like this forever.”

For the longest time after that, neither of us said anything. I was unaccustomed to his silence, but I didn’t mind it. I knew near everything about him, and he knew near everything about me, and all that made our quiet a kind of song.

The kind that you hum without even knowing what it is or why you’re humming it.

The kind that you’ve always known.

I am thankful:

For books and those who publish and champion them. (Especially my own books, of course—many thanks to Sarah Odedina, Jonathan Pecarsky, Dorian Karchmar, Janine O’Malley, and the good men and women of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.)

For readers and their teachers.

For my parents, who censored nothing, and for Hans Canosa, who is, among other things, the best reader a gal writer could want.

I tell you, this is a good life.