Just as he was about to reveal the punch line, a particularly impressive wave of pain pulsed through my head. My nails dug into James’s palm, piercing his skin, making him bleed. I couldn’t speak, so I tried to telegraph my apology with a look.

“No worries,” James said, “I can take it.” He winked at me.

In the emergency room, a doctor with eyes so bloodshot they made me tired just looking at them asked James how long I had been passed out, and he replied twenty-one minutes, he knew exactly. He’d seen it happen. “At Tom Purdue, there’re these steps out front. One second, she’s walking down them and the next, she’s flying headfirst toward me, like a meteor.”

“Is it strange that I don’t remember that?” I asked.

“Nope,” said the doctor. “Perfectly ordinary to forget incident-associated narrative for a time.” She shined a light in my eyes, and I flinched.

At some point, another doctor and a nurse had joined the party, though I couldn’t have told you when with any confidence. Nor can I recall much about them as individuals. They were an indistinct blur of pastel and white uniforms, like chalk doodles on a sidewalk in the rain.

The second doctor said that she had to ask me a couple of questions, general ones, not about the accident.

“Your full name?”

“Naomi Paige Porter.”

“Where do you live?”

“Tarrytown, New York.”

“Good, Naomi, good. What year is it?”

“Two thousand and…2000, maybe?”

Even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t right. Because if it was 2000, I would have been twelve, and I knew for sure I wasn’t twelve. I didn’t feel twelve. I felt…I couldn’t say the exact number, but I just knew I felt older. Seventeen. Eighteen. My body didn’t feel twelve. My mind didn’t feel twelve either. And there was James, James proper—James looked at least seventeen, maybe older—and I felt the same age as him, the same as him. I looked from doctor to doctor to nurse: poker faces, every one.

One of the doctors said, “Okay, that’s fine for now. Try not to worry.” This made me worry, of course.

I decided that the best thing for me to do would be to go home and sleep it off. I tried to sit up in the gurney, which made my head throb even more intensely than it had been.

“Whoa, Naomi, where you going?” the nurse said. He and James gently pushed me back into a horizontal position.

The doctor repeated, “Try not to worry.”

The other doctor paraphrased, “Really, you shouldn’t worry.”

As they walked across the ER to some other patient, I heard the doctors muttering to each other all sorts of worrisome phrases: “mild traumatic brain injury” and “specialist” and “CT scan” and “possible retrograde amnesia.” I have a tendency to deal with things by not dealing with them at all, so instead of demanding that someone immediately tell me what was wrong, I just listened until I couldn’t hear them anymore and then decided to concentrate on matters more tangible.

James always said how ugly he was, but I think he must have known that he wasn’t. The only bad thing anyone could have said about him was that he was too skinny, but never mind that. Maybe because I couldn’t seem to remember anything else, I felt like I needed to memorize every single thing about him. His fraying white dress shirt was open, so I could see that he was wearing a really old concert T-shirt—it was faded to the point that I couldn’t even tell what the band was. His boxers were sticking out over his jeans, and I could make out they were a dark green plaid. His fingers were long and thin like the rest of him, and a few of them were smudged with black ink. His hair was damp with sweat, which made it even darker than usual. Around his neck was a single leather rope with a silver ring on it, and I wondered if the ring was mine. His collar had gotten half turned up. I noticed blood on his lapels.

“There’s blood on your collar,” I said.

“Um…it’s yours.” He laughed.

I laughed, too, even though it made my brain beat like a heart. “In the ambulance…” For whatever reason, the phrase in the ambulance embarrassed me, and I had to rephrase. “In the van, you said you were my boyfriend?”

“Hmm, I hadn’t known you were listening to that.” He had this funny smile on his face and he shook his head a couple of times, as if in conversation with himself. He let go of my hand and laid it on the gurney. “No,” he said, “I just said you were my girlfriend so they would let me ride with you. I didn’t want you to be alone.”

This was disappointing news, to say the least.

There’s a joke about amnesiacs, which always reminds me of meeting James. It’s not exactly a joke, but more a “funny” slogan you’d wear on a T-shirt if you were a) an amnesiac, and b) extremely corny, and c) probably had issues in addition to amnesia, like low self-esteem or the need to give “too much information” or just plain bad taste in clothes. Okay, picture a really cheap, fifty-percent-polyester jersey with a white front and red sleeves. Now add the words “Hi, I’m an amnesiac. Have we met before?”

“You know something funny?” I said. “The first thing I thought about you was what an honest voice you had, and it turns out you were lying to me.”

“No. Not to you. Only to some jerk in a uniform,” he corrected. “If I’d been thinking at all, I would have said you were my sister. No one would have even questioned that.”

“Except me. I don’t have any siblings.” I tried to make a joke of it. If given the choice, I preferred being his imaginary girlfriend to being his imaginary sister. “Are we friends, at least?”

“No, Naomi,” James said with the same little smile, “can’t say that we are.”

“Why not?” He seemed like the kind of person it might be nice to be friends with.

“Maybe we ought to be” was all he replied.

It was and it wasn’t a satisfactory answer, so I tried a different question. “Before, when you were shaking your head, what were you thinking?”

“You’re really gonna ask me that?”

“You have to tell me. I might die, you know.”

“I didn’t take you for the manipulative kind.”

I closed my eyes and pretended to pass out.

“Oh, all right, but that’s awful low,” he said with a resigned laugh. “I was wondering if I could get away with letting you think I was your boyfriend. And then I decided that would definitely be the wrong thing to do. It wouldn’t be fair—you don’t even know what year it is, for God’s sake. A good relationship is not built on lies and all that crap.

“And well, I also wondered if it would be wrong to kiss you—not on the mouth, maybe on your forehead or hand—while I had the chance, while you were still thinking you were mine. And I decided that would be very, very wrong and probably uncomfortable later on. Plus, a girl like you probably does have a boyfriend—”

I interrupted. “You think?”

James nodded. “Definitely. I don’t give a damn about him, but I didn’t want to compromise you…or take advantage. I decided that if I ever kissed you, I’d want your permission. I’d want—”

At that moment, my dad came into the ER.

James had been leaning over the side of the gurney railing, but he stood up straight like a soldier to shake Dad’s hand. “Sir,” he said, “I’m James Larkin. I go to school with your daughter.” But Dad pushed right past James to get to me, and James was left with his palm in the air, and I saw the four puncture wounds my nails had made from grabbing him so tight.

The doctors returned then, followed by a nurse, a specialist, and an orderly who began wheeling me away without even bothering to tell me where, and then I really had to throw up, and I didn’t want James to have to watch that (I didn’t want him to leave either), and somehow James slipped out without my seeing, which is something I would later find out he had a talent for.

Once I was admitted into a room, Dad passed the time by asking me if I was okay. “You okay, kid?”

“Yes, Dad.”

Five seconds later, “Kiddo, are you okay?”

In an amazing display of restraint, I managed to reply Yes, Dad three more times even though I had no earthly idea if I was. On the fifth or sixth time, I finally just snapped, “Where’s Mom?” She was better than Dad in these types of situations.

“In the city,” he said. He kept pacing the room and looking up and down the hallway. “Christ, is anyone ever going to help us?”

“Is she working?” Mom was a photographer and she sometimes had to go into New York City for that.

“Working?” Dad repeated. His head was sticking out the door like a turtle, but he pulled it back inside so that he could look at me. “She’s…She…Naomi, are you trying to worry me?”

“Dad, are you screwing with me?” Knowing my dad, this was not an unlikely scenario.

“Screwing with you?”

I assumed he hadn’t liked my use of the word screw, though Dad was not normally the sort of parent who cared much about swearing. He always said that words were words and the only reason to ever eliminate any of them was if they were either hurtful (and you weren’t meaning to be) or inexpressive. I figured that the anxiety of the situation must be getting to him, so I rephrased. “Sorry. Playing with me, whatever.”

“Are you screwing with me?” Dad asked.

“So you can use screw and I can’t? That doesn’t seem fair,” I protested.

“I don’t give a damn if you use the word screw, Naomi. But is that what you’re doing?”

“I’m not screwing with you! Just tell me where Mom is.”

“In N.Y.C.” It sounded like slow motion. EHNNNNN. WHYYYYY. SEEEEE. “New York—”