“We could listen to it in my car,” James suggested.

“Okay.” I shrugged. Will usually had good taste in music, and the songs wouldn’t mean anything to me anyway.

James put the CD in the car player, but no sound came out. “This player’s old, and it can be a little spastic with home-burned stuff.” James popped the CD out and handed it back to me. I thought about throwing it out the window; I was still pissed at Will from yesterday. Instead, I just slipped it in my purse.

James hadn’t mentioned where we were going, and as part of my new life philosophy I hadn’t asked.

“Aren’t you curious where I’m taking you?” he said in that low voice of his.

“No, I trust you.”

We were stopped at a red light. He turned to stare at me. “How do you know I’m trustworthy?”

“How do I know that you aren’t?”

James abruptly pulled the car into another lane. “We’re going to California, right this instant.”

I didn’t blink.

“If I drove you to the airport and told you to get on a plane to California, you’d follow me.”

“Why not?”

“Unfortunately, I’m only taking you to dinner, Naomi. Maybe a movie. If I’d known it was your birthday, I would have planned something more exciting.”

But just being with James was exciting. I liked that his past was as much a mystery as mine. I liked that he might do anything at any moment. I liked that he didn’t expect me to behave any specific way. I liked that he believed me when I said I would take off and go to California.

“Maybe I’ll have to take you to California sometime?”

“What’s in California?”

“Kick-ass waves. I’m an amateur surfer and the Atlantic don’t really cut it,” he said. “My dad is, too. He lives in L.A.”

“Are you from there?”

“The thing is, I’m not really from anywhere, you know what I mean?”

I did.

“But yeah, I lived there for a while. Until I came here to live with my mom and my grandfather, and…I’d like to go back there for school. To the film program at USC, if I get in.”

On the way to the restaurant, it had started to snow.

By the time the movie was over, the town was a different place, the negative image of itself. I felt almost newborn myself, like it was my first winter ever.

“I wonder if there’s enough snow on the steps at school for us to go sledding,” James said.

We left his car at the movie theater and walked over to Tom Purdue, which was about a mile away. I was freezing, but I didn’t care. I bet the weather was worse in Kratovo.

We trudged across the campus to the entrance of Tom Purdue. We stood at the bottom of the steps, which were entirely blanketed by snow.

“This is where we met,” I pointed out.

“The lengths a girl will go to to meet a boy,” he deadpanned. “We need sleds.”

I told him I didn’t know where we could find any.

“No, like cafeteria trays or garbage can lids or something. Unfortunately, school’s closed.”

Luckily, I had my yearbook keys. I ran inside and located two plastic lids right in the front hallway.

“Let’s go,” I said. I didn’t bother to mention to James that I was supposed to be avoiding sports on account of my head. I didn’t really care.

My first few times down the hill I couldn’t really control the “sled,” and I got sent down at strange angles.

James was better than me. He showed me how to position my body and back so that I was in the middle and leaning forward. My next attempts were better.

“Who needs the Pacific?” he yelled.

We sledded down the steps until eleven-thirty. It was like meeting him over and over again.

We sledded until I couldn’t even make one more trip up the stairs. My cheeks were flushed, my lips were chapped, and every part of me was wet or sticky with snow. I was so cold, I was past feeling cold at all. I lay down in the snow at the bottom of the stairs. I felt like I was becoming an ice person and that when it became warm again, I would probably melt and disappear.

James kept sledding even after I had stopped. He went up and down five or six more times before parking himself at my feet. For the longest time he only looked at me.

“Lying there, you look like an angel,” he said softly.

I didn’t speak.

“Funny thing is, I don’t believe in angels.”

He offered me his hand, and we walked back to my house in the bright, early hours of Sunday.

He kissed me when we got to the door, and even though it was late, I invited him inside. Dad had gone out with Rosa Rivera, and for all I knew he was probably snowed in somewhere or other. James was shivering nearly as much as me at this point.

I brought him some clothes from Dad’s closet and he changed into them. “I’ll get my dad to drive you to your car when he gets back.”

James nodded and sat down at our kitchen table.

“Seventeen,” he said. “You’re still a baby.”

“Why? How old are you?”

“I’ll be nineteen in February.”

“That’s not that old.”

“Feels plenty old to me sometimes,” he said. “I was held back a grade.” He shrugged.

I smiled at him. “I’ve heard the rumors about you, you know?”

“Oh yeah, like what?”

I listed the most interesting ones: 1) he used drugs, 2) he went crazy over some girl at his old school, and 3) he had tried to kill himself and had been in a hospital.

James ran his fingers through his hair, which was still damp from the snow. “All true. Technically, the drugs were prescribed. And technically, I may have tried to kill myself twice, but basically all true. Does it matter?” His voice had changed. “Think. Think before you answer. It’s allowed to matter.”

I told him that it didn’t.

“I would have told you, but it’s not something I like to talk about when I first meet someone, or ever, and also…” His eyes were turned toward the window, but I could tell he was really watching me. “I wanted you to like me.”

“Why?”

“You seemed like a person who it might be nice to be liked by. I haven’t thought that about anybody for a while.” I had thought the same thing about him.

I put my arm around him. Neither of us moved or spoke for the longest time. “I can leave now,” he said, “and then we could just go on from there. Friends, maybe?”

I took his face in my hands and I told him none of it mattered to me at all.

That’s when he told me everything. For a guy who said “screw the past,” James certainly had a lot of it.

It had all started the year his brother died of lung cancer. James was fifteen. Sasha was eighteen, the same age James was now.

The night before Sasha’s funeral, James swallowed an entire bottle of a prescription his brother had been taking. They thought James was trying to kill himself, but he hadn’t been. He had just wanted something that would help him sleep through the night. In a weird way, James said it made him feel closer to Sasha, having his brother’s pills inside.

James’s mom found him, and he had his stomach pumped. They sent him to his first doctor, who gave James his first antidepressant. He was supposed to go to therapy, but he never went. The drugs screwed with his head, made him feel kind of numb, which James said was all right by him.

Things were good for a while, only insofar as they weren’t too bad. By then James was sixteen, and he had met Sera. James said that they told each other they were in love, but looking back, he said they hadn’t been. Puppy love, if anything, he said. He might have only said this so as not to hurt my feelings.

At some point, he realized that the drugs weren’t working anymore. He started feeling jumpy all the time. Kids were looking at him funny; he was pretty sure they were talking about him, too. James cursed out one of his teachers. Sera broke up with him.

He stopped taking the pills to try to get Sera back, but she’d started going out with this other guy.

One night, he crawled into her bedroom window. She wasn’t there. James said he was so lonely, he had just wanted to be with her things. He saw a packing knife on her desk, and it suddenly seemed like a really good idea to slit his wrists.

After that, things got hazy.

In the hospital, they said Sera’s mom was the one who had found him. James still felt bad about this. Sera’s mom was a nice lady, he said. Sera, too, for that matter. James saw now that none of it had been her fault.

James was sent to the East Coast, where his mom lived. He was in an institution for about six months, which was not something he liked to talk about. When he got out, his parents said James could go back to his old school in California, but he didn’t see the point. James was eighteen by then, and had been held back a year, and anyone who remembered him at his old school thought he was crazy.

That’s when James met me. That day, he’d only been there to drop off his old school records. He hadn’t been planning or wanting to meet anyone. If he hadn’t stopped for a smoke, he wouldn’t have met me at all. He patted the pocket where he kept his smokes. “Always knew these would be the death of me.” He smiled when he said this.

My phone rang. It was Dad; he said he was staying at Rosa Rivera’s for the night on account of the snow.

“My dad can’t get back tonight,” I said to James.

“I should probably walk then. I don’t want my mother to worry.”

“Call her,” I told him. “Let her know you’re staying with friends.”

“I don’t lie,” he said, shaking his head.

“Are you saying we’re not friends?”