“I’m saying we’re not just friends.”

“Still, you can’t go out in this.”

“My mother worries,” he repeated. It was like that day in Will’s car when James hadn’t wanted a ride even though it was pouring. He had a stubborn, tough, even masochistic streak, and he insisted that he leave then. All I could do was stand at the window and watch as he disappeared into that whitewashed night.

7

OF ALL THE STUPID THINGS TO BE FAILING, I WAS failing photography.

The last school day before Thanksgiving, Mr. Weir held me after class. I knew what he wanted to talk about. I still hadn’t turned in a project proposal, and the semester was more than half over. Most of the classes were structured very loosely, with Mr. Weir showing slides of work by famous photographers like Doisneau or Mapplethorpe and us discussing them. The rest of the time we’d critique each other’s work, though I hadn’t brought in anything to critique all semester. Whenever Mr. Weir asked about my project (about once a week or so), I’d just B.S. something or other. The nature of the class made it easy to get away with doing nothing.

Mr. Weir handed me a slip. “I’m sorry to have to do this right before the holiday, Naomi,” he said. “I’ve got to give this to anyone who is in danger of receiving a D or below. It requires a parent’s signature.”

“But, Mr. Weir, I thought our grade was based on the one big project.”

“Yes, that’s why I’m giving this to you now. You still have time to make it work.”

James was waiting for me outside of Weir’s class.

“Wondering if you need a ride?” he asked.

I had yearbook, of course.

“Do you have to?” James asked. “Everyone’s gone for the holiday already.”

Actually, there was tons of work to do in yearbook, not to mention that Will was pissed at me already. It had started just after my birthday.

“Did you get my mix?” he’d asked.

“Which one?”

“The one for your birthday.”

“Yeah, but I haven’t had time to listen to it yet.”

“Well, that’s rude,” he’d said finally. “I spent a lot of time on that.”

But what I had thought to myself at the time was: How much time could he have possibly spent? The kid gives me a mix like every freaking week.

Anyway, Will had been pretty icy to me since then, but I hadn’t had time to deal with him.

“So,” James was saying, “why don’t I just take you out for coffee before you go to yearbook? I’ll have you back by three-thirty, I swear.”

James was wearing this black wool peacoat, which he looked particularly tall and handsome in. Some girls like suits or tuxedos; I’m a sucker for a guy in a great coat. I knew I couldn’t refuse him. Plus, after my talk with Mr. Weir, I really needed to get out of school.

We drove into town. James had a cup of black coffee and I had a glass of orange juice, and then we took our drinks outside and walked down the main strip of town. Even though the day was gray and moist, it was nice to be outside instead of where I was supposed to be: cooped up in that yearbook office where every part of me felt dried and tired, my hands always covered with these oppressive little paper cuts.

“I don’t want to go back to yearbook,” I said.

“So don’t” was James’s reply.

“I don’t just mean today. I mean ever.”

“So don’t,” he repeated.

“It’s not that easy,” I said. “People are counting on me.”

“Honestly, Naomi, it’s only a stupid high school yearbook. It’s just a bunch of pictures and a cover. They make a million of them every year all around the world. I’ve been to three different high schools, and the yearbooks always look more or less the same. Trust me, the yearbook will get published with or without you. They’ll find someone else to do your job.”

I didn’t reply. I was thinking how if I quit yearbook, I’d have more time for everything else: school, my photography class that I could no longer drop, therapy, and James, of course.

“It’s three-thirty,” James said after about ten minutes.

I told him I wanted to keep walking awhile, which we did. We didn’t say much; above all, James was good at keeping quiet.

James dropped me off at school around five.

Since it was the night before the holiday, I knew most of the kids would be gone early. Except, of course, for Will.

From the beginning, the conversation did not go well. I tried to be nice. I tried to explain to Will about my schoolwork and my photography class. I tried to tell him how he could run the whole show without me, that he already had been anyway. Will wasn’t hearing any of it, and before too long I found myself making some of James’s points, which had made so much sense when I was outside in the daylight.

“It’s just a stupid yearbook.”

“You don’t think that!”

“It’s just a stack of photos in a binder!”

“No, this is all wrong.”

“You said you’d understand if I had to quit!”

“I was being polite!” He was silent for a moment. “Is this because of James?”

I told him no, that I’d been unhappy for some time.

Will wouldn’t look at me. “What is so great about him? Explain it to me.”

“I don’t have to justify myself to you, Will.”

“I really want to know what is so f’n great about him. Because from my point of view, he looks like the moody guy on a soap opera.”

“The what?”

“You heard me. With all his moping around and his brooding and his cigarettes and his cool haircut. What does he have to be so upset about?”

“For your information, not that it’s any of your business, he has someone in his family who died.”

“I was there when he said it, remember! And hey, let’s throw a goddamn parade for James. Lots of people have people in their families who died, Naomi. I’d wager everybody in the whole damn world has people in their families who’ve died. But not all of us can afford to go around screwing things up all the time. Not all of us have the luxury of being so exquisitely depressed.”

“You’re being a jerk. I don’t see why you’re attacking James just because I don’t want to be on yearbook!”

“Do you actually think you’re in love with him?” Will laughed. “’Cause if you do, I think you lost more than your memory in that fall.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that you’re acting like a dope. The Naomi I knew honors her commitments.”

“Get it through your head. I’m not her anymore. I’m not the Naomi that you knew.”

“No shit!” he yelled. “The Naomi I knew wasn’t a selfish bitch.”

“I hate you,” I said.

“Good…I h-h-ha…Good!”

I started to leave.

“No, wait—”

I turned around.

“If you’re really quitting, you need to give me your office keys.”

“Right now?”

“I want to make sure you don’t steal anything.”

I took them out of my backpack and threw them in his face.

Sometimes these things take on a momentum of their own. I had gone in there just to quit yearbook, but I had ended up quitting Will, too. Maybe it had been naive to think it could have gone any other way.

When I got outside, James was waiting for me.

“Thought you might need a ride,” he said.

“But not home. Somewhere I haven’t been before.”

He drove me to the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, which seemed a strange place to take a girl, but I went with it.

“There’s a particular grave I want you to see,” he said.

“You’ve been here already?”

James nodded. “I’ve been to a lot of cemeteries. Sera and I went to Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris and we saw Oscar Wilde’s at Père-Lachaise, too. Wilde’s was covered in lipstick prints.”

I asked him how he’d gotten into visiting graveyards.

“Well…when my brother died, I guess. I liked thinking of all the others who had also died. It seemed less lonely somehow. Knowing that there are more of them than us, Naomi.”

He took me to the grave of Washington Irving, who wrote the novella The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I don’t know what kind of rock the headstone was made from, but at this point it was white from time. The stone was so worn away you could barely make out the inscription. It was a simple tombstone, just his name and dates.

“Most famous people tend to go that way, no epitaphs,” James said. “That’s what I’d do.”

“You’ve thought about it?”

“Oh, only a little,” he said with a wry grin.

It was pleasant in the graveyard. Silent. Empty and yet not empty. It was a good place for forgetting things. My phone rang. It was Will. I turned it off.

“That story reminds me of you,” he said.

I didn’t necessarily take that as a compliment. We had read Sleepy Hollow in Mrs. Landsman’s class around Halloween. It was something of a tradition in Tarrytown, where the book is set. (Technically, North Tarrytown, where James lived, was the true Sleepy Hollow.) It was about “the ghost of a Hessian trooper whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during the revolutionary war” and who was said to “[ride] forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head.”

“You think of me as a headless horseman?” I asked.

“I think of you as a person on a quest,” James said.

“What does that mean?”

He was standing behind me, and he put his arms around me. “I think of you as someone who is figuring things out under difficult circumstances. Despite the fact that I am falling in love with you, I think that I am likely to be a brief chapter in this quest. I want you to keep sight of that.”