In the time all this took, it had officially become dark, and I was ready to be home. I jogged out of the building and down the marble stairs.

People said I had tripped—as in Did-you-hear-what-happened-to-Naomi-Porter-she-tripped-going-down-the-stairs-and-her-brain-exploded—but that wasn’t what happened.

Think about it. I was not an eighty-year-old woman with a creaky hip, and at that point I had been climbing those Tom Purdue steps for almost four years: seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth grades. I knew how they felt when they were slick with rain. I knew how they felt when wearing heels and a formal dress. I knew how they felt in the middle of winter, coated with salt.

Those steps could not have been more familiar to me, so that’s why it was impossible that I could have tripped.

What really happened was that someone had left a Styrofoam coffee cup on the steps. In the darkness I didn’t see it, so I kicked the cup and whatever was inside spilled out. I remember slipping a bit on the liquid and that’s when I lost my grip on the camera. In that split second before diving down the stairs, my only thoughts were for the camera, and how it had cost The Phoenix a heck of a lot of money, and how much I wanted to catch it before it hit the stairs.

I didn’t trip or fall—tripping and falling are accidents.

I dove—diving is intentional. Idiotic, yes, but also intentional.

Diving is a leap of faith plus gravity.

I had been throwing myself toward something.

Maybe away from something else.

I had kissed Will the night before.

Actually, he had kissed me, but I hadn’t stopped it.

It had happened quickly; we were covering the Science Club’s back-to-school trip to the planetarium. I had always teased Will about his obsessive coverage of academia. Will’s “Nerd Inclusion Campaign” I called it, even though that was probably mean, and let’s face facts, we were both kind of nerds ourselves. In any case, we decided to stay for the star show.

So we kissed. I think we had both been tricked by the air-conditioning and the darkness and all those treacherous fake stars.

That kiss had probably been more about my ambivalence toward Ace than any romantic notions I had had about Will. Besides, I hadn’t met James yet.

In all these months, Will had never mentioned it, though. I suppose it didn’t matter anyhow. I was with James now, and Will and I weren’t even friends.

Sitting in James’s car, I took off my sunglasses even though we were in the midst of a brilliant, white January sunset.

We were stopped at a traffic light when James said to me, “You’re awfully quiet.”

I nodded blankly and tried to smile. I felt like if I spoke, I might have an aneurysm.

“You aren’t wearing your sunglasses,” he said.

“Oh…” I put them back on. Then I kissed James on the mouth, probably too hard.

I decided that I wouldn’t tell him or anyone else about my remembering. In a way, none of it mattered. None of it changed anything.

This was what I told myself.

I looked at James. I looked at him and felt grateful again that he’d been the one at the bottom of the stairs. It could have been anyone.

For obvious reasons, my exams went much better than expected, my French exam particularly. I did so well that Mrs. Greenberg decided to base my grade solely on the final. She was a tough teacher, but always, always fair. “You have had much to deal with, Naomi,” she said in French, “but you have studied hard and come out beautifully.”

I understood her perfectly and expressed my gratitude in French.

At his request, I went to see Mr. Weir on the last day of finals. “Congratulations. You have eighteen more weeks to dazzle me,” he said. Instead of failing me, he was giving me an incomplete. Incidentally, if I’d had my memory back in September, I definitely would have dropped that class. His was the worst kind of elective—the kind with the potential to bring down your GPA.

When I got back home that night, Dad was in his study working.

I quietly took the car keys off the hook by the kitchen door and went for a drive.

It felt good to be behind the wheel again.

I didn’t drive anywhere in particular. I stayed in my neighborhood, making enough right turns so that I ended up back where I started.

When I was about seven years old, I got lost in a museum. My parents had been researching their third or fourth Wandering Porters book, the one in the South of France. I had thought I was with my mother, but I hadn’t been. I had been mistakenly following a woman with a camera bag that looked like hers. When the woman turned, I realized my error and began to cry.

The woman looked at me and although she did not speak English (I don’t think she was French either), I managed to detect the question “…Maman…?”

I nodded miserably and pointed to the camera.

“L’appareil-photo?”

I nodded even more miserably. As it happened, my mother entered the gallery then, and I was found.

For many years, l’appareil-photo was the only French word I had.

I don’t know why my memory came back that day in James’s car—maybe there was some medical explanation having to do with synapses and neurons—just as I don’t know for certain why it left in the first place.

All I knew was that I missed my mother.

9

I DIDN’T WANT TO TELL ANYONE ABOUT THE END OF my amnesia, and the effort of keeping track of what I was and wasn’t supposed to remember was exhausting me to where I began to forget insignificant things. Like my history book. The first day of the new semester, I lost mine. I thought it might have been in James’s car—we had passed many enjoyable hours in there. I walked over to James’s house to see if I could look around.

James was at work, so the car wasn’t even there. I asked Raina if I could go look in his room, and she said to “be her guest.” Raina had not been particularly warm, but James said it wasn’t about me and I shouldn’t take offense.

I looked under James’s bed. Improbable as it may seem, my book was there: the mythic first place I had looked. As I was taking it out, my eyes alighted on something else.

It was a still-sealed envelope from the University of Southern California, where James had applied early. It was postmarked December 13. James had left it unopened for seven weeks. It seemed a little, for lack of a better word, crazy. I mean, I knew that he had really wanted to go to the film program there, but was he so afraid of not being accepted that he wouldn’t even open the envelope?

The right thing would have been to leave it there, but I didn’t do that. I picked it up and put it in my pocket. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it, but I couldn’t bear the thought of it lying there under his bed.

He called me after work that night. He said that Raina had mentioned my visit and that he was sorry he’d missed me.

I told him that I’d been looking for my book when I’d accidentally stumbled upon the letter.

James grew deathly quiet.

“I could open it if you want,” I said.

He didn’t say anything.

“Are you that afraid of not getting in?”

He told me to mind my own goddamn business, and then he hung up on me. You could say that that was our first fight. He had never even raised his voice to me before. I suppose he was right to yell at me.

At school the next day, I didn’t see him until lunch. I handed him the still-unopened letter and apologized if I had violated his privacy.

James took the letter. Without a word, he opened it. It was an acceptance. He set it on the ground, as if he couldn’t care less. It started to blow away, so I put my boot heel on it.

“It’s great news,” I said. “It’s what you wanted.” I hugged him, but his posture was rigid. “What is it, Jims?”—that was my nickname for him—“Why aren’t you happier?”

James explained, in an odd, low voice, “I hadn’t been afraid that I wouldn’t be accepted. I’d been afraid that I would.”

I deluded myself into thinking he was talking about me—how we’d just met and now we’d be on two separate coasts or something like that.

By the time lunch ended, the coolness between us hadn’t quite thawed.

After school, I was taking books from my locker when Ace Zuckerman came up to me. I hadn’t spoken to him for months other than an occasional nod in the hallway. As I was still preoccupied with James and the whole acceptance business, I wasn’t in the mood to talk to him now either.

Ace was captain of the tennis team that year, and he wanted to know if I was going to go out for it.

I said that I hadn’t planned on it.

Ace was outraged. In addition to hair, the guy was incredibly passionate about tennis. “Well, you’re a great player, and it would be a real shame for you not to play because of me.”

“You?” I laughed. “Don’t flatter yourself. I just don’t want to play tennis anymore.”

“You love tennis, Naomi. How can you not remember that?” Ace was standing really close to my face when, suddenly, something pulled him away. It was James, his eyes wild and blazing.

“Get the hell off of her!”

I tried to tell James that Ace and I had only been discussing tennis, but it was too late. These things tend to take on a momentum of their own.

Although James was wiry, he was not weak. He pulled Ace off of me and threw him against a locker. He punched him.

Ace hit him back, but mainly just to get James to stop attacking him. “You tool,” Ace said. “We were only talking about tennis.”