“Congratulations. This sounds exceedingly well planned,” Will said as he opened his door.

I had expected a prison, but Sweet Lake reminded me of Thomas Jefferson’s house, Monticello, where I had taken a field trip in fourth grade. Or maybe it looked like a very large B&B.

Visiting hours on Saturday lasted from noon to seven. I had called ahead. It had been that same receptionist, and I’m pretty sure he recognized my voice because he said, “You do know that patients have the right not to see someone.”

Will gave his name at the desk, and then we went to wait in the visiting room.

“Will,” James said, coming through the door. “Is something wrong with…?” Then he saw me. At first, I thought he was going to walk right back through those doors the same way he’d come, but he didn’t.

He walked to the sofa where Will and I were. After a while, James sat down, but he wouldn’t look at me.

When he finally did look at me about five minutes later, it was not in a very pleasant way at all. “So?” he said.

I had rehearsed what I wanted to say ever since I’d decided to come. I took a deep breath.

I thought about asking Will to leave, but I didn’t. “I think you”—I turned to James; I didn’t care if he wanted to look at me or not—“have gotten the idea that if I could remember everything, I wouldn’t want to be with you. And since that is the case, I shouldn’t be ruining my life by being with you in the meantime when you’re so…flawed. Is that right?”

He nodded and muttered under his breath, “Something like that.”

“Well, here’s the thing. I haven’t been an amnesiac since January. I love you now. It’s not gratitude or amnesia. It’s love. And I know you’re screwed up. Everyone is screwed up. I don’t care.”

“You’re a goddamn liar,” James said.

“I can’t believe it,” Will said. “How could you not say?”

I looked at Will.

“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

His face was flushed. “I’ll wait for you by the car,” he said. And then he left.

James didn’t speak to me for a long time. Finally, he said, “Let’s go outside. I can’t be in here anymore.”

It was a nice day, and I don’t mean that it was sunny either. It was humid and not too cool, like winter was getting annoyed with itself and wanted it to be spring just as much as everyone else. We sat down at a picnic table.

I remember wanting to touch him, but not feeling like he would let me. Eventually he took my hand. “It’s cold,” he said. He cupped his hands, which were dry and warm, around mine.

“Sometimes,” he said after a while, “I was sort of jealous of your amnesia, I know how crazy that probably sounds. Because for so long in my life, I just wanted to forget everything that had ever happened to me…

“After my brother died, it became real easy to picture myself dying young. But recently I’ve realized that I’m probably not going to unless I do something to make that happen. I know this probably seems evident to you, but it’s, well, it’s news to me. And if I’m not going to die young, that means I’m stuck with the consequences of my actions. That means I have to figure things out, do you know?”

I did.

“Because now, I’m older than my brother ever was. And I’m going to go to college, which is something that he never did. The way I see it, now’s a really good time for me to get a handle on all of this.

“As for you…well, I just don’t want you to turn into another Sera,” he said. “But you make things difficult for me.

“I wish we’d met some other time,” James said. “When I was older and had my shit together. Or younger, before everything got so messed up.

“Someday,” he said, “we’ll run into each other again, I know it. Maybe I’ll be older and smarter and just plain better. If that happens, that’s when I’ll deserve you, Naomi. But now, at this moment, you can’t hook your boat to mine, ’cause I’m liable to sink us both.”

I promised to leave him alone until he got out. And then I couldn’t help it, I asked him when that might be. I’m ashamed to reveal this, but I might have been thinking a little about junior prom in May.

He said that since he was just in the “transitional” program, he was doing his schoolwork over e-mail and that he hoped to be back for graduation, maybe sooner, but he wasn’t sure.

“I’m…well, I’m glad to see you, but I’m embarrassed that you’re here in a way,” he said. “I kind of wanted you to think I was perfect.”

I told him that I knew he wasn’t perfect.

“Yeah, but I wanted you to think that I was.”

We sat on that picnic table for a really long time, until the world became darker and darker. For a second I wished that time might stop, and it might stay twilight forever. Maybe I could live my whole life on this park bench with James, who I loved, next to me.

The sun went down.

Visiting hours were over.

I kissed him goodbye, and Will and I drove back home.

Will didn’t talk to me for the first hour and a half on the way back, and when he finally did speak, it was only to alert me to the fact that he wanted to stop at a diner.

“I just want to remind you that I am at liberty to order whatever I want on the menu,” he said.

All he ordered was a patty melt and a chocolate milk shake, which was lucky because I only had forty bucks on me and that had to get gas, too. I didn’t feel like eating, so I just watched him.

“So…so…if you’ve had your memory back all this time, does that mean you remember everything?”

I looked at him. “Yes.”

“Everything everything?”

I was pretty sure he was thinking of that time he and I had kissed, but I didn’t necessarily want to talk about it just then. “Yes.”

Will nodded and ate a couple of French fries.

“But that day I made you go back for the camera? Normally, I would have just gotten it myself. I was only being so difficult because I didn’t want you to think that things had changed between us. I guess I was overplaying the friends thing.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said. “I was the one who tripped.”

Will nodded. “I was hurt,” he said. “That day, I can truly say I was hurt. I was in love with you, and the next day you acted like us kissing was no big thing.”

“Will…” I sighed. “Of course, it was a big thing. How could it not have been? You’re my best friend, right?”

“I know I should have said something, right then in the parking lot, but by the time I had a chance, you’d forgotten everything. Me entirely. Then you quit yearbook. You met James. It was all too late. But the worst of it is, somewhere in there…somewhere after you and that idiot Zuckerman broke up, maybe I had a chance? But I didn’t say anything then either.

“But I don’t love you anymore,” he said firmly.

“Will.”

“I don’t love you so much.”

I couldn’t figure out anything to say. In a way, I sort of wished I was in love with him instead of James, because it would have been easier on everyone.

11

THE FOLLOWING WEEK, I GOT A POSTCARD FROM JAMES.

First off, the picture made me laugh, but he probably knew that it would. Big-eyed, cherubic, blond cartoon toddlers (were they brother-sister, or were they more?) on the beach, and the caption at the bottom, Wish You Were Here…Albany, NY. Are there even beaches in Albany? And considering where here was for him, I doubt he actually wished I was there.

Then I flipped the postcard over and read his personal message, which was only two words long and had no signature. “Forget me,” he wrote. That was it, that was all.

It seemed like the worst possible thing a person who knew me at all would ask.

Yes, I would leave him alone.

No, I would not forget him. It wasn’t his choice.

The only person I wanted to talk to about all this was Will.

I tried him on the phone, but he wasn’t picking up. I ran to school—the exertion felt strangely good—and he was still in the yearbook office, but he was talking to Winnie Momoi. I didn’t want to go in and interrupt, so I waited in the hallway for him or Winnie to leave. I guess he must have seen me through the window on the yearbook door. He came outside like fifteen seconds later, and I burst into tears, even though I could see Winnie watching us curiously.

I could tell he wanted to ask me what was wrong, but he didn’t. He put his arm around me, and we started walking out to his car.

The only thing he said to me was “You’re not wearing your coat.” He went back into the office and returned with his coat (this crazy orange suede one with a lamb’s wool collar) and he told me to put it on. I did. It must have weighed about sixty pounds. It was huge on him, so I was basically drowning in it.

He drove me home.

“It’s really over,” I said.

“I know,” Will said.

“I’m such a jerk,” I said.

“No, you’re not, Chief. You’re great.”

Somehow Will calling me great started me crying all over again. I didn’t feel at all great.

I wasn’t crying for James, though. I think I was crying for how much he didn’t know me and how much I didn’t know him and how I’d acted like such an idiot. How messed up it was that I didn’t feel like I could even tell him when I got my memory back.

I was crying a little for the boy I had wanted him to be and the boy he hadn’t turned out to be.

And I was crying for gravity. It had sent me down the stairs, and I’d thought that meant something, but maybe it was just the direction that all things tend to flow.