By then, he was pulling into my driveway. I told him that I doubted that Ace even liked Woody.

“Probably not,” he said. “Have a good time at your dance, Naomi.”

I wore the black velvet dress from my closet because I hadn’t had time to buy anything else. (Maybe the truth was that I hadn’t made time to buy anything else.) At the very least, I couldn’t remember having worn it before.

“Even better than last year,” Dad said when I came downstairs.

When he came to pick me up, Ace didn’t mention my having worn the dress before. He just kissed me on the cheek. “You look nice.”

Ace drove us all to the dance. I sat in front with him, and Brianna sat in the backseat with Alex, who, despite being Ace’s good friend, turned out to be a complete dick. I actually felt sorry for Brianna, which was saying something. The boy was drunk before we even left for the dance, and he kept trying to kiss her and paw her. I kept hearing her say, “No, Alex. No. Just wait, would you?” and other things like that. Ace turned up the radio, I think, to give them privacy, but maybe he was simply tired of listening to Brianna’s protests.

Finally, I turned around and said, “Look, Alex, hold off for fifteen minutes, will you? She wants to look nice for her picture, okay?”

“Naomi, it’s fine,” Brianna said icily.

I tried to make a joke of it. “She probably spent the last ten years getting ready.”

I think I heard Alex mumble something about “immature high school kids,” but I wasn’t sure.

The rest of the car ride was completely silent. I could tell Brianna, Ace, and that tool Alex were all pissed at me. I didn’t care about Brianna or Alex, but I felt somewhat bad about Ace. I started to regret having said anything in the first place. I mean, a girl like Brianna could take care of herself.

Inside the dance, they named the homecoming king and queen, and I saw one of the freshman staffers from yearbook taking pictures. I could tell that the pictures weren’t going to turn out well. For one, the angle was too low, which would give everyone double chins, and for two, he wasn’t getting any sort of variety. I went over to him and told him to stand on the table. He did. Then he thanked me and said that he was getting better stuff. He showed me a few in his camera’s digital monitor. I took off my heels and got on the table and shot a couple of frames myself. It was the most fun I’d had all night. I started to hypothesize that maybe the reason I had gotten so involved with yearbook was because I had liked taking pictures. Maybe it had been that simple. I wondered if it was all that simple—if my memory never came back, maybe it was as easy as asking myself what I liked and what I didn’t like.

When I turned to get off the table, Will was standing under me. “Can I help?” he asked, offering me his hand.

I accepted it. It’s difficult to get off a table in a dress.

“I didn’t think you were coming.”

“I wasn’t planning on it. I despise these things. Patten got sick, so I had to cover the photo keychain booth.” The photo keychain booth was one of yearbook’s many fundraisers. “Your dress—” Will began.

“I know, I know. It’s the same one I wore last year.”

“If you’d let me finish, I was going to say that it looks better with your hair that way,” he said. “You clean up good, Chief.”

“Thanks.” I slipped my heels back on, and I was now looking down at Will a spike’s worth. “I like your suit,” I told him.

“Had to improvise.” He was wearing an emerald velvet suit and a paisley shirt. He was the only person dressed even remotely that way. “Get any good homecoming court pictures?” he asked.

I rolled my eyes. “Just your usual thrill of victory, agony of defeat.”

“Ah, youth. Bittersweet. Fleeting,” he wisecracked.

“Exactly.”

“I watched you, though,” Will said, looking me right in the eye. “You looked really, really…happy up there.”

I had been happy, but I didn’t like the way Will was looking at me. No, looking isn’t the right word. Seeing. I wasn’t comfortable with how much Will saw. He made me feel transparent when I was still opaque to myself.

He said he’d tried calling me that afternoon, but that my phone had been off. I was about to make up yet another lie when Ace was suddenly by my side. “Will,” Ace said.

Will nodded. “Zuckerman.”

“Been harassing my girl?” Ace said, putting his arm around me.

I knew that objectively speaking there was nothing wrong with Ace calling me “his girl,” and yet the arm offended me. It seemed over the top. “Just yearbook business,” I said.

“Right. Always with the yearbook business,” Ace said in a nasty tone that perplexed me.

“Yeah, how else are we going to preserve your glory years, Zuckerman?” Will asked.

I felt like I didn’t know quite what was going on between Ace and Will. Somehow, it made me long for James.

“So, Will, you mind if I take my girl for a dance?”

“She doesn’t like to dance,” Will said under his breath. Then he excused himself. I didn’t see him for the rest of the night.

After the dance, Brianna and Alex decided to get a ride home with someone else, so Ace and I were alone in the car. I thought he was just driving me back to my house, but instead he took me to his.

He said his parents had gone to Boston for the weekend and that we had the run of the place.

He asked me if I wanted a drink, and I declined. I had been avoiding alcohol since his friend’s party, which seemed like something he might have guessed.

He led me to his room, which was tidy and preppy like the rest of the house, and like Ace himself, for that matter. The wallpaper was plaid, and vintage wooden tennis rackets hung from the wall. I looked at his bookshelves, and other than school books all he had were athletes’ memoirs and a set of leather-bound classics. He had one picture of us taped to the wall by his bed. We were both dressed for tennis. The picture was out of focus, but I could see my hair was in a ponytail, the way Ace had said that he liked me best.

I sat down on his bed: an old, spring-loaded mattress that sounded like it was wheezing. Ace sat down next to me—squeak—and kissed me on the mouth. He still tasted like Gatorade even though I knew for a fact he hadn’t had any for at least the last five hours.

“Do you remember what happened here a year ago?” he asked.

Duh, I had amnesia. “No,” I said.

So he told me. At last year’s homecoming dance, Ace and I had “put one over the net”—i.e., we had done it for the first time. We had “played several sets” since then, but had mutually agreed to sit out the “summer season” for reasons which Ace chose not to specify. It was his idea that we should celebrate our anniversary with a “rematch.” I’m not sure if nerves were the reason for Ace’s lame sports/sex metaphors, but it was starting to put the whole tennis wristbands debacle into pathetic perspective.

I told him that I still hadn’t started up with the pill again, and he said, “That’s okay. I’ve come equipped.” He whipped out a pack of condoms from the nightstand like a sports manager providing balls for the team. His hands were so quick—I barely saw him open or close the drawer—I got a sense of what he was probably like on the courts.

I felt oddly numb about the whole thing. My thinking was along the lines of Well, I’ve done it before. Might as well get it over with and do it again.

Ace started to unzip my dress, but he couldn’t get the zipper down. “This is stuck,” he said.

“Well, don’t break it,” I protested. “I need to be able to put it back on.”

At that moment, his one-hundred-year-old basset hound came into the room to say hello. “Get, Jonesy,” Ace said. “Get!”

Jonesy didn’t want to go. He mounted Ace’s right leg and started humping it. Ace kept shaking his leg at Jonesy, but the dog would not be deterred. “Get, get!” Ace stood up and pushed Jonesy from the room, but I could still hear the dog’s howls outside the door.

I started to laugh. It struck me as humorous that something Ace didn’t want his dog to do was something he desperately wanted me to do.

“Where were we?” Ace asked.

The whole thing was absurd.

Since I couldn’t remember the “real” first time I’d lost my virginity, this would have become my de facto first time. I wanted a better story than I did it with this boy who I wasn’t very into and who had mysterious Gatorade breath; in his room decorated with sports equipment; at least he was nice enough to provide condoms and get his ancient, horny dog to leave us alone. Put it that way, and I couldn’t help but wonder how I’d let it get so far in the first place.

“Ace, I’m not going to have sex with you,” I said. I reached over my shoulder and zipped my dress back up without any problems.

“Is it the howls? I can put the dog in the yard,” Ace said. “Just hold on a second. I can get him to stop. Bad Jonesy! Bad dog.”

I told him that it wasn’t about the dog.

“Well, what is it then?” He walked over to his bedroom window. His back was toward me, and I couldn’t see his face.

“I…I just don’t know,” I said. “The truth is, I don’t even know you. I don’t even know what we have in common.”

“There’s lots of stuff,” Ace said.

“Tell me, then. I’d really like to know.”

“Tennis. School.” Ace sighed. He wouldn’t turn back around. “I love you, Naomi.”

“Why?”

He shrugged violently. “Jesus, I don’t know. Why does anyone like anyone? Because you’re super-hot?”

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

“I’m asking you. I mean I’m telling you. I don’t know. You’re confusing me.” Ace turned around and looked at me helplessly, hopelessly. “Because you’re good at school, but can also hold a drink. Because we used to talk about stuff. I don’t know. I just did.”

“Did or do?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Did in the past, or do in the present?”

“Do! I meant do. Isn’t that what I said?” He collapsed onto his bed, so that he was staring up at his ceiling. The box spring squeaked in agony, which started Jonesy barking again. I opened Ace’s door, and Jonesy ran in. Luckily, Jonesy wasn’t in the mood for sex anymore either. He wanted cuddling and intimacy. He jumped onto the bed and lay down next to Ace.

“But honestly, you’ve been acting so weird lately,” Ace said quietly.

Maybe because I can’t remember anything? I thought bitterly.

“Like yelling at Alex in the car, what was that about? And now you’re in this play? And your hair!”

It was the first he’d mentioned it since the day I’d cut it. I had no idea he was still thinking about it. “What about my hair?” I asked. Not because I cared, but because I was sort of curious.

“I loved it long.”

It was the second time he’d used the word love all night, but it was the only time I believed him.

“I’m not used to it this way,” he continued. “I honestly don’t even know what to think.”

“Say what you mean, Ace.”

“I hate your stupid hair,” he said, his voice rusty with truth, bitterness, feeling. Everything else he’d said the whole time we’d been together had sounded merely confused or frustrated, but this was different. This was unmistakable. This was passion! It was what was missing from every other element of my relationship with Ace. It was what I’d heard when Alice spoke about the play, or Will about yearbook, or Dad about Rosa Rivera. It was what I’d heard when James had said he’d wanted to kiss me in the hospital.

For the record, I didn’t know boys could care so much about hair. Maybe this was asking too much, but I wanted someone who felt as strongly about the rest of me. Poor Ace. The boy had been in love with a haircut.

I knew what I had to do.

“I think we should take some time off. From each other, I mean,” I said. Then I tried to make a joke. “Give my hair some time to grow.”

Ace didn’t laugh. “Are you saying you want to break up?” he asked. Did I detect a hint of relief in his voice?

“Yes.”

“But that’s not what I want!” Ace protested a little too adamantly. “I want you to get your memory back and for everything to be like it was.”

“Well, maybe that will happen. But in all likelihood, it won’t. And you’ll be in college next year anyway, so this was bound to happen sooner or later,” I reasoned.