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.”

He had never said “love” before, and I suppose it should have thrilled me. The fact that the “love” was in a clause took a bit away from the moment, though. I asked him what he was really saying.

“I want you to know that I don’t expect anything from you.” James took my hand and turned me around, so that we were looking eye to eye. “I need to take pills to keep me steady,” he said, “but you make me feel the opposite. I worry about that. I worry for you. That’s why I fought this. You. Us. I’m not even sure I trust myself with anybody now, but…

“If things start to go bad…I mean, if I start to go bad, I want you to break up with me. I won’t fight you on it. I promise.”

“What if I fight you? Aren’t I allowed to do that?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Promise me you won’t, though.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You have to, otherwise we can’t be together. I swear to God, I’ll end it right now. If I get sick again, I don’t want you to come visit me or even think about me. I want you to forget we ever met. Forget me.”

I knew that would be impossible, but I crossed my fingers and told him I would.

I spent Thanksgiving alone with Dad. Rosa Rivera had gone to Boston to spend the day with her two daughters. James went to L.A. to see his father.

My dad cooked way too much too-rich food; we ate nearly nothing, and then Dad drove the rest over to a local food bank.

My mother called my cell phone in the afternoon while Dad was out. I had been ignoring her thrice-weekly messages since September, but I was feeling pretty blue that Thanksgiving so I picked up.

“Hi,” I said.

“Nomi,” she said, shocked at getting me. “I was just going to leave a message.”

“I can hang up and then you can still do that.”

Mom didn’t say anything for a moment. “How are you?”

“I’m good,” I said.

“Did you get the coat I sent you for your birthday?”

“I’m wearing it right now.” It was red with tortoiseshell buttons and a hood. I felt like Little Red Riding Hood in it, but it was warm.

“Your dad likes the house pretty frigid.”

“He’s getting better. It’s not his fault; it’s me. I’m always cold.”

“I know. Dad told me.”

“I should go. I have some schoolwork to do.”

“Okay. I love you, Nomi.”

“I should go.”

“Okay. Oh wait, I actually had a reason for calling…”

“Yeah?”

“Dad said you were having some trouble in photography. I could help. I do that, you know.”

“It’s not trouble. I just have to turn in this assignment. I…I really have to go.”

“Thanks for picking up,” she said.

We said goodbye and I hung up the phone. I didn’t want her goddamn help. She was always trying to find ways to insinuate herself back into my life.

And yet, I wondered…

If I had forgiven Dad for lying to me about Rosa Rivera, why couldn’t I seem to do even half that for Mom?

When it came down to it, I didn’t even know why I was in a fight with Mom. I knew the reasons, yes, but the fight itself was just a story I had been told.

I was thinking about calling Mom again when Dad came home.

He turned on the television and started watching a program about the meerkat. “The meerkat,” said the narrator, “is one of the few mammals other than humans to teach their young. Watch the adult parent show its child how to remove the venomous stinger from the scorpion before eating it.”

“Sweet, right?” Dad said.

“What are you planning to teach me?” I asked Dad.

An ad came on and Dad pressed mute on the television. “Unfortunately, your old man is pretty unskilled. I know a bit about cooking and travel. And a very little bit about writing and animals, but other than that, you’d be better off with a meerkat for a pop, I suspect.”

We watched three more nature programs in a row—one on pandas (cute to look at, but basically jerks), one on eagles, and another on bobcats. The one we were currently watching was called Top Ten Smelliest Animals, which was pretty much Dad’s ideal program, combining list-making and nature as it were.

During another ad I asked Dad, “Is this how you spent a lot of time before you met Rosa Rivera?”

He pressed mute again. “Yeah, I was pretty bad there for a while,” he admitted.

I considered this.

“What’s Mom’s husband like?”

Dad nodded and then nodded some more. “He’s in building restoration. Nice guy, I think. Nice-looking. There’re probably better people to sing his praises than me.”

“And Chloe?”

“Smart, she says, but then you were, too. Cass and I, we pretty much thought you were the best little kid in the world, you know? We always said it was a good piece of luck, you getting left in that typewriter case.”

I nodded.

“Will coming by today?” Dad asked.

I shook my head. I hadn’t told Dad about quitting yearbook or our fight.

“You’re not spending as much time with him these days,” Dad said.

“I think we’re growing apart,” I said.

“Happens,” Dad said. “He’s a good egg, though. Takes care of his mom since his father died. Hard worker. Always been a good friend to you.”