“So how about it?” Dad was still holding the pencil out to me.

“If I can’t remember it in the first place, how’ll I remember to put it on the list?” I asked. It was the most absurd thing in a day of absurd things, as ridiculous as asking a person who has lost her keys where she had last seen them.

“Oh. Good point.” Dad tapped on his head with his pencil. “Brain’s still working better than your old man’s, I see. How about, as you hear things you don’t remember, you tell me, and I’ll write them down for you?”

I shrugged. At least it would keep Dad occupied.

“Things Naomi has forgotten,” he said as he wrote. “Number one, Cass’s and my divorce.” He held up the paper to show me. “Just seeing it written down, doesn’t that make it all so much less frightening?”

It didn’t.

“Number two,” he continued. “Everything after Cass’s and my divorce. So that would be 2001, right?”

“I don’t know.” I knew Dad was trying to be helpful, but he was really starting to annoy the crap out of me.

“Number ten. Your boyfriend, I’m assuming?”

“I have a boyfriend?” I thought of what James had said.

Dad looked at me. “Ace. He’s still away at tennis camp.” He made a note.

My dad was up to nineteen (“Driver’s Ed? No. Driving? Maybe.”) when a nurse came into the room to wheel me away for my first of many tests. I remember feeling relieved that I didn’t have to hear twenty.

I was in the hospital for three more nights. A rotating coven of evil nurses would wake me up every three hours or so by shining a flash-light in my eyes. This is what they do when you’ve had a head trauma: all you want to do is sleep, and no one will let you. Besides not sleeping, the rest of my time was occupied with taking boring tests, ignoring my father’s incessant list-making, and wondering if James Larkin might take it upon himself to visit.

He didn’t.

My first visitor was William Landsman. Visiting hours began at eleven o’clock on Fridays, and Will showed up at 10:54. My dad had gone outside to make a few phone calls, so there was no one around to even tell me who this teenage boy in the maroon smoking jacket was. “Nice save, Chief!” Will said as he entered the room.

I asked him what he meant, and he explained about my rescue of the yearbook camera. “Not a scratch on it. Really going above and beyond the call of duty there,” he added.

Despite his questionable clothing choices, Will was not the least bit fussy or wimpy. When I asked him about the jacket, he claimed to wear it ironically, “as a way to entertain myself in the face of the daily monotony of school uniforms.” He was compactly built, about my height (five feet seven inches), but solid-looking. He had wavy chestnut hair and dark blue eyes, sapphire or cerulean, a deeper shade than either mine or my mother’s. His eyelashes were very long and looked as if they had been coated with mascara even though they hadn’t been. On that day he had light dark circles under his eyes, and his cheeks were flushed. If he seemed loud or cavalier about my condition, I suspect now that it was a way of masking his concern for me. In any case, I liked him immediately. He felt comfortable and broken-in like favorite jeans. It probably goes without saying that James had had the opposite effect on me in the brief time that I had known him.

“Are you Ace?” I asked, remembering what Dad had said about my having a boyfriend.

Will removed his black rectangular-framed glasses and wiped them on his pants. I would later learn that removing his glasses was something Will did when embarrassed, as if not seeing something clearly could in some way distance him from an awkward situation. “No, I most definitely am not,” he said. “Ace’s about six inches taller than me. And also, he’s your boyfriend.” A second later, Will’s eyes flashed something mischievous. “Okay, so this is deeply wrong. I want it on the record that you are acknowledging that this is deeply wrong before I even say it.”

“Fine. It’s wrong,” I said.

“Deeply—”

“Deeply wrong.”

“Good.” Will nodded. “I feel so much better that you don’t remember him either. By the by, your man’s a dolt not to come.”

“Dolt?” Who used dolt?

“Tool. No offense.”

“Leave. Right now,” I said in a mock stern tone. “You go too far insulting Ace…What’s his last name?”

“Zuckerman.”

“Right. Zuckerman. Yeah, I’m really outraged about you insulting the boyfriend I don’t remember anyway.”

“You might be later and if that’s the case, I take it all back. Visiting hours only started a minute ago, so he’ll probably still come,” Will said, by way of encouragement I suppose.

“Dad said he was still at tennis camp.”

“If it were my girlfriend, I would have come back from tennis camp.”

“Who’s your girlfriend?” I asked.

“I don’t have one. I was speaking hypothetically.” Will chuckled and then stuck out his hand for me to shake. “Introductions are in order. I am William Landsman, the Co-editor of The Phoenix. Incidentally, you’re the other Co-editor. Your dad said you might have forgotten some things, but I didn’t think it was possible I might be one of them.”

“Are you that memorable?”

“Pretty much. Yes.” He nodded decisively.

“And humble.” I didn’t need to remember him to know exactly how to tease him.

“And also your best friend, if you haven’t already figured it out.” Will cleaned his glasses again.

“Really? My best friend wears a smoking jacket?” I nodded. “That’s very interesting.”

“It’s ironic. Seriously though, you can ask me anything. Honest to God, Chief, I know everything about you.”

I looked in his eyes, and I decided to trust him. “How does my face look?” Since they’d stitched up my forehead, I’d been basically trying to avoid my reflection.

He examined me from both sides and then from the front. “A little swollen around your left eye and cheekbone, but most of it’s covered by the tape and gauze.”

“Look under the gauze, will you?”

“Chief, I am not looking under the gauze for you! It’s completely unsanitary and probably against the rules! Do you want me to get kicked out of here and not be able to visit you?”

“I want a report before I have to see it for myself. I want to know if I’m, like, disfigured.” I tried to say this casually, but I was scared. “Please, Will, it’s important.”

Will sighed heavily before grumbling, “I said I’d tell you anything, not that I’d do anything. I want it on the record that I, William Landsman, did not want to do this, and am furthermore not trained for medical procedures.” He went into my room’s doll-house W.C. and washed his hands before returning to my bedside. He placed his left hand gently on the right side of my face before using his right hand to slowly remove a section of surgical tape from the left side near my hairline. “Tell me if I’m hurting you. Even a little.” I nodded.

When one of my hairs got pulled in the tape, I winced what I thought was imperceptibly, and Will stopped. “Am I hurting you?”

I shook my head. “Go on.”

Ten seconds later he had removed enough of the tape so that he could lift up the gauze and look under it. “There are nine stitches, and a raised knob right below that, probably the size of a brussels sprout, and a larger bruise spread out across your forehead. None of it looks permanent. You’ll probably have a tiny scar from the stitches.” He refastened the gauze as delicately as he had removed it. “You’re still insanely, unfairly, torturously beautiful, and that’s the last I’m gonna say about it, Chief.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“You are welcome,” he said jauntily. “Glad to be of service.” He tipped an imaginary hat. “Don’t think I’m unaware that you were really just fishing for compliments.”

“Yup, you see right through me,” I said.

Will leaned in close and whispered, “Come on, admit it. You really do remember me. All this amnesia crap is so you can get a break from The Phoenix.”

“How’d you know? I just didn’t want to hurt your feelings, Landsman.”

“That’s real considerate of you.”

“So, what’s my boyfriend like?” I asked him.

“Let’s see. Ace Zuckerman is an awfully good tennis player.”

“You’re saying you don’t like him.”

“As he’s not my boyfriend, I don’t think I’m technically required to, Chief.”

“What about James Larkin?”

“James Larkin. Larkin comma James. Yeah, we haven’t really met him yet. He’s new this year, which is unusual for a senior. I think he might have gotten kicked out of his last school or something.”

“A delinquent?” That was interesting…

Will shrugged. “I only met him this morning when he dropped off the camera at The Phoenix and he was polite as anything. FYI, the kid is nothing like Ace Zuckerman.” He paused. “Or me.” He reached into his messenger bag and pulled out his laptop. “You have your headphones with you, right?”

I shook my head. “I’m not sure.”

“You always do. Where’s your bag?”

I pointed to the closet in the corner of the room. Will opened the door and started digging through my backpack, which probably should have bothered me, but it didn’t. It seemed like someone else’s bag anyway. He pulled out an iPod, presumably mine, then plugged it into his laptop. “When I heard from your dad, I decided to make you a mix. Don’t worry. I burned it for you, too.” He handed me a CD and a playlist entitled Songs for a Teenage Amnesiac, Vol. I. “It’s not one of my best. Some of the selections are a little broad,” he continued, “but I was under time constraints. I promise that Volume II will be better, as it is with, for example, the second record of the Beatles’ White Album or the Godfather movies.”

Will handed me my headphones and put away his laptop. He started speaking really fast. “It’s hard to make a good mix. You don’t want anything too cliché, but you don’t want to make the songs too obscure either. Plus, you can only fit about nineteen tracks on a CD, and you want each one to say something different, and you want a balance of slow and fast songs, and then there’s the added pressure of making sure each track organically leads to the next. Plus, you’ve got to know the person for whom the mix is intended really well. For example, on yours each of the songs means something. Like the first one is sort of how we met freshman year. I thought it might jog your memory.”

I read the CD liner. “‘Fight Test,’ the Flaming Lips?”

“Yeah, I was on the fence between that and ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Part I.’ And also ‘To Whom It May Concern’ by John Wesley Harding. I eliminated that one first ’cause I had another of his songs I wanted to use and it’s bad form to duplicate artists. The one I used instead is called ‘Song I Wrote Myself in the Future,’ and it’s the next to last track.”

I was about to ask him how we had met, but I was interrupted by the arrival of someone who made me forget the mix and William Landsman for the time being.

“Hi, Mrs. Miles,” Will said to my mother.

“Hello there,” she replied uncertainly.

Will laughed. “We’ve never met before, but I’ve seen your picture. I’m William Landsman, Will.”

“Could we have a moment alone?” my mother asked Will.

Will looked at me. “You’ll be okay?”

I nodded.

“I should be getting back to yearbook anyway,” Will said.

“There’s yearbook in the summer?” I asked.

“It never quits.” He took my hand in his and shook it rather formally. “I’ll call you,” he promised. “Don’t forget to charge up your cell phone.”

After Will closed the door, neither my mother nor I spoke.

My mother is beautiful, and since I’m adopted you can know I’m not saying that as some sort of backhanded way of telling you how pretty I am. Besides, everyone says so. And she isn’t beautiful in any of the clichéd ways. She’s not tall and skinny and blond with big boobs or something. She’s little and curvy with wavy light brown hair halfway down her back and almond-shaped ice blue eyes. It felt like I hadn’t seen her in forever. I almost started to cry, but something kept me from doing it.

Mom, however, did not hold back. She burst into tears almost as soon as she got to my bedside. “I told myself I wasn’t going to do that,” she said. She mock-slapped herself across the face before taking my hand.

“Where were you?” I asked.