Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac Read Free Page B

meant. And Mom and I not speaking? It seemed so unbelievable to me and like more than I could even begin to figure out in my current state. I needed time to think.
    I told Dad that he didn’t need to call Mom, and his brow unfurrowed a wrinkle or two. “Well, that’s what I thought,” he said.
    About a minute later, Dad clapped his hands together before taking his pad and pencil out of his back pocket. He always carried them in case he should be inspired. “You should make a list of everything you don’t remember,” he said, holding the pencil out to me.
    Although my dad writes mainly books for a living, what he loves writing most are lists. Groceries, books he’s read, people he’s angry at, the list goes on. If he could write lists for money instead of books, I think he’d be a happier person overall. I once said that to him, and he laughed before replying, “What do you think a table of contents is, kid? A book is just a very detailed and elaborate list.”
    My father is one of those people who believe that anything can be accomplished, the ills of the world cured, so long as it’s written down and assigned a number. Maybe it’s genetic, because I am most definitely not one of those people.
    “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