“Hey there” was all I could manage to say. I didn’t make eye contact either. I had my eyes focused on the foot of the bed. Then I decided that this was idiotic, so I looked at him as unsentimentally as possible. “Well, what happened to you?”
I moved over to his bedside and Will told me. He’d been feeling bad for a while, but he’d ignored it, thinking it was stress or just the flu or what have you. And yesterday, all of a sudden, he passed out. “They have no idea how I managed to take it so long,” he said almost proudly. “My lung had collapsed, it was so packed with bacteria.”
“Lovely,” I said.
“Isn’t it though? It was much more complicated than your average pneumonia.”
“You could never be simple,” I said.
We went on like that for a while, not saying all that much. If Will had gotten my note, he didn’t mention it or didn’t think it was anything to remark on. I didn’t bring it up either.
Yet, inside me, things were different. It was like that physics DVD I’d watched about string theory way back when. Do you remember? The one with the scientists groping around in the dark. I had thought the way I felt about Will was just a room, but it had turned out to be a mansion. He had turned out to be the mansion. Now that I knew that, it was difficult to go back to the way things had been.
At the end of my visit, Will told me he needed to talk about something serious. I thought to myself, Here it comes. My stupid note.
All he said was “I need you to do me a really important favor.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “Do you want me to get your assignments or something?”
He shook his head. “No, Winnie’s doing that. I want you to run yearbook for me while I’m away. You know as much as me, and I’ll probably be out of school for at least the next two weeks. Plus, the book’s done. Only distribution and the end-of-year inserts and things like that. Stuff you could do sleepwalking, Chief.”
“Sure thing, Coach,” I said. “Just put me in the game.”
So that’s how I went from Ex-Co-editor to Interim Editor-in-Chief of The Phoenix.
There were a few people on the staff who were not exactly happy to see me back. They rightfully thought of me as a traitor and a deserter. But most of the staff understood that I was filling in for Will because he had asked me to do it. They didn’t necessarily throw a parade, but out of respect for him they respected me.
Will sent me almost hourly e-mails. As his mother had banned him from the phone for the first several days of his recuperation, I went to see him every night with updates and to ask advice, even though it wasn’t the sort of work that required much input. It was mainly just accounting and distribution, as Will had said. But he was crazy over that sort of thing.
His seventeenth birthday was June 5.
I did the best I could to wrap the record player, but I hadn’t done that great a job and the arm was poking out. I lugged it out to the car, then drove over to the apartment he shared with his mom. Winnie was there, as were Mrs. Landsman and a few people from the staff.
It was a pretty tame birthday party. I was glad of it. He had only been out of the hospital about a week, and I still worried about him. Winnie gave him a straw hat with a black-and-white band that was without question something Will would wear; Mrs. Landsman gave him a pair of binoculars. He left my gift for last, but he kept making jokes about it, like “I wonder what that is…Could it be a toaster? A tennis racket?”
When he finally ripped the paper off, he said, “Of course you know I’m perfectly shocked.”
“I would have found a box, but I didn’t think you could handle too much excitement, Landsman.”
Winnie put her arm around Will’s shoulders. “Now we have something to play all those records on, baby.”
I tried to smile at Winnie, but it stuck in the middle somewhere. “I should go,” I said.
“No,” Will said, “don’t go yet. This is great, Chief.” He hadn’t called me that in such a long, long time. “When’d you get this?”
“Months ago. Before everything. When Dad first started dating Rosa Rivera, I mentioned to her about your record collection, and she showed up with this crazy old record player. Rosa Rivera’s always trying to give stuff away.”
“So, it’s a re-gift?” Winnie asked.
“No, I had to get it fixed. I was planning to give it to you at the start of the school year—you know, as a way to celebrate us being editors of The Phoenix—but the guy at the store had to order a part, and it took longer than I’d hoped. By the time it was finished, I’d forgotten I’d dropped it off in the first place. I only got it back because I happened to be in that same store last November to pick up something else and the store owner recognized me. But then, I didn’t even know who it was for.”
“You couldn’t guess it was me? Who else has vinyl?”
“At the time, I’d forgotten about your record collection. When I remembered, you and I were not exactly speaking.”
“That’s an amazing story,” Mrs. Landsman said. “So much misdirection, rather like a Shakespearean comedy.”
Will put on the hat that Winnie had bought him. “Looks good, baby,” she said. I didn’t like the way she called him baby. Not to mention, if she’d been so concerned about him, why hadn’t she noticed that he’d been sick all that time? Maybe I wasn’t being fair. I often had such thoughts when I was around Winnie and Will.
“I should go,” I said.
“Won’t you stay for some cake, Naomi?” Mrs. Landsman asked.
I shook my head. “There’re a couple things I have to do for yearbook tonight. Tomorrow’s the day the book’s supposed to arrive at school.” D-Day, we called it.
“I should be there for that, Ma,” Will said.
“You’re staying right here,” Mrs. Landsman said.
“But, Mrs. Landsman…” Will protested, like a student asking for a better grade.
I shook Will’s hand and wished him a happy birthday.
He called me later that night.
“I really loved your gift,” he whispered so that his mother wouldn’t hear. She had set a phone curfew for him of nine o’clock while he was recuperating, and it was already ten-thirty.
“I’m glad.”
“You know those records were my dad’s.”
“Yes, Will.” Of course I knew that; I knew everything about that boy. “But my thinking was…It was so long ago…My thinking was that maybe you ought to take them off the wall and play them once in a while?”
Will didn’t say anything for a minute. “Winnie br—”
At that moment, Mrs. Landsman came on the line. “William Blake Landsman, you are supposed to be asleep.”
“Ma!”
“Hi, Mrs. Landsman,” I said to my English teacher.
“Hello, dear. Tell my son that he needs to get off the phone, would you?”
What could I do? Certainly I had an interest in whatever Will was planning to tell me about Winnie, but the woman would be grading my final in less than two weeks. “You should rest, Will.”
“Thank you,” said Will’s mother. “Now tell Naomi goodbye and hang up the phone, William.”
“Good night, Chief,” he said.
The next day was chaotic with the arrival of the books. When I opened the first cardboard box, I felt sadness that Will wasn’t there. It had been his baby after all, and it didn’t seem right that I should be the first one to see the book, certainly not without Will. No one had loved this yearbook more than he, and all his work had made this beautiful thing that people would have forever. The book was all white. In the lower right-hand corner it said The Phoenix in a very simple black Arial type font, and on the spine was a small silver bird coming out of a silver flame. The inside papers were gray, and on the upper left-hand corner of the interior front cover the school’s name and date were printed. It was simple and elegant; we had begun the design months, even years earlier, before we had even been co-editors.