Just One Year

by Gayle Forman

Genres: YA Coming of Age; YA Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

After spending an amazing day and night together in Paris, Just One Year is Willem's story, picking up where Just One Day ended. His story of their year of quiet longing and near misses is a perfect counterpoint to Allyson's own as Willem undergoes a transformative journey, questioning his path, finding love, and ultimately, redefining himself.

Release date: October 10, 2013

Publisher: Speak

Print pages: 352

Sample

**This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof.**

One_________AUGUSTParis_________

It’s the dream I always have: I’m on a plane, high above the clouds. The plane starts to descend, and I have this sudden panic because I just know that I’m on the wrong plane, am traveling to the wrong place. It’s never clear where I’m landing—in a war zone, in the midst of an epidemic, in the wrong century—only that it’s somewhere I shouldn’t be. Sometimes I try to ask the person next to me where we are going, but I can never quite see a face, can never quite hear an answer. I wake in a disoriented sweat to the sound of the landing gear dropping, to the echo of my heart beat­ing. It usually takes me a few moments to find my bearings, to locate where it is I am—an apartment in Prague, a hostel in Cairo—but even once that’s been established, the sense of being lost lingers.

I think I’m having the dream now. Just as always, I lift the shade to peer at the clouds. I feel the hydraulic lurch of the engines, the thrust downward, the pressure in my ears, the ignition of panic. I turn to the faceless person next to me—only this time I get the feeling it’s not a stranger. It’s someone I know. Someone I’m traveling with. And that fills me with such intense relief. We can’t both have gotten on the wrong plane.

“Do you know where we’re going?” I ask. I lean closer. I’m just about there, just about to see a face, just about to get an answer, just about to find out where it is I’m going—

And then I hear sirens.




I first noticed the sirens in Dubrovnik. I was traveling with a guy I’d met in Albania, when we heard a siren go by. It sounded like the kind they have in American action movies, and the guy I was traveling with commented on how each country had its own siren sound. “It’s helpful because if you forget where you are, you can always close your eyes, let the sirens tell you,” he told me. I’d been gone a year by then, and it had taken me a few minutes to summon the sound of the sirens at home. They were musical almost, a down-up-down-up la, la, la, la, like someone absentmindedly, but cheerfully, humming.

That’s not what this siren is. It is monotonous, a nyeah-nyeah, nyeah-nyeah, like the bleating of electric sheep. It doesn’t become louder or fainter as it comes closer or gets farther away; it’s just a wall of wailing. Much as I try, I can­not locate this siren, have no idea where I am.




I only know that I am not home.

I open my eyes. There is bright light everywhere, from over­head, but also from my own eyes: tiny pinprick explosions that hurt like hell. I close my eyes.

Kai. The guy I traveled with from Tirana to Dubrovnik was called Kai. We drank weak Croatian pilsner on the ram­parts of the city and then laughed as we pissed into the Adri­atic. His name was Kai. He was from Finland.

The sirens blare. I still don’t know where I am.

The sirens stop. I hear a door opening, I feel water on my skin. A shifting of my body. I sense it is better to keep my eyes closed. None of this is anything I want to witness.

But then my eyes are forced open, and there’s another light, harsh and painful, like the time I spent too long looking at a solar eclipse. Saba warned me not to, but some things are impossible to tear yourself away from. After, I had a head­ache for hours. Eclipse migraine. That’s what they called it on the news. Lots of people got them from staring at the sun. I know that, too. But I still don’t know where I am.

There are voices now, as if echoing out from a tunnel. I can hear them, but I cannot make out what they’re saying.

“Comment vous appelez-vous?” someone asks in a lan­guage I know is not mine but that I somehow understand. What is your name?

“Can you tell us your name?” The question again in an­other language, also not my own.

“Willem de Ruiter.” This time it’s my voice. My name.

“Good.” It is a man’s voice. It switches back to the other language. French. It says that I got my own name right, and I wonder how it is he knows this. For a second I think it is Bram speaking, but even as muddled as I am, I realize this is not possible. Bram never did learn French.




“Willem, we are going to sit you up now.”

The back of my bed—I think I’m on a bed—tilts forward. I try to open my eyes again. Everything is blurry, but I can make out bright lights overhead, scuffed walls, a metal table.

“Willem, you are in the hospital,” the man says.

Yes, I was just sussing that part out. It would also ex­plain my shirt being covered in blood, if not the shirt itself, which is not mine. It is gray and says SOS in red letter­ing. What does SOS mean? Whose shirt is this? And whose blood is on it?

I look around. I see the man—a doctor?—in the lab coat, the nurse next to him, holding out an ice compress for me to take. I touch my cheek. The skin is hot and swollen. My fin­ger comes away with more blood. That answers one question.

“You are in Paris,” the doctor says. “Do you know where Paris is?”

I am eating tagine at a Moroccan restaurant in Mon­torgueil with Yael and Bram. I am passing the hat after a performance with the German acrobats in Montmartre. I am thrashing, sweaty, at a Mollier Than Molly show at Divan du Monde with Céline. And I’m running, running through the Barbès market, a girl’s hand in mine.

Which girl?

“In France,” I manage to answer. My tongue feels thick as a wool sock.

“Can you remember what happened?” the doctor asks.

I hear boots and taste blood. There is a pool of it in my mouth. I don’t know what to do with it, so I swallow.

“It appears you were in a fight,” the doctor continues. “You will need to make a report to the police. But first you will need sutures for your face, and we must take a scan of your head to make sure there is no subdural hematoma. Are you on holiday here?”

Black hair. Soft breath. A gnawing feeling that I’ve mis­placed something valuable. I pat my pocket.

“My things?” I ask.

“They found your bag and its contents scattered at the scene. Your passport was still inside. So was your wallet.”

He hands it to me. I look at the billfold. There are more than a hundred euros inside, though I seem to recall having a lot more. My identity card is missing.

“We also found this.” He shows me a small black book. “There is still quite a bit of money in your wallet, no? It doesn’t suggest a robbery, unless you fought off your attack­ers.” He frowns, I assume at the apparent foolishness of this maneuver.

Did I do that? A low fog sits overhead, like the mist com­ing off the canals in the morning that I used to watch and will to burn off. I was always cold. Yael said it was because though I looked Dutch, her Mediterranean blood was swim­ming in me. I remember that, remember the scratchy wool blanket I would wrap myself in to stay warm. And though I now know where I am, I don’t know why I’m here. I’m not supposed to be in Paris. I’m supposed to be in Holland. Maybe that explains that niggling feeling.

Burn off. Burn off, I will the fog. But it is as stubborn as the Dutch fog. Or maybe my will is as weak as the winter sun. Either way, it doesn’t burn off.

“Do you know the date?” the doctor asks.

I try to think, but dates float by like leaves in a gutter. But this is nothing new. I know that I never know the date. I don’t need to. I shake my head.

“Do you know what month it is?”

Augustus. Août. No, English. “August.”

“Day of the week?”

Donderdag, something in my head says. Thursday. “Thursday?” I try.

“Friday,” the doctor corrects, and the gnawing feeling grows stronger. Perhaps I am supposed to be somewhere on Friday.

The intercom buzzes. The doctor picks it up, talks for a minute, hangs up, turns to me. “Radiology will be here in thirty minutes.” Then he begins talking to me about com­motions cérébrales or concussions and temporary short-term memory loss and cats and scans and none of it is making a lot of sense.

“Is there someone we can call?” he asks. And I feel like there is, but for the life of me, I can’t think who. Bram is gone and Saba is gone and Yael might as well be. Who else is there?

The nausea hits, fast, like a wave I had my back to. And then there’s puke all over my bloodied shirt. The nurse is quick with the basin, but not quick enough. She gives me a towel to clean myself with. The doctor is saying something about nausea and concussions. There are tears in my eyes. I never did learn to throw up without crying.

The nurse mops my face with another towel. “Oh, I missed a spot,” she says with a tender smile. “There, on your watch.”

On my wrist is a watch, bright and gold. It’s not mine. For the quickest moment, I see it on a girl’s wrist. I travel up the hand to a slender arm, a strong shoulder, a swan’s neck. When I get to the face, I expect it to be blank, like the faces in the dream. But it’s not.

Black hair. Pale skin. Warm eyes.

I look at the watch again. The crystal is cracked but it’s still ticking. It reads nine. I begin to suspect what it is I’ve forgotten.

I try to sit up. The world turns to soup.

The doctor pushes me back onto the bed, a hand on my shoulder. “You are agitated because you are confused. This is all temporary, but we will need to take the CT scan to make sure there is no bleeding on the brain. While we wait, we can attend to your facial lacerations. First I will give you some­thing to make the area numb.”

The nurse swabs off my cheek with something orange. “Do not worry. This won’t stain.”

It doesn’t stain; it just stings.




“I think I should go now,” I say when the sutures are done.

The doctor laughs. And for a second I see white skin covered in white dust, but warmer underneath. A white room. A throbbing in my cheek.

“Someone is waiting for me.” I don’t know who, but I know it’s true.

“Who is waiting for you?” the doctor asks.

“I don’t remember,” I admit.

“Mr. de Ruiter. You must have a CT scan. And, after, I would like to keep you for observation until your mental clarity returns. Until you know who it is who waits for you.”

Neck. Skin. Lips. Her fragile-strong hand over my heart. I touch my hand to my chest, over the green scrub shirt the nurse gave me after they cut off my bloody shirt to check for broken ribs. And the name, it’s almost right there.

Orderlies come to wheel me to a different floor. I’m load­ed into a metal tube that clatters around my head. Maybe it’s the noise, but inside the tube, the fog begins to burn off. But there is no sunshine behind it, only a dull, leaden sky as the fragments click together. “I need to go. Now!” I shout from the tube.

There’s silence. Then the click of the intercom. “Please hold still,” a disembodied voice orders in French.




I am wheeled back downstairs to wait. It is past twelve o’clock.

I wait more. I remember hospitals, remember exactly why I hate them.

I wait more. I am adrenaline slammed into inertia: a fast car stuck in traffic. I take a coin out of my pocket and do the trick Saba taught me as a little boy. It works. I calm down, and when I do, more of the missing pieces slot into place. We came together to Paris. We are together in Paris. I feel her hand gentle on my side, as she rode on the back of the bicycle. I feel her not-so-gentle hand on my side, as we held each other tight. Last night. In a white room.

The white room. She is in the white room, waiting for me.

I look around. Hospital rooms are never white like people believe. They are beige, taupe, mauve: neutral tones meant to soothe heartbreak. What I wouldn’t give to be in an actual white room right now.




Later, the doctor comes back in. He is smiling. “Good news! There is no subdural bleeding. Only a concussion. How is your memory?”

“Better.”

“Good. We will wait for the police. They will take your statement and then I can release you to your friend. But you must take it very easy. I will give you an instruction sheet for care, but it is in French. Perhaps someone can translate it, or we can find you one in English or Dutch online.”

“Ce ne sera pas nécessaire,” I say.

“Ahh, you speak French?” he asks in French.

I nod. “It came back to me.”

“Good. Everything else will, too.”

“So I can go?”

“Someone must come for you! And you have to make a report to the police.”

Police. It will be hours. And I have nothing to tell them, really. I take the coin back out and play it across my knuckle. “No police!”

The doctor follows the coin as it flips across my hand. “Do you have problems with the police?” he asks.

“No. It’s not that. I have to find someone,” I say. The coin clatters to the floor.

The doctor picks it up and hands it to me. “Find who?”

Perhaps it’s the casual way he asked; my bruised brain doesn’t have time to scramble it before spitting it out. Or per­haps the fog is lifting now, and leaving a terrific headache behind. But there it is, a name, on my lips, like I say it all the time.

“Lulu.”

“Ahh, Lulu. Très bien!” The doctor claps his hands to­gether. “Let us call this Lulu. She can come get you. Or we can bring her to you.”

It is too much to explain that I don’t know where Lulu is. Only that she’s in the white room and she’s waiting for me and she’s been waiting for a long time. And I have this ter­rible feeling, and it’s not just because I’m in a hospital where things are routinely lost, but because of something else.

“I have to go,” I insist. “If I don’t go now, it could be too late.”

The doctor looks at the clock on the wall. “It is not yet two o’clock. Not late at all.”

“It might be too late for me.” Might be. As if whatever is going to happen hasn’t already happened.

The doctor looks at me for a long minute. Then he shakes his head. “It is better to wait. A few more hours, your mem­ory will return, and you will find her.”

“I don’t have a few hours!”

I wonder if he can keep me here against my will. I won­der if at this moment I even have a will. But something pulls me forward, through the mist and the pain. “I have to go,” I insist. “Now.”

The doctor looks at me and sighs. “D’accord.” He hands me a sheaf of papers, tells me I am to rest for the next two days, clean my wound every day, the sutures will dissolve. Then he hands me a small card. “This is the police inspector. I will tell him to expect your call tomorrow.”

I nod.

“You have somewhere to go?” he asks.

Céline’s club. I recite the address. The Métro stop. These I remember easily. These I can find.

“Okay,” the doctor says. “Go to the billing office to check out, and then you may go.”

“Thank you.”

He touches me on the shoulder, reminds me to take it easy. “I am sorry Paris brought you such misfortune.”

I turn to face him. He’s wearing a name tag and the blur­riness in my vision has subsided so I can focus on it. docteur robinet, it reads. And while my vision is okay, the day is still muddy, but I get this feeling about it. A hazy feeling of something—not quite happiness, but solidness, stepping on earth after being at sea for too long—fills me up. It tells me that whoever this Lulu is, something happened between us in Paris, something that was the opposite of misfortune.

Two_________




At the billing office, I fill out a few thousand forms. There are problems when they ask for an address. I don’t have one. I haven’t for such a long time. But they won’t let me leave until I supply one. At first, I think to give them Marjolein, my fam­ily’s attorney. She’s who Yael has deal with all her important mail, and whom, I realize too late, I was supposed to meet with today—or was it tomorrow? Or yesterday now?—in Amsterdam. But if a hospital bill goes to Marjolein, then all of this goes straight back to Yael, and I don’t want to explain it to her. I don’t want to not explain it, either, in the more likely event she never asks about it.

“Can I give you a friend’s address?” I ask the clerk.

“I don’t care if you give me the Queen of England’s address so long as we have somewhere to mail the bill,” she says.

I can give them Broodje’s address in Utrecht. “One mo­ment,” I say.

“Take your time, mon chéri.”

I lean on the counter and rifle through my address book, flipping through the last year of accumulated acquaintances. There are countless names of people I don’t remember, names I didn’t remember even before I got this nasty bump on my head. There’s a message to Remember the caves in Matala. I do remember the caves, and the girl who wrote the message, but not why I’m supposed to remember them.

I find Robert-Jan’s address right at the front. I read it to the clerk, and as I close the book it falls open to one of the last pages. There’s all this unfamiliar writing, and at first I think my eyesight must really be messed up, but then I realize it’s just that the words are not English or Dutch but Chinese.

And for a second, I’m not here in this hospital, but I’m on a boat, with her, and she’s writing in my notebook. I remem­ber. She spoke Chinese. She showed it to me. I turn the page, and there’s this.




There’s no translation next to it, but I somehow know what that character means.

Double happiness.

I see the character here in the book. And I see it larger, on a sign. Double happiness. Is that where she is?

“Is there maybe a Chinese restaurant or store nearby?” I ask the clerk.

She scratches her hair with a pencil and consults a col­league. They start to argue about the best place to eat.

“No,” I explain. “Not to eat. I’m looking for this.” I show them the character in my book.

They look at each other and shrug.

“A Chinatown?” I ask.

“In the thirteenth arrondissement,” one replies.

“Where’s that?”

“Left Bank.”

“Would an ambulance have brought me here from there?” I ask.

“No, of course not,” she answers.

“There’s a smaller one in Belleville,” the other clerk offers.

“It is a few kilometers from here, not far,” the first clerk explains and tells me how to get to the Métro.

I put on my rucksack, and leave.

I don’t get far. My rucksack feels like it’s full of wet ce­ment. When I left Holland two years ago, I carried a big pack with many more things. But then it got stolen and I never replaced it, instead making do with a smaller bag. Over time, the rucksacks kept getting smaller and smaller, because there’s so little a person actually needs. These days, all I keep is a few changes of clothes, some books, some toiletries, but now even that feels like too much. When I go down the stairs into the Métro, the bag bounces with each step, and pain knifes deep into me.

“Bruised, not broken,” Dr. Robinet told me before I left. I thought he was talking about my spirit, but he’d been refer­ring to my ribs.

On the Métro platform, I pull everything out of the ruck­sack except for my passport, wallet, address book, and tooth­brush. When the train comes, I leave the rest on the platform. I’m lighter now, but it’s not any easier.

The Belleville Chinatown begins right after the Métro stop. I try to match the signs from her character in my book, but there are so many signs and the neon lettering looks noth­ing like those soft ink lines she wrote. I ask around for double happiness. I have no idea if I’m asking for a place, a person, a food, a state of mind. The Chinese people look frightened of me and no one answers, and I begin to wonder if maybe I’m not really speaking French, only imagining I do. Finally one of them, an old man with grizzled hands clutching an ornate cane, stares at me and then says, “You are a long way from double happiness.”

I am about to ask what he means, where it is, but then I catch a glimpse of my reflection in a shop window, my eye swelling purple, the bandage on my face seeping blood. I un­derstand he isn’t talking about a place.

But then I do glimpse familiar letters. Not the double happiness character, but the SOS letters from the mysterious T-shirt I was wearing earlier at the hospital. I see it now on another T-shirt, worn by a guy my age with jagged hair and an armful of metal cuffs. Maybe he’s connected to double happiness somehow.

It winds me to catch up with him, a half block away. When I tap him on the shoulder, he turns around and steps back. I point to his shirt. I’m about to ask him what it means when he asks me in French, “What happened to you?”

“Skinheads,” I reply in English. It’s the same word all over. I explain in French that I was wearing a T-shirt like his before.

“Ahh,” he says, nodding. “The racists hate Sous ou Sur. They are very anti-fascist.”

I nod, though I remember now why they beat me up, and I’m pretty certain it had little to do with my T-shirt.

“Can you help me?” I ask.

“I think you need a doctor, my friend.”

I shake my head. That’s not what I need.

“What do you want?” the guy asks me.

“I’m looking for a place around here with a sign like this.”

“What is it?”

“Double happiness.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m not sure.”

“What is it you’re looking for?”

“Maybe a store. Restaurant. Club. I don’t know, really.”

“You don’t know shit, do you?”

“I know that I don’t know shit. That counts for some­thing.” I point to the egg on my head. “Things got scrambled.”

He peers at my head. “You should have that looked at.”

“I already did.” I point to the bandage covering the stitches on my cheek.

“Shouldn’t you be resting or something?”

“Later. After I find it. The double happiness.”

“What’s so important about this double happiness?”

I see her then, not just see her, but feel her, soft breath against my cheek as she whispered something to me just as I was falling asleep last night. I didn’t hear what she said. I only remember I was happy. To be in that white room. “Lulu,” I say.

“Oh. A girl. I’m on my way to see my girl.” He pulls out his phone and texts something. “But she can wait; they always do!” He grins at me, showing off a set of defiantly crooked teeth.

He’s right. They do. Even when I didn’t know they would, even when I’d been gone a long time, the girls, they waited. I never cared one way or another.

We take off, walking up and down the narrow blocks, the air thick with the smell of stewed organs. I feel like I’m run­ning to keep up with him, and the exertion sets my stomach churning again.

“You don’t look so pretty, friend,” he tells me right as I retch bile into the gutter. He looks vaguely alarmed. “Are you sure you don’t want a doctor?”

I shake my head, wipe my mouth, my eyes.

“Okay. I think maybe I should take you to meet my girl, Toshi. She works in this area, so she might know this double happiness place.”

I follow him a few blocks. I’m still trying to find the dou­ble happiness sign, but it’s even harder now because I got some sick on my address book and the ink’s smeared. Also, there are black spots dancing before my eyes making it hard to see where the pavement really is.

When we finally stop, I almost cry in relief. Because we’ve found it, the double happiness place. Everything is familiar. The steel door, the red scaffolding, the distorted portraits, even the faded name on the facade, Ganterie, after the glove factory it must have once been. This is the place.

Toshi comes to the door, a tiny black girl with tight dreadlocks, and I want to hug her for delivering me to the white room. I want to march straight to the white room and lie down next to Lulu, to have everything feel right again.

I try to say this, but I can’t. I can’t even really get my legs to move because the ground beneath me has turned liquid and wavy. Toshi and my samaritan, whose name is Pierre, are arguing in French. She wants to call the police and Pierre says they have to help me find double happiness.

It’s okay, I want to tell him. I’ve found it. This is the place. But I can’t quite make the words come out straight. “Lulu,” I manage to say. “Is she here?”

A few more people crowd around the door. “Lulu,” I say again. “I left Lulu here.”

“Here?” Pierre asks. He turns to Toshi and points to his head and then to my head.

I keep repeating her name: Lulu, Lulu. And then I stop but her name continues, like in an echo chamber, like my pleas are traveling deep into the building and will bring her back from wherever it is she’s gone.

When the crowd parts, I think it really has worked. That my words dredged her up, returned her to me. That the one time I wanted one to wait, one did.

A girl steps out from the crowd. “Oui, Lulu, c’est moi,” she says delicately.

But that’s not Lulu. Lulu was willowy with black hair and eyes as dark. This girl is a petite china doll, and blonde. She is not Lulu. Only then do I remember that Lulu is not Lulu either. Lulu was the name I gave her. I don’t know her real name.

The crowd stares at me. I hear myself babbling about needing to find Lulu. The other Lulu. I left her in the white room.

They look at me with odd expressions on their faces and then Toshi pulls out her mobile phone. I hear her talking; she is requesting an ambulance. It takes me a minute to realize it’s for me.

“No,” I tell her. “I already have been to the hospital.”

“I would hate to see you before,” Wrong Lulu says. “Were you in an accident?”

“He got beaten up by skinheads,” Pierre tells her.

But Wrong Lulu is right. Accident—how I found her. Accident—how I lost her. You have to give the universe cred­it, the way it evens things out like that.


Three_________

I take a taxi to Céline’s club. The fare eats into the last of my money but it doesn’t matter. I just need enough to get back to Amsterdam, and I already have a train ticket. On the short ride over, I nod off in the backseat and it’s only when we pull up outside La Ruelle that I remember we left Lulu’s suitcase here.

The bar is dark and empty, but the door is unlocked. I hobble down to Céline’s office. It’s dark inside there, too, only the grayish glow of her computer monitor lighting her face. At first, when she looks up and sees me, she smiles that smile of hers, like a lion waking from a nap, refreshed but hungry. Then I click on the light.

“Mon dieu!” she exclaims. “What did she do to you?”

“Was she here? Lulu?”

Céline rolls he