Both Can Be True

by Jules Machias

As quickly as I can, which is not quickly because I’m holding a loopy Pomeranian, I unlock my bike from the tall fence around the dog-walking yard. I slide my arm through the short handles of the shopping bag, give it a yank to make sure it’s sturdy enough to hold Chewbarka, and slip her in.

  This is going to be a disaster. I don’t know why I’m doing this. Why am I doing this? Mom will lose her mind if she finds out.

  I text her, my fingers shaking with adrenaline: On my way. I get the bike free and push it clumsily across the gravel parking lot with one hand. Just as I go around the corner of the building, I hear the night worker open the kennel door to let a dog outside.

  We’re safe. Barely.

  But the real trouble is about to begin.

  3

  Klutzy Nincompoop

  Ash

  In photography class on Friday, which has kids from all three grades since it’s an elective, Daniel seems exhausted. He’s looked more and more wiped out all week. Like something’s really wearing on him. He takes out his folder and notebook at the table he and I share with Fiona Jones, the tall Black eighth-grade girl Griff said Daniel kissed, and Braden, an obnoxious sixth grader with a non-ironic blond mullet who likes to talk like he’s an announcer at a monster truck show. Fiona asks Daniel if he stayed up too late playing Super Smash with Mitchell again.

  “Yep, I dominated,” he says unconvincingly. He knocks his folder to the floor with his elbow. When he leans down to get it, he bumps his head on the table.

  Fiona laughs her perfect, dainty laugh girl-me would die to have. Her cheekbones are so defined when she’s smiling. “You’re a hot mess. You good?”

  “I’ll let you know when I figure it out.” Daniel rubs his eyes and starts to yawn, then notices me watching. He cuts it off and clears his throat.

  I quickly look down at the Billie Eilish song measures I’ve been doodling to try to hang on to my fading femininity. I hate it when people stare at me too. I’m always worried they’re trying to figure out if I’m a boy or a girl. Even though Mom tells me all the time the puberty blockers I’m on till I “figure things out” are working just fine. That no one can tell what’s under my clothes, and even if they could it’s none of their ding-dang business.

  Our teacher, Ms. Bernstein, is an older white lady with pin-straight dark hair and unfortunate bangs. She tells us we have two tasks today: to learn about an assignment due next week and to use the darkroom to load photo paper into the oatmeal-box pinhole cameras we made yesterday. “The rule of thirds is a way of composing a photo so the most interesting parts align with the intersections of four lines.” She flips on the projector, which displays a rectangular grid. “It’s easiest to see in landscape photography. The horizon falls along one of the two horizontal lines. A point of interest, like a tree or a mountain or a rock formation, falls along one of the two vertical lines.” She shows us photos cropped with the horizon line and point of interest in the center, and cropped with them along the lines. The rule-of-thirds photos look so much more interesting, even though they’re of the exact same thing.

  I glance at Daniel, who’s looking at the screen like he already gets it. Ms. Bernstein tells us to take out our phones.

  “That’s a first,” Braden laughs. “Y’all always tell us to put them away.”

  “For this assignment, you’ll use your phone camera. I want you to experiment with composition without worrying yet about the mechanics of the single-lens reflex cameras we’ll use later on.” Ms. Bernstein shows a slide with instructions for getting to the camera settings on iPhones and Androids. “Almost all phones have the option to overlay grid lines. Follow these instructions to turn them on.”

  Everyone does except Daniel. Fiona peeks over his shoulder. “Of course you already had them on, photo geek.”

  “My dad turned them on,” Daniel mumbles around a suppressed yawn.

  “Your assignment, due next Friday, is to make a photo that has two subjects placed at the intersections created by your grid lines. Experiment with placement. See what feels right. As for the content, choose two objects that are personally significant to you and place them on a plain background. That could be a towel, a stretch of pavement, a poster board, whatever. As long as it’s all the same color and texture and it fills the frame.”

  Braden snickers under his breath. “How about a couple hundred-dollar bills on my left butt cheek?”

  Fiona shoots him a look like you’re disgusting.

  “Any questions?” Ms. Bernstein asks.

  A kid at table four raises her hand. “Why’d you say ‘make a photo’ instead of ‘take a photo’?”

  Fiona pokes Daniel. “You know.”

  “Daniel, what do you think?” Ms. Bernstein says.

  “Um. You make a photo when you choose what goes in the frame and like . . . compose it. I mean put the subject there on purpose. Instead of taking a photo, where you see something interesting and snap a shot of it.”

  Ms. Bernstein smiles. “Correct. When you use your pinhole cameras next week, you’ll take a photo. When you do your rule-of-thirds assignment, you’ll make a photo. Each of you will present your rule-of-thirds photo to the class next Friday.” She claps her hands. “On to loading the pinhole cameras. Make sure when you put the paper in, the shiny side is toward the hole you poked in the box.” She says it like a thousand students over the years have done it wrong. “Table one, go on into the darkroom. Table two, when someone comes out, one of you can go in. We’ll go around the room that way. Four kids max in there at a time. The rest of you, please take out your lens worksheets from yesterday.”

  Daniel yawns about fifty times while Ms. Bernstein walks us through the worksheet. His dark wavy hair keeps falling over his forehead and he keeps pushing it away. Braden is sneaking popcorn out of his drawstring bag, eating most of it but occasionally flicking pieces at us when Ms. Bernstein isn’t looking. Fiona notices me watching Daniel and one sculpted eyebrow goes up. She hides a smile with her hand.

  I focus on my worksheet, a blush spreading over my face. I always feel like a klutzy nincompoop around eighth graders, which makes no sense ’cause I’m the same age as them since I flunked sixth grade. They’re just so . . . I don’t know. Like they know something I don’t. Like they’re about to spread their wings and take flight while the rest of us are pushing out pinfeathers.

  Especially Fiona. How she can make a navy-blue Avengers T-shirt look elegant is beyond me. Maybe it’s her thin gold charm bracelet with all the tiny Avengers charms. Or her gold Squirrel Girl earrings. Or the way she’s built all willowy and strong like a ballet dancer.

  Two kids from table three come out and Daniel and Fiona go in the darkroom. It’s hard to focus on the worksheet with Braden chewing like a cow next to me. When the guy I have a minor crush on is in a darkroom with a girl he kissed. I switch to sketching my beagle, Booper, doing the cute little awoo sound he makes when I get home from school and hug him. It’s one of my favorite parts of the day.

  When another kid comes out of the darkroom, I grab my oatmeal box and photo paper off the shelf and open the door to the vestibule, the coffin-sized pitch-black room that’s there so no classroom light gets into the darkroom. I wait till the classroom door is closed and then reach for the darkroom door just as I hear it start to open. The darkroom’s dim red safelight isn’t bright enough to show the person’s face. They collide with me and make an oof sound.

  “Daniel?” I ask.

  “Yeah, who’s—I mean sorry, I just—oh god.” A peal of laughter comes out of him, bright and contagious in the cramped, dark space. “This dog thing’s got me so tired I don’t know what year it is.” He giggles again like a rippling purple ribbon, and then there’s a fuzzy curved thump like he’s slumped against the wall.

  “Dog thing?” I giggle too. “Like, a mutant zebra-platypus-shepherd mix?”

  He laughs like that mental image is sending him over the edge. “No, no. Forget I said that.” He tries to stifle the laugh and fails. “Sor
ry, I’m just tired because—because—”

  “Super Smash?” I suggest.

  “Yes!” Something hits my arm like he just gestured. “Oh crap, sorry, it’s dark!” His laugh flattens and thins as it edges toward hysteria. “I can’t see you because it’s dark!”

  I’m worried the boy is gonna blow a gasket. A sharp knock sounds at the classroom door. “What’s going on in there?” Ms. Bernstein asks.

  “Nothing,” Daniel gasps. “Sorry. Oh my god.” He sucks in a breath and holds it, then lets it out. “Okay. Wow.” He clears his throat and pulls open the classroom door. Light spills in as he steps out. He wipes away a tear streaking down his face before the door falls shut and I’m closed in the darkness.

  4

  Nothing to Lose

  Daniel

  The classroom is painfully bright after the pitch-black vestibule with Ashley. Or at least I think it was her. I squint as my eyes adjust and my brain shifts out of that embarrassing giggle fit. Ash isn’t at our table.

  Okay. Cool. Just made an idiot of myself in front of a cute girl.

  At least it was too dark for her to see me laugh-crying.

  Ms. Bernstein gives me a suspicious look as I go back to my seat. Braden clips my shoulder as he heads to the darkroom because he’s that kind of guy. I trip into the corner of table three. The kids sitting there laugh. I make it to my seat and collapse onto it. If this growth spurt doesn’t end soon so I can figure out what shape I am, I’m going to wind up breaking a bone.

  I blink blearily at my worksheet. It made sense before I went in the darkroom, or as much sense as anything can make when you’ve had a total of six hours of sleep in three days because you’re hiding a—what, stolen? borrowed? rescued?—tiny dog in a tent in the woods. A dog whose tongue doesn’t quite stay in her mouth. Whose eyes go in two different directions sometimes. Who limps when she walks. Who pees all over herself constantly, which is probably the real reason that guy tried to have her killed. A dog I’ve fallen stupidly in love with despite my life totally upending because of her.

  “. . . eleven, Daniel?”

  “What?” I check my paper. “Um, I didn’t get that one yet. But I got f/4 for number ten.”

  “Number ten is f/5.6. As we just said. Please try to pay attention.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” I write f/5.6 for number eleven—or wait, she said it was for ten. I try to erase what I wrote but I’m using a pen. I scribble it out and the paper rips.

  My eyes sting with incoming tears. I swallow hard and cover the mess on my worksheet. It doesn’t matter. It’s not a test or anything.

  But it’s photography, the thing I shared with Dad that was just ours. Before he moved out in August, I took so many photos with his old Nikon D80 DSLR that the shutter button started to stick. Now I haven’t picked up the camera in two months and I can’t even do a worksheet right and I’m regretting choosing this class for my art elective because it feels like jabbing a bruise for forty-three minutes a day.

  I rub my eyes and try to figure out question twelve. But thinking is impossible. When I was volunteering yesterday, Gavin said Tina’s daughter broke her back and that Tina will be gone for a month. I couldn’t think of a non-weird way to ask him to look up her number. I’ve been biking the three blocks to the woods to check on Chewbarka after school every day, and after dinner if I can think of an excuse to go outside, and after Mom goes to bed at eleven, and in the morning before her alarm goes off at 6:03. Last night I was so stressed I didn’t even go home between the late-night check and the early-morning one. I just lay on the stinky tent floor staring at the dark roof with Chewbarka asleep on my stomach, my mind a riot of all the things that could wind up with her getting killed. When I went home to get ready for school, I stuffed my hoodie behind the shed. I didn’t want to put it in the laundry smelling like pee and prompt awkward questions from Mom. Who totally suspects something is going on because I bombed two quizzes this week.

  I can’t let her find out what I’m doing. She’ll tell me I’m too tenderhearted, then she’ll demand I tell Dr. Snyder the truth, and then Tina will be fired and Chewbarka will be killed.

  I grit my teeth. I don’t care how hard this is. I’m not letting them kill her.

  Ashley sits down and gives me a shy smile. A thought pops into my head that I could tell her. Just tell her everything. When we were talking about her beagle the other day, she said she loves dogs. She made that joke about her dog’s farts and then got embarrassed.

  Maybe she’d understand. And what do I have to lose? She already thinks I’m a screwup after that vestibule mess. And she’s basically a stranger, so she’s not going to rat me out to Mitchell or Mom.

  I could tell her. I really could. It would feel so good to not be alone with this.

  When class is over, I get behind Ash as everyone is leaving. I tap her shoulder in the hall. “I can explain about the dog,” I blurt. “I mean, if you want to hear it. It’s a funny story.” I don’t know why I said that. And I’m suddenly less sure this is a good idea.

  She smiles. “The mutant platypus-zebra mix?”

  “Yeah. I mean she’s a Pomeranian.” Did I already say that? I can’t remember. “This lady Tina at the vet office where I walk dogs . . . um, had to go out of town all of a sudden. She—” Ah, shoot. “Where’s your locker? I’ll walk you to your locker.”

  “In the 700 hallway.” She looks perplexed.

  “Oh, right. I forgot you’re in seventh.” The grade levels aren’t supposed to go in each other’s wings, but no one keeps track. We set off through the swarm of kids. “So, Tina brought Chewbarka to work with her that day because Chewbarka, um, needed shots.” Yes, that could happen. “And then Tina got a call that her daughter was in a car wreck, in like Indiana or Iowa or someplace. She was rushing out the door crying, and I was like, ‘What about Chewbarka?’ and she asked if I could take her till she got back and I sort of said yes.” My armpits are going sweaty. I hate lying. “And my mom is all, ‘No dogs allowed, ever!’ and I can’t tell her about it. So I’m watching Chewbarka till Tina gets back.”

  “Isn’t there someone else who can help?” Ashley asks. “Did you call her and see if one of her friends could take her dog?”

  “I don’t have her number.” Not a lie.

  “Can you ask someone who works at the vet office to give it to you?”

  “Well, I mean, I did tell Tina I could watch her dog.” Ick, lying. “Apparently her daughter’s wreck was really bad and she’s going to be gone for like a month.” I stumble through explaining how I’m staying up super late and getting up before the sun, and it’s made me kind of loony and that I’m sorry about my vestibule hysterics.

  “Your hysterics were cute.” She looks away like she knows I’m noticing her blush. “So you’re taking care of Chewbarka till like November?”

  “Yeah. I just, I mean, I’m sure it’ll be fine. A person can’t die from lack of sleep, right? Like you’d just fall asleep instead of dying. I think.”

  “Maybe don’t run that experiment to find out.” We reach her locker and she spins the combination lock. She tucks a strand of purple hair behind her ear and I notice that her pastel pink nail polish is chipped. “So, my mom’s a dog lover too. She might be cool with us keeping Chewbarka till Tina gets back. If that would help.”

  A spark of hope darts through me. “Really?”

  “We already have a dog, so it wouldn’t be a big deal. As long as you think Tina would be cool with it.” She pops her locker open. “Maybe you could come by this afternoon with her? My mom gets home at four thirty.”

  My knees go rubbery at the thought of relief. But then I tense. Oakmont’s a huge district that serves seven suburbs. Ashley could live ten miles from me. “Where’s your house?”

  “We live at the Glenview Apartments. Is that close to you?”

  Relief again. “I’m in Green Oaks. Not far.” I take out my phone and check the distance from my place to hers. “It’s two point four miles. I can bik
e that easy.” Unless I run into a tree or a car because I’m seeing double from a gnarly case of the tireds.

  Ash closes her locker and hikes her bag onto her shoulder. “If you’re gonna hit your locker before the buses leave, you better hurry.” She points up at the clock.

  “Oh, right. I’ll text you when I’m leaving the . . . wait, what’s your number?”

  “It’s 555-3265. Last four digits spell ‘DANK.’ Easy to remember.”

  I laugh as I put her number in my phone. “How’d you figure that out?”

  “My friend Griffey did like two seconds after I got my own phone. He was jealous ’cause his only spells ‘LAMP.’ See you in a while?”

  “Definitely. Thank you times a million. You’re the best.” I start down the hallway, then turn and nearly collide with her. “Sorry. Um, I just wanted to say thanks. Again.”

  “Duh, of course.” She gives me another one-dimple smile.

  My brain goes a little goofy at the lopsided cuteness of her grin. She steps around me and is swallowed by the crowd.

  Mitch has swim practice three days a week, so we only ride the bus together sometimes. On Wednesday when we got off at our stop and he went left and I went right, he didn’t say anything. But today he’s nosy. “What are you doing?”

  “Nowhere. I mean nothing. I just feel like walking.”

  “With all your crap?” He whacks my bag with his trumpet case. “You suck at lying.”

  “You suck at trumpet.”

  “Not as much as you sucked at saxophone, dropout.”

  I reverse course and head for home. He follows, pestering me to tell him where I was going. He finally gets bored of me ignoring him and takes out his phone. He opens Insta and the first meme that shows up in his feed is one of Fiona’s, because he likes and comments on everything she does on there like that’s not creepy or weird. On the surface, it looks like they’re friends, but he nearly lost his mind in June at Cole’s party when we played spin the bottle and I was supposed to kiss Fiona. I thought Fiona would be mad if I didn’t kiss her because it would look like I was rejecting her in front of everyone. But I knew Mitch and Cole would be mad if I did it, since they both liked her. Which is so far beyond awkward it needs a new word invented to describe it.