The Rule of Thirds

by Chantel Guertin

  I say yes, and he asks if that’s what I want to be when I grow up, which I think is funny to hear, but it’s true. He tells me he wants to be a pro skateboarder.

  “Is that how you broke your leg?” I ask and he nods. “You must be pretty bummed out.”

  He shrugs. “Nah. I almost landed an eight-step handrail. Now I know I can do it. Soon as I get this off. Will you take my pic? I want to remember this.”

  The first shots are him with the candy skateboard, and then he gets me to grab his actual skateboard. “Here’s how I did it,” he says, lifting the skateboard up, then maneuvering it over the railing on the side of the bed. I snap a bunch of pics of Howie in action, first focusing in on the skateboard, letting Howie go out of focus behind, then vice versa.

  “I’m probably not supposed to take your picture without your mom or dad’s approval,” I realize aloud, then I assure him I’ll send him the pics and won’t do anything else with them. I help him back into bed and tell him I have to go. By the time I leave Howie’s room I’m in a really good mood. Back downstairs, I grab a delivery for the third floor. It’s only once I’m off the elevator—actually, it’s only once I’m, like, right there at the door, about to knock—that I glance at the tag to make sure I have the right room. Room 334, the tag says. And my legs nearly give out beneath me. Room 334.

  I lean up against the wall and close my eyes and try to take a deep breath but I can’t get enough air.

  Room 334.

  There’s the supply closet, just down the hall from the waiting room where I’d hunch down in a chair and watch TV when everything in the room got to be too much, or when my parents had something adults-only to discuss. There’s the poster: Washing Hands Saves Lives. Which I always wondered about—prevents a few flu cases, maybe, but saves lives? It seemed a little overblown to me. And there’s the nurses’ station I’ve been avoiding. It’s a bit past 5 on a Tuesday afternoon—Rishna’s the nurse on duty unless the schedules have changed. She had the best stories. The one she told me right near the end, about how she woke up in the middle of the night to find a strange cat in her house. Her color-blind husband had let it in. He’d thought it was their cat.

  I take a long slow breath. Everything’s going to be OK. Lots of patients have come and gone from this room. It’s just a room. It’s been cleaned. It’s been sanitized. There’s nothing left in that room that has any memories at all. There’s just someone else in there, a little earlier on the same journey that ends with a daughter no longer having her dad around.

  Or whatever.

  Three more deep breaths. My eyes focus on the numerals: 334. My camera clacks against the door as I set the arrangement on the floor. Then, focus: the door number in the right third of the frame, the other two-thirds filled by the hallway I walked so many times. That’s right: concentrate on the rule of thirds, so you don’t concentrate on anything else.

  • • •

  Dylan’s carrying a blue blanket and I’m carrying the Cherry Blaster candies he gave me when he picked me up in front of the hospital in his dad’s total dad-mobile, a navy Cadillac, with a shiny wood dashboard and all the stations preset to easy listening. Not at all what I would’ve thought the lead singer of Rules for Breaking the Rules would be driving but, in its own way, so awesome.

  He lays out the blanket at a spot about halfway between the stage and the concession stands, and we both look down at it. It’s a plush blanket—with an enormous Buffalo Sabres logo on it.

  “Wow,” I say, blinking.

  “Uh. Yeah,” he says.

  “I didn’t realize you were a big hockey fan,” I say. “You know, you could probably see that thing from space.”

  He laughs. And then I giggle, and then I can’t stop laughing, and neither can he. “Actually,” Dylan says, “my dad’s the fan. I guess I just kind of grabbed the first blanket I saw. Oh god, this is embarrassin. . . . Are you even gonna sit on this?”

  “I’ll give it a shot,” I say, still laughing.

  “Hey, you want a drink?”

  “You think you’ll be able to find your way back?”

  He grins. “I’ll just look for the only girl on a Buffalo Sabres blanket.”

  Dylan heads off, picking his way among the blankets and the picnic baskets and as he goes I watch him, this boy, this easy boy, this boy who just made me laugh more than I’ve laughed in the whole of the previous year. He’s even cuter in the viewfinder as I snap a few pictures, out of reflex.

  When he comes back he hands me a Diet Coke. He’s drinking water.

  “Can I see?” he asks, nodding at my camera.

  Does he know what he’s asking? Does he know what’s in that camera? A.k.a., my life?

  As well as the pictures of him I just shot. The way he smiles suggests that he gets it.

  It takes a minute for him to figure out how to get it into view mode. He ticks through the ones I just shot of him without comment, then continues through the rest of the images on the data card.

  “Wow,” he says after a while. “I love how you see the hospital through your lens.”

  “Passing the time,” I say, but his words are comforting.

  He gets to the room 334 photo and looks at me with a question.

  “My dad’s room,” I say.

  He studies the picture for a second. “I’m sorry.”

  My hands are busy pulling out blades of grass. Find blade, pull. Find blade, pull.

  I twist the blade between my fingers and look at Dylan. “It’s OK. Life goes on, right? I’m just trying to concentrate on other stuff. Vantage Point, this photography contest, for example. Top two go to a Tisch camp in New York next month. I’d learn so much. It’s two weeks of hardcore photography. But the best part is that I’d be there—right at the school. And it would look good on my college apps. Tisch is my dream school.”

  “That’s awesome.”

  “What about you?” I ask. “What happened with Harvard?”

  He takes a sip of his water. Nods. Then explains that he deferred for a year. “I needed to get some things in order and decide if going to Harvard is what I really want to do.”

  There’s now a patch of dirt where there used to be grass.

  “I’ve got a few things on the go,” he says.

  Like what? I’m dying to ask, but then the stage lights come up. There’s the unmistakable shag of the Cherry Blasters lead singer, and I say something about it to Dylan and he laughs.

  “That would be a great name for a band,” he says. “Unmistakable Shag.”

  Lots of questions occurred to me when Dylan first asked me to go to see Cherry Blasters. What would it be like, just the two of us? Even though I’ve had my massive crush forever, it’s not like we’ve spent much time together. What if we had totally different concert styles? What if he hated standing up—and got mad if others stood up in front of him? Would he dance? How did he dance? And what would he think of the way I danced? And also: what did I think of the way I danced? But from the moment Cherry Blasters come out I realize I have nothing to worry about. Dylan grabs my hand and pulls me up, and it starts with him bobbing his head, and then I’m bobbing my head, and then my hips start moving and his are too, and there we are on the Buffalo Sabres blanket, in full-on dance mode, a mode we stay in through the whole of the rest of the concert.

  The Cherry Blasters never do encores. It’s kind of their thing. So when they announce the next song will be their last, I know it’s going to be their big hit, “Even if You Don’t,” and I touch Dylan’s arm and go on my tiptoes to shout into his ear, “I love this song so much,” and then I realize, I just touched Dylan’s arm. I just shouted into Dylan’s ear. And it was completely natural.

  “The line about being in love with a girl who doesn’t love you back?” Dylan says once the lights have come up and he’s gathering his ridiculous blanket under his arm. Then he puts h
is other arm around me.

  Also completely natural.

  “Only that’s not it,” I say as we follow the crowd toward the exit. “It’s just that she has a secret and doesn’t want to hurt him. I wonder what the secret is.”

  “It kinda doesn’t matter, right? It’s like trust, I guess. You either trust someone or you don’t.”

  “I think it matters. If the secret is hurtful,” I say.

  “What if she’s worried if he finds out, it’ll taint his view of her. And she just wants a fair shot with him?” We reach the car and Dylan opens the door for me.

  “I don’t know,” I say once he’s beside me in the car. “It’s so deceitful. Like tricking the person into falling in love with them, without knowing everything up front.”

  “So I should tell you I only have three toes on my left foot? Makes it hard to wear flip-flops but I get to park in handicapped spots.”

  “Ha, ha,” I say, then actually laugh.

  “Hey, so what time do you have to be home?” He pulls out of the parking space and follows the line of cars out of the lot. “Awesome,” he says after I say 11. “You game for a little celebratory snack? I think the Cherry Blasters were sufficiently deserving, no?”

  “Yes,” I say. And then I turn toward him. “I had such a good time tonight.” He just looks at me and grins. I can’t remember the last time I felt this way. It’s not happy, exactly. It’s more of an awareness of not being unhappy. Buoyant. Light. Something. As we drive we talk and it’s not until he’s pulling into a parking lot that I register where we are.

  Scoops.

  Suddenly my mouth goes dry.

  Dylan is saying something, but I don’t know what. I lean over, putting my head between my knees, the seatbelt cutting into the side of my neck.

  “Are you OK?” Dylan asks, his hand on my leg.

  “Take me home. Take me home. Take me home,” I say over and over. Am I saying it aloud? Can he hear me? Does he know where I live? What is he going to think of me?

  Everything goes quiet.

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2 4 DAYS UNTIL VANTAGE POINT

  WTF?

  I open my eyes and stare at the ceiling. And then it all comes back. Again.

  “Oh . . .” I roll over and stare up at my dad’s photo. “Why couldn’t I just be a normal teenager and get super wasted, make a total ass of myself and then feel like this?

  I bury my head under my covers, shutting out the waft of coffee that means Mom is up, and I’m going to have to explain last night to her.

  “Get up,” Dad tells me. He’s right. Staying in bed, replaying things, only makes things worse. Passing out in Dylan’s car, waking up in the driveway. Dylan helping me to the door. The worried look on Mom’s face when she let us in. Dylan explaining what happened. Mom taking me upstairs to bed. Putting a glass of water on the nightstand and kissing me goodnight. Telling me to get some rest, and not to worry. The guilt of knowing she would be sleeplessly worrying for both of us.

  “Waffles,” Mom says, pushing open my door with her foot, carrying a tray. She’s in jeans, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She places the tray on the bed and hands me a plate and a fork and knife. She pulls the chair from my desk and sits down, taking the other plate, and her cup of coffee.

  “Why are you still home?” I ask, digging in.

  “Pippa, I was worried. Wanna talk about it?”

  “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  “Really? Because you arrived home in the arms of a very nervous-looking boy who explained you’d passed out. I thought you’d been roofied.”

  “I was drinking Diet Coke from a bottle. I wasn’t roofied.” I say, putting my plate on the nightstand. Telling her I’d been roofied is probably better than telling her the truth.

  “So what happened then?” she asks gently. She puts her plate on the desk and gets up, then climbs onto the bed beside me, leaning into the pillows.

  I sigh. “I had another panic attack. A bad one.”

  “Oh honey . . .” Mom wraps her arms around me and pulls me into her for a hug. I bury my head in her shoulder. “What caused it?”

  “Dylan took me to Scoops.”

  “But you love Scoops,” Mom says, confused. I shake my head.

  “I haven’t been there since Dad . . .”

  She squeezes me harder, and says she had no idea. “I thought you didn’t have the panic attacks anymore. You told me you and Dr. Judy worked through them. Even Dr. Judy told me months ago that you weren’t having them anymore.”

  I sniffle. “That’s because I told her they’d stopped.”

  “But why would you lie about this?”

  “Well, they had stopped, kind of. I have all these coping mechanisms Dr. Judy taught me. And it’s better, it really is. It’s just . . . I’ve been thinking about Dad a lot. And my Vantage Point theme brings back more memories of him. And I started freaking out and I didn’t want to tell Dr. Judy because she was being so positive about how I wasn’t having panic attacks anymore. I felt like I’d been failing her and that made me feel like I’m wasting your money by even going to see her.” I haven’t been this honest with my mom in months.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I didn’t know being at the hospital was making you feel that way.” She pulls away from me so she can look me in the eye.

  “I didn’t want you to worry.”

  “Oh Pippa. I’m going to worry about you no matter what. It’s my job. Like it or not. So you might as well give me concrete things to worry about,” she says with a smile. “OK?”

  I nod. “OK.” She smoothes my hair, like she’s been doing since I was little. I tuck my head back onto her shoulder.

  “So this guy you went to the concert with . . .”

  “Is so awesome,” I moan. “And now he probably thinks I’m a total freak.”

  “I highly doubt that. He seemed very nice. And he said to tell you that he was sorry for rifling through your bag, but he was trying to find something with your address on it because he didn’t know where we live.”

  All I can think is that I’m glad I didn’t have any underwear in my bag, which is such a bizarre thought because I can’t even imagine why I would have underwear in my bag. Ever.

  “This boy seemed genuinely concerned about you,” Mom says, retrieving her coffee and taking a sip. She sits back on the desk chair.

  I pull my legs under me.

  “Can you really defer on a school like Harvard?” Mom wonders aloud.

  “Ugh—Mom. We’ve already talked about this.”

  “I’m just asking!” She looks at the wall behind me. “You know, when your dad wanted to do this thing with the wallpaper? I was so against it. We fought about it for weeks.”

  “Why?”

  She sighs. “I don’t know. It was silly but I was worried he was going to influence you too heavily to be a photographer. It’s such a risky business. I don’t want you to have to struggle the way we did because we both had such unstable jobs.”

  “How did he finally convince you?”

  “He didn’t. He just did it.” She looks at the wall, at Dad. “I’m glad.”

  • • •

  In the afternoon, while I’m going through my photos from last night for the millionth time (OK mostly staring at the ones of Dylan), he texts.

  Dylan: Ding! Thank you for saving me from what’s obv. v. bad ice cream. A bit dramatic but I’m impressed by ur dedication to cause. (U OK?)

  Me: Scoops ice cream actually v. good. Just me that’s crazy. Sorry.

  Dylan: I like crazy. I like u. So u feeling better?

  Me: Yes.

  Dylan: Good! Liam Argyle photo exhibit at Train Station tomorrow night. 1 night only. Inspiration break? Burgers & shakes at BRGR first?

  THURSDAY, OCTOBER 3 3 DAYS UNTIL VANTAGE POINT

  Dace h
ands me a blue and white polka dot Kate Spade cosmetics bag on Thursday morning.

  “What’s this?” It’s filled with unopened makeup—mascara, two eyeliners, three lipglosses, a creamy M.A.C blush Dace swears by, and a couple of nail polishes.

  “Not that you need it, but just a little something for tonight. Just because.”

  I hug her tight. “Love you.” I put the bag in my locker, and my phone buzzes in my back pocket.

  Mom: Dace’s mom is trying to reach her. Tell her to answer her phone.

  I show the phone to Dace. She groans.

  “Someone stole my mom’s iPad,” Dace says.

  “What? Are you sure?”

  “Positive. Vivs reamed me out this morning when she couldn’t find it. I told her I haven’t seen it but she says that it was on her nightstand when they left for Vegas. She thinks I brought it to school—so I went with that, to buy some time, but I don’t even know why, because I haven’t touched the thing. I don’t know what I’m going to do. She’s going to kill me if I don’t get it back from whoever stole it.”

  “Who would steal it?”

  “Well, someone who was in the house. We’ve got to figure out who that chick was that was making out with Cole. It’s got to be her.”

  “I guess . . .” I say. “But what about Cole or Asher, if they were in the house?”

  “Well, if we’re going down the boytoy route, what about Ben . . .” she says, warningly.

  “But he was with me the whole time,” I say, feeling a strange defensiveness.

  “Fuck.”

  “—tional,” I say out of habit.

  She glares at me. “I wish we knew who the girl was. That’s it, I’m calling him.” She punches Cole’s number into her phone. “Of course, no answer. Screening my calls. Ugh. Ass.”

  “—phixiation.”

  “Really not in the mood, Pippa.”

  “Sorry. Maybe his phone’s off. He could be in class.”