“Actually, it was pretty great,” I said, stretching my legs and looking out the window, where the sunset glowed pink and orange, bright in the sky and pale in its river reflection. “I ran into this guy, Sam, from my photography class when I was out taking photos—”
“Oh, Sam, I see,” Jess interrupted with audible delight. “This is the guy you mentioned the other night, right? Leaving Ethan behind so soon?”
“I have told you over and over I have no interest in Ethan.”
“Uh-huh. Tell me more about Sam.”
“He’s a nice guy and a good photographer. He’s helping me.”
“You’re in love with him.”
“I am not!”
“You’re getting married next month.”
“I like him a little,” I admitted. “But I don’t want to make a big deal about it, okay? There’s enough going on. It doesn’t matter.”
“Sure. Continue?”
“Well, we walked around and took photos for a while, and then we went to brunch with his cousin and her girlfriend. Claire and Kitty. I told you about them a few nights ago when I was talking about Sam? I think we’re starting to be friends. The food was incredible. You would have been obsessed with these waffles. And the coffee was so, so good. And then they gave me a tour around the school and showed me their rooms. Claire’s room is… I’ve never seen anything like it.” I described the draperies and the metallic accents and the black-and-white photos. “And now I’m at home, and Oma’s making dinner.”
“Wow,” Jess said after a moment. “It seems like you’re loving it there.”
“Loving is an exaggeration. But today…was nice.” I picked at a thread on the blanket.
“I bet your parents are thrilled,” Jess said. There was something in her tone I couldn’t quite put my finger on, and I didn’t like it. “To have you away from me. With better people.”
“Jess,” I said, trying to sound gentle, though my stomach had dropped with a panicky jolt. “There is no one better than you.”
“Okay, but have your new friends ever been almost expelled from school? Because if not, they probably have a leg up on me.”
“I don’t give a fuck what my parents think. And Claire and Kitty and Sam—” I tried to find the right words. “They’re great, yeah, but they’re no you. Also, I’ve only known them a few days, and, Jess, I love you more than anyone in the whole world.”
“I love you, too,” she said quietly after a moment. “I really miss you, you know.”
“I miss you, too,” I said.
After a few moments of silence, I said, “My parents are glad, though. I think more than anything, they’re happy to have me out of the house, so they can focus on the twins. I had this awful conversation with them last night…”
“The twins?”
“No, of course not. My parents.”
“Okay, good. Because I love the twins, but I’m pretty confident I could beat them up if you needed me to handle that for you.”
I laughed. “Thanks for the offer. They’re fine. But my parents just—I’m surprised they spoke to me at all. They so clearly wanted to get off the phone as soon as possible.”
“Motherfuckers,” Jess muttered. “I thought for sure I was going to break curfew last night, and Mom has sworn for once that she’s going to enforce my curfew—”
“An unwelcome change.”
“Exactly. And this party was dragging on and on, but I could not get Patrick to leave. This place had a pool table, and it’s not like he’s good at pool, but…” As she talked about Patrick, describing his antics, I could hear the smile coming back into her voice.
Patrick was the first guy Jess had ever dated for more than a month, and like her last boyfriend, I didn’t pay much attention to him at first. But when they passed the two-month mark, and Jess told me she’d said I love you, I made an effort. I made jokes, asked about his life. I tried to get him to talk to me. I got zero response.
After a few weeks of attempts, I pivoted to just trying to see why Jess liked him so much. At first, I thought it was all aesthetic, because he was undeniably hot—bright green eyes, over six foot, and strong, even though he wasn’t on any sports teams. (“That’s just how he is naturally,” Jess said, smiling and shrugging. I would later learn he spent weekend mornings weightlifting with his older brother.) But as Jess talked to me about him more and more, I understood better. He picked up coffee for her without her asking; he did whatever she wanted to do most weekends; he returned her texts at all hours of the night. But mostly, she said, he listened to her. He didn’t try to offer advice or fix her problems; he just listened.
Of all the reasons Jess loved Patrick, most had to do with how he treated her, and very few were about him. I was comforted to know that my initial take on his personality—that it approximated that of an unbaked potato—had been correct. But I told Jess I was glad she had found someone like him.
Even if she’d already had someone like him, because she had me.
“…but of course, Ethan was sober, and he drove us home,” she finished. “And I got in right before midnight. Mom was sitting there waiting for me. Like a goddamn movie, sitting in the kitchen in her bathrobe. But I was on time. I was worried she was going to ask me if I was drunk, because I definitely was, but then she went to bed without saying anything. I think she was drunk.” Jess’s voice got quiet. I wished I could hold her hand.
“That seems like it went okay,” I said tentatively.
“I guess, yeah. I just feel like we’re in this weird standoff where we’re both waiting for her to catch me doing something, but also she probably won’t notice.” There was a short pause, and then Jess laughed sadly. “Do you ever feel like your parents have no idea how to be parents?”
I thought about my mom and dad. About the bouquet of tulips they had gotten for Candace’s first voice recital. The late nights they had spent helping Bryan go over his student council speeches and buying construction paper so he could make campaign signs. The basketball hoop they had mounted on our garage and the many evenings of horse they had played with Candace and Bryan, games that even I had joined most nights.
“No,” I said. “I think they know exactly how to be parents. They just don’t know how to be parents to me.”
Silence on the other end of the line. The window in Jess’s bedroom faced east. If she was looking outside right now, it would be dark.
“I have homework,” I said at last.
“Yeah, me too.”
“Do you wanna stay on the phone while we both do homework?”
“Yeah. Definitely.”
I put my phone on speaker and set it on the windowsill, right next to the pile of books, and finished my Spanish worksheets with the white noise of Jess highlighting textbook pages on the other end of the line.
In the moment, it was peaceful. If I closed my eyes and stopped breathing—stopped inhaling the soft, dusty smell of the comforter and the scent of Italian spices from the kitchen—it was almost like being at home. Nothing has changed, I told myself. You can do this from afar.
But then, muffled on the other end of the line, I heard Jess’s dad calling for her to come down to dinner. We exchanged goodbyes and I love yous and she was gone, the hum of the phone line conspicuously absent in the air. And all my formless doubts and worries came rushing back in, worse than before.
It seems like you’re loving it.
Your new friends.
Better people.
The kitchen timer rang.
“June, dinner,” Oma called a minute later.
I emerged from my room to the strong, savory aroma of eggplant parmesan and my grandmother sitting at the dining room table, looking as pleased as punch. In addition to the main dish, she had set out a salad in a wooden bowl, a plate of crusty bread, and a pitcher of ice water.
I pulled out
the chair and sat down slowly.
“Are you okay?” she said, her smile fading.
“Yeah,” I said. I slipped my napkin into my lap and looked at my plate to avoid her eyes. “Just tired. Thank you for making dinner. This looks great.”
“You’re very welcome,” she said, some of the happiness slipping back into her voice. “I got the bread at the farmers market today. We’ll have to go together sometime. I think it’ll be nice with this recipe. I enjoy eggplant parmesan so much, and I almost never make it any more. I guess that’s because it’s best fresh and I never eat all the leftovers. But now I have you to share it with.”
I nodded and lifted my fork to my mouth, then set it down. The smell was making me nauseous.
“I’m glad you’re finding some friends at school. Especially Claire and Kitty. They’re lovely girls. I remember when they were in my class last year, they—”
I burst into tears.
“Oh my goodness! June!”
I hadn’t meant to cry; I hated it, wanted no part of it, but I couldn’t stop. The ferocity of my sobbing took me by surprise. My whole body was tight, folded over on itself, utterly out of my control. I dimly heard the clatter of Oma’s utensils as she dropped them to run to my side of the table.
“Are you hurt?” she asked as if from far away, and when I shook my head, she exhaled and rubbed my back in circles.
In the back of my head, a tiny voice—the same small angel that always used to be sensible and alert when Jess and I were drunk together—stayed calm. This is fine, it said to me. This feels good, right?
It did, sort of.
I never would have cried like this at home. If I did, I would’ve left the house, run down the block or sat in the car where my parents couldn’t hear me. They always asked so many questions, and the questions always led to reproach—toward me, or Jess, or the person who had made me feel this way. My parents were people who believed in a single line of causality. They believed in personal responsibility and problem solving. They didn’t understand that sometimes I just got sad.
I waited for the same from Oma, my treacherous body having trapped me in this chair, waiting for her interrogation. But she didn’t ask me what was wrong. She stayed kneeling beside me for minutes and minutes, until my sobs turned into hiccups. Then, when I was finally quiet, she asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”
I shook my head.
“Can I help?”
I shook my head again.
“Shall I put away dinner? We can have this tomorrow instead.”
I paused and then shook my head a third time. “No, let’s have dinner.”
To my own surprise, I was hungry; it was as if I had cried the nausea out. I blew my nose in an embarrassing snuffle and wiped my eyes, and Oma got up, wincing from the hardness of the floor on her knees.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You don’t need to be sorry, sweetheart,” she said as she sat down again. “I just want to make sure you’re all right.”
I looked at her across the table and saw my mother in her soft face, saw myself. I waited for her to keep talking, but she didn’t. I took a bite of eggplant parm.
“This is excellent,” I told her. “Really. Thank you.”
She grinned. “You’re welcome. You know, the secret is the fresh spices. Nadine has one of those grow lights to keep her herb garden going during the winter. There’s rosemary and basil in here thanks to her. It’s really a pretty neat little setup. Of course we’ll have fresh herbs from the school garden once we get into the spring, but for now, I get them from Nadine.”
We ate in silence for a few minutes, tearing off pieces of the bread, slowly consuming the salad.
“Oma?” I said finally.
“Yes?”
“I miss home.”
It wasn’t the whole truth, but it was the core of it. I looked at the wood grain of the table while I waited for her response. I waited for her to say You made this bed, now lie in it, or Your choices led you here. I waited for her to tell me the truth.
“That’s okay,” she said at last. “Of course you do.”
We ate half the pan of eggplant parm, and Ellie licked our plates clean of red sauce. Then we washed the dishes together without speaking; the sink full of suds, winter rosemary and basil on my tongue, Beethoven playing on the radio.
Nine
“Now, for a test strip, we’re going to place the film directly onto the photo paper and cover about eighty percent of it. Let me look—a little more than that, Ruby—okay. We’re going to click our lights on at exactly the same time, for exactly the same amount of time. Starting with a second. I’ll count. Ready? Everyone ready? Okay, three, two, one…”
Click.
“And off again. Move to reveal another twenty percent of the paper. And this time for four seconds, on…”
Click.
All around me, perfect squares of white light pierced the darkness, illuminating the film below, looking like windows to another world.
“Three, two, one…”
Click.
The lights went out, and the darkroom sank into its murky red resting state once again.
I had been surprised by the red light when Erica had first ushered us in two days ago. That day, Tuesday, she had taught us how to develop film, with all of us crowded into the tiny, separate development room. As she showed us how to mix the chemicals and shake the film, the new winter sun had fallen on her shoulders from the floor-to-ceiling windows, and I had almost forgotten about the next step in the process. When she led us into the darkroom at the end of class, I whispered to Sam, “It’s so dark in here.”
“It literally is called a darkroom,” he whispered back. “I’m not sure what you were expecting.”
“All right, smart-ass.”
Admittedly, I wasn’t sure, either. I had seen darkrooms on TV. But I was unprepared for the dense, underwater quality of the air inside, how it made me second-guess what I was seeing with every glance.
“Okay, come bring your strips over here.” Erica stood near the counter in the center of the room, which held the large trays of chemicals we would use to develop our prints. “Slip them into this tray—no, not yet—okay, now. We’re looking for three minutes here. Maya, can you shake the tray a little? Just enough to agitate the solution.” Erica looked up at the rest of the class as Maya moved the tray. “From your reading, can anyone tell me what this is?”
“The developer?” a blond girl said.
“That’s right. If you look, you’ll start to see the print appear.”
Twelve bodies scooted in closer, and twelve heads peered low over the tray.
“Whoa,” I breathed. Sam, next to me, nudged me lightly with his shoulder. I could see the smile spread across his face out of the corner of my eye.
In the liquid, clear as water, the strips of photo paper were darkening and changing. Lines of images appeared, starting as blurry shapes and then sharpening. Shades of gray coalesced into clear, precise pictures surrounded by a velvety black and outlined by tiny lines that said 35mm. One end of the test strips was very light, the other very dark. I knew what the test strips were supposed to look like—there were examples in my textbook—but seeing the pictures blossom on the paper was something different.
“It’s like magic,” I said to Sam under my breath, and then I felt silly. He must have done this hundreds of times. “I know it’s how the chemicals react,” I added, “but still…”
“No,” he whispered. “It’s magic.”
I looked at him, his face so close to mine, his eyes still on the emerging image, and I felt as if the floor were falling out from under me.
Erica’s voice broke the spell. “Now what’s happening here is…”
At her instruction, we moved the test strips into the stop bath, then into the fix. The tongs were c
lumsy in my hands, and each piece of paper felt heavy and thick. I found the whole process pleasantly tactile in a way I had not expected. Before I had realized this was a film photography class, I’d assumed there would be a lot of sitting at a large monitor and fiddling with edit settings. This was nothing like that.
Finally, after the strips had rinsed, we were permitted to take them out of the water bath and inspect them. Erica explained how to use the strip to choose the exposure for our contact sheet, which would show us all our photos and help us decide which negatives we wanted to turn into prints in Tuesday’s class. While Erica talked, I inspected my five images, the strip close to my face. It was peculiar to see the pictures for the first time so many days after taking them.
I had chosen a set of negatives near the beginning of my roll of film, photos I had taken right before I got to the graveyard. I felt a vague, unwarranted disappointment that the images weren’t exciting, even though I knew I had been pointing the camera aimlessly. It had taken so much work to get to see these little pictures.
Sam had already moved back to his cubby. I went over. “How did your photos turn out?”
“Too early to say.” He passed me his test strip. “I think I’m going to do my contact sheet at six seconds. You?”
I examined his strip next to mine. It contained a couple of portraits of a woman I assumed was his mother, then a picture of a mural I didn’t recognize, then a few images at the light end that were so overexposed I couldn’t tell what they contained.
“Eight seconds,” I said.
“Bold. Dark.”
“I like my coffee how, et cetera.”
“Time for contact sheets!” Erica called out, clapping her hands together once.
As contact sheets came out of the water bath, the group of girls gathered around the drying clotheslines, inspecting the first complete evidence of our weekend assignment.
Looking at the contact sheets of my classmates felt intimate somehow. These were the things that had caught their attention over the last week, arranged in neat rows and dripping water from the line. I felt almost as if I were reading a stranger’s diary.
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