Any Place But Here

by Sarah Van Name

  “Wow!” Oma’s exclamation interrupted my thoughts. I turned to see her holding the wet print by the edges, examining it under the brightest of the red lights. “This is really something, June. You took this photo?”

  “Yeah.” I walked over to look at it with her. It was for our third assignment, abstracts. After this, we would launch into our final project, although Erica hadn’t told us anything about it yet. I really, really hoped it was not more abstracts.

  Oma turned it vertical, then horizontal again. “Is it supposed to go this way?”

  I grimaced and took it from her, turning it upside down again. “This way.”

  “Ah.” She looked at it closely. “Is that my glass paperweight?”

  “Yeah. On the red carpet with all of Ellie’s dog hairs underneath it.”

  “Oh, that’s what those are. I thought they were…mitochondria or something like that.”

  “Well, you’re not supposed to be able to tell what it is.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means we should vacuum sometime,” I sighed, and Oma raised her eyebrows. Vacuuming was supposed to be my job.

  “We?”

  “Okay,” I said defensively, and Oma laughed.

  “So what do you have left to do here?” she asked.

  “Not much. If I like the look of this one after I see it in the light, that’ll be it. If not, I’ll have to do another version. But that shouldn’t take me long.”

  She wandered back over to my enlarger, where my things—photo paper, binder, camera—were scattered all around. “So let’s see it,” she finally said.

  “See what?”

  “How to make a print. Can you teach me?”

  “Um…” I glanced at the clock. The darkroom would still be open for another few hours, long enough to redo my abstract if I needed to. “Yeah. Sure. What do you want to make a print of?”

  She thought for a moment. “A few weeks ago, you took a picture of me and Ellie on the couch. Could we do that one?”

  “I think it’s kind of dark, but sure.” I flipped through the binder until I found the right set of film, sliding the negatives out of their plastic protector. I showed her how to fit it into the enlarger, set the paper into the correct position, and took a guess on the right exposure. Listening to myself answer Oma’s questions, I could almost believe I knew what I was doing.

  I let Oma slip the paper into the developer. We watched as the image burst to life. “Oh,” Oma said with a soft gasp of delight. This was my favorite part.

  I remembered taking the photograph. It had been when I was working on landscapes, and I’d needed to use up the end of a roll of film. A Monday, and Oma had come home earlier than usual. She claimed a headache, but I saw her grab the book she’d had her nose in all weekend. I had been doing homework at the kitchen table, and Eleanor Roosevelt jumped up on the couch beside Oma and put her nose on top of the book. “Hold right there,” I’d said as I picked up my camera. Oma had looked up and smiled automatically. “No, no, just look back down at your book like you were.” She obliged me. It was right before sunset, the light was rich and gold, and I knew before I lifted the camera to my eye that it wouldn’t be enough. The photo would be dark. Still, I snapped.

  I hadn’t looked at the image beyond glancing at it on my contact sheet. As I’d suspected, it was much darker than the rest of the film, so I couldn’t tell if there was any value in it. But now, it looked like I had chosen the right exposure for the print, because right before my eyes, the details were filling in: Eleanor Roosevelt’s fur and the rough texture of the paper of Oma’s book, the pattern of the blanket in which she had curled. It was still too dark, the composition unremarkable. But it was a nice photo. I congratulated myself silently for getting the focus right.

  “Time to move it along.” I nudged Oma to pick up the tongs. We kept watching it circulate in the stop bath, not saying anything.

  “Thank you,” she said tenderly after a while. “I think I’ll get it framed.”

  “It’s not that great,” I said, a little embarrassed. “It’s not good art or anything.”

  “It doesn’t have to be good art. It makes me happy. You should be proud of that.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything.

  “I always wanted to learn how to develop film,” Oma said, leaving me to finish the print as she started to walk around the darkroom again. “Never managed to get to a class. But I used to carry a camera around everywhere.”

  “Really?” Oma never even took pictures with her phone.

  “Oh yes. All the time. I must have thousands of photos of your mom. She was hard to get a picture of. Always running around all over the place. And as a teenager, she hated having her picture taken.” Oma laughed. “Or maybe she just didn’t like me taking her picture, I don’t know. We fought a lot. It’s hard to say exactly what about.”

  “I’m sorry that she was horrible to you,” I muttered.

  “I didn’t say she was.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “She wanted to live her life on her own terms,” Oma continued. “But I disagreed with some of the choices she wanted to make, and I won, because she was a teenager and I was her mom. Thus the fighting.”

  “But if that’s how she felt when she was my age,” I burst out, “then why is she so awful to me?”

  “In what way is she awful?” Oma asked calmly.

  “She…she…” I moved the photo to the water bath, my hands shaking around the tongs. The emotion had risen in me suddenly, and I wanted to put it away again, to make the darkroom go back to a quiet, isolated space. But Oma was waiting for an answer, and I knew it wouldn’t be possible. The waters had already been disturbed.

  “She acts like she doesn’t trust me to do anything,” I said finally. “When I do something bad or whatever, it’s like that’s what she expected all along. And when I do something good, she doesn’t pay any attention. You know I have not gotten a single B on a high school report card? Ever? But she never makes a big deal out of my grades. She brags about the twins to anyone who’ll listen, but she only cares about me when I’m in trouble.”

  Oma stood there, looking at me. She was in a shadow; I couldn’t read her expression.

  “And—” I didn’t mean to keep going, but I couldn’t stop. “Jess. She hates Jess. My best friend, who loves me more than anyone. Mom hates her. That’s why she wants to meet us on Saturday instead of Friday, you know that? Because if I don’t leave until Saturday, she’ll take her time on the way home, and then I’ll miss a whole day with Jess. That’s what she wants.”

  I turned away from Oma to hang the print on the line to dry. Up close, I could see its flaws. There was a speck of dust in the corner of the lens.

  “Your mother wants the best for you,” Oma said after a long moment. “Like I wanted the best for her.”

  I picked up a clothespin that had fallen on the table and clipped it back onto the line.

  “It’s hard to see your daughter make mistakes,” she said.

  “Jess isn’t a mistake,” I said fiercely.

  “Of course not,” Oma said. “No one is a mistake. That’s not how it works.”

  I stayed quiet. She came up beside me to look at the two prints on the line, my weird abstract and the one of her and Ellie.

  “Thanks for taking this,” she said. She plucked it down. The water droplets still clutching its surface dripped onto her shoes. “And for teaching me. This is fun, and you’re good at it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I mean it.” She put a hand on my shoulder, and I turned a little, unwillingly, to face her. “I really am going to hang this up.”

  “Cool.” I fidgeted under her touch. “Maybe we could put it on that wall in the living room above the bookshelf.”

  “That sounds like
a perfect place.” I could hear the smile in her voice. She hugged me, then stepped away. “Will you be back soon for dinner?”

  “Yeah. I want to make sure this abstract print is okay. Then I’ll be done.”

  “Okay.” She paused by the door. “Don’t come back too late.”

  “What are you making for dinner?”

  “Leftover pasta from yesterday.”

  “Nice.”

  “Love you, June.”

  “Love you too, Oma.”

  I let her footsteps fade away, down the hall and down the stairs, before I plucked my abstract print from the line and went outside the darkroom to inspect it in the dying sunlight. It was fine. It was an adequate print of an adequate photograph, the best of the shots I had. I couldn’t figure out a way to make it better. The other finished photos in my abstract set were more interesting, so if I turned this in, I would probably still get an A. I could hang it back up to continue drying, clean up my space, and go home for dinner.

  Instead, I grabbed my textbook and turned to the section on experimental prints. We hadn’t talked about this section in class, but I had flipped through it while looking for something else, and it had caught my eye: double exposures, distressing the negatives, and other oddities. Some of these techniques would ruin the negative for any future prints, but what did it matter if the picture wasn’t that great in the first place?

  By the time I left forty minutes later, I had several new versions of my abstract print, each more abstract than the last. On one, I had exposed the paper to light in one-second increments, turning it a little each time so the image swirled and darkened like a shadowy kaleidoscope. On another, I had unevenly waved a piece of paper back and forth across the whole image during exposure, so some parts were darker than others. For the last one, I had scratched the negative in stripes with a paper clip. That one was my favorite. It looked injured, offended.

  I hung them on the drying line, where I would pick them up tomorrow, and left the art building, setting out across campus toward home. It was still busy, girls drifting to and from the cafeteria and standing in clusters chatting after sports practices or rehearsals. No one could say it was warm, but it wasn’t so cold anymore: it was March, and spring was coming, if slowly. After spring break, the Garden Club would have its first meeting of the semester. The streetlights lining the sidewalks flickered on as I walked.

  I checked my phone. Sam, who almost never texted, had sent me a message saying I’m dreading turning in this abstract assignment tomorrow, how are you feeling about it? I sent pictures of my last few prints with the caption BAD. He responded quickly: wow, those are…abstract!

  I grinned as I walked and was about to respond when a message from Jess popped up: TWO MORE DAYS.

  I tripped over an uneven edge in the sidewalk and received a severe glance from a teacher walking by. It was dark enough now that the contrast with my phone screen was making it hard to see, so I pressed Call and held it up to my ear, waiting for Jess’s voice to explode in excitement. She had missed our normal call this week, and I figured since she was texting me now, she was free.

  But the phone rang once, twice, six times, and went to her voicemail: “Hi, you’ve reached Jess, leave a message,” in a cheerful tone that sounded nothing like her. I hung up. Almost immediately, she texted me: sorrrryyyyy can’t talk having dinner with patrick and ethan and ash!

  I bit my lip.

  I texted back, no worries SEE YOU SOON

  She responded with a bunch of hearts, and I put my phone back in my bag. I imagined her sitting at a McDonald’s booth, curled into Patrick’s chest, eating fries and giggling at an inside joke with Ashleigh. Ash. Maybe Ash was dating Ethan now. He and I hadn’t talked lately. I felt a tiny twinge of jealousy, even though I had never wanted to be more than Ethan’s friend.

  I took out my phone, then put it back in my bag again. I wished I had sent Jess the pictures of my prints. Maybe if she saw them, she would get it. The scratches and the shades of gray. The four different ways of looking at the same thing, which barely looked like anything, trying to make sense of something that didn’t have a whole lot of sense to begin with. Or maybe she would just ask which side was up.

  Thirteen

  The rosé shimmered on my tongue as I took the last sip from the bottle. I met Jess’s eyes as I swallowed and watched the smile spread across her face. She fell back against Patrick’s chest and clapped. I drank in the sight of her: her hair, messy and short, fell in her face; the red strap of her tank top slid down her shoulder.

  “More,” she cried. “More for my girl!”

  Patrick, trapped beneath her, shrugged and looked at Ethan beside me. Ethan groaned and got up, disappearing down the stairs to the kitchen, where presumably he would find another bottle. I never understood where the alcohol came from. Until I went away, I never questioned it, but now I couldn’t stop wondering, though I didn’t want to ask. It was boys, always boys, who provided.

  Jess arched her eyebrows, and I shook my head.

  “Your tolerance is shot,” she said, tossing a balled-up napkin at me. It hit me in the shoulder and bounced off.

  “I’m a cheap date,” I retorted.

  She wavered in my vision, as if she were standing in a parking lot in the summer.

  I picked up my camera from where it sat beside me, held it to my eye, and clicked. I knew the settings were right for the room; I had checked earlier. She didn’t see until it was already done, and she rolled her eyes.

  “No photos! You’ve had that thing with you all week.”

  “I can’t help it,” I said. “You’re too gorgeous.”

  It was Tuesday, and we were in Ethan’s bedroom. We were ostensibly playing the board game Sorry, but mostly, we were drinking and laughing at each other. Outside, it was raining hard, and with the sound of the raindrops and the shadows from the window, it could have been any time of day or night. The actual time was two in the afternoon. Ethan returned with a six-pack of beer and sat down next to me.

  “No more wine,” he informed the group. “Beer only.”

  “I’ll live,” I said.

  “I’ll die,” Jess said.

  “Whose turn is it?” Patrick asked.

  Jess flipped over a card and knocked one of Patrick’s players back to his starting line. “Sorry,” she said, face mocking. It had been my turn, but I stayed quiet. I plucked an Oreo from the open box between us and ate it slowly as Ethan considered his play.

  When Mom had picked me up on Friday, I’d been prepared to fight. Oma and I listened to a true crime podcast all the way down to the halfway point, a Panera Bread near the Virginia border, and I couldn’t stop thinking about all the things Mom might bring up on the long ride home. But as soon as I opened the car door, she gave me a big, long hug, squashing my face into her shoulder. She smelled like clean laundry and rose water, a scent unique to her, and I missed her more right then than I had for the last two months combined.

  On the way home, she asked me about all the things I wanted to talk about, my friends and my classes and Oma and photography, and it seemed like she listened. She barely even complained about the hours of driving to pick me up. Of course, she also asked about my grades and spent a little too long discussing the twins’ accomplishments, but I didn’t mind that much. A two-hour car ride with my mother was nice. As I texted Kitty later that night: What?

  Now, in Ethan’s house, Jess won the game. Ethan had never cared about it in the first place, and I was too drunk to make sense of the board; Patrick did care, but Jess had made it her mission to beat him, and beat him she did. She pushed the board to the side after crowing her victory and then reached across the carpet to grab my hands.

  “What do you want to do, June? My homecoming queen?”

  “I’m happy with anything.” My voice sounded distant to me, and in the back of my head, I tried to figure out
how many drinks I’d had. How many drinks was half a bottle of wine? Or had it been three-quarters? No, more. There had been more than one bottle when we started. Where had they gotten all that wine? And wait, there had been vodka, too.

  I tried to focus. “We could play another game.”

  “No more games.” Jess shook her head hard. How much had she had? More than me, I was sure.

  “We could watch a movie.”

  “I’ll fall asleep.”

  “It’s rainy. It’s the right kind of day for a movie.” The idea felt good to me, cozying up on a couch with the storm shutting us in. Sometimes Jess and I cuddled together under a blanket, and that sounded good too, her warm, soft legs tangled with mine—

  I caught the thought and swept it away. “We can make popcorn,” I proposed.

  Jess’s eyes widened. “Popcorn! God! Ethan, do you have popcorn?”

  “I have popcorn,” he said solemnly. “I will make the popcorn.”

  “I need to drink some water,” Patrick announced. He rose and staggered down the stairs.

  Ethan followed him, and Jess and I looked at each other across the discarded game. Her face split open in a grin, and she crawled to me, the board crunching under her knees. She slung a clumsy arm around my neck. I laughed and let her tug me to the floor. I lay beside her, looking up at the ceiling fan’s slow rotations.

  “I missed you, baby,” Jess said. Her voice sounded slurred and distant. “I’m so glad you’re back.”

  “I missed you more,” I said.

  “I mean it.”

  “I mean it, too. Jess—”

  I turned toward her, her arm still tucked under my neck, and she turned to face me, and that was when I realized my face was very close to hers.

  “Hi,” she said. She giggled.

  “You’re so beautiful,” I whispered. I knew I shouldn’t have said it, but I couldn’t help it, because her eyes shone like planets beneath the dark arches of her eyebrows; her lips were full and pink and shining. To not say it would have felt like lying.