Any Place But Here

by Sarah Van Name

  “You didn’t have to wait for me,” I told her, but she shook her head.

  “I figured if I went back to my room, I’d just fidget around and make things look worse.”

  “You don’t have to clean up for the portrait, you know. It’s just supposed to be a picture of you in your room.”

  “I know! I want it to look good.”

  “But it is amazing.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  We set off across the lawn toward her dorm, the fresh air a welcome change from the stuffy office. At the edge of campus, I could just barely see Kitty jogging along the sidewalk on her daily afternoon run.

  I didn’t usually spend time with Claire alone, and as a result, I was finding it hard to start up our normally easy conversation. We had decided on her room as the setting for her portrait a few days ago, and at the time, I thought it was perfect. The room was practically a portrait of her in and of itself, and it represented the ways she had welcomed my friendship; after all, when your only private space is half a dorm room, inviting someone into that space is an intimate gesture. I had thought she’d be happy with the setting, too. She was proud of her room, and she had been openly excited about being framed in our new art gallery. But now…

  “Don’t be nervous,” I told her. “It’s nothing, really.”

  She laughed and looked at me, smiling in a way that instantly put me at ease. “I’m not nervous. I’ve seen your stuff. You’re incredible.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I think that college counseling session just really freaked me out,” she continued.

  “Oh my God, me too,” I said in relief, and the dam broke, both of us bubbling over with indignant questions and complaints.

  “She told me that if I didn’t get an A in precalculus this year, I might as well not even apply to any out-of-state schools.”

  “She wouldn’t even say if I could try for Virginia tuition.”

  “I asked what she’d recommend doing to prep for essays, and she literally said just to do my English homework, as if I’m not doing that already.”

  “I’m pretty sure now I’m not going to get into college at all.”

  “Same!”

  I gave her a grateful look. As she swiped open the door to her dorm, I asked, “For real, though, do you know where you’re going to apply?”

  “Yeah.” We started up the stairs side by side. “UVA, Virginia Tech, and Hollins here in Virginia, Penn State to have an option near home, and then a few safeties I haven’t figured out yet. Oh, and MIT as my stretch school, but I won’t get in there.”

  “Don’t you want to go somewhere with a good music program?”

  “Nah. It would be a nice bonus, because that would probably mean good practice rooms that aren’t on the far edge of campus, but I’m not gonna be a music major. It’s too much practicing. I want to do physics. Or maybe straight-up math, I don’t know.” We had reached her room. “What about you?” she asked as she unlocked it.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, trying to sound more nonchalant than I was. I felt a headache coming on, as if the pressure of the looming decision and all its attendant anxieties—SATs, grades, my near expulsion from Greenmont—were literally expanding inside my head, threatening to burst.

  Thankfully, Claire didn’t ask any more, preoccupied with straightening her room and suggesting spots for the portrait, though I had told her a hundred times she didn’t need to give me any direction. Ever since we’d decided on her room, I’d had the idea of photographing her from below as she stood on her desk, so her head floated close to the starry-night ceiling. I knew a lot of girls were planning on photographing their friends in their rooms, so I’d have to make my image stand out. I could see it in my head, the flickering lights around her hair, her looking out into the distance as if she really was standing beneath a midnight sky.

  Reality, however, did not match my imagination. As soon as she got up on the desk, I sensed it was wrong. The frame caught too much of the walls and not enough of the ceiling. The severe angle was not flattering; it caught the bottom of her nose and the acne on her chin in a way I knew she’d hate. Most of all, the desk was not built to hold a girl standing on its back corner. Every time she shifted her weight, it shook perilously, and she kept glancing down. She didn’t say anything, but I really, really didn’t want to be the reason her desk collapsed into pieces.

  I shot half a roll of film trying to make it work. But when she took a small step and we heard a crack, I said, “Okay, this isn’t working. Let’s try something else.”

  She came down off the desk visibly relieved. “Can we try one of my ideas now?”

  “I…” The words were on the tip of my tongue: I told you, this is my project. It’s not about you. But it was about her—why she was my friend, why she was important. I owed her a try. “Yeah, okay.”

  “All right, here’s what I was thinking…” She busied herself moving around the pillows on her bed and pulling over a chair. “I’ll lie on my bed like this, and you stand on the chair like this, and then you’ll shoot down at me, okay?”

  I looked at her doubtfully, but I had said I’d give it a shot. “Okay.”

  I held the camera to my eye and pointed it where she directed, but the angle of the bed distorted her limbs, and the frame caught something awkward no matter where I focused. I shook my head. “No good.”

  “Just try it,” she protested.

  I took a few shots, knowing they wouldn’t work, as the tension built in the room. This was supposed to be fun, but it was serious, too. What Erica had taught us about the rule of thirds, the fundamentals of good portraiture, collided in my head with Claire posing on her bedspread. I let my camera fall on its strap against my chest and took a picture with my phone. I held it out to her as I climbed down off the chair. It wasn’t exactly what I saw through the viewfinder of my camera, but it was close enough. “See?”

  She glanced at it and wrinkled her nose. “Is that what I look like?”

  “Not normally,” I admitted. “Normally, I’m just looking at you straight on like this.”

  “Okay, so take a picture like that.”

  “I can’t. It’s not right.”

  “Oh my God, you are taking this way too seriously,” she said, laughing and breaking a little of the tension. “It’s just a photo.”

  “But it’s going to hang up for ages.”

  She made a face at me. I made a face at her.

  Then she made a more exaggerated face, twisting her eyebrows and sticking out her tongue.

  “Photograph me like this,” she said. “It’s how I want to leave my impact on the world.”

  “You’re not funny,” I grumped. She made an even more ludicrous face, and she kept making faces at me until I broke. We were giggling together, she was still making faces at me, and I raised my camera and took photo after photo. I wouldn’t get a good grade, but at least I had a good friend. I snapped and snapped and—

  Suddenly, I knew it was right, this unposed here and now. She was laughing, looking at me just above the camera, her eyes shining and her hair falling around her cheeks, with the magnificent art of her room dancing unfocused behind her. I yelled in delight.

  “That was it! I got it!”

  “You got it!” she yelled back, raising her hand for a high five. “Did you get it when my cheeks were puffed out?”

  “God, I hope not.”

  “I hope you did.”

  * * *

  Sometimes at night, after Oma went to bed, I couldn’t focus on anything. I would sit in my room staring at my homework, reading the same page from my textbook over and over, or watch mediocre TV on my laptop until my eyes hurt. It made no sense to me. I should have just gone to bed. But alone in the little blue room, I felt an inexplicable melancholy draw over me, and I was afraid that if I turned out the lights and closed
my eyes, it would possess me completely.

  After the bizarre college counseling meeting and near-failed photo session with Claire, I was having one of those nights. I had been on the same section of my math worksheet for half an hour. I texted Jess, asking if she could talk, even though we didn’t usually talk on Mondays, but she didn’t respond. The clock read 11:53, which meant I had to get up in seven hours and seven minutes. I kept looking at my phone. It kept not lighting up.

  Until it did. I grabbed it and peered at the text. Not Jess. Sam.

  first of all, sorry to bother you so late. second, can you remind me what chapters we’re getting quizzed on in photography tomorrow? I was an idiot and I can’t find it in my notes.

  I felt myself smiling, just a little. This was an odd text to receive, given that I had been sitting beside him in class when he jotted down the quiz info last Tuesday.

  chapters 8 and 9, I replied. how are your portraits going?

  thanks! ok I think—haven’t developed any film yet, he said. looking forward to yours tomorrow, I have some ideas I think might work well.

  same! I justified this response by telling myself that it was only partially a lie. We’d made plans to meet up and photograph each other after school tomorrow, and I was excited. But I absolutely did not have any ideas. I was hoping I would be struck by inspiration, which was, I recognized, not my best-ever strategy.

  My phone was quiet, and I scrolled back through our text history, which consisted mostly of us coordinating where and when we’d be meeting our other friends. He wasn’t going to say anything else. He was going to do his photography reading and go to bed. The same thing I should have been doing.

  I texted him, I know it’s late, but could I call you?

  He called me a few seconds later. I picked up on the first ring.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hey, are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m totally fine. I just can’t sleep.”

  “Oh.” He laughed. “Well, I’m never asleep at this time, so you’re in good company.”

  His voice on the phone was deeper than it was in person. It made me feel simultaneously more relaxed and more awake.

  I drew looping figure eights on the back of my math homework while I tried to figure out an excuse for calling him so late at night on a Monday. I could say I had a question about development techniques. Or tell him that Claire wanted to plan a picnic this weekend. I could—

  “Claire told me y’all had a college counseling meeting today,” he said. “She said it was bad.”

  I sat back against my pillows. “It was.”

  “I don’t envy you.”

  “You don’t have college counseling?”

  “Nothing formal like that. I like my advisor, so I’ve talked with her about it. But I have no idea where I want to apply, so I guess she hasn’t helped much.”

  A wave of relief swept through me. “I don’t know, either.”

  “Really?” He sounded surprised. “But you’re so smart.”

  I laughed. “You’re smart, too.”

  “Thanks, I agree. I just would’ve assumed you had this all figured out ages ago.”

  “Smart doesn’t mean I’m good at planning. And remember my plans got screwed up when I got kicked out of school.”

  “Asked to leave, right?”

  “Yeah. Asked to leave.” I outlined the figure eight over and over again. I had told him the story of the dance more than once, opening it up a little more each time, giving him more details, more memories. I didn’t mean to, but it was where all my stories from home and some of my stories from here inevitably led. Before and after, my parents and Oma, the reason for my curfew, why I always followed the rules in Virginia. Jess, Jess, Jess.

  “Do you ever regret it?” he asked quietly.

  I stopped drawing. On my bedside table, my lamp glowed, and outside my window, the night was soft and dark. It felt like everything should be dark. My phone sandwiched between my shoulder and cheek, I stacked my homework and set it gently on the floor, and on the other end of the line, Sam waited in silence. I turned off the light and sat back against the headboard, my eyes adjusting.

  “I can’t regret that one night without regretting all of it,” I answered finally. “Of course I regret getting drunk that one particular night. I wish we hadn’t. But I also wish that Jess and I had stood in separate stalls. Or that Mary Elizabeth hadn’t walked in when she did. Obviously, we were going to drink; we always did for dances. It was tradition. So to regret that…” I struggled to explain.

  “I get it,” he said.

  “Do you?”

  “I think so.”

  “It feels inevitable,” I said. “It all feels inevitable.”

  I snuggled under my blanket, pulling the covers up to my chin and turning to face the wall. It had to be past midnight now. Tomorrow already.

  “What are your greatest regrets?” I asked him. I had meant to say it like a joke, to lighten the tone of the conversation and make him laugh—not to really ask him. But it came out soft and tentative, and I couldn’t take it back.

  “I don’t have anything like that,” he said. “Nothing that’s ever gone really wrong for me.”

  “Something less serious, then,” which is what I had been going for in the first place.

  He sighed, but when he spoke, I could hear the smile in his voice. “This is embarrassing on a number of levels.”

  “You don’t have to tell me.”

  “No, I should. But you have to promise not to tell Kitty and Claire.” He sighed again. “Well, Claire already knows. And actually, Kitty probably does, too. But promise not to talk about it with them.”

  “Cross my heart.”

  “So I got into photography in middle school, right? Not film at first, just digital. My uncle—Claire’s dad, actually—gave me a DSLR for my bar mitzvah. I spent all my free time photographing everything and everyone around me. I was incredibly annoying, I’m sure.”

  “Were any of them good photos?”

  “Absolutely not.” He laughed a little. “But I didn’t know it at the time. In fact, the summer before ninth grade, I convinced myself that they were good enough to sell. So I spent all my savings getting my favorite ones printed and framed, and then I went around to every restaurant and art gallery in town, asking them if they would hang my photos.”

  I winced. “Oh no.”

  “Oh yes. I had no shame. And it paid off, because finally this café called Latte Love agreed to hang them. Mostly around the bathrooms, some in the seating area.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “They were just displaying them?”

  “Not just displaying. Selling. In theory.”

  “Sam.”

  “I priced them at two hundred fifty dollars apiece.”

  “Sam.”

  “You’ll be shocked to learn that not a single one sold.”

  I was shaking with giggles, trying to keep them out of my voice. “So if I show up at Latte Love, can I still see them?”

  “You cannot, because Latte Love went bankrupt four months later.”

  “Wait. Let me get this straight.” I took a deep breath to still my laughter. “Your art was so bad that it put a coffee shop out of business?”

  “I like to tell myself that it wasn’t a hundred percent my fault. Turns out they hadn’t been making a profit in months. I can’t imagine my photos were the straw that broke the camel’s back. But still.”

  “So where are they now? Hidden in the garage? Or are some of them hanging up in your house?” I had never been to his house, and all of a sudden, I was intensely curious about what it was like. I had seen Kitty’s and Claire’s homes, at least the ones they had here. What was hanging on his walls?

  “Oh, I never got them back.”


  I made an incoherent sound of indignation, both for him and for myself. I wanted to see these pictures.

  “I showed up one day, and someone had put a padlock on the door. I could see them inside, but I couldn’t get to them. I tried calling the owner about thirty times. He never picked up. And then a few weeks later, I was walking by, and the whole place was cleaned out.” He sighed again. “So, June, that is my greatest regret.”

  “Which part?”

  “Pretty much every part. Except not getting the photos back. I lost hundreds of dollars, but that’s a small price to pay for no one ever having to see them again. They were bad art.”

  “I mean, what is good art?”

  “Definitely not those.”

  We stayed on the phone in companionable silence for a long minute. It had been ages since I’d talked on the phone like this—late, in the dark, with an easy intimacy borne of that lateness and darkness. I used to talk to Jess like this all the time. When had we stopped?

  “Anyway,” Sam said, “I should go to bed.”

  “You mean read your photo chapters.”

  “Oh, right. Yeah. Those.”

  I ran my fingertip along the cool windowsill. “Thanks for calling, Sam.”

  “Thanks for talking, June.”

  “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  I hung up first. Outside, a car drove across the bridge, cutting a lonely path of light above the water, hurtling toward some late-night adventure, or else coming home.

  Seventeen

  The next day, I stood outside the arts building after school, fidgeting with my camera strap while telling myself that there was nothing to be nervous about. Last night’s conversation felt dreamy and indistinct, blurry at the edges, and I had woken up thinking I might have imagined it. But at lunch, Sam had greeted Claire by announcing, “I told June my greatest secret.”

  Claire clapped her hands over her mouth. “The Latte Love story?”

  “Correct.”

  “Wait, what’s the Latte Love story?” Kitty looked bemused.

  Sam rounded on Claire. “You didn’t tell her? I thought you told her everything!”