Any Place But Here

by Sarah Van Name

  “It was your greatest secret! Of course I didn’t tell her! What kind of cousin do you think I am?”

  So then he’d had to tell the whole story again, and I knew that I hadn’t made it up.

  Now, though, Sam was walking across the grass to meet me so we could photograph each other, and I still had no ideas for his portrait. I badly wanted to impress him, even as I knew it was unnecessary. He liked my work already—he had told me a hundred times. As he got closer, I resolved to relax. I would come up with something.

  Sam hugged me lightly when he reached me, both of us taking care not to crush our cameras between our bodies.

  “Good to see you,” he said. His smile was big and genuine.

  “You too.”

  “Do you wanna do me first?”

  I arched my eyebrows, and he flushed. “Okay, that’s not what I—”

  I laughed, his discomfort making me feel more at ease. “You take your picture of me first. You said you had ideas, right?”

  “Yeah, I narrowed it down.” We set off across the grass, him leading me toward Oma’s condo.

  “So, tell me more about these Latte Love photos,” I said. He winced. “We’ve been over the story, but I want the aesthetic details.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Paint me a word picture.”

  “Oh God. Okay. There was this one photo where I had taken a picture of my dad mowing the backyard just as it had started raining, and I used this free editing app to make it so that the lawnmower was the only thing in color and everything else was black and white, so—”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Well, because I thought it looked cool and also because it was like the mower was cutting down life—you know, the grass—while the water was giving life, so the mower being red symbolized hell…”

  He entertained me all the way to the condo with stories of his middle school photos. I expected us to cut into town, but instead, he stopped in the parking lot. I stood two steps behind him, looking around. It was not a photogenic place. The lot was half full of cars, the walls surrounding the courtyard were tall but plain, and the condo building itself, while impressive in scale, was not architecturally interesting. Which could only mean he wanted to take the picture inside.

  “I didn’t tell Oma you were coming over,” I said. “Want me to text her?”

  He shook his head. “I want to do the portrait out here.”

  “Out where?”

  “Stand over there, by the entrance. But leave your stuff here.”

  “You sure? There are lots of prettier places.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, as long as you don’t give me the lawnmower treatment.”

  After piling my backpack and camera on the ground beside him, I walked over to the gates, conscious of his eyes on me. When I reached the closed gates, I turned around and called, “What now?”

  He yelled something back, but it was windy, and I couldn’t hear him. I shook my head and pointed to my ears, and he jogged over, camera bouncing against his chest.

  “Center yourself,” he said.

  “Like in meditation?”

  “No, like—” He reached out to touch my shoulders, then paused. “May I?”

  I nodded. He took both my shoulders in his hands and moved me gently a few steps to the right so my back was against the place where the two halves of the gate met. He rotated me a few degrees to the left, then stepped back, stepped closer, rotated me again.

  “Turn your face toward me,” he murmured. We were very near to each other. If he had taken one more half step forward, if I had tilted my chin up, if he had angled his head down—

  “Okay,” he said. “Like that. You can relax into it. You don’t have to stay so tense.” He turned to jog back to where he had been standing, and I exhaled. I had been holding my breath.

  Back in place, he raised his camera to his eye, gave me a thumbs-up, and—I assume—took several photographs. I saw him turn the camera to take a vertically oriented shot, so there were at least two. I looked away from the camera, then back at it. While I watched him shoot, the idea for my picture of him coalesced into being.

  When he put down his camera and gave me a second thumbs-up, he started walking toward me, and I yelled, “Stop!” I jogged over before he could get much farther.

  “Stay right there,” I said breathlessly when I got within speaking distance. Lord, my cardio was bad. I really needed to take Kitty up on her offer to go running sometime. “Stand just like you were, with your camera up to your face.”

  He considered for a moment, then nodded. “Okay.”

  I grabbed my things from the ground and ran back to my place by the gates. As I had requested, he put his camera up to his eye.

  When I looked through the viewfinder, it was as I had hoped. Sam was the only person in the scene, standing in the middle of the road with the hill toward town rising up behind him. His camera obscured his face, as it had for so much of the time I had known him. He looked like a gatekeeper or a guide, a sphinx to which you had to give your face in a photo. Your soul, if you believed the saying. But unlike the creatures from myths, he did not look malevolent. With his curly hair falling over his forehead, he just looked like a boy with a camera.

  “Was that your idea the whole time?” he asked me when I had gotten back to him.

  “Alas, no. I’m happy with it, though.”

  “Well, congratulations on completing another part of this enormous project,” he said. “Celebratory hug?”

  I smiled. “Yes, please.”

  This time, he slung his camera around his back before opening his arms, and I did the same before I stepped into them. Seconds passed as he held me. I treasured the feeling of his T-shirt against my cheek. So close, again. If I looked up, and if he looked down. Another second, two. Surely this was longer than a hug between friends was supposed to last. I pulled back a fraction of an inch and—

  He let me go, stepped back. He cleared his throat, pulled his camera back around so it rested on his chest where I had a moment before.

  I found my voice. “I told Oma I’d help with dinner,” I said.

  “Yeah, I’m gonna go develop this film.”

  “See you tomorrow?”

  “Yeah. See you.” He smiled again before turning and leaving, and the whole way through the courtyard and up the stairs to Oma’s, I wondered if I had imagined the eagerness in that smile, or whether it had really been there for me.

  * * *

  “I will have the biscuits and gravy, please,” Kitty said.

  “And I’ll get the grilled cheese and tomato soup,” I said, passing both our menus back to the waiter.

  Kitty leaned back in the booth across from me, smiling blissfully as he walked away. Outside Harold’s, the sky was just starting to deepen into a sunset shade of blue. “God, I love this place.”

  “Why do you always get breakfast food? They have so much other good stuff.”

  She shrugged. “Best meal of the day. No reason to mess with something perfect. And besides, I always get something different off the breakfast menu.”

  She looked out the window at something, her mouth turned up a little at the edges, and I quickly raised my camera and snapped a photo. She turned back to me and gave me an exaggerated frown.

  “There was a very good dog walking by,” she said severely. “You can’t take advantage of my seeing a good dog.”

  “You said I could take pictures tonight,” I protested, and she sighed.

  “You’re sure this is the right place? You couldn’t take a photo of…I don’t know…me running? From a distance?”

  “This is the right place.” She rolled her eyes, but she smiled, too, and I took another quick photo. Harold’s was the first place we’d spent time together outside school, and though Claire and Sam lov
ed this place just as much as she did, I associated it the most with Kitty. Her enthusiasm about their coffee and her deep love of breakfast didn’t hurt. Still, as much as she adored Harold’s, she did not adore having her picture taken, and I was glad she had let me invite her out.

  “Are you sure it’s okay that you’re missing the seder at Sam’s?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah.” Kitty took a sip of water. “Passover is obviously important to Sam and his core family, but for Claire, it’s not as big a deal. She wasn’t really raised religious. I know she feels awkward about going to religious events with Sam’s family sometimes. So I think my being there might be more weird than good for her.”

  “Got it,” I said, though I didn’t, not really. Claire had never talked to me about the way her family practiced—or didn’t practice—Judaism, and coming from a family of only-on-Christmas Episcopalians, I didn’t have a lot of experience with religion myself.

  “Also,” Kitty added, “she didn’t invite me until this morning.”

  “Okay, that tracks.”

  Our food arrived, and Kitty and I shuffled containers of ketchup and glasses of water to make way for our enormous plates. My so-called cup of tomato soup was at least a bowl and possibly a tureen.

  Kitty looked down at her plate with a tenderness that might have been sweet if it hadn’t been directed at a plate of biscuits. I very slowly raised my camera. At the sound of the shutter, she looked up at me sharply.

  “You are not taking photos of me eating,” she said. “There, I draw the line.”

  “That was the last one, I promise.” I pulled off my camera strap and tucked the whole thing into my bag at my feet, raising my hands in surrender. “See?”

  “Okay,” she said, mollified. “As long as I can eat in peace.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of stopping you.”

  We ate. As always, the food was perfect. My grilled cheese was crisp and buttery, and the tomato soup was wonderfully rich, thickened with more cream and butter than I cared to imagine. I passed Kitty a bite of my sandwich and snagged a forkful of gravy-drenched biscuit. Outside, the sky slowly darkened; inside, yellow walls met red tables, and fake sunflowers perched cheerfully in mason jars next to the salt and pepper shakers. The tables around us buzzed in conversation, but while we ate, we were quiet.

  After several minutes, it still looked as if we hadn’t made a dent in our plates. Kitty sighed and sat back in her chair, hand on her belly like a cartoon of satisfaction.

  “This is such good food,” she said. I nodded, my mouth too full of soup to answer properly. “You ready for AP tests?”

  I sat back, too, and grimaced. “I don’t have to be ready yet. We still have ten days.”

  “Spoken like a girl who’s not ready.”

  “I’m ready, I guess. Oma made me write a study plan a week ago. There’s nothing in particular I’m worried about. But I have four APs this year, and last year, I only had three. Plus, switching schools, I don’t know if anything got lost in transition.” I took a bite of my sandwich. “What about you?”

  “Yeah, I feel okay. I only have three, thank God, and they’re all subjects I’m good at. I have a lot of brushing up to do in history, but that’s just memorization. It’s just so much pressure, you know? Especially since we have to take the SATs at the same time.”

  “The worst fucking timing,” I said gloomily.

  Kitty nodded. “The worst.”

  “Maybe college admissions boards will take that into account?”

  Kitty made a noise that was half cough, half laugh. “Sure. Yeah. Let’s dream that.”

  Between the mandatory counseling sessions and our looming tests, every conversation this month inevitably turned to college—not just between me and Kitty or Claire but among all the junior girls at St. Anne’s. Kitty hadn’t told me much about her counseling session, only that it hadn’t been helpful. When I’d asked her where she thought she would apply, she told me she wasn’t sure. She’d quickly asked me the same questions back and listened when I’d admitted my confusions and fears. Overall, though, it didn’t seem to be her favorite subject, so I was trying to figure out a way to pivot to a new topic when she spoke up.

  “I wish we could just stay here,” she said. She played with the silver bracelet she always wore, circling it around her wrist.

  “Harold’s won’t kick us out,” I said. I craned my neck to look at our waiter, who was occupied on the other side of the room. “They like to move tables fast, but we still have food in front of us.”

  She smiled at her hands. “I don’t mean here. I mean, broadly, the here and now. School, spring, junior year. It feels like…everything is in its right place, you know?”

  “Yes.” And I did, even if I didn’t feel exactly the same way all the time. For me, it wasn’t so easy. Even on my happiest days in Virginia—and I was happy, sometimes overwhelmingly so—home tugged at me, making it hard to be completely present. Almost every night, I was on the phone with someone. The twins were doing great without me. My parents still acted suspicious when I said I was doing well. And there was Jess. Some days, I thought of her barely at all, or with platonic fondness, and felt silly for thinking I loved her any other way. Other days, I woke up aching, having dreamed of her, a blur of laughter and soft skin and kisses in the pink flannel sheets of her bed. Those days made me honest with myself: I couldn’t possibly be straight, nor could I continue being happy as only her friend.

  But I knew what Kitty was saying, too. There were moments in the gazebo, with her and Claire and Sam, when we were all giggling at stupid jokes and drinking coffee—iced coffee, now that it was warm! And she’d be leaning against Claire, Claire’s hair curling in the wind, and Sam and I would be sitting close together, and he would look at me as if he thought no one else saw how he looked at me, as if I were something to look at. Our cameras were forgotten in our bags. And even Jess was forgotten, and my parents, and our books lay forgotten on the ground. And I would squint out at the river, the sun shining down on it and all of us, and the whole world would glitter.

  In those moments, I wanted to stay in the here and now and never leave.

  I snapped back to myself, to Kitty sitting across from me, looking sad despite talking about happiness. “Aren’t you excited, though?”

  “About what?”

  “About…” I shrugged. “College. I know the counseling was bullshit, but you have great grades. You’ll definitely get in somewhere good. You’ll probably get scholarships. Aren’t you looking forward to not having the school set your curfew anymore? Not having to sign out every time you leave campus? And more interesting classes that you actually get to choose?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Sure. That all sounds great.”

  I was taken aback by her cynicism. “I’m sorry,” I said, not knowing entirely what I was apologizing for. “I didn’t mean…”

  “No, I’m sorry. That does sound great. It’s just…” She spread her hands on the table in front of us. “I don’t know what’s gonna happen with me and Claire.”

  Her words hung in the air, surrounded by the hum of conversations in Harold’s—other people’s words, other people’s problems and victories and mundane lives. I got the sense that she had been waiting to say those words for a long time.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I know it’s stupid,” she said in a rush. “I know you’re not supposed to take things like that into consideration when you’re thinking about your future. But Claire is my first girlfriend. I love her so much. Like—so much. Even though she drives me up the wall sometimes. I don’t know where I’d be without her. I don’t talk to that many people, you know? I don’t make friends easily. She makes it easy for me. She takes care of me.” Kitty looked at me across the table intently, as if trying to make me understand.

  “I know,” I said. I searched for adequate words and came up empty. “It�
��s not stupid. It’s really hard. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” she said quietly. She took her hands off the table and folded them in her lap. “Who knows? Maybe we’ll end up at the same place.”

  “Or close together.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And if not, there’s always long distance.”

  I was trying to be helpful, but it was clear that had not been the right thing to say.

  “I hate talking on the phone,” Kitty said. “I don’t think that would work.”

  “You could get better,” I said.

  Her face softened. “Yeah. I guess if the only way to stay with her is to talk on the phone more, I could do that.” She picked up her fork again and ate a few more bites of biscuit. I nibbled at my grilled cheese, just to have something to do with my hands.

  I looked across at Kitty carefully, trying to judge if she had more to say. I wanted to talk to her about something else, and I hadn’t wanted to bring it up via text or with the others around. She caught my eye and smiled.

  “You don’t have to worry. I’m fine,” she said. “It’s just what comes up for me whenever I think about the future. What about you? How are you? What’s going on?”

  “I think you were right,” I said.

  “Not surprised. About what?”

  “I think I’m definitely bisexual,” I said. It was the first time I had said it aloud, as something I thought, and it felt strange on my tongue, like a food I had never eaten.

  “Cool,” Kitty said. “Welcome to not being straight.”

  “Thanks, I guess?”

  “You’re welcome.” She smiled, really big this time, and I laughed in relief. I took a deep breath and released it, feeling a little less tightness around my chest.

  “Have you told Jess?” she asked me, and immediately, there it was back again, that familiar constriction.

  I shook my head. “No. But I kissed her.” I swallowed hard at the memory.

  Kitty sat up straight. “Oh wow.” She looked at my face, which must have been dismal. “Oh no. It went badly?”

  “We were drunk,” I said. A flicker of judgment crossed Kitty’s face, but she didn’t say anything. “I played it off the next day. So in a way, I did the exact opposite of telling her. Oh, and she confirmed that she was straight, by the way, because it turns out she’s also kissed this other friend of hers.”