“I wasn’t ready,” she said. “That’s not fair.”
“It was just a test shot,” I said, setting the camera down on my chest. I tried to smile at her. “I’ll make you look good, I promise. Just sit down on the swing, and I’ll find the right angle.”
She sat, crossed her ankles, and plastered a smile on her face.
“It’s not a school photo,” I said. “You don’t need to smile like that.”
The smile dropped as suddenly as it had come on. “Okay.”
“Just look natural,” I said, but I could hear how unnatural that sounded. Her expression didn’t change at all. I tried to think about what had worked with other people. “Think about something nice. Something fun we did together. Like…” I racked my brain for examples. The sun was full in the sky, and sweat gathered in the small of my back.
“Like remember when we were at the pool last summer and the ice cream truck came and you got the guy to give us free ice cream sandwiches? Because you told him we were sisters and we weren’t allowed to have ice cream at home?” The foamy vanilla had oozed out from between the chocolate shells and melted down our arms. Jess was remembering, too; I could see it in the way her lips curved, as if she was trying to tamp down her smile but couldn’t quite.
“I was very convincing,” she said.
“I think it was your tits in that bikini that were convincing,” I said, and she laughed big, and I snapped.
Her smile disappeared again. I was still holding the camera to my eye, and I faltered, seeing her expressionless face through the viewfinder, not sure if we were continuing or not. Her eyes were hidden behind her sunglasses.
“Did you get what you wanted?” Jess asked.
“Yeah, I think that one was good. But we can take more.” I had envisioned—hoped for—a whole photo shoot, enough so I could bring her prints of herself when I came home for the summer.
“If you got what you needed, let’s go home,” she said in a voice that brooked no disagreement. She got up and turned, and though I knew she wouldn’t like it, I took one more picture of her like that: the swing set in the foreground, her ponytail swinging, the back of her walking away.
* * *
When we got back to the condo, Ellie was there, but Oma was gone—working with the Garden Club, or visiting Nadine. Jess asked if she could nap in my room, where she could close the blinds to shut out the sunlight, and I said yes. I almost asked how late she had stayed up last night, but I didn’t think there was much point.
I folded laundry and washed some dishes that I had left to soak the previous night. I opened and then closed my computer; I had no homework.
It was the first weekend after testing was done, the lawns of St. Anne’s were busy and happy, and if Jess hadn’t been here, I would’ve gone down there and found Claire and Kitty or just read a book by myself, enjoying the activity around me. Or maybe I would’ve gone to the arts building to keep working on my photo project, which I was behind on, thanks to the chaos of the last two weeks. But I had not planned to do any of those things. Jess was here for a precious thirty-six hours, and I had planned to spend all of them with her. Instead, she was alone in a dark room, passed out.
I texted my group chat: Jess still isn’t feeling well. I think I need to cancel dinner tonight—so so sorry.
The response came immediately from each of them: don’t be! from Claire, totally get it from Kitty, no worries from Sam. I looked sadly at the screen. I had asked Oma to buy all the ingredients for a rice-and-vegetables dish that Claire had made us in the dorm kitchen, and now they’d sit there unused.
Kitty texted me separately: everything ok?
I replied, who knows!!!!!!!! to which she said love you v much, here if you want to talk, but I did not. I didn’t know what I wanted. I picked up a novel I had started a few weeks ago, but I couldn’t get into it. After twenty minutes of trying, I turned on the TV to find a Law & Order marathon. I got a glass of lemonade and sat down with it. I picked up my phone to call Oma and see where she was, but then I set it down again. My Saturday was ruined, but hers didn’t have to be.
Two episodes later, my bedroom door opened and Jess came out, wearing a big T-shirt and tiny sleep shorts and looking tired but not unhappy. She glanced at me on the couch, went into the kitchen, and returned with a glass of water.
“Feeling better?” I asked.
“Yeah. Sorry for being so boring.”
“You’re never boring,” I said. She grinned at me and raised her glass like a toast. I raised my lemonade to match her. I felt the instinctive desire to reach out and touch her—her shoulder, her thigh—and scooted away, into my corner of the couch.
We made it through half of another episode before Jess checked the time on her phone and asked, “What’re we doing for dinner?”
“Up to you,” I said, trying hard to sound casual.
“Weren’t your friends going to come over?”
“They were, but I canceled.”
She didn’t say anything for a long time, long enough that a few scenes passed and I thought she had accepted what I said. But then she spoke up. “Why?”
I shrugged. “It just seemed like you didn’t like them that much.”
“I liked them fine.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. I said, “I’m sorry,” though I knew there was nothing to be sorry about. But it seemed to prompt her, because she spoke up again.
“They’re fine,” she said dismissively. “I don’t have anything in common with them, but they’re fine.” She paused as if deciding whether or not to continue and then plowed ahead. “What I don’t like is who you’ve become because of them.”
I looked at her without understanding, the TV show forgotten.
“Like, where did this whole photography thing come from? You were never that artsy at home. At first, I thought it was just an easy class, but now it’s this huge part of your life, and I don’t get it. And I saw how judgmental they were when I said I was hungover. Which is fine. I don’t give a fuck what they think. But I felt like you were judging me, too.”
“I wasn’t—”
“And you like walking? What does it even mean to like walking? You’re living in the most boring town in America, and you love it. Before I got here, you lectured me about the rules over and over. You sounded like your mother.” The words were spilling out of her, as if she had been tipped over and could not be set straight. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes hard and determined. “You’re different now. Even the way you talk is different. You’re not fun anymore.”
I looked away from her, back to the TV, and focused on breathing. In. Out. In. On-screen, a girl was crying; justice had not been served. I braced myself for Jess to keep talking, keep striking the tender spots where bruises were already forming under my skin. But a minute passed, two, and she didn’t say anything else. Inside my head was white noise.
I tried to line up my thoughts to form a coherent argument. Jess, I’m allowed to have new hobbies. I still like drinking with you. I have always liked walking. I told you about the rules because I love Oma and I don’t want her to be angry at me. I can be different and still be myself.
Or: Jess, that was really mean.
Or, somehow: Jess, I am in love with you.
Instead, what came out of my mouth was, “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
And a part of me believed it.
Jess muttered, “No, I’m sorry,” under her breath.
My phone buzzed a few minutes later, with Oma telling me she was staying at Nadine’s for dinner. So she missed me and Jess watching TV for the rest of the night, not talking, and she didn’t get to enjoy any of the takeout we ordered and then barely ate. Cooking with Nadine two floors down, she couldn’t reprimand Jess for pouring vodka in her lemonade. She wasn’t around to bridge the gulf between us. There was only Ellie, who stretched out in th
e middle of the couch, trying to touch us both.
When Oma got home at nine, we had turned out all the lights, and Jess had lain down on the futon in the living room. I was in my bedroom under the covers, not asleep. I heard the key turn in the lock and the familiar creak of the door opening, the deadbolt sliding home again. Oma’s soft footsteps tapped into the living room and paused, then came down the hall.
I was turned toward the wall when she opened the door. Ellie jumped down from the foot of my bed to greet her, but Oma stayed where she was; I felt her presence, waiting, watching. I thought she might come in and sit down on the bed, ask me to explain why a gaggle of former students wasn’t gathered around her dining room table, why the kitchen was still spotless, why we were in bed so early. But she must have decided I didn’t need comforting, because she shut the door quietly and padded down the hall, leaving me all alone.
Twenty
Maybe Jess was hungover again. Maybe she was sick. Or maybe she just didn’t want to speak to me. All I know is that when her mom pulled up at the condo at the agreed-upon hour of noon, she was still brushing her teeth and putting on eyeliner. She hadn’t woken up in time to have breakfast with Oma or walk along the riverbank like I’d planned, and I hadn’t roused her. Instead, Oma had made French press coffee, scrambled eggs, and toast for just the two of us, and we had eaten outside, each of us reading our own books, in silence I welcomed.
In the elevator on the way down, Oma said, “It was wonderful to have you, Jess. Come back any time.”
“Thanks. It was nice to be here,” Jess said politely.
I almost cried then—not at Jess but at Oma, her kindness. But the elevator settled onto the first floor with a ring of an electronic bell, and we stepped out, and I knew this was no time for tears.
Beside her mom’s car, I hugged Jess goodbye. She squeezed me tight and clung to me as if I were the edge of a building, and I held her back in the same way, as if I were afraid to fall.
“See you,” she said, pulling back, avoiding my eyes.
“Only a month.”
“Yeah.”
She turned to Oma. “Thanks for having me.”
“You’re welcome,” Oma said, glancing between us. I looked at the ground.
“Ready?” Jess’s mom called through the window. She was still in the car, the AC running. Jess tossed her bag in the back seat and climbed in the passenger side, and Oma and I stood there waving until the little red sedan turned the corner out of sight.
I exhaled. Oma put her hand lightly on my back, but I stepped away.
“I’m gonna go do some work in the darkroom,” I said.
“Are you sure, sweetheart?” Worry pressed deeper creases in the lines beside her eyes. “It’s lovely out. We could take a walk with Ellie to the bakery.”
She was right; it was a beautiful day. The sky was oil-paint blue and flowers bloomed everywhere I looked, from trees and from the ground, glorying in the new warmth.
“Yeah, I’ve got a lot of work to do. I’m kind of behind.”
“Okay. Well, let me know if you change your mind. I might get us some croissants for later anyway.”
I gathered my photo supplies from the condo and took the main road to the arts building. It took longer than cutting between the dorms, but campus was buzzing with activity, everyone outside, and I didn’t want to see Claire and Kitty. I wanted, more than anything, to be alone. And there was no likelier place to be alone than a darkroom on a sunny spring Sunday.
Sure enough, I was the only person in the building. I developed the roll of film I had finished yesterday and hung it to dry, then sat on the floor next to the drying cabinet to try to make sense of the work remaining. I felt as if my head were full of dense clouds, as if I were inside an airplane, looking out into the thick gray nothingness, not knowing if I was moving or staying still. Making a list forced my attention away from the window.
So: Oma, Claire, and Sam were done. I still had to print the pictures of Kitty, Jess, Ethan, and Candace and Bryan. And I still had to figure out how to take a photo of my parents without having them physically present, then develop the film and print it.
I scratched some checkmarks and empty boxes into my notebook, and even as it helped, I knew that I couldn’t evade my own mind forever. I thought back to Jess yesterday—you’re different now—and my pen broke through the page.
I left my phone in my bag when I went into the darkroom and spread my things across multiple stations, working my way methodically through the list. If I teared up a few times, if I couldn’t entirely focus on the task in front of me, I was still productive. After several hours, I finished the final print of the twins and set aside the imperfect ones to hang on my wall or give to them as gifts.
When I stepped out of the darkroom and finally checked my phone, texts and missed calls had piled up: Claire asking what I was doing, Kitty asking if I was okay, Sam asking how the visit had been, Oma asking when I would be home. Candace and Bryan were each texting me separately complaining about the other; apparently there had been a debate about chores. There was also a missed call from Jess, but she hadn’t texted or left a message.
I responded to only two messages: to Oma, 6 pm? and to the twins, just fold the laundry together while you watch TV, you’ll get it done in half the time anyway. Then I put my phone back in my bag. The hours had fallen away from me, but it was only five. I had enough time to make a contact sheet of this weekend’s film before getting back home.
I took it out of the drying cabinet and carefully cut it into lines of five images, sliding them into their protective plastic casing. I held the sheet against the light of the window when I was done. Seeing the pictures this way, reversed in shades of brown—my friends looking like ghosts and familiar landscapes like alien dimensions—I tried to guess which ones would work best as prints. This roll was half walking-around photos with my friends and half Jess, and I thought the one of her laughing at the playground might be good.
When the contact sheet blossomed into life in the developer bath, I knew it was a failure. The images stood out against the ink-black lines and edges of the page, each flawed in some obvious way. Claire half out of frame. Oma with a pole behind her head, giving her an absurd headdress. Jess, out of focus. Jess, eyes half-closed. Jess, in the middle of speaking—not dynamic, not drawing you in, just caught in an awkward moment.
There was one photo worth printing. That was easy to see. I had composed it well; the focus was crisp. It had texture and contrast and body, clean lines and graceful curves. It was the last one on the roll. The one of Jess walking alone. Even in the still image, you could see the purpose in her walk, her step quick and her shoulders slight and slumped: a girl in the obvious, inevitable process of leaving something behind.
* * *
I was gathering my things to leave when the door to the darkroom opened. It startled me. No one was ever here this late on a Sunday. I thought it might be Erica, getting an early start on mixing that week’s batch of chemicals, or Oma, coming to find me. But Sam stepped through.
“Oh,” he said. He stopped. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
“I just…um.” He gestured to the station where he usually worked, which was currently a holding zone for some of my extra paper. “I was just here to work on my print of my mom. I didn’t know anyone else was in here. But it’s good to see you.” He smiled.
I tried to smile back. “You too,” I said, though it was not good to see him. I had come here to not see anyone. “I was actually just leaving, though.”
“Oh, okay.” He shifted in place as I slid my film back into its protective plastic sheet. “How was the visit with Jess?”
“Well, it was fine,” I said.
“It was really great to finally meet her,” he offered.
“Yeah.” I tried to slide past him to get to the stack of paper I’d put on his station, b
ut he put a hand on my shoulder. I stopped.
“June,” he said gently. “What happened? What’s going on?”
He was always kind to me; his kindness was relentless, consistent, and undeserved. And he was tall, solid, reliable, there, and his hand on my shoulder was warm and strong. Suddenly he was close to me, studying me in this unnatural light that was called darkness, and not backing away. I looked up at him. I didn’t back away, either. He leaned his head down toward me, and I knew what was coming, and I didn’t stop it.
The kiss was tentative. Soft. Better than I had imagined, the many times I had imagined it. But nothing like it had been with Jess. Even as his hands moved to my waist and tightened there, sending a jolt of electricity through me, I knew in my gut this wasn’t the right time, and I pulled away. My hip bumped the counter and threw me off-balance.
“June?” he said, hesitant, confused.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to go.” I frantically tried to gather the papers I had left, but my hands were shaking. I gave up and sidestepped away from him, grabbing my bag from the floor.
“Wait, what?”
“I have to go home.”
“Wait, June, did I—” He reached out but didn’t touch me. “I’m sorry. I thought you wanted—but maybe I was wrong. I just—can we talk about this?”
I shook him off. “I’m late.”
“But we—you can’t—” He took a breath. “Can I call you?”
“If you want.”
“June, come on. What the hell?”
I was at the door. I turned around to see him with his hands raised, like he was trying to surrender. I couldn’t read the expression on his face.
“We have to talk.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” I said. My voice was shaky. “I don’t owe you anything.”
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