Boy

by Blake Nelson

  “What are you doing this summer?” I said, wiping my hands on my apron.

  “I’m going to Germany,” she said.

  “What’s in Germany?”

  “My dad. My real dad. He’s in the army.”

  “What’s he do in the army?”

  “He sits behind a desk. He’s a major.”

  “Is that high up?”

  “It’s pretty high up.”

  Mrs. Renwick, still on the phone, came back and pointed for Antoinette to get in the car.

  “Give me your address,” said Antoinette. “I’ll send you a postcard.”

  I wasn’t sure if she was serious, but I dug in my apron and found one of my little pencils. I wrote my address down on a scrap of paper.

  “Have fun,” I said, handing it to her.

  “I will.”

  • • •

  It was that night that I finally tried out my brother’s camera. It had been sitting in its case in the back of my mom’s car for a week.

  There was no reason for Russell to own such a complicated camera, but my father had insisted. It probably cost a couple grand. It had a million special features, most of which prevented you from taking pictures.

  In July, in Oregon, it was still light out at nine p.m. So after work I drove to the east side industrial district. There were some skateboard spots down there and train tracks and some homeless encampments. “The Wilds” was what the skater kids called this area. I parked in a gravel lot and slung the absurdly expensive camera around my neck. I started walking. Every time I saw another person, I worried I might get robbed. But I did manage to take some pictures. And with the fancy camera, they looked pretty good.

  As I walked around, I thought about Antoinette. It had been nice seeing her. I thought back over our conversation at the Garden Center. Then I would see something interesting and stop and take a few pictures. It was a nice way to spend a summer evening. It was the only fun I’d had since the Hanna incident. But then, as I was taking a few last shots, the camera’s autofocus froze. I tried everything I could think of to unfreeze it, but it remained stuck. Which is what happens when you buy the most complicated camera on earth.

  12

  The main focus of the Meeks family that summer was outfitting my brother for his journey east to Cornell University. Deliveries showed up almost daily on the doorstep: sweaters, khakis, dress socks, boxer shorts . . . these arrived in boxes from Brooks Brothers, J.Crew, Banana Republic. Style-wise, my father seemed to think that to go back East to college was to travel back in time to the days of cardigans and penny loafers. Russell and I shared our last brotherly moments of rolling our eyes at our father. A few weeks after Russell left, I found a stash of all the more ridiculous clothes my dad made him buy, stuffed in a box in the back of an upstairs closet. At college, Russell would wear jeans and sweatshirts like everyone else.

  • • •

  Much to my surprise, about halfway through my first tennis-free summer, I began to miss it. And then Logan Hewitt called. He and Olivia wanted to play tennis and they wanted me to come. Olivia had a friend who would join us.

  This was at the beginning of August. We were well past the two-week friend embargo by that point. But Logan was still maintaining a certain distance from me. So I was happy for any chance to normalize things between us. It helped that Claude was constantly on the road. Logan was as bored as I was.

  I drove to the public courts and met Logan and Olivia in the parking lot. They didn’t have real tennis clothes. The other girl—Rachel Lehman, from Hillside High School—was wearing cute cutoffs and a brightly striped T-shirt that said ASPEN COLORADO on it. Logan had on board shorts and Vans slip-ons. Olivia wore a tank top and a skirt.

  We hit the ball back and forth. It felt good to hold a racquet again, to stroke the ball, to follow through. Logan was pretty good, and Rachel had played before, but Olivia could barely hit the ball back. That part was hard for me, hitting dink balls to no real purpose. We couldn’t play an actual game. Every once in a while I’d whack one with some pace to Logan. That felt good.

  Afterward, the four of us got sandwiches and juice drinks at the little market down the road. I tried to talk to Rachel a little. She was very cute. Even more so once you got close up. But I couldn’t get her to say much. So we mostly listened to Olivia and Logan.

  We walked back to our different cars in the parking lot. Rachel was driving her parents’ Lexus, and I had my dad’s new Mercedes Coupe, which my mom was letting me drive since he was out of town. Rachel smiled a certain way when I unlocked the Mercedes. She seemed to approve. I approved of her as well. I approved a lot.

  • • •

  It turned out the feeling was mutual. Logan called me the next day and said that Rachel told Olivia that she liked me and that I should ask her out.

  So I did. I was much smoother this time, having learned my lesson with Grace. I called Rachel. I made a date. I made sure not to talk too much. The date was to go ice-skating at the Sherwood Town Center, since Olivia said Rachel was a big ice-skater.

  We met on a Friday night. As promised, Rachel was very good at ice-skating. She was extremely cute in general. It was fun to watch her do anything, even just lace up her skates. So then I started to really like Rachel Lehman.

  Unfortunately, when I called her a couple days later, she said she was leaving for the San Juan Islands on a sailboat with her parents. She hadn’t mentioned this before. She would be gone the rest of the summer. That seemed like an odd thing to not tell someone. It pretty much put an end to our summer romance.

  So back to the Garden Center I went. Hosing down the parking lot. Carrying the fertilizer. Hanging out at the pool with Logan and Olivia when they invited me, which was not very often. Eventually, I got a postcard from Antoinette. On the front was a painting of a guy from the 1800s, standing on a mountain peak, looking down at the clouds. “Wanderer in the Mist,” it was called. It was a landscape painting.

  On the back she’d written:

  Frankfurt is hot and boring, but I went to Berlin last weekend with a friend. Never made it to the youth hostel. Met some wild Australians. Partied for three days straight, had to hitchhike back because we spent all our $$$. —Antoinette

  I must have read that postcard ten times. Not in a romantic way, but because it was so interesting to imagine Antoinette running around some city in Germany. What a strange girl she was.

  I put the postcard on my wall with a thumbtack. Every couple days I would turn it around so that some days it was the painting, “Wanderer in the Mist,” and other days it was Antoinette’s message of crazy adventures from across the ocean.

  13

  The day my brother left for college, we loaded up the Toyota RAV4. This was early evening, the end of August. The landscaping guy had cut our front lawn that day and trimmed the hedges. Our house, our yard, the entire neighborhood had a clean, wholesome, well-kept feel to it. Gentle Portland. Familiar Portland. It would be a hard place to leave. I thought it would be.

  But not Russell. He was eager to go. He was sick of my dad, sick of being coached and lectured and advised. You could see it in his face. He was like: Get me out of here.

  It was a long drive to the airport. My poor mother cried through most of it. My dad got mad at her when she couldn’t compose herself long enough to get a picture of the three of them in the departures area. I took the picture: the two proud parents and their Ivy League son. That’s what my dad wanted. What he got was my mom with her Kleenex and my brother looking vacant and scared and my dad pissed off at everyone.

  Driving back from the airport, I thought about my own college situation. Where would I go with my 2.8 grade-point average and my lack of any other talents except tennis, which I had already been washed out of? I would end up somewhere. That was one good thing about my father. No matter how much he claimed he didn’t care about me, that would change when college time rolled around. He wouldn’t want to be telling his golfing buddies that his other son went to c
ommunity college. He and my mom would figure out some way to make me look good.

  • • •

  As the beginning of the school year approached, I sent Antoinette a chatty Facebook message, thanking her for the postcard. She was back from Germany, according to Facebook. But she didn’t message me back. I thought maybe she and Bennett were having an intense reunion, but then I noticed that she had changed her relationship status to single, and I quickly looked through the rest of her page to see what was up. Had she broken up with Bennett? Not that it was so important. But I was curious. I looked through her posts, but there were no clues. There was barely anything about being in Germany. Antoinette was not the type to put anything too revealing on Facebook.

  A couple days later, I happened to tell Logan about the Antoinette situation. We were at Nordstrom, at the back-to-school sale. He was surprised by the way I was talking about her.

  “Wait? So you like Antoinette?” he asked.

  “Well, no . . .”

  “Then why do you care if she broke up with Bennett Schmidt?”

  “I don’t . . . it’s just . . . I’m curious about her.”

  Logan shrugged. “I don’t know, bro. To me, a girl like that? What’s the upside? She dresses like a freak. She’s got the unibrow going. Her brother jumped off a bridge. Not that that means there’s anything wrong with her. But, dude, there’s probably something seriously wrong with her.”

  “Could be,” I admitted.

  “If I were you,” said Logan, “I’d stick with the normal girls. They’re cuter. They’re cleaner. They’re easier to deal with.”

  “Yeah, like Rachel,” I said. “She sort of disappeared, though.”

  At that moment, Logan became suspiciously silent.

  “What?” I said. “Do you know something about Rachel?”

  “No,” he lied, thumbing through some shirts.

  “Dude, you know something. Come on, tell me. What happened?”

  Logan sighed. “All I know is what Olivia said, and I don’t know if it’s true.”

  “What is it?”

  Logan lowered his voice: “I guess Rachel thought you were still friends with Claude and Hanna.”

  “What?”

  “She thought you were . . . you know . . . tight with those guys. She didn’t know about the pool party. And the Hanna situation.”

  “Wait,” I said. “So she only liked me because she thought she could hang out with Claude and Hanna?”

  “I’m sure that’s not the only reason.”

  “Jesus.”

  “What?” said Logan. “Girls do stuff like that all the time. Everybody does.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “Yes you do,” said Logan. “That’s why you went out with Grace.”

  This was painful to hear. Doubly so because it was true.

  “So we’re all shallow assholes,” I said.

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” said Logan. “We’re humans. We do what humans do.”

  • • •

  So yeah, the last days of summer. It was a difficult time. The last thing I did before school started was take my brother’s camera to a camera shop downtown. I didn’t catch the official name of the shop, but the big sign in front said PASSPORT PHOTOS.

  I went in and there was an old man and a younger guy there. The old man was doing something in the back. The young guy was sweeping behind the counter and whistling to himself. There were no customers. I wondered how much business they had, since everyone had cameras in their phones now. How many people used real cameras?

  When he could see that I needed help, the younger guy stopped sweeping. He was in his midtwenties, I would guess. He looked foreign, Italian or Middle Eastern, maybe. He seemed to have a lot of energy that wasn’t getting used up.

  I put my brother’s camera on the counter. “I’m having trouble with this,” I said. “The autofocus froze. I can’t get it to do anything.”

  “Did you reset it?” said the guy.

  “I tried.”

  “You got the manual?”

  “No. I couldn’t find it.”

  He took the camera from me. He looked it over. “This is a serious camera,” he said.

  “It’s my brother’s.”

  “He’s got good taste.”

  I nodded.

  “Yeah,” he said, trying it himself. “Looks like you’re froze up.” He began to push things. He held one button down. He turned something else. When this didn’t work, he took out the battery and rubbed it on his pants. When he put it back in, the autofocus whirred to life. “There we go,” he said, as the various functions came back on.

  “Cool, thanks,” I said.

  “Yeah, these cameras tend to freeze up,” he said. He checked the view-screen and began to scroll back through the pictures I’d taken in the Wilds. “Great quality, though. Jeez. Look at these.”

  I stood there, waiting.

  “What’d your brother do with this?” he asked.

  “Nothing. He got it for Christmas.”

  The guy laughed. “He got this camera for Christmas?”

  I nodded, trying to smile.

  “Well, he’s a good photographer anyway,” said the guy. “Did he study photography?”

  “No,” I said. “He never used it. He never took it out of the box.”

  “So who took these pictures?”

  “I did.”

  “You did?”

  I nodded and blushed a bit.

  “You got a good eye, kid,” he said. He looked at more of the pictures. “What’s your name?”

  “Gavin.”

  “Okay, Gavin,” he said, pushing some more buttons. “I think we got this figured out. Let me check the manual online.”

  I waited while he brought out a laptop and set it on the counter. He looked up my camera.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Richie.”

  “Are you a photographer?”

  “I am.”

  “What kind of pictures do you take?”

  “I take passport photos,” he said, pointing to the big sign outside that said PASSPORT PHOTOS.

  “Oh, right,” I said.

  JUNIOR YEAR

  You see something happening and you bang away at it. Either you get what you saw or you get something else—and whichever is better you print.

  —Garry Winogrand

  If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.

  —Robert Capa

  14

  My summer vacation had turned out okay, I thought, considering how badly it started. I’d laid low, made a little money, hadn’t aggravated the Claude and Hanna situation. Once school started, I assumed things would go back to normal. Claude would forgive me for kissing Hanna. He knew it wasn’t my fault. Hanna said it wasn’t. And Claude and I had been friends for so long. That had to count for something.

  But when I got back to school I had a rude awakening. For one thing, Hanna, who I thought had been gone for the summer, had been home for the entire month of August. She’d had a big party at her parents’ house. Not only was I not invited, but I hadn’t even known about it. Also, two sophomore girls, Ashley and Krista, had suddenly emerged over the summer as the new party girls, and there had been several parties at Krista’s parents’ McMansion, where people had skinny-dipped and done beer bongs and jumped off the second-floor balcony into the pool. Supposedly, at one of these parties, Grace hooked up with a senior football player named Austin Wells and now they were in love. Which you’d think someone would have mentioned to me, out of common courtesy.

  I slowly realized that Logan had been at most of these parties and hadn’t told me about them, either to spare my feelings or because he had been instructed not to. I figured this was Hanna’s doing, or Claude’s. Maybe Grace was even behind it. She had been the most hurt by finding Hanna and me together. I guess finding your first boyfriend in the arms of your best friend would be pretty traumatic, though I noticed it hadn’t st
opped Grace from remaining friends with Hanna.

  • • •

  As the shock of this new reality set in, I found myself remembering other people who’d experienced devastating social downfalls. I remembered this guy Kyle, a basketball player who’d buddied around with Claude and me freshman year. He seemed destined for social success at Evergreen, but then his dad went to prison and suddenly his family had no money. He quickly faded from the scene. Or this girl Fiona Martin from eighth grade, who everyone liked. Even Hanna wanted to be her best friend, but something happened to her, too. She had health problems and gained a lot of weight, and by the time she hit high school she had become completely invisible.

  Was that going to happen to me? I didn’t know. It seemed like it might. I mean, I hadn’t disappeared. I was still here. I still hung out with Logan and Olivia sometimes. I was still tall and blond and good at tennis. How far could I fall?

  Quite a ways, it turned out.

  • • •

  There was a big party about two weeks into the school year, at Madison Decker’s house. She was one of the editors of the school magazine and not an experienced party thrower. You could tell by the way people talked about it, the party was going to be huge. I asked Logan if he was going, but he and Olivia were doing something else that night. I wondered what that meant exactly. Probably there was a better party somewhere else and I wasn’t invited. But I refused to worry about it. And on Friday I did something I’d never done before: I went to a party by myself.

  I parked a few blocks away and walked up the street to Madison’s house. The party was the same night as our first home football game, so a lot of kids from the game had shown up. Little packs of bewildered freshmen and sophomores were standing in the street and in the driveway. For some of them this was their first high school party ever. And it showed.

  I slipped through the people, a little embarrassed to be there at all, but I kept up a good front. People brightened when they saw me. I was still—by reputation at least—one of the cool kids. Someone asked me about Grace. “We broke up,” I said bluntly. Someone else—amazed to see me alone—asked if Hanna and Claude were coming. I didn’t answer.