by Blake Nelson
I had to say: “Uh, ma’am . . . I mean Lady Katrina . . . this is for the Portland Weekly. They’re only going to use a couple of these. They won’t have room for your entire jewelry collection.”
That didn’t go over well. She got offended and started telling me I was a typical young person and didn’t respect the past. I tried to apologize and calm her down, but she was off in her own little world by then.
Finally I said, “Uh . . . Lady Katrina . . . ? Would you mind standing over there and looking around, like you’re remembering your years here?”
She totally lost it then. She started shrieking and waving her arms around. Then she told me to get out. Some of her lady friends were there by then, and they started yelling at me too. “You rude, rude boy!” they said. I tried to apologize because it was my fault. I should have said it differently. But I didn’t know. It was my first gig! Then she started to cry. Her friends literally pushed me out the door. And then I felt terrible.
I sent the pictures in though. And the woman at the Portland Weekly liked them. And a couple weeks later, I got my first check.
• • •
Meanwhile, my high school friends were doing the summer-party routine. There had been talk at school about how the summer between junior and senior year was supposed to be epic. Your “last great high school summer,” some of the seniors told us. “You better enjoy it.” This made sense, I thought. Since everyone had driver’s licenses and cars and credit cards, you could pretty much do anything. And you weren’t worried about college yet, or dealing with the stresses of leaving home.
Claude and Logan took this to heart. They had regular parties at Logan’s beach house. I went to a couple of these. It was the usual crowd, the rich kids from our school and the other schools, the good-looking people, the tennis-player types. It wasn’t that I disliked these people. It was just so familiar. I could predict what people were going to say before they said it. The girls drank wine and the boys drank beer, and the girls talked about each other and the boys talked about sports. And everyone made fun of people who were ugly or poor or who weren’t like them, laughing at them with their perfect teeth and their highlighted hair and their expensive sunglasses. Still, they were my people, the people I grew up with. So I rolled with it, like I always had, sitting with the guys, watching the girls parade around the pool in their bathing suits.
• • •
It was much more interesting to hang out with Antoinette and Kai. Agenda had half-price dance parties on Tuesday nights in June, so we went to several of those. Bennett Schmidt and some of his buddies were sometimes there. Since Kai and Antoinette were friends with him, I had to be nice to him too. He wasn’t so bad. He knew a lot about music. He was also popular with the girls.
In July, Antoinette went back to Germany to see her dad. After that, she was going to travel around Europe. So then it was me and Kai doing things. That was a little strange at first. We hadn’t hung out that much, just the two of us. At first there wasn’t much to do, but then we went to a party with Britney Vaughn and her friends, which was way crazier than any high school party I’d ever been to. After the first one, I made sure to always have a camera with me whenever I hung around Britney or any other Agenda people. I’d bring the old Canon, which still had a big dent in the casing but worked fine. I’d leave it on the floor or on a bookshelf somewhere and then casually pick it up occasionally and snap a few pictures of people drunkenly rolling on the floor or peeing out the window or making out with someone in the bathtub. There was an art to being inconspicuous like that. The real secret, I realized, was you couldn’t judge people. You just had to be there. You couldn’t be like: Oh my God, I can’t believe you’re doing that! You had to be super chill and not care about anything. And the Agenda types, they all wanted the attention anyway. They loved that someone was taking their picture. So I became part of that world in a new way.
It was also fun to be with Kai. We’d have these crazy, weird nights: fleeing Britney’s parties when the police showed up and then eating french fries in the parking lot of Jack in the Box until four in the morning. I had basically zero parental supervision now, so I could do anything. One night there was a full moon and Kai and I bummed a ride with some other people to the Grayson Hot Springs. These were college students we met at a coffee shop. As soon as we got to the hot springs, Kai ran down the trail, stripped off all her clothes, and plopped down into the mud. So then the college kids did too. And then the bunch of us rolled around and lay there and soaked in the mud. Kai found this cool rock and wouldn’t let me see it, so then I had to wrestle her, to try to get it, and the two of us were squishing around in the mud, trying to get the rock from each other, until we got so tired we had to stop. The college kids only had one small towel in their car, so we messed up their backseat pretty badly.
• • •
That was also the summer that Kai tried to teach me about fashion. She took me around to the various thrift stores and clothing-exchange places. At first I couldn’t stand to not be dressed in Levi’s and cotton shirts. But Kai got me to wear different things, Western shirts and sweaters and old-man shoes instead of Nikes. Slowly I got used to it. It was weird, though, to stand out like that. To have people look at you on the street. But as she kept saying: “Do you want to be a cool young photographer, or do you want to be another high school dork with a camera?”
For a couple weeks in August, Kai and I were together almost every day. I’d get off work and we’d meet up somewhere. At night we’d go to Agenda and dance and talk about people. Also, Kai wrote stuff. She wrote poems and kept journals. Some of her writings, which she was gradually letting me read, were hilarious. She was good at observing people, and seeing the absurdity of things.
One thing though, she still hated Claude and Hanna and those people. At one point, Logan Hewitt had this big end-of-summer party. Everyone was going. Even Hanna was supposedly going, though she’d been AWOL all summer. I thought it would be super fun. I tried to convince Kai to come.
“No,” she said. We were in a booth at a coffee place downtown. She was drawing something in her journal. “Not going.”
“What if I promise to stay with you?” I offered. “For the whole night?”
“No,” she said.
“You wouldn’t have to talk to anyone if you don’t want.”
She continued to draw. “I don’t go places where those people are. Logan Hewitt? Barf.”
I was sitting long-ways in the booth, my back against the wall, sipping the dregs of an old coffee. “But Hanna’s gonna be there,” I said. “And she’s so funny. There’s a reason she’s so popular, you know. She’s hilarious.”
“Not to me she isn’t.”
“But they’re my friends. Can’t you just tolerate them for an hour or two? If only for my benefit?”
“No,” she said, straightening up to better evaluate her drawing. “I can’t tolerate them. They are intolerable. I can’t believe you’re actually friends with them. I can barely tolerate that.”
42
And then a miracle happened. Richie was offered an assignment from a magazine called Nylon, which covered fashion and music and nightlife. They wanted us to go to Berlin and shoot photos for a travel piece about Berlin. Richie texted me immediately. Could I get off work? Could I come be his assistant?
My first thought was of course I could. I’d quit my job if I had to. My second thought was Antoinette. She was over there somewhere. I e-mailed her: I’m going to Berlin with Richie for a magazine assignment. Can you come meet us? A day later a reply appeared in my in-box: Oh my God! Of course I will! What days are you there?
Nicole gave Richie and me a ride to the airport. I knew the drill by now—checking the gear through, talking to the security people. Richie and Nicole said their good-byes. I couldn’t tell how much Nicole liked him. Richie was totally in love with her. He was already talking marriage—to me, not to her. She seemed to enjoy his goofiness at least, so that was good. I sure liked h
er. She had that solid, whole-grain feeling about her. I think I was a little bit in love with her myself. It made me sad when she left us there at the airport. It made me sad for Richie.
• • •
We landed in Berlin twelve hours later. It was a lot of airports and a lot of flying. We stumbled out of the terminal and grabbed a cab. I immediately opened the window and let the hot afternoon air blow on my tired face. It smelled different there, in Europe, in Germany. And the sky looked bigger in a way. But the cabdriver, who was Middle Eastern, started yelling at me about something, the air-conditioning, it turned out. So I put up the window.
Berlin looked like the future to me. Everything was super new and advanced and complicated. Our hotel had unusual qualities to it, like no shower curtain on the shower, a toilet you couldn’t figure out how to flush, and gooey lotions that you didn’t know what part of your body they went on.
The next day Richie got out the SHIT WE HAVE TO HAVE list, and in our groggy, jet-lagged state, we began to work our way through it. We started off shooting a trendy café where all the “chic” people hung out. Then we shot a German skateboarding store, and then an art collective by the university. Berlin was very fashionable, but in an alien way. Like you’d see someone and you’d think: Is she trying to look like an elf? Also, everyone was very serious. Like if you asked someone a question they would get very intense and think about it a long time and give you this very careful and considered answer.
Before we left, Richie had said that dressing right was crucial on a gig for Nylon. So I had brought only the cool clothes Kai made me buy. I was so glad I did. With Richie and his rock-star photographer persona and me with my hipster teenager look, everyone treated us with great respect. People were constantly surprised we were American. This made everything way more fun.
That night we hit some Berlin nightclubs or “discotheques,” which were also on our list. These were very high-tech dance clubs. And the music, oh my God, it was on a whole other level. Also, wherever we went, we were from Nylon, so everyone was super nice to us and buying us drinks and taking us into the special VIP rooms or whatever.
• • •
Antoinette arrived on our second day. I was so excited to see her. And the fact that I was there with Richie, on a photography gig: I felt like that might change the way she thought of me. She couldn’t just dismiss me as a minion anymore. She would have to take me seriously.
I’d e-mailed her our schedule that day and she showed up at a design store we were shooting in the afternoon. Antoinette had never seen us work. She’d never seen me do anything like that. I think she was impressed by how pro we were.
I was so glad to see her! And she was so glad to see me! The minute we had a break, I ran over and hugged her. I don’t think I’d ever done that before. But whatever. We were in Berlin!
• • •
Richie knew about Antoinette. He’d seen my portrait photos of her (“This is the girl you’re in love with?” he’d said). So as soon as we finished the shoot, he gestured for me to go. He could pack up the rest of the equipment himself. So Antoinette and I ran off.
Antoinette’s Berlin was slightly different from the stuff we were shooting for Nylon. She knew all the cheap restaurants and where the young people were. We went to a student café she knew about, where all these brainy-looking college students were hanging out. At another place, we sat outside, watching people stroll along the Strasse. After that we walked down an alley full of little shops and galleries. Antoinette kept bumping into me. And smiling. And touching my arm. She didn’t usually do that. She had never been what you’d call demonstratively affectionate.
We ate dinner at a tiny Indian food place she knew about. It was so small it didn’t have chairs. You had to stand around these upright tables to eat. A bunch of Turkish and Indian cabdrivers were there, shouting at each other in various languages. Once they found out we were Americans, they wouldn’t leave us alone.
“America!” they said. “New York! California!”
Antoinette was like, “Seattle! Pennsylvania!”
They said: “Florida! Dallas Cowboys!”
It wasn’t what you’d call an in-depth conversation. But everyone was very happy to meet us.
• • •
Unfortunately, after we ate, I suddenly got so tired I could hardly keep my eyes open. And it was only eight o’clock at night. Antoinette understood. She knew about jet lag and how the time difference caught up to you. Her youth hostel was nearby, so we went there.
She had come to Berlin by herself and had her own room. It was just a bed and a sink, but it also had a little balcony. We stood out there for a few minutes, looking at the people below and breathing in the city air. I guess I never thought of Germany as super old, but it was. It felt ancient, watching it from above, with the moon shining just over the rooftops.
Antoinette told me to lie down and try to sleep. She would read her book and wake me up in an hour, since Richie would want me back at the hotel that night and ready to work in the morning.
So that’s what I did. I took off the shirt Kai had picked out for me and lay down in Antoinette’s narrow youth hostel bed with the tight German sheets. Antoinette told me to take off my pants and socks, too. That I would sleep better. So I did that. When I lay down, I pretty much passed out instantly.
I don’t know how long went by. But it was dark when I woke up again. I woke up because Antoinette was getting into the bed with me. I wasn’t sure what she was doing. Or why she was doing it. But in the dark I could see she had taken off her pants and socks as well. When she got in, the warm skin of her legs touching mine sent a shiver through my body. My brain was still in a fog of jet lag and lack of sleep. I tried to keep it that way. I made a conscious effort to not wake up, to not think about what was happening. Or why. Or what it meant. This was the only way. If I tried to do something, or even just think something, the magical dream would end.
Antoinette nestled up against me. And I curled around her. And then, as easily and as naturally as an autumn leaf floats gently to the ground, we came together. Like all the way together. Like as together as you can get.
• • •
Afterward, I slipped off to sleep again, and when I woke up, it was eleven thirty. I had to get back to the hotel. Antoinette had fallen asleep too. I kissed her forehead and face and eyebrows until she woke up.
“I gotta get back,” I whispered into her hair. She turned toward the clock, and when she saw how late it was, roused herself out of bed. We put on our clothes, in silence, in the dark.
We walked back toward my hotel, through the streets of Berlin. It was late now. There were fewer people, which made you more aware of the city itself, its gray stone buildings, its Gothic streetlights. Even though it was still August, fall was on its way. You could feel the chill in the air. Berlin was a winter city, a cold, formidable place; soon it would be in its natural state once again.
We crossed the big main square, Alexanderplatz. There were still people there, young people mostly. They were in groups, laughing and running around. A tram went by. People were on bikes. Antoinette and I barely spoke. We walked and watched everything. Then, as we approached my hotel, she bumped shoulders with me again. This was her way of acknowledging what had happened. It was about as much as you were going to get from Antoinette. But I took it. I absorbed the bump and held it there, in my shoulder, where I hoped it would stay for a long time.
SENIOR YEAR
My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.
—Diane Arbus
My idea of a good picture is one that’s in focus and of a famous person.
—Andy Warhol
43
Four short days after I returned from Berlin, I was standing in the parking lot at Evergreen High School again. This time, though, I was a senior.
I pulled my backpack out of the RAV4 and walked across the parking lot toward the junior/senior wing. Other people from my class were standing around. T
hey waved or said hi. So now we’re seniors, seemed to be the feeling. It was like none of us could believe it.
Inside the building, my first thought was Antoinette. Where would her locker be? Would we have any classes together? How would she react to me when we met again? I knew her well enough to not be too hopeful. I still couldn’t imagine us as a couple. To be a couple at Evergreen required an acceptance of the rules and rituals of high school relationships. I couldn’t see her doing any of that.
But something must have changed between us. We’d slept in each other’s arms. I’d kissed her eyes and her face and her thick eyebrows. Then again, she’d gone out with Bennett for months and she seemed to have no lingering feelings for him. So who knew? The situation was confusing and hard to think about. I decided the only reasonable strategy was to do nothing, expect nothing, be as casual as she would no doubt be. If anything further was going to happen between us, let her start it.
• • •
It was nice being back at school, anyway. It was fun being a senior. You could feel the difference right away. Walking down the hall, I felt more important, more in control. There was an authority to being a senior. Nobody knew more about high school than you did. You were the expert. And at the same time there was a lightness to it. Stuff didn’t matter so much. As one guy said, “What can they do to us now?”
Of course, different people had different approaches to it. Logan and Claude saw their senior year as a well-deserved vacation. They had put up with high school bullshit for three long years. The school owed them, in their mind. This year they would put their feet up and relax.
For other people, senior year was their last chance to get their grades up, or improve their test scores for college. If you were on a sports team, this was your final shot at a league championship. Or if you were really into some particular academic subject, you could do an independent study and focus on something you actually cared about for once.