Summer in the Invisible City

by Juliana Romano

  DIAL BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  Copyright © 2016 by Juliana Romano

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ebook ISBN: 9780698168831

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Romano, Juliana, author.

  Title: Summer in the invisible city / Juliana Romano.

  Description: New York, NY : Dial Books, [2016] | Summary: “Sadie has always idealized her absentee dad and the popular girls in her school, but as she grows her photography skills and develops a crush on a guarded boy, she starts to see things as they really are”— Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015034393 | ISBN 9780525429173 (hardback)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Coming of age”—Fiction. | Love”—Fiction. | Fathers and daughters”—Fiction. | Photography”—Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Family / Marriage & Divorce. | JUVENILE FICTION / Art & Architecture. | JUVENILE FICTION / Social Issues / Friendship.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.R668 Su 2016 | DDC [Fic]”—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015034393

  Jacket photo © 2016 by Johannes Knuth

  Jacket design by Samira Iravani

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Before Chapter 1

  June Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  July Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  August Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  September Chapter 46

  Acknowledgments

  For my teachers

  Before

  Chapter 1

  Memories are like plants: if you care for them, they grow. I’ve relived this one night so many times that what was once just a sapling has now become a tree, its roots twisting deep into the dirt.

  I was standing on the roof at a New Year’s Eve party during winter break of tenth grade. It was below freezing, but we stayed outside anyway because up there we could be reckless and loud. And sometimes the cold feels good, the way it holds your heart in its claws.

  Below me, the city spread out in all directions. Sparkling lights lined up in the neat rows of Manhattan, and the bridges to Queens and Brooklyn draped like beaded necklaces across the glassy East River. Looking at New York from above at night is like looking at a galaxy full of stars.

  “This is the best.”

  I turned and Noah Bearman was standing next to me. A lock of dark hair fell helplessly across his face, grazing the top of his sharp cheekbone and covering one of his dark eyes. He was wearing a sweatshirt that looked nowhere near warm enough. His hands were shoved into his pockets and his shoulders were hiked up to his ears, like maybe his muscles were cramping from the cold.

  “What is?” I asked, trying to act like it was normal that he would be talking to me.

  “This,” he said, looking at the view. His breath froze when he spoke, making icy, geometric shapes in the night air.

  I pulled a cigarette out of my pack and lit it. I hate smoking, but I thought it made me look cool. If Willa were there, she would have made me put it out. I sucked hard, hoping I seemed experienced.

  He watched as I took a drag and then asked, “Can I get one of those?”

  “Sure,” I said. I held the pack out to him.

  He paused before taking a cigarette, and I willed myself not to stare at him. Still, I couldn’t help notice the way the winter air had made his full lips even redder, and how it had turned his nose adorably pink.

  “Which one do I want?” he murmured.

  “What do you mean? They’re all the same,” I replied, confused.

  He looked at me and his eyes twinkled. “Are they?”

  Noah kept his eyes glued to mine as he reached into the pack and pulled out all the cigarettes. Then, he stuffed them all in his mouth so that they stuck out in every direction like crazy teeth. The whole time he kept looking at me.

  I said, “Those are my cigarettes. They’re expensive. Don’t waste them.”

  Noah didn’t answer me. He couldn’t speak anyway, with his mouth full of cigarettes. He held out his hand for my lighter and I gave it to him. He flicked it on and wiped the flame across the tips of the cigarettes, torching them all. They lit up at once.

  I was aware that Noah was doing something so strange and twisted that it verged on being mean. But he was trying to tell me something. And anything Noah Bearman wanted to tell me, I wanted to know.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, my voice tiny now.

  He reached up and took the cigarettes out of his mouth, grabbing them with his full fist. Then he dropped them on the ground and stomped on them.

  “I just did you a favor,” he said. “Don’t be mad.”

  “I am mad.” I pouted. But I wasn’t.

  “I’m Noah,” he said, as if I didn’t know who he was.

  “I’m Sadie,” I told him.

  “So the girl with the red jacket has a name.”

  Noah Bearman wondered about my name?

  An icy wind howled, licking across the roof and whipping against us so hard that I had to turn my back on it and cower.

  “You’re shivering,” he said, tapping my elbow with his own.

  Even with the fabric of his sweatshirt and the thick wool of my coat between us, and even though it was just his elbow knocking against mine, Noah’s touch made the cold night turn hot.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go inside.”

  So we did.

  In some ways, it doesn’t matter what happened next, or back a
t school, or in the year and a half since then. That night was perfect and I’ll always have it. I’ll hold on to the memory tight as I want, because it’s mine.

  June

  Chapter 2

  Summer came suddenly this year. Last week, it was cold and rainy. But this morning, on the walk to school, the sky above the city was a bright, unblemished blue and the air felt bathwater warm on my skin. Around the edges of the asphalt basketball court, grass has been sprouting, winding its way through the chain-link fence that divides our school from the sidewalk.

  I’m taking Photo 2 at my high school this summer, so I’ve spent every afternoon for the past two weeks in the photo lab: perfecting my technique, loading and unloading rolls of film, and soaking my prints in tubs of developer. These days, my hair smells like darkroom chemicals even after I shower.

  “Sadie,” my photo teacher, Benji, calls out. “I’m ready for you.”

  I hand Benji my photograph and watch as he inspects my latest print. He’s made me reprint five times already, and from the expression on his face, I’m guessing he’s about to make me do it again.

  The old wall clock says it’s only 10:30 a.m., which means Photo 2 is less than half over, but I’m already tired. I work harder in this class than I ever do during regular school.

  “Hmmm. Okay,” Benji says. He grabs his Sharpie and starts making dots next to areas I need to fix, and my heart sinks. Benji has X-ray vision for photographs. Compared to him, the rest of us are basically blind.

  “Here . . . and here . . . and this. . . .”

  Benji’s punk-rock haircut, a long swatch of glossy hair, slips from side to side as he works. From far away, he looks like a teenager because he’s so skinny and not even taller than me, but up close, you can see that he’s older from the way his pale, thinning skin falls across his bones. Behind him, ribbons of long black negatives hang from a clothesline, gently twisting in the breeze of the ceiling fan.

  Benji hands my picture back to me. “Try again. Lighten this area so you can find some more detail and texture in there. There’s a shadow blocking this corner. Do you see what I mean?”

  I strain my eyes to see what he’s talking about.

  The assignment was to take a picture of something no one had ever seen before, so I photographed the inside of one of my overstuffed drawers. It’s a mess of things—an old set of photo booth pictures of me and Willa, some random markers and old gum wrappers, and an ArtForum with Allan on the cover. I like the drawer because everything is all mixed together—the things I saved on purpose and the things I saved by accident.

  “Nice work, though,” Benji says, after a minute. I look up at him and he smiles, revealing the crooked teeth of someone who never had braces. “It’s interesting that you photographed such a small space. Very smart. Keep it up.”

  “Okay, thank you,” I say, groping for the perfect words to show Benji how much I care about his class. “I’ll try to fix that shadow. I think I get it now.”

  —

  The photo classroom is divided in two rooms: the lab where Benji helps us with our pictures and where we meet as a group, and the darkroom where we print. The rumor is that when our school raises enough money, they’ll get rid of the whole thing and put in a digital lab with a bunch of computers and printers. But I love this creaky, old-fashioned equipment. All my best memories from eleventh grade are of afternoons spent down here, watching my pictures emerge in the chemical baths like hallucinations.

  I go back into the darkroom and linger by the door while my eyes adjust. For the kind of photo we are doing, all of our materials are light sensitive, which means that if the film or the paper gets exposed in the wrong way, the pictures will be ruined. The darkroom isn’t pitch-black, though. There is a special amber-colored safelight that glows an eerie red and that doesn’t damage photos or film. Everything looks flat and strange in here, just a mess of black shadows and crimson shapes. People look like cardboard cutouts instead of real humans, with heartbeats and insides and skin.

  I go to my favorite enlarger in the corner. There are ten enlargers, one for each student, and they are basically big mechanical cameras that expand your picture from the size of film to the size of a photo. Next to the enlargers is a row of chemical baths that make the image stick to the paper. The chemicals reek of something sour, but now that I’m used to them, I kind of love the scent. They smell toxic and good at the same time, like gasoline or spray paint or nail polish remover.

  I pull a piece of glossy photo paper out of my bag and set it carefully on the base of the enlarger. I crank the old, creaky lever to lower my negative down and watch the picture shrink on my page.

  There are a lot of things about Benji’s class that are more intense than in Photo 1. He’s a stickler for technique, which means everything takes ten times as long as it normally would. But even harder is that Benji always comes up with open-ended assignments that you can solve a lot of ways. I always thought that kind of freedom would make things easier, but actually, it’s the opposite. When there are no rules, you have to decide for yourself what’s right and wrong.

  “Psssst, Sadie Bell,” Izzy whispers, snapping me out of my daze. Even in the murky safelight of the darkroom, I can see the bleached tips of her long curly hair.

  “Why are we whispering?” I whisper back. Nobody whispers in here. The music and the vents are so loud you don’t have to.

  “It’s more fun this way,” Izzy replies. “So, listen, tomorrow is my half birthday and I’m gonna do something. Do you want to come?”

  Izzy’s words zap me to attention. I’ve always admired Izzy from afar, like the way her eclectic mix of gold bangles and friendship bracelets seem to glow against her dark skin. But she has never invited me to hang out with her and her friends before.

  I’m so flattered it takes me a minute to realize she’s waiting for me to reply.

  “Yes. Definitely. I’d love to come to your half-birthday party,” I gush.

  “It’s not really a party.” Izzy rolls her eyes. “A bunch of us are just gonna go to the beach.”

  “That sounds really fun, I’ll come, that sounds so great,” I blather, practically drooling with excitement.

  “Good. You’ve got to get some sun in,” Izzy jokes, poking the bone-white skin of my forearm. “You’re gonna be the palest person in the world from spending every stupid day in this dungeon.”

  I smile and nod, too stunned to be able to form normal, complete sentences.

  “I gotta go finish printing before Benji bites my head off,” she says. And then she turns and walks away, blending into the grainy red haze of the darkroom.

  I turn back to my enlarger, but my mind is zinging too hard for me to think about photography. Izzy said a bunch of people were going to the beach. Does that mean Noah Bearman? They were friends before he graduated and he might be back for the summer, so it’s possible. I know I shouldn’t want to see Noah after everything that happened. I know the only thing I should try and do is not think about him. Willa tells me that all the time.

  But Willa has never been left behind. She doesn’t know it’s impossible to make yourself forget about someone just because you want to. I know it sounds crazy, but sometimes it feels like the person who hurt you is also the only person who can heal you.

  Another student pushes past me, and suddenly, I remember where I am and what I’m supposed to be doing. I adjust my paper and then flip the switch on my enlarger. The machine wheezes as the light grows bright for a fraction of a second before snapping back to black.

  —

  That night, Willa and I sprawl across her bed, doing this really stupid thing that we’ve been trying to perfect for years: painting each other’s toenails simultaneously. Her bare feet are in my lap, and mine are in hers.

  “Don’t be mad if I mess up,” Willa says. “This is a hard color.”

  I peer at my feet, which are
stained purple.

  “You’re doing such a bad job! I’m doing a way, way better job than you.” I laugh.

  “That’s because I’m staying so still, and you keep moving,” Willa replies. “And because I have no manual dexterity.”

  “That’s not true,” I say. But we both know it’s true. I sigh. “Willa. Seriously, is that the best you can do?”

  Willa puts down the nail polish and makes a don’t-be-mad-at-me puppy-dog face. “I’ll pay for you to get a pedicure. Will that make you happy?”

  “Typical,” I tease. “Just throw money at the problem.”

  Willa’s thick glasses are wedged onto her face, etching pink imprints on the sides of her nose. Willa could be pretty if she tried, but she insists on not trying. I think it’s because she wants to be different from her older sister, Danielle, who is super social and gorgeous.

  “How was lab? Did you cure Ebola yet?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Willa deadpans. She is taking AP Bio with all the other geniuses at a high school near her apartment so she doesn’t have to take it during the school year.

  My phone beeps and Willa grabs it before I do. She reads the screen and scowls at me.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “Are you stalking your dad again?” she asks, hurling the phone at me.

  I catch it and read the screen. It’s a Google alert: Kaplan and White announced today that Allan Bell will be doing a walk-through of his exhibit on July 14th. Tickets will go on sale the week prior.

  “Sadie,” Willa whines. “I thought you’d stopped.”

  I put the phone down and concentrate on painting her teeny-tiny pinkie toenail. “I guess I forgot to turn off my Google alert,” I lie. “It’s not a big deal.”

  “Well, at least you’ve stopped stalking Noah,” Willa says. “We’re making progress.”

  It stings to hear Willa joke about him like that, but I push the feeling away.

  “That reminds me,” I say, wanting to change the subject, “I’m going to the beach tomorrow with Izzy Tobias for her half-birthday party.”