Summer in the Invisible City

by Juliana Romano

  After the movie, we stumble out of the theater into the carpeted lobby that smells like greasy popcorn and cleaning supplies. I’m about to suggest that Willa and I play a round of pinball when I notice a group of boys walking toward us and I freeze.

  I recognize him right away. He’s unmistakable: tall and lanky with that lock of dark hair in his eyes, shadows forming in the hollows beneath his cheekbones.

  His eyes lock onto mine as he gets closer, and a half smile breaks on his lips.

  “I know you,” he says.

  “Hi, Noah,” I say. And in that instant when I hear myself say his name out loud, it’s like I’m right back at that rooftop party a year and a half ago.

  “How are you?” he asks, his black eyes swallowing me up so that the rest of the world gets blotted out.

  “I’m good,” I say.

  “Come on, Bearman,” one of the other boys shouts. “Let’s move it.”

  Noah nods at his friend. To me he says, “See you around?”

  And then, just before he walks away he tosses me one last smile. There’s a bottle in my heart full of all the things that I want even though I know I shouldn’t. Noah’s smile smashes that bottle and everything that I’ve tried so hard to keep contained spills out.

  —

  On the street outside the theater, I try to breathe. The sun has gone down and the sky is dark. All the natural daylight has been swapped for too bright, artificial nighttime lights.

  Willa puts a hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

  “I can’t believe that just happened,” I murmur.

  “He’s the worst.” Willa sighs. “Sadie. You are so way too good for that guy.”

  “I know,” I reply. “Totally.”

  Willa frowns. Then she says, “He doesn’t deserve you.” As if she didn’t hear what I just said.

  —

  Later, I lie on top of my covers and stare at the ceiling in the dark. Not seeing anything, just listening to my blood pump between my ears.

  That night a year and a half ago, after I followed Noah in from the roof, we went to the living room where there were people drinking and loud music was playing. We sat side by side on the couch and swapped stories about stupid things, like what bands we’d seen live and where we went to elementary school. He told me he also had Mr. Lewis for math in ninth grade, and then I told him about how I accidentally found Mr. Lewis’s YouTube account where he posts nightly videos of his cat. He didn’t believe me. He said, show me. I said, my phone battery is low. He said, “C’mon, we’ll find a computer.”

  Noah led me into some random bedroom and closed the door behind us. It looked like a guest room slash office. There were no decorations on the wall or clothes on the floor. There was just a big plain bed and a desk with a computer on it.

  Noah walked over to the desk and sat down in the swivel-y chair. I stood behind him, looking over his shoulder.

  Noah jiggled the mouse to wake up the computer. It wheezed and then the black screen lit up and a log-in page appeared.

  “Damn,” he said. “I guess no cat videos.”

  “Oh no,” I said, biting my lip.

  Noah sighed and stood up. But then, instead of leaving, he sat down on the edge of the bed. I stood there, unsure of what to do.

  “Come here,” he said softly.

  I didn’t move right away, so he reached out and took my hands and pulled me gently toward him. His hands were strong and soft, and I wondered if he noticed how much mine were sweating.

  A lock of brown hair fell into his eyes, and he looked down at my shoes and then up at me. His eyes were underwater. He pulled me close to him. One of his knees was in between my legs. His hand slipped up under my shirt, under my bra.

  We hadn’t even kissed and he was touching my breast. If he had been even the tiniest bit less certain, I would have been grossed out. But his abandon was contagious. I could feel my own thoughts growing disorderly.

  He stood and grabbed me and flipped me around so I was lying on my back on the bed. He hovered over me on his hands like he was at the top of a push-up. The overhead light on the ceiling was a blinding white bulb behind him. His face was in shadow. His lips were damp. His body was a tent that I was hiding underneath, and it was warm and dense and slow in the tent. He kissed me in a way that felt like so much more than a kiss. It felt like we were talking or dancing or seeing through each other’s skin to our insides.

  It all felt so right. The way he pulled my jeans off with the light still on. The feeling of his hands on my stomach, my thigh, my knee, my ankle. He was easy to do things with. I thought I’d have been afraid, but Noah was so unafraid that I just followed his lead. We got closer and closer together, kissing and rolling around, and I was pulling him toward me as if I’d known him my whole life. Then he lifted off of me, and I opened my eyes to see him put on a condom. That was the only moment I really saw any of the parts of him I’d been touching.

  When we were having sex, I felt certain that Noah loved me. He held on to me like he needed me, like he’d been seeing me in the hallways every day and wondering about me. I felt as if he knew everything about me, even things about my mom and our little apartment. It was like he knew I barely had a father and he could see the hole that Allan left in my heart, and he cared about all of it. It felt like he wanted to make it all better. And it seemed like he could. At one point, I felt him grab on to my foot and it felt small in his hand, and he squeezed it so tight he cracked the knuckles in my toes.

  Chapter 11

  When we show up for class the next day, Benji has scribbled a quote from the night’s reading across the board. “A photograph is a constructed object. What it shows the viewer is not necessarily the truth. It is, after all, nothing more than an arrangement of light and shadow.”

  “What does this mean?” Benji asks, tapping his marker against the whiteboard.

  Nobody raises their hand.

  “It’s from the reading,” Benji presses. “Did anyone understand the essay? What does it mean that a photograph doesn’t necessarily show the truth?”

  I raise my hand and Benji waves his marker at me. “Yes?”

  “I took it to mean that a picture is a real thing. Like it’s a piece of paper and it actually exists, but the image on it could be made up or not totally real,” I say.

  The truth is, I thought about the essay all night. I read it twice and lay in bed wondering if all the things the writer said about the photos were true. It seemed to me like he was saying that photography shows us the world but also lifts off and away from the world at the same time.

  “Great, Sadie,” Benji says. “Nice explanation. Can anyone add to that?”

  Izzy looks at me and rolls her eyes.

  “What?” I whisper.

  She mouths something back, but I can’t understand her at all.

  —

  After we discuss the reading, we pin up our photographs from the street photography assignment. Today is our first real group critique. Everyone’s pictures all together are so similar they practically blend. Other than me, everyone took pictures on the street. I took mine inside of a subway car on the ride back from Willa’s last week.

  At first, I had been afraid to pull out my camera on the subway. I didn’t want some creepy old guy to start talking to me and asking me questions about the Leica. But, it was a quiet afternoon and I could tell no one in that car was going to bother me. So I took out the camera, and I even pulled out my light meter and my gray card, and took a whole roll of film between Eighty-Sixth Street and Astor Place.

  The best picture from that roll, the one that I printed for today, ended up being this one I took of a little boy sleeping on his grandmother’s lap, his cheek smeared sweetly against her thigh. I was surprised when I printed the photograph to see how good the lighting looked. I think of subway light as being really bad, but in my
photograph, the light seemed liquid. It pooled in the empty seat next to them and slid down the slick surface of the metal pole.

  Benji singles out my picture right away.

  “What do you guys see here?” he asks the class, pointing to mine. “Sean?”

  “A boy on a train,” Sean grumbles. Sean fell asleep twice today already.

  “I like the pole,” this girl Alexis says. “I like how shiny it is.”

  “I like the kid’s sneakers,” Cody with the long hair adds. “They look brand-new.”

  Benji jumps in. “It seems like there’s lots to look at in this picture. When there are so many things happening, how do you know what the picture is really about?”

  “Maybe it’s about a lot of things,” Alexis adds.

  “Maybe it’s about light and shadow,” Izzy says.

  Benji lights up. “Yes!”

  He looks at the photo, temporarily turning his back on us, and Izzy takes the opportunity to stick her tongue out at me. And then she laughs, which makes me laugh, too.

  Benji hears us laughing and turns in our direction, locking eyes with me. “Is something funny, Sadie?”

  My laughter stops abruptly, a car screeching to a halt. My face burns as I shake my head no, too shamed to speak.

  “Good,” he says.

  When he turns away again. Izzy rolls her eyes at his back, like Benji is so uptight. I try to smile in agreement, but I’m worried that Benji thinks I was laughing at him when really, all I think is that he’s wonderful.

  When I get home, my mom is sleeping on the couch in the front room.

  I tried so hard to find interesting people to photograph for this assignment, but now, seeing my mom resting there with wide stripes of afternoon light lying across her body like tropical leaves, and her gold bangles slumped drowsily down her wrist, she’s the most amazing subject in the world. I pull out my camera and take her picture.

  She must hear me rustling because she wakes up.

  “Hey, honey,” she says, rubbing her eyes with the backs of her hands. “Wow. I just touched bottom.”

  “Guess what?” I say, putting down my camera to untie my shoes. “Benji loved my photo this week.”

  “Who is Benji?” she asks, sitting up.

  “Benji is my photo teacher. How could you forget that? I talk about him constantly.”

  “Oh, right. Gosh, how did I forget that? I’m just really out of it today.” She sighs. “I need some tea. Maybe that will make me feel more grounded.”

  Whenever my mom is stressed she gets super spacey. For some reason, it annoys me more than if she just snapped at me.

  “I’ll make it,” I grumble, heading to the kitchen.

  If Allan were here, he would want to know everything about what Benji said. He’s probably even read the essay that Benji assigned over the weekend.

  —

  I put a pot of water on the stove and lean against the refrigerator. The kitchen window is propped open with a stained cookbook and soft, humid air seeps in from outside.

  Every day, the days are getting longer. Summer is opening up like a flower. Soon, Allan is going to be here and then everything is going to finally be the way it’s supposed to.

  Chapter 12

  Allan lived in the city for a year when I was in fourth grade. I had barely ever seen him before then and, at first, when he told my mom he wanted to see me, I said no because I was so scared.

  That was back when I used to take Saturday morning ballet class from my mom’s friend. I always felt like a real ballerina warming up in that room, the out-of-tune piano banging out music as we stretched. Something would stir inside of me when I clutched the worn wood of the ballet bar, the wet sleety city outside all cold and hard and ugly, and everything inside hot and kneaded and beautiful.

  Even though I was afraid to meet him, my mom said it was important that I did. So one Saturday morning, we ate breakfast with him before ballet and then they took me to class together. Allan was strange and unfamiliar. He didn’t look anything like the button-nosed boys in my class who everyone thought were cute. But he had a kind of authority that not even my teachers had. It was hard to make him smile, but because of that, when he did, it mattered more.

  We did that for a few weeks, and then Allan volunteered to take me to class alone. Soon after that, he decided he wanted to use my voice-over for a film he was working on so I started going back to his studio with him after class for weekly recording sessions. He gave me this French philosophy book to read, and I didn’t speak French so I just spat out the words as best I could, and made up a lot. No matter what I did, though, Allan loved it. He told me I was doing a great job all the time. He gave me coffee and doughnuts, two things I was never allowed to have at home. I think if I’d asked him for a glass of wine, he would have said yes.

  My favorite part, though, was riding the subway together after class. I loved sitting side by side on the yellow and orange bucket seats of the train. In everyone else’s eyes, to all those strangers on the train, we were a normal father and daughter. Feeling normal felt extraordinary to me.

  “Is Daddy coming today?” I asked my mom on the way to my Spring Ballet Recital that March. The sky was a mixture of rain and sleet. The two of us huddled together under her umbrella as we shuffled up 125th Street toward the subway.

  “Since when is he Daddy?” she asked, squeezing my hand through her gloves. “Oh, forget it, let’s take a cab.”

  My mom yanked me with her into the street. I had to jump over a puddle to not drench my shoes. Rain sloshed in the gutter. She stuck out her arm until a yellow cab swerved over to us. “Get in.”

  “Is he coming?” I asked again, once we were inside the cab.

  “I’m pretty sure he is,” she said.

  I smiled, satisfied. I wondered if Allan would bring me flowers. Not that it was that kind of recital; it was just in the classroom. But he might not know that some parents brought flowers.

  “Sadie?”

  I looked at my mom. Behind her, icy sludge slid across the cab’s window.

  “Don’t call him Daddy, okay?”

  “Why not?” I ask.

  “I just don’t think it’s appropriate.”

  “What’s appropriate?”

  She sighed and then, with a forced patience in her voice, asked, “What does the word appropriate mean or what is appropriate in this situation?”

  I wasn’t sure what I was asking either, so I just shrugged and turned back to my own window. I touched my bun to make sure it was still perfectly in place.

  Chapter 13

  “Do you want to go to the New Museum right now and just get it over with?” Izzy asks as we pack up our bags at the end of class on Friday. Benji is making us go see art over the weekend and write about it for homework. Teachers always make us go to museums when they run out of ideas.

  “I was supposed to go over to Willa’s,” I say, biting my lip. “Lemme ask her and see if she wants to come.”

  I text Willa and she writes back:

  ur teacher is making you go to a museum? What is this, fifth grade?

  I write:

  I kno rite

  She writes:

  I’m just gonna stay home and be boring. Have fun tho.

  When Izzy and I step outside, storm clouds are blooming overhead, carving out dark shapes in the summer sky.

  During the school year, Izzy and I were secret darkroom friends who never spoke outside of the photo lab. We always stayed long after the first bell to print. We didn’t talk those afternoons, we just listened to Tom Waits and The Cure and watched our pictures emerge in the chemical baths, using the tongs to gently rock the photos against the plastic walls of the tubs. Sometimes we stayed past the late bell at four thirty, until the lab supervisor came in to dump the developer and lock the doors at six. In the winter, when you go
outside at six o’clock it’s already dark. Icy air freezes all the traces of chemicals in your hair.

  The first time Izzy and I really spoke outside the darkroom was on the first day of class earlier this summer, when Benji paired the two of us up for an icebreaker assignment. We had to photograph each other and do interviews.

  The picture Izzy took of me ended up being not very good. She thought it would be interesting to photograph me alone in a classroom. It was a good idea in theory, but in reality, the room looked washed out and I looked like I was posing, but I’m not supposed to be posing, so it’s awkward.

  My picture of Izzy turned out really well. I had her lean against this metal door in the hallway by the girls’ bathroom in the back of our school. I chose that spot because the light back there is amazing. It’s one of those spots where, if you go there in the middle of the day, everything—even the thick swarms of dust in the air—is illuminated. Light bounces off the adjacent white wall and makes the whole space glow. In the photo, the light seems to emanate from Izzy herself.

  The funny thing is, nobody ever uses that bathroom because it smells and the sink is permanently stained. But in the photo, lots of things got erased. Photography is powerful that way. If you want it to be, it can be the best liar in the world.

  When I interviewed Izzy, I learned that she dyed her hair for the first time in fourth grade, and that she let her cousin pierce her ears. I learned that her mother is a fashion designer from Algeria and her father is an architect. Her favorite food is dumplings and her favorite movie is Heathers. Also, I learned that, like me, Izzy wants to go to art school next year.