Depth of Field

by Chantel Guertin

  He nods and pops the card out of the machine, then tosses the memory card in the air. I reach out for it, but it doesn’t quite make it to me, and Ben reaches out and grabs it and passes it to me. My face is burning. I want to disappear.

  “Oh, I just love this assignment,” Mikael is saying. “Do it every year. You work so hard to get here, and then bam, you’re in New York, it’s so exciting, no parents, no rules, no curfew, and you forget why you’re here—or how to take a photograph that’s in focus. Or some of you do. The ones who aren’t cut out for this. The ones who are too interested in partying to remember to actually do their job. Do you want to be a photographer? Or do you just want to have a good time? How many of you have anything usable for your end of week assignment?” He reminds us that everything we shoot this week should be working toward an ongoing week one assignment, which we’re to hand in on Friday end of day. It needs to be some sort of series, with a theme.

  “You don’t know that she wasn’t working on that assignment. Maybe her theme is drinking her way through camp,” Connor says, then flashes me a competitive grin.

  Great. So now I’m pegged as the flaky party girl? How did this even happen?

  “What were those—Vod-Bombs?” Ben whispers.

  I don’t know. I’m not that girl. I don’t even know my alcohols.

  At Spalding, I was so serious about my photography. Starting the photography club, being one of the best in the school. Everyone looked up to me. But here, I’m not like everyone else. I didn’t go to any fancy camps. And now I’m the joke of the class. I’m that 10% they’ve already pegged to drop out before the two weeks are up.

  “I really don’t feel well,” I say for the billionth time from under the Sabres blanket on my bed, but Ramona isn’t having anything to do with my excuses.

  “You didn’t come here to hide out in Greeneland. I got just as shitty photos last night, and you don’t see me crying about it. It’s one night. Big deal.”

  “You didn’t get publicly shamed. And Mikael doesn’t know your photos suck.”

  “Excuse me? You totally outed me. Your pics may have been blurry, but it was clearly me in those first drunken ones. At least there was no real proof you were drunk.”

  “Sorry about that,” I say sincerely.

  She shrugs. “Oh, it’s fine.” Ramona puts on bright red matte lipstick. “Hang on, I just have to run to the bathroom and then let’s go?”

  I shake my head. “I told you, I’m not going.” There’s no way I’m going to the gala tonight. I don’t care if we’re supposed to find and meet our mentors. Isn’t that why they gave us the business cards—so we could just call or text our mentors to meet up?

  I thought I’d feel better as the day wore on, but I just feel worse and worse.

  I look at the photo of Dad on the desk beside my bed. Mom cut it from a scrap of leftover wallpaper from my room. For my 16th birthday, Dad gave me wallpaper he’d made out of photographs—some of him, some of my mom, some of me, some of all three of us, mostly ones he’d taken but a few Mom took or I took. Mom said she had a bit of leftover in the basement, which she had framed then tucked in my suitcase so I’d find it when I unpacked. The photo is the one of him when he was 19, maybe 20, in New York, outside his apartment on Christopher Street, where he lived when he was only a few years older than me, going to Tisch. On his way to becoming a real photographer.

  What would he think of me? Working so hard to get here and then throwing it all away.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper to him, hoping I’ll think of something that’ll make me feel better. But all I can think of is how I thought this camp would get me one step closer to getting into Tisch for college. That I’d make this stellar impression and then when I applied the admissions committee would remember me—remember hearing about me from the instructors here. How getting to Tisch Camp would give me an advantage over everyone else who hadn’t gone.

  Now all I can think of is the opposite. How everyone who didn’t make it is better off. Because people like Jeffrey and Gemma, back at Spalding in Photo Club, who didn’t make it here still have a chance to make a first impression on their applications. To think about what to submit, and to send in their very best, calculated work.

  But me? I’ve made my first impression: that I care more about Vod-Bombs, or whatever I was supposedly drinking, than photography.

  I lie back on my bed and stare at the ceiling—someone’s taped a movie poster of The Shining up there. Ramona bursts back into our room.

  “OK, here it is,” she says. “Yes, you tanked last night. And in the eyes of Mikael, you’re not exactly the star student. But you know what you are? The underdog. Under the radar. You can only go up. You can’t fall from his high esteem, you don’t have to worry about buckling under the pressure. You just have to do a little better each day, and before you know it, there’s a chance you’re the surprise hit of the camp. The most improved student. The diamond in the rough. And I’m going to make it my mission to make sure that happens. Because while I didn’t IV those drinks into you, I was a very bad influence. And I’m sorry.” She swings my legs over the edge of the bed and sits down on the bed beside me.

  I sit up and turn to face her. She’s wearing bright pink tights and a red dress, a scarf wrapped around her wrist. Her hair’s piled up on top of her head in an elastic, the curls tamed and then wild.

  “That was a pretty inspiring talk.”

  “I do all my best thinking in the bathroom. Now put this on.” She hands me a red lipstick. “Everyone will be here any minute,” she adds as there’s a knock at the door.

  Apparently, Ramona’s made Greeneland the meet­­ing point and within a few minutes our room is packed and Ramona’s standing on top of her desk, waving a purple sock and ordering everyone to file out of the room to the elevator.

  The gala’s being held on the Lower East Side and we make our way there, winding through a bunch of streets. Tilly’s leading the pack, Todd’s at the back and Ramona and I are walking together in the middle, though she’s practically skipping along, talking a mile a minute—and I’m half listening, half tuning her out as I take in the streets around me. We make our way down Broadway through SoHo, past Bloomingdale’s and Topshop and past a store called OMG that we think is hilarious, and then start zig-zagging along Spring, with its little patisseries and cafes, to Bowery, down to Delancey past some sort of Spanish temple and finally, a few streets later, ending up on a street called Clinton.

  The entrance is through the back, and we push through a set of ceiling-to-floor black curtains into a holding area, where everyone sort of disperses. We hand our coats to the coat-check guys, and then I sling my camera over my shoulder, Ramona links arms with me and we pass through another set of black curtains into a bright white space. White high-top tables are collected in the center of the room and photographs line the white walls. The lights drift from blue to purple to green to red and back to blue again. Ramona heads straight for the center of the room and aims her camera up at the ceiling to capture the balloons of colored light.

  The space is packed—there have to be at least two hundred people here already, and I don’t see anyone from class. “Should we walk around and look at the photos?” I suggest.

  “Yes, exactly. That’s exactly what we should do,” she concedes, and we walk to the closest image on the wall: a sea of black hats, all tilted in slightly different directions. The inscription reads Orthodox Jewish funeral.

  “Uplifting,” she jokes, and we move on to the next photo. “How are we supposed to find our mentors in this crowd?”

  “We’re supposed to be learning how to network, I guess.” I Googled Deena Simone and saved to my phone what seemed like the most recent photo, but who knows if she looks like what Google coughed up. But the bigger challenge is that I keep getting distracted by possible David Westerly sightings.

  Someone taps on a microphone and I look around, then see an Italian guy with dark curly hair, maybe early twenties. The
photographer. The reason we’re here. He starts talking, thanking everyone for coming, thanking the school for the support, then talking about the inspiration behind his photos.

  I try to picture myself, in five years, graduated from Tisch. Will this be me? Will I have an exhibit like this? Will hundreds of people turn up to see my work? Only if I stop getting drunk and actually start being a real photographer, I think glumly. I pull up the photo of Deena Simone on my phone again, study it, then look around the crowd.

  And there he is.

  He’s tall, maybe six-three, and he’s wearing a fisherman’s cap, a caramel sweater over a blue button-down shirt, dark jeans shoved into the tops of chestnut leather ankle boots.

  I pull my camera up to my face so I can watch him without looking like a stalker. He surveys the room, then approaches a woman with short platinum hair and deliberately black roots, kisses her on the cheek and nods. They talk, he laughs, crosses his arms over his chest. Then Ben moves into the frame. They shake hands, David slaps Ben on the back. Ugh.

  “Come on,” I say, grabbing Ramona’s hand. “Let’s find our mentors.”

  “I’d rather find cute guys to make out with,” she says, and I can’t help thinking that she and Dace would get along. Am I always drawn to the boy-crazy girls? But Ramona follows me around the room, and then a few minutes later, she’s yelling in my ear and I turn around and she’s off, standing with a man—brown sweater with elbow patches, skinny jeans rolled at the cuff, black leather boots—I’m guessing it’s her mentor, the food photographer. I look around and a few minutes later she grabs my arm and pulls me over to a group of Tisch campers. We join the discussion of who’s found their mentors, who hasn’t, and whether we can split once we’ve met up with them. Julian brings up some party his boyfriend’s cousin who goes to NYU is having on the Lower East Side, and Savida and Izzy are into it.

  “Let’s do it,” Ramona says to me. Except I haven’t met my mentor and I tell her to go ahead without me. So Ramona hugs me and then they split and I look down at that photo of Deena Simone on my phone for what seems like the billionth time and when I look up, he’s standing in front of me. David Westerly.

  His smile softens his face, which is bearded with a few days’ worth of stubble in that I-couldn’t-really-be-bothered-to-shave way, though I wonder if it’s a calculated look. Even though he and Dad were best friends and in the same year at Tisch, he seems younger by about five years, at least. My dad had a bit of an upstate New York thickness to him, the kind people get in the suburbs from driving everywhere. David is lean, just like New Yorkers are in movies and TV shows. I resist the urge to yank at a hangnail.

  “Pippa Greene?” David asks.

  I nod. My lens cap chooses that moment to tumble to the concrete floor and I bend down for it, grab the thin plastic disc and am back on my way up toward vertical when the back of my head hits something hard. I clutch my head—it really does hurt—and David’s grasping his chin and wincing. “Wow,” he says. “Wow, that hurts.”

  I’m not bleeding, but my face is hot, and I know it has to be bright red.

  “Well, Pippa, you’re hard-headed like your mom, I’ll give you that.” David flashes a cool smile. “I’m David.”

  I nod. “I know.” We cycle through the pleasantries, and he tells me he was friends with Mom and Dad. “I’m sorry,” he adds, and I nod again.

  “How is Holly, anyway?” he asks. “Still as beautiful as ever?”

  I go through a couple of platitudes, that she’s fine, she’s great, of course she’s beautiful and hilarious and mostly that’s all true, if I were talking about the Mom she was before Dad died. But he doesn’t need to know she’s not quite the same ever since. He doesn’t need to know she’s not the same Holly she was when he knew her—when she was a real model. When she was living in New York, right after high school. That’s how she met Dad. But then she got pregnant with me and gave up modeling and New York and her dreams, and they moved back to Spalding, where she was from, right after I was born.

  “You inherited her beauty,” he says.

  “I don’t know about that,” I say, thinking how I’m the modified, unglam, unmodel version of her. “I think I got my dad’s genes.”

  David raises his eyebrows. “Well, if you got into this program, you definitely inherited someone’s photography skills, that’s for sure—how old are you now, anyway?” He shakes his head at my answer. “Sixteen?” he says. “Jesus. Sixteen. It’s been that long.”

  “I really wanted to come over and talk to you. To say hi.” My voice wavers.

  “Yeah, well I was about to split but I figured I better find you, so we’re set for tomorrow. How do you feel about chilling at my studio? I’ve got a shoot at 1:30. Or 2.”

  I shake my head. “No, sorry, you’re working with someone else—Ben Baxter.”

  “No, I’m your mentor.” He grins.

  “You’re … you’re my mentor?”

  He nods. “Yep. We hang out. You idolize me. That sort of thing. So how well do you know the city?”

  “First-timer.” David’s my mentor?

  “Well, we’ll get you up to speed in no time. I’ll come get you then, and we’ll walk back to my studio. It’s not far.”

  I nod, dumbfounded. I know I should tell him again that he’s supposed to be with Ben, not me. But I don’t want to pass up this chance to spend the next two weeks with him. He takes his phone out of his pocket, then punches a couple of buttons. “What’s your number? In case anything comes up.”

  I tell him and he punches the number in. He’s a lefty, like me.

  “Great. I’ll text you tomorrow and we can figure out where to meet. Cool?”

  I shake my head. “As much as I want to be paired with you, I’m not. Ben Baxter is. You were talking to him earlier. Tall guy, short sandy-blond hair? Blue sweater? What some people might call good looking?”

  David nods. “Oh yeah, Ben. He’s gonna hang with my friend Deena. Deena Simone. I introduced the two of them. So it looks like it’s you and me, kid.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Approximately 13 seconds of dead air happens between me telling Mom that David Westerly’s my mentor and the point where she actually says something.

  “Hello?” I pull my phone away from my ear. Yep, still connected. I lay back on my bed, dressed in striped leggings and a sweater dress. It’s not even seven o’clock but I wanted to catch Mom before she headed to work.

  Mom clears her throat. “I thought you got the woman from Seventeen.”

  “I did, but I don’t know, I guess there was a mix-up.”

  How, exactly, did I end up with David Westerly? No clue. I can’t imagine Deena Simone would initiate the swap. And David certainly didn’t. Which leaves the only really plausible explanation that Ben was behind the switch. But why on earth would Ben ask David? He would never do something as selfless as trade mentors with me so that I could get the one photographer I would die to get paired with. And how did he even know I wanted to be paired with David?

  “Look, just be careful, OK? David … Well, just be careful,” Mom repeats, her voice filled with worry. “Are you sure you want to work with him?”

  “Am I sure that I want to learn from Dad’s best friend from college? The guy who knew Dad when he lived here? Who’s probably the most super-talented photographer I’ve ever met?” I say, then feel a stab of guilt like I’m betraying Dad in that category, but I’m making a point. “Um, yeah, like 100% sure.”

  A pause.

  “Well, that’s great news,” she says, sounding like I just told her I killed all the dogs at Furry Friendz with a machine gun and the cats are next on my hit list.

  “Why don’t you sound happier? You do like him, don’t you?”

  “Of course I like him,” she says unconvincingly, but she doesn’t expand. She’s good like that—she never blatantly badmouths something important to me. But I just don’t get her reaction.

  “It’s not David,” she fills the silence. “I�
��m just worried about you. You focused your entire entry to win Vantage Point around your father, and now you’re going to spend all your time with David, probably asking him about your dad. What if it’s too much?”

  “The instructors say the opposite, actually. How important it is to embrace too much. To fully immerse ourselves. To go with something we’re passionate about and follow through with it. To be a specialist, not a generalist.”

  “Well, OK. This is a case of Mom Doesn’t Know Best then,” she says wearily. “Listen, I’m just tired. And I trust you. And love you. But know that if it gets to be too much, I’m always a phone call away. And if not me, Dr. Judy.”

  Ramona catches my attention, pointing at her wrist, where a watch would be, but instead is just a stash of bracelets. I tell Mom I have to go, grab my bag and head out the door.

  “Come on. You’re hanging out with your dead dad’s best friend. It’s a reminder to her that her husband died and his best friend didn’t. This isn’t about you, it’s about her,” Ramona says as we walk to school. “So had you met this dude before?”

  I shake my head from behind my camera, as I stop to take a picture of the roasted nuts in the food cart on the corner. “My dad hadn’t seen him in years.”

  “What about the funeral?”

  “He sent flowers.”

  “That’s a pretty shitty friend,” she says. “For the record, I’ve only known you three days and I’d go to your funeral. But I guess I get it. He’s that way-back friend you lose touch with when your lives go in separate directions.”

  “Yeah,” I say, but when I think of Dace, it doesn’t make sense. We’re way-back friends, but I can’t imagine us never seeing each other again. How do you go from seeing someone every day to never seeing them again? “I guess the distance … they just lost touch after a while. I think Dad felt a bit intimidated by him—that he was still a working photographer in New York.”

  Ramona clucks her tongue. “That’s what happens when you move to the burbs. That’s why you can never leave New York.”