Where You End

by Anna Pellicioli

  I wake up choking on my breath. The street lights are on outside. My door is shut. The house is quiet. My eyes adjust to find my cell phone: 1:10 a.m. One new text, from Adam.

  Good night, Meem. Wanna ride the bus tomorrow?

  There’s a handwritten note near my phone:

  We tried to wake you up but it was impossible.

  Leftovers in the fridge.

  See you tomorrow.

  I walk into the bathroom to pee and check if my parents’ light is still on. The only noise is the rinse cycle in the dishwasher downstairs. They must have stayed up later than usual. I brush my teeth and rinse my mouth out to get rid of the nightmare taste.

  Back in bed, I go through my third grade roster, alphabetically. I sing “You Are My Sunshine” in my head five times. I count the number of years Henri Cartier-Bresson lived. When I get to ninety-six, I take time to remember my mom’s birthday present. I was fourteen. She gave me a copy of The Decisive Moment, Cartier-Bresson’s book. Her dedication is scribbled under the title, on the first page:

  Cartier-Bresson was not interested in the darkroom. Don’t spend all your time in there. The viewfinder is where you make your pictures. The world is where you get them. Get out there.

  Love, Mom.

  I stole that line from my mother so many times. The viewfinder is where you make your pictures. I’ve spit it at Adam whenever he wanted to crop a picture, make it brighter, or highlight the most important detail.

  Even evil David was impressed with my plagiarized thought over wine, cheese, and blue grapes. Yes, we sixteen-year-olds drank wine at Elliot’s house. We were sophisticated there, an odd kind of progressive, at least about wine. Well said, Miriam. What a smart girl you found, Elliot. And not afraid to have an opinion. Elliot had winked at me. Bear with it, his eyes seemed to say. Eventually, we will sleep together and laugh about this. But I am smart, I had wanted to tell everybody in the room. This isn’t a joke. I’m not being cute.

  I get up and look for The Decisive Moment in the boxes in my closet. I’ve marked my favorite parts with little exploding snowflakes.

  “Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact,” Cartier-Bresson wrote, “and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact.”

  So that’s what I am. I’m a photographer struggling to recognize a series of facts. And staying awake isn’t going to help. I need sleep to think straight, and I need to think straight to get sleep. My jeans are crumpled on the floor. I crack the window open and stick my hands out to read the temperature.

  Elliot’s socks are still under my bed, and Adam’s camera beckons from the floor. He forgot it here this afternoon. The screen is printed with the lines of his thumbs, like sweaty tree circles telling time. I put the strap around my neck, like a tourist. The body of the camera falls right in the middle of my chest, the lens looking out to lead me through the dark house. Now Adam’s name is in the book too. We are all tangled.

  The wind is brutal, and it almost knocks me off the bike once or twice. It’s not constant, more like gusts, and I can’t predict when the next one will come. I turn onto the main arteries, hoping that the bigger buildings will shield me better. I ride past many of our regular haunts: the coffee place, the movie theater, the water tower at Fort Reno.

  Everything in the store windows looks trapped. The oranges, the hula hoops, the power drill and leather boots; the televisions, the laundry hampers, the antique chair; the milk steamers and the cold medicine and the composition notebooks, they are all sleeping behind the shatterproof glass. All the objects look so discouraged, as if they dread the impending fluorescent light that will get them handled, kidnapped, and consumed.

  There is a great little stream of nervous energy in my insomnia. Despite the wind, the slopes feel possible tonight. My body is drawn to this place; I couldn’t get lost if I tried. A rush of something cool quenches my sleepless, beat-up body. On Elliot’s street, the lamps turn everything orange. I drop my bike on the sidewalk several feet back from the front door. The neighborhood wind chimes clank furiously.

  Adam’s camera is in “open” view.

  Most of the lights are off, except for the desk lamp in his room. I refuse to think of Elliot, in his bed under his sheets, but in refusing, I picture it perfectly. To wake him or not to wake him. I set up the tripod on the slippery grass. Adam’s camera fits perfectly, of course. I just need to breathe and click, and then we’re done. It’s all ready, but I wait.

  What would you do if you were sitting in front of your sleeping ex’s house, feeling like you had very little love left, but still so much longing? How would you lock up all that nostalgia? For me, it’s a picture. It always is, and always will be. You don’t shut it out. You lock it up and take it with you. I know that now.

  Someone walks into his room. I gasp and look closer, squinting my eyes in the dark. It’s his mother, in her pajamas. I’m embarrassed to see her like this. Even in Delaware this summer, she was always dressed by breakfast. I grab the tripod, leave the camera on, and take a few steps back.

  She walks toward Elliot’s bed, stops, looks, steps back toward the desk, and extends her arm to flick the light off. I don’t see her leaving the room or closing the door, and I can’t hear her saying good night or I love you. Do mothers still do that? I don’t have a picture yet.

  As I get ready to leave, her own bathroom light comes on, across the house. Mrs. Fox pulls her hair up, splashes her face, and brushes her teeth. This is the picture I take, as she gets ready to go to bed. The wind comes back suddenly, and a loud thump makes me run to the bike. I get on and lean into the wind, to make a U-turn. A giant rodent is crawling across Elliot’s lawn. He’s huge. He looks lost. He is shaking, like he’s scared, and dragging his tail along the dying grass. I ride back past the house without looking in.

  Pedaling back home, I resolve to meet Elliot outside of school, like I did almost two years ago. I have three hours before the alarm clock goes off again, so in anticipation of the force with which my head will hit the pillow, I try Eva again.

  I went to the guy’s house. I think the wind knocked a possum out of his tree. Is it a sign?

  After I read it over the third time, the message strikes me as a metaphor I can’t understand, and that thought gives me peace. That’s the last feeling I have before I fall asleep: a sliver of pure peace.

  thirty

  Adam is in the student lounge, which is essentially a glass box, but he doesn’t see me. He’s wearing a sweater I’ve never seen before. He’s talking to Victor, probably about photographs, and his hands are drawing something monstrous in the air. I already feel like I’ve betrayed him. Victor notices me first and motions through the glass for me to join them. Adam smiles a brave, handsome smile and my fingers feel shaky down there, at the tip of my body.

  Actually, it feels like every extremity could just drop off, starting with my fingers, then my hair, then all the teeth in my mouth. I’m losing to the floor. Adam’s face shifts from brave to scared, and he walks toward the door, toward me. The rest of the room fades, the kids and their laptops are all little dots in an impressionist painting. I back into a wall and lean while the room pirouettes giddily—my Adam, my fixed point.

  “Hey,” he says.

  His eyes are softer than they were yesterday, less determined.

  “Does Victor know?” I say.

  His face scrunches, betraying surprise and disgust in equal measure. I see how easily I can hurt him, how easily I can make him afraid.

  “What do you mean?” he says.

  “It looks like he knows. Does Victor know what happened yesterday?”

  As the words come out, I suck all those lost pieces back into me. My body is whole in rage. Aggression glues it back together.

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Good. I don’t want him to know.�
�

  Victor has stopped at the door. He can tell we are talking about something important. He waves and sits back down on the fake leather couches. Adam is probably telling the truth. Victor probably doesn’t know.

  “Did you get my message?” Adam asks.

  “Yes. My dad took me to school.”

  He looks away to think for a second. “Oh. Cool.”

  “It has nothing to do with you.”

  “No, I know. It’s nice.”

  My heart is like playdough left out overnight. Crusty. Someone should throw it out already. Adam is struggling.

  “Why are you so far away, Miriam?”

  He reaches out for my hand, in the middle of the hallway, in front of every hungry beast in the student lounge. I let him have it, but I don’t squeeze back. After a few seconds, he lets go, and I put it in my pocket, where I feel for Eva’s key. It’s not there. I can’t remember if I left it under the pillow last night. Or in my other pocket. Maybe yesterday’s jeans.

  “Are you scared?” he asks.

  I snicker. “You have no idea.”

  “I’m scared too, Miriam, but we have to stick together. Like Robert Frank and Allen Ginsberg. Like James Agee and Walker Evans. Like Bogart and Bacall.”

  I don’t tell him Bogart’s gone, or that I used his camera to take a picture of Elliot’s house last night. I try to sneak out of his gaze, away to join the other bodies dragging or bouncing to class. To look for my key. I just want to find the key, then I can talk to him.

  “Can we just talk? Will you walk home with me? I think we need to talk and figure this out,” he says, sounding urgent.

  That last part makes me squirm, because there’s nothing like a boy saying what he should be saying when you are trying to blame him for what’s making you sick. I need to go now.

  “Okay,” I say quickly.

  “Okay,” he says, not moving.

  “I gotta go to class,” I say.

  “Okay. I’ll see you after school.”

  “Fine.”

  “Main gate.”

  “Okay.”

  I walk to the bathroom and realize no one’s life has been altered by our exchange. Victor welcomes Adam back into their conversation. The hall is still full of smart boys and girls planning how to drink themselves dumb. To them, it’s just Miriam and Adam talking, the photo freaks, best friends since Torah school. But I remember last night and his face when he took off my shirt. I recognized those eyes. Hope and fear together make hunger. That’s it. That’s the one feeling in the world. Hunger. I was wanted, people. Wake up. I was loved.

  thirty-one

  I need my camera.

  all my pictures are in there.

  can you just answer me?

  you can drop it off wherever you want.

  are you okay?

  i still have your key.

  thirty-two

  I consider getting a late pass from Ms. K, but I don’t want to step into her talking trap right now. When I walk into Calculus late and sans excuse, Mr. L lets it slide because I do my homework every night, and occasionally ask useful questions. The only empty seat is next to Maggie Sawyer.

  Maggie is pretty, but not scary pretty. She is funny, but not side splitting witty, never sarcastic. She knows when to talk and when to be quiet. She can negotiate with boys. She has friends who play tennis and friends who play guitar. She reads her Austen and her Cosmo. She’s balanced, very very balanced.

  So balanced she flashes me an empathetic smile when I duck into the chair and promise myself I will get through these forty-five minutes. After seventeen years of grooming, at my mother’s imagined insistence, I smile back the most polite smile I can muster.

  The class is in the middle of Mr. Lang’s practice exercises, and I pull out my pencil to catch up. It feels smooth and familiar. I hold it under my nose. It smells like second grade.

  “Do you want to look at my notes, Miriam?”

  Her voice always sounds like she’s got strep throat, which I imagine Elliot finds sexy, because I do, begrudgingly.

  “Uhm, thanks. Sure.”

  She slides her notebook across our joined desks, motioning for me to keep it on my side of the line. She’s in no hurry. I look around to confirm what I suspected. Everyone is looking at us. This interaction makes for great gossip, since everyone knows Elliot and I were practically married last year, and that it’s Maggie he’s swapping spit with now. According to the general public, there was a grace period of about two months when Elliot belonged to nobody but himself.

  What they don’t know is he came to see me in the dog days of August. About two weeks before school started, when the city returns to its swampy origins, the mosquitoes come up with the sun, and the air conditioning doubles you over at the grocery store. My parents were at work. Adam was on his annual family vacation out West, in big sky country, channeling his inner fly-fisherman. I was debating whether to throw out every picture of Elliot I’d ever taken. Our low, limited sky was begging to release, like a kid who can’t find a bathroom. It wanted to rain.

  Elliot rang the doorbell, and I answered and let him in, like I had in every single one of my daydreams since Delaware. He looked as sad as he had in the best of them, as ashamed and desperate as I hoped he would. If I’d kept my mouth shut, if we had stayed in that doorway, he would’ve been mine forever.

  The minute I told him to come inside, I started losing, leaking power and confidence, washing the floors with my resolutions.

  “Can I sit?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “I haven’t been here in so long,” he said.

  “It’s not that long. You want something to eat?”

  “Just water or something.”

  I took my time in the kitchen, so he would think about me more. I was wearing Mom’s yoga pants and a tank top. I considered changing and decided not to. Too desperate. Too obvious. I took off my bra instead, and temporarily hid it in the spice cabinet, behind the cumin and the turmeric and the five-pepper steak mix. Nothing is pre-meditated. Nothing is for a reason. Everything is a decisive moment. We do things because we do things. And then sometimes we deal with what we’ve done. Sometimes.

  I poured Elliot a glass of orange juice. When I came back, he was looking at one of my baby pictures, smiling at what he’d lost. It was perfect. I could not have written a better script.

  “You could tell you were stubborn back then too,” he said.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yes, all that hair and your smile. Like you’re not scared of anything.”

  I barely acknowledged him, but inside my head the redemption orchestra played a full house. I tried to focus on keeping him at arm’s length, where he could look and not touch.

  “So, what are you doing here?”

  Sigh. Slouch. Green eyes up.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, you can always leave,” says the girl whose bra is in the spice cabinet.

  “I’m not sorry I’m here. I’m sorry about what happened in Delaware.”

  He looks invigorated, like this is the part of the speech he remembers well, like it’s coming back to him.

  “I know we haven’t talked in a couple of weeks, and that you probably don’t want anything to do with me, but I just wanted to see you again. I have these nightmares.”

  “Me too.”

  “Yeah?” he says, hope lighting up his eyes.

  “Yes. It’s hard to go to sleep.”

  “What do you dream about?”

  I shake my head.

  “Am I in them? Am I in your dreams?” he asked.

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “I guess not,” he says. “In mine, you’re always behind a camera, and I keep telling you to take it away from your face so I can see you, but you won’t, and I never do. I
never see your face. It drives me nuts.”

  Now that I know what I know, now that I’ve finally bled, now that I kissed my best friend, maybe the only real friend I have left now, I think that this part may have been a lie, because nobody’s nightmares make that much sense. Dreams are weirder, much messier than that. There’s got to be an octopus that is trying to have sex with you, or a policeman telling you that you can’t go to the snow mobile ball, or your mother with red monster eyes. Shit that makes you uncomfortable, stuff you don’t want to repeat. Not me hiding behind a camera lens and you wanting to see my face. That’s too perfect.

  Never mind hindsight, though, because after the dream story is exactly when I turned around and walked up to my room, and he put down his half-drunk orange juice and followed me. When we got inside, he saw the ocean walls and didn’t say a word. He just took off my clothes and kissed me. Everywhere he could reach. We stuck together and repelled like magnets in a kid’s hands until the warmth of victory and recognition and desire kicked in, and I swallowed up all my righteousness for one, last, sweet time.

  Against the wall, I could still smell the paint, the latest coat a few days fresh. To this day, I sometimes put my nose up to it, but whatever has happened since has dulled the smell. I clung on like a barnacle to a ship as he took his clothes off, and, my body being human and not holy, I gave in with great pleasure and hope. I like to think we both did, from whatever heights we had been standing on.