Chapter One
Clara
November 15th
The rain ricochets off the sidewalk and raps on my umbrella, the sound like a drumline tapping on a single snare. There's a distant honk, some nearby yelling, splashing of tires. All the sounds that remind me how much I've missed Toronto. Five months away managed to simultaneously feel like five minutes and five years.
It’s bitterly cold today but not even that can stop the smile on my face or the pep in my step walking towards the gallery. I switch the umbrella between my hands back and forth, the anticipatory energy building up in my chest and expanding its way out in movement as it so often does.
I knew while finishing my graduate degree in the spring that Loretta Stole’s gallery, DebuTaunt, only hired one new candidate per year. I also knew that they only took applicants in the winter season following a successful fall run, and if it wasn’t so successful—they didn’t take them at all. But I refused to work anywhere else but for my idol. So, I took the risk.
I had some other offers, sure. I impressed my professors, shook the right hands, and got the interviews lined up just in case. I just wanted more. I wanted Loretta—a world-famous, high-concept photographer with an almost forty-year career that I envy.
And while most of my fellow graduates are now shooting weddings for their third Ashley and Brad of the month, reminding kids to remove their fingers from their noses, or posing models in a way that makes their bones sharper, I’m here.
My roommates, Leah and Jen, were not shy to admit they see this gig as a major downgrade, being that it’ll be mostly scheduling meetings and coffee runs, but I don’t agree. Not at all. Because watching this gallery operate, being a part of that, it’s one step closer to having the career I want. Loretta’s career, to be exact. And this exact job forty-odd years ago, for her idol, is how Loretta Stole got her start. That is probably why she has hundreds of applicants every year.
Call it prideful, because it was, but I knew I’d get it. I’m damn good at what I do, and this is what I’ve been working towards since my seventeenth birthday.
I had come downstairs to a stack of pancakes, a tender note from my mom who’d left for her shift at the ER already, and a gift sitting next to my father’s plate: a neatly tied red ribbon around an emerald green box. My first camera.
I ran outside immediately with it clasped in two fists. Time slowed as I placed it to the apple of my cheek, looked through the lens, and clicked the shutter without a single thought of composition, angle, or perspective.
But, even still, I was flooded with pride when I looked at that small playback screen. It was a photo only I could have taken. Not because of skill, that would come later, but because I was the only one in that exact place at that exact time. The tree was blown by the wind in a way that will never be again. A moment so entirely unique that it would have disappeared forever if not captured by a seventeen-year-old girl and her cheap, entry-level Canon.
Pure magic.
From the second I heard the first click, I was hooked. Enraptured by the idea of collecting unique moments in time. Hoarding stills, poses, and views only I was present for.
I went from Clara, the fairy-sized girl from the middle of nowhere set to attend school for nursing—like her mother and aunts all did— to Clara, the one who constantly has a camera around her neck.
Convincing my parents to let me apply for an undergrad in image arts wasn’t as hard as you may expect, considering they were both working-class, no-bullshit folks from farm country. I think they were just happy to see their only child finally passionate aboutsomething.
For most of my life prior to that point, I’d have considered my parents worried about me. I was one of the rare unicorn little girls who got diagnosed with ADHD early. Mostly because my mother fought every doctor that said I didn’t show the classic signs (AKA I didn’t have a penis) and won.
The medication kept me pretty listless. The doctors were aiming for me to be morego with the flow,but I landed somewhere aroundlazy river.My parents tried all sorts of different things. Different motivators, medications, diets. But ultimately, I wasn’t a bad kid, and I think they eventually just learned to let me be. I did my homework most of the time, I had a few friends, I got decent grades, kept a clean room, and didn’t really talk back.
But they never stopped encouraging me to find something that ignited a fire in my belly. Like my mom with medicine, and my dad with growing crops.
So when they, in perhaps a last-ditch effort, gave me yetanotherhobby that I could hyper-fixate on for a week or two then quickly drop, I doubt they were expecting it to stick. But it did, and they were thrilled.
My dad came home with a nicer camera three months later. My mom would set up bowls of fruit while packing her work lunch at 4am, just because it gave me something new to photograph.
And when I turned eighteen, got into the university I wanted, and gotoffthose meds—mostly because I kept forgetting to go to the pharmacy—the world opened up. Literally. It felt like I had been wearing 2D glasses in a 3D movie.
Suddenly, my photography got better, I was happier, and—this could be unrelated—I finally got boobs.
Eight years and thirty-thousand dollars of student loans later, here I am. Crossing the street towards the DebuTaunt Gallery. First day as the assistant to Loretta Stole. She was one of my third-year professors during my undergraduate degree but my obsession with her started far earlier than that. Leah and Jen, who I live with now andmetin that class, hated me at first. I wouldn’t (couldn’t) stop listing off Loretta’s many accolades to them and anyone else who would listen.
But the jokes on Leah, Jen, and all of those other students who called me, often affectionately, a kiss-ass. Because it paid off. I’m here.
I fix the lapel of my beige trench coat, fold and tap my umbrella under the gallery’s awning, and take a deep breath. Encapsulating the moment as I normally would with my trusty Lumix-S5, then push open the chic, two-story glass door towards my new beginning.
Chapter Two
Evan
I swear to god the moment Remembrance Day is over the kids only have one thing on their minds. I’ve helped sew more fucking pom-poms onto red velvet hats today than a real-life elf ever could.
