3
“I don’t want to do senior pictures,” Keme said.
We were playing a game.It was called: keep Keme from going back into the house, and it was kind of likePong.Keme kept trying to get past me, and I kept moving back and forth, blocking his way, and he’d bounce off me and try again from another direction.(Is that anything likePong?)
“They’re stupid,” Keme said.
“They’re not stupid,” I told him.
“Yeah, they are.Everybody looks like a wiener in their senior pictures.”
“It’s—”
“If you say a rite of passage, I’m going to pull your underwear off through your nose.”
Thatwas a powerful image.
“It’s fun,” I said (although that hadn’t been my first choice).
Keme scoffed.
“It is!”I insisted.
“Last time you had to get headshots taken, you said you regretted every choice you’d ever made in your life and then locked yourself in that secret room downstairs with a pan of brownies.”
“That’s called a coping skill.I was coping.”
“Indira made them for me!They were my brownies!”
“That’s ridiculous.I mean, in the first place, I’d like to see your paperwork documenting a claim to the aforementioned brownies—”
Keme chose that moment to dart around me.
I caught his arm.We spun together.He pulled free and raised one fist, and I had a powerful image of my underwear, molecule by molecule, uh, transversing the inside of my body.
“You can get them printed and give them to people!”I said.(I was also shielding myself with both hands now.) “Your friends.Your family.So they can remember you.”
Slowly, Keme lowered one fist.“I don’t have any friends,” he said.“Who am I going to give them to?My mom?”
Keme’s mom was a tricky subject, to put it lightly.So, I went for Plan B: emotional manipulation.“Indira would like one.”
And that’s how we ended up outside, with Keme sitting in one of the chairs on Hemlock House’s porch, while Indira combed his hair and Fox fluttered around holding up clothing options and Millie checked her camera settings (yours truly was assisting Millie by being the test subject for the camera; I spent most of the time trying to flex, and I could hear Keme groaning all the way from the porch).Bobby’s role was prison guard.He told me he objected to the term, but hedidstand right in front of the door, arms folded across his chest, and observe everything seriously.
“I look stupid,” Keme said when Indira finally released him.He was dressed in a new pair of jeans, a new Volcom tee, and new slides—all of which Indira had produced as if by magic.
He didn’t look stupid, though.He looked handsome.And underneath the sullen wariness, he even looked a little pleased.
“Make him do the pose where he cups his face with his hands and looks like an angel,” I told Millie.
Keme charged after me, and I had to hide behind Bobby.
Instead, Millie had Keme try a few other poses.He sat on the steps to Hemlock House, framed by old brick, the ocean spreading out behind him.He rested one arm on his knee.
For a boy who was a natural athlete, who swam like an otter (that’s a thing, right?), and was so at home on a surfboard that eventually he was going to be even better than Bobby, Keme looked like someone had made him out of Legos.And not the cool kind of Legos.He looked like a bunch of six-year-olds had just stuck the bricks together however they wanted, and that’s why his arm got stuck like that.
Millie tried a few other poses.Her coaching—“Relax, try softening your face, let your arm rest naturally”—was about as effective as you imagined.In fact, it seemed to accomplish the exact opposite, making Keme tenser and more uncomfortable and, therefore, stiffer in every photo.
Fox saved us by announcing, “Costume change!”
