By the time I got home, Alex had already texted to ask how it’d gone, and I’d managed a neutral reply—Long, but fine—focused on how I could do next week’s assignment better, or at least more to the professor’s liking. After all, he’s the guy that’s going todecide my fate.
I try to remember that now as I walk toward the north entrance of Hazleton Park, a rope of tension along my weary spine, a ball of nerves in my stomach, and my camera bag pulling tight and heavy across my body. I went to work early this morning, stayed late to make calls for Dennise, who’s finally got Mr. Morgan to agree to in-home care. The traffic out to the townhouse had been snarling, a minor accident slowing everything to a crawl, so I’d barely had fifteen minutes to change and grab my camera before coming all the way back downtown, clenching my jaw in frustration the whole time at how far I still live from the things I’m trying to make more central to my life. It’s been a six-ibuprofen day and it’snot even 3 p.m.
I stand at the tall, wrought iron gates that stay open until dusk in the summer and make a conscious effort to relax my body, to let go of some of the tension I’m carrying. Some of it is from the day I’ve had, the stress I feel over how the class is going—and I certainly don’t want Alex to see that, don’t want him feeling responsible for Hiltunen’s hostility toward me.
But some of it, too, is from the fact that I’m here meeting Alex at all—from the way I think about him,late at night.
The way I shift and stretch in my bed, straining to get comfortable in ways that have nothing to do with my body’s imperfections. When I’m with him—walking streets I know with my eyes closed, sitting on a couch where I’ve sat hundreds of times before—it feels like something’s changed in the way time moves. Every second is that second before the runners spring off the block at the start line, or the second before the bass drops in asong you love.
He makes the whole world sit in that beat of suspended animation. And every time I’m with him, part of me is always thinking:Please, please, please. Press Play.
“Hey there,” he says, coming from the other direction, and jeez. I didn’t meanPress Playfor right now. “Sorry if I snuck up on you. We’ve got to stop meeting this way.”
He smiles as though he’s nudging me with a small inside joke. He looks good—I mean, healwayslooks good, but today he looks better rested than he did yesterday, his cheeks less drawn. I’m a little annoyed, actually, at Alex showing up looking like he’s had a full eight hours and a very productive therapy session whereas at 2 a.m. this morning I was looking to distract myself by mentally counting the bottles of nail polish Ava has on the top of our toilet tank (eight, nine if you count topcoat). This morning when I put on concealer I’m pretty sure my dark circlescackled at me.
“How was it?” I ask him, even though I know it’s rude to. What he talks about with Patricia is private, and absolutely no one’s business. But I’m sotired, and that’s at least in part because of him, and this small, petty piece of me wants him to give mesomething.
He looks past the gate into the park when he answers. “It was—okay. Not fun, that’s for fucking sure.” When his eyes shift back, cast down slightly to meet mine, they’re so bright green in the sun that they look like the great swaths of grass that’ll greet us as soon as we pass through this entrance. “She gave me homework. A book I’ve got to read, about panic disorders, and then some—I’m supposed to write in a journal. Keep track of when I’ve got…you know. The noise.”
I nod, not wanting to break this spell.
He lowers his head further, chin dipping almost to his chest, and breathes out a laugh that makes me feel like my clothes have disintegrated from my body.
“I’ve never done homework a day in my life. But I feel like if I don’t do this, I’ll go back there next week and she’ll make me stand in the trash can or something. She’sscary as hell.”
We both laugh this time, and there’s a new, tentative camaraderie in it. I like having a person in common who isn’t Kit—its own kind of intimacy between the two of us. I mean, notintimacyintimacy. If my clothes hadn’t already fallen off at the sound of his laugh, this would also be a moment where they’d give up the ghost.
“So,” I say, eager to get us back on task, “I was thinking, there’s an herb garden here, a huge one, and it’s got—you know. Herbs. A lot of them. And there’s always ladybugs this time of year, whichare good luck.”
He’s still got a crooked smile, a remnant of our laugh, or maybe something new. “Only good luck, then?”
“Uh,yeah. Why would anyone take pictures of bad luck things?”
He shrugs. “Variety?”
Variety?What is he, crazy? I’m trying to graduate here, not tempt fate. “Varietyis overrated.”
“So’s luck.”
“You don’t believe in luck?”
He laughs again, but this one’s different, a sharper edge to it. He runs a hand through his hair, making the black mass of it stick up in all directions. “Not really. My dadwas a big fan.”
Oh. I know a little more now about Kit and Alex’s dad than I used to, know he’s got a problem with gambling—a huge source of guilt for Kit after we played and won the lottery. I open my mouth even before I know what I might say to this—before I’ve decided whether to ask a follow-up, or to change the subject, or, hey, to say something about how his laugh has textile-destroying capabilities—but he speaks before I do.
“We can try a ladybug. Setting yourself a pretty tough challenge there, a little thing like that.”
I lift my chin defiantly, but when I look at him again I see he’s not saying it as a warning, or as some kind of condescension. NoGreer joined our class latebullshit from Alex. Only a glinting look of anticipation that’s as bad as the laugh for all the things itmakes me feel.
“Well, come on then,” I say, walking through the gates, muttering the next part to myself. “I need all the luck I can get.”
* * * *
The first thing I’d done when we’d gotten to the herb garden was move to take my camera out, but Alex had paused beside me and said, “Don’t worry about your equipment yet. Worry about the bug for now.”
We’d walked through rows of fresh plants, small placards of identification tucked tidily into the ground at their roots—Caraway,Angelica,Fennel,Yarrow,Dill—and each time Alex would ask me questions: Did I like the leaves of this plant? What shape did I like best? Which would I like best for a small, rounded bug? What did the underside of this plant look like, if you took the photo from beneath it? He’d move to stand somewhere different, his long body changing the angle of the afternoon sun, and he’d gesture again—asking, wordlessly, for me to look at the light, to notice how it’d be different. In those moments I’d understood something different about the camera and all its features, even without it in my hand. The picture I’m trying to get—that’s got to do with my eye, not my camera. Everything the camera can do is about showing someone else what myeye is seeing.
By the time we’ve settled on where we want to try for a shot—Alex warning me that we’ve got to be willing to move, if something changes—I’m oddly relaxed, oddly focused, oddly alert. It’s still that second-in-suspense feeling, but now, with my hands on my camera, that feeling is purposeful, necessary. The time’s moving slower because I need it to. Because I need to waitfor this shot.
