“I wasn’t sure if you had something after.” With her free hand, she makes a small gesture toward the stragglers, as though she thinks I’ve got some kind of fan club meeting after this.
“I don’t. I’m grateful you came. It helped, having you here.” That tiny line, right between her eyebrows. It slays me. “I was nervous.”
Her lips tip up at the corners. “You didn’t seem like it. You were really good.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh, yeah.” She leans forward slightly so I catch a whisper of lavender again. “The girl in front of me put a picture of you on her Instagram. Probably you’re trending. Hashtag hot photographer.” She blinks. “I—did not mean to saythat out loud.”
There it is again, that tiny glimpse of what I see in Greer underneath all her reserve. Secret, precious liveliness—sly humor and clear, clever understanding, the sense that she’s got some incisive comment on every single thing she’s quietly observed throughout her day.
She’s probably not going to let me carry her books, but I’m too desperate not to try forsomething, anything that’d keep her close to me.
“How about I walk you to your car?” I ask, for all the world like the desperate, crushing kid I never had the chance to be.
* * * *
We’re quiet as we leave the building, as we cross the threshold from the campus to the city that surrounds it. I’m grateful for the few minutes of silence after hearing my own voice for the last hour. When I walked these streets a week ago, coming to meet Greer, the storefronts I’d passed—a tattoo parlor, a few sandwich shops, a used bookstore, a café where through the window, almost everyone had been staring at a computer—had looked blandly, distantly familiar to me from the times I’d come to visit Kit here, always with the chip on my shoulder that I’m only recently starting to acknowledge fully. Now, the streets look lively, interesting, streetlamps twinkling on in the falling twilight, sidewalks busy with people.
“I took some more pictures this weekend,” Greer says.
“You did?” I’ve said it as though I’m surprised, but I’m not, not really. Greer’s got a good eye; that’d been clear even before I saw her hold a camera, but once she did I knew she’d do just fine in her course, with or without me. Still, there’s an unfamiliar twinge at my breastbone, a feeling I’ve missed something important.
“Nothing major. But the professor already has future assignments posted on the course website, so I wasexperimenting.”
“What’re the assignments?” I’m genuinely curious, and not only because I don’t want her doing themall without me.
She makes thathmmnoise again, the one I like so much, before speaking again. “Black and white. People—a portrait and a crowd shot. I mostly took pictures of my sister, for the portrait assignment. She’s—let’s say she’s camera ready.” The smile she aims at the ground is sweet, indulgent. “She’s an actress, like my mom.”
“She’s the oneyou live with?”
She tucks her bottom lip into her mouth for a fleeting second before she answers. “Not for much longer. I’ll move into the city when I graduate.”
“How come you didn’t—” I break off, cautious now. What I was about to ask, it’s probably too personal.
“How come I didn’t what?” I’ve kept my eyes ahead, on the stretch of street in front of us, but I can feel that she’s turned herhead toward me.
“How come you didn’t move here after you won the lottery? With—you know. You didn’t want to use some of your money for that, be closer to school?”
I look over to see her open her mouth and close it again, tilt her head slightly, considering. She’s arranging something in that head of hers, some version of this that isn’t the whole truth. “Well. I have a big family, as you know, and—it was important to me, when I won, to share it with them. I paid off some things for them. So I need to wait until I graduate. Untilmy job starts.”
I still think there’s more to the story, but this alone—this is a lot. Kit had wanted the same, to split the money with me. A payback of sorts, she’d said, for my raising her. I’d had such a terrible reaction to it—first, to the implication that she owed me anything for doing the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life, and second, to the suggestion she’d made that I settle down, stay in one place.
Greer and her family, I’ll bet they don’t have the same kind of fucked-up baggage Kit and I do. It nags at me somewhere unpleasant, that Greer doesn’t seem to have kept enough for herself, but I don’t suppose I understand what it’s like for money to be something unproblematic, unweighted by addictions and responsibilities and resentments between family members. Maybe it was perfectly natural to her, what she’d done.
“I like what you said,” Greer says, interrupting my thoughts. “About watching.Watchingishelping. I’ve never thought of it that way.”
I let out a breath, my shoulders loosening from a tightness I didn’t know I was holding, I guess at what she’d thought of my answer. At whether she thought there was something to what that kid had asked me—that maybe Ishouldfeel bad about what I do for a living.
We turn a corner, down another side street, and I’ve got to imagine we’re close to her car, a fact that fills me with unaccountable dread. Now that the lecture’s over, I feel a strange, pulsing weightlessness, not unlike the feeling I get when I’ve finished a job where everything’s gone well. I want to work off that feeling with Greer, and while my ideas about that are mostly of the gutter variety, I’d also be content to walk these streets with her beside me, to get a bite to eat, to talk about her project. Hell, toloaf aroundsome more.
Up ahead there’s a small group of students gathered, a few of them kneeling on the ground around something I can’t see. At the exact same time, Greer and I look at each other with what I suspect are twin looks of concern on our faces, and without saying anything we both pick up the pace, Greer’s skirt fluttering at her sides and grazing against my hand.
When we get closer, a peal of laughter splits the air, girlish and uninhibited, and I breathe in relief. We’re close enough now to see floodlights on the sidewalk, tangles of extension cords behind them, tilted up to illuminate the brick wall of a building, vast and brutally plain, no windows at all. The students who crouch are gathered around a set of baskets—laundry hampers, I’d guess—some wicker, some plastic, all filled tothe brim with…
Water balloons?
“What’s this?” I ask, breaking stride to pause at the same time Greer does. There’s not much that seems secretive about what this group is doing out here in the encroaching dark; the lights are a dead giveaway, but so are their bold laughs, their called instructions to another set of students who linger closer to the wall, spreading tarps along the sidewalk just beneath it. Whatever this is, it’s got to be city sponsored, or at least city sanctioned.
