Billy Fauver. He graduated last year but you remember him in the halls, how he seemed too big for the small lockers, how with one lazy reach of his hand he could brush his fingers against the popcorn ceiling above your heads. He used to get into fights all the time—once you saw him bash another boy’s face into the porcelain rim of the water fountain, his girlfriend pulling at his arm, crying, begging him to stop, blood on the floor, on the bulletin board, how it only made him angrier.
And there is Sabrina, getting into his car.
You lower the camera from your face, feeling revealed. The colors of the fields too bright, the whistles too loud, the motions of the players and the ball so fast they make you dizzy. And still. You find yourself promising to Miss Hamilton that everything is fine.
“Okay,” she says. “Why don’t you take that home? Mess around with it, bring it back next week.”
“Really?” you ask, flushing with pride.
“Of course. I trust you. Shoot anything you want, and I’ll develop the film for you so you can understand what you’ve done, how we might improve. You can use the rest of this roll and I’ll give you a second one. I know how much you like photography.”
“Thanks,” you say, knowing your cheeks must be going crimson. That phrase rings through your body, your secret shadowing every exchange with a double meaning.
So you can understand what you’ve done.
ANNABELLE
You don’t know what to photograph outside the buzz and bustle of school. Everything inside your house has the look of something forlorn and forgotten, so you walk out to the factory ruins, stepping ever so carefully on the path with the camera around your neck. You shoot the blank spaces where the windows used to be, which now frame slices of the sky. On impulse you stick your hand far into the gap in the wall where you and Sabrina would leave one another messages, trinkets, where your mother placed those flowers and wooden animal figurines the day she left. Nothing but cold air, cold stone.
You tell yourself you hadn’t been hoping for anything and almost believe it.
Inside, you shoot the front hall and the last of the days’ light coming through the fan window, to try to capture the lonely feeling that squeezes your ribs as the light hits the wide plank floors that carried your ancestors over the threshold, toward the warmth of the hearth. In her room Sabrina is playing music too loud with her door open, so you head up the stairs and pause in her doorway. She refuses to turn from where she stands in front of the mirror, so you inch to the left, raise the camera, and take a picture of the two of you framed that way, you in the background, Sabrina leaning in to the mirror in front of you, the glint of a necklace bright against her skin. She strokes the chain, flips her hair over her shoulder.
“Where’d you get the necklace?”
“The Coyote gave it to me,” she says, angling her chest toward the mirror.
You raise the camera again.
“What the hell are you doing?” she asks.
“Practicing. For yearbook.”
“Well go practice somewhere else. You’re supposed to take pictures of people doing things. Not creeping around.” Her voice is hard but still, you detect the begrudging kernel of admiration, maybe even envy, as she eyes you from the mirror. The necklace is pretty: gold and dainty and delicate, a star charm that sits in the hollow just below her throat.
Though you wouldnever admit it to Sabrina, you agree that you need to find more people to practice on, so that weekend at the Cranberry Festival you bring the camera with you, walking three miles down the road toward the sound of music, notes of saxophone floating above the trees.
The festival takes place over two days, and every year since you and Sabrina were old enough to count change you would go with your mother and she would sell her tinctures from the garden, rub salves into people’s hands. People would lean close and speak to her in confidential voices.Do you have something for… My husband, he’s having trouble with… My mother, her memory is going…And she would produce a bottle or pot of something from underneath the table, send them on their way. They believed in her magic. You all did.
But where is she, and her magic, now that you need her more than ever before?
You had asked Sabrina if she wanted to come with you and she only sighed and looked down at her fingernails.
That constant hunger buzzes in you as you walk the fair, first past the hot rods and vintage trucks with their candy-colored paint jobs that glisten in the sun.Snap, snap, snapwith the camera. You have never before been so alive to smells and sounds of food. The greasy sizzle of peppers and onions of the grill. Powdered sugar you swear you can taste in the air when you walk past the funnel cake stand. You walk the entire fair, partly convinced that you will seeyour mother as she always was, the cloth she dyed from beetroot spread over the card table, her hair long down her back, her sleeves rolled up and her hands glistening, greasy with poultices and salves. Root of wild indigo for slow metabolisms, poor immune systems. Pipsissewa leaves for skin ailments. The bark of wild cherry trees for sore muscles and bad lungs.
You’re walking with the camera braced in your hands when you hear a familiar voice.
The Coyote.
You see him, so different from the way he was in his car. He’s standing in a circle of other men, all of them with cups of beer in their hands. One of them is older and you recognize him as the chief of police. He had been to the school last spring to shake the hands of every student who complete their D.A.R.E. education.You are doing your part to help keep our community safe and maintain your own bright future.At the time it made you swell with pride, to hold the certificate bearing his signature.
“And this idiot, he takes this turn on his four-wheeler like you wouldn’t believe, I swear, this close to flipping it…”
A man in a chambray shirt crosses his arms. “Fuck you, it wasn’t that bad.”
“It was, you moron. I saw your eyes under your helmet visor. About to pop out of your damn skull.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t been drunk off your ass…”
