Page 79 of Arctic Titans of Northwood U: Volume 3

Griffin skipped down the stairs, passing by the camera and joining me. Two sets of lenses recorded everything we did now. My heart beat a little faster. My palms sweated. “Old photos from under your bed.”

He was supposed to say, “Old photos from our room.”

“What were you doing under my bed?” I asked, thrown off by the improvisation.

Griffin grinned for the camera. “Looking for secret boxes.”

My mouth went dry. I could see the fan fiction stories popping up everywhere in which Griffin found a box that most certainly contained no old photos. “Open it,” I said, voice thin and raspy.

Griffin tossed his head in the direction of the sofa where the light was good, and we moved there. He set the box on the table, cameras moving after us, one to take our close-ups and the other to record the details of the photographs.

“I didn’t realize you had these here,” Griffin said as he opened the box. That, at least, was genuine and true. That was the line for the episode that Jen had suggested, but Griffin hadn’t seen the photos. He only knew I had been taking and developing them last year. We’d never gone through all the photographs I’d brought with me when we moved here. We’d never sat down to look at them.

And for good reason.

It hurt to see the fourteen-year-old Griffin in a wide shot of a snowy field, standing next to a snowman half again as tall as him. He called the snowman Andrei when I’d suggested taking this photo.

I had only been starting to play with film cameras. The composition was all wrong, the exposure burning the shadows away, but I liked the fine grain that came naturally with film. Developing it was hell. I’d botched it four times before getting this one right.

“I remember this,” Griffin said, not laughing. “Me and Andrei.”

“The snowman?” Jen asked.

“Yep,” Griffin said, waving the photo. He thrust it to me, and I took it, our fingers touching for a moment. It was like a zap of electricity, and my hand jerked away with the photo between my fingers.

He dug into the box and took out a bunch of photographs. Some were black-and-white, others bursting with color. One was from last year. It was our first semester. In fact, it was our first week at Northwood. Griffin lay on his bed, pillow crushed beneath his elbow, a comic book with a broken spine between his hands, skin around his eyes wrinkled in a radiant smile.

He lingered, looking at the picture. “You took two that night.”

I snort laughed and shook my head. “This was the first one.”

“Yeah, you thought you were so sneaky, but you turned on the flash then.”

I laughed. “I thought it was too dark.”

“It was perfect,” Griffin said. “See?” He waved the photo again.

“Do you have the second photo?” Jen asked.

We shared a laugh.

“He developed it,” said Griffin. “And then we ceremonially burned it outside on the lawn. The flash made me jump, and I looked like the meme of the guy waking up.” He looked at me. “Nobody’s ever taken a worse photo of me in my life.”

But not this one. This one was among the best.

Griffin flipped through a handful of photos, all of them spontaneous snapshots of his figure. Sometimes, he was a lonely figure on the ice. Other times, he was surrounded by friends. At times, he didn’t know the lens was watching him. At other times, he looked right into it, dimples popping and teeth shining.

Griffin narrated the memories surrounding those snapshots, so I didn’t have to talk.

My throat tightened as I looked at the photos.

“Andrei,” Jen said. “You’re not in any of these.”

I shook my head. “Um…I’m behind the camera.”

“In all of these?” she asked.

I looked at her, ignoring the camera’s widening eye as the cameraman zoomed into my face. “Yeah, I took all of them.”