Dream Boy (8 page)

When we got back to the table, I was too amped up to eat my sandwich, so I just nibbled on carrots while I watched Martin poke at his Salisbury steak. He was like some sort of Greek god.

I thought of the guys in the romance novels that my mom sometimes read: “broad-chested” and “chiseled” with “dark waves of hair,” “piercing eyes,” and “smoldering lips.”

Okay, maybe the lip part was a little over the top, and Martin’s waves were more golden than dark, but the rest was pretty much him. And, he was mine. Sort of.

He looked over at me and his lips (maybe smoldering a little) curled up at the edges in this delicious, sexy way.

Talon and Serena stared at us like they’d scored front-row seats and Martin was the headliner. Meanwhile, Will kept turning around and snapping pictures.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

Snap.

“A panoramic,” he said. Snap.

“Oh.”

Snap. Snap.

“That wasn’t panoramic,” I said.

“You’ve got jelly on your face,” he said. “Just capturing the moment.”

Snap. That one was of Martin. I had a sudden fear that he wouldn’t show up on film, like a vampire, but Martin didn’t seem worried so I tried not to be, either.

“Would you stop?” Talon said. “You’re so annoying.”

Snap.

“Yearbook,” Will said. “I’m getting candids.”

Martin stood up.

“I have to go talk to Coach,” he said. He touched my cheek. “See you soon.” To everyone else he said, “Nice meeting you.”

“A pleasure as always,” Will said.

After he left, Talon gave Will a look. “What is
up
with you?”

“I’m being polite,” Will said. “Chivalrous.”

“I’ll bet Martin wears a gambeson,” Paolo muttered.

Will gave Paolo a nudge and then picked up his camera, focusing this time on me.

“So,” he said. “Homecoming.”

“Yeah.” I looked down. “About that.” I wasn’t sure where to start, so Will did.

“I guess all bets are off,” he said.

“You’re okay with that?”

He shrugged and took the camera away from his eye. “I believe you’re the one who said if we hadn’t found someone by homecoming we would go together. And if I’m not mistaken, you found someone.”

“Yeah,” I said again. “I guess I did.”

“So,” he said. “Live long and prosper and all of that.” He gave me that little Star Trek finger sign with his free hand.

“Are you still going to go?”

“I’m shooting it for yearbook,” he said. “I guess I have to.”

“Alone?”

“There’s always Bessie.” He held up his camera.

“There must be someone you can ask.”

“I wasn’t even going to go at all until you brought it up,” he said. “Now I’ve got this assignment so, you know, whatever. I’ll just go and snap a few pictures and leave. It’s no big deal.”

“I don’t think Talon’s going yet.”

“Talon hates homecoming,” he said. He looked across the table at Talon. “Right?”

“Thank you for not acting like I’m invisible,” she said to Will. To me she said, “I don’t hate it. I loathe it.”

“See?”

“There has to be someone—”

“Look, Annabelle,” he interrupted. “I don’t need you playing matchmaker for me.”

“Yeah, but—” I started.

“Can we drop it?”

“Sure,” I said. But I didn’t want to drop it. I wanted Will to be happy. As happy as me. “So, you’re in the photo lab this afternoon?” I asked, intentionally changing the subject.

“Yep.”

“Maybe I could help out?” I was searching for some reason to hang around until after football practice anyway.

He looked at me like I’d just sprouted a second head, but then he smiled. A little tense around the eyes, but still a smile. “Yeah, okay,” he said.

The photo lab was a big low-ceilinged room in the annex at the back of the school. No windows—and from the looks of it, the janitors had pretty much written it off circa 1995. It was bright enough, but it had a strange sawdusty smell, and the boxes in the corner had easily been stacked there since the Clinton administration. To the back was Chilton High’s version of a “media center” with video cameras, a few TVs, huge umbrellas, lights on metal stands, and for some reason that I couldn’t quite fathom, a big old-fashioned microwave. On the other side were long shelves packed with junk, and a tall black tube that served as a door of some sort. “DARKROOM,” it said. Beneath was a bumper sticker with a camera that read, “Help! I’ve been shot!” and another that read, “Photographers do it in the dark.”

Will was sitting at one of the computers, uploading his pictures, and across the room a few random guys huddled around a Goth chick who was drawing something with a fat, black marker.

“Hey.” I took a seat next to Will.

“Hey.” He nudged my knee with his knee.

“This the stuff from earlier?” I asked, pointing to the computer screen.

“Yep. A day in the life.”

Each picture flashed on the screen for a moment in a sort of slideshow. A group of sophomore girls with too much makeup voguing in front of the trophy case. Mr. Stauffer sitting on the edge of his desk, his eyes squinting in that “I’m listening” face he makes. A kind of artsy shot of test tubes filled with different colored powders. The Lobmans’ Japanese exchange student, Akiko, smiling over her shoulder as she walked down the hall. Two guys running off the soccer field, a haze of blue mountains in the distance.

“These are solid,” I said. “You have a great eye.”

“Just one?” He looked at me, deadpan. “I always thought both my eyes were equally great.”

I gave him a kick. “You are soooo smooth,” I said.

“Smooth like ex-lax.”

“Smooth and gross,” I added.

“Like ex-lax.”

The pictures from lunch flashed by next. I’d been there, right beside him the whole time, and it had seemed like he was kind of goofing off, so I was surprised by what he’d managed to capture. In his photos, all the confusion of the cafeteria seemed much more interesting than it had in real life. It was as if by freezing its motion and drawing a frame around its edges, everyday stuff had taken on some deeper meaning…truth, even. Each frame had a little story: Billy Stubbs tossing a crumpled milk carton toward the trash can in a high perfect arc while Trina Myers checked out his butt; Melanie Butler, whose hair color changed with the weather (orange today), puckering her lips as if she was just about to curse at Clive Porterfield, who was half-sitting, half-standing, trying to explain something.

Will stood. “I need to work on some prints while these upload. Wanna come?”

“In a minute,” I said. I was waiting to see the photo he’d taken of Martin, wondering if it’d be, I don’t know,
there
. But what I saw first was not Martin; it was me. I had a little jelly on my chin, as promised, and a huge grin on my face. I looked prettier than I thought of myself as looking. And happier than I was used to feeling. Then there was Martin in profile, beautiful as always, slightly out of focus, but even so, good-looking enough to be a high-end underwear model. There was another picture of Martin, too, this one from behind. He had a small tattoo on the back of his neck, two small, squiggly lines, like waves. I wondered why I’d never noticed it. But maybe I had; it looked somehow familiar. Before I was ready to stop looking at him, Serena appeared, a mahogany curl coiling over one eye as she offered Paolo a rutabaga chip.

“Can you get me a copy of those?” I asked him. “I might want to use some for sketches.”

“That’s quite a compliment, coming from Chilton’s resident artist.”

“You’re an artist, too.”

“I just like to take pictures,” Will said. “Anyway, the camera only sees what’s going on outside. Your drawings show what’s inside. It’s like you make this invisible connection between what you’re thinking and feeling and what the person who sees your work could be thinking and feeling.”

I blushed. “Nick would love it if my head swelled up so much I couldn’t fit through my doorway. He’s always wanted my room.”

Will nudged my knee again. “Come on,” he said.

I followed him to the darkroom door, which was really this cylinder, with a piece cut out. Once inside, you stand on a circle and slide the door so that the entrance into the cylinder becomes your exit into the darkroom. That way you don’t allow in any light from the outside. Pretty much, it works the same way some of my mother’s spices work: saltshaker technology.

“Voilà,” said Will, even though he was taking Latin instead of French.

The darkroom was, as expected,
dark
. It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the eerie red light—the same kind they used in the mad-scientist display for the haunted house at Dixie Caverns each Halloween. They actually set up the haunted house
inside
the cave, which went on for about a mile underground. That way you got that wet-spooky feel of being trapped underground with the campy-spooky feel of a vampire popping out of a rustic wooden coffin. Will’s favorite was the guy in a bloody flannel shirt who chased people with a revving chainsaw (as he said, “How can we know he’s not a sociopathic townie who
really
wants to cut us all to bits?”), but the one that always got me was the crazy woman with matted hair, singing off-key to a dirty, headless baby doll. In the past, I’d always liked being scared, running from somebody else’s nightmares. Now that I had had my own, I wasn’t sure I could face Dixie Caverns. I wasn’t sure I could even face the darkroom.

The red light blared. And the whole place smelled like the inside of a can of ant spray. But my eyes adjusted, and I didn’t see any snakes.

Will showed me how to focus and expose the negatives, and then slip the photo paper in various trays of chemical solutions to develop and fix the prints.

“We shoot digital for the yearbook,” he explained, “but Heller makes us do it old-school for class.”

We were working on the roll he’d taken two weekends before at Olde Salem Days, a street festival in a town nearby. Little kids with balloons, people looking at baskets, a woman whittling a primitive fertility-goddess figurine, that sort of stuff. One of me, Talon, and Serena talking to this old guy who had a 1906 Model-T Ford that he promised to give us a ride in if we ever came back to Salem when the streets weren’t so crowded.

I put in another negative strip and focused on a close-up of Talon licking this huge double scoop of pineapple frozen custard that a cute dairy farmer from Franklin County had given her—free of charge. Everywhere we went, older guys drooled over Talon; she had a quirky beauty that high school boys didn’t even seem to notice, but college-age guys found irresistible. Not that it did them any good. She took the free ice cream or the waived cover charge or, once, a huge stuffed rainbow-striped frog—and went on her way, untouched.

I zeroed in on Talon’s nose. “So, about homecoming…”

I could hear Will, who was looking over my shoulder, suppress a groan.

“I have an idea,” I went on. “Macy White.”

“What?”

I turned. I was pressed uncomfortably close to his chest and for a minute I felt this kind of flicker in my stomach, and Will was looking down at my mouth and I couldn’t swallow. He seemed tall, suddenly. My mind flashed blank and I felt myself straining upward, rising on the balls of my feet.

Then Will moved back, like we’d been caught kissing.

“What?” he asked again.

“Macy, for homecoming,” I said, though I was having trouble concentrating on my words. “You could ask her.”

He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “It’s all right. I have it covered.”

“What do you mean you have it covered?”

“I’m going with Talon.”

“Talon?” My head was swirling. “But she hates homecoming—”

“Yeah, well. I guess she changed her mind.”

“When?”

“During P.E.,” he said.

“Oh. Well. That’s great then,” I said, trying to make it sound like I sincerely meant it. Which I should have, right? I’d suggested Talon. Will had a date, one who hadn’t stolen away Daniel Kowalski. And Talon was “opening herself up to new experiences” that did not involve her parents, The Doctor, or another piercing.

Will took out his contact sheet and held it up to the light. He circled a picture of Talon’s ear with a black Sharpie. The picture was close. Not close enough so you could see earwax or anything, but close enough that it went beyond looking like an ear and started looking like something else. Tunnels. Or a seashell maybe. Her gold studs just looked like part of the landscape.

He circled another, and I viewed it through the loupe. It was a little boy looking lost among a bunch of kneecaps.

“I hope you helped him find his mother after you took that picture,” I said.

“She wasn’t far away,” he said. “The assignment was to show emotion.”

“I thought all photos showed emotion,” I said.

“Nope,” he said. “Many photos feature fake smiles, which offer the appearance of an emotion—like happiness—but not the actual emotion itself.”

“But isn’t fake happiness an emotion?” Sometimes it seemed like I was in a perpetual state of fake happiness.
“I’m so happy you found your bliss in Alaska, Dad.” “We’re doing great, Aunt Caroline. Four-course dinners every night.” “Daniel who?”

“Hmm.” Will frowned into the loupe. “I’ll have to take that one under advisement.”

I savored my almost-victory as Will circled a picture of an old man bent in front of a shelf of carved wooden bowls, his face etched like an ancient tree. Then he circled a picture of me and Serena and Talon. “This one’s not for Heller,” he said. “But there’s nothing fake-happy about it, is there?”

I looked at the photo under the loupe. It was taken before Martin, when I was busy hating Chilton, worrying that I was going to get stuck here all alone, like my mom. But I wasn’t alone; I was with my friends. And I had to admit, the smiles were real.

Will moved forward to some photos he’d taken over the weekend—wildlife shots from the river, Chilton’s watery border. The mountains stood tall in the background, turning the town into a postcard. A dead tree. A squirrel, which stared right into the camera so his eyes followed you, like the Mona Lisa. Three deer and one deer butt, which made me laugh. A close-up of a snake, which turned my stomach to ice.

“When did you take these?” I asked him.

“Yesterday. Why?”

My breath came quick, as I forced out a “no reason.”

“It’s a northern water snake,” he said.

“It looks evil.”

“Nah,” Will said. “It’s harmless.”

I closed my eyes for a minute, and prayed that Will Connor really did know everything.