Fall For Anything (10 page)

I turn on the computer. I open up a browser and search Culler’s name in Google. His site is the first hit. I don’t know why I didn’t do this before, when we were in the car together, because then I would’ve told him how much I admired his work even if I didn’t really, because maybe then he would have kissed me twice. His site loads quickly. The first page is just his name in small black letters against a white background. It doesn’t even say he’s a photographer.

CULLER EVANS

I click through to the next page, which holds his artist’s statement, but no photos yet. I feel like I’m reading a diary entry. It’s what Culler told me in the car but more intimate, somehow. Personal.

ART IS NOT COMPROMISE. IT’S EVOLUTION—A COMBINATION OF BOLD TRUTHS AND LIES THAT YOU MUST BE BRAVE ENOUGH TO LOOK AT AND BRAVE ENOUGH TO SHARE … I BELIEVE IN ART AT ALL COSTS …

I stare at it for a long time before clicking
SELECTED PHOTOGRAPHS
.

I am not a great judge of art. I honestly don’t know what it is, or if it can be so defined, but these photographs are raw and strange. They begin and end, sad stories. All of them are sad and I wish he was here, so I could ask him about them. Ask him if it means he’s sad.

There’s one set of photos, a collection of a woman in a hospital bed that seems boring at first, nothing, until the final page, which turns all the photographs into an animation and you can see that the person is slowly exhaling. He’s titled it
Last Breath
and I’m afraid it means what I think it does and then I can’t stop looking, because if this woman is not dying, I’ve decided she is. That makes me feel really weird.

Another series,
Compassion
, follows a beautiful woman (girlfriend? I hope not) from a distance. He’s shadowing her. She doesn’t know he’s there. I get absorbed in the story of her day as she moves from place to place, until the last photo is of her lying in an alleyway. In the corner of the photo, a shadowy figure retreats. I pause, my breath all caught in my throat.

That can’t be real. Is it?

I end up questioning all of his photographs this way. They’re narratives, definitely. They have beginnings, middles, and ends. They’re all unsettling and private, but the strangest and most compelling thing about them is some of them—a lot of them—I can’t tell if they’re staged.

The angles he uses remind me of eavesdropping.

There is a series of a couple fighting in a kitchen. It’s told backwards, from the end of the fight—she is walking away—to the beginning—they’re smiling and laughing together. Culler calls that one
Best Friends
. A woman hitting her child in a store, first alone, and then by the last photo there’s an audience and some of them look like they’re enjoying watching it.

Culler calls that set
Perfect Day
.

Various photographs of people seen in ways no one wants to be seen. And there’s a passiveness about them too—I should be inspired to act, but like the person behind the camera, all I can do is watch. I don’t know how it makes me feel. One of the last sets is of a faceless couple totally fucking, which makes me feel weird. I think I like it. But that angle—I don’t know if they know they’re being photographed. The series is called
Apologies
.

I want to ask him what that even means.

I click away from the screen and lean back in my chair.

*   *   *

Something about Culler’s
kiss has made me so restless.

I keep replaying it in my mind—just the kiss—and then I take it one further. I imagine us having sex on the pavement and it’s amazing. I think of it close. The way I see it in my head, it’s all skin and touching and expert hands. And then my brain pans out and we’re surrounded by all the photographs my father took. And that is when I stop replaying it in my mind.

For a couple of minutes.

I’m not restless enough to call Milo, who I also think of and imagine having sex with Missy because I’m a freak, but restless enough that when Beth starts pressing the haircut thing again, I say, “Fine. Let’s go. Right now.”

We’re in the kitchen. Mom is upstairs in bed, where she’s been for the last five days. That’s not normal. This is a bad week because for all of the planning my dad apparently put into jumping off a building, he forgot their wedding anniversary would be the first post-death event. It’s still not for another couple of weeks, but Mom looked at the calendar and saw it penciled in and it was all over from there.

I overheard her crying about it with Beth the night I got back from the studio. First she wanted to know if he remembered their anniversary and killed himself anyway. Then she wanted to know if he was so full of the idea of dying, he just totally forgot. Then she realized neither was the better option and it all ended with her crawling into bed.

I stood outside the door to her bedroom, wanting to go in and say something, but all I could think about was how much I hated my dad for doing this to us and then I felt so sick and then Beth came out and said, “Where did you put everything from the studio?” I told her he’d gotten rid of it, all of it, and she relaxed and actually said, “Oh, good. That makes it easier.”

And then
I
crawled into bed.

Which is also when I started thinking about having sex with Culler.

I want to have sex with someone.

What is wrong with me.

Beth and I maintain stony silence in the car. Well, I do. She hums to herself—no radio, because it distracts her—and babbles about what kind of cut I should get.

“You have well-defined cheekbones and sharp features,” she says. “I’ll leave it up to Cory, but if you’re going to keep it long, the least you could do is ask him to thin it out, so it doesn’t bushel around your head.”

Bushel
around my
head
? I hate everything that comes out of this woman’s mouth. I study Beth. Her blond hair—which is already going gray, but dyed to hide it—is cropped tight to her head and she has such an ugly mouth. She has these tiny lips that she somehow turns into red colored squares with lipstick.

“I want to look like Marilyn Monroe,” I tell her.

She laughs. “You’re no Marilyn Monroe.”

The hair salon is just off the mall and it’s called CUTZ, which makes me embarrassed for it, but it’s a nice little place, I guess. It’s all yellow and checkered floors, which clashes horribly with the country music they pipe in through the speakers.

Beth is really weird with me when we’re out in public. She tries to pretend we like each other or at the very least,
she
likes
me
and she doesn’t know what the fuck my problem is. She knows Cory, the stylist—an older man with frosted tips, which makes me feel embarrassed for him—and insists he be the one who cuts my hair. She tells him I’m the daughter of one of her oldest and dearest friends and he mouths,
the jumper
? when he thinks I’m not looking.

She nods and takes a seat in the waiting area.

Cory takes me to the back and washes my hair.

“So what kind of look are you after?” he asks over the water, and I feel really gross for liking how his old-man hands feel massaging my scalp.

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “Marilyn Monroe.”

He laughs. Why does everyone think that’s a joke? He finishes up and takes me back out front. The chair he puts me in is in front of three mirrors and next to the windows, so everyone can look in and see. I hate that. It’s like being put on display.

“Have you always kept it long?” he asks, drawing my wet hair back with his hands. My hair stops just in the middle of my back. It always has. I nod.

Beth looks up from the gossip rag she’s reading. “Doesn’t the length drag her face down? No wonder you’re always so sullen looking, Eddie.”

“You look ready for a change,” Cory tells me.

“Cut it all off,” I say. I imagine myself bald. Shaved head. I almost say that but think better of it. “I mean—short but long. I mean, just different. But short. But long.”

Beth gives Cory a wry look. “Did you get all that?”

Cory ties up my hair into a ponytail. My palms start to sweat. I wipe them on my pants. He notices and says, “Relax. This won’t hurt a bit.”

He grabs the scissors.

I catch sight of myself in the mirror and realize my father will never see me like this. I am becoming a person my father will never get to know. I am trying to force that thought out of my head at the same time Cory cuts the ponytail off. Just like that. Before I’ve even had time to prepare, to change my mind, it’s gone and I’m that person
now.

I dig my fingernails into the arm of my chair.

“Hey, kid—are you okay?” Cory says, noticing. “Beth—”

“What’s the problem?” Beth is beside me before I can blink. She takes one look at my face and says, “Eddie, what’s wrong with you?”

I’m not ready to be that person now.

Beth is convinced I have diabetes or hypoglycemia or something because I went all “rigid and strange” while Cory was cutting my hair.

She won’t fucking leave it alone.

“My first thought was
it’s her sugars
,” Beth tells Mom over lunch, which consists of scary green smoothies for both of them and me sitting there and not eating anything. Now that Mom’s out of bed, I want to be in the house less, but Milo hasn’t called me and I know it’s because if I said a fight was on, I have to tell him when it’s off, but secretly I think he should end it because everyone’s daily goal should be making things easier for me while I’m in mourning. “Does your family have a history of diabetes or anything like that?”

“What?” Mom asks. She’s been staring out the window.

“And she’s pale all the time,” Beth continues. “Look at her—sallow, even. I can see it now that her hair is finally out of her face.”

Mom stares at my hair for a long time, until she finally spots the difference.

“It’s a nice haircut, Eddie,” she says.

Beth frowns. “But look at her complexion. So pale.”

“Maybe I need more Vitamin D,” I suggest.

“Well, I’ve been saying
that
forever—”

“So I’ll get some.” I get to my feet. “Like, right now. I’ll get some.”

“Are you going out?” Mom asks. Something about this much of her voice after a forever of almost total silence is setting me on edge. “With Milo? I never see Milo around anymore…”

“When would you even notice that?” I ask.

It doesn’t even come out of my mouth meanly, even though that’s what I feel in my heart, but because she’s my mother, she senses it. She knows where my heart is when I say it.

And she cries.

I leave the room awkwardly, my chest winding itself tight. Hearing your mother cry never gets easier to take. It’s a sound that goes through you each time. I’d never seen her cry before he died. I’d never made her cry. I have made her cry. I push through the front door. I’m halfway down the walk when Beth appears.

“I got her to promise to
try
today,” she says, furious. “She was trying and you
ruined
it.”

It’s the meanest thing Beth has ever said to me.

She goes back inside before I can say something equally mean to her.

Hate her. Hate this. Hate this. Hate this. I hate this. I grab my bike and pedal fast, hard. I focus on the way it feels, the air against my face. I’m going to tell Milo about this and then we will go to the river and he will have his flask and I will hate Beth and drink until I love the world again and everything in it.

But when I get to Fuller’s, Missy’s car is there. Of course.

I do a few laps in the parking lot next to Fuller’s and debate going somewhere else, but fuck it. She can be his girlfriend all she wants. He was my friend first. And even if she
is
his girlfriend again, she’s only here for the summer. Totally still a temp.

I pedal over, toss my bike on the ground, and practically throw myself inside, saying, “So! What are we all doing today?”

Missy and Milo are at the register, forever, always. They’re surprised to see me.

Missy’s eyes widen.

“You cut your hair!” She rushes over and pulls at the ends. “Oh, wow, Eddie. That looks great. You can totally see your face.”

“Nice face,” Milo says behind her.

Missy keeps touching it. Cory did an okay job on my hair, I guess, after my freak-out. He thinned it out and made it short—just barely past my chin—with jagged edges and declared it a style. I can live with it. I mean, it could have been worse. In a place like CUTZ, I could’ve just as easily walked out with some kind of country music–inspired disaster.

“Thanks,” I mutter, moving away from Missy.

Nobody says anything. I look at Milo and he looks at me, but he’s not giving me an out or any help. It makes me mad. I don’t want to talk to him with her here.

So I don’t say anything.

But Missy eventually catches on and she says, “Oh, hey. You know what? I told my grandpa I’d pick up a bag of mulch from the co-op for him. I should do that while I remember. Be right back.”

“See you in a few,” Milo says.

She leaves.

Milo turns back to the register like he finds it very interesting.

I lean against one of the freezers.

Silence.

“We’re not in a fight anymore,” I finally tell him.

“I’m thrilled,” he says.

It comes out of his mouth casually, but he hates me when he says it, like I hated my mom when I spoke to her earlier and I don’t know what upsets me more, me doing that to her or him doing that to me but I feel it all on me and my face gives it away.

“Shit,” he says, alarmed. “Eddie, I’m—”

“Don’t,” I tell him. “Forget it.”

No sign of Missy yet. My father is dead. He killed himself. The studio is cleaned out. I have been kissed by a guy who is older than me and knows how to kiss. I’ve been thinking about how I want to have sex. I cut my hair. My mom tried to talk to me today and I ruined it. Beth says I ruined it. This whole summer is a bust.

“How did cleaning out the studio go?” Milo asks. I shrug. If he wanted to know, he could’ve taken me. “Who was that guy? The one that drove you? That wasn’t Beth.”

I don’t know why I like that Milo wants to know, but I like it. I like it in a weird way I shouldn’t. It makes me tingle a little bit.

“Beth uhm, bailed. He’s a photographer. A student. My father’s student,” I answer. Milo raises an eyebrow. “I know. I didn’t know about him before … He gave me a ride and helped me clear out everything. His name is Culler Evans.”

“How old is he?”

“Twenty-one,” I lie. I don’t know why. “He’s nice.”

“It was nice of him to help you.”

“Yeah.”

“I really wish I could have—”

“I was serious, though,” I interrupt, because I don’t want to hear it from him. I want to hear it less and less. “What are we doing today?”

“You actually want to hang out with us?” Milo asks. “Because if you do, we’re going to Jenna’s after my shift. Jenna and Aaron, me, you, Missy. Wasting an afternoon around the pool. Sound good?”

I nod, but I wonder if he really wants me there. It’s probably easier for everyone when I’m not around.

He would freak if I said that out loud.

*   *   *

Jenna’s been popular
ever since she got a pool, which was the sixth grade. It’s not one of those lame, aboveground pools either. Inground. Great length. It’s cool. We all flock to it and we never stop being impressed by it because rural life means being that easy. I think the nicest thing about lounging around Jenna’s pool is that you can be present, but you don’t have to engage and by not engaging, you’re engaging. Disengaging is engaging.

I drink a couple of beers with Missy and end up dozing on a towel next to the pool. Jenna’s loaned me one of her swimsuits. All she seems to own are bikinis.

Maybe I’ll get a tan.

But it’s awesome that this is all I have to do. It’s enough. Conversations happen around me and sometimes I’ll chime in or laugh when someone’s said something funny, but mostly I just enjoy the lack of expectations and the sun on my face.

This is how my summer was supposed to be.

“Hey.” Milo pokes me in the side. He’s been sitting next to me, his legs in the pool, for the last hour or so. “Switch sides or you’ll burn.”

“I always burn,” I tell him, but I roll onto my stomach and turn my head to the pool. Missy and Jenna are at the other end, talking and pretending to watch Aaron dive. He takes it really seriously, which is funny because it’s not like he’s on any teams or anything. It’s not like Branford High even has a pool. I close my eyes again.

I wonder what Culler Evans is doing right now.

“Sunscreen?” Milo asks.

“I guess.”

I expect him to hand me the bottle but he doesn’t. Just like that, his hands are on my back, smoothing the lotion into my skin, and I tense because it’s the freakiest thing.

“My mom tried today,” I tell him.

“That’s great.”

He sounds like he means it.

“I made her cry.”

“That’s not so great.”

He pushes what’s left of my hair back from my neck, and I feel him hesitate, just for a second. Noticing the difference. I wonder what he really thinks of it and if he likes it or if he doesn’t. I wonder if I care either way.

At what point is sunscreen fully absorbed into the skin? Milo touches me longer than he has to, but that’s okay. His palms smooth across my shoulder blades. I keep my eyes closed. After a while, his hands are off me, but I feel that he’s near, more than I did before. For some reason it makes me feel sad but grateful. I want to open my eyes and tell him it’s nice to know that he’s there, but I don’t. I just want to keep this moment going as long as I can.

And because that’s what I want, of
course
Missy swims over and ruins it.

“Getting in?” she asks him.

“Nah,” he says. “It’s nice out here.”

“It’s nice in here too.”

I almost risk cracking an eye open just to see what kind of look they’re exchanging when Aaron’s voice drifts from the other side of the pool.

“Ready for this?” he calls.

“Aaron, you asshole, get down from there,” Missy yells. “You’ll break your neck.”

I open my eyes. Missy and Milo are turned away from me. It takes me a minute to spot Aaron. I look to the diving board first, but he’s not there.

He’s on the roof.

He climbed out there through Jenna’s window. The visual makes my heart jump, spastic beats, horrible beats—an ugly fear running through my veins even though I know it’s not what it looks like. Aaron is going to jump off the roof and into the pool. The ultimate dive. It’s stupid and it’s dangerous, but it’s not impossible. I’ve seen this happen at Jenna’s house before.

No one has ever died doing it.

“I’m fine,” Aaron shouts.

“He’s fine,” Jenna echoes. “He’s done this a hundred times.”

Missy and Milo are quiet, eyes trained on Aaron, and before anyone can blink, Aaron launches himself off the roof and the time it takes him to fall seems like one of those forever kind of seconds—the kind you feel every inch of yourself present for, the kind where you can absorb every detail and recall it easily later, but also the kind that’s gone so quickly you wonder how it’s even possible to have walked away with that much of it carved into your soul.

He hits the water with a loud splash. I flinch.

And then it’s over.

But some things—they just ruin your day.

Like, completely.

“Asshole,” Milo mutters. His voice is strained. I close my eyes. “She see it?”

“No,” Missy says. There are wet splashy sounds and I realize Missy is hoisting herself out of the pool. I imagine how jiggly that must look; she’s in a bikini too. “I’m going in to get a beer. Come with me.”

“Sure,” Milo says. He reaches over and squeezes my shoulder. His hands are trembling. I shrug him off because I can’t stand how that feels. It doesn’t feel nice, his touching me—not like before. He leans close to my ear. “Hey, wake up. We’re going inside for a second. Coming?”

“No,” I say.

“You want anything?”

“No.”

He squeezes my shoulder again and then they go. I lay there for a minute and then I open my eyes. Aaron is doing laps around the pool. He really is an asshole, but it’s not his fault, I guess. It’s not like my dad died so he can never jump off roofs in front of me again.

“What’s the roof feel like?” I ask, when he gets close to me.

He pauses and treads water. His black hair is plastered against his forehead. He pinches his nose and says, “It’s sort of hot. Makes sense, though, right? Closer to the sun.”

“Were you afraid?”

“I’ve done it before.”

“You could bash your head off the side of the pool. Brains everywhere,” I say, and he lets out a nervous laugh. “How can you be sure that’s not going to happen?”

“It’s really not that far,” Aaron says, gesturing to the roof. Jenna’s window is wide open, where he climbed out. The roof slopes down, closer to the pool than it isn’t. “Just get a little momentum and you’re good.” He studies me. “Gonna do it?”

“Jump off a roof?” I ask. “You mean, like my dad?”

Aaron’s eyes get round, but he doesn’t say anything. I get to my feet and pad across the hot concrete. I pull open the sliding glass doors that lead into the kitchen. Missy, Jenna, and Milo are gathered around the island. I spot limeade, tequila and beer. Missy catches my eye.

“Beer margaritas,” she explains. “Want one?”

I make a face. “No, thanks.”