Hold Still (25 page)

1

Like she did on the first day, Ms. Delani calls us according to where we sit, which means that I’ll be last, but that’s okay. She’s taken down all the photographs from around the room, making space for our new ones. I choose a book to look in while I wait. Inside, all the pictures are of the photographer’s mother.

By the time it’s my turn, there are only a few minutes left of class. Ms. Delani comes out and thanks everyone for a good year, and tells them they can go, and says, “Caitlin, your turn.”

I clutch my folder to my chest and follow her to the office.

She closes her grade book. We both know that next to my name are three Ds and a long line of zeros. But I have twelve new photographs in my hands.

She peers at me, apprehensively, through her glasses.

“Tell me you have something good to show me,” she says.

I shift all my weight to one foot and stand there like an ostrich. “I have a series.”

She exhales. “You have no idea how glad I am to hear that. Why don’t you arrange them on the table. Call me out when you’re finished.”

So I go back into the classroom and lay them all on the big table under the window, where the light is perfect, and makes all the details show. Then I tell Ms. Delani I’m ready.

I don’t look at her face as she evaluates my photographs. Instead, I look at my images with her.

I got slides made of Ingrid’s photographs and used my savings to buy a small generator. Dylan rigged everything so that a single image covered the entire movie screen. It was incredible, how sharp and bright and vast they looked. Dylan sat above in the projection room while I worked downstairs with my tripod and camera. I had to expose each picture for a long time because, apart from the screen, the room was dark.

“These are . . .” Ms. Delani says, and doesn’t finish.

“At first I didn’t know if it would work,” I say. “You know, photographing a photograph.”

“But you’ve done so much more than that,” Ms. Delani says.

“Just by the act of enlarging the images, you’ve given her photographs heightened significance. They demand to be seen.”

“Thanks,” I say. “And the theater is important, too. It was her favorite place to go, but she never got to see the inside of it. I thought this would be a way of letting her in.”

She nods. “Yes,” she says. “When standing back and looking at them as a group, I see the lighted images first.” She looks from photograph to photograph, saying, “The record player. The bedroom. The rain-spattered window. Bare feet. But then the details of the theater emerge and I see that there is much more going on here. The rows of empty seats are telling; they imply that though the images are enormous and commanding, they are going unseen. There is a secret here. Something private being exchanged between photographer and image.”

“And there are the curtains, too,” I say. “See this one?” I point to Ingrid’s self-portrait with her camera. I pulled the heavy velvet curtains in a little on both sides so they cut the image off, narrowed the screen. “I was trying to make it seem like she was being hidden.”

“Yes.” Ms. Delani nods. “The light is still cast on the drapery, but the folds in the fabric obscure the image. As if the film is ending before it’s finished.”

“Like it might be able to tell me more if it weren’t being forced away.”

We study my photographs in silence for a little longer.

“Have you titled it?”

“Yes,” I say. “It’s called
Ghosts
.”

“Caitlin,” she says. “This is stunning work.”

I feel so good it aches—not just because she’s said it, but because I know it’s true.

“Hold on.” She disappears into her back office, and I remember the entry I brought for her in my backpack, the one where Ingrid talks about how much Ms. Delani inspired her. I had been planning on giving it to her today, but now I don’t really want to. Maybe it’s selfish, but I want this afternoon to be about me. So I grab the entry out of my bag and turn it facedown.

When Ms. Delani comes back into the room with a jar of push-pins in her hand, I say, “This is for you, but for later, so I’m just gonna drop it on your desk.”

She nods, then she gathers my photographs and drags a chair to the front of the classroom. She hangs them there, one next to another, until they line the center wall.

The first pictures for the new year.

2

I’m perched on the edge of Henry’s diving board, arms straight in the air.

“Dive!” Dylan shouts.

“Or stay,” Taylor calls after her. “You look good up there. Look at your arms!”

“She
is
a carpenter,” Dylan says.

“A what?”

“You didn’t know that?”

I jump. The pool is so warm I barely feel the transition from air to water, but in a moment I’m immersed. I open my eyes to clear blue. Several pairs of board shorts and boys’ legs, bikini bottoms, and red toenails. Turquoise tiled walls. I surface. Hear Henry ask, “So, your girlfriend. Is she hot?” Dylan answer, “She’s gorgeous.”

Finals have ended. This is the last-day-of-school party I always wanted to attend but never had the courage to. “Remember,” Dylan said when we got to Henry’s door an hour ago. “Drink beer, talk about who’s hot, and spend some alone time with Taylor in the parents’ bedroom.”

“Are you serious?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Or, you know, you could just swim.”

I swim. Slowly, deep enough to run my hands along the smooth white floor. Someone grazes my back. Taylor. We kiss underwater. When we surface, drops cling to the tips of his eyelashes.

“Hold still,” I say. He closes his eyes and I lick them off. I taste chlorine, summer.

“You’re a carpenter?”

“Yes.”

“Dylan just told me. And a photographer?”

“Yes.”

I think,
And a daughter, and a friend.
I shut my eyes and try to picture myself as all of these things. I can almost see it. I open my eyes to him, beaming.

“You’re beautiful,” he says.

“
You’re
beautiful.”

We swim together to the other side. I wish I had an underwater camera so I could capture the way his hair fans around his ears. The movement of his ankles as he kicks through the pool.

Hours pass. Taylor and Jayson are outside on the lawn chairs, having a silly conversation about superpowers. “You
already
run crazy fast,” I hear Taylor say. “You should, like, shoot from here to the city in a millisecond.”

“Zeptoseconds are faster,” Dylan informs me. We’re across the backyard, sprawled out on the grass.

“What’s it like when you make out with Maddy?” I ask.

Dylan’s eyebrows raise. “That’s an unexpected question.”

“It shouldn’t be,” I say. “We’ve talked about everything else. Why not this?”

She shrugs.

“This is what most friends talk about,” I say. “Let’s just try it.”

She turns onto her back and looks up. The sun is setting. Streaks of orange and pink line the hills.

“Let’s start with Maddy. Give me two adjectives to describe how Maddy kisses.”

Dylan covers her face with her hands and grins. I edge closer to her.

“Confident,” she says. “Graceful.” She peeks at me between fingers.

“You’re blushing!” I yelp. “You’ve never blushed before in your entire life.”

“That’s not true.” She laughs.

“Why is she blushing?” Taylor yells from across the yard.

“And Taylor?” she whispers.

“Miraculous,” I whisper back. “Sweet.”

More hours pass. People leave. The house quiets. Taylor and Jay son and Henry and Dylan and I are outside, sharing a pizza Henry had delivered. Everyone is talking, laughing, but Henry just eats and stares off into the night. We finish the pizza. The night air becomes cooler. I walk inside the house. Henry is in the foyer, sitting on the edge of the fountain under the family portrait. He had been so quiet that I didn’t even notice when he slipped away. I pull my balled-up, yellow sweater from the depths of my backpack. Instead of going back outside right away, I sit down on the fountain next to him.

We don’t say anything. He stares at his hands; I tug on the ends of my sweater drawstrings. Then he dips his hand in the fountain and splashes water on his family portrait.

“Life is shit,” he tells me.

I nod. “Maybe.”

His face is red with anger or embarrassment, I can’t tell which. I glance at the portrait, then back to his face when I feel him watching me.

“But not all the time,” I say. “I don’t think all the time.”

3

My treehouse is finished. Actually,
finished
might not be the right word. I’ll say this instead: my treehouse is complete.

It has a wide, sturdy ladder that rises ten feet from the ground. It has six walls, and an opening for a door, and big openings on each side to let in light and air. The tree trunk rises through the middle of the wide floor, its bark thick and rough and strong. The ceiling is seven feet high—I had to stand on a stepladder to build it, and my dad helped me with the hard-to-reach places, by holding beams steady as I hammered, by helping me lift what was too heavy.

Mom had the Persian rug cleaned for me, and now the colors are even more vibrant than they were when I found it. On a small branch just outside a window, I’ve hung the wood-and-glass hummingbird feeder. I bought a really comfortable, cushy chair from a sidewalk sale, and placed it in a corner. I used the wine crates from the garage as little tables, put a vase with flowers on one, next to a picture frame with Ingrid’s self-portrait in it, and a couple candles in my dad’s old, hippyish candleholders. I bought sixteen simple black frames from a store in the strip mall, to frame my
Ghosts
series. Then I hung them, three on five of the walls, the last one above the door. When I invited them up to see, Dad actually cried, and Mom gazed at them with this proud look, like I just painted the
Mona Lisa.

Tomorrow is demolition, and it’s also the
treehouse-warming party,
as my parents insist on calling it. Maddy’s coming out from the city, and Dylan’s bringing some of her mom’s amazing food, and Taylor and Jayson, and, of course, my parents, who have been going on and on about the dessert they’re making with rhubarb from their garden. I left a message for Ms. Delani, asking her to come. She left me a message back saying she would love to.

I’ve already picked out the music, and set up the plates and sil verware, so I have nothing to do but wait. I turn the music on with the volume low, stretch out on the rug, and fade in and out of sleep for a while. Each time I wake up, I look through the skylight to see how the clouds have shifted.

4

I wake up at 2 A.M., only five hours before the demolition starts, and know I have to go to the theater one more time. I leave a note for my parents on my bed, slip on some jeans and a hoodie and my green Converses, grab my bag, and creep out the door.

It’s pitch-black when I get there, and I silently thank my dad for forcing me to keep a flashlight in my trunk. I park in front of the library, use the flashlight to find my way to the broken window, throw my bag through it, and crawl in after.

I pull Ingrid’s journal from my bag, and rip out the first page, careful to tear it cleanly. I put the drawing
Me on a Sunday Morning
in a folder in my bag. Then I head up to the projection room for the box of marquee letters. I want to send her a message.

If I hadn’t spent all year dangling from tree branches, I would be terrified right now. I’m climbing to the top of the rickety ladder that has surely been leaning against the wall in the break room for years, with a flashlight under one arm, the bag of letters under the other. Thankfully, there is a ledge beneath the marquee where I can set everything down. It is a still, warm night. I have no idea how I’ll be able to fit everything I have to say to her in this small space. I take down the old words, GO DBYE & tha K YOU, and think of what to write.

I think of everything: red earrings that looked like buttons. Stealing glances of her journal from over her shoulder, glimpsing words and phrases and parts of drawings. Grooves in her fingers from squeezing her pen too tight. The way I felt when she looked at me from behind the lens: awkward, pretty, necessary. Ditching school to do nothing. Blue veins and pale skin.
You are such a nerd
. Red light of the darkroom across her concentrated face. A quiet hill, damp grass under our bare feet. Scar tissue spelling
ugly
. Clear blue eyes.
I’ll go wherever you go
. Tall glasses of champagne.
Hold still. We look amazing
. Dancing in a yellow dress. The creek.
You might be looking for reasons but there are no reasons
. Slipping nail polish into pockets.
I don’t want to hurt you or anybody so please just forget about me.

I sort through the letters and pull out what I need for the beginning. They snap easily into place. And even though I thought I would need every letter, I finish the first sentence and realize that it’s all I have left to say.