Rule of Thirds, The (12 page)

My scream’s drowned out by the wail of an alarm. The SUV’s lights flash. “Run!” Dace yells, sprinting back toward my Honda. But my memory card. The hole the rock made is just big enough. My cheeks press up against the sharp edge of the tinted safety glass. The streetlight shines through the hole and I can see what the tinted glass hid moments ago: a rear compartment full of electronics. There’s an iPad, a couple of iPods and then, by the rear wall of the back seat, the Canon Rebel camera that’s the object of this misbegotten quest.

Then comes the blare of a second alarm. It’s not coming from the car, but from behind me—and it’s getting louder. A glance around the SUV’s side, and I can see the lights of oncoming police cars.

There’s the old familiar feeling. The creeping black around the edge of my vision. The world tilts—and I clutch at something, anything to stay vertical.

No. No. No. Not now.

Hey, panic attack? You listening? Now’s just not a good time.
Anytime
but now.

It’s the rear windshield wiper—that’s what I’m grabbing. OK. My arm fits through the hole in the window but my hand gropes only air. The vehicle dips when I step onto the rear bumper. I push my arm in up to the shoulder—
there
, the camera strap. The lens knocks out a new section of window on its way out just as two cop cars pull up in front of Cole’s house. Noise complaint—that’s why they must be here, but they’ll register which vehicle the alarm’s coming from soon enough. I have seconds, really. Just enough time to grab one more thing before I duck down and scurry back to Mom’s Honda.

Dace is huddled down in the passenger seat of the Honda when I get in.

“Did you get it?”

I hand her my camera, and then the second thing—the iPad that was alongside it. “It’s Vivs’s color,” Dace says, flipping open the magnetic pink cover and turning it on. The car starts on the first twist of the ignition and I pull the Honda out of the tight space, narrowly missing the back bumper of the car in front of us. “That’s what I like to see,” Dace says, showing me the picture of Vivs and Fred on the tablet’s home screen. “It’s hers. You saved the day, Pippa.” We’re around the corner when Dace sticks her head out the half-opened window.

“Busted, asshole!” she shouts into the night.

Under the circumstances—and that we’re out of sight from the cops—I let the swearing-ban violation slide.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 5
28 HOURS UNTIL VANTAGE POINT

Dace’s groaning wakes me up the next morning. “My head . . .” she moans, and for a moment I forget about last night. Then I remember everything.

“Adviiiiiiilllll.” I get her a glass of water from the bathroom. Thankfully Mom got up early to work the
7
a.m. shift and she obviously didn’t even realize Dace was here.

Dace moans some more. “Ohhhhh . . .” she says as I climb back in bed.

“Hey, we didn’t talk about the fashion show,” I say.

More groaning.

“You got my text.”

She nods, running her fingers through the ends of her hair.

“Why’d you sneak away without talking to me?”

She looks at me in disbelief. “That’s what you care about? Not that you
saw me in a mall fashion show
?”

“Of course that was a surprise, but all I care about is our friendship.”

“I’m sorry,” she mumbles. “I was so embarrassed that you saw me and that I lied to you . . .”

“What’s going on?” It’s so unlike Dace to be like this. She’s usually the strong, confident one.

“Come on,” she moans. “I went on and on about how I wasn’t doing mall shows anymore because they’re the death of any real modeling career and how I’m better than that and I get the new agent and then you catch me in my lie?”

“But I don’t get it . . .”

She’s staring at the comforter. “I can’t
do
anything more than mall shows. That’s what the new agent says, just like the old agent said. It’s my destiny. Mall model forever . . .” Tears start down her face and she sniffs, still staring at the comforter. Then she starts to cry. Really cry. I’ve never seen her like this. Tears uncontrollable, face blotchy, black eye makeup smearing down her cheeks. Her nose running and her breath catching. But I get it. Modeling is her life. I can’t imagine how I’d feel if someone told me I wasn’t talented enough to go to Tisch. But I also don’t believe that Dace’s career is over. She
is
talented. Surely those two agents don’t know everything there is to know. I reach over to hug her. I pull her into me and she buries her head in my chest. I smooth her hair, the way Mom does to me.

“That’s not true,” I reassure her.

“But it is.” Her voice is muffled in my tank top. “I’m over the hill. And there’s nothing else I want to do. I’m going to have to face reality. Live the American Dream and work at the dollar store.”

“Just so you know, I’m pretty sure you will never have to work at the dollar store—unless you get hired by a mag for some ironic haute couture shoot in one.”

“You don’t get it. You’re legitimately good at what you love to do. You’re going to be a photographer, just like you’ve always wanted. But I don’t have a backup plan.”

“Listen to me,” I say, handing her a wad of Kleenex. “You don’t
need
a backup plan. You’re not going to be a model. You
are
a model. We just need a better plan. And we’re going to figure it out.”

“We are?”

I nod. “And I already know what we’re going to do.”

“What?” Dace rubs her mascara-smudged eyes.

“I’m going to win that competition—somehow—and get into the Tisch camp. And you’re going to come with me and find yourself an agent in New York. One who gets you real go-sees for real jobs. Deal?”

She nods. “Oh, one other thing I should probably mention.”

“What? Last night while you were drunk you binged on entire Fudgee-O’s rather than tossing the wafers?” I say, pointing to the near-empty bag on the floor. “It’s OK. You’re allowed.”

She shakes her head. “I still have my V-card.”

“What?”

“I lied. I don’t know why. Asher and I didn’t do it. I mean, he wanted to and I sort of wanted to but then he passed out. And when you told me about Cole and how he was fooling around with some random chick—and I actually liked him better than Asher. What an ass. I don’t know why I lied. I just felt stupid. And I wanted Cole to hear the Asher rumor somehow, to make him think I didn’t care about him—even though I did.”

“But why did you lie to me?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think it really even had anything to do with you. I was just feeling like such a failure about everything and I didn’t want to tell you how badly modeling was going because I felt like we had this plan for our lives and I was letting you down. I thought that you’d make it big and you wouldn’t need me anymore.”

I shake my head. “I’ll always need you—whether we’re super famous or both working at the dollar store.”

“Could you even imagine? Us, at the dollar store?” She giggles, and so do I. Then reality sets in. All my first-choice photos are gone. Maybe I can use alternates from those same shoots. At least I have the ones on my camera . . .

I unplug the charger from the outlet by my desk and pop the battery in my camera. “I took some pics of you in the show. You look really good.”

“Ugh,” Dace says, but moves to the end of the bed as I turn my camera on and press the playback button. The screen is black.

“Fuck.”

“What?” Dace is standing over my shoulder. I flip the power button on and off again, but the screen’s still blank. I open the tiny door that holds the data card. It’s empty.

“He even stole my data card! I’m screwed.”

26 HOURS UNTIL VANTAGE POINT

Everything’s so messed up that I even arrive late to my
10
a.m. Vantage Point review session with Mrs. Edmonson. She’s booked each of us into
15
-minute slots to individually show her our Vantage Point entries and give us feedback before the big day. When I get to the photocopy room, Ben’s inside and I can hear Mrs. Edmonson gushing over his photos. The metal lockers are cold against my T-shirted back as I slide down to sit on the tile floor. When he opens the door, I stand up and rush over to him. He looks away.

“Ben—my data card. Please, just give it back.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, not even stopping. And he’s around the corner.

“Pippa?” Mrs. Edmonson calls from inside the photocopy room. I swallow hard. Push the door open.

She pats to the chair beside her. “Everything OK? You’re late—I let Ben go ahead of you because he was waiting.”

“Sorry,” I say, plugging my USB key into the computer. Focus on the photos.

Which are fine. Fine. Fine. Fine. Breathe.

“My theme is Memories,” I explain half-heartedly, opening the folder with the photos I’d backed up to my laptop—ones that never made it into the folder he deleted because they weren’t my best shots. The gazebo in Hannover Park, the single photo on the yellowed album page, room
334
at the hospital, the steps leading up to St. Christopher’s, my dad’s Nikon.

As I walk Mrs. Edmonson through the photos, I feel better. Sure, I know I can do better, but these are still pretty good shots. But when I reach the end, she’s silent. Not the reaction I was going for. She clasps her hands, resting them in her lap, and studies me. “Pippa, what’s going on?”

“What do you mean?”

“I just saw an almost identical slideshow from Ben. What gives?”

He not only stole my photos but
used
them? “How could he use the same photos? What was his theme?”

“Same theme. Most of the same photos. Maybe slightly different angles, but very,
very
close.”

“But how could they be his memories? Mrs. Edmonson, these are
my
memories. The room my dad stayed in at the hospital, his old camera he gave me, which is
right here
”—I pull the Nikon out of my bag. “This is insane. Ben stole my data card, he swapped cameras with me. He stole my Vantage Point photos off my computer.”

She looks alarmed. Neither of us speaks. She has to believe me. Who would make that up?

“Pippa, this doesn’t reflect well on either one of you. It’s your word against his. Why would
he
take your photos?” She crosses her legs. “If the Vantage Point judges think either one of you is using photos that aren’t your own, you’ll both be disqualified. Not to mention how badly it’ll reflect on the school.” She thinks for a moment, wringing her hands. “I could tell both of you you’re not going to Vantage Point at all for this—clearly one of you is lying—but you’re both very talented photographers and I don’t want to deny you this opportunity. And I know how much going to the Tisch camp means to you.” Her tone softens. “So here’s what I’m going to ask. You’re going to have to come up with brand new photos for the competition. I don’t want to see a single photograph even remotely similar to Ben’s. I suggest you start from scratch, to be sure.”

“Start from scratch? Are you kidding? I’ve been working on my entry for
months
! How am I going to come up with six
good
new photos by tomorrow? And what about Ben?”

“I’ll tell him the same thing. Now I suggest you get out there and start shooting. You don’t have much time.”

24 HOURS UNTIL VANTAGE POINT

So many headstones. Tall ones, ominous ones. Flat stones, nestled in the grass, that have probably been there for hundreds of years. Which one is his? It’s only been three months, but the last day I was here was so crazy, there were so many people and so many cars, that the cemetery where my dad is buried seems like a different place today. Coming out of the meeting with Mrs. Edmonson I just wanted to talk to my dad about what to do, and my first instinct was to go see him in my room. But Mom’ll be home by
1
. The last thing I want to do is have to relive the morning.

It seems easier to bear, this place, from behind my camera. It’s a clear day that we get only rarely in October, and I set up a couple of headstone shots, but my lens keeps getting drawn to the signs of life all around here. Someone’s spent the summer going nuts with the Miracle-Gro. Red impatiens contrast with the green of the lawns and the gray of the headstones. Strange how the thing that pops out of cemetery photos are images of life. I’m so distracted, so in the frame, that I’m taken by surprise when I recognize my dad’s name on a monument.

I kneel down in the grass, keeping the camera to my face and focus on the headstone. I zoom in on the pebbled texture of the stone, snap some photos, then slowly zoom out, taking in the headstone against the grass. Then I rest the camera in my lap and fold my legs over so I’m sitting cross-legged on the ground.

“Hi,” I say finally. “So . . . this is weird, huh? We never talk here. Which uh, OK, kinda my fault. It’s not like you have much choice in the matter. But I just . . . I don’t know. I have no good excuse. Pain to get here on the bus? Lame, I know! Like, you died, and you’re stuck out here by yourself—or I guess there’s other people around but it’s not like you know them, right? And I can’t be bothered to get on a bus? It’s totally not that. I guess it’s just . . . Mom comes all the time and I thought, like, maybe in the same way she doesn’t know how we talk in my room, maybe she doesn’t want me here? Like it’s her place to be with you, alone? So don’t tell her I came, OK?”

My camera is resting in the space between my crossed legs, and I keep my eyes on the grass that’s, I guess, six feet above him.

“You know what I hate?” I continue, grabbing my camera again, and shooting around the headstone. “When we’re in my room I can just pretend you’re in New York for work. That you got a studio there like you always wanted and you’re living the dream. And I’m—just at Dace’s or school or whatever when you come home. Like I just missed you. When I go to Tisch camp, we’ll hang out for the whole two weeks, just like we used to. I know it’s crazy but it’s part of why I want to win so badly. But then what? I get there and where are you?”

I wait for Dad to answer, to tell me that it’s normal what I’m feeling, or that he’s glad I’m here, or that yes, he is actually in New York and we’re going to have so much fun when I’m there.
If
I’m there. But he doesn’t say anything. I lower the camera again.

Silence. Not my dad’s voice, solving my problems for me. Not like I was hoping. I stand up to take it all in. The grass that tops my dad’s final resting place. The annual flowers decorating his headstone. Everything but the words.

“I don’t think I’m going to Tisch camp, Dad. Remember Vantage Point? The photo contest that was going to be my in to get into Tisch? Memories—that was going to be my theme, but it can’t be, not anymore.”

I focus on the front of the headstone now, on the words visible above the tall grass, inscribed in stone.

Evan Alexander Greene

July 24, 1976–June 18, 2012

Loving husband of Holly, father of Philadelphia

Gone but not—

The rest is a blur through my tears.

• • •

There’s no hurry. If you can’t cry in a cemetery, where can you cry? The tears finally stop their steady stream maybe
20
minutes later. There’s a soft white cloth in my satchel, the one I use to wipe my lenses, and it serves as a Kleenex. It’s only as I give myself one last blow that I notice it, partially obscured by taller grass around the headstone: a tulip, Easter yellow, still in full bloom. An impossible sight in October. Isn’t it? The flower stands out among the grass, bright petals against the gray stone.

It looks so beautiful, this vibrant symbol of life against so many symbols of death. Uplifting. A lightness in a dark place. I snap a shot that frames the tulip against the backdrop created by my dad’s headstone. And all at once, I have my Vantage Point theme. I grab the Nikon from my bag and snap one more.