Snap (4 page)

B
Y THE NEXT MORNING,
I hadn't forgotten about the old woman, exactly, but I'd come to view her presence in the photograph as a bit of random weirdness. Frankly, I had too many real-life worries crowding my head to give her much thought. The most immediate of my concerns: I'd been in town only two days, and I already owed someone money.

Psychic Photo's purple door was open even though a sign taped to it said
PLEASE KEEP DOOR CLOSED.
Once again, I felt that peculiar sense of well-being when I stepped inside, like the air was filled with the faintest, soothing humming, the frequency just outside my hearing range.

A man in flowered swim trunks stood at the photo printer. “So I just push this button?” he asked Delilah. His voice was high for a man's.

“Yup.”

“And then…?”

“You can crop or zoom, same as last time.” She was sitting on
a stool, engrossed in something on the counter.

“What about if I don't like this shot? Do I still need to print it?” He sounded worried.

“Nope,” she mumbled, her eyes still downcast.

“Then what do I do?”

“Hit ‘next.'”

I pulled the door closed behind me. The bell jingled.

Delilah looked up. “Hey.” She tucked a strand of striped hair behind a twice-pierced ear.

“I brought your money.” I'd found sixty bucks in my wallet—just enough to cover the repair.

I crossed to the counter. There was the wooden plank I'd seen the day before, only now it was painted two shades of green. Delilah had glued rows of round objects to the board and decorated them with polka dots and swirls. Loose straws lay scattered around.

“That's…interesting,” I said. “In a good way.”

“It's a lollipop farm. Get it?” She pivoted the plank so I could get a better look, eyes narrowed as if she was testing my reaction.

I stared at the board, and the round objects seemed to take on a new form. “I do.”

Weird: when I'd seen the umbrellas on the beach, I thought they looked like a field of lollipops. It had seemed like such a random thought at the time—like something that no one else would come up with. If I believed in all that psychic stuff, I'd wonder if maybe…Oh, never mind.

“It took me weeks to collect enough Snapple caps,” Delilah said, brushing one with her fingertip. Her nails were painted midnight blue, and she was wearing all of her silver rings again. “I
considered making do with some AriZona Iced Tea, but I was going for uniformity in the design.”

“Why not just buy a case of Snapple?” I asked.

Delilah wrinkled her nose. “That would be cheating—even if I could afford a case of Snapple, which I can't. My focus right now is on found art.”

“Found art?”

She checked my face again, considering me once more, before continuing. “I find a bunch of objects—on the street, on the beach—and then I transform them into art. Bottle caps, old napkins, squished pennies from the railroad track—that kind of thing. Last year I found a headless Barbie doll in the sand. It was like she was waiting for me.”

“You mean…trash?”

“More like recycling. But I like to think of it as a treasure hunt. Finding the materials is the first part of the creative process.”

I felt a spark of recognition. “You know, that's kind of like photography. You never know what you're going to find. You don't make a shot—you discover it.”

“Exactly,”
she said.

“What color is your hair naturally?” I blurted, forgetting for the moment that you don't say stuff like that to people you've just met. For some reason, it felt like I'd known Delilah for years but just hadn't placed her. Like, we'd been in preschool together or gymnastics or Girl Scouts or something and we were just waiting for the moment when we'd figure out how we knew each other.

She looked up at her striped bangs. “I've been dying my hair so long, I can't even remember what color it used to be.”

I stuck a hand in my beach bag, pulled out my plaid wallet, and extracted three twenties. “Anyway, here's the money I owe you.”

She abandoned her art and shuffled through a pile of yellow papers until she found my invoice. “That'll be…twenty-one dollars and twenty cents.”

I shook my head. “It was fifty-three.” I didn't want her to discover the error later and think I'd cheated her.

Her mouth twitched. In addition to the freckles that ran across her nose, there was a faint constellation above her mouth. It looked kind of like the Big Dipper.

“That was the estimate. This is the actual cost.”

I glanced at the yellow slip. The original amount had been very obviously scratched out.

“I don't want to get you in trouble,” I said—though twenty-one dollars was sounding really, really good to me.

She raised her pale, feathery eyebrows. “I don't follow.”

“Wouldn't your mother get mad?”

She hooted. “Funny.”

I didn't really know what she meant by that, but I handed her the cash, suddenly afraid she was going to say she'd been joking and of course I owed her more.

The guy in the flowered swim trunks was still at the photo machine. “I just zoomed and cropped. Now what do I do?” He rubbed the back of his neck as if he was fending off a stress headache.

“If you want to save the picture, hit
save.”
Delilah took my bills and handed back some coins.

The man looked up again. He had a kind face below light, baby-fine hair. “And then what do I do?”

“Hit
next
,” Delilah said pleasantly. “Like the last twenty times,” she muttered under her breath.

The bells on the door jingled, and a tall, skinny orange boy came in. Seriously. His wavy hair was bright orange and fell just below his chin, while his pinkish face was splattered with freckles. His pants, cut off at mid-calf, were orange, too. He looked like a walking sunset. At least his T-shirt was white. The skateboard under his arm was a disappointing gray.

“Mom here?” he asked Delilah.

“In the back. Getting ready for a reading.”

He rolled his eyes. “Lighting candles and burning incense?”

“No more incense,” Delilah said. “Not since it gave that woman the asthma attack last week.”

“Bad karma,” the boy said.

“Totally.”

“Can I zoom out?” the guy at the machine asked in his high voice. “Or only zoom in?”

“You can zoom out once you zoom in,” the redheaded boy said. “But you can't zoom out from the original shot.”

“Why not?”

The boy wiped some sweat off of his pink forehead. “There's nothing you can zoom out to. You've only got what's already in the picture.”

The man's eyes widened like he'd just been told the secret of life. “You're right,” he said in wonder.

“Madison, this is my brother,” Delilah said to me.

“Samson?” It just popped out.

Delilah scowled. “Ha, ha, funny.”

“You've heard that one before.” I wished I could take it back.

“Almost as many times as the psychic jokes.”

“I'm Leonardo,” the boy said.

“After the artist?”

He wiggled his orange eyebrows. “The turtle.”

That made me smile. “Who's older?”

“I am,” Leonardo said. “By a year and a half.”

“I'm fifteen,” Delilah said.

“Really? Me, too.”

She nodded as if she knew that already. “A lot of people think I'm, like, twelve.”

“I didn't think that,” I said, far too quickly. I looked at Leonardo's orange hair and then at Delilah's striped locks. “Your natural hair color?” I guessed.

She raised her pale eyebrows and tucked a striped lock behind her ear. “Who's to say what's natural?” She turned to Leonardo. “What are you up to?”

He shifted his skateboard to the other arm. “Me and Duncan are going down to the beach to skate. I think I'm late.”

“Duncan and I,” she said.

Leonardo rolled his eyes. “What. Ever.”

“Who's Duncan?” I asked, though it was none of my business.

“Our virtual brother,” Delilah said.

I nodded as if that made total sense even if I wondered:
Hologram? Imaginary friend?
Nothing these two said would surprise me much.

The bells on the front door jingled again, and a youngish woman in a loose beach cover-up—yellow patterned with blue fish—clomped over to the man at the printer.

She put her hand on his back. “What's taking you so long? I
was getting worried.” A straw beach bag hung from her shoulder.

“This picture stuff is complicated.” He peered at the screen.

“It's really not.” She smiled patiently and pushed some buttons. Her hair was the same sandy color as her husband's.

I thought of my camera. I hadn't planned on telling anyone about the old woman in the beach shot because it sounded so Sci Fi channel. But it was probably just some technical snafu. Maybe Delilah and Leonardo could explain it to me.

As I fiddled with the case, I tried to keep my voice casual. “After I got my camera back yesterday, I took some shots on the beach. And there was this weird thing. I mean, maybe it's not that weird, but I've never seen it before…”

I turned on the camera and found the picture of the old woman in the pink bathrobe. Delilah and Leonardo peered at it while I told them what had happened.

“You're right,” Leonardo said when I'd finished explaining. “It is weird.”

“Could something have happened during the repair?” I asked. “Like, maybe someone took a test shot to see if it was working?”

“On the beach?” Delilah said. “No.” She wrinkled her freckly nose, scrunching the constellation above her lip. “Have you ever seen this lady, Leo?”

“No.” He wrinkled his nose in exactly the same way. “But she looks…bright.”

“You mean smart?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No, I mean bright—like, light. See? Everything around her is dim and foggy. But she looks like she's standing in a patch of sunshine.”

He was right. Normally I pay close attention to the lighting
of my photographs, but I'd been so freaked out by the woman's presence that I hadn't even noticed that she seemed to have come out of a different, better-lit shot. Which brought me right back to explanation number three: technical difficulties.

“There must be something funny going on with my memory card,” I said. “Like, maybe the last time I downloaded my photos onto my computer, the camera got infected with some kind of virus.”

“That makes no sense,” Delilah said.

“Maybe she's a ghost,” Leonardo suggested, just as the bell on the front door jingled. As I looked up, I half expected to see the woman in the pink bathrobe float into the room.

Instead, it was a guy about my age, shorter than Leonardo, lean and wiry. He looked vaguely familiar. He had tan, almost golden skin and bright green eyes. His hair was brown and wavy-wild, the tips bleached whitish blond. A tiny gold hoop hung in each earlobe. His clothes were standard-issue skater boy: loose, dark T-shirt and long shorts.

He was really cute if you liked that type.

“Dude,” he said to Leonardo. “I've been waiting for you for, like, an hour.”

“Complications,” Leonardo said.

The guy's green eyes shot to me, stopped and grew wide. Blood rushed to my face—and then I realized where I had seen him before.

“The girl on the sidewalk,” he said, still looking at me. Of course: he was the guy who'd almost run me down with his skateboard.

“Hi.” I looked at the floor, my face still hot for reasons I couldn't
understand. He was the one who should have been embarrassed, not me. Because surely that's all I was feeling: embarrassed.

“Madison, this is Duncan,” Delilah said. “Our virtual brother.” So he wasn't an imaginary friend.

“You met his dad,” Delilah told me. “Remember Larry? The guy who fixed your camera?”

I said, “So Larry and your mother are…”

“He's her boyfriend,” Delilah said. “Or maybe ex-boyfriend. It changes from week to week.”

Duncan said, “My dad said it's over. But he was, like, doing her laundry when he said it, so who knows.”

“Larry has settling-down issues,” Delilah said. “And my mother has commitment issues.”

“But she's made a commitment to working on her commitment issues,” Leonardo chimed in. “Jury's still out on Larry.” Skateboard under his arm, he opened the front door. “Let's boogie,” he told Duncan.

Suddenly, the walls shook with thunder.

“So much for the beach,” I said.

Duncan's green eyes glittered. “Are you kidding? This is the best time to be there.”

I was about to follow Leonardo and Duncan out the door when I noticed the computer on the counter, looking all unused and lonely.

“Would it be okay if I checked my e-mail really fast?” I asked Delilah.

She shrugged. “Sure.”

I hope she didn't think it was rude of me to ask—which it was, kind of—but I was feeling seriously out of touch.

On MySpace, I had a comment from Rolf Reinhardt, the guy I'd almost, sort of, gone out with in the spring.

I'd heard Rolf was on the paper, but I hadn't said anything to him about it. I clicked over to his page (his profile shot showed SpongeBob, which was neither funny nor original) and congratulated myself on not checking to see if he'd posted any new photographs. But, okay, I did glance at his relationship status: single! No way! He and Celia had broken up already!

Not that I cared.

I ran through about twenty possible return comments before finally settling on a simple “congratz.”