The Tension of Opposites (3 page)

“Write down what this picture represents to you.”

I wrote
freedom
, not caring that I had stolen the word from the classmate who had shouted it out a few moments earlier.

“Now comes the tricky part. I want you to write down three things you could photograph that would oppose that thought, feeling, or idea.”

I stared at my teacher.

Tricky?

Not so much.

I looked down at my paper and wrote one word three times.

Noelle

Noelle

Noelle

“Now,” said Mr. Hollon. “Write three more words. What thought, feeling, or idea would your picture represent?”

I looked around the room, several words echoing through my head.

Kidnapped, abducted, snatched

Enslaved, imprisoned, restrained

Most people were hunched over their papers, writing. A few others stared at the drop ceiling, squinting into the fluorescent light, or studied the rows of pictures that plastered the walls like patchwork wallpaper. I twisted in my seat, wanting to walk to the row of computers that ran along the back of the room, needing an update on Noelle and the guy who had taken her. Instead, I watched an orange-breasted robin land on a swaying branch of the tree right outside the classroom window. Counted the flowers Darcy doodled along the side of her paper.

Mr. Hollon walked past my desk, tapping his finger on my paper. I swiveled around to find Max facing me, one elbow balanced on his desktop and the other on the back of his seat. His fingers were intertwined, his hands resting on his chest.

“Whatcha got?” he asked, his whisper nearly scalding me.

I covered my paper with one hand. “You wouldn't understand.”

Max leaned forward, and I breathed in his clean scent. My brain rode a wave of laundry detergent, shampoo, and bar soap. I fought to keep from being pulled under. If I allowed myself, I might sit here for the rest of my life, breathing him in.

Max propped his elbows on his knees and crossed his forearms over his legs. “Try me.”

My hands started shaking, so I clasped them together. All those words were still shouting through my head, jumbling everything so that nothing made any sense. Least of all my desire to reach out and rub my thumb along Max's smooth lips. “I'm not even finished,” I said.

Max stared at me, his smile pulling inward a bit. “Better get to it, then.”

I ducked my head toward my notebook, scratching my pen across the paper several inches from my eyes. Max leaned back into his seat. He swung his knees lazily in the aisle. Darcy flipped and flopped her sandal. She popped another bubble of her gum.

Finally, I wrote the three words represented by Noelle, thinking about how she and the idea of freedom opposed each other.

Captive

Prisoner

Hostage

Mr. Hollon finished his round through the desks and parked himself in front of the classroom, blocking my view of his prizewinning close-up of a praying mantis. “Anyone care to share?”

Max raised his hand.

Mr. Hollon's eyes scrunched closed. “Mr…. Kinsley, right?”

“Yeah.” Max nodded. “I immediately pictured myself in the backseat of my parents' car.” Several people laughed. “I was their prisoner as we drove from Montana to Ohio, away from all my friends and family, miserable about spending my junior and senior years with a bunch of strangers.”

As Max spoke this long string of words, I was surprised to remember that his voice was velvety soft. Somehow my memory of the previous Friday in the woods had been distorted, the sound of his voice turning more abrasive with each passing day. I had expected his words to be gruff and crackly—scratchy to my ears, the way the stubble on his face would feel against my hand.

Mr. Hollon moved on, allowing several other people to share, and I tried to catch another glance of Max without being obvious. It didn't work. When he caught me looking, his face broke out into another one of those smiles from the woods. A smile that I found myself starting to like. Maybe a little too much. Just before I looked away, a few loose curls dipped forward onto his forehead, and he swiped them back with his hand.

“So there we have it. Your portfolio theme is the Tension of Opposites. We will learn many different techniques during the first three quarters of the year, and by the end of March, you will put together a portfolio demonstrating your mastery of each lesson. Fourth quarter will be an intensive on style. We'll talk about that later.”

Everyone got quiet. I glanced at Max's brown leather shoes. He was tapping his foot, and I wondered what kind of music he liked. Then I squeezed my eyes shut. Since when did I care anything about a random guy sitting next to me?

“What about the Tension of Opposites?” Darcy asked.

“In addition to fulfilling a variety of requirements, while also taking the best pictures you can take, you'll infuse your work with emotion by showing the opposition that is evident in every aspect of life.” Mr. Hollon looked around the room. “Put plainly, each photograph in your portfolio must have an opposing image.”

I thought that maybe my first photograph could be of Max. The next, a self-portrait. He was so confident. And I was so … not.

“I know a few of you prefer to use thirty-five-millimeter cameras. I expect you to find some way to incorporate a digital trick or two into your final project. And I might suggest that you hoard all the film you can get your hands on. It's going out of style. Fast,” Mr. Hollon said as he passed out the classroom rules and syllabus for the first quarter. “For the remainder of the period, I'd like for you to make a list of all the antonyms you can think of. Hopefully this exercise will jump-start your creative process.”

I put my pen to the paper in front of me.

Right and wrong

Easy and difficult

Big and small

Concrete and imagined

Max leaned in to me again. “How'd your pictures turn out?”

His scent infiltrated my nose. Scrambled my brain all over again. “What?”

“The Three Sisters?” He tilted his head, his eyes soft and sincere.

“Oh.” I took in a deep breath. Through my mouth. “Pretty good.”

“I'd love to see them.”

“Yeah, right,” Darcy said. Then she snapped her hand to her mouth, hiding a smile.

I turned to her and widened my eyes.

“Oh. Did I say that out loud?” Darcy slid forward and looked past me, speaking directly to Max. “Tessa is a bit shy,” she said, like I wasn't even there.

Max's brown eyes locked on mine. I looked away.

“Shy?” he asked Darcy.

“She only shows her pictures to two people. Mr. Hollon”—Darcy pointed at our teacher, now seated behind the mess piled on his desk, and then turned her finger toward herself—“and me.”

“Really?” Max crossed his arms over his chest and looked at me. “Didn't you have to turn in some kind of portfolio to get accepted into this class? I thought the whole Art Department evaluated the applicants, deciding who's in and who's out.”

“Yeah,” I sighed. “Not my idea.”

“Last year,” Darcy said, “I was Mr. Hollon's teacher aide the same period Tessa had photography. When I saw how good her pictures were, I talked him into letting her apply early. Tessa, however, wasn't so easy to sway. She chickened out at the last minute.” Darcy shrugged. “So I broke into her locker and turned the portfolio in for her.”

Max sat back in his seat. “Classic.”

“She's lucky it worked.” I tapped my pen on my paper. Wrote two more words.
Friend
and
enemy.

“All I did was get you in.” Darcy pointed her finger at me. “You could've taken it off your schedule.”

“I know,” I said, looking from Darcy to Max. “I had this crazy
whatever
moment when I was in the counselor's office going over my classes. I just let it go.”

“It was a good decision,” Darcy said. “You'll see.”

“Hey, Darcy,” someone called from the back row. “Come back here for a minute. I gotta ask you something.” Darcy popped out of her seat, rushing back to talk for the last five minutes of class.

“Just so you know,” Max said, rapping his knuckles on my desk, “I like a challenge.”

“Don't bother,” I said. “Darcy's right. I don't show my stuff to anyone. Ever.”

Max shook his head. “That right there. That was a challenge if I ever heard one.”

“No,” I said, wondering if Max could feel the vibrations of my pounding heart. “It totally wasn't.”

“I'll have my pictures later this week,” Max said. “I'll show you mine”—he smiled again, lowered his voice to a near whisper— “when you're ready to show me yours.”

Part of me started to hate him. Wanted to scream for him to leave me alone. It was the side of me that did everything possible to keep people—all people—away. But another part of me, the side that was dying for a friend (or maybe a little more), the side that I wanted to tear out and mash into the carpet, felt a little excited.

“I don't think so,” I said, bending over the lines of my notebook, pressing my mind toward the next pairing of opposites. Trying, trying, trying not to smile.

Noelle and I are at our neighborhood park, sitting at the grassy edge of the pond. Thirty feet away, a fountain splashes water toward our bare feet, which dangle in the cool water. We're both laughing hysterically at something. Noelle's head is thrown back, her face tipped to the sky. Her eyes are squeezed tightly against the sun, and the fingers of both hands curl around long green grass that sprouts from under her legs. And me, I'm looking right at her, my mouth open wide as laughter pours from me. This is one of my favorite pictures from the summer I turned fourteen. Sitting there next to her, I had no idea it would be our last summer together.

Noelle had never seen the image, which had been taken a few weeks before she went missing. Every time I looked at it, I wondered if we'd both known, on some instinctive level, what was drawing near. With Noelle gripping the ground like she didn't want to be torn away, and me staring like I was trying to memorize every aspect of her that I could, it wasn't so hard for me to believe that we'd heard a whisper carried on the wind. If only the message had been a shout, if only we could have prepared, everything in my world might have remained right side up.

Lying on my bed, clutching the photograph, I glanced at the television on my dresser. I'd muted the sound when I flopped down in the middle of my bed, deciding as I waited for the interview to start that it was finally time to prepare the gift I'd held on to for years.

I slid the picture into a frame and secured the back in place, then dropped it into a slender box and sighed. Noelle had been home for over a week, and every time I gathered the nerve to call, one of her parents or Coop told me she wasn't ready to talk. So far, this interview was the best shot I had at getting any new information about her. And this gift was the best plan I'd come up with to see her face-to-face.

“An act of denial,” my therapist had said when I told him about the picture and how I planned to give it to her one day. During that session, he made me choose a date when I would admit she was gone, acknowledge that she was never coming home. The date became a big deal to him, and when it arrived, I lied, telling him I had put the framed picture in a box, wrapped it, and buried it in the woods behind the park.

For effect, I added that I had played our theme song, “One Step at a Time” by Jordin Sparks, on my iPod while mounding damp dirt on top of the entombed box, pressing it deeper into the ground as the melody swept through the swaying treetops. He steepled his fingers under his chin and nodded slowly, then said he thought I no longer needed to see him on a regular basis. When I walked out his door for the last time, I wondered if he was calling me cured and almost laughed.

I folded a piece of cream-colored card stock and opened it before pulling the cap off a purple gel pen.

Forever friends,
I wrote.

And then,
Love you. Tessa.

I stuffed a few pieces of white tissue paper into a gift bag and gently placed the box inside, then tucked the handmade card beside it and pushed everything away from me, pressing my face into my patchwork comforter. Part of me wanted to call Dr. Anderson and tell him how very wrong he had been. Noelle was home. If I had actually buried the picture, I wondered, would the box still be there, waiting for me to dig my fingers into the soft soil and pull it into the sunlight?

I looked up to see Noelle's parents seated at a table behind a line of microphones. I hit the volume button and heard the rustle of paper and the rush of hushing voices.

Mr. Pendelton looked at the scene before him, wiped his scruffy cheek with one hand, and then started speaking. “First of all, we want to express our gratitude to all the people who have helped from the very beginning.”

Mrs. Pendelton nodded. “There is no way to thank you enough. All the long hours of searching, following up on leads, the prayers—they all played a part in Noelle's safe return.”

“Noelle is home now,” Mr. Pendelton said. “Nothing matters more.”

“How is she?” asked a voice from behind the cameras.

“She's okay. Struggling a bit, as expected.” The camera zoomed in on Mrs. Pendelton, highlighting the dark purple bags under her eyes. “We just want to give her some normalcy after everything she's been through.”

“So … as I'm sure you will all understand and respect”—Mr. Pendelton cleared his throat—“we will not be doing any additional interviews. We need to allow Noelle some space. And to keep the media circus as far from her as possible.”

“You mentioned normalcy. When will she be returning to school?” This was a different reporter. His voice was softer, not as close to the microphones. I turned up the volume, leaning forward as I watched the Pendeltons glance at each other.

“We're not sure. We're seeking advice on how to deal with the different situations that will arise. Right now, we're just trying to love our daughter.” Mr. Pendelton's voice cracked.

“We know how lucky we are,” Mrs. Pendelton said.

“Do you know anything about what happened to Noelle during the two years she was gone?”

Mr. Pendelton closed his eyes.

“We're going to let her share those things when she's ready.” Mrs. Pendelton reached over and grasped her husband's hand.

“The arraignment was today, and Croft pleaded not guilty,” another reporter stated. “What about the trial? Will Ms. Pendelton testify against Croft?”

The camera zoomed out as a man who was seated next to Mr. Pendelton leaned toward the microphones. His thick red beard looked scratchy and rough. “I'm Garrett Kelley, the lead prosecutor for this case. All I can say about the issue is that I have spoken with her and I am very impressed with her strength and fortitude.”

Noelle's parents thanked everyone again and then stood. Cameras flashed brightly and reporters shouted as the couple walked offscreen. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. How could Noelle's life ever return to normal?

I sat up, grabbed my cell phone, and dialed the first three numbers of the Pendeltons' house, then threw the phone down on my bed.

If I called, they would tell me the same crap about Noelle not being ready for visitors. And I couldn't let that happen.

As I drove through the familiar neighborhood, my mind wandered back in time, recalling the details of one of the last days I had spent with Noelle.

“What are you gonna do with this old thing anyway?” Noelle slid forward in her chair and picked up the camera I'd set on the patio table, turning it around in her hands. I wanted to fling its thick strap around her neck to make sure she wouldn't drop it on the concrete.

“Dunno.” I shrugged. “Use it, I guess.”

“It's not digital, though?” Noelle crinkled her nose.

“You have no appreciation for the finer things, Noelle,” Coop said as he hopped down the kitchen steps with an orange Popsicle in his hand, plopping into one of the padded chairs around the table.

“Who asked you?” She kicked at his bare feet, which he swept off the ground and propped on the table.

“Eew.” Noelle swatted at his long legs. “People
eat
here, you know?”

Coop rolled his eyes. “Like Mom has ever let anyone enjoy a meal outside without dousing this table in Clorox first?”

“But your toenails are
disgusting
.” With her eyes narrowed to slits, Noelle inspected her brother's toes.

“A little length never hurt anyone,” Coop said, sliding his foot toward Noelle's face with a laugh.

Noelle flung herself back into her chair before he could make contact. “If any of your foot fungus gets on me, I won't hesitate to kill you.”

My eyes fluttered back to Noelle's hands. I held my breath, waiting for my grandfather's camera to crash to the ground, smashing its lens into a thousand tiny pieces.

“Is there any film in here?” With one hand, Noelle shielded her eyes from a wave of sunlight that burst from behind a passing cloud.

“I loaded a roll this morning,” I said. I held out my hands, and Noelle passed the camera over. “My dad had to help me figure it out.”

Noelle stood up, pulled at the waist of her tank top, and ran barefoot into the Pendeltons' grassy backyard. “Take one of me!”

“Uh-oh,” Coop said. “This could be trouble.”

“Come on, Noelle. My grandpa used this camera for serious stuff.”

“I'm not a serious subject?” Noelle flung her arms in the air and spun in looping circles, like we used to do as kids, trying to get that drunken-dizzy feeling and seeing who could stand up the longest.

“Just this morning, my dad spent twenty minutes on a grueling version of his this-is-not-a-toy lecture.” I stood and pointed the camera at a red bird perched on the branch of a tree that butted up to the back of their house. “He's waited three years to give me this camera. It's the one thing Grandpa Lou left just for me. I don't want my first roll of film to—”

“How offensive.” Noelle stopped spinning and placed one hand on her chest, holding the other out into the air to steady her balance. “I'm pained beyond words that you don't feel I'm good enough to photograph.”

“You're a drama queen.” Coop balled up his Popsicle wrapper and launched it at Noelle. She ducked, her hair flaring out, and the paper spiraled over her head.

I secured the camera's strap around my neck and centered the bird in the frame. My finger found the shutter-release button and pressed. The shutter clicked and the bird startled, flying into the air.

“Hey!” I placed the camera against my stomach, walked back to the table, and sat. “Stupid bird.”

“I won't run away,” Noelle said in a singsong voice.

“No,” Coop said. “We'll never be that lucky.”

Noelle stuck her tongue out at her brother. “You love me, and you know it.”

“Like I love gnarly foot fungus,” Coop said.

“Just one, okay?” Noelle propped a hand behind her head, her elbow sticking up toward the deep blue sky, jutting her hip into the air in a way that made her teal miniskirt sway back and forth.

I sighed, stood up from the table, and stepped into the silky grass. “Fine,” I said, raising the camera to my face.

“Have I ever told you,” Noelle said as she moved toward me with a huge grin on her face, “that sometimes I feel like a shooting star?”

“Stop there,” I said, pressing the shutter-release button.

“But I'm a star, and I'm going to fly!” Noelle leaped toward me, her face filling the entire frame just as the camera snapped her picture.

“Noelle, you ruined the shot,” I said with a slight whine. “I want this entire roll to be perfect.”

She giggled and started spinning again, her long chestnut-colored hair twirling around her body.

“Leave it to her,” Coop said from behind me, “to mess everything up.”

“Oh, shut up, Pooper,” Noelle said with a giggle.

Coop shoved the Popsicle stick into his mouth and crunched it, smiling at Noelle.

“That drives me crazy,” she said.

Coop crunched again, splintering the wood into several tiny slices. When he pulled it from his mouth, it looked like a miniature broom. “I live to drive you crazy.”

“I'm gonna go,” I said, reaching for the camera case and tucking the Nikon into its cool dark security. “I'm gonna head to the park and get some shots of the ducks or trees or something.”

“Oh my God!” Noelle clapped her hands and ran to the table. “That's perfect. Pooper, go get your shoes. You're coming, too.”

I shouldn't have said anything. Once Noelle got something in her head, there was no turning her back. Still, I always tried. “I was going to go by my—”

“One more shot,” Noelle said. “You and me by the fountain. Shoes off, toes slipping into that cool water. It'll be great.”

“Noelle, I—”

“Not another word from you,” Noelle said. “Pooper, why aren't you moving?”

Coop shook his head, his longish blond hair waving in the breeze. Looked into the sky like he hadn't heard a word Noelle had said.

“Ugh, fine.” Noelle walked behind Coop's chair and leaned over her brother's shoulder. “
Cooper
, love, be a dear and slip on some shoes. I'd be forever indebted if you could take a picture of me and my BFF by the fountain.”

Coop nodded. “Love to,” he said, brushing Noelle's tanned arm with the slimy wood.

“Gross, Pooper.” Noelle flicked him in the forehead.

“Watch it, sis,” Coop said, pushing her hand away. “I just agreed to do you a favor.”

“Fine,” Noelle said with a huff. “I'll get you back later.”

Coop ran up the steps and pulled open the screen door to the kitchen. “I'll meet you guys out front.”

Noelle held her hand out to me, and I stepped forward, taking it in my own, not knowing that years would pass before the opportunity would arise again.