The guy shook red pepper flakes onto his pizza. His hair went in his eyes but he didn’t flick it out of the way. His fingers were long and bony, and he was at least as cute as the guy Erika had liked. If the skater girl showed up, I wanted her to be dressed exactly as she had been the other day, so I could see if she still looked like a boy now that I knew she wasn’t one. If she truly looked that much like a boy, then the mistake would be on her. The skater kid took a big bite of pizza and then went wildly for his soda cup, a gesture too outsized for how spicy the pizza could have been, even if it were smothered in red pepper flakes, which I guessed it was but couldn’t see for sure. I was still outside.
Men in jean jackets stood outside the bar across the street, smoking cigarettes in the rain. I thought bars, or most bars, allowed smoking inside. In my gray-blue raincoat I was the same color as the rain and the buildings and the sidewalk. The smoking men stared out at the street. Some people’s parents might not have let them walk around downtown in the dark by themselves. With my hood up, I felt invisible. Meaning safe. My shoulders were broad, my height tallish. Most clothes fit me in places and hung off me in others. I was built, so what, like a swimmer, but that didn’t mean the guy at Rich’s had had any right to say, You look like you could be. That he’d said it was still bugging me. It was bugging me mostly because what did that guy know about swimming, or how a swimmer should or could look.
I passed Rich’s and couldn’t see in through the fogged-up windows. Every place, it felt like, was becoming impossible for me to go. At the bus stop a homeless guy tried to sell me a transfer, and I could have given him the change in my pocket. I pretended not to hear him. The rain came down hard and there was no room in the bus shelter. I felt my jeans getting soaked at the thigh-line. A packed bus, not mine, pulled up and pulled away. Daylight savings had just happened and it felt darker than it should have for how early it was.
MY MOM TOOK some white meat. My dad passed the salad. I said to my dad, Do you still have that old camera? He asked if I meant the Pentax. I said, I don’t know, the one with the strap. The camera I remembered had a braided leather strap. It had a lens that twisted out to make it longer, or maybe it was a separate lens that attached. Alexis hadn’t said what kind of camera I’d need, but my Polaroid was definitely not real enough. After dinner I followed my dad downstairs to his office and he got down the camera from a shelf in the closet. It had a wide cloth strap that said Pentax. It looked newer than I remembered. My dad asked if I knew how to work it. The camera was cold from sitting in a closet in the basement for who knew how long. It had real heft to it. I raised the camera and pointed it at my dad. I moved the focus ring and watched him get blurry and clear. He made his Donald Duck face. Sometimes I forgot I had parents.
I pressed the metal button to take the photo. Nothing happened. I said, Something’s wrong with it. I said, Maybe it’s too cold. My dad moved the wand to advance the film and I heard the little teeth catching. He said he didn’t know what was on the rest of the roll, that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d used it. He said I was free to take the camera if I wanted it. His footsteps moved up the stairs and sounded across the floor above me. I looped the camera strap around my neck. I pointed it at my dad’s desk. I took the lid off his rubber-band box and looked in on that. When the office had been my brother’s room the walls might have been blue, but he’d let me in so rarely I couldn’t remember. I pointed the camera at the coils of the dead space heater. It was freezing down there.
At nine we all watched L.A. Law in the family room. The main case involved my favorite lawyer, who was arguing on behalf of a client whose baby had gotten sick after chewing on a toy painted with toxic paint. The lawyer for the corporation that made the toy said that parents should watch their kids to make sure they didn’t put toys in their mouths. My favorite lawyer was taking the corporation to town. I hadn’t noticed before, but she had a thing that she did where she moved a swath of her hair — blondish, shiny as a weapon — from behind her shoulder to in front of it. Alexis hadn’t said what kind of photos she’d want me to take. If she had some more downtime we could pull old yearbooks off the shelves and she could show me what she thought I’d be good at. Once I learned the basics and got going, I could see myself hitting my stride. Taking photos might become the thing I did — not because I cared about moving up in Yearbook, but because I was a good photographer. The shelves in our house had a few of my brother’s trophies and some old family photos, but the walls were mostly blank space — all that was up in the family room was a poster from a jazz festival, another of the Golden Gate Bridge at night. I looked at the blank, beige walls and saw framed images heaving into focus.
The credits rolled. Pledge lifted herself from her dog pillow and stretched, her collar jangling. In my room I took off my sneakers and set them in the middle of my turquoise wall-to-wall carpet. I sat on my bed and aimed the camera at them. I aimed across the room at my posters. I was the photographer taking a picture of R.E.M. standing on a bridge over a river in a place I thought of as Germany. I focused the shot on the drummer’s ear. On Michael Stipe’s eyebrow. No one had conversations about whether he was cute. I took a painted pinecone I’d made as a kid and put it on my pillow. I looked at it through the lens from a couple different angles, but some ridge or another kept ending up in shadow. Maybe Alexis could show me the right way to use the camera. She could give me a lesson or two, no big deal. I put the pinecone back on its shelf. I’d develop the film as soon as I got through the rest of the roll, and I’d see what else was on there. My dad hadn’t said how old the film was, it could be a year or five years. For all I knew it could be rotting in its chamber.
IT TOOK ANOTHER week for Melanie to request volunteers again, and for Erika to leave the room, and then Melanie, and then all that were left were a few straggling proofers, and Ms. C. at her desk, and Alexis, and me. The camera was wrapped in a bandana at the bottom of my bag. I took it out and unwrapped it and set it on the table. I went back to my captions.
Alexis said, Still cutting? You’re a trouper. She offered a bag of yogurt-covered raisins. She said, It’s been crazy. Now they’re saying we need quotes from three different printers. I nodded. She said, And it’s like, why can’t we just use the printer we’ve always used?
The camera sat on the table between us. It pointed toward me.
Alexis said, Is that your camera?
I said, I borrowed it.
She said, That looks like a nice one. I don’t know how to use those things.
The yogurt shells moistened in the cave of my palm. I loose-tugged my seed-bead necklace. Alexis was standing across the table in her soccer sweatshirt. I knew, I don’t know how, that I needed to get her to not walk away.
I said, Do you still need someone to take photos? The Pentax was huge on the table between us. It was clunky and ridiculous. I said, You said something about it last week.