Every Visible Thing Page 2

  Tracy and I both have classes in the Unified Arts Building after Geometry. We walk there together. That’s pretty much the extent of our relationship, besides the notes I write her, which she refuses to answer, because she doesn’t think I should write them in the first place. Not that she cares about Geometry, she doesn’t, she just respects rules. Tracy is a horse fiend. She spends every afternoon and all weekend working at a barn an hour outside of the city, to pay for the board of her own horse, Cecil. Which is why we never do anything outside of school. She wears dirty jeans that smell slightly of barn and worn Tshirts over her totally flat chest. Her brown hair is always pulled into a neat, low ponytail. She’s not interested in boys and reads while eating her lunch. It takes a lot, usually something weird, to make her laugh. I’m not even sure she likes me very much.

  The main building of the high school has four floors and is shaped like a square with a landscaped quadrangle in the middle. On our way from Geometry, Tracy and I cut through the Quad. There is no major popular crowd here like there was in my grammar school. Now there are different groups, named for the places they choose to hang out. There are two red-brick stairways leading up to first-floor classrooms, labeled the Punk Stairs, where kids with Mohawks keep pet rats hidden in the hoods of their sweatshirts, and the New School Stairs. The New School is a probation program for extreme fuckups, delinquents who are starting over after some tragedy, who take non-taxing classes and spend a lot of time “cooling off” in the social work office. There are other groups who hang out inside: drama kids, science geeks, socially conscious rally organizers. Jocks sit along the benches in front of the sports building that has the gym and the community pool. The Quad is mostly for the bad kids, the ones who smoke, who drop acid, who look world-weary one minute and like excited toddlers the next. Half the classrooms overlook it, so normal kids, whose lives have never fallen apart, can look out of the windows to see what they are missing.

  Tracy would rather not walk through the Quad. She’s always trying to get me to go around the hallways and out the front entrance. I’m the one who insists we walk this way. Sometimes I torture her by stopping to lean on a stone wall, turning my face to absorb the sun.

  “Lena, let’s go,” she says when I linger today, looking around and pinching her mouth.

  “I think I’ll start smoking,” I say, watching a New School girl hold her long hair out of the way as a shirtless boy lights her clove cigarette with a match.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Tracy says. “Why would you want to smoke?”

  “Why not?” I say.

  “Lung cancer, for one thing. Plus, it smells gross.”

  “Teenagers don’t get lung cancer,” I say. She has no answer to this except her superior shrug.

  The heavy blue door to the right of us bursts open and out pours a group of sophomore girls. They wear sweatpants twisted in toward the ankle, white Gap socks, L.L. Bean shoes with laces spiraled at the eyelets, and huge polo oxfords in pastel colors. They march past us, ringlets swinging, flavored gloss oiling their lips. Two of them were popular girls in my grammar school. They pretended to be my friends for about two weeks in the fifth grade, after Hugh disappeared and I was briefly interesting. In grammar school I had to endure them every day, but here I can go a week without seeing them at all. They stare at me and snicker, as they always do now, like they can’t be bothered to insult me outright. Tracy doesn’t notice, rummaging in her backpack for a book.

  I look toward the Punk Stairs, where a guy with spiked green hair keeps the attention of a group of girls by burning his arm hairs off with sweeps of his Zippo.

  “Tracy, don’t you ever get bored of yourself?” I say. This doesn’t come out the way I mean it, and I’m afraid she might feel insulted. But she doesn’t really hear me. She shuts her paperback, tucks a strand of frizzing hair back where it belongs.

  “I’m bored now,” she says. “Can we go? I’ll be late for class.”

  Arch kids, in the darker of the two tunnels that lead from the Quad to the front of the building, are tough, from the poorest neighborhood in town, Whiskey Point, where I once went to church and Sunday school. When Tracy and I walk through, girls with bangs that defy gravity glare at us and blow smoke out their nostrils. We part on the first floor of the Unified Arts Building without goodbyes, she to her drawing class, me to Beginning Photography. I’ve seen her portfolio in her bag. All she ever draws is horses.

  The photography lab is on the third floor, at the end of a long linoleum hallway that smells more like a science lab than an arts building. The first part you see when you walk in is a normal classroom, with writing desks and a rolling blackboard and a projector. Behind this is a galley of sinks and cabinets stocked with white plastic bottles of chemicals, a tall drying rack where we can peek at the advanced classes’ photos. Most of them are of trees or of people’s feet. There is a closet-sized room for developing negatives, which you have to do in pitch-blackness. At the end of the sinks is a doorway covered with a black curtain. This is the darkroom, where the entrance breaks off and turns three times, like a maze, to keep the light from getting inside. The walls are lined with soft black fabric. The darkroom is huge, with machines on the counters and a long deep sink down the middle with constantly running water and dishpans full of chemicals. The whole place is barely lit by red bulbs, making everything lose its color to shades of pink and red. It gives me this weird feeling, like I’m camouflaged, and though I can see everything, no one can see me.

  There was a tour of all this on the first day, but so far we’ve only been in the classroom part, learning how to use our cameras. Our teacher, Mr. Allen, is new this year. He smiles too much, and on the first day his hands shook when he wrote on the board. If this were History, he’d be eaten alive, but since Photography is an elective, we all feel sort of sorry for him, and are well behaved. There are ten kids taking the class, three other girls, who know one another already and won’t talk to me, and six boys. One of the boys, Jonah Baskin, is in New School. The rumor is he slit his wrists and missed most of sophomore year, first in a hospital, then with his mother in London. The girls in class must think he’s cute, because they whisper and stare at him and ask him to say things with an English accent. Jonah pays no attention to them, or to any of us, just takes notes and fiddles with his camera, greasy hair like curtains closing over his face. He never pushes up his sleeves.

  I had to ask my parents for Hugh’s camera. It’s valuable, a Leica given to him by my grandmother, and has been living in my parents’ closet in a camera bag with a Clash sticker on it. No one knows why Hugh didn’t have it with him that night, since he never went anywhere without it. But he left it behind, and now I carry it like he did, slung around my neck and under one arm by the frayed yellow strap. Though I have learned to load and rewind the film, set f-stops and focus and the light meter and depth of field, I haven’t taken any pictures. That’s not what I’m here for.

  Today is our first day not spent at our desks. In the kitchen galley, Mr. Allen shows us what we will do in the developing closet. Break open our finished roll of film and wind it onto a metal wheel, which we put into a matching canister with two lids, a large one to seal it into darkness, and another smaller one to pour the chemicals into. Once the film is safely in there, we can come out and do the chemical part.

  It seems easy enough, but once locked in the room, a bunch of kids freak out and ruin their film. One boy gets claustrophobic, another one opens the door to ask Mr. Allen a question, exposing his film. The girls are better at it, winding their film in record time, making the boys sneer from where they wait their turns, sitting up on counters at the end of the room. Jonah and I practice on blank rolls of film with our eyes closed.

  When it’s my turn, Mr. Allen gives me a brief tour with the light shining through the door; all that’s in there are a counter, a sink, and a light switch taped down in the off position. He hands me the scissors and tells me to take one last look at everything, then shuts the door.

  It’s like I never knew what the word dark meant before now. I have no sense of myself, let alone what’s around me; like I’ve disappeared instead of the light. I manage to get the scissors under the lip of the film roll and cut a line into the hard plastic. I break the shell and am careful not to smear the film with fingerprints. Winding it on the metal roll was simple outside in the light, but now I can’t find the little groove I’m supposed to anchor the end of the film on. I think I’ve got it four times, but when I roll the film it flops loosely away. Then I drop the ring and have to squat and feel around with one hand while I hold the unraveled film above my head with the other. The dark is really getting to me now, and I can understand why that boy started screaming to be let out. It’s almost like it gets deeper inside you with every breath. And even though there’s no time limit, the dark makes me feel like if I don’t hurry up something awful will happen. Like my chance at getting out will slip by.

  By the time I find the ring on the floor and miss twice more at winding the film, the dark seems to be getting thicker, like I have to fight to move through it. I’m kind of dizzy and my breath is quick and shallow, like Owen having an asthma attack. It occurs to me that I can’t do this, that I will have to open the door and expose every one of Hugh’s unseen photos on this roll of film. I try one more time, and even with my shaking hands and having already half given up, it works, so easily I don’t understand how I missed it before. I quickly wind the film and slip the ring into the canister, sealing the top with a few twists.

  “Ready!” I call out, because by this point I’ve forgotten where the door is. I stumble out and someone steadies me by grabbing my arms.

  “Are you all right?” Mr. Allen asks. He’s not the one holding me, though, it’s Jonah, which I don’t
like, so I wriggle free.

  “I’m fine,” I say. Jonah backs away.

  “We were wondering what happened to you in there,” Mr. Allen says. I think he’s referring to how long I took, but it turns out that he’s been calling my name for a few minutes, and was close to breaking the door down. I didn’t hear a word.

  I follow the laminated instructions taped above the sink, adding developer, swirling it every thirty seconds, pouring it out, adding stop bath, then fixer, then fixer remover, then rinsing with water. Just before the bell rings I take off the top of the canister and pull out my negatives. I hang them on a line with a clothespin, taping a small label with my name on it to the bottom edge. They hang in a curl like flypaper. With the light from the window I can make out a few images, human figures, stone stairs, a graffiti-covered brick wall. The Quad. It doesn’t look very different from how it looked today.

  The difference is that Hugh took these pictures. First of our family, but then of his friends, his places, what he blinked his eyes open and shut upon. Besides books and albums, a leather jacket, and the stiff, averted faces of my parents, these pictures are all I have left of him.

  2. stopwatch

  Fridays are Owen Furey’s worst days, because of the time tests. After lunch, while the students are still sluggish with peanut butter, Mr. Gabriel passes out mimeographed sheets of numbers, facedown, with the solemn expression of an Olympic coach. They are given four minutes to solve twenty multiplication problems. Mr. Gabriel holds a stopwatch, interrupting their concentration to announce the close of each minute. The same four students compete for the record, the rest are left hoping only for a respectable time. Owen—skinny, fidgeting, purple-eyed with sleep deprivation and self-criticism—has yet to finish within the time window. The last rows are always eights and nines, his doom. There is only one other student so pathetic, Mindy Turner, who is rumored to be slightly retarded. It doesn’t help that the fast kids shoot their hands up when finished, and that Mr. Gabriel bellows out their time as if they are running the fifty-yard dash. Two minutes ten seconds, new record! Owen wastes his math energy on calculating minutes gone by against problems left, convinced he’ll never make it.

  The desks, normally grouped together in clusters of four, are rearranged in a circle for time tests, to discourage cheating. Owen normally sits with his desk diagonal to Danny Gray, the new arrival of Indian summer, a year and a half older than the fifth-graders (a fact that hushes them, the horror of being “kept back”) and Owen’s best friend. Even Danny does better than Owen on the time tests. He regularly finishes somewhere around the three-minute mark, but writes his answers slowly, pausing to glance around the circle, eyes too white from his recess application of Visine, making the record-holders, who hunch in concentration over their desks, look paranoid. As if he could beat their best time if he bothered to try.

  Danny Gray has moved from New York and calls Owen’s town “the country” even though they are walking distance from Boston. During recess he leads Owen behind the tennis courts to the deserted merry-go-round, hunches in a little archway of fallen brick wall, and lights a joint. The first time he offers it to Owen, he closes the glowing end in his mouth and gestures for Owen to lean forward. He blows the smoke in one thick billow that Owen inhales with his whole face, not just his lips which, for the briefest instant, touch Danny Gray’s. Owen is shamed by his embarrassment; clearly this is a normal practice that causes no one but him to linger on the memory of their best friend’s lips. Danny’s are full, darker than Owen’s, as is his skin and his thick glossy hair. He is part American Indian, though the person who planted this in him, his father, has long disappeared. This makes him the smallest ethnic minority in their class. The majority seesaws between Jews and Wasps, followed by the Asians, lumped together by others if not by themselves, then six African-Americans, four of whom come from mixed marriages, three children who speak Spanish at home, and two Irish Catholics including Owen. Danny stands alone, though some kids lump him with Rohit, a boy who missed the entire fourth grade visiting family in Calcutta.

  Danny is fascinated by Owen’s family. He is amazed that Owen’s parents are still married, and asks questions Owen either finds insulting or doesn’t know the answer to, such as does his dad hit his mom and do they still fuck. “Have you got any sibs?” Danny asks, and Owen’s chest tightens. “A sister,” he says. “Is she hot?” Danny asks, and Owen shrugs and says, “She’s fifteen.” Danny nods, as if this is explanation enough. When he meets Lena, or at least glimpses her storming through the living room to the back of the house, he informs Owen that she has no tits but a cute ass. Owen suffers such a variety of reactions to this statement, he ends up saying nothing. He is embarrassed for his sister, leered at in this way, suspects he should defend her. He is also furious, as if Lena has walked into his room uninvited. Mostly, the emotion he feels is one he doesn’t dare name, but it’s familiar. It’s the same way he feels about the attention Danny attracts from girls in their class. Danny, with all his talk of tits and ass, is unimpressed by these girls, though occasionally he will exchange a series of notes with one of them, plummeting the girl and her friends into turmoil. While they giggle and whisper and sigh, Owen likes to imagine different ways of inflicting pain and shock on them: hair pulling, biting, comments about imaginary B.O.

  The boys spend most afternoons skulking around Coolidge Corner, trading stacks of coins for candy bars and McDonald’s fries, occasionally shoplifting random items from Woolworth’s—shoelaces, pink disposable razors, badminton birdies—which they then toss into public trash cans. They ride on the backs of green MBTA trains, planting their sneaker soles on the metal prong used to connect one car to the next, holding on to windshield wipers with fingers numbed by cold. The first time, Owen almost loses his grip when a train passes them going the other direction, the suck of air and the surprise startling him off balance. Danny grabs onto his collar and pulls him back, and for an instant, the seriousness of the near-fall allows Owen to press his face into the greasy shoulder of Danny’s jean jacket. At the next stop, the driver, tipped off via radio by his passing colleague, comes running to the back of the train to curse at them. Danny has to pull Owen away, laughing at the way he holds on for dear life even while the train is standing still.

  On rainy days they go to Danny’s house, so far from Owen’s he thinks of it as a different town. Danny lives on the outskirts of Whiskey Point—named for its blue-collar Irish population, most of whom send their children to the Catholic school—on the top floor of a beige three-family house with chipped, decrepit balconies. His mother, a waitress home most afternoons, serves them grilled-cheese sandwiches and root beer. When Owen calls her Mrs. Gray she laughs, insisting that he call her Sylvie. He can’t bring himself to do this and so avoids her name altogether. She also asks about his family as if they are fascinating, tells him it is a blessing his parents are still married. She wants to know if his mother works, and he has to explain, mumbling because he finds this fact too weird to be proud of, that his mother is in medical school. “Wow,” Mrs. Gray says, prying the top off a Seagram’s wine cooler. “She must be smart.” Owen shrugs. His mother’s intelligence is not something he thinks about. He measures her in other ways. He can’t remember, for instance, the last time she made him a grilled cheese.

  Owen prefers to sleep over at Danny’s. Their parents make them switch off, one weekend at Owen’s, the other across town. Sleepovers at Danny’s are long, luscious nights of unsupervised boredom. Danny’s mother leaves for work as it’s getting dark and doesn’t come home until after two A.M., a fact that hasn’t been mentioned to Owen’s parents. Owen believes his father, who is still new at being in charge of such things, hasn’t thought to ask. The boys are instructed by Danny’s mother to go to Mrs. Curran downstairs if there’s an emergency. They stay up until they hear her key in the door, gorging themselves on Jiffy Pop, Hostess cakes, and reruns of Hawaii Five-0 and The Twilight Zone. Sometimes they share one of the wine coolers, staining their tongues with berry. Danny has a futon mattress on the floor of his room, and Owen secretly prefers this to the twin bed setup at his house. It’s easier to watch his friend sleeping, savor the moment his eyebrows relax their normal furrow, when Danny is right next to him. Danny’s eyelashes seem to grow longer when he’s asleep, like the hair of vampires in the Anne Rice books Owen loves. On the futon, Owen can get close enough to smell his best friend’s unbrushed breath.