We All Looked Up

by Tommy Wallach

  Eliza

  IT HAD ALL STARTED A year ago.

  Eliza was working late in the photo lab, as usual. She spent most of her free time there, alone with her thoughts, her favorite music, and her vintage Exakta VX (a kind of reverse going-away present from her mother, who moved to Hawaii with her new boyfriend just a few weeks after Eliza turned fourteen). It was the same camera that Jimmy Stewart used in Rear Window, with a black leather grip and a polished silver band running down the center. The dials on top were thick with machine-tooled hatchings and spun with heavy, satisfying clicks. Eliza kept the camera in a side compartment of her bag at all times, so she could get at it easily in an aesthetic emergency. Quick draw, like a cowboy with a six-shooter, always ready to capture that fleeting frame.

  She believed photography to be the greatest of all art forms because it was simultaneously junk food and gourmet cuisine, because you could snap dozens of pictures in a couple of hours, then spend dozens of hours perfecting just a couple of them. She loved how what began as an act of the imagination turned into a systematic series of opera­tions, organized and ordered and clear: mixing up the processing bath, developing the negatives, choosing the best shots and expanding them, watching as the images appeared on the blank white paper as if in some kind of backward laundromat—a billowing line of clean sheets slowly developing stains, then hung up until those stains were fixed forever. And then there was the setting, crepuscular and shadowy, everything about it perfectly calibrated for creativity, from the sultry red glow of the darkroom lights to the still and shallow pool in which her prints rested like dead leaves on the surface of a pond. If no one else was around, she could put her phone in the dock and blast Radiohead or Mazzy Star loud enough to make the room tremble with each downbeat, to erase the world outside. Immersed in that cocoon of sound and crimson light, Eliza could imagine she was the last person on Earth. Which was what made it so startling to be touched gently on the shoulder as she was examining a developing print for the first hint of beauty.

  She whipped around with a hand out, as if slapping at a mosquito. A boy, bent over, holding his palm to his face.

  “Ow! Shit!” he said.

  She ran to the dock and turned down the music. The boy shook off the slap, unrolling his impossible height. Eliza felt annoyed that she recognized him, in the same way that you can’t help but recognize Hollywood actors on the covers of magazines, even if you despise everything they stand for. He was Peter Roeslin, of the Hamilton basketball team.

  “You surprised me,” she said, angry with him for having been hurt by her.

  “Sorry.”

  He stood there in the semidarkness, tall and slim as the silhouette of a dead tree.

  “Hey, what are those?” he asked, noticing the prints drying on the line.

  “Pictures. Can I help you with something?”

  He took her curtness in stride. “Oh, just the music. We’re having a meeting upstairs. Student council.” He leaned in close to one of the photographs. “What are they pictures of ?”

  “Nothing really.”

  “I totally suck at art. I’m super jealous of people like you.”

  “Thanks, I guess.”

  “Why are they all black and white?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just interested. Sorry.”

  But now she felt bad for being so abrupt. “No, it’s okay. It’s just hard to explain. I think black-and-white photos are more honest. Color has no . . . integrity.” That was the best she could do with words. To really answer, she’d have to show him how the blacks in a color photo were always tinted red or speckled with yellow. How the whites were creams. How the grays were so often contaminated with blue. Eliza had always felt that fiction described reality better than nonfiction (or her reality, at any rate); in the same way, black-and-white photographs mirrored the world as she saw it more faithfully than color photographs did. Sometimes she dreamed in black and white.

  “Look at that kid,” Peter said, pointing at one of the pictures. “Poor little guy!”

  “Yeah, he’s kinda amazing.”

  The photograph Peter was looking at happened to be her favorite. It had been taken outside a private elementary school just a few blocks from Hamilton. By chance, Eliza had passed by just as the kids were struggling to arrange themselves in alphabetical order for a fire drill, and one boy had immediately caught her attention. He was smaller than the others in his line, and dressed about ten years too old, in pressed chinos and a button-down shirt with a little red bow tie—an outfit that wouldn’t have been cool even if he had been ten years older. Every school had a kid like this. He stood in the very center of the line, exactly where he was meant to be—a point of stillness—as the students diffused into a buzzing, slow-exposure swarm at either end of the frame. You could already see the tough years of puberty stretching out before him, a minefield strewn with awkward rejections on dance floors and lonely Friday nights. He was imprisoned within his upbringing. Doomed.

  “I feel like that kid sometimes,” Peter said.

  “Are you joking? In what possible way are you like that kid?”

  “You know. Just keeping it together. Being good.”

  “And what would you be doing if you didn’t have to be good all the time?”

  She hadn’t meant it to sound flirtatious, but everything was flirtatious in a darkroom. Peter looked down at her, and Eliza felt her pulse quicken. This was crazy. She didn’t know the first thing about him. And sure, seen from a purely objective standpoint, he was a handsome guy, but she’d always preferred the artsy delinquent types—the ones who’d already ponied up for their first tattoos and would be walking walls of graffiti by the time they were twenty-one. Or at least that’s what she preferred in her head. In reality, she’d never had a serious boyfriend, and she’d lost her virginity practically by accident at a summer camp for blossoming artists, to a pale Goth boy who only painted wilted flowers. But standing there in the unnatural bloodred twilight, only a few inches away from a beautiful stranger who happened to be Hamilton royalty, she felt the inner twist of desire, or at least the desire to be desired.

  “I don’t know,” he said softly. “I just get sick of it sometimes. Going to practice every day. Doing enough homework to get by. Dealing with my girlfriend.”

  Eliza could picture this girlfriend. Stacy something. “I’ve seen her. Brunette, right? More makeup than face?”

  Peter laughed, and even in the darkness Eliza could make out the moment when he realized he shouldn’t have been laughing. He distracted himself by looking back at the photos. “I wish I could do stuff like this. I wish I could . . .”

  “Could what?”

  His eyes were auburn in the red light. Too close. He reached around behind her and drew her toward him, and then their mouths were mashed hard together and he was lifting her up off the ground. She heard the fixer fluid sloshing over the edge of the bath and splashing onto the floor. He sat her back down on the table, still kissing her, his tongue rough in her mouth, and his hands were making their way up her shirt when the lights flickered on.

  A skinny blond girl stood between the black curtains in the doorway, her mouth agape, like some cartoon character expressing shock.

  “Are you an idiot?” Eliza said. “This is a darkroom! Turn the light off!”

  The girl turned and ran, her heels clicking on the tile like a snicker.

  “Shit!” Peter said.

  “Who cares?”

  “She’s a friend of Stacy’s.” He was already chasing after her, but he stopped just in front of the curtains. “Listen, I’m sorry about this.”

  Eliza pulled down her shirt. “Don’t worry about it.”

  He started to say something else, then gave up and left.

  Eliza was surprised by her behavior, not to mention the suddenness of the kiss, but she wasn’t p
articularly worried. Assuming word even got back to Stacy, what was the worst that could happen? A confrontation? A catfight? Was one kiss really that big a deal, in the grand scheme of things?

  Yes, was the answer. Yes it was.

  By the time Eliza got to school the next morning, someone had already spray-painted her locker, one huge black word with four capital letters: S-L-U-T. The same word had been written on a few hundred scraps of blue-lined notebook paper, which came pouring out of her locker when she opened it up, a flood of little anti-valentines. Suspicious eyes greeted her from every corner of the lunchroom, and a few girls went out of their way to slam against her shoulder when they passed her in the halls.

  The first day it was shocking. The second day it was infuriating. And every day after that, it got a little bit sadder, a little more isolating. With all the tools of social media at their fingertips, Stacy and her friends spread the word far and wide, even to the freshmen and sophomores, so that everywhere Eliza went, there were whispers and points and pointed smiles. The girl who’d prided herself on always staying under the radar was suddenly thrust into the spotlight, cast as the lead in a crappy high school production of The Scarlet Letter.

  It totally, incontrovertibly sucked, in all possible ways, shapes, and forms.

  And then everything got much, much worse.

  “Hey, Judy,” Eliza said to the nurse working the front desk. “My dad awake?”

  “Should be. Go on in.”

  “Thanks.”

  She walked past reception and down the hall, but was so distracted that she passed right by her dad’s room. For some stupid reason, she couldn’t stop thinking about Peter calling out to her across the quad that afternoon. She’d been so focused on ignoring him that now she couldn’t even remember what it was he’d said. Something about the sky?

  “Hey, Dad.”

  “If it isn’t Lady Gaga,” he said, sitting up in bed. She’d gotten used to seeing him like this, gaunt and hairless, studded with tubes, wearing nothing but a flowered dressing gown.

  “Once again, I’d like to formally protest the use of that nickname.”

  “You know I’m kidding. Gaga’s a fucking hag next to you.” (For as long as Eliza could remember, her dad had sworn like a sailor around her. There was footage of baby Eliza’s first steps accompanied by the repeated cry: “Look at that kid fucking go!” And though Eliza’s mom had waged a pretty serious campaign against the constant stream of vulgarity, she’d lost the right to judge anyone for anything when she skipped town.)

  “Untrue. But thanks anyway.”

  Eliza took her usual seat by the window and started in on her homework. Her dad watched TV and flirted with the nurses. He still had a charming shred of an accent left over from his childhood in Brooklyn, and though a few women had taken an interest in the years since the divorce, they all fled the scene when they realized that he wasn’t over his ex-wife.

  “I just need a little more time,” he’d always say.

  But time had run out on him. Hard as it was to believe, the ladies weren’t exactly lining up at the hospital door.

  Up until her dad got sick, Eliza had believed the universe to be a fundamentally balanced place. She figured that, excepting the super lucky and the super unlucky, most people ended up with about the same amount of good and bad in their lives, when all was said and done. Which meant that if you happened to be ostracized by the majority of your high school because of one stupid kiss, you were owed some good news. It was only fair.

  But not long after Eliza’s illicit moment with Peter in the darkroom, her dad checked into the hospital with a weirdly tenacious stomachache and a low-grade fever. And after a lab rat’s worth of tests had been administered, the diagnosis was delivered by a matter-of-fact oncologist with all the empathy of a GPS system correcting a wrong turn—stage III pancreatic cancer. Might as well have been a guy in a black robe with a scythe. At first Eliza couldn’t even believe it, considering all the other shit she was dealing with. But that diagnosis was her first taste of what she now recognized as the fundamental rule of life: Things were never so bad that they couldn’t get worse.

  She cried for about a month straight, in classes and on buses, in her bedroom and in waiting rooms, alone and by her father’s side while he got the chemo treatments that doctors said were unlikely to do much of anything other than make him nauseous. The grief was so profound that it transformed her; she went hard and numb as a frozen limb. Before, she’d walked around school like a leper, gaze perpetually set on the floor. Now, if some bitch tried to stare her down in the lunch line, Eliza would just stare back, dead-eyed, until the other girl got so unnerved she had to look away. The strangest thing was that her frosty attitude earned her a sort of prestige (the difference between coldness and coolness was, after all, simply a matter of degree). She was befriended by Madeline Seferis—a.k.a. Madeline Syphilis—a famously promiscuous senior, who introduced her to a new way of expressing disaffection, by putting on a tight skirt and a lot of makeup and heading out to the clubs where the bouncers didn’t card and the college boys bought the drinks. “If you’re going to have the reputation,” Madeline said, “you might as well get the fun.”

  But Madeline had gone off to college last September, and Eliza was left on her own again. The chemo did end up slowing the growth of her dad’s tumors, but good news was a weird thing when you were dealing with a fatal illness. Instead of a few months, the doctors gave him a year. That was how you could be lucky without being lucky. That was how you could be a winner and still lose.

  “Dinnertime,” a nurse said, balancing a tray in each hand, like a waitress.

  They dug into their overcooked penne and overly sweetened pudding. Eliza realized that she now ate the vast majority of her meals off of cafeteria trays.

  “Doc says the stent is good to go, so I’ll probably be home tomorrow.”

  “Great.”

  “So what about you? Anything juicy happen at school today?”

  “Not really. Well, sorta. Do you remember Peter?”

  “You mean the Peter from last year?”

  “Yeah. He tried to talk to me today. First time since . . . you know.”

  Her dad shook his head. He knew the whole story. “That asshole. Didn’t know a good thing.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wait.” He poked her chin gently with his fork. “You’re not interested in him, are you?”

  “Are you kidding? He, like, wrecked my life.”

  “I know. But your mom wrecked my life too, and you know my feelings about her.”

  “I do.” Eliza knew them, she just didn’t understand them. How could you keep loving someone who cheated on you and then ran away? “But the answer is no. I’m not interested. He can fuck off and die for all I care.”

  “There’s my sweet girl.”

  After dinner, she gave her father a kiss and grabbed ten bucks from his wallet to pay for the hospital parking lot. She couldn’t handle being alone at home right now, so she headed out to the Crocodile to have a drink and maybe dance a little.

  The guy who chatted her up at the bar was probably twenty-two, with a nicely trimmed blond Afro and the easy confidence of the stupid. They danced. They made out. And all the time, Eliza was thinking about Peter. Peter who sometimes felt like a little boy in a red bow tie. Peter who’d let his girlfriend ruin Eliza’s reputation. Peter who was still with that same girlfriend.

  Screw him.

  “So you wanna go back to my place?” the blond Afro guy asked.

  “I don’t go home with strangers,” Eliza said. “But you can come home with me.”

  He said he’d be cool with that. They always did.

  Outside the Crocodile, a group of punkers was standing around in a haze of warm breath and cigarette smoke. Eliza recognized one of them from Hamilton—Andy Rowen. He had long brown hair, down to his s
houlders, and was finally beginning to triumph over the volcanic acne that had plagued him since puberty. She’d bought pot from him once, and he’d given her a discount.

  “Eliza!” he said. “Holy shit!” His excitement at seeing her off campus was so sincere she was almost embarrassed for him.

  “Hey, Andy.”

  “Where you going? You guys should sit down and hang out.”

  “Sorry, we were just leaving.”

  Andy looked at her, then at her date, connecting dot A to dot B. She would have introduced them, but she couldn’t remember the name of the guy she was about to take home. Something with a J ?

  “Hold up, though. You wanna see something amazing?”

  “Sure.”

  Andy pointed upward. She followed the line extending from his index finger out into the dark distance. A single spark of bright blue, like a puncture in the black skin of the sky. And hadn’t Peter said something about a star?

  “Wicked, right?” Andy asked.

  Eliza knew what he meant by the word; it was one of a million different synonyms for “cool”: sweet, ill, rad, dope, sick. But for some reason, she felt like he had it wrong. The star seemed wicked in the original sense. Wicked like the Wicked Witch of the West. Wicked like something that wanted to hurt you.

  Eliza had been labeled a slut by an entire high school. She wasn’t speaking to her mom. Her dad was dying. But if she’d learned anything in the past year, it was that no amount of suffering could save you from more of it. And that star looked like a sure sign that more was coming.

  Wicked indeed.

  Andy

  ON THE OTHER HAND, IT was good to be out of class.

  Andy threw down his deck and hopped on, letting the pavement carry him effortlessly down toward the other end of campus. If only everything in life could be like that—effortless. If only there weren’t all this school to get through, and homework, and all these expectations. If only you could get up when you wanted and eat some Cinnamon Toast Crunch and play some music and smoke a bowl and drive to school whenever and maybe take a class if you felt like it, if you were actually interested in it, and then just chill with your friends the rest of the time. If only . . .