Leading Lines

by Chantel Guertin

  On Tuesday I go to school but only because Mom forces me. I give my Streeters column to Jeffrey to complete for the following week’s Hall Pass. On Wednesday I scroll through every single one of Muse’s hundreds of Instagram photos. On Thursday I check her page about 23 times for updates. On Friday she posts a picture of her and Dylan: he’s holding his guitar, and she’s got a notebook on her lap—her head touching his as they lean together to fit in the frame. My heart beats faster and my eyes sting. My hands shake as I close the app and toss my phone aside, then flop back on my pillow, staring at the ceiling.

  I try to analyze what I’m feeling, Dr. Judy style. Am I jealous? Or sad? Or mad? I decide it’s All of the Above. Are they together? Is it because I broke up with Dylan? Or would they have gotten together no matter what, and it was only a matter of time until he broke up with me? Or did Dylan cheat on me? I text Dace but she doesn’t respond, which is weird because she’s basically been checking in with me every five seconds since Dylan and I broke up. Emma and Gemma are also MIA, and then I remember they’re all at ski club. I go to bed at 7 and don’t get up until 11 on Saturday morning. Mom has breakfast waiting on the kitchen table and an appointment scheduled with Dr. Judy.

  • • •

  Dace arrives on the doorstep for Sleepover Saturday laden with two huge beach bags—one filled with her sleepover stuff and the other fully stocked with break-up survival snacks: chips, Cokes and a bag she’s filled at the bulk candy store with every type of candy, except the one I eat every Sleepover Saturday: Twizzlers.

  “Nice try,” I say half-heartedly.

  “At what?”

  “Trying to make me forget my usual.”

  She shakes her head. “Moving on.”

  We settle into my room, pillows and blankets in a cozy nest on the floor. Then she busts a Cosmo out of her bag and flips it open, pointing at a small article in the corner.

  “What?” I peer at the page.

  “It says it takes a quarter of the time you dated someone to get over them. No matter whether you were the dumper or the dumpee.”

  I do the math: Dylan and I were officially together for 14 weeks but I always cheat and count from two weeks earlier—the day I first saw him at St. Christopher’s and my crush on him became something much, much more. So that means four solid weeks to get over him. Six days down, three weeks and a day to go. I look at the calendar on my phone and count it out.

  “Oh god, my get-over-him day is Valentine’s Day. That’s just cruel. I don’t think I can do it. I’ve worn the same jeans to school all week. I haven’t washed my hair since Wednesday.”

  “Both are good for you. The jeans are setting and your hair is creating natural oils to clean itself.” Dace props up my laptop so we can both see it and then loads Netflix. “But you’re going to need to eat a lot of this candy.”

  I start to cry.

  CHAPTER 14: THREE WEEKS UNTIL I’M OVER HIM

  I haven’t been in the darkroom, Dad’s darkroom, since before Dad died. I tried the door once, right after he died. It was locked, and I took it as a sign. Mom has the key, somewhere, but she hasn’t been in there either. As though she also can’t bear to deal with the one room that was all Dad’s.

  Mom’s sitting at the little desk she has in the kitchen, sorting through bills. Her laptop is flipped open and she’s staring intently at the screen.

  “I need to go into the darkroom.”

  She looks up and shuts her laptop. “Are you sure?”

  I nod, but then my face crumples into the human equivalent of a Shar-Pei. I blink away the tears. “Mom, I just really need to be in the darkroom right now.”

  “OK.” She opens the drawer where she keeps rubber bands, Scotch tape, sticky notes and other sundries. She hands me the key. “I love you, sweetie.”

  Dad’s darkroom used to be the fruit cellar, back when my grandparents lived here. It was their house—the house Mom grew up in. They moved here when she was four and Emmy was two, and then Mom moved to New York, and Emmy later, and then when Mom got pregnant with me she moved back home, and Dad came with her. Grandma and Grandpa moved into an apartment a few years later to give us more space.

  At first, Dad worked at a portrait studio with another photographer, but after a few years he decided to go out on his own. He never had a studio in town, he just worked from home, which he said he liked because he was always here when I got home from school. Mom was usually home too, because she didn’t work, though she used to teach yoga once in a while.

  The darkroom is down a hallway at the bottom of the basement stairs, with a heavy wooden door and a wrought-iron handle. Grandma used to store her preserves in it, even after they moved. She had shelves upon shelves of jam made from every possible fruit. She’d start every year with strawberry, then make strawberry rhubarb, then apricot, then peach, then peach melba, which is a combination of peaches and raspberries, then raspberry on its own and finally blueberry. In the fall she’d move on to pickling vegetables: beets and cauliflower, carrots and mini onions, sweet pickles and dill pickles. The cellar was full when Grandma died. From then on, Mom was strict about finishing a jar of jam before opening another. To make it last. One day, we realized we only had one jar left. It was Dad who came up with the idea of having the Jam session to make what would’ve otherwise been a sad occasion into a memorable, fun one. He made posters for it and plastered them around the house. The party started at 8 p.m. with directions on how to get to the cellar from, say, the second floor bathroom. Dad only played music by the Jam, this band from the ’70s. I invited Dace, and we danced and ate jam on crackers. Dad took pictures. There’s this great photo of the three of us—Dad, Mom and me—that Dace took, each holding up a cracker with jam, Dad holding the final jar. The pic is a bit blurry—Dace was laughing when she took it—but we’re all laughing too, and the way the strobe lights are hitting us, we’re a rainbow of color.

  I unlock the door and take a deep breath, then turn the wrought-iron handle. The familiar smell of developing chemicals hits me and it’s so much a part of my memory of Dad, it’s like smelling his deodorant or his aftershave. I pull on the string that’s dangling from above and the bare bulb casts a yellow light on the room. The metal developing basins are in front of me. Overhead, photos are clothespinned along a long piece of string stretching from one wall to the other.

  I dust off the old recliner in the corner. The creamy white leather is soft and worn and I sink into it like it’s made of marshmallows. Sometimes Dad would work down here so late that he would fall asleep in the chair and Mom would have to wake him up in the morning. She’d make coffee and then ask me to bring it down to him. I’d hold a red dish towel under the cup to absorb any spills as I navigated the stairs down to the basement.

  I pull the lever on the side and let my body stretch out. Cobwebs dangle from the wood beams and pipes on the ceiling. Dad’s old wood desk looks frozen in time: a pile of invoices sits under a paperweight—a pet rock I painted when I was in preschool. The mug I gave him one Father’s Day—which used to say I ❤ Dad, but the words erased, and all that’s left is the heart—holds a stash of pens. The yellow wrapping on a roll of Kodak Ektachrome film catches my eye. I grab the roll and press it between my palms. It takes me 10 minutes to prep the developing station and then I’m extracting the film from the canister. I’ve got to see what’s on the roll—I need something from Dad, some message from beyond to get me through this. In the movies, I’d find one last roll and there’d be a photo in there. Something I’d never seen before. Something to connect me to Dad and give me some moment of peace and clarity. But 20 minutes pass and the photos turn out to be … well, of some sort of squash? Close-ups of yams. The odd pumpkin. Maybe Dad was working on a project about harvest vegetables at some point and forgot to develop the roll? The framing is classic Evan Greene, but the images have nothing at all to say about my strange, so-called life.

 
Hours have passed by the time I come out of the darkroom. After finding and developing two more rolls, I’ve inspected every single frame, and that gives me an odd sense of completion, of knowing that there’s nothing left uncovered, but I can’t help feeling disheartened and empty. Vulnerable. The main floor is quiet, but the distinct smell of paint hits me as I walk down the front hall, toward the stairs to the second floor.

  “Pippa?” Mom calls from upstairs. I follow the scent and find Mom standing on a stepladder, her jean overalls, (formerly) white T-shirt and arms all splattered with peach paint.

  “What are you doing?” I say. But it’s obvious. All the furniture’s in the middle of the room, covered in drop sheets. The green—the forest green the walls have been forever—is gone. The walls have been primed white, and Mom’s working on the wall her bed is usually up against. It’s peach.

  She looks down at me. “No bedroom should be green. It feels like a massive empty field. Nothing as far as the eye can see. It was depressing.”

  I want to point out that probably what’s depressing about her bedroom is that her husband is dead and now she sleeps alone, but instead I state the obvious. “So you’re painting it peach?”

  Mom looks around the room from the top of the ladder. “Time for a change. Want to help?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  Mom looks surprised.

  “Dad hated the color peach,” I point out. “Or have you already forgotten?”

  I practically spit the words. Mom stares at me, shocked. She climbs down from her ladder, puts her paintbrush on top of the paint can, then grabs a sheet from a pile on the floor and puts it on the bed. “Sit.”

  I shake my head no.

  “What’s going on with you, Pippa?”

  “What’s going on? Why are you doing this?”

  “The peach or the room?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. “Your father may have hated peach, but that’s not why I’m painting it peach.”

  “Oh really?” I say.

  “I’ve always hated this green. For years. Your father was well aware I wanted to change it. And we had the peach in the basement. I just need a change. This was easy, and free.”

  “So you can forget all about him?”

  She winces. “Pippa. Stop. This has nothing to do with forgetting your father. It has to do with me. It’s cathartic. It’s symbolic. I read that it’s a stage I need to go through.”

  “So that’s it?! Forget everything you loved about Dad, forget the good times, forget that what you shared was special. Forget that you told him you loved him, that you’d love him forever? You’re not willing to fight for him, fight for what you had? You just reach a bump in the road and you’re just so eager to take a new path? How can you do that? How can you have cared so much, and then just like that, you don’t care at all?” I kick at the drop sheets and they sort of puff up into the air and I grab at them with my hands, and then throw them back on the ground.

  “Pippa!” Mom says, alarmed. “What are you talking about? What’s gotten into you? Fight for what? Your father’s gone. How can I fight for someone who isn’t here? Pippa? Pippa?” She’s still talking, but I can’t hear her, the words are a blur and I realize I’m bawling. And then, a second later, her arms are around me, hugging me tight.

  “It’s not fair, Mom. It’s just not fair. I love Dylan so much. Why doesn’t he fight for me?”

  I can’t get any more words out, I can’t catch my breath I’m crying so hard. Mom rocks me in her arms, pulling me into her so that I feel weightless, whispering in my ear, “It’s OK, honey, it’s OK.”

  CHAPTER 15: TWO AND A HALF WEEKS UNTIL I’M OVER HIM

  I don’t know what I’m looking for. I open the drawers of Dad’s desk, move books, check his filing cabinet. There has to be something. A clue. An answer. And then, on a Thursday afternoon when I’ve skipped a Hall Pass meeting to instead come home and be alone, I pull open the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet, something I’m sure I’ve done a dozen times already, but this time, I lift up all the papers—receipts, notes and who knows what else—and underneath is a photo, 4x6, color, matte finish. A picture of Dace and me: we’re skating on the pond, being totally ridiculous, carefree. It was only last winter, but it seems so long ago. I lift the picture to look more closely, and underneath is another. My mom and me washing her beat-up Honda, suds on both our faces thanks to the impromptu water fight she started. Under that one is another. And another. Shots that he’d developed from film, but which never got scanned for the photo album Dad created at the end of each year. “One for the yearbook,” he’d say whenever he captured something memorable—a birthday, something funny, whatever.

  These are the pictures that didn’t quite work out. Underdeveloped. Slightly out of focus. A blur of movement. But they’re real. They’re life.

  And then I realize that we don’t have a yearbook for this past year, for the first time since I was born. I think over last year: the trip we took to Disney World on my school break in March. Mother’s Day, when we surprised Mom by making her stay in bed for the entire day, which was what she’d been saying for years was all she really wanted. Then Dad got sick. What would the rest of the year show? Him in the hospital? Us at his funeral? Him not coming to my end of sophomore year photo display, not coming to Vantage Point, not taking me to the bus terminal when I went to New York, not coming to pick me up. Memories of everything he missed.

  But those things still happened. I still took photos. Mom and I are still here, incomplete but still a family. I flip through the old photos, sorting through my thoughts.

  I need to make that yearbook. Not for Dad, but for Mom and for me. For us to move on.

  I start up his huge Mac, the one he used for all his editing work. He always kept a running folder marked Yearbook, where he’d load the good photos during the year, his and mine. I find it and click. He’d started it—creating separate folders inside the main one for each month. I click on January and scroll through the photos. Then I close it and click through the following months. When I get to May, it’s empty. The month he was hospitalized. June’s empty too. The month he died. And then I see one folder that doesn’t belong. It’s not a month at all. Instead, it says DW. My fingers are trembling as I click on it. There’s got to be at least 200 photos in it. I open the first one. It’s me as a baby, maybe a few weeks old; the same photo hangs from the wall on the second-floor landing. I click on the next. Me again, about a year old, standing in the backyard. I click and click and click. All pictures of me, growing up. Was Dad going to make an album for David? Because he was dying? Because he wanted him to have something of me?

  My instinct is to shut down the computer, to ignore this information. But even once I’m out of the darkroom, thoughts of these photos, these projects my dad had started, fill my mind. No amount of homework or TV distractions can shut out what I’ve seen. There’s something about it—this was important to my dad, sure, but there’s something else too. I lie in bed trying to work through it, too restless to sleep. Maybe it’s that I’m the only one who knows these unfinished projects exist.

  Finding out that David’s my father, that my mother kept it a secret, that my dad did too, Mom wanting me to talk to David, seeing David with Savida: everything has been happening to me, totally out of my control. But these projects that Dad started? It’s up to me what happens. I can decide to finish the yearbook that he started, to continue the tradition. I can create an album for David, a gift from my father—and a gesture that acknowledges who he is to me. I have the choice, finally. I feel a lightness and a sense of calm, but instead of finally drifting off to sleep, I’m energized. The house is dark—Mom is asleep—and I tiptoe downstairs and back into the darkroom. I start up the computer again and open the first folder.

  CHAPTER 16: ELEVEN DAYS UNTIL I’M OVER HIM

  Dace sideswipes me on my way out of last period. “You’re coming home
with me. No excuses.”

  I shake my head and try to break free from her death grip. “I have to go home. I—”

  “You’ve been spending every single minute in that darkroom. Gemma told me you skipped photo club this week and I heard Jeffrey gloating you’re giving him all your Hall Pass bylines. Have you forgotten you need that stuff for your college apps? And you’re starting to look like a snowball. It’s not healthy,” she says as we walk outside. “Your skin’s all pasty white and uneven. What you need is a change of scenery and a vitamin C peel. Also, without your nagging, I haven’t been doing my homework. The novelty of my school supplies has worn off. Not even scrolling through photos of cars helps. I need moral support. You don’t need to do anything, you just need to be there. To keep me in check.”

  The wind is whipping through my coat, and the thought of walking home makes me feel cold and lonely. I’ve spent the past two weeks locked away in the darkroom, but both the Greene Family Yearbook and the album for David are basically done. And so I give in, and we hole up in her room, with hot chocolate, marshmallows and chocolate chip cookies. I’m just setting up on the bed with my Geography textbook when Dace says tentatively, “Hey, can we talk about something?” She moves from her desk to the bed.

  “Of course.” I push my homework aside and arrange myself so I’m sitting cross-legged in front of her. “What’s up?”

  “It’s … about Juan. I broke up with him.”

  “When? Why? I thought you really liked him.”

  “Yeah well, I did, and I thought everything was totally cool after the party, but then he started acting all weird about our age difference. I was so caught up in me breaking my own rules and going for a younger guy, I never considered he might have his own rules.”

  “Wow, he said that?”

  “No, which is kind of the point. If he had, I might have respected him more, but he said it didn’t matter to him, but that his friends have been giving him a hard time about dating me because I’m older. Like, what the Fudgsicle? Man up, little boy. So I told him it was over. I’m not going to date someone who lets his friends dictate his life.”