by Blake Nelson
I sank into silence.
“These years,” he said. “Sixteen to eighteen, these are the years when we, your parents, we let you go. We release you into the world. It’s the time when you start taking responsibility for your own life.”
I nodded vaguely.
“What can I do?” he continued. “Ground you? Lecture you? You know how unhealthy smoking is. And how socially unacceptable.”
“—but I didn’t—”
“It doesn’t matter if you did or not. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. This is your life. You can do whatever you want. If you want to wander off into the smoking sections of the world, then okay. Since you don’t appear to have any other plans or goals.”
There was no point arguing with him. He continued on about choices, lifestyles, the decisions that affect one’s life over the long term.
As he talked I felt that sinking sensation in my chest that I often got during moments when my father and I completely misunderstood each other. We weren’t on the same planet at such moments. We weren’t even in the same universe. In that way, he was right. It was my life now. He sure didn’t know anything about it.
• • •
When he was done talking, I went back to my room. I ate some of the Sun Chips from that same bag I bought with the cigarettes. I picked up my phone and found Antoinette’s number. I called and let it ring a couple times. Then I hung up.
Eventually I went back to looking at my photos from the night before. I’d moved them onto my big computer and was manipulating them in various ways. There were about thirty pictures in all. The best one was of the girl flipping us off. I’d zoomed in at the last minute and got this slightly blurry, slightly shadowy perspective on her face. She had this hard, dull look in her eyes. She didn’t even look American. She looked like a girl from another time, another country, on the streets of some war-torn city. . . .
18
“Huh . . . this chick flipping you off . . . I kinda like that one,” said Richie. “Where’d you take these?”
“Downtown,” I said. “Outside the Starlight Theater.”
We were standing at the counter of Passport Photos. Richie had transferred my photos onto his laptop. “Hmmmm,” he said.
“The light’s messed up,” I said.
“But the blurriness kinda works,” said Richie.
“Yeah, but I don’t know how I did it.”
“That’s okay. You’ll learn.”
“And it’s too dark.”
“It is too dark,” Richie agreed. He spent a few minutes talking to me about light. He even tried to sell me one of those handheld light meters.
“I’ll tell you, though,” he said, going into the back. “You want to take pictures of people on the street? This is your baby.” He returned with an older camera, a Canon. I could tell from the casing that it was rock solid. It was still digital, but much simpler to operate. You could figure it out in a few seconds.
“And then you gotta look at this,” said Richie. He dug around under the counter and pulled out an old paperback art book. It was called The Americans by Robert Frank.
He plopped it down in front of me. “This guy invented street photography.”
The book itself was old and curled up at the corners. I put down the camera and opened it. It was all photographs. One per page. They were black and white, from the fifties and sixties, it looked like. They were mostly people, all different kinds. A cowboy. A nurse. People on a bus. Rich people in tuxedos. Teenagers around a jukebox. They were in big cities, small towns. The people in the pictures seemed to have no sense of a photographer being present. The guy who took them must have hung around for a long time. He’d waited so long that everyone forgot he was there. And then he got the shot.
“What do you think?” said Richie. He was smiling. He could tell what I thought.
“These are great.”
“Hell yes, they’re great. Take it home. Study it. That’s pretty much all you gotta know right there.”
• • •
So that’s what I did. I went home, ate dinner, did my usual bare minimum of homework. Then I got out The Americans. I looked through each picture in the book. Obviously a person could study these pictures in a technical way, the angles and the light. But I didn’t notice that stuff. Not at first. I liked how they made you feel. Most of them were sad or revealing in some way. A bored waitress. An angry factory worker. A tired old person, thinking about the past. It was kind of astonishing how much they affected you. The pictures had been taken half a century ago, and yet they felt so new, so alive.
After looking at that, I went back to my own photos of the girls at the Starlight. They didn’t look so good now. They looked obvious and amateurish, like something a high school kid would take.
Later, though, on a whim, I sent one to Antoinette, the one where the girl was flipping us off. My phone rang five seconds later. “Oh my God,” she said. “That picture is hilarious!”
“I know!” I said.
“They look like they’re from another century. How did you do that?”
“I have no idea.”
“The one girl’s cute. With the skirt.”
“I don’t know if I’d use the word ‘cute,’ ” I said, blowing up that same picture on my computer again.
“Well, she’s no Grace Anderson.”
“Hey, leave Grace alone,” I said.
“At least these girls have some style. Grace doesn’t have anything.”
“Grace has plenty of style. It’s just more . . .”
“What?” said Antoinette. “Mall based? More suburban? Grace is an idiot.”
“Just because someone is from the suburbs doesn’t mean they’re an idiot.”
“Oh yeah? You sure about that?”
“People have to grow up somewhere,” I said. “It’s probably better to grow up in a safe environment—”
“The suburbs aren’t safe. Who told you that? The suburbs destroy people. They rot your brain.”
“They’re not rotting my brain.”
“How do you know? Do you think people know when their brain is rotting?”
There was a click on the line. “That’s Kai,” said Antoinette. “I sent her your picture. Gotta go.”
19
I didn’t talk to Antoinette again for almost a week. That was the thing with her. It was like you were friends for a day or two and then she would totally disappear. Then she would reappear a week later and you were friends again. I didn’t know where she disappeared to. You didn’t really see her around school.
And then one day she came to her fifth-period geometry class totally high. Apparently she had done this before. She got called on by the teacher and had to go up to the board. She was supposed to do a proof—which she couldn’t do—and then she couldn’t find her way back to her desk. The whole class was snickering behind the teacher’s back. Then, when Antoinette did find her desk and tried to sit, she missed the chair. She landed so hard on the floor she knocked herself out. So then Principal Brown had to come, with the school nurse. When they couldn’t wake her up right away, they called the paramedics.
I heard about this between classes. Everyone was talking about it, and the ambulance was still in the parking lot with its lights flashing. Antoinette had been brought to the main office by then. I hurried to see what was happening, but several teachers were blocking the door. Also, all the adults were talking about Kai. She and Antoinette had both taken a Xanax, it turned out. Kai had run off. She’d left campus. Nobody knew where she was. Which was why the police were called.
The police showed up a few minutes later. Not only did they have their flashing lights on, but they blasted their siren a couple times as they pulled into the faculty parking lot. The whole school was buzzing with excitement. When the bell rang, nobody went back to class. A general chaos had taken over, especially when the policemen came marching down the hall with their radios and their guns.
The teachers kept telling us to go
to our classes. But nobody did. I stayed by the office as long as I possibly could, trying to see inside, or at least hear what happened. The expressions on the teachers’ faces were so grim and serious, I wished I had my camera. Meanwhile, the students were loving it. Antoinette had knocked herself out! And Kai was being chased by the cops! It was the most exciting day ever at Evergreen High, and now we were missing a whole class because of it!
Eventually Principal Brown announced that any students not in class would be suspended. So finally we went. We took our time, though. People were still running around, yelling back and forth. Back in our classes nobody could focus. The entire day was disrupted. Even the teachers gave up.
After school, in the parking lot, people told and retold the story of Antoinette falling on her ass. They discussed which direction she fell. They described the sound of her body hitting the floor. They told how Principal Brown got down on his hands and knees and whispered to her as she lay unconscious on the floor. This was also the first time I heard the nickname “Antoinette Trainwreck.” This phrase became very popular for a while. For months afterward, anytime Antoinette showed her face—in a class, in the hallways—people would giggle and whisper to each other: “There she is, Antoinette Trainwreck!”
• • •
The next day Antoinette’s and Kai’s punishments were announced. They were both suspended for three days. Kai was lucky that was all that happened, since she almost got hit by a car, stumbling down the West Beaverton Highway. That’s what the police told Principal Brown when they brought her back to school.
At lunch, I texted Antoinette. We had the following text conversation:
Me: You okay?
Antoinette: They think I have a concussion
Me: What did your parents say?
Antoinette: Very mad
That was all I could get out of her. So then I texted Kai.
Me: You all right?
Kai: Ya
Me: They said the cops found you
Kai: Ya
Me: What did the cops say?
Kai: “Get in the car”
Me: And you did?
Kai: Ya
Me: Your parents freaking out?
Kai: Uh, ya.
I didn’t hear any more from them, and then they came back to school on Friday. Everyone was looking forward to that. I thought they might show up all embarrassed and apologetic, but they did not. They walked in more defiant than ever: Kai with dark eyeliner and a very short skirt, and Antoinette wearing her fake fur coat and a scarf like she was a rock star. Everyone wondered what would happen. Would Principal Brown send them home? Would he suspend them again? Would Mrs. Parsons get out her ruler and measure Kai’s skirt to see if it met the dress code?
It was a pretty entertaining day. Not that people were on their side. Most people disapproved or felt sorry for them. Antoinette Trainwreck. Sure, she was having fun now, but a drug suspension on your high school record? And then showing up dressed like that? Good luck getting into a good college.
Other people complained they got off easy, that it wasn’t fair, that if a normal person did the same thing, they’d be punished much worse. But since they were such freaks to start with—and with Antoinette’s tragic past—nothing that bad happened to them.
Hanna and Petra had their own take on it. They understood the power of reputation, so they had to respect any girls who could pull off such extreme attitude. “I love it,” Hanna told a bunch of us at lunch. “The way they do whatever they want. I mean, look at Antoinette. She’s not afraid if people think she’s a slut. She could care less.”
“She’s not a slut,” I said.
Everyone laughed.
“What?” I said. “Who has she had sex with besides Bennett?”
“Kai,” said Petra.
Everyone laughed again.
“That’s what I heard,” said Petra. “They’re lesbos.”
“They’re not lesbos,” scoffed Logan. “Antoinette went out with Bennett. All they did was have sex.”
“Sex with Bennett?” said Petra. “Oh my God. That’s disgusting.”
“I respect them,” said Hanna loftily. “They decided they wanted to be the bad girls. And they’ve done it. Everyone knows who they are. And everyone knows what their deal is.”
“Maybe she hasn’t gotten over her brother’s death,” said Olivia. “Maybe she’s acting out because of that.”
“Oh, come on,” said Hanna. “That was a year ago.”
“And she was weird anyway,” said Petra. “She was like that when she got here.”
“It’s almost too perfect, though, isn’t it?” said Hanna. “If you wanna be the crazy messed-up chick? To have your brother jump off a bridge?”
“Her dad is a major in the army,” I said.
“Exactly,” said Hanna. “The whole thing is like out of a book. She wants to be a tragic figure? Good for her. Maybe she’ll get her wish.”
20
And then one day I came back to my locker before lunch and found Grace Anderson standing there. That was a surprise. She appeared to be looking for me.
“Hey, Grace,” I said.
“Hey, Gavin,” she answered, smiling bashfully.
“What’s up?”
“Not much,” she said. “I was wondering if I could talk to you for a minute?”
I couldn’t imagine what she wanted. But I said okay. I put my books away and followed her down the hallway and out to the breezeway.
“How’s it going?” I said as we walked.
“Good.”
“How’s Austin?”
“Good. Really good.”
That was all the small talk I could manage. But it was nice to see Grace again close up, to be talking to her and having her actually acknowledge me instead of looking through me like I didn’t exist, which was what she usually did.
Outside, Grace stopped and faced me. “The thing I need to ask you . . . ,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“It’s about Claude.”
“Claude?” I said.
“Hanna’s worried about him.”
“What’s she worried about?”
“There’s something going on with him,” said Grace. “He’s acting strange. His parents want him to take medication for social anxiety.”
“Claude has social anxiety? I find that hard to believe.”
“They don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s depression.”
“That doesn’t sound like Claude,” I said.
“Have you seen him though? Have you talked to him? It’s true. He’s different.”
I looked away. “So what do you want me to do about it?”
“Hanna says he doesn’t have any friends.”
I laughed. “What are you talking about? He has a million friends. He can be friends with anyone he wants.”
Grace shook her head. The expression on her face reminded me that Grace was not an idiot, despite what Kai and Antoinette said. Grace understood certain things. She had been cute and popular her entire life, and when other cute, popular people were in trouble, she could feel their pain.
“Hanna thinks you should talk to him. That he misses you.”
I shifted my stance. “Hanna? Who completely fucked up our friendship to start with now wants me to fix it?”
Grace nodded. “Hanna didn’t mean to do that. It was just her jealousy. She’s working on that.”
“She’s working on it?” I said. “Oh great. Good for her.”
“But don’t you want to be friends with Claude again? He was your best friend.”
“Yeah, well, maybe things have changed.”
Now Grace did a little pout, her version of one of Hanna’s classic moves. “Well, if you don’t want to . . .”
“It’s not that. I mean, yes. Of course I do.”
Grace brightened. She hit me with her killer smile. “Hanna would soo appreciate it.”
“Hanna,” I grumbled. I stared at the ground for a second. Then I looked
up into Grace’s face. “What about you? Why are you tangled up in this?”
“They’re my friends,” she said. She paused a moment. “And you’re my friend too. I hope. If you want to be.”
I blushed when she said that. “Of course I want to be.”
We both stood there for a moment.
Finally, I said: “I have to tell you. It’s hard seeing you and Austin Wells having so much fun. It makes me feel like I wasn’t much of a boyfriend.”
“You weren’t that bad. You tried. You were nice.” She shrugged in her cute way. “And anyway, we were younger then. We were sophomores. We didn’t know what real love was.”
• • •
So then I had a new mission: Figure out how to talk to Claude. Not that he avoided me. But we had developed the habit of not talking to each other. So now we had to break the habit.
I came up with a plan. I parked my car—my brother’s RAV4—next to Claude’s BMW in the parking lot and then waited in it after school so I’d catch him. I was stalking a dude, basically.
When I saw him walking toward our two cars, I got out and pretended to do something on my phone. When he got closer to me, I looked up. We gave each other the usual head nod. He unlocked his car with his remote.
“Hey,” I said to him.
“Hey,” he said back, tossing his book bag into the rear seat.
Then he hesitated a moment. We both looked at each other over the roof of the BMW.
“I never got to hear how the tournaments went last summer,” I said.
Claude grunted. “Not too good.”
“I heard you made the finals in Idaho.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But I got killed in California.” He shook his head. “I wanted to strangle my coach.”
“Huh.”
“I did finally beat Jake Jorgenson in Seattle,” he said. “That felt good.”
“Wow. Jake Jorgensen.”
“But he’s done,” said Claude. “He doesn’t care anymore. He was playing out the summer for his parents’ sake. Same as me.”
“So that’s it? You’re done?”
“Well, if you can’t get out of the second round of half your tournaments, yeah, I’d say you’re done.”
