Picture This

by Norah McClintock

  Picture This

  Norah McClintock

  orca soundings

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  Copyright © 2009 Norah McClintock

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  McClintock, Norah

  Picture this / written by Norah McClintock.

  (Orca soundings)

  ISBN 978-1-55469-139-5 (bound).--ISBN 978-1-55469-138-8 (pbk.)

  I. Title. II. Series: Orca soundings

  PS8575.C62P52 2009 jC813'.54 C2009-902579-5

  Summary: Ethan has a secret that someone is willing to kill for.

  First published in the United States, 2009

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2009927572

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Cover design by Teresa Bubela

  Cover photography by Getty Images

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  PO BOX 5626, STN. B

  VICTORIA, BC CANADA

  V8R 6S4

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  PO BOX 468

  CUSTER, WA USA

  98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  Printed on 100% PCW recycled paper.

  12 11 10 09 • 4 3 2 1

  To P.S. and those nice bright colors.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter One

  It was my own stupid fault, just like everything else in my messed-up life.

  “It’s all about choices,” Deacon, my youth worker, always used to say. “There are good choices and bad choices, and each one leads to more choices.”

  Okay, so it was a bad choice to decide to take a shortcut through a dark alley. Not that I expect anyone to believe me, but I actually thought about it before I did it. And I chose to take the shortcut anyway because (a) I’m a guy, not a girl, so it wasn’t like I had to be afraid that some crazy guy would attack me and drag me behind some bushes, and (b) I was in a hurry to get home before my foster mom started to worry. So I ducked into the alley.

  I was exactly halfway down it, kicking a stone ahead of me and enjoying the rattling sound it made as it skipped across the broken asphalt ahead of me, when a guy came up behind me, stuck something hard into my back and offered me another choice: Hand over my backpack or else.

  I stuck my hands up in the air and turned around slowly. Maybe you wouldn’t have done that. May be you would have just dropped that backpack without a second’s hesitation. But I wanted to know who I was dealing with—a guy who was pretending to have a gun shoved in my back or a guy who actually had a gun shoved in my back.

  The guy was holding what looked like a real gun. He was wearing a balaclava, you know, one of those hood-like things that guys pull over their heads when they’re up to no good. All I could see were his eyes, which were hard and cold, and his mouth, which was small and mean.

  “Hand it over,” he said when I didn’t immediately do what he wanted.

  “You’ve got the wrong guy,” I said.

  I know. You probably would have kept your mouth shut. But, really, he did have the wrong guy. I wasn’t some rich kid. There was no wallet bulging with cash and credit cards in my backpack. There was no bank card that he could grab or force me to use. There was nothing in there worth stealing except maybe my camera, and even that wasn’t worth much to anyone except me. There was no way I wanted to hand it over to someone who would either toss it or sell it for five or ten bucks.

  “Don’t make me say it again,” the guy said. He raised the gun and pointed it at my head.

  I stared at the barrel. Up close, it looked as big as a cannon. My legs were shaking. I looked straight into the guy’s cold, hard eyes.

  “Seriously,” I said. “There’s nothing in my backpack. I’m broke. I live with foster parents. And they only took me in because of the money the government pays them.”

  Only part of that was true. The Ashdales probably would have taken me in even if they didn’t get paid. It wasn’t about the money for them. They were foster parents because they wanted to make a difference in the lives of kids like me. They were strict, but they were nice.

  “This is your last chance,” the guy said.

  I know what you’re thinking: What’s the matter with you, Ethan? Give the man the backpack before he hurts you. But you’re not me. You don’t understand how much that camera meant to me. You don’t understand what it would have been like to let some nut job with a gun grab it and either junk it or sell it for cash, probably so he could get high.

  I stared at that gun again. It looked real enough, but, come on, the guy was mugging me. What were the chances that anyone would come at a kid with a loaded gun just to get a backpack that might contain a few dollars or a bank card or maybe an iPod? You have to be hard up to do something like that. Either that or you have to be totally out of it, some kind of crazy or drugged-up junkie. Idiots like that don’t carry real guns. They can’t afford to. It had to be a fake.

  I glanced at the stone I had been fooling around with—it was a couple of inches from my foot—and made my choice.

  I lowered my hands slowly to my shoulders, watching the guy the whole time to make sure he understood that I was moving them toward the straps of my backpack. I saw the same satisfaction in his eyes that I had seen in the eyes of dozens of bullies over the years, the pure joy they always experience when they succeed in forcing someone to give them what they want.

  Then quickly, trying not to think about what I was doing, I kicked the stone as hard as I could. It ricocheted off a dumpster, startling the guy. When he turned his head to see what had happened, I swung my backpack hard at the hand holding the gun. The gun clattered to the ground, and I kicked it as hard as I could in the other direction. Then I sprinted down the alley. I was almost at the other end when I heard a shot. I felt sick inside. The gun was loaded after all.

  I powered on the speed. I never once looked behind me—it would only have slowed me down. I zigzagged through alleys and up and down streets. I ran until I was sure my lungs would explode.

  When I reached my street, I slowed down. No one was following me. I stopped, gasping and panting, and looked around again. Still I saw no one. My breathing returned to normal. I ran up the front walk, opened the door and was greeted by the smell of Mrs. Ashdale’s meat loaf. Home sweet home, I thought. I was safe. Nothing would happen to me here.

  Chapter Two

  “Perfect timing,” Mrs. Ashdale said when she saw me. She pulled the meat loaf out of the oven. “Set the table, would you, Ethan? And then call the others.”

  The others were Alan, who was eleven and who had been seized by child welfare because his mother, a meth-head, had been neglecting him, and Tricia, nine, whose dad had abandoned her after her mother died. Alan had been with the Ashdales for nearly four years. He was okay. Tricia was new. She cried a
lot and had major temper tantrums. I had been with the Ashdales for almost a year, ever since my last foster mother had a heart attack and couldn’t handle kids anymore. I mainly got along okay with Mrs. Ashdale, who stayed home, and Mr. Ashdale, who was in charge of a couple of recreation centers in the city. They didn’t have kids of their own. I’m not sure why.

  “Bill won’t be home for supper,” Mrs. Ashdale said as I opened the drawer to get the cutlery. “It’s just the four of us.”

  I set the table and called Alan and Tricia. By the time they came downstairs, Mrs. Ashdale had set out the food. We all knew better than to dig in. We waited until Mrs. Ashdale said grace. Then we passed our plates so that she could serve out thick slabs of meat loaf, big scoops of fluffy mashed potatoes and fresh green peas. It sounds pretty ordinary, but it tasted great. Mrs. Ashdale was a good cook.

  “So, how was everyone’s day?” she said when we all had full plates. “Alan?”

  Both Alan and Tricia were going to day camp for the month. Alan went to a sports camp at one of the rec centers. Tricia went to a nature camp on the island.

  “We played soccer against another camp,” Alan said. “I scored three goals.” Alan was a soccer fanatic. He knew which teams and which players were the best in the world. He wanted to play professional soccer. He might even do it too. He was good for a little kid, and he practiced every chance he got. Sometimes Mr. Ashdale called him Beckham, and Alan looked like he would burst with pride.

  Mrs. Ashdale smiled at him. “That’s great, Alan,” she said. “How about you, Tricia?”

  “We counted frogs,” Tricia said in a small, whispery voice. “I found some that no one else saw. My counselor said I have sharp eyes.” I thought that was kind of funny, because she didn’t look up from her plate even once. She was quiet when she wasn’t freaking out.

  “It’s good to be observant,” Mrs. Ashdale said. “With your interest in nature and your sharp eyes, you could grow up to be a biologist. Or a botanist. Or a zoologist.” She explained what each of those things was and why they were all important. Tricia kept her eyes on her plate, but Mrs. Ashdale didn’t let that bother her.

  “What about you, Ethan?” Mrs. Ashdale said to me. “How’s the project going?”

  I was too old for baby camps, so my youth worker suggested that I take part in a special program for kids like me, which is to say, at-risk kids. Kids who have been in trouble. Kids who need to turn their lives around before it’s too late. The program was called Picture This. It taught kids the basics of photography and gave them special projects to work on, which we were supposed to talk about regularly in a group. The idea was to really look at the world around us and to try to capture it with our cameras.

  We spent the first couple of weeks learning how cameras work and experimenting with composition, framing and photo editing on the computer. Now we were working on our own projects.

  “So far, so good, I guess,” I said. “But I’m probably going to have to go back for more pictures. I want to see if I can get closer this time.”

  We were supposed to pick a theme and illustrate it with photographs. I picked freedom. I wanted to show that it isn’t possible for a person to be completely free, because there is always something—usually more than one thing—that puts serious limits on freedom. To do that, I was documenting a couple of hawks I’d discovered in the woods north of the city one time when Mr. Ashdale took me hiking. Hawks look like they’re totally free, especially when they’re soaring high against a clear blue sky. They’re birds of prey, powerful birds that take whatever they want from nature. They’re like a lot of guys I used to know. They look and act like kings. But they aren’t completely free. Not only was the hawks’ habitat endangered, but so was the habitat of their prey, thanks to people. It was getting harder and harder for those kings of the sky to get what they wanted. And it was going to get even worse, just like things almost always turned bad for the guys I used to know, guys in gangs who thought they could do whatever they wanted, but who ended up either dead or in prison.

  My project was going really well. I was proud of what I’d done so far. All my pictures were in the digital camera that the Ashdales had bought me for my birthday back in April. That’s why I didn’t want to hand it over to the guy in the alley. I didn’t tell Mrs. Ashdale about what had happened. I didn’t want her to worry.

  “I’ll probably head up there again tomorrow, if that’s okay with you,” I said. “I have a note from DeVon.” DeVon Loomis was in charge of the Picture This program. I’d asked him to write the note so that Mrs. Ashdale wouldn’t think I was trying to duck the program for a day. I dug it out of my pocket and handed it to her. She didn’t read it. She just smiled and set it next to her plate.

  “I’d love to see what you’ve done so far,” she said. “Maybe you could show me after we clean up the kitchen.”

  “Sure,” I said. If I had to name only one thing that I liked about the Ashdales, it was that they were really interested in what I was doing. It wasn’t a put-on. They actually listened when I told them how my day had been or what assignments I was working on for school. So I was more than happy to get out my camera later that evening and show Mrs. Ashdale my pictures. She exclaimed over the ones that I thought were the best and asked a lot of questions.

  “Who’s that?” she said, pointing to the camera display screen. I squinted at it.

  “Just some guy,” I said. He was a middle-aged man, and he was leaning on a shovel. He was in the bottom corner of two of my pictures. “I need those shots,” I said. “I figured I could edit him out.”

  “You can do that?” Mrs. Ashdale said. She sounded surprised.

  “With the software they have at the youth center, you can do anything,” I told her.

  I had a few more pictures to show her, but we were interrupted by a crash and a shout from Alan: “Tricia’s breaking things again!”

  Mrs. Ashdale sighed.

  “If you haven’t already, you should make backup copies of your pictures, Ethan,” she said. She sounded like DeVon. He was always bugging me to back up my work.

  “I will,” I said. “After I get the last few shots I need.”

  She ran up the stairs to deal with Tricia. I looked through my pictures again and made a list in my head of what I needed to complete my project. It’ll be easy, I thought.

  Chapter Three

  I got up early the next morning and made myself a couple of peanut butter sandwiches. I put them in my backpack along with an orange and a bottle of water. Then I headed out. I had to take two city buses and then transfer to a completely different bus line to get where I was going. It was like traveling to another country.

  The bus driver let me off at the side of a two-lane highway. I darted across it and walked against traffic to a graveled side road. Fifteen minutes later, I left the graveled road for a path that led into the forest where Mr. Ashdale had taken me hiking that time.

  It was cool and peaceful in among the trees. Everything smelled like pine and wildflowers, and I heard the babble of a stream running, hidden through the trees. Every now and then a chipmunk scurried across the trail ahead of me, and I heard the call of birds overhead. I wished I could tell what kind of birds they were just from the way they sounded, but I couldn’t. I had to see them, and even then I only knew the basic ones: robins and blue jays, pigeons and seagulls, eagles and owls. And, of course, hawks.

  I pulled out the map Mr. Ashdale had given me and that I had marked as best as I could so that I would remember where I had been. I used it to guide me deep into the woods where I had found my two hawks. They weren’t in their nest, so I settled down to wait for them.

  Quiet and patience were good things when you were looking for birds, Mr. Ashdale had told me. Anyone from my old neighborhood, the one where I used to live before I was put into foster care, would tell you that I am not a quiet or patient person. Normally I wasn’t. But there was something about being in the woods when there was no one else around that ma
de me feel calm and peaceful. And there was something about scanning the treetops through the lens of a camera or a pair of binoculars that made me pay close attention to what I was looking at. An hour passed before I knew it, and I wasn’t the least bit impatient or antsy for something to happen.

  I took out one of my sandwiches and ate it between peeks through my binoculars. I peeled my orange and ate that too. I was about to start on my second sandwich when I saw my two hawks soaring high in the sky, doing a slow, wheeling, swooping dance up there against the clear, bright blue before finally setting their wings to sail for home.

  I got a couple of good shots. Then, once they were nested, I crept up to the bottom of their tree and pointed my camera directly up. I could barely see their nest from way down below. I took a picture. Then I extended my telephoto lens halfway so I could make out the clump of twigs and leaves and who-knew-what-else the two birds had glued together to make a home. I took another picture. Finally I extended my lens the whole way, for as close-up a shot as I could get. I took that picture too. I returned to where I had been sitting, unwrapped my second sandwich and ate while I waited for the hawks to go hunting.

  It was midafternoon, and I hadn’t done much except sit, watch and wait. But I finally got what I needed. I checked to make sure I had picked up all my garbage—like Mr. Ashdale had taught me—and I headed back to the highway to catch a bus home.

  I was still in a pretty mellow mood by the time I got back to the city. I couldn’t wait to show Mrs. Ashdale my new pictures. I knew she would appreciate them. So I was swinging along, humming to myself, when I got to the end of my street. That’s when I saw the cop cars—two of them—pulled up to the curb in front of the Ashdales’ house. In the old days, I would have been shaking all over, sure that they had come for me. But I hadn’t done anything wrong since I’d been living with the Ashdales, so I knew I was in the clear. I ran up the street to see what had happened.