Sorry for Your Loss

by Jessie Ann Foley

  The judges stood before Qurt and Pup’s wall, staring at each photograph for a long time. Finally, one of them spoke.

  “What is the name of your piece?”

  She looked at both of them over a very professorial-looking pair of tortoiseshell glasses, lips pursed, fingers steepled together. Qurt answered first.

  “I call this Portrait of Nudes in Walmart Parking Lot.”

  “Aha.” She jotted something down in the notebook she was carrying. “And you?”

  “Um.” Pup looked from face to expectant face. He felt his armpits drip. Why had he worn polyester? “This is called . . . um . . . Luke.”

  “Luke,” repeated Tortoiseshell.

  “That’s it?” Qurt guffawed.

  “Yes. I mean, no! See, the full title is, of course—” His mind searched in vain for something cool. “Luke on the Roof.”

  Qurt smirked while Tortoiseshell jotted some more in her notebook.

  Pup nearly collapsed with relief when the three judges stepped away from the display. They began whispering with their heads leaning together, while Tortoiseshell typed up notes on a little tablet. Then they disappeared back into the felt-walled maze, and Qurt resumed sculpting his mustache in his phone camera.

  A little while later, the judges returned. Tortoiseshell smiled first at Qurt, then at Pup. She was holding a stack of pink ribbons in her hand. She walked over to the display and stuck one under the pin that held Qurt’s photograph.

  “An honorable mention in the category of digital photography is awarded to Portrait of Nudes in Walmart Parking Lot,” she said, shaking Qurt’s hand. Then, she peeled another ribbon from the stack and pinned it next to Pup’s photo.

  “And an honorable mention in the category of film photography is awarded to Luke on the Roof.” She grabbed Pup’s dumbfounded hand and shook vigorously, one, two pumps. “Congratulations to you both.”

  As soon as they walked away, Pup turned to Qurt.

  “Wait. We won?”

  “We didn’t win, technically,” Qurt sighed, unpinning his ribbon and folding it carefully into his fanny pack. “We qualified.”

  “Qualified? For what?”

  “Regionals. Don’t you know anything? This was a state competition. Winning an award here qualifies you for Midwest regionals. They’re in Ann Arbor at the end of August.”

  “Ann Arbor, Michigan?” Pup only knew the city because he followed Big Ten basketball.

  “No. Ann Arbor, Argentina. God. Anyone who qualifies at state gets to present their portfolio at regionals, and if you qualify at that, you get to go to nationals in DC and compete for a scholarship to art school. Next thing, you’re going to tell me you don’t know what a portfolio is.”

  Pup fiddled with the silky fabric of his ribbon and didn’t answer.

  “Oh my god. A portfolio is a collection of your best images, usually arranged around a theme. Didn’t your teacher tell you any of this?”

  Pup shook his head. Of course Mr. Hughes hadn’t told him! If he had, Pup would never have agreed to submit his photo in the first place. He had just earned himself, along with his pink ribbon, a humongous homework assignment over his summer break, with the very likely possibility that it would all end in his massive humiliation in front of a crowd of intelligent and accomplished Ann Arborians. But he didn’t even have the time to freak out about any of this because Abrihet was running toward him, calling his name, and waving her own pink ribbon over her head while Mr. Hughes jogged behind her, smiling so big his gums were showing.

  “James!” she yelled. “We won! We won! We won!” Then she was hugging him, and as soon as she let go, leaving Pup in a happy, embarrassed daze, Mr. Hughes reached in for the man-to-man handshake thing, pulling Pup into a half hug and then slapping his back, and he was still smiling in that broad, uncontrollable way, as if he’d completely forgotten, at least for a moment, to be a tortured artist or an overworked teacher. “I knew you had it in you, Flanagan,” he kept saying. “I just knew it.”

  12

  AS SOON AS MAYA ULRICH realized that not only had she not qualified for regionals, but that Pup Flanagan, Studio Art dud and all-around loser, had, she burst into tears. On the short drive from the Natural History building back to the hotel, Mr. Hughes made her sit in the front seat so he could give her a soothing pep talk as she blubbered into a tissue. Pup felt sorry for her—sort of—but more than that, he wondered what it was like to be the type of person who actually expected to win things.

  Once Mr. Hughes checked everyone in, they split up to drop their bags in their rooms and get ready to go out for dinner. Pup was in such a good mood that he didn’t even mind having to share a room with Brody for the night, not even when his new roommate sprawled himself across his bed and FaceTimed Izzy, a conversation filled with screen kissing and repeated breathy I miss yous, despite the fact that Brody hadn’t seemed to be missing her very much when he was flirting with Maya and Abrihet the entire drive down to Champaign.

  “Hey, Flanagan!” Brody called. His face was so close to the phone he was practically licking it. “My girlfriend wants to talk to you.”

  Pup hesitated. He hadn’t seen much of Izzy in the two weeks that had passed since their ill-fated game of Spin the Bottle. In fact, he’d gone out of his way to avoid her. Whenever the morning bell rang, he steered clear of the Languages hallway, where he usually caught up with her on her way to Latin class, and instead cut through the weight room to get to first-period English. A few of the varsity football players were always in there, getting huge in the off-season, and they usually heckled his weak physique as he scurried past. Taking the long way also made him late to class, and Mr. Spellman wasn’t a fan of Pup even at his most punctual. Still, he’d rather get heckled and lose participation points than face Izzy and the pity he’d seen in her eyes after their kiss. Then again, it wasn’t like she’d tried to get in touch with him, either. So maybe she didn’t even feel sorry for him. Maybe she didn’t think about him at all.

  “Flanagan! Are you deaf?” Brody took his phone and tossed it across the room. It dropped onto the hotel carpet with a muffled thud, and Pup, smoothing his hair with a quick sweep of his hand, unwillingly picked it up.

  “Hey, stranger!” Izzy’s voice was loud, too bright, too falsely casual. She was lounging on her bed, with its mountain of frilly decorative pillows, but she looked nervous. “I hear you won an award!”

  “Yeah.” Pup took his ribbon from his back pocket and held it up for her to see. “Finally have something to add to the Flanagan family trophy case.”

  “You know he traded sexual favors for it,” called Brody. “It’s the only explanation. All he did was take a picture of his drunk-ass brother passed out on the roof of their house. If I’d known it was that easy, I would have taken some snaps at Lily Hubert’s graduation party last weekend. You missed it, Flanagan, but it was sick. Plenty of drunken photo ops to be had.”

  “Oh, really?” said Pup. “And I guess you’d know how to compose the shot and expose the film and develop it by hand, too, right?”

  “I know how to do plenty of things by hand,” Brody retorted. “Just ask Izzy.”

  “You’re such a pervert!” Izzy shrieked, craning to look past Pup at Brody in the background, who was smiling to himself and unwinding the cord to his headphones.

  “Listen,” Pup said, “let me put you back on with Krueger. I have to change my clothes. Mr. Hughes is taking us out to dinner to celebrate.”

  “No, hang on a second.” She sat up on her pyramid of pillows and looked Pup full-on in the camera, focusing her attention entirely, for once, on him. She lowered her voice. “While I’ve got you on the phone, I actually wanted to talk to you about something.”

  “Oh.” Pup glanced over his shoulder and saw that Brody had pulled his headphones over his ears, and was blasting his terrible pop country so loud that Pup could hear the auto-tuned twanging from all the way across the room. “What’s up?”

  “So . . . about what happe
ned at my house. With Spin the Bottle and everything. I just want to say that I’m sorry.”

  “Okay.” Pup could feel the heat rising from the hollow of his throat all the way up through his cheeks and forehead. Did they really have to be video chatting at a time like this? “For what?”

  “I don’t know.” She reached for a pale pink cylindrical pillow that looked like a giant-size version of his dad’s cholesterol pills, and held it over her chest. “I just am.”

  “Well, okay.”

  “So . . . are we okay?”

  “Babe!” Brody lifted a headphone from his ear. “Don’t use up all my data!”

  “Almost done, babe!” She winced a little, and smiled at Pup. “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” said Pup. “I really do have to get ready, though.”

  “Okay. Well. I’ll see you at finals week?”

  “Sure. Bye, Iz.” He ended the call and tossed the phone back onto Brody’s bed, not sure if their conversation had left him feeling better or worse.

  13

  AFTER HE FINISHED GETTING DRESSED, Pup looped his camera around his neck and left Brody, who was busy picking at his neck pimples in the bathroom mirror, to head down to the lobby where they were all supposed to meet before dinner. The girls were already there, Maya stretched on one of the couches with carefully applied makeup over her puffy eyes. She appeared to have recovered from her devastating loss, and was pulling the neckline of her shirt lower as she posed for a selfie to add to her never-ending social media story. Abrihet was standing apart, in a patch of light that poured in through the sliding glass front doors. She had changed into a red dress with flowers all over it and swept her hair into a bun near the top of her head. She looked sort of gorgeous. She wasn’t on her phone, or talking to the lady at the desk, or really doing anything but standing there, in a contented kind of solitude, thoughtfully fiddling with one of her earrings. When Pup saw her, a feeling came over him, the same feeling he’d experienced just before he’d taken the picture of Luke on the roof: a need to trap the moment. Before she could turn around and see him coming, he lifted his camera, framed the shot, and snapped her picture.

  Mr. Hughes took the group out for dinner at Murphy’s, a burger place on campus he used to frequent in his undergrad days. As they ate, he regaled them with stories of his years as a painting major, the campus protests he’d attended against the Gulf War, the life-changing semester he’d spent in Spain. “One cannot claim to have lived a life,” he declared between bites of his veggie burger, “until one has stood before Guernica.”

  “Oh, Spain is such a spectacular country,” Maya said, measuring out a tiny spoonful of fat-free dressing to drip onto her salad. “But when my family vacations there, we spend most of our time on the Costa del Sol. I mean, not that I’m complaining, but I told my father the next time we go, we have to hit the museums in Madrid.”

  “Wow,” Pup said. “That sounds like some vacation.”

  “We go to Europe every year,” Maya said casually, tossing her long ponytail behind her shoulder. “Sometimes for the beaches, and sometimes for the skiing, depending on the season.”

  “I’ve been to Paris.” Brody yawned. “It was boring.”

  “Excuse me.” Mr. Hughes dropped his half-eaten veggie burger onto his plate. “Did you just say Paris was boring?”

  “Yeah.” Brody picked up a chili-cheese fry and stuffed it in his mouth. “And the food was weird.”

  Mr. Hughes stared for a moment, then put his head in his hands and sighed wearily.

  “You guys are so lucky,” Abrihet said. “I’ve never been to Europe in my life.”

  “At least you grew up somewhere else, though,” Pup said, squirting ketchup onto his hamburger bun. “You speak another language and everything. Me? I’ve never been anywhere.”

  “As of this summer,” Mr. Hughes reminded him, “you’ll be able to say you went to Ann Arbor.”

  “I’m sorry,” interrupted Maya, “but when you say you’ve never been anywhere, do you mean you’ve never been anywhere?”

  Pup shrugged. “There are eight kids in my family. I have thirteen nieces and nephews and another one on the way. We’d have to rent a school bus if we wanted to go on a family vacation.”

  “But you don’t all have to go.”

  “Yes, we do,” Pup said. “You don’t know my family.”

  “I totally get that.” Abrihet smiled at him. “I have a big family too.”

  “Are you sure you’re not Amish or something?”

  “Maya,” said Pup, “just because I have seven siblings and a haircut my mom gave me doesn’t mean that I’m Amish.”

  “But that is just so sad,” said Maya. “I mean—to never have even left Illinois.”

  Pup didn’t say anything. Technically, he had left Illinois, once. But he didn’t feel like talking about the Milwaukee trip, not with Maya Ulrich. It was one of his most treasured memories and he didn’t want to risk seeing it diminished in her European beachgoing eyes. Patrick and Luke had taken him to Miller Park for the Cubs-Brewers series as an eighth-grade graduation gift. They took the train from Union Station and bought Pup whatever he wanted that day—two bratwurst and a corn dog, a soft pretzel, a giant Coke, peanuts, a glossy game-day program, even an official MLB-approved Anthony Rizzo jersey that he absolutely loved and that he absolutely couldn’t wear now because it just reminded him of that day and made him sad. It had been a June day like this one, perfect baseball weather, cloudless and warm with a light wind, and the Cubs had won 8–2. All of Pup’s favorite players had scored: Rizzo, Baez, Bryant. Kyle Schwarber hit a beautiful two-run bomb out to the right center stands, nearly clear out of the park. Toward the end of the game, the Flanagan brothers had even made it onto the Jumbotron. When the Brewers fans had seen them on the screen and began booing them for their Cubbie blue clothing, Luke jumped up and started to bend over. The Jumbotron operator, knowing what was coming, had cut away quickly, but not quickly enough: Luke still managed to moon all forty thousand fans at the ballpark that day. The three of them had laughed the whole way back to the train, and on the ride home to Chicago they decided they’d had so much fun that they hatched a plan to visit all thirty Major League Baseball fields before Pup finished high school. They even made a list: the following summer they could fly to Boston and hit Fenway, then rent a car and drive to Yankee Stadium and Citi Field. Cincinnati, Detroit, the Jake in Cleveland, and even Minneapolis could all be done in longish weekend road trips. Carrie’s uncle lived in LA; they could crash with him and see the Padres, the Dodgers, and the Angels in one trip. And they’d already been to the Cell for the Crosstown Classic. Pup would need a passport for Toronto, but that shouldn’t be a problem. The plan was to visit their final ballpark—Busch Stadium, because they had to save their most-hated team, the Cardinals, for last—the summer Pup graduated from high school. Yes, they agreed; it was totally doable and it was going to be amazing. They all shook hands to make it official and Pup, sunburned and happier than he’d ever been in just about his whole life, had drifted off to sleep clutching his box score card just as Luke and Patrick were pulling out their phones to consult the next year’s schedules.

  They had never gone to Fenway, of course. Three months later, Patrick would be gone, and Luke would fold himself away into his law school study groups and his drunken weekends. Pup had once considered asking Luke about Fenway, just to see if he still remembered, but bringing up Fenway meant bringing up Patrick, and you didn’t bring up Patrick with Luke, not on opening day, not during October baseball, not during game seven of the Cubs-Indians World Series, not ever.

  After dinner, back in their shared hotel room, Brody stuck on his headphones and began jamming, eyes closed, to his awful pop country music while Pup went into the bathroom to take a shower. He brought his pink ribbon with him and placed it lovingly on the toilet lid. He wasn’t going to leave his award out there, unattended, with Brody. He didn’t trust that guy and his chili-cheese-stained fingers for anyt
hing.

  He stood under the hot water, eyes closed, mind emptied, for what felt like hours. If he was going to try this portfolio thing, he’d need a collection of great images, like Qurt said, and he’d need a theme. What even was a theme, though? It was something they talked about in English class sometimes. The theme was the, like, message, right? The message of a story. But how did you come up with a message when you didn’t have a story in the first place? As their conversation at dinner had demonstrated, Pup was a kid who’d never been anywhere, who’d never done anything, who’d never seen anything. What did he have that was worth sharing with the world? He thought of Mr. Hughes’s advice: articulate the emergency inside of you. As he watched the water swirl between his feet and down the drain, Pup wondered: What is my emergency?

  By the time he turned off the water, his skin was a boiled pink, tight over his face and bony limbs. He dried off, wrapped himself in a little white hotel towel, and stepped back into the hotel room. Brody, who was digging through his overnight bag, looked up and said, “Forty minutes in the shower, Flanagan? Your right hand must be worn out.”

  “What? I wasn’t—shit!” He jumped backward, nearly dropping the towel and exposing himself to Maya Ulrich, who he only now noticed was standing in the middle of the room.

  “How hot was that water?” she laughed, checking out Pup’s pink naked torso and the prominent ladder of his chest bone. “You look like you just got roasted on a spit!”