From Bad to Cursed

“Mom’s home!” I said. “Clear the history!”

I handed Megan her shirt, and she ran to the bathroom to change. Tashi had been right. None of my usual stain-removal methods had even come close to working.

Kasey’s fingers dashed around the keyboard. “I’m going to say I’ve been working on an English essay,” she said. “You go!”

I hurried to the living room and plunked down on the sofa seconds before Mom came in from the garage.

She reached the end of the hall and looked me up and down. “Honey, you’re not ready!”

“For what?” I asked.

“Are you kidding?” she asked. “Your interview! We really should have left already.”

Oh, right. Young Visionaries.

Megan waved good-bye and left, and I went back to my room and stared into my closet, at a total loss.

Finally, I dug out a ruffly red blouse Mom had given me for Christmas and a slim-fitting gray skirt one of her coworkers gave me (people who lose everything in a fire get a lot of hand-me-downs). I tucked the shirt in and, on impulse, wove a thin yellow belt of Megan’s through the belt loops. And I found another pair of Mrs. Wiley’s castoff shoes from the pile in the corner—dark brown leather pumps with little cutouts around the edges. I caught sight of myself in the mirror and decided the outfit was all right—but I couldn’t suppress the unease I felt about the greasy, awkward girl who was wearing it.

Did I really go around looking like this all the time? Had I only realized it by being surrounded by a mob of beautiful girls?

I went to the bathroom and brushed my hair back into a ponytail. Then I started experimenting with Kasey’s makeup. I was unfamiliar with the brushes and powders and bottles and palettes, but I bumbled my way through, trying to recall what I’d seen Megan do.

To my relief, with each stroke of the makeup brushes, my reflection became less offensive.

Mom came to the door of the bathroom and glanced at her watch in a very obvious way.

“Almost done,” I said.

“We’re already behind,” Mom said. “I’m very disappointed about this. You know how important punctuality is.”

“Can I borrow your dangly earrings with the roses?”

That caught her off-guard. “Yes—but I wish you’d hurry. Do you really need to wear three shades of eye shadow?”

“Mom,” I said, turning toward her. “You standing there nagging doesn’t help. Go get the earrings!”

She returned a second later and dropped them on the counter. “I’ll be in the kitchen whenever Your Highness is ready,” she said, walking away. “Something’s really gotten into you tonight, Alexis.”

You don’t know how right you are, I thought, leaning in to blend my eye shadow.

“WARREN? ALEXIS WARREN?”

The receptionist directed me to a conference room with a long table in the center. On the far side were the five judges, including Farrin McAllister. On the near side was a single chair.

It looked like a firing squad.

I wondered if I was supposed to say hi to Farrin, or pretend we’d never met, or what. But as soon as I sat down, she spoke.

“I talked to Alexis when she dropped off her application,” she said, not looking up at me. “I was quite impressed with her work.”

I could tell that Farrin’s word carried weight among her fellow judges. A couple of them sat up straighter and looked at me almost like I was the one who needed to be impressed. The guy on the end even straightened his bow tie.

“So…tell us what photography means to you,” the woman in the middle said.

“What it means to me?” I repeated. Under the table, my hands fidgeted.

They waited.

What came to mind first were a bunch of bland platitudes: It means sharing my ideas with the world. It means creating a beautiful and exciting image. “I…don’t think it means anything.”

Good-bye, car, good-bye.

“I mean,” I said, and suddenly the answer sort of cobbled itself together in my head, “it’s not something I think about. I don’t do it to mean something. I just do it. It’s part of me.”

Farrin leaned closer. “What’s your favorite photograph?”

Now that I could answer without thinking. “‘Can of Peas,’ by Oscar Toller.”

“Tell us why,” she said.

“Oscar Toller was a photographer who found out he was going blind. So every day, he took a picture of something he wanted to remember. And one of his pictures was a can of peas on the kitchen counter. And the way the light hits it, it’s almost like there’s this halo.”

They were all watching me, and I wondered if I’d made a huge tactical error. “Can of Peas” wasn’t one of Oscar Toller’s more famous images.

Nobody said anything, so I faltered on. “And even though it’s just an ordinary tin can sitting on a kitchen counter, it makes me think that the real power of photography isn’t finding a new way to look at stuff, but like…showing other people how I see things.”

“You think the way you see the world is special?” the man in the bow tie asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably not. But even if it’s not…being able to share it with someone—that’s what’s special.”

I noticed that my portfolio was being passed down the line, and my heart fluttered. But the words kept coming, so I kept saying them. “I mean, a tin can is just a tin can to most people. But if it were the last one you’d ever see…it might be beautiful. Or sad. And you feel that when you look at that photo.”

There was a long silence. Suddenly I felt a layer of nervousness melt away. I wasn’t sorry for anything I thought about photography. I was just going to answer.

“At least, I do,” I said.

“You don’t work with digital?” one of the women asked. “Or color?”

“I had some color pictures,” I said. “But they were lost.”

She looked up, alarmed. “Losing stuff” probably wasn’t high on the list of intern qualifications.

“In a fire,” I added.

A few of the judges made sympathetic noises, and I realized that, if they were photographers, they understood what it would mean to lose everything.

“I might get a digital camera for Christmas,” I said.

“Until then, I just work in the darkroom.”

“At home?” someone asked.

“No, at Surrey Community College.” I shrugged. “I had one at home, but I lost it.”

A couple of them looked up at me and smiled, getting the joke.

“Have you taken classes?” the bow-tie man asked.

Surely one disastrous week didn’t count. “No.”

“Good for you,” one of the women muttered, and they all laughed.

“Do you think you could survive a summer making coffee and photocopies and answering phones?” someone else asked.

I looked straight into her eyes. “I’ve survived worse.”

They were quiet.

Then Farrin spoke. “One last thing.”

I looked up at her.

“Describe your work in one word,” she said.

The word slipped out of my mouth before I could stop myself: “Mine.”

* * *

As Mom and I snaked through the crowd of my competitors, I was glad I’d worn something unique—there was a punk boy with a Mohawk, a boy wearing a purple suit with a ski

Behind me, I heard the sound of the doors opening, and several sets of footsteps.

“We’ll be resuming after a five-minute break,” said the man with the bow tie, and the judges came filing out.

We’d made it out to the car when Mom remembered she’d left her book on the bench inside. She went back to get it. I stood, looking down at the recent calls list on my phone to see if Carter had tried to reach me. So I didn’t see Farrin approach.

“‘Can of Peas,’” she said. “Really?”

I nearly dropped my phone.

“You don’t like it?” I managed to ask.