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“I know,” Kasey said, nearly a whisper. “I’m sorry.”
“The thing is,” Lydia said, her voice breaking oddly, “I’ve tried to talk to you about this before. And you make excuse after excuse. So do you really know? Are you really sorry?” She inhaled and then let her hardest hit fly: “Are you truly committed to Aralt?”
“Of course I am!” Kasey cried. She shot me a helpless look, but I averted my eyes.
“Then you need to make the effort,” Lydia said shortly. “Because to some of us, it doesn’t seem like you care at all.”
This set the whole room buzzing.
“I’m sorry!” Kasey said, not to anyone in particular. “I—I didn’t mean to let anybody down.”
She was petted and cooed over like an injured kitten for the rest of the meeting. In the car on the way home, she kept her head tucked down, staring at her folded hands. She didn’t even give me an angry look.
I was a
Nobody liked to be ganged up on, but sometimes you have to break something down so you can build it up stronger.
And if Aralt thought Kasey needed breaking, who was I to question him?
I ate an early di
Parking tickets, dress code, spilled nail polish—these things ran through my brain like a flip book labeled “Things We Get Away With.” I pushed the door open and added barging into people’s private offices to the list.
The office was a perfect reflection of its owner—graceful, spotless, and decorated in clean, modern lines. There were so few objects lying around that I was able to make a quick visual sweep of the room. Perfectly normal, no creepy talismans or other dark supernatural things.
The only thing that didn’t seem to fit was a framed photograph on top of the bookshelves. It was old—from the seventies, judging by how faded the colors were—and it was a posed group picture of about twelve or thirteen girls who looked a little older than me—college, maybe? There was a unity to them that resonated deep inside me.
Aralt’s girls.
I leaned closer and found Farrin—young and intense-looking. Next to her, with a square jaw and ruler-straight posture, was a girl who had to be Barbara Draeger.
Before I could look at the rest of the girls, I heard a click behind me and turned around, ready to apologize.
“Alexis,” Farrin said. “It’s a real pleasure to have you here. Did you bring something to work on?”
Not a word about snooping around her private office.
“Yes, film,” I said. “But I can just develop…I don’t need to print tonight. I don’t want to keep you too late.”
She smiled. “I can stay as late as you need. I don’t require much sleep.”
That didn’t surprise me.
“Come along,” she said, leading me through the workroom.
We stepped into a black cylinder about three feet in diameter with a two-foot-wide door cut into it. Farrin grabbed a handle inside the cylinder and rotated the whole thing so the opening was on the other side, releasing us into the darkroom.
“Everything you need is in here,” she said, indicating a giant wall of shelves. The dim red light was bright enough for me to see package after package of different types of paper, filters, and tools. An entire section of shelves was dedicated to immaculately labeled bottles of chemicals. Across the room were the enlargers. There were five of them, in different sizes.
“Changing bags and processing canisters are over here,” she said. “And there are timers all over the place.” She scooped one off the counter and handed it to me. “Smocks and aprons by the door, but I think you’ll find that we don’t tend to spill.”
We.
“Go ahead and get started.” In the dark, her eyes looked black. “Call if you need me.”
The cylinder closed around her, and I was alone.
The darkroom was so airy and clean that I felt like I was on some sort of spaceship.
As the film processed, I set the timer and wandered around, enjoying the way the rubber mats absorbed the sound of my footsteps, and wondering if I could ever stand the crowded, dirty community college darkroom again after working in this faultless place.
When the film was dry, I cut the negatives into rows of five and made a contact sheet.
Farrin came in without making a sound, picked it up, and motioned for me to follow her back to the workroom.
She set the contact sheet on the light box. Then she took a loupe—a small handheld magnifying glass—and began studying the pictures of Megan by the pool.
“Which of these would you print?” she asked, handing me the loupe.
I studied them, trying to get past the fact that I was basically getting a private photography class with Farrin McAllister.
Megan pouting. Megan glaring. Megan looking like a little girl who’s mad she didn’t get the last piece of cake.
“This one,” I said, pointing to the sulkiest photo.
“Why?”
“Because…it’s edgy, I guess.” And edgy was my kind of picture.
She stood back. “Any others?”
I’d missed something. I leaned forward and looked again, more carefully. On the first pass, I’d disregarded the ones where Megan was smiling. I looked over them again.…
“Here,” I said, putting my finger over one near the end of the roll.
“Why?”
I bent down again. Megan’s dark hair, carefully set in large, loose waves, whipped wildly out to the side where the wind had caught it. The rippling water in the foreground seemed to echo the pattern. Her skirt hung in smooth, graceful folds, the wet edges sticking to the tiled side of the pool. On her mouth was the tiniest touch of a smile, and her posture was relaxed, and her eyes…
“She looks like she has a secret.”
Farrin smiled.
“Can I grab something?” I asked.
She made a gracious gesture, and I went past her to my backpack, where I kept a binder of all of my negatives, neatly filed in plastic sleeves. Behind each sleeve was its contact sheet. I flipped through them to find that first roll of self-portraits.
The disgruntled photo of me with my new camera, the one that had been blown up for the party, was the tenth one on the roll. But I kept sca
I remembered that picture. I’d finally gotten a sense of the new camera, but I thought I was out of film. I’d been sitting there and accidentally squeezed the bulb.
My head was turned so you could see the full, scalded-off, jagged side of my hair. There was a haughty half-smile on my face. In a way, it was an edgier picture than the other one could ever hope to be, because who sits in front of a camera with burned hair and a broken collarbone and wrist—and smiles?
I stood up and found I’d been holding my breath. I took a gulp of air, like I’d been underwater.
“That one,” I said, and Farrin took the loupe from my hand.
A moment later, she stood up. Some strange light seemed to flicker behind her eyes as she turned her body squarely to me. “Brilliant,” she said.
For a moment, I saw stars.
“Let’s blow these two up,” she said, and I looked to find her tapping the photo of Megan.
She stood over my shoulder, mostly watching but occasionally offering a bit of advice, like recommending a high-contrast filter. We processed the print of Megan and hung it to dry. Even in the dim red light, I could tell it was extraordinary.
Then we printed the picture of me. Blown up, the image looked old-fashioned, gothic. Like something that would be hung in a haunted house—and when you walked past it, it would turn into something horrifying.