“I don’t know if Ingrid told you, but I convinced her to enter a national student photography contest. It was only a few weeks before she took her life.”
“No,” I say. “I didn’t know that,” and as I say it I feel flooded with bitterness at all the things Ingrid kept secret from me.
“She had gathered somewhere that judges look down at portraits, that it’s considered more artistic not to photograph people, so at first she submitted that sweet shot of the hill. I like that photograph; I don’t think it’s her strongest image, but I like it. Anyway, on the morning of the deadline, she changed her mind and came to me with this.”
Ms Delani lifts the frame and turns it to face me. It’s a large print, black-and-white, of me in my messy room. The lighting is very dramatic, mostly dim except for the light my floor lamp casts on me, sitting in the corner. Around me are all of my magazine clippings tacked up on the walls, and my books and CDs and clothes are strewn across the floor. My bedspread is rumpled; the top of my chest of drawers is covered with papers and clothes. I’m staring at the camera with a look that says, Stop looking.
I stare harder at the face in the photograph. Is it possible that I’ve ever looked this intense?
“Look,” Ms. Delani says, and hands me a certificate. “She won.”
The certificate says, First Prize: Caitlin in her room, by Ingrid Bauer.
“I have so many photographs of you, photographs that I will never throw away. Some of them are like this one. You’re very self-aware, very cognizant of being watched, but in others you aren’t. She took them from across a room, or outside at a distance. You’re bent over a desk, reading, or walking with your back to her, or laughing at someone else’s joke. Or simply lost in thought. There are even some of you sleeping. I don’t know if you realize the extent to which you inspired her. All of these photographs that she took of you . . . they fill a drawer in my office.”
I try to grasp what she’s saying. I knew that Ingrid took a lot of pictures of me, but she took a lot of pictures of everything. She always had her camera. She was always pointing it at something.
She says, “Her suicide shook me deeply. It changed so much about how I view myself, the work I do with all of you.”
She sighs.
“How can I explain this?” she murmurs.
“What was it you two wrote . . .” She settles into her chair, takes her glasses off, and places them on the table. “ ‘ Picture Ms. Delani pouring spoiled milk down her drain. Picture her getting a physical. Picture her emptying her cat’s litter box.’ ”
My throat tightens, but she smiles.
“I found one of your notes. I always wondered what you two wrote about so intently.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “It was this stupid thing we did. You just always seemed so perfect.”
She shakes her head. “But here’s the truth: I do all of that. Every single thing on that list, I do. I don’t know how many lists you made, or everything you wrote, but I imagine that everything you thought of, I do.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” I say. “We thought of a lot of things.”
“Well, maybe not everything, but I am not perfect. Ingrid’s death should make that absolutely clear. Apart from her parents, I was the adult that she was closest to. I was so blinded by her talent that I didn’t recognize the tremendous pain behind her work. She gave me hundreds of images, so many chances to see that she was in trouble. I failed her.”
I want to tell her that she failed me, too. I’m thinking about the first day of school—I was sure that she would make things better, that she would treat me as she used to.
I say, “I needed you, too.” My face burns.
“Yes,” she says. “I know. I’m so sorry.”
I can’t say anything else, and for a little while, neither can she.
Finally, she goes on. “I knew that if you reached out to me, that I would have a responsibility to you. That’s why I didn’t want you to be in my class at first. It isn’t fair, but the image of you is so intertwined with my memories of her. When I heard of Ingrid’s death, I pored over her photographs, and images of you were what I was seeing.”
She pauses, waits for me to say something, but this is too much to take in, and all I can do is stare at the photograph in front of me and think that I never looked this closely at myself before, at my whole self just sitting in my room.
“You had no idea how complex a subject you were,” she says. “She took photographs of you that evoke confusion, love, anger, joy . . . the full range of human emotion.”
She holds another photograph out to me. I take it.
“This is one of my favorites,” she says.
Raindrops. Patches of light through clouds. Me, on a swing, in the sky, smiling. Smiling. I never knew she developed it.
And then my eyes tear over. I’m swinging. It’s the first time I ever ditched school, and I’m moving through the sky as the clouds break. I hear the wind. I hear myself laughing.
Ingrid, I yell. This is the first law I’ve ever broken!
Her voice: How does it feel?
The rain falling. The cold waking me up.
It feels perfect!
There is commotion outside the classroom. People are going to start coming in for first period, but I’m not ready for them yet. I pry my eyes from the frame in front of me. They land on the picture of me grimacing and I look away. I focus on myself swinging. That smile.
I hold it carefully, this artifact of myself. I need a few more minutes to let all of this sink in.
Ms. Delani rests her hand on my shoulder. “They bring her back a little bit,” she says. “I wish they could bring her back completely.”
I want to squeeze my eyes shut but I can’t, not with the door opening.
Before everyone streams in, she says, “They bring you back a little bit, too.”
Ms. Delani lets me spend first period in her back office by myself, looking through her heavy art books for inspiration. I have a lot of catching up to do if I want to pass her class. I hear her lecturing in the classroom, then the sounds of people talking, and I’m thankful to be back here, away from it all. I don’t think about anything—I just turn pages, look at images, try to get myself calm.
18
Mom is home early from work. I’m lying on my bed doing math when she knocks and peeks her head around my door.
“Hi, sweetie,” she says. “I’m on my way to run a few errands. Want to come?”
I sit up in bed and stretch. “What errands?”
“Dry cleaner, hardware store, Safeway. You could pick out some snacks for your lunches . . .”
I need a bunch of stuff for my treehouse: more bolts, sandpaper, clamps. “Yeah, okay,” I say.
When we get to the hardware store, my mom heads to the gardening section.
I grab a basket and fill it up with the stuff I need. After I’ve found a few things, I remember the sixth-brace problem. I head to the rope aisle. The selection is overwhelming; there is thin rope, thick rope, rope made of metal, rope made of cloth.
I’m standing and staring at it when a guy in the hardware store’s khaki uniform passes me and stops.
“Do you need some help?”
“I don’t know which kind of rope to get.”
“What thickness do you want?”
“It has to be pretty thick, I guess. I need it to support a person.”
“How heavy of a person?”
“It needs to be able to support me.”
He scans the choices. “This should be good,” he says, picking up a spool of medium-width, yellow rope.
“Should I cut it myself?” I ask him, but he doesn’t answer.
He’s looking at something behind me. I turn to find my mom standing two feet away, her hand over her mouth, the blood draining from her face.
“What?” I ask.
The guy who was helping me backs away nervously.
“What?” I ask again.
Then I fo
llow her gaze to my hands, to the rope. And it flashes back to me—the morning I found out about Ingrid. Before they told me how she did it, I thought about all the tools she could have used to die. The gun her dad kept in his safe, the knives in the kitchen, the pills in her mother’s medicine cabinet. A rope.
“Mom,” I say. “You don’t think I . . .”
Her hands are shaking.
“Mom, it’s not what you’re thinking.”
“You’ve been so angry.” Her voice wavers. “You wouldn’t meet with the therapist. You never tell us about how you’re doing. I try to talk to you but you keep pushing me away. I worry about you all the time.”
“Mom,” I say. “I would never do that.”
And then, in a narrow aisle of a hardware store, with millions of nails and bolts and hooks and hoses and spools of fishing wire and tiny lightbulbs and ropes and flower seeds, I step forward, I reach out, and I hug my mother for the first time in months. Her hands grab onto the back of my shirt and I can feel her chest heaving as she tries not to cry. She feels so small all of a sudden, so fragile. Without even thinking, I whisper, “I’m okay, I’m fine, I’m okay, I’m fine,” over and over until she starts breathing normally again, until she lets go and steps back, cups her hand under my chin, and says, “Promise me.”
“I’m okay,” I say. “I promise.”
19
When we get home, I find my dad in his office and lead him and my mom outside. We walk past my sad little car, through their vegetable garden, over the hill, around a few smaller trees, and up to my oak. It looks beautiful in the sunlight.
“This is what I’ve been working on,” I say.
The ladder I built up the trunk looks straight and secure; the beams I’ve been able to attach extend six feet from the tree trunk, supported by sturdy braces.
“There will be one more beam there,” I say. “And then I’ll be able to lay all the floorboards down. I just haven’t been able to build it yet.” I turn to my mom. “That’s what I need the rope for,” I say, softer.
My mother squeezes my hand.
My dad sucks in a breath of appreciation. “A treehouse! Fantastic. I always wanted a treehouse when I was a kid.”
“They aren’t just for kids, though. I found this book.” I open my metal toolbox, pull out the treehouse book, and hand it to them. “See?”
With Mom looking on, Dad thumbs through pages of elaborate treehouses with kitchens that have ovens and tables and pots and pans; bathrooms with claw-foot tubs and pedestal sinks; living rooms with wood-burning stoves and couches and rugs.
He stops on a page with a simpler treehouse. It’s pretty big and rustic and it doesn’t have electricity or anything. It was built by two brothers who just like to sit up there some days and look out over a river. “Yours is like this one, but also your own design. I like how you’re building yours with the trunk going through the middle.”
“I just thought that might be cool.”
“It’s beautiful,” my mom croons.
“Stunning,” says my dad.
They look so proud. I wish I could photograph their faces.
spring
1
The mornings are getting warmer. My parents’ flowers are slowly blooming and their vegetables are sprouting up. I walk past the neat rows of plants and over the hill and down to my oak tree. Hoisting myself onto the branches, I think of how I will talk to Taylor soon. I can’t hide from him forever. I don’t want to.
I climb higher and settle myself into the rope swing my parents helped me secure to a thick branch. Yesterday, after I saw Dylan, I hauled all the leftover planks onto the part of the floor that I’d built already, so now it’s easy for me to get to work sawing and hammering without making a million trips up and down.
I work for three hours, not even thinking about anything, losing myself in the sounds of the morning: the birds and the wind through the leaves and my hammer making contact with wood and metal. I finish the whole floor. I get up and step gingerly at first, to test how secure it is. After I’m convinced that it’s strong enough to hold me, I walk from one side to the other and back—it’s just as big as I wanted, twelve feet all the way across.
I stomp. I jump.
The planks are solid beneath me.
2
Before first period, from across the quad, I spot Taylor, Jayson, and Henry walking toward me. I get a tingly feeling all over, half excited, half nervous.
Taylor and Jayson both smile at me and say hi.
“Hey,” I say to Taylor. I smile at Jayson, too, and look at Henry, thinking maybe now that I’ve been to his house he might acknowledge my existence, but he’s scowling at the ground.
“Hold on a sec,” Taylor says to Jayson and Henry, and he steps up closer to me and guides me a few steps away.
“So,” he says. “I was wondering if you wanted to do something Friday?”
“Actually,” I say, “I was going to ask you the same question.”
From behind Taylor, Henry says, annoyed, “Taylor, we have to go.”
Taylor turns to him. “Just one second,” he says, and then, to me, “Did you have something in mind?”
“Yeah. You know Dylan? Her—”
“Okay, fine,” Henry calls out. “I’m leaving, you can catch up.”
“I’m coming, just a sec.” Taylor rolls his eyes at me. “Clearly, I gotta go, but yes. Whatever you want to do. I’ll see you fourth period. You can tell me the specifics.”
3
I don’t know what to wear to the play, so I show up at Dylan’s house with a sackful of options. I lay them out on Dylan’s bed and she stands with her hip jutting out, her hand on her chin, deciding.
“It’s a school play, so it shouldn’t be that dressy. But it is in the city, and also it’s opening night, so it isn’t totally casual, either. Plus it’s a date,” she says. “Right?”
“Kind of,” I say. “At least I think so.”
She nods. “I think so, too.”
She’s wearing black as usual, but a more dressed-up version. Her pants are tight and kind of shiny and her tank top scoops down in the front and in the back, revealing her shoulder blades and the back of her neck as she leans over to examine the pattern on one of the shirt options I brought.
“This skirt,” she says. “And that sweater.” She pivots toward her closet. “And I have a belt for you.”
I grab the clothes she chose and head into the bathroom.
“Oh,” she says. “And the orange scarf. The orange scarf is adorable.”
“Okay,” I say, and shut the door.
Inside the bathroom, I look into Dylan’s mirror. I want to look the opposite of adorable. I want to walk up Eighteenth Street tonight and look like I belong walking next to Dylan, like I know my way around the city the way she does. But then I think of me in the photograph that Ingrid took, the one that won the prize. Ms. Delani was right: I did look interesting. And I was just sitting in my room, looking like myself.
I slip off my pants and step into the green skirt that Dylan chose. It doesn’t fit me the way it used to. It hangs a little. I guess I’ve been substituting Popsicles for too many meals lately. I take off my shirt, pull on a dark brown sweater that I took from my mom’s closet. It’s made out of this really soft, thin fabric. The faint outline of my bra shows through it. Last, I buckle Dylan’s wide, tan belt over the skirt. It’s covered with little bronze studs and makes the whole outfit work, makes it just the slightest bit tough like I wanted it.
“You look great,” Dylan says when I come out of the bathroom. I feel her eyes scanning my body, wonder if I can really pull this sweater off.
“Really great,” she says.
“Thanks,” I mumble, and don’t make eye contact. “But I really don’t. Look at the way this skirt bunches.”
“Fine,” Dylan says. “Be difficult. All I’m saying is Taylor’s gonna think you look gorgeous when he gets here.”
Taylor shows up five minutes early, and
we climb into his yellow Datsun and head onto the main road. Before we get on the freeway, we have to stop so Dylan can get a coffee, and then after we’re over the bridge and finally find parking in the Mission, we go into the Dolores Park Café to get another one. This time Taylor and I order, too, and he insists on paying for all three of us.
“What a gentleman,” Dylan says, grinning at him.
He turns to me. “Caitlin, did you hear that? She thinks I’m a gentleman.”
The barista calls Taylor’s name. I grab my coffee and go over to the bar to add sugar, hoping that if it’s sweet enough, it won’t be as bitter as it was when I had a macchiato with Dylan and Maddy.
“Caitlin?” It’s a guy’s voice, but it isn’t Taylor’s. I turn around to look.
Davey and Amanda are filling their coffees up right beside me. Davey’s grown an Abe Lincoln beard, the kind with no mustache. Amanda’s cut her hair short. Instantly, I feel a little dizzy. My head buzzes.
“Oh my God,” Amanda gasps. “Caitlin.”
She takes a small step toward me but stops there. They used to hug me every time we saw one another, so now the space between us feels a million times longer than it actually is.
“Hi,” I manage.
They seem just as startled as I feel. Amanda looks like she’s trying not to cry. Davey stands completely still, like he’s in shock.
“Look at you,” he finally says. “You look . . .” But he doesn’t finish.
“You look grown up,” Amanda says.
When Davey finally moves, he reaches out, touches my shoulder light and fast.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “This is hard, isn’t it? But, shit, it’s so good to see you. Are those your friends?” He gestures out the window, to where Dylan and Taylor are leaning against a pole, talking.
I don’t know what to say. How can I say yes without making it seem like I’ve completely moved on from Ingrid? But there’s no other way I can answer.