“Caitlin, did you cut school?” Mom’s voice is straining to be patient.
I stop chopping and turn around, thinking maybe they’ll feel bad when they see what their onion is doing to my eyes. But they just stare at me.
I can’t think of a good excuse, so I just tell them, “I hate my photo teacher.”
“Ms. Delani?” Mom’s eyebrows lift in surprise.
“You liked her last year,” Dad says. My parents glance at each other, but they don’t say anything. I can see my mom get frustrated. Her lips are tight and she starts taking all these short breaths. Dad sighs.
Finally, he says, “Caitlin, you can’t ditch school. There are going to be a lot of people in your life who you won’t like and you’re going to have to learn to deal with them.”
“Ms. Delani is a very, very nice woman,” my mom says. “She taught you and Ingrid so much last year.”
“She didn’t teach me anything,” I say. “I wish I’d never met her.”
I turn to look out the window but it’s dark, so all I see is us, reflected. The most unlikely of family portraits. My mother, an apron tied over her suit, her hair falling out of a barrette; my father, leaning against the oven, one hand rubbing his forehead in exasperation; and me, staring straight at the lens, onion tears drying on my face. I try to think of some way to explain this situation to them, but my mom is going on and on about the dangers and consequences of skipping school until it seems so absurd that she’s reacting like this over something so small.
“Why are you laughing?” Mom asks me, her voice hurt and angry.
“I can’t help it,” I say, giggling now. “You’re acting psychotic.”
She stops talking. She stares at me hard, then wipes her hands on her apron. Calmly, she walks to the stove and turns it off. She turns toward me and I brace myself for a hug. But she brushes past me, lifts the cutting board from the counter, and scrapes the chopped onion in the trash can.
“I’ll be in our room,” she says to my dad, and leaves the kitchen.
27
I eat three grape Popsicles for dinner and keep a few Cure songs playing over and over pretty loud so I won’t drive myself crazy trying to hear if my parents are talking about me. I don’t care about not getting along with them. I mean, it’s completely normal, right? I can’t think of anyone who always gets along with her parents. Ingrid used to fight with Susan and Mitch all the time, even though I thought they were pretty nice. Still, I keep waiting for a knock on my bedroom door because we’re just not like that, my parents and me. We snap at one another sometimes but we don’t really fight.
The knock comes about an hour later, just a light tapping on the door that I can’t hear over the music at first.
“Honey?” Mom says. “Someone’s here to see you.” I can tell from her voice that she’s just talking to me out of obligation. She hasn’t forgiven me yet.
I walk to my door and open it. My mom’s eyes are swollen and her mascara is smeared off. It hurts to look at her.
“Should I send him up?” she asks.
“Okay.” I peer skeptically at my sweatpants and ratty T-shirt; whoever it is, he is not going to see me at my best.
Mom patters back downstairs.
I hear her say, “Go on up. Last door on the left.”
Quickly, I throw the covers over my bed, trying to fake some semblance of order.
“Hey,” says a guy’s voice.
I turn around.
Taylor Riley is standing in my room.
“What are you doing here?”
“Oh,” he says, looking confused. “Well, we’re having a quiz tomorrow in precalc. He just announced it today. And it’s on the homework but you don’t know what the homework is, so I thought I should come tell you. You know, in case you wanted to, like, glance over it or something.”
I don’t answer him because I’m staring at his shirt. It says, in big letters across the front, Will WORK FOR SEX.
He looks at me. “What’s wrong? Is there something on my . . .”
He looks down at himself. I watch his face turn pink and then red.
“Oh my God,” he says. “Oh shit. I completely forgot I was wearing this. Oh my God, your mom. I can’t believe she let me into your room.”
He looks so embarrassed, and I would laugh except for how weirded out I am that he came over to my house to tell me about the homework.
“Do you think she noticed?” he asks.
“It’s kind of hard not to.”
“Yeah, but does she wear glasses usually? I mean, she wasn’t. So maybe she couldn’t really read it because it was blurry?”
I say, “She doesn’t wear glasses,” and I can’t help but laugh because he’s acting so funny and his face looks red next to his blond hair and those sideburns. “So what is the homework?”
“Pages eighty-seven to eighty-nine. Odd problems only,” he recites.
“Thanks.”
“Okay,” he says. “Well, you can study now.”
Then he pulls his shirt up over his head. I look at my feet. “What are you doing?”
“Turning my shirt inside out. Just in case I run into your dad on my way downstairs.”
“Why do you have that shirt anyway?”
He shrugs. “Jayson and I saw it in Berkeley at one of those T-shirt stores and I thought it was funny. I guess it’s kind of lame.”
I don’t want to think about Ingrid’s journal entry again, so instead I think about what I would do if Taylor started to kiss me. I imagine him reaching out for me. I would forget about everything bad for a little while.
My face gets hot. The real Taylor is right here, standing in front of me, apparently at a loss for words. Now his shirt says Xes ROF KROW LLIW.
“Thanks for giving me the assignment. I mean, it was kind of weird for you to just show up here. But, thanks.”
“No worries,” he says. He turns and walks to my door and stops.
Then he says, “That thing you told me about Ingrid? I guess that was your way of telling me that it was jacked up of me to ask how she did it. So I guess I also came to tell you that I’m sorry if it seemed like that to you. I didn’t mean anything by it.” He stops and I can see that he’s thinking about something. Finally, he says, “It was harsh, though, the way you told me. I learned the stages of grief once. I think you might be in the anger stage.”
He says it from across the room, but it feels like he just reached out, grabbed me by the throat, and squeezed me there. I feel my eyes well up. I can’t think of anything to say to him, so I just look at the carpet and he says, “See you,” and then I’m alone in my room again.
I retrieve Ingrid’s journal, ready to break my one-entry-a-day rule. But then I put it down. I need something that will listen and talk back. I rifle through my drawer for the school directory and open it to Schuster. There’s Dylan’s number next to a pixelated photo of her glowering for the camera.
I recognize her voice when she answers. It isn’t low but it’s kind of raspy.
“Hi,” I say. “This is Caitlin.”
“Oh, hey,” she says, and I’m so thankful at the way she says it, like it’s totally normal for me to call her.
“So, um. I have to do this photo assignment tomorrow after school? And I was wondering if you might want to come with me. We could go to the noodle place or somewhere before.”
“Yeah, sounds good,” Dylan says. I hear her mumble something in the background. “So I’ll meet you at our lockers?”
“Okay, cool,” I say, and I’m glad she isn’t here to see me nodding my head up and down over and over like an idiot.
I hang up and go outside again, but this time I climb into my car. I turn the tape on and listen until I fall asleep.
28
I thought it would be easy to find a bad landscape, but it isn’t. Even things that are ugly and plain in real life look different once I’m looking through the camera. Everything small turns significant. The gaps between branches on a sad little
shrub transform into a striking example of negative space. I pivot around to face the strip mall. I half expect some miracle, but it remains ugly through the lens. I’m about to snap a picture when Dylan stops me.
“Wait,” she says. “Your teacher’s going to think that you’re making a statement. She’s going to be like, ‘Caitlin, fabulous commentary on our consumerist culture,’ or something.”
I lower the camera. “You’re right. We need to find a place that’s all just dirt.”
Dylan sips her coffee, says, “There’s this place that’s like a block from my house where the land’s all leveled.”
We start walking.
Dylan lives in the opposite direction from me, on the newer side of town. The houses there are mostly huge. Some of them are trying to look Spanish with white stucco exteriors and clay tile roofs. Others are just gigantic, modern boxes.
We get there and stop. “This is exactly what I wanted,” I say, staring at a dirt lot.
“I think someone’s going to build a house here.”
I start messing with the aperture on my camera.
“What are you doing?”
“I want it to be overexposed and out of focus.”
Dylan laughs. “So why, exactly, do you want your picture to suck so badly?”
“The photo teacher hates me and I hate her.”
“Sounds healthy.”
Dylan watches me take a couple of pictures of the dirt. The light outside is just the way I want it—not too bright. The contrast of the dirt against the sky will be almost nonexistent. After I’ve snapped a couple shots, Dylan shakes her head.
“Why does she hate you?”
I try to think of a way to explain it that won’t make her freak out the way my parents did. I stop messing with the camera and sit down on the curb next to her.
“It’s hard to explain. I was in her class last year, with Ingrid. She was actually nice then. But Ingrid’s like this amazing photographer.” I stop. “Or she was, I mean. An amazing photographer. So Ms. Delani was really nice to me because I was always with Ingrid.”
“And she isn’t nice anymore?”
“She just completely ignores me.”
Dylan nods. She watches me closely. “Okay,” she finally says. “So you’re doing this to get her attention.”
“No,” I say, and it comes out a little harsher than I meant it to. “It’s just that I don’t see the point in trying to put effort into her class.”
Dylan leans back on the sidewalk and stares up at the sky. I untie my shoes and then tie them again, tighter.
“I don’t want to sound like an asshole or anything,” she says after a while, “but it seems like there’s more going on. We just walked half a mile so that you could take a picture of dirt. So it seems like you are putting effort into this. You really want to piss her off.”
“Oh,” I say. “So you’re an all-around genius? You don’t have to save it up for English papers?”
She laughs. “I’m thirsty, are you thirsty?”
We walk up one more block to Dylan’s house, which is smaller than the others, painted dark blue.
“You have an old house.”
“Yeah, my parents aren’t into these monstrosities,” she says, gesturing to the three-story beige houses that tower above her little one.
“Look,” she says. “We actually have a white picket fence. I told my parents that if they were going to move me to the suburbs, they’d better go all out. Watch: isn’t this fantastic?”
She stops on the sidewalk and then skips through the fence. And it is funny, Dylan in her dark, tough clothes, her messy hair, and smudged eye makeup, entering a white picket fence.
Dylan’s living room is decorated with all of these old prints that look kind of scientific. They each have one type of flower or fruit printed on them with the plant’s name in small letters across the bottom. When we get to her room, I look at the stuff on her desk as she puts her backpack down and takes off her sweater. She has a laptop and pad of paper and a mug with a bunch of pens in it. Next to it, there’s a photo in a thin, silver frame of a girl with short, light hair and a wide smile.
“Who’s this?” I ask her.
“That’s Maddy,” she says.
“Does she go to your old school?”
“Yeah.” Dylan opens a window by her bed. “We’ve been together for five months.”
“Wow,” I say. I start my crazy nodding. I can’t seem to stop or to think of anything else to say. I want her to know that I’m not weirded out or anything, so I say, “That’s really cool!” It comes out way too enthusiastically and Dylan raises an eyebrow at me.
I look at a bulletin board above her desk and see a picture of an adorable little boy. He’s wearing rain boots and playing in the sand. The photo has this old snapshot quality that I really wish I could pull off. It’s softly focused and the colors are muted in a way that makes me feel nostalgic just looking at it.
“I love this picture.”
Dylan looks at it, then looks away.
“Okay. Something to drink,” she says. “Follow me.”
We walk down the hall and into a kitchen with bright yellow walls and a million pots and pans hanging from a metal rack over the stove.
“Mom’s a cook. Like, as her job. She’s really into her kitchen. When we were looking for houses, my dad would go straight to the backyards, I would head back to check out the bedrooms, and my mom would go directly into the kitchens. This was the first house we all agreed on. So we took it.”
She grabs two glasses from a cabinet.
“Water? Juice? Soda?”
“Water’s good.”
“Plain or fizzy.”
“Fizzy.”
“So,” Dylan says, handing me a glass. “Do you want to go to the city with me tomorrow? I’m meeting Maddy and some of our friends.”
“Sure,” I say, and take a sip so she won’t see me smiling.
When I get home, I drop the camera off in my room and head back downstairs. I unlock the door to my car and climb into the backseat, but for some reason I can’t get comfortable. It feels kind of cramped or dark back there. I haul my backpack up to the front, and squeeze my way into the passenger seat. The view is different from up here—I can see more of the house, the patio. Actually, I can see more of everything.
I take Ingrid’s journal out of my backpack, prop my knees on the dashboard, and read.
I finish reading and shove the journal into the glove compartment. I wish I knew why she never told me any of this. Maybe she thought I wouldn’t be able to handle it, that I was too sheltered or too innocent or something. If she had told me why she cut herself all the time, or that it was the pills that made her act so spaced out, or that she was even on pills, or even saw doctors, or any of it, I would have done my best to help her. I’m not saying I’m a superhero. I’m not saying I would have just swooped down and saved her. I’m just saying the only reason everything was a waste was that she made it a waste. That whole time, back when I was just a normal kid in high school, living out my normal life, I really thought everything mattered.
29
The next day in precalc, Taylor strides past his usual seat and takes the desk in front of me. He doesn’t say hi or anything. He just sits there with his back to me like it’s normal. Mr. James hands our quizzes back to us. I got an 89 percent. I scribble on my paper, trying to figure out the problems I missed.
Taylor turns around and stares down at my quiz.
“Hey, look,” he says. He shows me his. “We got the exact same grade. Crazy.”
“Yeah,” I say, kind of sarcastically, but I’m glad that he’s sitting here, talking to me.
“If anyone has any questions about the quiz, you can see me after class,” Mr. James says. “We’ll go over the homework in a few minutes, but first I want to introduce a new project. This will be a little different. I want you to find a partner and choose a mathematician from anywhere in the world—past or present—and prepare
a presentation for the class that discusses the mathematician’s life, achievements, and historical and political setting.” He keeps talking about how math doesn’t only happen in classrooms, how it’s connected to everyday life. Taylor turns to face me again.
“Wanna work together?” he asks.
“Sure,” I whisper, and feel blood pump in my ears.
He turns back.
Mr. James says, “When you’ve broken into pairs, let me know.”
Taylor’s hand shoots into the air.
“Yes?”
“Me and Caitlin’ll work together,” he says, and then hunches over, suddenly fascinated by his quiz. I can feel the eyes of all the other students staring at us. My face feels hot.
But Mr. James, unaware that guys like Taylor are only supposed to want to work with the Alicia McIntoshes of the school, just mumbles, “Taylor and Caitlin,” and writes our names down, together, on a sheet of paper.
30
When I get to the library, Dylan is talking to the study-hall teacher, so I stay out of their way and look through a stack of art books.
I glance over at Dylan but she’s still talking. She sees me and mouths, Just a second.
I start picking books off a stack. There’s one about Brazilian music and one about bridges and one about decorating small spaces.
Then I find one with a photo of a treehouse on the cover. I open it up, expecting to see all these simple treehouses built for little kids, but that’s not what the book’s about at all. These are real houses. People actually live in them, and they’re built up on high branches and they look amazing. They are tiny and private and warm. A bunch of them have built-in bookshelves and desks. I had no idea that treehouses like these existed.
Suddenly Dylan’s behind me.
“Hey,” she says. “Sorry. Ready to go?”
I don’t even look at her. I can’t stop looking through the pages of the book. Not only are there photographs, but there are lists of supplies you need to build your own, illustrated step-by-step directions.