All I can think about are the stacks and stacks of wood planks just waiting for me to put them to use.
“Let’s go, come on,” Dylan says.
“Okay,” I say. “Yeah. I just have to check this out first.”
31
When we walk up the escalator from underground at the Sixteenth and Mission BART station, there are panhandlers everywhere, asking us for money, food, cigarettes, to buy the papers they’re selling, to give them change for a BART ticket so they can get home. I feel caught in a stampede, but Dylan just handles them.
“Sorry, man,” she says to a boy who looks just a few years older than us, holding an angry dog on a leash.
To the ruder men who get up in our way as we’re walking, she says simple, hard no’s.
Whenever Ingrid and I got out of the suburbs, into Berkeley or San Francisco, and saw how other people lived, Ingrid would cry at the smallest things—a little boy walking home by himself, a stray cat with loose skin and fur draped over bones, a discarded cardboard sign saying HUNGRY please help. She would snap a picture, and by the time she lowered her camera, the tears would already be falling. I always felt kind of guilty that I didn’t feel as sad as she did, but now, watching Dylan, I think that’s probably a good thing. I mean, you see a million terrible things every day, on the news and in the paper, and in real life. I’m not saying that it’s stupid to feel sad, just that it would be impossible to let everything get to you and still get some sleep at night.
I walk fast with Dylan up Eighteenth to Valencia and then across to Guererro, until we finally reach Dolores Street and I see the park.
“This is my old school.” Dylan points to an old, grand building across from the public tennis courts and a bus shelter. “And those,” she says, pointing to a group of kids sitting under a tree, “are my friends.”
We walk toward them, and as we get closer, they come into focus: a boy with delicate arms wearing dark jeans that actually fit him, a couple—a boy and a girl—their backs against a tree trunk, their fingers clasped together.
“Dylan!” they all call out, their voices rising over one another’s.
I smile nervously. I can just tell from the way they’re sitting, so comfortably, that they’re so much cooler than I’ll ever be. They look different from the people at my school. My mom would say they look worldly.
Dylan and I sit down on the grass with them and I listen to them all talk. I don’t say anything but it’s not because they aren’t including me. It’s just nice to sit back and listen. Half of the conversation is directed to me. They tell me all these stories about themselves and one another. There is one about an all-night diner on Church Street, and how the boy in the jeans had a crush on a waitress who worked the night shift. He snuck out of his house every night and stayed for hours while she refilled his coffee.
“Oh!” he says, his face all lit up with excitement. “And here’s the best part: her name was Vicky. She wore this little apron over her skirt. It was so retro.”
“So what happened?” I ask. “Did you ever talk to her?”
“No,” he says, sighing. “She just stopped working. One night I went and she wasn’t there. And then she never came back again.”
“It was a tragedy,” Dylan says. “He’s never gotten over it.” She smirks at him and he swats her leg with his sweater.
They start another story. This one is about the couple, who have been together for almost a year, and the way the girl followed the guy for two quarters before finally having the courage to introduce herself. I lie on the grass with my head propped on my backpack and watch all the people walking by us on the grass. I imagine what it would be like to go to a school so big that people don’t know one another.
After a while it’s time to go meet Maddy at her job. We all stand up and walk to the edge of the park. They hug one another as I stand aside, and then they wave to me and we break off into three directions.
It’s just Dylan and me again. She rocks backward and then forward on her feet, puts her hands through her messy hair, and says, “We need coffee, right?”
Inside the café, Dylan pulls a silver cigarette holder from her back pocket. She snaps it open and I see a few rolled-up bills between its mirrored sides. She pays for her coffee and I buy a cookie, turn, and see her at a table peering into the cigarette case. She squints her eyes, opens them wide, and smears some black stuff around them. Then she snaps the case shut and starts tapping nervously against the table.
“Are you okay?” I ask her.
“Me? Yeah. Let’s walk.” She’s up and out the door in seconds and I’m dodging bicyclists and strollers trying to keep up.
We walk for a million sunny blocks, past palm trees and cafés and Laundromats, until we reach a small store on a corner. It’s red-and-white-striped, like an oversize, square candy cane with the words COPY cat painted on the front. We stop outside and Dylan looks at her reflection in the window. She moves a strand of hair away from her face and then moves it back. She turns around and announces, in a louder voice than usual, “Maddy’s shift should be over in two minutes.” She says this like I am part of a walking tour and Maddy is the most important of landmarks.
I start to think of how I could tease her about this, when the glass door opens and a girl with light, wavy hair walks out of the store. She has big dark eyes, and when she sees us a smile blooms across her face. And as Dylan turns to look at her, I watch this amazing thing happen. Dylan, in her skintight black jeans, safety-pinned shirt, and bulky armbands, with her hair sticking out in every direction and that black freshly smeared around her eyes, doesn’t just smile, doesn’t just walk toward Maddy and put her arms around her. No. Instead, every muscle in her whole body seems to lose all tension, her step forward resembles a skip, and she lets out a hey that might as well say, I love you, you are so beautiful, no one in the world is as amazing as you are.
32
Sitting at an outdoor table at a café a few blocks from Copy Cat, Maddy leans over the round, green tabletop and says, “Caitlin, tell me about yourself. What do you enjoy doing?”
It’s the kind of question I’d expect parents to ask a guy you wanted to date. It sounds so adult, but for some reason I kind of like it. She cocks her head and waits for an answer. Dylan is leaning back in her metal chair, rubbing her finger against the snaps of her leather bracelet.
Maddy looks at me as intently as Dylan does, but in a different way. When Dylan stares at me it’s like she’s looking through me, learning all the things about me that I don’t even know. Maddy just looks focused. It makes me think for a second. I want to say photography, but it’s only been a day since Dylan watched as I took the worst photograph imaginable. How would I look if I admitted that I was purposely failing at something I loved?
So I say, “I like building things.” I listen to the words as they come out, testing how they make me sound.
Maddy looks interested and Dylan glances up from her bracelet.
“Out of wood,” I add.
“So you’re an artist,” Maddy says. “That’s fantastic. What do you build?”
I try to figure out how to tell the truth without making myself sound really lame. I decide to focus on the future. “I’m about to build a treehouse,” I say. “But not like a kid one.”
“Like the ones in that book you just checked out?” Dylan asks. She sips her coffee—her third refill of the afternoon.
“Yeah,” I say. “I have this great tree in my backyard I’m going to use.”
Maddy looks excited. “My parents have a friend in Oregon who has a treehouse on his property. It’s so beautiful. I sit up there all the time when we visit him. I’d love to see yours when you finish it.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Definitely, you should.”
“Maddy’s an actor,” Dylan tells me, resting her hand on Maddy’s back.
“That’s so cool,” I say. “I took drama one semester but I wasn’t that good. I got stage fright.”
Maddy says,
“I used to get nervous before performances, too, but it went away. Now I have a ritual that I do before the production starts where I imagine a light around me, protecting me from what everyone in the audience thinks. It sounds strange, but it works.”
She explains this so confidently that I’m convinced. I ask, “So are you going to move to L.A. after you graduate?”
“Oh, no,” Maddy says. She shakes her head, and her white shell earrings sway back and forth. “I’m only interested in theater.”
I sip the macchiato I ordered and wish I’d gotten something different. I like the little cups they come in, and all the foam, but the actual drink is so bitter. I haven’t discovered the right coffee drink yet.
“So, Dylan,” I say. “What do you enjoy?”
Dylan shrugs. “I’m still finding myself,” she says.
Maddy laughs. “She just doesn’t like to brag. She’s crazy smart. Do you know how she spent five straight summers of her life?”
Dylan laughs. “Shut up,” she says to Maddy, but she says it sweetly.
“Physics camp!” Maddy shouts. Then she repeats it, solemnly: “Physics camp.”
It’s hard to believe. All the science geeks at school spend their lunch period in little clusters, talking about acceptance rates at MIT. And rarely is anyone good at both science and English.
Dylan shrugs. “We got to make electromagnets and measure light and stuff. It was fun.”
We sit for a while longer, just talking, and I wonder what it would be like to be really passionate about something. I thought photography was it for me. I thought I loved it and I was good at it. Now it turns out that I only loved it.
“I’ll be right back,” Dylan says. She gets up from the table and Maddy smiles at her retreating figure, all long skinny limbs and shoulder blades and wild hair.
When Dylan’s back inside the café, Maddy says, “I’m glad she found you. She was worried that she wouldn’t find any friends in Los Cerros.”
I fidget in my seat. “Yeah,” I say. “It’s a pretty small school.”
“I’m sorry to hear about your friend.”
I stare, startled, into my macchiato cup. It’s still full and getting colder.
“I’m sorry,” Maddy says. “I know it must seem strange for me to say that. But I wanted to let you know that Dylan lost someone, too. It’s not something she likes to talk about, so please don’t mention anything. But know that she understands what you’re going through. She’s an amazing person. I’m also glad that you found her.”
33
On the way home from the city, I sit next to Maddy in the backseat of Dylan’s mom’s car and wonder how it works when Maddy spends the night. I mean, her mom obviously knows that they’re a couple. Do they both sleep in Dylan’s room?
Dylan twists around in her seat as we pull up to my house. “So, want to hang out at lunch on Monday?” she asks me.
“Yeah,” I say. “Meet me at our lockers?”
“Great,” Dylan says.
I thank her mom for the ride and I’m about to tell Maddy that it was nice to meet her when she unbuckles her seat belt and leans over to hug me. “It was so nice to meet you,” she says. “I really hope we can see each other again soon.”
I hug her back. When we let go, Dylan and her mom are both looking at us, smiling. I want to spend the rest of my life in this car. I want to be frozen in time here, prop my knees up on the back of Dylan’s seat, and just stay. But the lights glow through the curtains of my house, and I open my car door to the night.
“Bye,” I say.
Together, they say good-bye back.
Inside, my parents ask how my day was.
“Good,” I say, beaming. “It was really good.”
They search my face for sarcasm. When they don’t find it, they exchange curious, smiling looks.
As I’m brushing my teeth, I think of Dylan and me, walking in the city with the buildings high all around us. Even the air there seems more awake. I decide that we should go there every day, a few times a week at least. As I turn off my light and burrow under the covers, I imagine myself in the future, lounging under a tree with Dylan’s friends who are now my friends. I look like them, I’m wearing clothes that look great on me. We’re telling stories to someone new.
A minute later, I switch the light back on.
Ingrid.
I get her journal out and read.
My chest is caving in on itself. I never thought I was perfect, I never even thought I was close, but I never knew how terrible I actually was. Now that I do know, regret fills me. Like the times that we would change in the locker room, and Ingrid would stare at herself in the mirror and say, How can you stand to look at me? I am so gross. I wouldn’t even look at her. I hardly heard it. I thought she was just being annoying, or looking for compliments like everyone else. I didn’t know how scared she was and I should have, because that’s what friends do: they notice things. They’re there for each other. They see what parents don’t. If I could do it again, I would stand with her in front of the locker-room mirror and tell her about all the amazing things I saw in her. And all the times when she got all freaked out and quiet, I shouldn’t have left. Instead, I should have put some music on the stereo and sat back against the wall on one side of her room, and hoped that even if I couldn’t get into the dark places in her head, I would at least be there waiting on the outside. And maybe most of all I shouldn’t have turned away from all of the cuts and burns and bruises she gave herself. I should have noticed all of them because they were a part of her. She deserved for someone to see her as clearly as they could. To make that effort to understand.
My best friend is dead, and I could have saved her. It’s so wrong, so completely and painfully wrong, that I walked through my front door tonight smiling.
winter
1
I walk to school as dawn breaks. I’m awake and alert, numb and exhausted. I never knew I could be all these things at the same time, but here I am, headed to school, eyelids heavy, breathing in the cold air.
An hour and a half before school starts the campus is a ghost town—no cars in the parking lot, no buses in the front circle, no people anywhere.
I break into the photo lab.
Ingrid and I used to do this all the time. There’s only one window. It’s along the back of the building where the shrubs are overgrown, and nobody ever goes. I guess the custodian just doesn’t know about it. Once, Ingrid and I unlocked it from the inside, and as far as I know, it hasn’t been locked since.
I pry it open and drop my backpack over, hoist myself up, and climb into the room. I shut the window and, for a minute, I just stand in the complete darkness. Then I feel my way to the darkroom.
Maybe it’s because I hardly slept last night, maybe the darkness is putting me in a dream state, but as I shut the darkroom door behind me, I can see Ingrid clearly. She flips on a safety light and stands in the red glow, takes a roll of film from her bag. In her yellow dress, with bare feet, she is the only thing illuminated, surrounded by blackness. Her back is to me. Each time she turns, I can see her profile. I want to touch her, but I stay on my side of the room. If I stay completely still, this moment might last forever.
Without turning, she says, I shot an amazing roll yesterday.
Of what?
I was just sitting in my room and this little bird landed on a branch by my window.
Just sitting? What were you thinking about?
Oh, I don’t know. Nothing. The little thing stayed there for me, hopped from branch to branch as I took picture after picture.
I found your journal. You meant for me to find it, right?
Then, when he started to fly away he lifted up, and flapped his wings so fast that they were just two blurs on either side of him.
I didn’t know you were scared.
It was like he was waiting for me, like he knew it would make a great picture. I got at least three shots of him hovering in the air like that before he flew away. Sh
e finally turns to me. Her clear blue eyes, her crooked smile. She brushes a blond curl away from her face with her wrist, careful not to get the photo chemicals on her cheek. A sharp pain shoots up my chest. I’ve forgotten to breathe. Of course you knew I was scared. There was just nothing you could do.
It hurts to look. I shut my eyes. When I open them, the room is quiet and empty. She is gone again.
I guide myself to the counter, pop open my film canister. The long negative strip tumbles into my open hands. I grope for the reel and slide in the film, fill the plastic canister with developing chemicals.
I barely have time to process this and wait for the negatives to dry. My landscape is due at eight o’clock.
2
All through fourth period the popular girls in the back corner write urgent notes to one another, the teacher sits over our quizzes with a red pen in his hand, a man’s deep voice wavers from the television speakers about the vastness of the universe, and I feel something poisonous in the pit of my stomach. If I could think of any way to make it sound rational, I’d meet Dylan at our lockers like I said I would and explain what I realized last night: it’s a huge responsibility to be a friend, and I just can’t handle it right now.
But when the bell rings, I grab my notebook and stick it in my backpack and try to make it out the door before anyone else. I think about hiding in a bathroom, but I’m too nervous to stay in one place, so I keep going until I reach the back parking lot, headed toward the bus stop. I’ll just ride the bus all the way through one route, till it takes me back here, and by then lunch will be over. Before I make it through the parking lot, though, I spot the hall monitor patrolling the edge of campus, bullhorn in hand. He sees me, lifts the bullhorn to his mouth. I make a sharp left and walk fast toward the baseball field. And that’s when I remember Melanie.
She’s sitting with some other kids on the bleachers, just like she told me. Usually, I wouldn’t even consider approaching a group of kids I hardly know. It takes a certain kind of person to do that. But this is a moment of desperation, and they’re already looking at me through the fence. It would seem strange if I turned around now. I step through a hole in the fence where the chains have been cut; my backpack snares on a wire. I have to slip the strap off my shoulders to get loose.