Rosebush (10 page)

I’d never experienced anything like that complete darkness and it threw me. I kept blinking, expecting my eyes to adjust, to be able to pick out the outlines of things, maybe a seam of light from the door.

Nothing. Just pure, all-engulfing dark.

When that realization settled in, I started to freak out. I felt like the ground was sliding out from under me, like gravity ceased to exist. I knew the table with all my supplies on it was in front of me, but my fingers wouldn’t work, I couldn’t find them. A trickle of sweat ran down my back and my hands and knees began to tremble and it was like someone was clenching my chest. I couldn’t breathe, I had to get out, only there was no out, I couldn’t find the door, the floor was sloping, where was the exit, I was trapped, I was going to die here, I’d never get out, I was—

I was gasping for air when he spoke from behind me. “Close your eyes,” he said, next to my ear.

It should have been terrifying to have a strange guy so close to me in the dark, but it wasn’t. It was reassuring. Grounding. I closed my eyes.

“Now take a nice big breath.”

I took a breath. And then another.

“You’re okay,” he went on. “You’re fine. It seems different, but it’s the same as when the lights are on. Everything is still there.”

Like magic, it was true. I was fine. My hands stopped shaking. I found all my equipment just how I’d laid it out, and I managed to thread the film into the negative-developing tank and seal it up. I wasn’t even the last one done.

It seems different, but everything is still there.
It had been true then, and it would be true now, I told myself.

When the lights had gone on in the darkroom, I’d looked around to see who had helped me and was astonished when the guy who always sat in the back by himself during critique wearing a fedora and making notes came over and introduced himself.

“I’m Scott.”

“I’m grateful. Jane.” I held out my hand.

“Nice to meet you, Grateful Jane.”

“No, it’s just Jane.” He raised an eyebrow and I realized he’d been making a joke. “Right, you knew that. Anyway, I am. Grateful, I mean.”

“No need, Just Jane.”

“How did you know what to do?”

“I’m a student of the way that perception impacts reality,” he said, sounding a little pompous. Then he grinned. “Plus I’ve been there. First time I did my own negatives, I totally freaked.”

He and I sat together at dinner at one of the scarred wooden tables with generations of initials carved into its top, and over institutional pizza and fizz-less soda I learned that he wasn’t shy, just thoughtful, that he lived in the town next to Livingston—“the sketchy town where you and your friends go to buy beer.” He was both the photo editor of his school paper and the head yearbook photographer and dreamed one day of having a gallery of his own. In the meantime, he planned to go to law school because you have to pay the bills somehow and fund it half with scholarships and half by doing commercial photography work. Over the next three weeks and innumerable cups of watery coffee, “Just Jane” was shortened to J. J. and we became good friends. He was more intense and focused than anyone I knew but also more passionate, ramming full speed ahead into anything that interested him.

I caught up with him one afternoon after a particularly harsh critique of his work. He veered off the path and into the forest, head down, fast. Pine needles crunched under my feet as I ran to keep up.

“Are you okay?” I asked when I caught him.

He turned to me, beaming. The sunlight filtered through the bluish-green trees, picking up the gold flecks in his eyes. He looked alight. “Hey, J. J.! Wasn’t that great?”

“The critique? But they—” I tried to figure out how to say it nicely.

“—they hung me out to dry,” he finished, grabbing me by the arms and spinning me around. “I know. Did you notice how not a single person could criticize the composition or the angle or the technique? It was all about how the photos made them uncomfortable.”

I nodded.

“It shows I got to them. My photos had an effect. That’s better than simple like or hate.” He exploded in a rich, rolling laugh and curled his hand into a fist of triumph. “They’re going to keep thinking about it. Perception can make reality. Change one and you change the other. That’s art.”

Perception can make reality. The darkroom felt different with the lights off, but everything was actually the same. Everything was still there, right where I’d left it.

It would be like that now—everything where it should be. But not being able to remember was making the world feel so weird, so alien. My life was still my life. My friends were still the same people they’d been before.

Which meant so was I.

I didn’t. I didn’t because it wasn’t possible. No one wanted to hurt me. My life was nearly perfect. I got along with almost everyone. People signed my yearbook with things like “You’re the best!” and “Love you!” and “Let’s get together this summer!” Friends didn’t harm friends—having friends meant never being alone and unprotected. Never being abandoned.

I opened my eyes and discovered Kate and Langley standing near the foot of my bed. My best friends. They were smiling at me, and Langley waved. I looked from one to the other of them and a voice in my mind screamed,
Bitches!

Chapter 9

The word had
swooped into my brain like an alien invasion and left me feeling just as rattled and confused as if I’d woken up on a spaceship. Something tugged at the edge of my consciousness like an image seen only out of the corner of your eye, but I had no idea what it was, no idea where that word, and the fury that accompanied it, came from. I loved Kate and Langley. They were everything to me.

In the next instant the anger was gone. But the residue of strangeness lingered like the bad aftertaste of food court Chinese food even as I realized how crazy I was being. If this was the kind of thing I could think about my two best friends, then hallucinating writing on a mirror was nothing. Kate and Langley
always
looked perfect. It was who they were. And who I was. It was part of what I liked about them and myself.

Langley was wearing a puff-sleeved T-shirt with cherries embroidered on it, a denim flared miniskirt, white lace kneesocks, and the Marc Jacobs Mary Janes we’d flipped a coin for when we saw them on sale two weeks earlier. Her lip gloss was fresh, her platinum hair just the perfect amount messy. She looked like Goldilocks on a slightly punk bender.

Even dressed casually in a green-gray long-sleeved T-shirt dress that matched her eyes and brown motorcycle boots, Kate managed to exude grace. Her wavy hair was held off her face with sunglasses and each time she moved, the armful of gold bangles she was wearing gave a pleasant tinkling sound.

Langley, naturally, made the first move, rushing toward me and saying, “Oh my God, jelly bean, I am so happy to see you awake!” She threw her arms around me as well as she could and hugged me.

Kate, moving more slowly, came around the other side and laid her fingertips on my hand. “You have to stop worrying us this way,” she said, bending to give me a kiss on the cheek. There was something strained about her voice, her manner, like she was playing at being carefree. Up close, I noticed she had a cut on her lip. She smiled and said, “Honestly, I feel it aging me prematurely. My mother will never forgive you if I have to start Botox at eighteen.”

“We can’t have that,” I agreed. “What happened to your—”

“Everyone is talking about you!” Langley interrupted. There was nothing strained or weird about her. She’d seated herself on the windowsill and now she picked up the teddy bear wearing the muscle shirt that had arrived earlier. She stretched the T-shirt to read it and made a face. “
Beary
soon? Who gave you this?”

“A secret admirer,” I said. “It came with the roses.”

“Isn’t that in slightly poor taste?” Kate asked.

“The bear?” I asked. “Or sending roses? Actually, yes to both.”

“I think it’s sweet,” Langley said. She pushed aside the vase of flowers from Ollie to seat the bear in the center of the windowsill. “There, now you can see it from anywhere in the room.”

“Lucky,” Kate said.

“Yes, I feel like one of fortune’s most favored right now.”

Kate laughed, her genuine ringing peal, and for a moment all the tension was gone. “At least you look nice with your hair slicked back? Very French and jejune.”

“Would you like fries with that whopper?” I asked.

Langley smiled. “That’s my line. But I’ll let you have it since you’re hobbled.” She hopped off the windowsill and pulled a DVD out of her bag. “Enough chitchat, we have something to show you.”

Placing my mother’s laptop on the table next to my bed, she slid the disc in and pressed play. The opening chords of David’s band’s best song, “Highway Man,” started. It was the background music behind a video of all my friends telling me to get well, get better, hurry back. The Bryson twins mooned the camera and T. C., Marla, and Poppy, our freshman little sisters, read a poem and Vivian and Boz beat-boxed while Winston did the robot and pretty much everyone in our class and the class below appeared doing something. They’d even managed to get Ollie, who wouldn’t let me take a picture of him “because you never knew what someone would do with it,” to appear standing in front of his Range Rover in Kate’s driveway saying, “Fix yourself up and get back here.” It looked like instead of spending the day at the country club, Langley and Kate had covered every inch of Livingston to interview all our friends, and as I watched it, I was touched. That they had done it, and that everyone had agreed to participate.
See
, I wanted to tell that weird voice from earlier.
You’re wrong.

Everyone looked happy and perfect, like they were in a music video or a hip catalog. One of the double-page spreads where it’s like you just caught a bunch of absurdly attractive guys wearing nothing but strategically ripped jeans and leather necklaces and girls in cargo shorts and ruffled shirts and rain boots with tiaras perched insouciantly atop accidentally loose braids running through a stream in the middle of nowhere on the way to some fantastic bohemian picnic where they would drink sodas in old-fashioned bottles and be clever and witty and have the most marvelous time.

That reminded me of Scott again, of the series of photos he did that he called Still Lifes with Aspirations. “People playing parts without even being aware of them,” he’d explained when I asked him about the theme. “You know those pictures that come in the frames you buy at the store? They show the perfect vacation, perfect wife, perfect child. It’s like lining those up on the dresser and pretending they were really yours.”

“But you shoot candids. Of real people.”

“Who are really posing. Playing at being real, living the way they think they should, hoping that if they make it look right on the outside, it will be right on the inside.”

“Isn’t that a little cynical?” I asked him. “Couldn’t people just be happy?”

Scott’s eyes twinkled. Unlike a lot of people, he enjoyed it when you questioned what he said. “How do you know they’re happy? I think every smile hides a secret. You can learn the most about people when they don’t know you’re watching them.” Then he went through and pointed out details in the photos that showed the space between appearance and reality, some troubling thing you didn’t see at first that suggested the perfection could unravel at any moment. “These images are like Christmas ornaments, shiny and pretty and reflecting back what people want to see. But they’re hollow—they’re all surface.” His eyes went dark and intense and sometimes when he got that way, he could be a little unsettling.

“I like surface,” I said to him, because it was true, and because I wanted to defuse his seriousness. “I want to believe in the possibility of perfection.”