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Once Rose had gone, Larry handed me the little silver camera, which felt lighter than usual and oddly warm, as if it had been baking in the sun. “You got lucky,” he told me. “Just needed to be cleaned.”

I pushed the power button, and the screen blinked to life with a reassuring chime.

“Like magic,” I said.

“Nope—not magic at all.” Larry pointed to the little screen, which showed my mom pruning a rosebush in front of our house in Amerige. We used to have gardeners, but my parents fired them to save money. Now half of our yard was overgrown and the other half was more or less dead. The roses looked good, though.

Larry's fingers were square at the edges, his nails cut very short. “You know how digital cameras work?”

I shook my head. As much as I loved photography, I'd never thought much about the technical stuff.

“You got your lens here,” Larry said, pointing to the front of the camera. “The lens sees the light from an image—just like the lens in your eye. Inside your camera, there's a chip made out of silicon covered with millions of these tiny dots called pixels.”

Larry took the camera from my hand. “When you take a picture, the pixels get all excited, and they change the energy from the light wave into photoelectrons.”

I smiled politely. This was kind of boring, and I really wanted to get to the beach.

The camera flashed in my face, and I yelped.

“Sorry,” Larry said, handing back my camera. “Didn't mean to scare you.”

“It's okay.” My heart raced. On the camera's screen I looked pale and lost, like a ghost of my usual self.
Delete.

“After you take a picture, the camera stores the electrical charge,” Larry said. “Then it converts the charge into a number—you know, a digit.”

When I didn't say anything, Delilah said, “As in ‘digital photography.”

“Oh!” I said. “Got it.” I imagined a billion tiny pixels in my head, all lighting up at once.

After Larry returned to the back of the shop, Delilah pulled a yellow slip of paper from underneath the counter and put it next to the junk.

She punched a couple of buttons on the cash register. “That'll be…fifty-three dollars even.”

I stared at her, horrified. With all the family drama, I'd forgotten that I'd need money for the repair. What was I thinking, sending my parents away? Not that I loved the idea of asking them to pay for anything right now. My wallet was back in the room. How much was in there?

“I don't have the money,” I said, finally. “At least not with me.”

Deflated and embarrassed, I put the camera on the counter, next to a mound of Snapple caps. “I'll come back later.” I swallowed hard, but the taste of misery remained. Maybe my parents and I could split the cost of the repair.

“How long are you going to be in town?” she asked.

“A couple of weeks.” God, that sounded like a long time.

She studied me. “Just take it,” she said after a long pause. “You can pay me next time you're downtown.”

Was she serious? I checked her face. She was.

“Thanks.” I tried to smile.

 

The beach was colder and foggier than the day before, though the fog did little to muffle the sounds of rushing waves, boat engines, and screaming seagulls. Pounding hammers echoed from a beachfront condo renovation. Camp kids in matching red bathing suits crowded the sand and water. The fog blurred their edges. They looked like something out of a dream.

It was too cold to swim, but following my surf shop victory, I had no choice but to put on my new bikini and board shorts. Once I'd returned from the restroom (which smelled like raw sewage and had no soap in the dispensers), I dropped the surf shop bag stuffed with my dark clothes on the sand next to my parents, who huddled in their beach chairs, towels over their laps, glaring at the water. Talk about negative energy.

“I'm going to take some pictures.” I took a small step away before adding casually, “My camera cost fifty-three bucks to fix.”

A seagull landed by my mother's feet. She shooed it away. “What's your point?” she asked finally.

I fiddled with my camera. “I didn't have any money with me. But they said I could come back later….”

“And you expect us to pay for the camera that you broke.” The crease between her eyebrows was huge. Next to her my father closed his eyes.

“I didn't say that.” So much for their paying half. “But I might need to borrow some money. I'll pay you back when we go home in a couple of weeks.”

“We might not be going home then,” she told the ocean.

“Excuse me?”

“Your father—the job here…he's going to see if he can stay on a little longer.”

I tensed. “How much longer? 'Cuz I've got that photography class the second week of August, plus Lexie is coming back from the lake. And also, Melissa—you know,
The Buzz
editor—she talked about having everyone over for a barbecue sometime this summer, and—”

“Not everything is about you, Madison,” my mother interrupted, her lips turning an angry white.

“I didn't say it was.” My hands shook.

“You think I'm happy?” she said. “You think I want to be here? Right now we're just trying to
survive.
”

I blinked in astonishment. “Survive? You're sitting on the beach!” I was going to say more, but a group of kids walked by. I looked at the sand.

“We have no money,”
my mother snarled once the kids had passed.
“Don't you understand how bad things are?”

“Stop!” my father pleaded, finally opening his eyes.

“No,
you
stop!” she said, turning her anger to him.

“Both of you stop!” I yelled—even though my father had said only, like, twenty words in the past six months. And then I turned and ran away because, frankly, I'd had enough.

Maybe divorce isn't such a bad idea after all,
I thought, a sob catching in my throat the instant the words formed in my brain.

W
HAT SUCKS ABOUT HAVING A BLOWOUT FIGHT
with your parents on a supposed vacation is that you can't lock yourself in your room or storm off to your best friend's house. Once I reached the parking lot, I hung a left on the sandy street that ran parallel to the water until I reached another parking lot…and entered a different section of the beach. Oh, yeah, I am such a badass.

Fog hovered over the sand, thick and eerie. I shot some pictures of the kids in the red bathing suits, but I was so upset that it felt like someone else was pushing the button. Still, I kept snapping because it gave me something to do.

At the beginning of the rock retaining wall, I snapped a picture of a green metal railing. I captured a waterbird dancing at the ocean's edge. Back on the public beach, the kids in red bathing suits looked like an army of ghosts. I zoomed in and took a few shots.

As I trudged along the sand next to the rocks, icy water nipped at my feet. I barely felt it. The camera remained firmly strapped to
my wrist: I hadn't even paid for this repair yet; I certainly couldn't afford another one.

The sand stopped at a rock outcropping, waves slamming into the side with a slap and a whoosh. The wide public beach seemed very far away, the kids in red a fuzzy blur, the long narrow strip of beach between us deserted. It looked like the end of the world. I could almost imagine what it would feel like to be the last person on earth. If I screamed or laughed or cried, no one would hear me. I had never felt so alone.

I held up my camera and held it steady. It warmed my hands. I looked at the empty beach, made small and safe within my camera's screen, and I squeezed.

I sat on the rocks for a while, ignoring the signs that warned me to stay off, almost hoping for a rogue wave to wash me away. Not likely: the surf was pretty tame.

Once I got too cold, I headed back to the main beach and my parents, who looked both relieved and mad when they spotted me.

“Can I have the room key?” I mumbled.

“We were just about to head back,” my mother said, pushing herself up from her canvas chair and sticking some things in the beach bag.

The three of us packed everything without looking at one another and trudged back to the room in silence. When we got to our door, my mother dug through her purse until she found the key.

She said, “Your father has to make a quick trip to Amerige next week. He'll bring back your suitcase.”

My father put his hand on my shoulder and kept it there until I looked at him.

“I'm sorry,” he whispered.

I nodded. There was really nothing else to say.

 

For dinner that night, my mother made blackened hot dogs. “Blackened” sounds better than “burnt,” which is what they really were. The ketchup was store-brand. Store-brand ketchup is crap. I could live with Target clothes (actually, some of them are pretty cute), cheap makeup, and my mother's cooking. But asking me to give up Heinz? That was crossing the line.

We didn't talk much at dinner, which was nothing unusual since at home we normally ate in separate rooms: my mom in the kitchen, my dad in the den (oh, sorry—The Library), and me in my room with my friendly computer. It seemed weird, though, to be in one room (my mom at the table, my dad on the bed, me on the couch) and say nothing more than:

“Is there mustard?” (Dad)

“No.” (Mom) And then to me, after a really, really, really long silence: “I'm going to get a job here. Just so you know.”

 

After dinner, I took a shower, which turned out to be a surprisingly stressful experience. As I washed my hair with what I swear was bug-spray-scented shampoo, someone in another room flushed a toilet, and the spray scalded my back. I spent the rest of the shower adjusting and readjusting the temperature and pressing myself as close to the tile wall and out of the spray as possible.

I want to go home,
I kept thinking.
Please let me go home.

How much longer did my parents plan on staying? They'd never answered the question. If my mom was really going to get a job—I'd believe it when I saw it—we'd be stuck here for at least
a month. Who would hire her for less than that? School started at the beginning of September, in…let's see…fifty-four days. At least we'd be home by then. (Things had to be bad if I was counting the days till I started tenth grade.) Surely they'd give me at least a week (two weeks, two and a half?) to do stuff at home before I went back to school.

Next, wearing one of my dad's big T-shirts, which was orange and said
DENNIS'S BUILDING SUPPLY
, I took my camera and a blanket outside. Beyond the sliding glass door, a long line of small concrete pads stretched along the length of the building, each patio “furnished” with two white plastic chairs and a matching plastic table, most of which were draped with beach towels and wet bathing suits. Beyond, a steep dirt hill speckled with scruffy grass blocked the freeway. Car fumes lay heavy in the air. I envied the cars whizzing by on the other side of the dirt divide. If only I could drive away from here.

I wrapped the blanket around myself, settled onto a slightly damp plastic chair, and turned on my camera, which glowed like a miniature movie screen in my hands. The camera was filled with shots from Amerige: the peer leadership group eating dinner at The Cheesecake Factory; a pack of friends laughing at the school lunch tables, a night at the movies. I was in a few of the shots, smiling along with everybody. That world seemed so far away.

There were a bunch of pictures taken on the day before we'd left, when I'd gone swimming with the Larstrom girls. Lexie, Brooke, and Kenzie all had long blond hair that turned white in the summer, little blue eyes, pointy noses, and slim, wiry bodies. They looked like the same person at different ages. My coloring was the exact opposite: brown hair, brown eyes, lightly tanned
skin. I looked like Lexie's negative.

There was Brooke jumping into the pool. There were Lexie's long toes, the nails painted to look like ladybugs.

Oh, well. Even if I were home now, I couldn't hang out with Lexie; her family had gone to their lake house yesterday.

Next, I zipped to the shots I'd taken today. In the distance, thunder rumbled. I pulled the blanket tighter around me.

The beach shots weren't very good. Sometimes photographs look better than life. Sometimes life looks better than photographs. The kids in red had appeared so ethereal through the fog, like figures in an impressionistic painting. In the photos, they just looked blurry.

The fog didn't do much for other pictures I'd taken, either, of rails and steps and birds. All it did was block the sun and make everything look flat and dull.

And then I got to the last shot, the one I'd taken looking back from the rock outcropping.

The scene looked just like I remembered: a narrow strip of sand bordered by the rock wall, stretching through the fog until it reached the fuzzy public beach and the tiny dots of people.

Only one thing was different. There was an old woman standing next to the
KEEP OFF ROCKS
sign. And she was looking right at me.

W
HEN SOMETHING DOESN'T FIT INTO YOUR
idea of the way things work, you come up with an explanation. Like:

I was distracted, so I just didn't notice the woman standing there.
During the beach walk I'd been really upset, and everyone knows that the mind can play tricks.

But I was emotional; I wasn't blind. Not only was the woman close—maybe ten feet away—she was dressed weirdly for the beach, in a pink bathrobe and dirty white slippers. Her skin was almost yellow, and she was so thin that her cheeks were sunken. Only her hair looked good: bright white, full and curly, like it had just been set. There was no way I could have missed her. No way.

So I moved on to rational explanation number two.

Someone else took the picture.
My mother borrowed my camera sometimes (she'd finally stopped asking me where to put the film). Maybe one of my parents took the picture when I was in the beach restroom.

Only one small problem with this theory: when I'd been in the
restroom, my camera had been right with me, in the beach bag. Besides, I remembered taking that very shot, and I was positive I'd been alone.

That left me with one final, slightly puzzling but still rational explanation.

Something happened during the repair.
By this I meant something technical—or, more specifically, something technical that I didn't understand. I'd always assumed double exposures only happened with film, but maybe it was possible for a digital camera to take one picture on top of another. What was it Larry had said about energy and electrons and digits?

I'd never seen the woman in the pink bathrobe, but maybe she was in the photo shop during the repair, and the camera went off, and the memory card got jumbled. Or something.

Yeah, that was it. People go shopping in their bathrobes all the time.