Authors: Vahini Naidoo
But I hope that maybe this is a first step, a step closer to each other. Because right now, I can imagine wanting to cry on her shoulder one day. I can imagine choosing to be her daughter one day.
And I couldn’t imagine that this morning.
I shut my door quietly and slip between the covers even though I know that this is just a show I put on for myself. Even though I know that I’ll swing my way out the window, Tarzan style, and climb up onto the roof in an hour or so.
I think about the memory that snapped into my brain
when I was thrashing on the floor of that house in Ghost Town. And with the covers curled up all around me, the world totally shut out, I press my fingers to my lips.
I still can’t believe that Amy kissed me.
W
E
’
RE STANDING IN
front of yet another window this morning. So many opportunities sliding into my life lately.
I look up. Slice of pie-blue sky. I look down. Loose soil beneath my feet.
Tristan stands next to me, whispering a constant stream of swear words because we should be at school right now. Not about to commit a felony.
I turn to him. “Hoist me up?”
He shakes his head. Once, twice, three times. “I—Ella. What are we doing?”
“Breaking and entering, obviously.”
I’m aware that my attempt to play it cool probably just looks stupid. After all, yesterday I was twitching on the floor of an abandoned house.
He rolls his eyes. “Obviously.
Obviously
.”
“You’re the one who said you wanted to ‘help me’ get over Amy, right?”
“I wasn’t aware it involved breaking the law.”
“Well, it does. Now help me up if I need it, okay?”
Mark’s bedroom window is on the ground floor, but his yard’s on a steep slope, so there’s a bunch of concrete foundation underneath the house to make sure everything’s level. Which means his window is something I can only
just
reach with my fingertips.
I remind myself that this is not weird. I’ve done this before, when Mark and Amy and I sneaked out to a concert in tenth grade, and he and Amy and I crashed at his house after. God knows, Amy and I didn’t want to go home and face our parents.
And Mark’s parents just didn’t give a shit.
The soil slips a little beneath my feet, and I reach up, curling my fingers around the window ledge.
I catalog the differences between this time and last time.
Last time, it was night. Last time, Mark and Amy were laughing like maniacs. Last time, I had permission to enter.
This time, I’m breaking in because I don’t trust my oldest friend. And, shit, I’m beginning to sound like those girls who have fights with their friends in the school bathrooms. They’re always going on about “trust” and what it means, and it’s like
blah blah
in my head when they speak.
I don’t want to be like them,
blah
-ing on forever, so I
stop thinking and start pulling myself up. My feet scrape against the side of the house. I look down and see the peeling white paint dancing away beneath my feet, falling to the ground like snowflakes.
My feet continue to scrabble. I’m not getting anywhere. It feels as if I’m running on a treadmill, kicking out against the same square of white wall over and over again. I lunge a little, dig my nails into the wooden sill, and hiss, “Tristan!”
“Oh, right.”
He moves to stand under me, and suddenly his hands are beneath my feet and he’s lifting. My arms get a little breathing space. I keep one hand on the sill and fasten the fingers of the other around the latch at the side of Mark’s window and pull. It slides open.
Now to deal with the screen. Mark put it in a few years back when his house was getting invaded by cockroaches and ants. Except, being the lazy idiot he is, he didn’t do it properly. The screen isn’t attached to anything; it’s placed against the inside of the window, and there’s a little bit of tape on the side—I’m not kidding, he used fucking tape—to make sure it doesn’t fall off.
I remove the tape, and the screen falls onto my head. Guess I should have thought that through a little more. “Ouch,” I say, rubbing my scalp as Tristan’s soft laughter floats up to me.
I give him the finger.
“Enough with the theatrics, Ella. Come on; get inside before I drop you. I’m not that strong, you know.”
I leave my finger up and count to sixty. He groans; but hey, I like my theatrics, and there’s no way I’m giving them up for Grenade Boy.
“Ella, I’m not kidding. My arms are killing me right now.”
“Look on the bright side; you’re building up some biceps,” I reply, my tone absolutely flat. But I can hear him breathing heavily and hard.
So over the window sill I go. Tumbling and scraping my stomach on the wood in the process. Beige carpet catches me, cradles me. Dust motes shoot up my nostrils, and I sneeze. Remember that this is Mark’s room I’m breaking into. Mark, who doesn’t understand the meaning of clean.
I get up and shake my head, looking down at what I landed on. A pair of boxers—which would be gross no matter what was on them, but shooting stars, seriously? It’s like he’s out-hippied himself. A plastic bag and a pair of jeans. Thank god I didn’t land on his belt buckle. That would’ve hurt.
“You okay?” Tristan calls.
“Yeah, fine. Where d’you think he’d hide his camera?”
“Shouldn’t we, you know, be a bit quieter? Could
be someone in the house.” His voice is quieter, barely audible. As if he’s remembered that he should be sensitive.
I almost snort. This is Mark’s house. “No one’s ever home. Trust me.”
He really does snort.
I don’t waste too much time thinking about Tristan, though. I have to find the camera. The one with the images of me and Amy on it.
I try under the bed first. My fingers swipe through cobwebs and boxers. Yeah, this is gross.
When I speak to Mark again, I’m going to lecture him on flinging his underwear around, while somehow avoiding the fact that I know he does this because I broke into his bedroom.
I should feel guilty, but I don’t. He’s the one who’s been lying to me for more than a month.
“Found it?” Tristan yells.
I shake my head before realizing he can’t see me. “No.”
“Tried the closet?”
I cast a sidelong glance at Mark’s closet. Then I cross over the floor, skipping around and over and onto Mark’s possessions. At one point I step on a skateboard and nearly roll away until I’m horizontal. His room is a fucking health-and-safety hazard.
When I get to the closet, I reach out and trace my
fingers over the ebony wood, the shiny silver handle, the poster of some band from the seventies no one’s ever heard of—Mark loves his nostalgia. He sees the seventies as some kind of paradise.
I swallow and turn the handle, wondering what I’ll find inside. The camera? Or something else? They say people keep their skeletons in the closet...
The door swings open, slow and creaky, like the soul of some ghost is rattling around in the wood. Turns out Mark doesn’t keep skeletons in his closet. But he doesn’t keep clothes in there, either. He keeps what looks like a whole bunch of journals.
Except when I flick open one of them, it’s full of photos. Photo albums. Mark keeps hundreds of photo albums. I flip quickly through one of the books. Some photos are of us. Under blue skies with clouds that he’s altered in Photoshop. They look like the inside of an eggshell.
The angles of the shots are interesting—like the one of Amy taken from behind, where she plays on a swing set as if she’s six instead of sixteen. Her long legs fly into the sky, and her dyed-auburn hair flutters away from her face like a kite. The sun kisses her; the trees and sky seem to exist only to frame her.
In the side margins, scrawled in Mark’s untidy handwriting, is one word:
Happiness
.
Other shots are of landscapes, of skies pressing their orange lips against the ground. Of birds flying in formation. Mark’s draped one of his scarves over the camera lens, and I see the picture through black-and-white checks. His annotation tells me he thinks the arrow of birds is
pointing me in the right direction
.
He reads nature, the world, like a book. Constructs it with his lens.
I’ve always known that Mark liked to be the one taking photos at parties, but I didn’t know he was
this
into it. How could I not have noticed that Mark’s a photographer? I guess it’s just like how I missed out on Amy being depressed. I need to pay more attention. Really, truly, open my eyes.
I scan the albums. Some red-bound, others blue or brown, one with a purple background and dancing green aliens. I could spend hours looking through the photographs. But I resist, because I need to find that fucking camera.
Mark’s closet is pretty wide. I climb inside it. The albums swoosh out around me as I cut a path through them, scattering Mark’s memories so that they’re out of order. Instinct tells me to head for the corner of the closet.
First the left one: nothing but a blue-skyrocket-covered photo album.
Then the right one: something wrapped in a purple scarf.
I pick up the scarf. Mark’s tried to force it into a nice square shape, but slices of paper jut out at odd angles, and I can feel the uneven planes of an object beneath the fabric.
I get out of the closet, sloshing my way through the albums. They fall into one another. Memories colliding like dominos.
I dump the package onto the bed. Untie the corners.
The cloth unfolds like the petals of a flower, and I realize the thin, angular slices jutting out of the fabric are photographs. Developed, waiting to be put into an album. They’re facedown, white backs glistening in the sunshine.
The camera is next to them.
I didn’t think my fingers could move that fast. The camera is in my hands. Pinched between thumb and forefinger. Shiny metal, sliding away beneath my skin, smudged with my sweat. My breaths drip from my mouth like sweat.
“Ella?”
Apparently, Tristan can hear me.
I don’t bother replying.
I push every single button on the camera until it beeps to life. Hope is climbing the staircase of my esophagus.
Hope is sitting in my mouth. Hope is fucking asphyxiating me. But when I fumble buttery fingers around, attempting to find the history and see the photos, a message in bright red flashes across the screen:
INSERT MEMORY CARD.
Fuck. Mark.
He’s taken the pictures out. The photos. The memories that are
mine
.
There’s this shriek of laughter, and it takes a second for me to realize that it came from me. I stuff my fist into my mouth, bite my knuckles. I scream until they’re bloody and raw. The hope that was strangling me dissolves into black ashes. Soot in my mouth.
My eyes find the pile of photos in front of me. I flip them over, and suddenly I feel so light that I could float away. My laugh is heady, spinning around me like a gauzy scarf.
Mark may be able to tell me lies with his sideways words and his sideways smile, but the camera never lies.
I’ve found them.
Pictures of that night.
I flip through them quickly. He’s written on all of them, taken out his grief and anger with permanent marker running across the glossy, compacted colors. On one he’s shredded our faces. On another he’s written
FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKWHOOPDEDOO
.
With quick fingers, I find the photo I’m looking for: Amy and I, sitting in the grass. He’s drawn wreaths of flowers around our heads, love hearts around our toes. We look like nymphs surrounded by a garden of booze.
Our lips pressed against each other’s.
I drop the photograph, and it floats back onto the purple scarf. My fingers move to my heart, to my throat. He saw.
He saw
.
His feelings, in that moment, twist through me like a knife. Betrayal, envy, hatred.
“Ella?”
“Yeah—” I run my fingers through my hair. It slips and slides out from between my fingers, refusing to bend to my will. I tilt my head, blowing the hair that’s in my face out of the way. It’s when my head is at that weird angle that I catch the writing in tiny blue pen cut into the side of the photo.
Dents, more than writing. A watermark of sorts on the moment Amy shattered.
I bring the photo back to my eyes. Closer, closer, closer. And suddenly the dents aren’t just dents. They’re words that I still can’t make any sense of:
THE VIDEO IS WORSE
.
What fucking video?
But my mind is already connecting the dots. It’s going into overload.
I sink into my memory, crying quietly, because this time I don’t
want
to know.
B
ROKEN
.
M
Y VISION
is broken like the bottle. Its shards glitter in the moonlight; I can see the amber whiskey from where I’m standing. I raise my arms above my head. Slippery tiles slide beneath my feet. “Whoa-oh-oh!” My arms windmill.
I’m standing on my roof
.
“
Careful. You’re drunk.” Petal steadies me. She’s drunk, too. She’s just better at being drunk than I am
.
“I’m not as drunk as Amy,” I point out
.
Amy’s sitting farther down the roof than the rest of us, muttering to herself. Her drunken words spill into the purple night and land in the weeds of my garden
.
“Ella,” she says, turning around. “Ella.” She pats the tile next to her, and there’s a clattering noise as it begins to slide away. Amy quickly slides it back into place and laughs. Laughs and laughs
.
Someone behind me laughs, too. I turn, and Mark’s there. He’s holding a camera in his hands. “And this,” he whispers in a
conspiratorial voice, “is why Ella’s parents are going to murder her when they get back from DC.” He takes a step, and another few tiles slide away, flicking through beams of moonlight before landing in the garden
.