Picturing You Read online

  picturing you

  Rowan Connell

  Copyright © 2019 Rowan Connell. All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.

  Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s imagination.

  Front cover image by Reed Naliboff.

  Book design by HAOC Creations.

  Published by Paper Birch Publishing, in the United States of America.

  First American edition Published in 2019

  by Paper Birch Publishing

  Lincoln University, PA 19352

  www.paperbirchpublishing.com

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Luke’s lovesick mixtape of a CD:

  Layla’s lovesick mixtape of a CD:

  A special thank you to C.M., S.S., L.J. and S.J. for your love and support.

  Without you, none of this would matter.

  Thank you, also, to Dorothea Lange and Imogen Cunningham,

  for offering us new ways to see,

  and for inspiring me with their quotations.

  “I have seized the light. I have arrested its flight.”

  — Louis Daguerre (1787-1851)

  A father of photography,

  inventor of the daguerreotype process

  Introduction

  I TOOK MY FIRST PHOTOGRAPH at age five, thanks to my father, who was a professional photographer, among other things. He said even at that age, I recognized the way life sometimes swelled with such energy it would pause, like holding your breath. He taught me how to capture moments like those through the frame of a lens.

  Instants caught in time. Stand-still scenes that went on forever.

  I’ve since learned the problem with photographs is not in the images themselves, but in learning how to live outside them, after they’ve been taken.

  One

  Riding in Trucks with Bullies

  Iturn into the school’s driveway on little more than two wheels, the shriek of my tires severing the morning’s peace. It may be early, but I’m late. Almost a quarter after eight by my dusty dashboard clock, but the bus is still here, parked at the far end of the lot, which means I can’t be the only straggler. No way would they hold up an entire bus to wait for me.

  We were told to park in the back, so I add a new spot outside the lines of the crowded last row. One check of my face in the visor’s mirror before I go: pale with dark accents—perfect wings of eyeliner, super smoky eyelids, flawless black lips, and…wet hair. No time for the hairdryer, when you hit the snooze button half a dozen times before launching yourself from bed.

  I grab my duffel bag and backpack, trip over nothing on my way out of the car, and walk-jog my way across the salt-stained asphalt. Fast enough to show I’m making an effort, but nothing close to eager.

  I don’t lift my head when I reach the yellow-orange flank, don’t lift it until I’m standing in front of the closed doors. They aren’t opening. I peek into them and spot a deserted driver’s seat. Shielding my eyes from the washed-out morning light, I stare up into the line of tinted windows above me. Empty.

  Crap.

  What do I do?

  The cold gray weather settles itself over my face, and I turn from the doors, ready to slink back to my car. Except, when I start walking, a low, groaning noise rises from the direction of the school’s driveway. No clue what it could be. Then, I see it. An old black truck, all the gleam gone from the dead, chipping paint.

  I know this truck, despite my efforts not to, and I know who drives it, despite the same.

  This is definitely not my morning.

  I’m left with two choices: hide by the bus and keep my fingers crossed that he doesn’t come over, or head back to my car and leave with some dignity—hopefully, before he notices.

  The truck careens through the lot and heads right for where I’ve parked, narrowing my options considerably.

  I’d still rather leave than hide, so I step from the bus’s shadow and hold my head high, trying not to shiver from my shower-soggy hair. I march straight for my old gray sedan as if I haven’t noticed the large vehicle wedged next to it. Maybe I’ll get away without having to talk.

  I toss my bag into the passenger seat, and I’m about to slide in, gripping my backpack, when the truck’s door opens. Of course it does.

  “Don’t tell me that’s not the bus.”

  The voice is deeper than I remember, but then again, I haven’t heard it in a while. Lucas—no, Luke—Owens.

  I don’t look up, but I do answer. “Fine. I won’t tell you.”

  “Shit.”

  He still curses better than I do, but I stopped being impressed a long time ago.

  “Yeah, well…” I reach for my door handle.

  “Hey,” he says, before I can slip in and pull the door closed. “What should we do?”

  I look over at him. I can’t help it. His blue-gray eyes are there, the same, and my voice catches before regaining its edge. “—Did you say we?”

  He has the decency to glance away—or maybe it’s an eye roll—but it’s brief. A second later, his gaze is locked back on my face. “Yeah, Layla,” he says, returning my glare. “We.”

  It’s been a long time since there was any kind of we, where Luke Owens and I are concerned. I’d been hoping to keep it that way.

  Luke presses his lips together, shoves his hands into the pockets of his black hooded sweatshirt. “I don’t know about you, but I have to go on this trip.”

  My first semester’s report card floats behind my eyes. Layla Marshall: mostly As, a couple of Bs and that big, useless F in gym. I guess that’s what happens when you stop showing up, but if I don’t get the extra-credit this ski trip offers, I don’t graduate. Can I really be that person?

  “Me, too.” I barely nod.

  “Okay, then. That settles it.”

  I blink slowly, force out a sigh. “Settles what?” My stomach’s threatening to turn inside out, but my well-honed demeanor says: indifference with a peppering of irritation.

  I get a frown and a return sigh for my efforts. “We have to drive to the ski resort,” Luke says, drawing out his words to display his ag
gravation. “We have no choice, since we missed the bus.”

  I tip my head, click my tongue. “Can’t. It’s supposed to snow and my car hates the snow.”

  Luke eyes my car’s road-salt splattered exterior. He nods in agreement and my mouth tightens. “We’ll take mine,” he says.

  My heart stutters. “Yours sounds like death.”

  “It always sounds that way.”

  “We don’t know how to get there.”

  “GPS,” Luke counters. “I already have the address.”

  “But…how long is the drive?” My eyes widen, rather than narrowing like they’ve been trained to do.

  Luke meets my deer-in-headlights gaze with deliberate evenness. “Three hours.” He waits for his words to sink in, and then he smiles.

  “Merry Day-After-Christmas,” he tells me, walking forward. He lifts my backpack right out of my hands, peeks into my car and walks around to withdraw my other bag. Then, he tucks both behind his truck’s front seats and waits, holding his passenger door open.

  I emerge from my car and lock it up. Things seem to be happening to me rather than by choice, but I’m able to dredge up my scowl as I approach Luke’s door. His eyes skim over me quickly before he shifts his gaze. “I take it you woke up late, too.”

  “Merry Whatever-You-Said.” I don’t bother responding to his latter remark, but make a mental note of it as an insult to my appearance. I’ll be keeping tabs.

  All too soon, Luke is driving us down the school’s driveway and I’m fighting the urge to leap from his truck. Instead, I direct the nearest heat vent toward me and lean forward to hold my hair close. It’s hanging in clumps like cooked spaghetti gone cold, and I need it to be dry already.

  “You can turn up the heat, if you want,” Luke says. I don’t answer, don’t even look at him, but I do drag off my coat and set the blower as high as it will go.

  “What is that?” he asks after a couple of minutes.

  “What is what?” I’m fanning the right side of my hair in front of the vent, which means I also sort of have to face him.

  “That. Your shampoo. Is it strawberry or something?”

  I quit my hair-fanning. “Guava.”

  He tilts his head, frowning. I know that look. Before—before he did the things he did, before I did the thing I can’t speak of, the thing he still doesn’t know about, but which put so much distance between us—that look would’ve been accompanied by a Come on, Layls.

  I turn away.

  “It’s nice,” he says to the back of my head.

  I flip the vent away from me, sit up straight in my seat, and lock my gaze out the window.

  There’s no way. I’m not doing it. I won’t be nice to this kid whose childhood was threaded so intricately through mine, whose face still fills so many of my photographs, my memories, not after everything that’s happened. We’re nothing to each other now.

  About fifteen minutes of uncomfortable silence later, Luke intervenes. “Can you find some music? My radio sucks, so I burn stuff onto CDs.” He points to a shoebox tucked behind our seats, packed with a row of thin plastic cases. I reach back and grab the corner of one that’s sticking up, without even glancing at its handwritten list of songs. Why bother? He won’t have anything I like.

  I push the disk into the player, and when the first notes pour from the speakers, recognition mingles with disbelief. “Sonic Youth?”

  Luke stiffens, but makes no comment. I face the window again and listen to Lee Ranaldo sing lyrics I know and love, though they make me ache inside every time I hear them.

  When “Wish Fulfillment” ends, a few soulful tunes from the ‘60s or ‘70s follow: Neil Young, Led Zeppelin, Nick Drake. They’re not all that familiar, but not bad. Then, as hills and lawns and scrubby woodlands roll by, so do more songs that could have been plucked from among my own eclectic music collection: The Raconteurs’ “Together,” Temple of the Dog’s “All Night Thing,” Mark Lanegan’s “I love You Little Girl.”

  By the time Lanegan’s voice joins his guitar, our town is a good distance behind us and I am getting pretty damn angry. Not only does this CD sound like a lovesick mixtape, a fact which is getting under my skin all on its own, but this weird genre-crossing rock mashup also belongs to Luke Owens. Luke Owens. Captain of the football team, Homecoming King, bully extraordinaire. His taste in music is not allowed to cross over into mine. Not anymore.

  I sink down in my seat, boiling in silent resentment, until the music distracts me and I forget whose car I’m riding in, who’s sitting next to me. I’m coming untethered, and it’s because of yesterday’s mistake. How could I let myself open that photo album, pore over it, the way I used to?

  But it was a hard one to resist, with its photos from my eighth birthday, the day I got a new best friend. His face was filled with light in each of the pictures, the way it used to be whenever he smiled.

  I could see the images that weren’t caught on film, too, the moments leading up to the photos: a summer day, the air so heavy and hot it stuck to your skin, Lucas riding into my life on his bike, weaving slowly back and forth along the street in our quiet neighborhood. He’d been trying to keep pace with his mother, who was walking their old dog, and he glanced at me, then away, while our moms made their introductions. Lucas’s eyes were light like his mother’s, his hair midway between her blonde and my brown, and every time our gazes crossed, a tiny crease formed between his eyebrows. Finally, he looked right at me, and when he smiled, my heart was his.

  Radiohead’s “All I Need” goes silent, and Luke’s voice replaces Thom Yorke’s. “Want something to eat?”

  I turn to him and stare up into his face for a beat too long. With a hard shove of my eight-hole Doc Martens against the floor, I sit up, stick straight, and look out the window: we’re parked at a gas station, one with an attached convenience store.

  “I’ll get something,” I answer without another glance his way.

  Luke kills the engine and climbs from the truck, but when I grab my coat and reach for the door, I stop. There’s a handprint smeared across the glass. My own hand comes up to mirror the shape, before I realize what I’m doing. Luke’s standing on the sidewalk, watching me, and my cheeks grow hot with understanding: I can guess what the mark signifies, and that it was probably made by one of my least favorite people on the planet. I grab the door handle, trying to block thoughts of Marissa Moore, and swing the door wide just as Luke steps forward to open it. He jumps back to avoid impact and shoots me a hard look, before turning away.

  “Sorry,” I call after him, pulling on my coat. I am sorry, but I also think it almost serves him right for trying to be a gentleman, when he so obviously isn’t.

  I dig cash from my pocket as we move forward through the cold, our breath hanging in the air, making clouds to pass through. The heat of the store blasts me in the face when Luke opens the door, and I turn back after I enter, ready to hand over gas money, but he’s already detouring down an aisle. Fine by me.

  The clerk at the counter stares blatantly when I approach with my chai tea and plastic-wrapped pastry. “Hey,” he says, leering in the way that’s become all-too familiar over the last few years. Some guys think if you’re wearing a skirt and torn fishnets, you’re either easy or a freak in bed. Both, more likely.

  “Nice lipstick. Black’s my favorite color.” He lets his gaze slide over me and holds up a pack of cigarettes.

  I offer him a look that I’m hoping will be the first to maim someone. “I don’t smoke and I’m under eighteen.”

  “Too bad.” He grins and wraps his fingers around mine when I pass him my money. I try to pull my hand back the instant he makes contact, but he laughs and smiles with tobacco-stained teeth, teasing that I’m trying to hold onto my cash.

  “Hey, you ready to go?” Luke asks, coming up behind me. For the first time in I don’t know how long, it’s good to hear his voice.

  The guy eyes up Luke—all six plus feet of lean-muscled, broad-shouldered him—and vis
ibly shrinks in front of me.

  “Hey, sorry man,” Tobacco Teeth says, snaking some change into my hand, “didn’t know you were together.”

  “We’re not,” I say under my breath as I pass by Luke.

  My eyes catch his and he stares back at me, before leveling his glare at the counter guy again. In case the clerk has somehow missed the fact that he’s pissed, he leans forward. “Twenty bucks. Pump three.”

  I exit the store and when Luke follows, I hold out my money again. He turns away and goes to fill the tank, focusing on the store window, where the guy at the cash register is looking every way but outside. I climb into the truck, pull the door closed behind me, tug off my coat and wipe its sleeve back and forth across the window, removing all traces of the smeared handprint. No one should have to ride beside that.

  My peripheral vision catches Luke’s gaze going over me when he slides back into his seat, and when I fail to look his way, he shoves the key into the ignition and starts the truck, shaking his head. My arms, already crossed rigidly over my chest, tighten. I feel like crying, or maybe kicking something.

  Luke was my hero—or Lucas was—once upon a time. But this guy? I don’t even like him; he’s not my Lucas and never will be again.

  “Why’d you do that?” I say, after we’ve regained the road and traveled a bit further. I can’t hide the anger in my voice; I don’t think I want to.

  “Do what?”

  “Intimidate that guy the way you did.”

  “Why? Were you interested?”

  I glare at him. He’s smirking and it makes me even angrier.

  “Of course I wasn’t, but why do you think you can treat people that way?”

  “The guy was slimy and he was hitting on you. I thought you wanted him to leave you alone.”

  “I did, but I can take care of myself.”

  “Fine. I’ll remember that.” Luke turns up the music. It’s a Metallica song from the ’90s, and even though I don’t hate it, I decide our tastes aren’t that similar after all.