The waiter brings our soups to the table.
“Thanks so much,” Dylan says, looking up at him.
“Thank you,” I say after.
We start to fill deep spoons with our soup, holding them for a little while, letting them cool.
“So what did you write about?”
“A Bob Dylan song,” she says. “Appropriately.” She fishes out a mushroom, then adds, “I’m named after him.”
“Oh,” I say. “That makes sense.”
“I chose ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’ ’ but really just used it to talk about how our generation is really different than his, and that it would be great if that song applied to us, but it doesn’t. We’re complacent.”
I’m not really sure what she’s talking about, so I just say, “I don’t think I know any of his songs.”
She doesn’t respond, and for a while we just eat. The silence starts getting to me. Not only do I not know a single Bob Dylan song, but I also have nothing interesting to say. She finishes her coffee and asks for another. I look around at the other tables, where people are talking and nodding their heads.
“I heard you got kicked out of your old school for making out with a girl in the bathroom,” I blurt.
Her eyebrows rise. She looks into her soup bowl, like it might tell her how to react if she concentrates hard enough. Then she starts to laugh.
“This school is so weird,” she says, shaking her head. She brushes a strand of hair away from her face. “I mean, really. And I’m still not over the fact that all the houses in this town are really just one design that was copied over and over and then painted alternating colors.” She spoons herself a green bean. “It’s no wonder most of the students at Vista are all clones of each other. Before we moved here, I had no idea that a place like this could exist so close to the city.”
Even though Los Cerros isn’t my favorite place in the world, I feel a little protective of it. “It isn’t all like that,” I say. “It has some good parts.”
“Well, let’s go, then,” Dylan says. “Show me.”
We split the bill, but Dylan leaves the tip because she ends up ordering a third cup of coffee to go.
As we walk out of the restaurant, Dylan says, “By the way, in case you were wondering—my dad got transferred. He can’t stand commuting, so we moved.”
We head away from the strip mall, past the identical, million-dollar houses, the chain restaurants, the new white, stucco city-hall building with its two skinny, sad palm trees on either side, and onto a narrow gravel street behind it all.
“So, this is it,” I say. “My favorite part of Los Cerros.” I sweep my arm up to the sky.
It’s an old movie theater, standing by itself on a shabby street where no one ever walks or drives. It’s hidden, it’s out of place, it’s run-down and forgotten and empty. But it towers above us, as real as the Starbucks and the Safeway. Most of its windows are boarded up and its paint has mostly peeled off, but someone once painted a mural on the side and you can still see traces of the colors it used to be: yellow and light blue and green. It’s falling apart, but I love it.
“The town’s going to tear it down,” I tell Dylan. The planning has been going on for years, but it’s still hard for me to believe that soon it will be gone forever.
Dylan squints against the sun to read the marquee with its missing letters: GO DBYE & tha K YOU.
I can’t tell what she sees—a broken-down, rotting old building with weeds waist-high around it, or a place that was clearly amazing before it was forgotten.
Dylan rocks back on her feet, sips her coffee, and heads toward the small circular windows on the four heavy doors. As I watch her peering in, guilt settles in my stomach. The only person I ever came here with was Ingrid. I want to travel back in time a few minutes and decide against leading Dylan here. At the same time I want to join her in her explorations. I want to push my face against the windows like Ingrid and I did a thousand times and stare at the darkened lobby with its empty concession stand.
I wonder if this is what betrayal feels like.
Dylan heads around the side of the theater, but I don’t follow her. I know what she’ll find: more weeds, a locked back door, a long rectangular window with a heavy curtain on the inside making it impossible to see through.
I sit against the ticket booth to wait for her. Trace my fingers along the edges of the tiled floor. Watch the tips of the weeds sway in the slight breeze. Listen to the traffic sounds from a distant street.
She emerges from the opposite side and leans against the booth.
“I wonder what the last movie that played here was,” she says. I smile up at her, feel another pang in my stomach. It’s something Ingrid and I used to wonder about all the time.
“I like it here,” Dylan says. It sounds simple, honest. “I’m glad I chose you to be friends with.”
She pries the plastic lid off her coffee cup and looks disappoint edly inside. Empty. I place my hand on my backpack. This is the first afternoon since I discovered it that I haven’t gone straight home to read Ingrid’s journal.
Without thinking, I say, “We used to sit here all the time.”
Facing out, across the street, she says, “Your friend died, didn’t she?”
I nod, even though I know she isn’t looking at me.
“That’s rough,” she says, and I’m so used to hearing people tell me things like that, but it’s the way that she says it—so calm and solemn—that makes me want to cry.
I don’t say anything back for a while. I’m thinking about how Ingrid always made huge elaborate plans for everything. One of them involved getting rich somehow and buying the theater and fixing it up and reopening it to show indie films. Instead of soda, we’d sell tea at the concession stand, and we might even have some photographs or books for sale. It would be more than a theater. It would be a place to escape to when people felt stifled by the chain stores and lonely in their massive houses. I can’t understand why she would make plans like that if she wasn’t planning on actually doing any of it.
Dylan slides down the side of the ticket booth, until she’s sitting next to me. She doesn’t try to hug me, she doesn’t even sit that close.
I decide that if this is a new friendship, if that’s what this is, then I’m going to start things out honestly.
So I say, “It actually feels strange to be here with someone else.”
And I don’t know how that sounds, and I hope that it doesn’t seem like I want her to leave. I hold my breath and she says, “Yeah, it must,” and she doesn’t sound offended, and she doesn’t get up to go, and I am filled with gratitude because it’s been way too long since I’ve just spent time with another person. I’m not ready for it to end yet.
24
It’s been weeks since junior year started, and Ms. Delani still isn’t looking at me. We spend first period in the dark, looking at projections of famous landscapes. Even though I wish I could hate everything she shows me, I get caught up in the photographs. We start with Ansel Adams, who is pretty overused by now. I mean, his stuff is all over inspirational posters and calendars, but the landscapes are still amazing. The entire front of the classroom goes from wa terfalls to forests to mountains to ocean. Looking at them makes me feel small, in a good way.
We move on to Marilyn Bridges. Ms. Delani stands at her desk, stating the obvious.
“Here we have a cityscape. Notice that the sun is brightest on the focal point. The surrounding buildings are in shadow.”
She goes through a few more, then says, “Now let me show some examples of student work from past years.”
She sits down and opens a new file on her computer. And I know that this is a stupid thing to wish for, but I hope that one of the photos she’s about to show will be mine. I know she didn’t like my picture of Oakland, but I took so many last year that I thought were pretty good. I took one of the Golden Gate Bridge from right below it, looking up. It was cool because it was of something that’s be
en photographed a million times, but I’d never seen a picture taken from that angle. I picture the image big, covering the wall. In my head I hear Ms. Delani saying, Excellent work, Caitlin. I hear it so clearly, every syllable.
An image of cranes on an open field appears on the screen.
“See the nice use of line in this piece?”
Click. Sand and waves and Alcatraz in the distance. Click. A strange rock formation. Click. A hill with little flowers on it and clear blue sky.
I blink. I’ve never seen Ingrid’s hill this big. The flowers look so full. I can see individual blades of grass. I want to close my eyes and be transported there, to that place, to that day. I remember the ground, cold under my bare feet. Ingrid’s purple scarf wrapped around her neck.
Ms. Delani clicks the hill away and there’s another landscape, but I don’t see it. Instead, I see Ingrid’s eyes up close, so blue, the way they looked through the lens of my camera.
Click.
Ingrid’s fingers covered in silver rings.
Click.
Her careful, delicate handwriting.
“See how interesting the negative space is here?”
Click.
The huge red sunglasses that covered half her face.
Click.
The pink-and-white scars on her stomach.
“Look at the contrast.”
Click.
A deep cut on her arm, bleeding.
Click.
Her eyes, vacant.
Click.
The word ugly carved into her hip.
Click.
“The tree in this image is not the focal point. Instead, the shadow is emphasized.”
The lights flash on.
Ingrid disappears.
I need to scream, to smash something. I grip the side of my desk so hard that my hand feels like it’s about to split open. Ms. Delani stands in front of the room in expensive-looking pin-striped pants and a crisp, button-down shirt. Her hair is smooth and perfect; her skin is perfect; her red glasses frame her eyes perfectly. She walks to the blackboard and starts to write something, but I interrupt her.
“Um . . .” My voice is shaky, loud. I don’t know what I want to say, but I know I have to talk. Everything is blurry. “Did you get permission to use those pictures?” I sound crazy, the words come out so loud.
Ms. Delani pauses and lowers the chalk she’s holding.
“Which pictures?” she asks.
“All of them,” I say. “All of the pictures by students that you showed without even giving them any credit, without even saying their names.”
No one will look at me. For once, Ms. Delani seems unsure of what to say next. I’m probably spraining my hand, but I can’t stop squeezing the desk. Some girls giggle nervously and then Ms. Delani smiles. She scans the class with bright eyes and says, “Caitlin has made an interesting point. In the future, I will consider asking students for permission to use their work as examples.”
Then she pivots toward the board and begins to write.
25
Next period, a freshman comes into class with a yellow slip. My history teacher peers at it.
“Caitlin.” He extends his arm, dangling the paper from his fingers like it smells bad. I get up.
“Take your things,” he says, and the blood rushes to my face.
I follow the directions on the paper and go to the office. The secretary doesn’t look up when I stand at her desk.
“I got this?” I say, and hand her the paper.
She glances at it. “Ms. Haas’s office is down the hall,” she says.
I trudge down the hall to the office, but the door is closed and I can hear voices inside. My heart starts pounding—did Ms. Delani call my parents? I can picture them in there, sitting next to each other, Mom dabbing her eyes with a tissue, Dad patting her hand and looking worried. The door swings open, and out walks Melanie.
“Oh hey, what’s up.”
We stand face-to-face in the doorway.
“Nice hair,” I blurt, and instantly regret it. For one thing, it isn’t true. Mixed in with the brown and blond and orange are now a few strands of blue. I don’t think nice is what she’s going for.
But she ignores me, points her head toward Ms. Haas, and mouths, Good luck. Then she slips soundlessly down the hall.
I wait in the doorway for Ms. Haas to notice me. She’s pretty old and kind of heavy, but not in a bad way. Her gray hair is pulled back in a bun and she’s wearing purple feathers as earrings.
She sees me and says, “You must be Caitlin. Come in.”
Ms. Haas is the school therapist. Although I have been invited many times, this is the first time I’ve been in her office. It’s small and decorated in a way that’s a little too inviting. The floor is covered with a bright yellow shag rug, and all the chairs are big and soft. Trees and sunsets and other nonthreatening images hang on the walls. I swear one of the pictures is by Ansel Adams—below a tall, strong-looking tree, the caption reads: Sky’s the limit. Disgusting. I choose the chair farthest away from Ms. Haas’s desk and try not to sink too far into it.
She introduces herself and talks about all the “wonderful services” she’s here to provide. I try to tune her out. When she’s finished, she asks me, “Do you know why you’re here?”
“Yeah,” I say.
She beams. “Great. Why?”
“Because Ms. Delani doesn’t know how to deal with anything or even communicate at all, so she feels the need to hand me over to you,” I say.
Ms. Haas leans back in her chair and clasps her hands together. I move my shoe across the shag rug, make the yellow darker, then lighter, then darker again. I wait for Ms. Haas to respond.
Then, finally, she says, “I hear that you and Ingrid Bauer were close friends.”
My stomach clenches up. I stop moving my foot and shrug.
“Maybe you would like to spend some time talking with me about her.”
She waits, and when I don’t say anything she says, “Maybe you would like to tell me how you felt when you were with her? What was special about your friendship?”
I try to sit up a little more in the chair, but it’s too soft. I say, “I don’t understand your question. I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”
“Okay,” she says, her voice full of patience. “I’ll tell you where I’m going with this. I’d like to help you voice any feelings of guilt or anger or depression that you might be feeling and to work with you to overcome those feelings. Now”—she leans toward me—“tell me what you would like.”
I look up from the rug to her face. She’s smiling in the nicest way.
“What I would like,” I say, “is to go back to class.”
26
I leave school directly from the office and walk to my house the back way so no one will catch me. When I get home, I shut the door to my room even though no one else is there, just because it feels good to be alone, surrounded by my tacked-up band posters and magazine clippings. I unzip Ingrid’s journal from its pocket and sit down on the chair in the corner by the window. I open to the next entry, hoping Ingrid won’t be drooling all over Ms. Delani again.
I propel myself out of the chair and into my closet, holding Ingrid’s journal gingerly, like it’s too hot to touch. I pull all my clothes out of my hamper, drop the journal to the bottom, and stuff the clothes back on top.
It wasn’t unfair to not want to talk about Jayson every single minute. I mean, I always went along with plans she made to try to bump into him and to casually walk by his house after school sometimes, hoping he’d see us. Just because I wanted to talk about something different for a few minutes a day doesn’t mean that she had to write that about me. And that whole hurting thing? Ingrid and I felt the same about almost everything, so I don’t really understand. Maybe I misunderstood it. Whatever, it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to think about it anymore.
I go outside. I walk past my parents’ garden, where their parsnips are beginning
to sprout, to the heap of wood. I pull a long plank off the pile and start to drag it away, down the slope of our backyard. It’s heavier than I thought it would be. I pull the plank past the brick patio, past the flowers, up and over this little hill, to the part where the land stops looking like a backyard and more just like a grassy area with a bunch of trees, almost dense enough to be a forest. I drop the wood at the base of the tree I like best. It’s a big oak. I used to climb it when I was a kid. After I catch my breath, I start back toward the house to get more. If I ever figure out something to build, I’m not going to do it with everyone watching.
Later, my parents call me down to the kitchen. I find Mom washing lettuce and Dad heating olive oil and garlic in a pan.
“What?” I ask them.
Dad turns to me. “Well, hello to you, too,” he says.
He’s taken his tie off and unbuttoned the first two buttons of his dress shirt. He holds his arm out to hug me, but I pretend I don’t notice and open the freezer instead. The cold feels good.
“How was your day, sweetheart?” my mom asks.
“Okay. Do you want help?”
“You could chop that onion,” she says.
I grab a knife from the drawer.
My dad continues some story he must have started to tell my mom before I came down. At first I try to listen, but I have no idea who he’s talking about. I cut the onion in half and my eyes burn.
A minute later, the phone rings and my dad hits the speaker button.
“Hello?”
We wait. A recorded voice comes on.
“This is the Vista High School office of attendance calling to report that your child missed one or more periods today. The absence will be marked as unexcused unless we receive a doctor’s note or notification from a parent or guardian explaining that the absence was due to a family emergency.”
My dad stops stirring. My mom turns the water off. I stand with my back to the phone, chopping.
Shit. I forgot about the phone calls.