Flash Burnout Read online

  I said, "What?"

  She said, "Finish up checking out the other girl. That's long enough."

  Ha! How lucky am I to get a girlfriend with a sense of humor? Well, most of the time, anyway. I don't know what kind of pod person took over her body this morning. I half expected her to reach up and unzip her forehead so the alien inside could escape, like that Doctor Who episode with the Slitheen (Season One, Episode Four).

  I join Marissa in the pizza line. "What's up with Shannon?" she asks.

  "I don't know. I guess I forgot to call her for the hundredth time, or something." Then I instantly feel like a traitor. "Nah, we just had a misunderstanding."

  Marissa's so easy to talk to, I sometimes wish that we had hooked up. But it's not that way with us. We're always going to be just friends. I still remember our first assignment in intro photo: shoot and print a series of black-and-white portraits of another member of the class.

  As the only ninth-graders, Marissa and I were paired up by default. We took the city bus up the hill to Washington Park, where we shyly pointed cameras at each other. Studying her through the lens, I realized that she had the most heartbroken eyes I'd ever seen. You don't notice it most of the time—she's usually smiling. And she's got a little jeweled stud in her nose, so your eyes automatically go to that.

  Marissa smiles at me now and says, "Bye. See you in photo." She grabs her pizza and leaves.

  Two slices of pepperoni and a large vanilla shake later, I'm looking for a place to sit down. I see Manny as I'm heading for the tables. I open my mouth to tell him Ellie will be here in a minute, then I think, What am I? Message boy? HELL no!

  Riley and some of the other guys are getting up a game of poker at one of the tables. I make my way over.

  "Flake, you in for some Texas hold 'em?"

  "Hell yeah, Vile."

  I'm juggling my pizza and a pair of aces, and feeling mighty good, when someone touches my arm. Shannon.

  "Hi," she says. She gives me a tentative smile.

  "Hi," I say.

  She stands there looking expectant. I realize that she wants me to leave the game and talk to her. I look down at my pair of aces. Have I ever held a pair of aces before? I could say, "Just let me finish this hand, Shannon," but I'm ninety-seven percent sure that would be the wrong thing.

  I lay down my cards, saying, "Fold," and get up to leave.

  Riley coughs the word "pussy."

  We walk away from the table, and Shannon takes my hand. "Sorry I freaked out," she says. "I was feeling, I don't know—" She struggles to find the right word.

  Hormonal? I almost suggest.

  "Anyway, Ellie told me I was being stupid." She smiles and shrugs. "Will you forgive me?" After a second she adds, "Baby?"

  Whew. She's back. Making a mental note that Ellie is my new best friend, I lead Shannon out to the bleachers for a little privacy, where we can forgive each other more thoroughly.

  ***

  I am full of Shannon after lunch. Her sweet, round shoulders and her thin, freckled arms that break out in goose bumps when I stroke them and her ohmygod luscious lips that I could just stay attached to for hours, and man, did I want to get her into the back seat of Garrett's car. But (a) I know Garrett would punish me repeatedly if he found out, and (b) we had to go back to class, and (c) no way would Shannon agree to it.

  For some reason, our photo teacher, Mr. Malloy, feels that he must wear a beret on his bald head and a goatee on his receding chin, like some kind of French poser. Seriously? We're too embarrassed on his behalf to even give him shit about it.

  "Let me see your series," I say to Marissa.

  She hands me her portfolio. Our assignment over the weekend was to shoot a series of color photos featuring monochromatic subjects. Mr. Malloy wanted us to find subjects to photograph that were mostly all one color, or preferably lacking in color, except for one contrasting bright spot that would draw the eye.

  Marissa's first photo shows an expanse of green lawn with one yellow dandelion sticking up. "I was lying on the ground for that angle," she says.

  The next one is a close-up of a gray stone birdbath with a flock of tiny grayish-brown birds splashing around in it. Her contrast is a blue jay, midflight, swooping down to the birdbath. Some of the tiny birds have already started to take off. She must have been sitting there forever waiting for that shot. "What are those—sparrows? No, they're too little."

  "Bushtits," she says.

  "Bush-scuse me?"

  She giggles. "That's what they're called."

  Nice," I say. "Your grandma's backyard?" Marissa lives with her grandma.

  "Yeah, and it was really cloudy out," she says, "so the background is gray, too."

  Her next shot is an arrangement of milky white vases, all empty except for one holding a red rose. The last photo is an extreme close-up of her black cat, sleeping, with just a glint of its pink tongue showing.

  "No people," I say.

  She pauses. "Huh. You're right. I never noticed, but I hardly ever shoot people." She frowns a little, then shakes her head. "Whatever. People are hard. Besides, Wizard Kitty is almost like a person."

  "Right," I say. "A person covered in fur and claws." She snickers. "Let me see your shots."

  I hand her my photos. I took the bus downtown really early Saturday morning, before people and cars were all over the place. I wanted some lonely shots. My first one is a wide-angle shot of the brick sidewalk on Broadway, stretching out clean and pinkish-red in the early morning light. The contrast is one crushed blue ticket stub. Then I have a close-up of black pavement where someone scattered a bunch of white petals. It made me wonder if some girl was picking the petals, saying, "He loves me ... he loves me not..." or if some guy got stood up by a girl and was ripping up the flowers as he walked away.

  My favorite shot is the one that's the most depressing: a woman, dressed all in black and gray, is passed out against the side of a dirty gray building. Even her pale arm looks dirty and gray, with a tattoo of a snake slithering down it. The only color in the shot is a streak of bright purple in her hair.

  Marissa grabs that photo and holds it closer to her face. She gasps, a ragged sound that breaks through the murmur of other people. "That's my mom!"

  CHAPTER THREE

  You are hereby forbidden to shoot any scene that could be called a cityscape.

  The world doesn't need any more of those. Look for street portraits,

  with a subject that cries out to be immortalized

  and a surrounding environment that compels the shot.

  —Spike McLernon's Laws of Photography

  Marissa's hand shakes as she grips the photo. "Where did you take this?" she asks, her voice shaking, too.

  "Um, down by Flink's."

  "Where by Flink's?" she says, suddenly loud.

  People are staring at us. Mr. Malloy heads our way.

  "Um, off of Burnside and Third. You know where Flink's is." Flink's is a club in Old Town. Not a month goes by that my dad doesn't do an autopsy on some drug OD from Old Town—or Tweaker Town, as he calls it.

  "I mean which street? Exactly which street?" Marissa is nearing meltdown.

  "I don't remember! I think it was Burnside."

  Mr. Malloy ambles up, cocking his head at us. "What's going on here?"

  Marissa drops her eyes. "Nothing."

  "Oh," I say. "We were, um, just talking about the homework."

  Let's see." He holds out his hand.

  Marissa hesitates for a second, then hands him the photo of her ... ohmygod her mom? I hand him the rest of my shots.

  "Gritty," Mr. Malloy remarks, glancing through them. He reaches for Marissa's photos and examines them. "Pretty," he says. "You two are predictable. I'm going to call you the Pretty-Gritty Team."

  I give him a fake smile. Marissa's gaze fastens on the photo of her mom, and as soon as Mr. Malloy walks away, she takes it out of my hand. "Where on Burnside?" she whispers. "Tell me exactly."

  "Marissa, I
told you. I don't remember." I stare at her while she stares at the photo. I want to say something, but I can only think of veryveryvery lame phrases. Sorry?

  "What day was this?"

  Saturday. Early."

  Her eyes fill up with tears, and her lips tremble like a little kid's. On a scale of good reasons to cry, Marissa's reason suddenly outranks Shannon's ten to one. I pat her arm a couple of times. She keeps her head down for a while until she gets herself under control.

  I have an overwhelming urge to study the photo of the woman passed out against the wall—Marissa's mom?—but I don't want to take it out of her hand. Besides, I can picture it in my head. The woman's face was mostly obscured by her straggly mud-colored hair, except for that bright purple streak in it. But the snake tattoo on her arm shows up clearly in the photo. That must be how Marissa recognized her.

  Marissa sits for the rest of the hour like she's in a trance. She hardly moves while Mr. Malloy talks about light and shadow. He makes us write down the word "chiaroscuro" and tells us our homework is to look it up and write a paragraph about how to use it. Then, one at a time, he looks at everyone's homework photos. I can hear him murmuring comments to people, like, "Try a slow synchro next time" and "Good depth of field." Since he's already looked at our photos, he doesn't stop by Marissa and me.

  When the bell rings, I figure Marissa will want to ask me more questions, but she just grabs her stuff and jets out of the classroom. She still has my photo, but I don't want it now, anyway.

  I'm standing at my locker getting out my Spanish book when I see Marissa heading for the door.

  "Mariss!" I slam my locker shut and catch up to her. "Where are you going?"

  "I have to go down there," she says. She doesn't need to explain where "down there" is.

  "But that was two days ago! She won't be there anymore," I say, baffled.

  "She might. When she crashes, she sometimes sleeps for days." Her heartbroken eyes bore into mine for a long moment before she turns away.

  ***

  Shannon has soccer practice after school—roughly forty-seven thousand times a week, plus one or two games thrown in to mix it up. But as I'm heading for Ottomans with Riley, she catches up to me.

  "Ms. Faraci had some last-minute emergency," she says. "She called off practice for today."

  Great!" I say.

  "Later," mumbles Riley, dropping his skateboard and stepping on, heavy backpack and all. He pushes off, rolling down the sidewalk.

  "She's going to kick our asses at practice tomorrow," says Shannon.

  "She said that?"

  No!" She giggles.

  At Ottomans, the beanbag chair that looks like a giant soccer ball is free. We juggle our milkshakes while we squish in together. Ottomans is a shop near school that sells drinks and snacks. It's not the cheapest place around, but it's ours. Not many adults want to sit on beanbags, footstools, or ottomans. All of the tables are low to the ground, too.

  I love the feel of Shannon against me. I love her pretty round kneecaps poking out of her baggy shorts.

  I love the way her long hair grazes my arm like feathers. It's shiny and soft, and seems to glow with every shade of blond you can think of.

  I love her belly laugh. We laugh a lot when we're together.

  We met over the summer, both of us working as "coaches" for the kids' day camps at the community center. Mornings we spent doing arts and crafts or playing various ball games with six-year-olds. Tuesday and Thursday afternoons were swim days. I'd seen Shannon around school last year, but she's kind of quiet, so I didn't know her very well. But when I saw her laughing and splashing in the pool in her little black bikini, I had a sudden urge to get to know her very well.

  Shannon squirms around in the beanbag, trying not to spill her shake, her hard hipbones moving against me. I'm still getting used to being this close to her. I can practically count the cinnamon sprinkle of freckles across her cheekbones.

  Shannon's cell phone rings. She hands me her shake while she pulls the cell out of her pocket. "Dang," she says, checking the display. "It's my mom."

  "How does she know you don't have practice?"

  "I don't know! She's spooky." She flips open the phone. "Hi, Mom." Pause. "Oh. It was canceled." Shannon widens her eyes at me and pretends to smack her forehead. Apparently her mom didn't know practice was canceled; she just called to leave a message.

  "Right now? Why?" says Shannon, shifting her delicious weight against me. I feel like groaning. She's practically in my lap. Little Guido is waking up in my boxers. "Oh," she says. "Okay. I will."

  She hangs up. Her grandma is in the hospital, and they need to go visit her, blah blah blah. "Sorry, big fella," she says with a little sigh against my neck, then wrestles her way out of the bean-bag. "Do you want us to drop you at home?"

  "Uh ... no. I'll call Garrett." Shannon's mom makes me nervous, and besides, I'm not going home yet.

  She gathers up her stuff. "I'll call you later." She gives me a quick kiss, and I watch her walk away.

  I flip open my cell and hold down 4 until it auto-dials Garrett.

  "Studly. What?" he says.

  "Can you drive me downtown?" I ask.

  "No." I can hear jock talk and metal music in the background.

  "Garrett, come on. I need to go downtown."

  "Why?"

  "It's important."

  "Blake, I'm busy," he says.

  I sigh. "Fine. And hey, Garrett? Could you make sure to keep crushing my spirit under your boots of indifference?"

  A moment of silence. "You've already used that line, man."

  Oh. All right, see you later."

  I walk to the bus stop. I really don't want to ride the bus downtown for thirty minutes and wander around with this hulking backpack weighing me down, but I can't stop thinking about Marissa.

  She had to know that she wasn't going to find her mom still passed out on the sidewalk in broad daylight two days later. Even if her mom does sleep for days after she crashes, some policeman would have called the drunk wagon by now.

  Oh my God. What if her mom was not just passed out in that photo, but dead? I never stopped to consider that before. What kind of cold, heartless bastard would stand around taking pictures of a body lying on the ground without even checking to see if the person was alive? What if she'd had a seizure or something and just needed an ambulance?

  The rest of the way, I worry about being a heartless bastard. I get off the bus at Burnside and start walking. Within two blocks I am offered an assortment of contraband: chiva, jelly, Tina, and ice. Don't ask me—I'm not even sure what they are. I'm kind of surprised no one tries to sell me any plain old weed. On the third block, heading my way, I see a scary-looking woman with bulging eyes and a short skirt. I cross the street. Flink's is on the corner of Third, and I head in that direction. As I pass the public men's room at the edge of Fountain Park, I smell puke. Nice.

  I walk around for probably an hour, but I never see Marissa. I stand at the bus stop waiting to go home. It's rush hour now, so people in business suits and students from the culinary college are waiting at the bus stop, too. It's more comforting to have people around when the gutter punks start asking for spare change. I give away all of my change except for what I need to ride the bus home. My dad tells me never to give street people money, but sometimes it just seems easier. I know they're ninety-nine percent definitely turning right around and using the money to buy their next hit, but what about that one percent that maybe really does just want to buy food? I know there are missions and places where they can get free meals, but what if they're really in the mood for a bacon cheeseburger?

  ***

  My mom is playing the piano when I get home. It's all heavy downer chords, like we're at a funeral. I swerve away from the living room. She always plays that song when she's in a bad mood. Since my mom is a hospital chaplain, even though she's around living people most of the time, she's frequently with people when they die. It's kind of weird, in a way,
that my mom spends time helping people die ... and my dad spends time figuring out how people died. You would think my parents would be the most depressing people on earth. But they're not, they're both pretty cool.

  After trolling around downtown for so long, I feel filthy. I head upstairs to take a shower while Mom is pounding on the piano. The Dog Formerly Known as Prince follows me. Even he must be feeling bummed out by the song.

  When I finish showering and go downstairs, Mom is sitting at the kitchen table doing a crossword puzzle. Something that smells good—like garlic and onions—is simmering on the stove.

  "Hi, honey!" she says, perfectly cheerful. "How was your day?"

  "Good." I grab a bag of Chex mix and start munching. I love that my mom never says, "Don't eat that now, you'll spoil your dinner." She understands that sometimes you're just starving and you have to eat right then.

  Dad comes in the back door, his hair bushed up like Albert Einstein. He ploinks the ear buds out of his ears, and leans over to kiss Mom. "Smells good in here," he says.

  "It's just a so-awse," Mom says, putting on her best Bronx accent. She frowns slightly at Dad.

  "What?" he says.

  "Did you have a stinky decomp today?" asks Mom. A stinky decomp is a corpse that has started, you know, decomposing.

  "Ohhh, I did! Sorry, I'll go shower." Dad hands me his iPod. "Check out the new Gingerfred," he says, and lopes away. He prides himself on being all hip to the new music. He doesn't know that he's always about six months behind, God love him.

  Suddenly my throat feels tight, like I might cry.

  My parents seem like a miracle.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  When wearing camera on neck strap, avoid entanglements.

  —Mitsu ProShot I.S. 5.3 camera guide, 2007

  "That chick is not a dog," Garrett says.

  "What?" We're Marauding to school, and we just drove into KWST range. A moldy oldie is playing "Lips Like Sugar" by Echo and the Bunnymen, and I'm zoning out, thinking that Shannon's lips are like sugar.