If I Fell

Chapter Sixteen

Making sure to glance about me to make sure the hallway was deserted, I quickly pushed open the door, turning around to swing it shut with a sigh. It may have seemed rather pitiable, but I needed to make sure no one that I knew – and even ones that I didn’t – hadn’t seen me walk into this room. After all I had learnt that my mother and Marcy talked once in a while without my knowledge, even if it was about my birthday. No one could be too careful, especially not me when it came to this.

I was going to be here later than even I ever wanted to be at school, but since it was for a good cause I wasn’t feeling all that pathetic – at least not anymore than usual. Anyways, I had nowhere to be until Cole got off of work.

That was a bit more pathetic.

And if I added in that there was no point going home since there was no one there to miss me, it made it even more so. I was trying not to think about it, though.

 Reaching over blindly to my side, my fingers found the light switch without problem, letting me flick on the dim lighting for the room. I’d been here so many times after school for years on end that I probably wouldn’t even need the lights to find my way around. However I was going to need them if I was going to develop anything.

All that tension from sneaking about before fled from my tightly pulled straight shoulders, allowing them to slump as I gave a sigh. If there was one place besides the library that I’d always felt relaxed in at school, it was of course the darkroom. Sure, some of the time I’d spent in here had been for class, but I took advantage of after school hours far more than any other student I’d heard about.

It had been far too long since I’d been in here.

Taking a few steps into the cramped room, I found my favourite lab table and dropped my bag on top of it carefully. I doubted it would matter if I hadn’t been in here for ten years, I would still remember everything I had to do, it might as well have been burnt into my retinas. Maybe it could be flesh memory by now, the same way I thought it was with Cole when he was playing a song on the guitar.

Even if I wasn’t desperate to get what I’d committed to film on a surface, I had also promised Anne the other night that I’d show her what I had. Not to mention both Cole and I had been expressing an interest if there was something on the film from the person that had possession of the camera before me.

It was that easy to fall back into habit and lose myself.

Without noticing, I’d lost all my thoughts into actions that I enjoyed so much. In my photography class, the other students had thoughts this to be a chore since they much preferred are work with digital cameras. I’d been one the few to fall in love with developing the film into negatives. It was like breathing life into a relationship that had fallen apart over the years.

The only thing that even compared in the slightest to my love of photography had occurred to me just recently, and it had been given to me by Cole. Watching him play or listening to music gave me the same sort of cathartic release, but it really didn’t match up with this.

Maybe my mother had been right to tell me to stop with photography, because it could easily take over my life. I would be only too happy to let it, but I suppose that’s where the problem came in. At the moment I didn’t care, though, I was just happy.

Hours passed with me noticing, only waking up after I’d completed the entirety of the photographs that had been on the roll. And it turned out that someone had definitely been using the film before me. Suddenly I was very happy that no one had walked in while I’d been developing the photographs, because they’d surely have more questions than why I was in the darkroom after all this time. I might even be suspended for having those images in school.