The Rule of Thirds

Chapter Ten

The first shots are him with the candy skateboard, and then he gets me to grab his actual skateboard. “Here’s how I did it,” he says, lifting the skateboard up, then maneuvering it over the railing on the side of the bed. I snap a bunch of pics of Howie in action, first focusing in on the skateboard, letting Howie go out of focus behind, then vice versa.

“I’m probably not supposed to take your picture without your mom or dad’s approval,” I realize aloud, then I assure him I’ll send him the pics and won’t do anything else with them. I help him back into bed and tell him I have to go. By the time I leave Howie’s room I’m in a really good mood. Back downstairs, I grab a delivery for the third floor. It’s only once I’m off the elevator—actually, it’s only once I’m, like, right there at the door, about to knock—that I glance at the tag to make sure I have the right room. Room 334, the tag says. And my legs nearly give out beneath me. Room 334.

I lean up against the wall and close my eyes and try to take a deep breath but I can’t get enough air.

Room 334.

There’s the supply closet, just down the hall from the waiting room where I’d hunch down in a chair and watch TV when everything in the room got to be too much, or when my parents had something adults-only to discuss. There’s the poster: Washing Hands Saves Lives. Which I always wondered about—prevents a few flu cases, maybe, but saves lives? It seemed a little overblown to me. And there’s the nurses’ station I’ve been avoiding. It’s a bit past 5 on a Tuesday afternoon—Rishna’s the nurse on duty unless the schedules have changed. She had the best stories. The one she told me right near the end, about how she woke up in the middle of the night to find a strange cat in her house. Her color-blind husband had let it in. He’d thought it was their cat.

I take a long slow breath. Everything’s going to be OK. Lots of patients have come and gone from this room. It’s just a room. It’s been cleaned. It’s been sanitized. There’s nothing left in that room that has any memories at all. There’s just someone else in there, a little earlier on the same journey that ends with a daughter no longer having her dad around.

Or whatever.

Three more deep breaths. My eyes focus on the numerals: 334. My camera clacks against the door as I set the arrangement on the floor. Then, focus: the door number in the right third of the frame, the other two-thirds filled by the hallway I walked so many times. That’s right: concentrate on the rule of thirds, so you don’t concentrate on anything else.

Dylan’s carrying a blue blanket and I’m carrying the Cherry Blaster candies he gave me when he picked me up in front of the hospital in his dad’s total dad- mobile, a navy Cadillac, with a shiny wood dash- board and all the stations preset to easy listening. Not at all what I would’ve thought the lead singer of Rules for Breaking the Rules would be driving but, in its own way, so awesome.

He lays out the blanket at a spot about halfway between the stage and the concession stands, and we both look down at it. It’s a plush blanket—with an enormous Buffalo Sabres logo on it.

“Wow,” I say, blinking.
“Uh. Yeah,” he says.
“I didn’t realize you were a big hockey fan,” I say.

“You know, you could probably see that thing from space.”

He laughs. And then I giggle, and then I can’t stop laughing, and neither can he. “Actually,” Dylan says, “my dad’s the fan. I guess I just kind of grabbed the first blanket I saw. Oh god, this is embarrassing . . . Are you even gonna sit on this?”

“I’ll give it a shot,” I say, still laughing.
“Hey, you want a drink?”
“You think you’ll be able to find your way back?” He grins. “I’ll just look for the only girl on a