TUESDAY, OCTOBER 1: 5 DAYS UNTIL VANTAGE POINT
Mom is not thrilled with the idea of me going to a concert on a school night. And she is even less thrilled with the idea of me going to a concert with a guy she’s never heard of. “Mom, don’t worry about it, he’s a nice guy, he got accepted to Harvard!” is my comeback to that one.
“It’s October, Pippa,” she says, and already I can see this comeback has backfired. “If he was accepted at Harvard, why isn’t he at Harvard?”
“Mom, just trust me, OK?”
She makes a couple more protests—she doesn’t like the sound of this, please be careful, she doesn’t want me making a habit of going out on school nights, don’t I have homework to do, blah blah blah. And then: permission granted. I don’t even care that I have to be home by 11. The concert starts at eight and there’s only one opener and Cherry Blasters only have two albums so, yeah, 11. Probably it’ll be over a bit after 10, actually, but I want a bumper in there so that I have some time before I get that blast of “Who Let the Dogs Out?” With a few more Dylan- ward texts the plan’s established: we’re meeting at 6, after my shift at St. Christopher’s.
Highlights of the day before the night of: lunch is a photo club meeting that sees us going around sharing our Threes photos. I almost think Ben’s not going to show up, but he eventually does, about fif- teen minutes into the meeting. He sits at the end of the table, not making eye contact with any of us. When it’s his turn, he flicks through an iPad photo album, and it’s weird. I recognize a couple of the photos from our afternoon in the park—three trees, three logs, three flagpoles I somehow missed. But once again his photos are not quite right. The angles are all off. They lack any sense of composition. They’re nothing like the pictures he showed us last week. Maybe he’s just having an off week?
I go last, after Gemma. Then there’s a moment where you can feel the room’s tension. “About next week’s theme,” I say, and everybody flicks to everyone else’s gaze. “Any ideas?”
Nada. Zilch. Zip. Which is what I was kind of hoping. “So,” I say, “what if we just skip the theme this week?”
“Yeah,” Jeffrey agrees. “I’m pretty busy putting my entry together for Vantage Point.”
As are we all, Jeffrey. As. Are. We. All.
After school is fun with sick people. I’m back on flower delivery. I guess because I did such a good job last week? Every time I take an elevator I expect Dylan to get on. But no, it’s all uneventful until I pick up a skateboard-shaped cookie, deco- rated with every type of candy imaginable. The address tag lists a room on the fourth floor, back in the Rehabilitation Ward.
“Howie?” I say as I knock on the door, guessing the patient’s name based on the icing inscription on the candy skateboard. I push open the door and find a boy, about 11, lying on the bed. The cast that goes ankle to thigh has about a thousand signatures on it. His eyes widen when he sees the edible skateboard.
“Holy crap, bring that over here,” he says, and I carry it over to the bed. A real skateboard rests against the wall beside the head of his bed. He notices my camera around my neck. “Hey, you take pictures?”
I say yes, and he asks if that’s what I want to be when I grow up, which I think is funny to hear, but it’s true. He tells me he wants to be a pro skateboarder.
“Is that how you broke your leg?” I ask and he nods. “You must be pretty bummed out.”
He shrugs. “Nah. I almost landed an eight-step handrail. Now I know I can do it. Soon as I get this off. Will you take my pic? I want to remember this.”
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
Buffalo Sabres blanket.”
Dylan heads off, picking his way among the blan-
kets and the picnic baskets and as he goes I watch him, this boy, this easy boy, this boy who just made me laugh more than I’ve laughed in the whole of the previous year. He’s even cuter in the viewfinder as I snap a few pictures, out of reflex.
When he comes back he hands me a Diet Coke. He’s drinking water.
“Can I see?” he asks, nodding at my camera.
Does he know what he’s asking? Does he know what’s in that camera? A.k.a., my life?
As well as the pictures of him I just shot. The way he smiles suggests that he gets it.
It takes a minute for him to figure out how to get it into view mode. He ticks through the ones I just shot of him without comment, then continues through the rest of the images on the data card.
“Wow,” he says after a while. “I love how you see the hospital through your lens.”
“Passing the time,” I say, but his words are comforting.
He gets to the room 334 photo and looks at me with a question.
“My dad’s room,” I say.
He studies the picture for a second. “I’m sorry.” My hands are busy pulling out blades of grass.
Find blade, pull. Find blade, pull.
I twist the blade between my fingers and look at
Dylan. “It’s OK. Life goes on, right? I’m just trying to concentrate on other stuff. Vantage Point, this photography contest, for example. Top two go to a Tisch camp in New York next month. I’d learn so much. It’s two weeks of hardcore photography. But the best part is that I’d be there—right at the school. And it would look good on my college apps. Tisch is my dream school.”
“That’s awesome.”
“What about you?” I ask. “What happened with Harvard?”
He takes a sip of his water. Nods. Then explains that he deferred for a year. “I needed to get some things in order and decide if going to Harvard is what I really want to do.”
There’s now a patch of dirt where there used to be grass.
“I’ve got a few things on the go,” he says.
Like what? I’m dying to ask, but then the stage lights come up. There’s the unmistakable shag of the Cherry Blasters lead singer, and I say something about it to Dylan and he laughs.
“That would be a great name for a band,” he says. “Unmistakable Shag.”
Lots of questions occurred to me when Dylan first asked me to go to see Cherry Blasters. What would it be like, just the two of us? Even though I’ve had my massive crush forever, it’s not like we’ve spent much time together. What if we had totally different concert styles? What if he hated standing up—and got mad if others stood up in front of him? Would he dance? How did he dance? And what would he think of the way I danced? And also: what did I think of the way I danced? But from the moment Cherry Blasters come out I realize I have nothing to worry about. Dylan grabs my hand and pulls me up, and it starts with him bobbing his head, and then I’m bob- bing my head, and then my hips start moving and his are too, and there we are on the Buffalo Sabres blanket, in full-on dance mode, a mode we stay in through the whole of the rest of the concert.
The Cherry Blasters never do encores. It’s kind of their thing. So when they announce the next song will be their last, I know it’s going to be their big hit, “Even if You Don’t,” and I touch Dylan’s arm and go on my tiptoes to shout into his ear, “I love this song so much,” and then I realize, I just touched Dylan’s arm. I just shouted into Dylan’s ear. And it was com- pletely natural.
“The line about being in love with a girl who doesn’t love you back?” Dylan says once the lights have come up and he’s gathering his ridiculous blanket under his arm. Then he puts his other arm around me.
Also completely natural.
“Only that’s not it,” I say as we follow the crowd toward the exit. “It’s just that she has a secret and doesn’t want to hurt him. I wonder what the secret is.”
“It kinda doesn’t matter, right? It’s like trust, I guess. You either trust someone or you don’t.”
“I think it matters. If the secret is hurtful,” I say.
“What if she’s worried if he finds out, it’ll taint his view of her. And she just wants a fair shot with him?” We reach the car and Dylan opens the door for me.
“I don’t know,” I say once he’s beside me in the car. “It’s so deceitful. Like tricking the person into falling in love with them, without knowing every- thing up front.”
“So I should tell you I only have three toes on my left foot? Makes it hard to wear flip-flops but I get to park in handicapped spots.”
“Ha, ha,” I say, then actually laugh.
“Hey, so what time do you have to be home?” He pulls out of the parking space and follows the line of cars out of the lot. “Awesome,” he says after I say 11. “You game for a little celebratory snack? I think the Cherry Blasters were sufficiently deserving, no?”
“Yes,” I say. And then I turn toward him. “I had such a good time tonight.” He just looks at me and grins. I can’t remember the last time I felt this way. It’s not happy, exactly. It’s more of an awareness of not being unhappy. Buoyant. Light. Something. As we drive we talk and it’s not until he’s pulling into a parking lot that I register where we are.
Scoops.
Suddenly my mouth goes dry.
Dylan is saying something, but I don’t know what. I lean over, putting my head between my knees, the seatbelt cutting into the side of my neck.
“Are you OK?” Dylan asks, his hand on my leg.
“Take me home. Take me home. Take me home,” I say over and over. Am I saying it aloud? Can he hear me? Does he know where I live? What is he going to think of me?
Everything goes quiet.