“I wasn’t a valedictorian,” I assured her. It occurred to me that the Keale girls had probably all been at the tops of their classes, the sort of motivated girls who took seven classes a semester, played two sports and one musical instrument and spoke conversational French. Basically, they were just younger versions of my sister, Kat.
“Don’t you think it’s exciting?” Erin gushed, and I realized that I had no idea what she was asking, or what was supposed to be so exciting.
“I guess,” I said. From her silence, I knew it was the wrong answer.
“Maybe it’s not so exciting for someone like you,” Erin said, and she snapped out the light.
* * *
The day before the semester was scheduled to begin, I made an appointment with the registrar. Mom had scheduled me for five general education classes, and there wasn’t a single one that interested me.
“My parents are concerned about my class load,” I told Dr. Hansen, who had a severe white bob and owlish eyes behind her oversize frames. I leaned close to her desk, keeping my voice conspiratorial. “I was hospitalized for stress last fall.”
Dr. Hansen raised an untrimmed eyebrow, frowning at her computer screen. “There was no mention of a hospitalization due to stress,” she murmured, tapping keys.
“No, there wouldn’t be. My parents were trying to protect me, I think. They probably said it was mono or something.”
“Ah,” Dr. Hansen said, nodding. “Well, of course it’s best for you to talk with your academic advisor, but—”
“Oh, I’ll absolutely do that. But for now, with classes starting tomorrow...”
Dr. Hansen said, “Right. Well, let me pull up your schedule and see what we can do.”
After a bit of searching and waiting for the appropriate screens to load, she agreed that with my medical history, it might be best to drop Biology for now, and switch my math class for Introduction to the Arts. Half an hour later, I left her office feeling decidedly better about life.
* * *
Intro to the Arts was taught by a team of professors, each quirkier than the last: a visual artist, a theater director and a musician. The goal was to spend five weeks studying in each discipline and finish the semester with a portfolio of critical and creative work. I completed a shaky landscape sketch and a self-portrait that looked more like the face of a distant cousin before attending a presentation on basic photography skills. Fill the frame. Align by the rule of thirds. Look for symmetry. I watched pictures flash by on the giant screen at the front of the room, subjects so close that I could see the crackly texture of leaves, the blood vessels in a woman’s eyes. Afterward, on a whim, I wandered up to the front of the lecture hall where Dr. Mittel was packing up his equipment.
“Hi, I’m Lauren. I’m in this lecture,” I began.
“Dr. Mittel,” he said, his lower lip almost lost in an enormous beard. “But I imagine you know that.”
I looked down at the table, where a binder was open to a page of detailed notes. I wasn’t used to chatting with instructors eye-to-eye; I had never been the kind of student who was distinguished for academics, admirable work ethic or even, for that matter, decent attendance. “I was just wondering. You mentioned there was a darkroom on campus.”
“Ah,” he said. “Are you a photographer?”
“No. I mean—I’m interested, though.”
He gave me a quick glance before closing the binder and zipping up his bag. “Do you have a camera?”
“Not a very good one,” I acknowledged. Most summers, when I’d gone off to camp, Mom had sent me along with a cheap point-and-click camera and several rolls of film with the understanding that neither might survive the summer. Somewhere, in my jumble of unpacked belongings, I had a 35mm Kodak.
“Tell you what,” Dr. Mittel said. “Why don’t you shoot a roll or two and bring it by my office? I’d be happy to develop your film and look at it with you.”
“Is there something...” I hesitated, afraid the question would be stupid. Knowing it was. “I mean, in terms of a subject, is there something I should focus on?”
Dr. Mittel’s smile was kind, and behind it I read a sort of mitigated pity. Poor little rich girl, trying hard for that A. “Shoot what speaks to you,” he said. “People, scenery, whatever.”
* * *
That weekend, I rode the shuttle into town and bartered with the owner of an electronics repair store over a forty-year-old Leica, all but draining my bank account.
Erin whistled later, finding the receipt I’d placed on my desk. “You spent nine hundred dollars on that thing?”
“The owner said it was the best,” I told her. The camera and its accessories were spread out on the bed, and I was figuring out the lenses and attachments from the store owner’s scribbled notes. The Leica came with a somewhat battered case that I instantly loved, thinking of all the places it must have gone with its previous owner.
“But this is just for one assignment, right?” she asked. I could see her mind clicking like a cash register. She would tell her friends, all the other Keale girls who were just like her, and I would be an anecdote to their stories, an inside joke. The girl who tried to buy her way to an A.
“For now, but I might take a photography class next semester,” I said, the idea just occurring to me.
Erin frowned. “Isn’t everything supposed to be switching to digital?”
I raised the camera to my eye, locating Erin’s perfect, pouty face in the viewfinder. She raised a hand in protest, and I snapped a picture, relishing the smart click of the shutter, the dark curtain spilling over the lens.
“Lauren! I don’t even have my hair done.”
“Relax,” I said. “It’s not loaded.”
I spent the next week shooting rolls of film all over campus, looking for interesting angles and tricks of light. I lugged my camera bag to the chapel to shoot the sunrise streaming through stained glass, and onto the roof of Stanton Hall at sunset to catch the last wink of sun as it disappeared over a row of elms, the branches backlit. I stopped some girls on the way to class, and photographed them with their arms around each other’s shoulders. “Is this for the yearbook?” one of them wanted to know, and I told her it just might be. What I liked most was the feeling of authority that came with the camera hanging from my neck, and the way I could instantly disappear when I looked through the viewfinder.
Dr. Mittel developed two rolls for me and we met in his office to look at the contact sheet through his loupe, a cylindrical magnifying lens that he kept on his desk. He passed over the smiling girls in their stiff poses, the sunrises and sunsets. “This is good for a first attempt,” he said finally. “You’re looking for all the right things—angles, lighting. And you must have a good lens on that camera of yours.”
I told him about the Leica, my splurge, and he frowned, either at the expense or at the thought of some no-talent hack having access to such nice equipment.
“I assume you’re serious about this, then,” he said, passing me the contact sheet. “The best thing for you, I think, would be to take a class this spring. I teach an intro course—very hands-on, lots of time in the darkroom, some developing techniques—”
“I’ll look into it,” I said, my heart hammering. Suddenly it was imperative that I take that class.
“As far as your portfolio is concerned, I think you probably already have a few prints here you could work with. But we’ve got some time, and you could certainly keep going. I feel like you’ve shot the things you think I wanted you to shoot—maybe the things you thought you should shoot. I’d like to see