And then one morning, I looked over at Erin, sleeping, lovely Erin, who was just like all the girls I’d ever known. She had a boyfriend at Boston University, and during her nightly chatter, I learned that she had planned their lives down to the most specific detail—engagement after their junior year, the wedding after graduation, kids two years apart. During the daytime, she looked too calculated, too poised, her face hidden behind foundation and powder, blush and mascara, the pinkish lipstick she reapplied even when it was only the two of us and her grand plans for the evening included sending an email to her boyfriend.
But at that moment, with the sunlight filtered through our Venetian blinds, creating light and dark panes on her face, she was a different Erin entirely. Pale wisps of hair covered one cheek, and her mouth was slightly, sweetly slack, with the tiniest bulge of fat beneath her chin. Beneath her pale yellow pajama top, the hard knot of one nipple was visible.
Before I knew what I was doing, I was freeing my camera from its safe spot at the top of my closet. I snapped one picture, and then, moving closer, another. In this moment, Erin was lovely in a way she’d never been before—relaxed, vulnerable. A small red blemish on her chin was visible; her lashes were pale and fragile against her eye socket. I knelt next to the bed, snapping away, entranced.
“What are you doing?” she murmured, drawing a hand over her face.
“Sorry. Just checking something on my camera,” I said, letting it hang loose from the strap around my neck. “I was going to head out to take some pictures...”
“It’s so early,” she moaned, rolling over, pulling her Garnet Hill sheets and the matching comforter into a heap over her head.
I was aware that it was creepy, that photographing a person without her knowledge was crossing a definite line. But I’d captured something good in that fleeting minute, which made me understand something else: none of the pictures I’d taken before—the landscapes and sunsets and reflections off buildings, the stained glass in the chapel—were any good. These ones were.
By this point, after a few weeks of tailing Dr. Mittel, I’d picked up the basics in the darkroom and he usually let me operate more or less on my own, only popping in occasionally to look at my negatives. It was a thrill to see Erin’s face appear during the developing process, the sunlight catching the fine strands of hair, the wet corner of her mouth. I stared at her face in the stop bath, warmth spreading through my body. I’d created this. No—that wasn’t quite right. It was simply there, but I was the one who found it. Afterward, I held my breath while I waited for Dr. Mittel’s regular verbal cues—the harrumph and hmmm, the tapping of his finger against an image. Instead, he was silent.
Maybe they weren’t good, I thought. Maybe they were horrible. Maybe I didn’t have an eye for this kind of thing at all. Maybe, like the faces I used to draw in the margins of my notebooks, photography was something that couldn’t be taught beyond the technical processes.
“What’re these?” he asked finally.
“My roommate,” I said, wiping my suddenly sweaty hands against my jeans.
He nodded. “Tell me about them.”
My words came out in a rush, stumbling over each other. I told him about seeing the sun on her face, how it was like I’d never seen her before until she was framed in the viewfinder.
“They’re good,” he said. “Obviously, there are some techniques you need to learn, some tricks of lighting and shadow, and then there’s a whole host of printing options...”
I waited, leaning back against the counter.
“But there’s something here, Lauren. Something raw and intimate. You let the camera speak. It’s almost like a lover’s gaze, seeing everything.”
“She doesn’t know—” I stammered, my gaze flickering to the outline of Erin’s nipple, which somehow looked innocent and obscene at the same time. “She was asleep.”
He frowned. “Obviously, that’s an issue. You’ll need to get her permission if you’re going to display these or use them in your portfolio. But maybe this is your thing. Portraiture, but not posed. Candid. Catching these unaware moments. This is something to pursue.”
I nodded, trying not to burst through my skin with happiness. This is something to pursue.
“You’re taking my class in the spring, I know. Maybe we’ll see about getting you on the Courier, too. Have you considered that? They’re always looking for photographers, and I could write a recommendation.”
I grinned. The Courier was Keale’s weekly newspaper, something I’d only glanced at occasionally in the Commons, thumbing through pages while I twirled my spaghetti with a fork. “That sounds great,” I admitted.
I left his office feeling the most alive, the most right, I’d ever felt. The closest I’d come otherwise was with Marcus, when everything was thrilling and dangerous, thrilling because it was dangerous. This was something I’d done, something I’d created, not dependent on anyone else. Dr. Mittel didn’t give a damn that I was a Mabrey, and I didn’t, either.
Megan
Mom wanted to know everything about Keale, but even after the initial newness wore off, I had trouble putting it into words.
Keale was its own little world—sprawling green lawns and clusters of Victorian-era buildings, bordered on two sides by horse pastures and on another by a seventeen-acre forest that backed onto a tributary of the Housatonic. The buildings were named after female suffragettes and abolitionists and artists—the Susan B. Anthony Auditorium, the Alice Stone Blackwell Hall of Arts & Letters, the Rebecca Harding Davis and Elizabeth Cady Stanton residential halls. “Who?” Mom asked, but I could hardly keep them straight myself. The school seemed torn between its past—earnest and vaguely religious—and its present, where couples openly held hands and as a form of protest art, girls hung their bloody tampons on a display in the student center.
I’d expected a campus built in the 1800s to be showing its age, imagining a dusty reference library, cracks in foundations, crumbling facades. Instead, every outward inch of Keale was maintained to perfection. The brickwork gleamed; the sidewalks were pressure-washed to sparkling silver. Leaves and food wrappers were whisked away by a small army of maintenance workers in green jumpsuits. Inside, the buildings were light and modern, housing computer labs and rows of microscopes.
That first night, alone in my room, I had the impression that Keale was a sort of sacred space, a feeling enhanced by a quaint bell from the original chapel marking otherwise silent hours. But then the dorms filled, and this vision was shattered with feet pounding in the hallway, music pulsing through walls, female voices echoing up and down the stairwells. In the common kitchen on each floor of Stanton Hall, someone was forever burning popcorn in the microwave or losing the remote control right before Friends was scheduled to start or bitching about who had used the one-percent milk, despite the fact that it had been labeled in permanent marker as Hailey’s Milk.
By contrast, my room was a tomb. Someone in Housing must have thought that Ariana Kramer and I made a perfect match, based solely on the fact that we were both from the Midwest. But Ariana was quiet and studious and serious, charged with living up to the expectations of her pediatrician father and her law professor mother. She lined the bookshelf above her desk with ribbons and plaques and trophies—First Place Academic Decathlon. National Honor Society Lifetime Member. Soroptimists International Achievement Winner.
“I didn’t think to bring my Pinewood Derby participation ribbon,” I told her that first day, after her parents had left for the airport and she was carefully arranging her clothes, grouping the hangers by color. I expected at least a courtesy laugh, but Ariana didn’t