LITMIR.BIZ

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says, “Jeez, I forgot about that. I’m screwed.” Knight in shining armor goes up in a puff of dust.

      Matt’s still waiting for an answer. I shake my head. I know he just wants to copy my homework. I should let him, and it’d serve him right. Does he think I get math just because I’m Asian? Maybe he thinks slanty eyes can see the numbers better or something.

      “I’m getting a D in math,” I say.

      Matt hoots. “Yeah, right, and I’m the King of—of England.” He turns to Greg. “They have kings there still, right?”

      I marvel at the fact that when I actually tell the truth, I’m not believed anyway. What would Daddy call this? A lie of disbelieving morons?

      I don’t want to be late for my least favorite subject, so I step around the boys and head down the hall. I hear them following me. Well, not following me exactly, just walking in the same direction since we’re all in the same class. I do wish Sean would follow me, like to the ends of the earth, or even just to my locker sometime, but no way am I going to waste wishes on that impossibility. Better to save them for something that might actually come true.

      In the room, I sit at my assigned front-and-center seat. Maybe Mr. Driggs thought I’d be a good example to the other students. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t be able to see over the top of anyone’s head if I sat anywhere else. Maybe he went alphabetically—backwards, since my last name is Wallace. I don’t dare try to figure out the last names of the two sitting on either side of me, just in case this theory doesn’t pan out.

      The bell rings, Mr. Driggs shuffles through the door, boredom sets in. Another typical math class.

      Fifty-two minutes later, when the bell rings again (waking everyone up), I don’t rush to the door with my classmates. I’ll get crushed. Plus, I don’t mind avoiding Greg and Matt when I can, even if it means missing a last glimpse of Sean. But to my amazement, Sean looks back at the last second before he disappears through the door, and he smiles. At me? I look all around. No one else here except Mr. Driggs. So for the rest of the day I have to wonder if that special, secret smile was for me or for the math teacher with the droopy pants, too much cologne, and a bald patch that I’m not sure he even knows about.

      I make it to seventh period in a daze. Was the smile for me or Mr. Driggs? For me? Or Mr. Driggs? Mr. Driggs? Me?

      “Hey, space-case.”

      My eyes focus. I’m about one inch from walking into Julie. We have photography together down in the art wing. Not that either one of us is artsy, but we had to sign up for some elective above and beyond our core curriculum, so we thought it’d be fun to take pictures together. I can’t even draw a stick figure with a ruler, so I figured this’d be easy. You know, let the camera do the work. Ha!

      After the first week of class, when Miss Shepard tried her best to teach us all the parts of a camera and explain about f-stop and shutter speed and other stuff I’ve already forgotten, she gave us our assignment.

      “You are to get with a partner,” she said.

      Julie and I grinned at each other. Perfect!

      “And take photos of each other.”

      This, I thought, was not so perfect. I hate having my photo taken. I’m so not photogenic. My nose looks flatter than ever, my eyes are slits, my hair is a black helmet.

      “You are to capture the essence of the person you are shooting. Take a look at these photos by Dorothea Lange.” She flashed a series of black-and-white images on the screen. “See how Dorothea captured the souls of these people during the Depression.” She talks in italics a lot. She went on to explain how Dorothea Lange traveled across the United States during the Depression, shooting pictures of families looking for work and food.

      One image appeared on the screen called “Migrant Mother.” It was a picture of a woman with two children beside her. The children were hiding their faces. The mother had one hand to her face, and she was staring off into the distance. I was surprised to feel tears prickle the back of my eyes as I looked at this image. Another shot came up. It was another mother with two children. It looked like they were in a car or the back of a bus. She looked so confused, like she was wondering how she got there. And even though it looked like it might have been hot out, because the little boy wasn’t wearing pants or shoes, they were all wearing heavy winter coats. I thought it was to remind them of when they had money, and I couldn’t help wondering what their lives were like before the Depression, and where they went, and how they ended up . . .

      Miss Shepard finished up with, “Use Dorothea Lange as your role model. Your photos must have quality and be evocative, literary, if you will. In other words, I don’t want my-trip-to-the-Cape type photos. And you must not show your model the photos until the end of the quarter.”

      It’s six weeks into the quarter now, and so far I have no evocative pictures of anything. They’re not Julie’s-trip-to-the-Cape photos. More like Julie’s-trip-to-the-tree, Julie’s-trip-to-the-couch, oh—here’s a creative one, Julie’s-trip-to-the-mirror. That was Julie looking in the mirror so that I got the back of her head and the reflection of her face. I thought it’d be so artsy and “literary.” Mostly it was just out of focus because I didn’t know whether to focus on her head or her reflection. The frame of the mirror is looking pretty good, but that’s about it.

      The biggest bummer about the class, other than having to have pictures taken of me, of course, is that we can’t use digital cameras. Miss Shepard says we have to learn to really feel the camera and to see the image and to experience the chemicals and the magic of developing. I think it’s just a way for the school to save money by not buying digital cameras. We use the school’s ancient Canons.

      We take turns in the classroom lab. Julie’s signed up to develop film on Tuesdays and I’m in there on Thursdays. That’s so we don’t see each other’s shots.

      It’s kind of an odd class because, unlike math where I get daily reminders of how poorly I’m doing, in photography we don’t get a grade until the final week of the quarter when we all display our photos and get critiqued. I’m thinking that’d be a good week to have instant chicken pox or mono or the flu or something else contagious.

      “Where should we shoot today?” Julie asks as I deposit my book bag on a table. She already has our cameras loaded with 200-speed black-and-white film.

      “Does it really matter?” I say, taking a camera.

      Julie gives me the stink-eye. “Of course it matters, but only if you want to pass this class,” she says, like she is reading my mind.

      “Okay, how about the caf?”

      “Food pictures?” Julie wrinkles her nose.

      “Then the gym,” I suggest. This has a double benefit. I know Julie’s into the gym scene, and I’m pretty sure Sean is there now.

      “Great.”

      Oh, I’m so devious.

      Julie grins at me as we walk down the hall. “You don’t think Sean has gym this period, do you?”

      Devious, not. Julie knows way too much about me.

      I shrug like I don’t have any idea and I don’t care, but Julie just laughs and nudges me with her elbow. She does that a lot, and I have the bruises to prove it. Of course they’re all up around my shoulder, seeing as she’s a giant compared to my barely five feet of height.

      We have to show our “art pass” to only one hall monitor. Miss Shepard lets us wander the school for location shots as long as we don’t disrupt other classes, run in the hall, smoke in the bathroom, or get caught by the principal.

      The gym is cavernous, which makes it loud and breezy. Only the breeze doesn’t blow away the stink of rubber soles, “newly pubescent boys” (lingo care of Mrs. Flint, the health teacher) who haven’t yet been turned on to deodorant, and

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