“Look.” Jamie comes near, stoops down, and shows me the screen of her camera. “I really am a photographer. See?” She flips from one frame to the next. Shadows behind a door, a pencil with a broken tip, an empty syringe surrounded by needles, someone’s bare back, a twist of yarn, uneaten food, empty prescription bottles, a half-pulled-back curtain, a close-up of her eye, and then finally the rust.
“You have no idea what you’re doing,” I say.
“What!” she explodes.
“I mean, not like you don’t know how to use a camera, but what are you taking pictures of?”
“Life, you asshole,” she snaps. “Because we’re human beings who should care about being alive, not about the glory of sitting next to some jamoke at a lunch table.”
“Wait, hold up. Don’t throw one of my ‘five good things’ back at me. That’s not fair,” I say. “I had to say something in that stupid room, and yeah, maybe having a prime seat next to the most popular guy in school is a bonus for someone like me.”
“Someone like you.”
“You know what I mean.” I angle my head back down and hide behind the hat.
Jamie slides the lens cap over her camera and slips it into her bag. “Yeah, I know. Stupid me for thinking there was more to it. Now, if you’re going to continue to be a cryptic a-hole, my bus is coming.”
“I’m not being cryptic,” I say, wheeling after her. She doesn’t slow down. It only makes me louder. “I’m not!”
Jamie steps onto the bus and pays her fare. The driver sees me and hits the hydraulics to lower the bus down to the curb with a wheezing hiss. A metal flap unfolds and the driver waits for me to roll on, so I do. If I see a white car drive by, right now, this second, then it’s a sign from the afterlife that I’m supposed to get on the bus.
A red car flies by, followed by a silver truck. Then a white car.
Close enough, Dad.
The bus gobbles me up, seals the door tight, and eats my money. My nostrils flare. I’m inside. I’m on the bus. I look with wide eyes at the parking lot. If my mother’s there, I don’t see her. And then I realize I don’t care.
I’m on a bus and I’m going far, far away to another place, and this is amazing. A smile breaks out across my cheeks so hard, it feels like a sunburn. I give my armrests a squeeze and gaze headily at the trees whizzing by. “You okay?” Jamie asks.
“I am so okay right now.”
“You look high.”
“I am not that kind of high,” I mumble. “But I wouldn’t know, that’s your arena.”
Her head bobbles. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you properly because it sounded like you just called me a drug addict.”
“The syringes.” I lean in and whisper. “On your camera. I saw them, but don’t worry, I won’t tell.”
The farther Jamie’s neck skews backward, the more her eyes stay locked on me. “Did you ever think those needles and syringes might be for medicine that keeps me alive?”
“Like for diabetes?”
“Something like that.”
“So…,” I drag out. “You’re a diabetic?”
Her lips purse like she’s sucking a lemon. “Yes,” she finally says.
I look at her wrists, but they’re covered with long sleeves. “Where’s your medical bracelet?”
“My what?”
I point to her right and left hands. “For the EMTs. In case your insulin gets too low and you pass out walking in traffic.”
She whips her hands up under her armpits. “I don’t wear one. They’re ugly, so stop looking.”
I scratch my chin. “I’m guessing you’ve got type 1 juvenile-onset diabetes, so I’m not sure what the pill bottles are for. Maybe high doses of—”
“Okay, enough, Dr. McKnowitall. I get it: you’re smart,” she interrupts me. “But this is not Jamie’s Medical History 101, so let’s talk about the weather.”
“But you’re in therapy.”
“So are you.”
I shake my head. “Not really. I only went to one session to make my mom happy.”
“Your mom sent you to therapy?”
There are so, so many ways I could answer that question. “Uh, no. Not quite. My orthopedic surgeon did.”
“An orthopedic surgeon sent you to therapy? Holy shit, Dylan, did you break your own leg?”
“What? No!”
Now Jamie is the one who leans in tight. I try not to get heady from the closeness. “We’re in therapy for self-harmers.” She gestures to my leg. “So if you did this to yourself, you need way more than one session.”
I turn toward the window. “Where are we going?”
“We?” she chokes out. “I’m sorry, were you under the impression we were going somewhere? Because you got on by yourself. I don’t tend to go on bus rides with people who insult my work and assume I shoot up black tar.”
She gets up from her seat and sits across the aisle, arms crossed and legs folded.
Suddenly the bus is cold. “I don’t know anything about photography,” I say.
“That’s obvious.”
“Why do you like it?”
“Why should I tell you?”
“Because I want to learn.”