“Do you want it there?”
“I’m done with lunch.” He grabs his backpack and walks away.
I follow him. “Please stop. Please talk to me. I need . . . I need—” My voice breaks. Tears fill my eyes, and I’m not ready for all this emotion.
I need you.
But I can’t say that. I’m not even entirely sure it’s him I need or if it’s someone else.
He’s not completely heartless. He stops. Turns. Looks at me. For the first time today, his eyes are heavy with feeling. I remember the same expression on his face when he held the weighted punching bag. You’re exactly as strong as I thought you were.
I would give anything for him to touch me right now.
He doesn’t. “I’m sorry, too,” he whispers.
Then he turns around and walks out of the cafeteria, leaving me alone in the middle of a swarm of students.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
INBOX: CEMETERY GIRL
No new messages
Every time I tell myself I’m not going to check my phone again, I do anyway. Not being able to email him is causing me physical pain. I grieved my mother’s death, but this is a different kind of loss. A deliberate removal. I’ve reread his final email until I could recite it by heart.
You don’t need me.
I do need him. I do.
I need him right now, while I’m sloshing chemicals in a light-safe tank, saturating my mother’s film. It’s been a long time since I’ve done this, and Mr. Gerardi is hovering. We had to start the process in complete darkness, winding the film onto a metal spool, but once it was in the tank, he flicked the lights back on and poured the developer in.
My heart beats so fast that my chest aches.
“Do you know what’s on the film?” Mr. Gerardi says.
I shake my head quickly. I haven’t told him about Brandon’s theory about the hit-and-run, because I’m worried he’ll stop the process and call my father.
I clear my throat and find it hard to speak around my galloping heartbeat. “They might be graphic.”
Mr. Gerardi’s eyebrows go way up, and his hand stops mixing the stop bath. “Graphic?”
I blush furiously and choke on nervous laughter. “Not like that. War zone shots.”
“Oh.” He nods and continues pouring chemicals.
“But they could be anything. Film was her hobby.”
“I remember.”
Of course he does. I used to spend more time in Mr. Gerardi’s classroom than anywhere else in the school.
He keeps his eyes on the chemicals as he measures. “What exactly brought this on?”
“I don’t know.”
He’s quiet, and he doesn’t look at me. My words float there in the silence for a while, until guilt begins to prick at me. I do know, and he knows I know, and he’s waiting for me to fess up.
“Brandon came over last night,” I say quietly. “He had a theory that she might have gotten a picture of the car that hit her. We checked her memory cards, but . . .”
“Nothing there?”
I shake my head. “Just shots from her last assignment.”
He straightens and looks at me. “I wish you’d told me this morning. I didn’t realize—”
“No . . . it’s okay.” I shrug and fiddle with her empty camera, sitting on top of her canvas bag. The lens cap is worn in spots from the pressure of her fingers taking it on and off. “It’s a long shot.”
“True. But either way, it might be nice to see what her final photos were.”
“Maybe.” I swallow.
The timer goes off, and I pour out the developer, and he stands ready to pour the stop bath into the tank. I’m out of practice, but it’s like riding a bicycle. I pour, he pours, and the lid goes on with a snap. He inverts the tank, and again we wait.
“Have you given any more thought to coming back to class?” he says quietly.
I shrug and start lining up the trays.
“How did it feel to shoot the Fall Festival?”
At the time, it felt like torture. But this morning, studying that photograph of Declan and Rev and the cheerleaders, I was reminded of how much I love photography. The chance to capture a moment of time, forever. Even if no one in that photograph ever saw anyone else after high school, that moment of friendship and separation was already immortalized.
“It felt . . . okay.”
He waits, but I don’t say anything else. He gives me teacher eyebrows. “And . . . ?”
“And . . . I don’t know.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Sometimes.”
He nods, then studies me. “Does it make it painful, to know this is something you shared with her?”
“No. It’s painful to know I’ll never be able to do what she does. It makes it all feel so pointless.” I freeze with my hand on a tray. That’s more than I wanted to say. More than I think I’ve ever admitted to myself all at once.
He stops measuring chemicals for the trays and peers at me. “Pointless?”
I blush because it might sound like I’m insulting his career. I don’t know how else to explain it. “She was making a difference with her photography. I can’t do that. I can’t go to Syria and walk through bombed-out buildings. I can barely drive through the city.”
“Juliet, you’re seventeen years old. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. I think you’d have a hard time walking down the street and finding anyone who would have the physical and mental fortitude to do something like that. And just because you can’t do it now doesn’t mean you can’t do it ever.”
I stare at him, fiddling with my fingers. I don’t know what to say.
He sets the bottles down and turns to face me fully. “My brother is a firefighter. I have no idea how he can walk into burning buildings—but he tells me he has no idea how I can stand in front of teenagers all day. Just because someone isn’t risking their life doesn’t mean their life’s work is . . . pointless.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”