Chapter Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Seven
My footsteps echoed up the empty hall of the high school’s east wing, my reflection a shifting shape on the floor. The entire building changed on the weekends, with light casting unbroken beams at an angle through the windows and the open emptiness of the rooms almost resonant.
The darkroom had been left ajar, allowing the scent of the developer and the trickling sound of the water bath to drift out into the hallway. I didn’t even blink when I caught the shape of Johnny as I passed the open door, and I wondered if that was how it would always be now—splices of him folded into the periphery of my life.
Olivia’s classroom was empty when I stepped inside, and I glanced at my phone, checking the time. I was a few minutes late. Beams of sunlight pierced through the air, striping the linoleum floor as I walked along the wall, letting my fingers trace over the paintings. Every time I came here, the smell of ink and clay and a hundred other familiar things transported me back to Byron.
I stopped when I reached Autumn’s photography series mounted and framed on the wall. The little star in the corner of the images had been written in pencil, the same one I’d seen on that message at Johnny’s. But those trees looked different to me now. They meant something different. What I wished I could know was what they’d meant to Autumn.
“James!” Olivia appeared at the classroom’s entrance, one hand hooked to the edge of the doorframe.
“Hey.”
“Thought I heard you. You barely caught me.” She walked straight toward a row of large binders on a shelf behind her desk, pulling two of them down.
“Sorry, I got caught up with something,” I said, surprising myself that I was actually tempted to tell her about Quinn. Like the teenage girl in me still wanted to pull it all apart with a friend, analyzing the details of everything. I’d missed that, I realized.
“The folder’s still in the darkroom.” Olivia found the binder she was looking for and pulled it down with a grunt. She opened it on top of the messy desk calendar and flipped through the plastic sleeves. “But I also ran across a few prints and I wanted to be sure you got them.”
I leaned a hip into the desk. “I appreciate that.”
“I know I put them in here,” she murmured, eyes skipping from one photo to the next. She kept flipping until she found it. “There they are!”
A photograph of Smoke and a few others were clipped together and slipped into the same sleeve. She pulled them out, handing them to me.
The corners of my mouth tugged into a smile. The shot of Smoke was of him sitting on the porch of the cabin, his ageless tawny eyes on the road and tongue lolling out one side of his open mouth.
“How are you holding up?” Olivia asked.
I could feel the smile falling from my lips now. “I’m okay. You?”
She closed the binder, crossing her arms over her chest. “It’s been a weird few days.”
“Did you talk to Byron?”
She nodded. “They’d been trying to reach Autumn because a portion of her first semester of tuition had been paid for and then she never showed.”
A sinking feeling traveled down to the pit of my stomach, remembering the payment on Johnny’s bank account. I’d have to contact them about that.
“Everyone here has been just devastated. The students, teachers, it’s all so hard to believe.”
I’d come close a few times to outright asking Olivia what she knew about Johnny and Autumn’s relationship, because she hadn’t brought it up once. That tracked with the Olivia I had known before. Sadie had always been a straight shooter, someone who didn’t shy away from things, but Olivia always seemed to exist in the background. Always on the edge of what was happening.
“Olivia,” I began, trying to choose my words carefully.
But when she looked up at me with those wide, innocent eyes behind her thick-framed glasses, I thought twice. There had been so much stirred up, so many questions raised, that I could feel the weight of it all crushing this town. And that made me feel like the fewer people who were dragged into Johnny’s mess, the better.
“Just”—I sighed—“thanks. For being a friend to Johnny.”
“You’re welcome.” A sweet smile stretched on her lips, her head tilting to the side.
“When do you head back to the city?”
“In a few days. Waiting to see how things…” I didn’t finish. I didn’t have to.
She gave me a sympathetic look. “Can we grab a drink at The Penny before you go?”
“I’d like that.”
She turned back to the shelf, stacking the binders in place, and I let my gaze drag over the classroom one last time. Olivia and I had spent half of high school conjuring up the same dream, but only one of us had lived it. And now I found myself wondering who’d been better off. She seemed happy here. Content. It made me ask myself if I could be, too.
I followed the hall back the way I came, finding the darkroom and flipping on the light. Johnny was gone. The chemical trays were empty and turned upside down, the water bath turned off, but the prints hanging on the line were still glistening. I smiled, realizing that they must be Olivia’s.
I took a step inside, scanning the series of photographs. At first, I couldn’t quite tell what they were. But slowly, my eyes began to make sense of the intricate shapes. They were shots of ice taken with a macro lens, so close that the patterns looked like something else entirely. Or maybe it was snow, I thought.
I was happy that Olivia was still shooting. There was something that was almost romantic about the idea—producing work just for the sake of creating it. Not for show or display or even the world’s consideration. Away from opinions or opportunities. It was just…free.
The smile melted from my lips as I thought it. When was the last time I made art like that?
Olivia’s footsteps echoed down the hall, followed by the screech of the double doors that led to the parking lot. I found the piece of tape with Johnny’s initials on the row of built-in cubbies that covered the opposite wall. The manila folder was still there.
I let it fall open, sifting through what was inside. There were some pieces of scrap photo paper, a tattered notebook that had exposure and developing times jotted down, and a few homemade dodge and burn tools.
I closed the folder and tucked it under my arm, then I reached up, flipping the switch just for old times’ sake. The stale white fluorescents flicked off and the safelight clicked on, painting the room in a saturated red. I turned in a circle, taking it in. My hand skipped along the edge of the cold counter as I walked to the enlarger and turned it on, just to hear its hum.
I stood there for another few seconds before I turned the light back on. The colors of the space instantly flattened, and I let myself look around the darkroom one more time, then opened the door. But just before I stepped into the hall, something made me pause.
I let go of the knob, eyes pulled back to the photographs drying on the line. I reached out, fingertips brushing the intricate constellation of lines. Not quite ice or even snow…it was frost.
A sense of familiarity was itching at the back of my mind, like I’d seen them before. I took out my phone, opening Instagram, and immediately pulled up Autumn’s account. I tapped the comments on the last post. When I spotted the one I was looking for, the thought was already forming.
@firstfrostchronicle Bright and early!
I clicked the handle and the profile’s grid populated, filling my phone screen with pictures that mirrored the ones hanging before me. They were Olivia’s. They had to be.
She’d told me she was working on her own photography series, and this was it. Olivia Shaw was @firstfrostchronicle.
The profile had no identifying information, but the handle interacted with Autumn’s account constantly. She liked all of Autumn’s pictures and they followed each other. But it was that comment that chimed like a bell in my head.
Bright and early!
The realization settled slowly, like stones in my gut. Autumn was posting about leaving for school the next day. When she said At dawn, we ride, maybe it hadn’t been a figure of speech about the future that awaited in San Francisco. Maybe Autumn was talking about actual plans early the next morning. Plans with Olivia.
I snatched one of the photos from the clips on the line and opened the door, my steps quickening as they took me back to the empty classroom. I walked straight toward Olivia’s desk, letting the folder slide from my hands before I cleared the clutter from the calendar. Olivia’s looping handwriting was everywhere, spilling outside the lines of the boxes, notes jotted down in every color with every type of writing utensil there was. I flipped back through the months, finding August, and my finger stopped on the eighteenth, the day of Autumn’s last post. Beside it, there was a scribbled note written in the corner of August 19. The day Autumn left for school.
Shoot with —5:30 am
The night Autumn went to Johnny’s house wasn’t the last time she was seen. That was the next morning, with Olivia.
The jingle of keys in the hallway made me flinch and I dropped the calendar, heart lurching in my chest when I saw Olivia in the doorway again. She looked surprised to see me still there.
“Oh!” She laughed. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you. Just forgot my…”
Her words slowed with her steps as she looked down at her desk. “What are you doing?” Her tone was still light, but her gaze turned probing.
“You’re first frost.” I could hardly hear my own voice, still working it all out in my head.
Olivia laughed again. “What?”
“On Instagram. Are you @firstfrostchronicle?”
She relaxed a little, but now she was blushing. “Oh, yeah, I am.”
Bright and early!
The words echoed in my mind again.
“How’d you know that?” She was smiling now, almost proudly.
I lifted the print I’d taken from the darkroom between us.
She frowned. “Oh, those really shouldn’t be touched until they’re dry.” She reached for it, carefully taking it by the edges.
“It’s the series you’re working on,” I said.
“It is. A never-ending work in progress, I’m afraid.”
I stared at the photo in her hands, but the shapes were distorting now, my vision beginning to warp and fragment. Slowly, my eyes traveled across the room to Autumn’s series that hung on the wall. Olivia followed my gaze, falling quiet, and before I could manage to keep the thread on the spool, the air around us shifted. It was almost as if she could see me thinking it. Like she could see it playing out behind my eyes.
I couldn’t keep the words from finding my lips. “You were with her that morning, weren’t you?”
Olivia didn’t move. She didn’t speak.
I picked up the calendar, holding it out to her, and she took it, eyes running over the notes.
“You were with her the morning she was leaving for Byron.”
Olivia sucked in her bottom lip and her bright, round eyes instantly turned glassy. Her entire appearance, even the way she was standing, withered, almost like a frightened child’s. She pushed the glasses up her nose, mouth twisting to the side. It looked like she was about to cry.
“I admit, I didn’t think about that,” she said. “The calendar.”
Instinctively, I reached to my back pocket for my phone.
“I hadn’t thought about the Instagram account, either.”
She’d already tracked my thoughts to the conclusion I’d made. She set the calendar down slowly as one tear striped her cheek. “What I need you to understand is that I really cared about Autumn.”
My pulse quickened, making me feel light-headed. I glanced down at my phone, unlocking it.
“She was just so…” Olivia bit her lip again. “ Special. ”
She walked past me, crossing the room to the mounted photographs of Autumn’s series, and I stared at her, unable to speak.
“And lucky. That was the thing.” She sniffed. “Some people are just lucky, you know? People notice them. Open doors and create opportunities. Autumn was just one of those people, like everyone just wanted to help her get where she was going.”
She wasn’t just talking about Autumn anymore. She was talking about herself. About the young budding artist in a rural town who no one had noticed. Who no one had thought to open the door for.
“I know it’s because of her talent. I mean, you’d have to be blind not to see it, right? And she just had this confidence about her that made it seem like everywhere she went, there was a spotlight moving to follow.” Tandem tears fell down her cheeks as she spoke, her eyes full of awe. “She was like you, James. Johnny thought so, too.”
“What happened, Olivia?” I whispered.
Her mouth twitched as she looked up. She searched my face, as if trying to decide whether she could trust me with it.
“I know it wasn’t exactly aboveboard to spend time with a student outside of school, but we were both working on our series. And Autumn, she really loved the work I was doing. Once, she even told me it was distinguished. ” She sniffed. “We started going out on shoots together her senior year, and we’d planned to go one last time that morning. Then I was going to drop her off at the bus stop.” She pulled at her lip with her fingers over and over, like a tick. “It was an accident,” she stammered, turning to face me again.
My lips parted, but my lungs wouldn’t inflate. It suddenly felt like there was no air in the room.
“There was a tree up on the cliffs she wanted to photograph again. It had been struck by lightning.”
I blinked, remembering it. I’d seen it when I went there with Micah.
“We had to hike down from the ridge above to get the right angle, and she was just standing there with the camera up.” Olivia pantomimed it, her face blank as she acted it out, her voice hollow. “And then she was just falling. Screaming. And when she hit the bottom…”
My stomach lurched. I took a slow step backward, toward the door.
“It was an accident,” Olivia repeated.
Her hands lifted before her and she shook them manically. She was breathing hard now, like she might hyperventilate. Her eyes moved all over the room, as if she couldn’t see me anymore.
Immediately, my mind plucked that sentence from the air, summoning the memory. It was an accident. How many times had we said those very words that night, standing over Griffin Walker’s body? How many times had its echo chased us, reframed us, into something else?
I took another step toward the door. Then another. Until I was standing in the hallway and watching her through the large glass windows. She paced the floor back and forth, muttering to herself.
“It was an accident.” Her voice cracked. “It was. I’m almost sure it was.”
I found Amelia’s number and dialed, holding the phone to my ear. It rang only twice before she answered.
“This is Amelia.”
“It’s James.” I swallowed. “You need to come to the high school. Right now.”