Chapter 10
age SIXTEEN
10
Evie
The Photography Club meets on Wednesdays in the art studio at the boys’ school. I’ve just signed up and Bree thinks it’s only for the potential formal dates, but, honestly, it’s because I want more extracurriculars on my CV and my dad gave me his old DSLR camera. I’m genuinely keen. On photography.
I mean, I’m keen on boys, in theory. Just not any boys I’ve actually met. Not a single candidate has measured up to the boys from the pages of the period dramas I wish I lived in, so until someone does, I am romanticizing straight A’s.
Crossing the quad at the boys’ school, I tighten my ponytail and pull at the hem of my skirt. The boys move in packs. Kicking balls and hacky sacks, shoving and headlocking each other, deep voices reverberating off the brick walls—their energy on high alert, tension ramped up at the sudden flash of a maroon uniform amid all the gray and navy.
“None of these boys could dredge themselves out of a pond looking hot in a white shirt if their lives depended on it,” I tell Bree on the phone as I walk. “They’re more likely to dredge themselves out of the gutter they’ve fallen into drunk at a house party.”
It’s all about subtlety for me. Slow-burn, will-they-or-won’t-they tension. “You don’t appreciate how incredibly sexy not having sex is,” I tell her, keeping my voice low in case a teacher, or, worse, a boy, hears me. “I want romance that’s forbidden . When it all seems hopeless …”
“IT ALL IS HOPELESS!” Bree shouts back. And maybe she’s right. I should be more careful what I wish for. “We’re so far behind, Eves! Neither of us has even had a first kiss!”
“That’s not true! Lachlan Montgomery hoovered my face off at the interschools’ disco, remember?”
“Yes, and you said that was like a cardiopulmonary resuscitation attempt!”
I end the call as I reach the art studio, attempt to muster confidence, and open the door. There’s a seat near the front, which I slide into. I zip open my pencil case and extract my favorite pen, trying to ignore a trio of obnoxious Year Nine boys, who of course are the absolute worst , their cracking voices grating on my skin as the minutes pass. Anxiety swells as I realize I might be the only girl in this room.
Quietly, I’m beginning to regret being so obsessed with my marks and my portfolio. Maybe I should have pushed myself to go to more parties so I actually know people. And dropped my standards to the reality of twenty-first-century boys.
Any contenders? Breanna asks by text.
Unless a boy opens the studio door right now and presents himself in a white shirt, breeches, and boots, horse tethered to the bike rails behind the quadrangle, I’m not interested.
On cue the door bangs open.
I look up from my front-row desk as the newcomer ambles into the room without a shred of urgency. He is, of course, not in period costume. Truth be told, he’s barely managing the school uniform—blue-and-gold striped tie hanging loose around his neck, slate-gray shirt tails flapping, camera bag swinging from his shoulder like he’s rolling in from a tabloid shoot.
The only thing remotely eighteenth-century hero about this boy is his brooding expression. He has troubled brown eyes and a general air of having a lot going on . I expect him to slump in a chair in the back and withdraw from the whole thing, but he dumps his stuff on the table at the front, kicks the teacher’s swivel chair out from the desk, and sits in it.
Right. So he’s running this? Of all the qualities this boy is giving off, “leadership potential” isn’t blaring.
“Hey, Kennedy,” someone calls, waving a camera in the boy’s face. “Smile!”
He doesn’t bite, totally unfazed by his tormentor in a way that I want to emulate. “Mr. Dalgleish will be here in a minute,” he announces, unzipping his camera bag. “He told me to get us started.”
Suddenly I wish I was hiding in the back corner, not sitting right up front under the flickering fluorescent light, fresh notebook on the desk beside my camera, perfectly aligned with the angles of the tabletop. This Kennedy person with the scruffy, dark hair and sullen expression glances at me as he clicks a lens onto the frame of his camera, then leans back in the chair and puts his feet up on the teacher’s desk. I notice his laces are untied. Typical.
My own feet are planted firmly underneath the desk in polished black school shoes. My pleated skirt hovers just below my knee as per school regulations and my crisp white shirt is ironed—and not just the scalloped collar poking out from the navy sweater. No shortcuts here. If someone from the uniform supply company knocked on the door right now, needing a model for an urgent photoshoot, they’d extract me in a heartbeat. Not because I look like a model, but because I carry off the whole studious schoolgirl thing to utter perfection.
The teacher bursts into the room, flustered, and snaps me from my insecurities. He’s carrying a pile of essays and a pair of drumsticks and is wearing a bow tie with music notes. “Ah, good. Kennedy. You’ve got this under control!” he says, and shuffles to a spare desk in the back corner. “Forget I’m here.”
I know from my brief foray into the combined schools’ orchestra that Mr. Dalgleish is the music teacher, and not a good one. He spent most of the time tapping his plastic baton fruitlessly on the metal music stand, attempting to control the flirting epidemic that erupted in the coed band room. All I know is Shostakovich’s “Festive Overture” was technically beyond us and the least of our priorities—I’ll never hear a trumpet fanfare without my heart bolting at the memory of Isaac Rickman winking at me across the woodwind section, from behind his bassoon.
“Principal Walsh wants us to organize a photojournalism exhibition for first term next year,” the boy up front announces flatly, as if the very idea is sucking the life force right out of his body. “That means planning it this term. So we have to agree on a theme by the end of this session. Go.”
His brown eyes hold me firm. So firm that my own gaze takes flight to avoid his. I cannot seem to stay focused on him, no matter how hard I try, and now my heart is thudding erratically. I feel my face flame and the pressure descend, like this is a trick question. Does he mean me?
“Er, s-sure?” I stammer, on behalf of everyone.
“On what theme?”
I’m like Elle Woods in Legally Blonde when she goes to that first lecture and hasn’t done the assigned reading. I don’t know anything about photojournalism. I just want to take better pictures, not that mine are bad, exactly, but …
He’s waiting.
“The patriarchy?” I panic-suggest. Bree and I have been obsessed with patriarchy-smashing since Year Eight. Why not attack it right at the source?
From behind me snorts an outburst of testosterone-laced laughter. My earlier nerves skitter aside, making way for a familiar sense of anger, because here we have to go. Again.
“Sorry—” I start, turning to glare at the perpetrators.
“Forgiven,” one of them replies, winking.
“I forgot I was at an all-boys’ school last seen on a prime-time current affairs show, scrambling to explain a scandal involving intrusive photos of female staff.”
Someone whistles, ahead of a sudden hush in the room. I blink back angry tears because this is not just about the teachers. When I turn to face the front again, I notice a shift in Kennedy’s eyes. He takes his clodhoppers off the desk and leans forward. “How about Girls as a theme?” I suggest.
This whips the fourteen-year-olds into a frenzy. “We already took photos of girls,” a Year Nine boasts. He finds himself immediately hilarious, as does his audience.
“Yeah, we’re famous for it,” another chimes in, fist-bumping his neighbor. Why did I think this was a good idea?
“Not the kind that get sent around group chats until the school is forced to bring in a rep from the police station for a consent lecture,” I say. “The antidote to that.”
A memory blazes of that time last year when I discovered Bree, shaking and speechless in the corner of her bedroom after a boy from this school pressured her into sending photos of herself that he then uploaded to that horrible website She Loves It.
“I’ll fix it,” I’d promised her, when she looked at me desperately and cried so deeply no sound came out. But we couldn’t go to the police. Bree and the other girls could have gotten in trouble for sending the photos too, so the website has stayed this massive, ugly, unfixable secret hiding in plain sight and, more than anything else in the world, I want to blow it to pieces.
“So, unfiltered portraits of our friends?” Kennedy suggests, trying to unpack my idea.
My imagination instantly conjures his female fan club, artsy girls with names like Sage and Mila and Blyth. I give them quirky plaits and Amelie fringe, dress them in black, with tartan skirts and ripped tights, while they listen to prog rock from the seventies and get high with him in an abandoned warehouse.
I’ve never been high. My toes squirm inside my school shoes, which now feel even more perfect and shiny beside the nonregulation Doc Martens Kennedy’s harem would obviously wear, and I wish I’d broken the school’s policy on makeup and put on some eyeliner or something. Not that I’m the policy-breaking type. Or any good with eyeliner.
“Friends, girlfriends, sisters,” I clarify, “doing random things that they love, you know? No pressure. As if the camera isn’t there.”
Maybe we’d even reclaim She Loves It. Of course, in my head this is already bigger than a photography exhibition because I can never just do something simple . I want to dismantle what they’ve done and take the power back. “We could start a blog! Shift the narrative? Go behind the scenes of private schoolboys looking at girls through a new lens?”
Kennedy stares at me. In fact, everyone stares, and not in a good way. I’m so used to the girls in our school talking fiercely about feminism and misogyny in classes and debates, but it’s brutally obvious that the same conversations aren’t going on here, where they’re most needed.
“Wow,” someone says from the back. “You’re intense.”
That’s it . A volcano explodes inside me and I appeal to the only boy in the room who doesn’t seem to be laughing at me.
“I’m not intense enough . You have no idea how much damage you do.”
I don’t mean him personally. Not unless he’s like the rest of them, which, let’s face it, is statistically likely in a culture like this.
“Isn’t your school in economic jeopardy from all that bad publicity? I bet the board would throw money at a project like this.” I seem to have shape-shifted into a forty-eight-year-old mother at a PTA meeting, but I’m not some weird economics genius. I know this stuff because it came up in a commerce class last week.
“I’m sorry, who are you?” Kennedy asks.
“Evie Hudson?” My response seems to come with a question mark, which is exactly the problem. I’m a person with top grades and an apparently “stellar future,” according to my latest report card. The announcement of my name should come with an exclamation mark, but when you’re the only girl in a room full of boys like this, it’s shocking how quickly your confidence plummets.
Kennedy looks like he’s seriously contemplating my idea. Of course, it’s the only idea anyone has suggested, but still.
“We could do Girls ,” someone says from the back, “or we could do literally any other theme and it would be way more interesting.”
“Yeah. Girls will get completely out of control,” another says. “Like the time Kaelan O’Keefe snuck his girlfriend into the school chapel and took photos of her with the Virgin Mary.”
More laughing and a couple of high fives. “Legend!”
Kennedy is even less impressed than he was when he walked in here ten minutes ago, and I watch as the spark I saw in his eyes dies out.
“Any other ideas for a theme?” he asks, with an apologetic glance in my direction.