Pictures of You

Chapter 11

11

Drew

It’s no secret St. Dominic’s has a reputation problem. Between a leaked video of a misogynistic war cry on the public bus to illicit photo sharing, the school has been in damage control.

The Girls exhibition idea is actually brilliant. The principal, Dr. Walsh, would probably go for it, and Evie is right—it could be the good-news story we need. The problem is, looking around the room, I have no faith that the members of St. Dom’s Photography Club are capable of the emotional nuance needed to pull it off. What they are capable of is handing another school scandal to the media when the exhibition is unveiled, revealing another sacrilegious threesome in the school chapel—or worse.

She hasn’t looked back at me once. She’s slumped in her chair, frown on her face, texting someone furiously, and I feel like I’ve caused this.

I’m already dreading next week’s session. I wouldn’t be volunteering to run this club except that I need leadership experience to try to offset my sliding marks in visual art. Academically, I was tracking well all through Year Eleven until Mum got sick again, but the art and photography school I’m striving for is mega-competitive, so this cocurricular club was meant to tick a box.

“I’m sticking this on the wall,” I announce, pinning a blank page to a pinboard. “Everyone add one exhibition idea before next week’s session.”

Evie sighs and looks at the clock above the door. I should be able to lead this thing with my eyes shut, but I didn’t expect to encounter Wonder Woman here, who’s threatening to ratchet up the work involved and wreck what was going to be a cruisy semester.

I have to get this club back on track, and it’s not like Mr. Dalgleish is helping. I need a minute or twenty or preferably the remainder of this meeting in solitude to get my head together.

“It rained this afternoon,” I tell them. “Maybe go outside and take some shots in the reflections?”

They pick up their gear and tumble out, Evie included, and once the door slams shut, my forehead meets the desk. Three slow and deliberate times. I don’t have the bandwidth for this girl.

I make sure the paper on the corkboard is secure and glance out the window. She’s the only one who’s really doing what I suggested, crouched on the asphalt, camera low to the ground, capturing red bricks and blue sky in a puddle of water. Ugh. I’ve got a weakness for earnestness.

“Evie, I’m sorry,” I say, catching up with her in the quad on the way out to apologize. “I think your idea is great.”

She frowns and keeps walking toward the bus stop. Something about her makes me want to straighten my tie and pull up my socks. “So great you immediately dismissed it?”

That’s not exactly true. I thought about it, listened to the boys’ views, imagined trying to supervise the whole thing, and started steaming toward a panic attack. “It would go badly in their hands,” I argue. “You heard them.”

She stops walking and faces me. Up close, she’s sort of terrifying. Bright. Intense. A “take no shit” attitude that’s at odds with the fact that she couldn’t even look at me straight in the classroom. And that had been fine by me. I don’t want a girl looking at me. I haven’t got time.

But that’s when the truth hits me in the gut. That life deals you a certain hand and you find yourself, at seventeen years old, with no headspace for friends. Especially girls like this—the type that makes you feel like you’re hovering at the starting line of a hundred-meter sprint, in those nerve-racking seconds before the gun goes off.

I don’t need this level of nervous energy. The fear that I’m going to mess this up before it’s even begun. I’ve known her only an hour and I’m already scared she’ll scale the wall I’ve built that’s kept all the others out.

“Walking past that behavior is as bad as doing it,” she challenges me, fierce blue eyes pushing the controlled burn of my life beyond containment.

Please make it stop.

Evie doesn’t understand. I’ve got nothing left in the tank. I just need everyone on board with some innocuous, paint-by-numbers exhibition—sunrises, trees, sports, I don’t care. Anything easy.

I can’t afford to unleash a wrecking ball in Photography Club. Or in my life.

I’ve seen the inside of the principal’s office three times in my five years at this school. First, at the introductory meeting in Year Seven. Next, in Year Nine when Mum was first diagnosed and we were signing off on an Individual Learning Plan for modified assessment. And now today, the morning after encountering Evie Hudson.

I tried the spineless music teacher, Mr. Dalgleish. But he wouldn’t commit to the exhibition theme.

“Nobody wanted it, Drew. You were there.”

“The fact that they didn’t want it made her point,” I argued, and he said I should run it past Dr. Walsh. The only person with any guts appears to be Evie Hudson, whom, inconveniently, I haven’t yet managed to evict from my head.

“Tell me, how is your mum?” Dr. Walsh asks. My heartbeat seems to lurch into my ears. It’s taken two years of practice to be able to hold myself together at school, and now is not the time to test that.

“This is about something else.”

It’s not just Evie’s frustration that motivated me. Doing something this worthwhile might pull me to the surface—even distract me for a minute from the quicksand at home.

“This isn’t my idea,” I make clear at the start. “There’s this girl …”

Dr. Walsh braces in his seat. An automatic response, probably, to the last few girl-related crises he’s had to defuse.

“The public photography exhibition you want us to do needs a theme. Evie suggested we all take pictures of girls.”

Frowning, Dr. Walsh sets his pen down on the desk. “No, Drew.”

I forge on. “Sisters, friends, mothers … lost in the moment, doing things they love.”

His focus fixes on some point on his leather-topped desk.

“Pictures of girls … as people.” My insides twist at the idea of having to drive home this obvious point. It’s what I loathe about the culture here.

“It’s a PR risk, Drew,” Dr. Walsh says, after a very long pause, during which I assume he undertakes an imaginary visit with the school’s legal team. “But this idea of yours may have merit.”

“It’s Evie’s idea,” I remind him.

“Who is this girl?”

I googled her last night. She only came up in videos of interschool debates and mock trials and for some historical society she’s in. She’s one of those “world at her feet” people. Clever and articulate. Driven in a way that I used to be once, and want to be again if I can ever get Mum through this crisis.

“I’ve never seen her at cocurricular stuff before,” I explain. But then I rarely go. And now half the school is asking who the girl is “who went off in photography.”

“She wants to change the world,” I tell him. You have no idea how much damage you do. “Starting with fifteen boys at a school that acutely needs an image overhaul.”

She’s basically your hero.