Pictures of You

Chapter 30

30

Evie

As I turn around and he takes the photo, I’m thrown back in time. Another beach. Another photo. Him behind the camera. Me …

This time, the memory isn’t a blur. Not like it was last night, while I was grappling to hold fragments of memories about Oliver. This one is sharp. And it’s not about being awed and overwhelmed by light. It’s a sense of peace. Safety. A feeling of being more myself than I’ve felt with any other person, even Breanna.

Maybe he was my best friend.

“We’ve done this before,” I say.

He looks out from behind the viewfinder.

“You and me,” I say. “At the beach, with a camera.”

He drops the lens away from his face and wades into the water where I am, denim cuffs of his jeans getting wet. “You remember?”

The way he’s looking at me, you’d think he’d struck gold. Not me in a rare lucid moment. The closer he stands, looking into my eyes like he’s searching for the real me past the glaze of amnesia, the surer I become: I know this man.

“I saw you. Younger you.”

Same height. Smaller breadth. Lanky. Smooth-skinned …

I reach out, involuntarily, and graze my fingers across the stubble on his chin, amazed that he needs to shave at all. Forgetting he’s not a boy anymore. The hair prickles the skin on my fingers, and I retract my hand quickly. “Sorry!” I say, embarrassed. What am I doing?

“We were on Bronte Beach,” he informs me. “A Sunday afternoon in the Easter holidays. It was still hot. We’d been for a swim.”

I can imagine it all. I read once about a condition called aphantasia , where people can’t create mental imagery. It’s not a challenge I ever faced. My mind is bursting with images and sounds and tastes—the imaginary world as intense as the real one.

“You’d just finished an English essay,” Drew says. “I proofread it. It was annoyingly perfect.”

More than a decade later, this thrills me. Academic praise has always been my love language.

“Then you bolted onto the sand. I took a photo when you turned around, splashing through the waves. I entered it in an exhibition we put on together.”

“We put on an exhibition?”

It sounds exactly like me. The spirit of me.

Suddenly, if this is the caliber of my teenage past, I’m thirsty for more. More information. Details. I want to hear everything about every moment Drew and I have ever shared, in the hope that it will dislodge this mental block and open a torrent of remembering.

“Do you still have the photo?” I ask.

His face clouds, jaw clenching. He seems to realize the cuffs of his jeans are getting saturated and steps back out of the waves, annoyed. “Oliver bought it,” he says. And, just like that, the magic is broken.