Chapter 3
“I don’t want to do senior pictures,” Keme said.
We were playing a game. It was called: keep Keme from going back into the house, and it was kind of like Pong. Keme kept trying to get past me, and I kept moving back and forth, blocking his way, and he’d bounce off me and try again from another direction. (Is that anything like Pong?)
“They’re stupid,” Keme said.
“They’re not stupid,” I told him.
“Yeah, they are. Everybody looks like a wiener in their senior pictures.”
“It’s—”
“If you say a rite of passage, I’m going to pull your underwear off through your nose.”
That was a powerful image.
“It’s fun,” I said (although that hadn’t been my first choice).
Keme scoffed.
“It is!” I insisted.
“Last time you had to get headshots taken, you said you regretted every choice you’d ever made in your life and then locked yourself in that secret room downstairs with a pan of brownies.”
“That’s called a coping skill. I was coping.”
“Indira made them for me! They were my brownies!”
“That’s ridiculous. I mean, in the first place, I’d like to see your paperwork documenting a claim to the aforementioned brownies—”
Keme chose that moment to dart around me.
I caught his arm. We spun together. He pulled free and raised one fist, and I had a powerful image of my underwear, molecule by molecule, uh, transversing the inside of my body.
“You can get them printed and give them to people!” I said. (I was also shielding myself with both hands now.) “Your friends. Your family. So they can remember you.”
Slowly, Keme lowered one fist. “I don’t have any friends,” he said. “Who am I going to give them to? My mom?”
Keme’s mom was a tricky subject, to put it lightly. So, I went for Plan B: emotional manipulation. “Indira would like one.”
And that’s how we ended up outside, with Keme sitting in one of the chairs on Hemlock House’s porch, while Indira combed his hair and Fox fluttered around holding up clothing options and Millie checked her camera settings (yours truly was assisting Millie by being the test subject for the camera; I spent most of the time trying to flex, and I could hear Keme groaning all the way from the porch).
Bobby’s role was prison guard. He told me he objected to the term, but he did stand right in front of the door, arms folded across his chest, and observe everything seriously.
“I look stupid,” Keme said when Indira finally released him. He was dressed in a new pair of jeans, a new Volcom tee, and new slides—all of which Indira had produced as if by magic.
He didn’t look stupid, though. He looked handsome. And underneath the sullen wariness, he even looked a little pleased.
“Make him do the pose where he cups his face with his hands and looks like an angel,” I told Millie.
Keme charged after me, and I had to hide behind Bobby.
Instead, Millie had Keme try a few other poses. He sat on the steps to Hemlock House, framed by old brick, the ocean spreading out behind him. He rested one arm on his knee.
For a boy who was a natural athlete, who swam like an otter (that’s a thing, right?), and was so at home on a surfboard that eventually he was going to be even better than Bobby, Keme looked like someone had made him out of Legos.
And not the cool kind of Legos. He looked like a bunch of six-year-olds had just stuck the bricks together however they wanted, and that’s why his arm got stuck like that.
Millie tried a few other poses. Her coaching—“Relax, try softening your face, let your arm rest naturally”—was about as effective as you imagined. In fact, it seemed to accomplish the exact opposite, making Keme tenser and more uncomfortable and, therefore, stiffer in every photo.
Fox saved us by announcing, “Costume change!”
The next outfit consisted of more new clothes, this time provided by Fox: dark jeans and a white button-up, with a pair of chukkas I knew were still legally mine, but seemed to be permanently requisitioned by the Feral Wolf Child.
It was even worse this time. Millie instructed Keme to lean up against an ivy-covered wall.
He did, but with about as much grace and ease as if somebody had propped one of his surfboards in the exact same position.
Millie tried to help—“Bend your knee, drop your shoulder, let’s see if you like your hand in your pocket. ” It was, again, a train wreck.
“Oh my God,” I whispered to Bobby.
Next to me, Bobby still had his arms folded across his chest, his expression tight.
“It’s bad, right?” I asked. “It’s really bad. It’s a category-five, and it’s about to be upgraded to emergency red alert.”
“What rating system are you using?”
“God, Bobby, Keme hates being the center of attention. Of course he’s going to be uncomfortable standing there and having all of us stare at him.”
Bobby made a considering noise. And then he said, “Remember how this was your idea?”
“Uh, well, it was more of a group thing—”
“Get ready to throw yourself on a grenade.”
“Oh, I’m more of the hide-in-a-foxhole kind of—Bobby, that look on your face is really scary. Why are you grinning—”
“Stop saying he looks like such a little man,” Bobby said, loudly enough for the words to carry clearly across the lawn. “It’s infantilizing.”
Time stopped.
Keme’s laser-eyed death stare swiveled toward me.
Okay, yes, he did look like such a little man. He was adorable, actually, in the dark jeans and the crisp white shirt.
But I was smart enough not to say that kind of thing out loud.
“You must have misheard me,” I said—also loudly. “Because I never said that or anything that sounded anything like that. Ever.”
“Yes, you did,” Bobby said. And then he pushed me toward where Keme was posing, and he muttered, “Talk to him. Distract him.”
“This is not what I imagined when I told you that you were the prison guard!”
“Go!”
I slunk across the lawn.
Keme watched me come.
“So, about that,” I said, “huge misunderstanding. What I said was—”
That was when Keme grabbed my hoodie and started shoving me against the wall.
(He’s freakishly strong, if I haven’t mentioned that before.)
Between concussions, I was vaguely aware of Millie circling us, snapping pictures in the brief interludes when Keme wasn’t committing physical violence against my person.
Snatches of conversation drifted in to me: “He looks so handsome,” and “Oh God, that one’s perfect,” and “Do you see that smile?”
And then Fox clapped their hands and announced, “Costume change!”
Keme growled at me before Indira led him inside for the next outfit.
“Oh my God, Dash,” Millie said, “this is PERFECT!”
“I think he broke my spine,” I moaned.
“I’m going to tell him you said he should cut his hair,” Fox said brightly.
“Bobby,” I groaned. “Help.”
“You’re doing great,” Bobby said as he massaged my shoulder. “Keep up the good work.”