Flash Burnout (2 page)

When Ms. B. (Buford?) finally releases us back into the wild, I hurry to English class, figuring I can catch Shannon outside for a minute and make up. It's been two hours. How long are BF-GF fights supposed to last, anyway? Does the duration vary based on the severity of the offense?

As I turn the corner, I see Shannon walk into English. Not
even waiting for me! Okay, now
I'm
getting pissed. That shit is not right.

Riley comes up behind me. "S'up, Flake?"

Again with the nicknames. But I call him Viley, so it's fair.

We roll in, and Mr. Hamilton says, "What's up, Riley? Cool shirt, Blake."

I nod at him, then see that he's wearing the same
lost in space
shirt as me, and I start laughing. He's the only teacher at West Park High who has a modicum of cool. I learned that word from him, by the way, when he told me I had a modicum of comedic talent. He's wrong, of course. I have a maximum of comedic talent.

Shannon goes straight to Moody Corner. That's a big chair in the back of the room reserved especially for premenstrual head cases ... I mean people who feel "sad, mad, or generally unable to deal," according to Mr. Hamilton's sign. But so far I've seen only girls sitting there. Coincidence? I think not.

Mr. Hamilton starts talking about
Dracula,
the book we're reading. "Okay, so who can tell me what an epistle is?" he asks.

"A piss what?" I say, and everyone laughs.

Score! Two confirmed laughs so far today and it's still early.

"Oh, Blake ... Blake," says Mr. Hamilton, shaking his head. "Never go for the piss joke. Don't just go for the easy laugh. George?"

Oh. Well, that still counts. It would have been bonus points if
the teacher laughed. I glance over at Shannon, and she's staring out the window, arms crossed, clearly not amused.

But Marissa is smiling. I tally an invisible point in the air, and she rolls her eyes at me.

Marissa and I met last year in intro photography. We were the only ninth-graders in the class, so we kind of huddled together in a clump of freshman nervousness.

I try to pay attention while Mr. Hamilton talks about
Dracula,
but I keep wondering what I'm supposed to do about Shannon. Are we broken up now? Is that
it?
Should I try to talk to her after class, or write her a note, or leave her alone, or what? I look over at her a couple of times, but she has her head down, scribbling something.

I wait for Shannon after class, like always. Lunch is next, and we usually eat together. But then Ellie goes over to her. Ellie is Mr. Hamilton's daughter, by the way. Which makes her totally cool by association. But even if she didn't have a tattooed, music-loving English teacher father, Ellie would still be cool. If she decided to start wearing canned vegetables pinned to her clothes, by the end of the week half the girls in the school would be pinning canned veggies to their clothes, too.

Ellie and Shannon whisper.

I lurk.

Shannon glances up at me as if I'm a waiter standing by to take her order. She says flatly, "I'll see you later, okay?"

I stare at her, frozen.

No. She did
not
just dismiss me! Oooh, she will rue the day!

I don't storm off, but I don't slink away like a bitch-ass punk, either. Just when I get to the door of the room, I hear Ellie say, "Hey, Blake?"

Now my whole exit is busted. I have to stop and turn around. "Yeah."

"If you see Manny, will you tell him I'll be there in a minute?" asks Ellie.

"Yeah."

I don't see Ellie's boyfriend Manny anywhere, but I do see her friend Dez. She's one of the hottest chicks in the whole school, even though she's only in tenth grade, like us. I admire her heart-shaped ass for a couple of seconds, since Shannon isn't around to catch me looking.

If there's one thing I've learned since getting a girlfriend, it's that you don't look at another girl for more than a hyper-second. You learn to take a quick sip, then savor the flavor of the afterimage in your head. About a week or so after Shannon and I became official, she noticed me noticing a girl, waited patiently for a few seconds, then said, "Okay, finish up now."

I said, "What?"

She said, "Finish up checking out the other girl. That's long enough."

Ha! How lucky am I to get a girlfriend with a sense of humor?
Well, most of the time, anyway. I don't know what kind of pod person took over her body this morning. I half expected her to reach up and unzip her forehead so the alien inside could escape, like that Doctor Who episode with the Slitheen (Season One, Episode Four).

I join Marissa in the pizza line. "What's up with Shannon?" she asks.

"I don't know. I guess I forgot to call her for the hundredth time, or something." Then I instantly feel like a traitor. "Nah, we just had a misunderstanding."

Marissa's so easy to talk to, I sometimes wish that we had hooked up. But it's not that way with us. We're always going to be just friends. I still remember our first assignment in intro photo: shoot and print a series of black-and-white portraits of another member of the class.

As the only ninth-graders, Marissa and I were paired up by default. We took the city bus up the hill to Washington Park, where we shyly pointed cameras at each other. Studying her through the lens, I realized that she had the most heartbroken eyes I'd ever seen. You don't notice it most of the time—she's usually smiling. And she's got a little jeweled stud in her nose, so your eyes automatically go to that.

Marissa smiles at me now and says, "Bye. See you in photo." She grabs her pizza and leaves.

Two slices of pepperoni and a large vanilla shake later, I'm
looking for a place to sit down. I see Manny as I'm heading for the tables. I open my mouth to tell him Ellie will be here in a minute, then I think,
What am I? Message boy? HELL no!

Riley and some of the other guys are getting up a game of poker at one of the tables. I make my way over.

"Flake, you in for some Texas hold 'em?"

"Hell yeah, Vile."

I'm juggling my pizza and a pair of aces, and feeling mighty good, when someone touches my arm. Shannon.

"Hi," she says. She gives me a tentative smile.

"Hi," I say.

She stands there looking expectant. I realize that she wants me to leave the game and talk to her. I look down at my pair of aces. Have I ever held a pair of aces before? I
could
say, "Just let me finish this hand, Shannon," but I'm ninety-seven percent sure that would be the wrong thing.

I lay down my cards, saying, "Fold," and get up to leave.

Riley coughs the word "pussy."

We walk away from the table, and Shannon takes my hand. "Sorry I freaked out," she says. "I was feeling, I don't know—" She struggles to find the right word.

Hormonal?
I almost suggest.

"Anyway, Ellie told me I was being stupid." She smiles and shrugs. "Will you forgive me?" After a second she adds, "Baby?"

Whew.
She's back. Making a mental note that Ellie is my new
best friend, I lead Shannon out to the bleachers for a little privacy, where we can forgive each other more thoroughly.

***

I am full of Shannon after lunch. Her sweet, round shoulders and her thin, freckled arms that break out in goose bumps when I stroke them and her ohmygod luscious lips that I could just stay attached to for hours, and
man,
did I want to get her into the back seat of Garrett's car. But (a) I know Garrett would punish me repeatedly if he found out, and (b) we had to go back to class, and (c) no way would Shannon agree to it.

For some reason, our photo teacher, Mr. Malloy, feels that he must wear a beret on his bald head and a goatee on his receding chin, like some kind of French poser. Seriously? We're too embarrassed on his behalf to even give him shit about it.

"Let me see your series," I say to Marissa.

She hands me her portfolio. Our assignment over the weekend was to shoot a series of color photos featuring monochromatic subjects. Mr. Malloy wanted us to find subjects to photograph that were mostly all one color, or preferably lacking in color, except for one contrasting bright spot that would draw the eye.

Marissa's first photo shows an expanse of green lawn with one yellow dandelion sticking up. "I was lying on the ground for that angle," she says.

The next one is a close-up of a gray stone birdbath with a flock of tiny grayish-brown birds splashing around in it. Her contrast is a blue jay, midflight, swooping down to the birdbath. Some of the tiny birds have already started to take off. She must have been sitting there forever waiting for that shot. "What are those—sparrows? No, they're too little."

"Bushtits," she says.

"Bush-
scuse
me?"

She giggles. "That's what they're called."

Nice," I say. "Your grandma's backyard?" Marissa lives with her grandma.

"Yeah, and it was really cloudy out," she says, "so the background is gray, too."

Her next shot is an arrangement of milky white vases, all empty except for one holding a red rose. The last photo is an extreme close-up of her black cat, sleeping, with just a glint of its pink tongue showing.

"No people," I say.

She pauses. "Huh. You're right. I never noticed, but I hardly ever shoot people." She frowns a little, then shakes her head. "Whatever. People are hard. Besides, Wizard Kitty is almost like a person."

"Right," I say. "A person covered in fur and claws." She snickers. "Let me see your shots."

I hand her my photos. I took the bus downtown really early Saturday morning, before people and cars were all over the place.
I wanted some lonely shots. My first one is a wide-angle shot of the brick sidewalk on Broadway, stretching out clean and pinkish-red in the early morning light. The contrast is one crushed blue ticket stub. Then I have a close-up of black pavement where someone scattered a bunch of white petals. It made me wonder if some girl was picking the petals, saying, "He loves me ... he loves me not..." or if some guy got stood up by a girl and was ripping up the flowers as he walked away.

My favorite shot is the one that's the most depressing: a woman, dressed all in black and gray, is passed out against the side of a dirty gray building. Even her pale arm looks dirty and gray, with a tattoo of a snake slithering down it. The only color in the shot is a streak of bright purple in her hair.

Marissa grabs that photo and holds it closer to her face. She gasps, a ragged sound that breaks through the murmur of other people. "That's my mom!"

You are hereby forbidden to shoot any scene that could be called a
cityscape.
The world doesn't need any more of those. Look for street portraits,
with a subject that cries out to be immortalized
and a surrounding environment that compels the shot.
—Spike McLernon's Laws of Photography

Marissa's hand shakes as she grips the photo. "Where did you take this?" she asks, her voice shaking, too.

"Um, down by Flink's."

"
Where
by Flink's?" she says, suddenly loud.

People are staring at us. Mr. Malloy heads our way.

"Um, off of Burnside and Third. You know where Flink's is." Flink's is a club in Old Town. Not a month goes by that my dad doesn't do an autopsy on some drug OD from Old Town—or Tweaker Town, as he calls it.

"I mean
which
street?
Exactly
which street?" Marissa is nearing meltdown.

"I don't remember! I think it was Burnside."

Mr. Malloy ambles up, cocking his head at us. "What's going on here?"

Marissa drops her eyes. "Nothing."

"Oh," I say. "We were, um, just talking about the homework."

Let's see." He holds out his hand.

Marissa hesitates for a second, then hands him the photo of her ... ohmygod
her mom?
I hand him the rest of my shots.

"Gritty," Mr. Malloy remarks, glancing through them. He reaches for Marissa's photos and examines them. "Pretty," he says. "You two are predictable. I'm going to call you the Pretty-Gritty Team."

I give him a fake smile. Marissa's gaze fastens on the photo of her mom, and as soon as Mr. Malloy walks away, she takes it out of my hand. "
Where
on Burnside?" she whispers. "Tell me exactly."

"Marissa, I told you. I don't remember." I stare at her while she stares at the photo. I want to say something, but I can only think of veryveryvery lame phrases.
Sorry?

"What day was this?"

Saturday. Early."

Her eyes fill up with tears, and her lips tremble like a little kid's. On a scale of good reasons to cry, Marissa's reason suddenly outranks Shannon's ten to one. I pat her arm a couple of times. She keeps her head down for a while until she gets herself under control.

I have an overwhelming urge to study the photo of the woman passed out against the wall—
Marissa's mom?
—but I don't want to take it out of her hand. Besides, I can picture it in my head. The
woman's face was mostly obscured by her straggly mud-colored hair, except for that bright purple streak in it. But the snake tattoo on her arm shows up clearly in the photo. That must be how Marissa recognized her.

Marissa sits for the rest of the hour like she's in a trance. She hardly moves while Mr. Malloy talks about light and shadow. He makes us write down the word "chiaroscuro" and tells us our homework is to look it up and write a paragraph about how to use it. Then, one at a time, he looks at everyone's homework photos. I can hear him murmuring comments to people, like, "Try a slow synchro next time" and "Good depth of field." Since he's already looked at our photos, he doesn't stop by Marissa and me.

When the bell rings, I figure Marissa will want to ask me more questions, but she just grabs her stuff and jets out of the classroom. She still has my photo, but I don't want it now, anyway.

I'm standing at my locker getting out my Spanish book when I see Marissa heading for the door.

"Mariss!" I slam my locker shut and catch up to her. "Where are you going?"