The morning hallway stunk of cinnamon, which meant that autumn was here, and Dunkin’ Donuts was selling Pumpkin Spice Everything, which meant that Hudson High would be full of hot, milky beverages. The smell, I didn’t mind. What bothered me was the herd mentality. The mandatory nature of the pumpkin spice latte. The way it was a status symbol, a way to say, Look at me, I have a car and drive myself to school and I can go out of my way to Dunkin’ Donuts and get a four-dollar coffee every morning.
Sure, it’s strange, but something that stupid could let the old darkness loose, tightening my chest and making it hard to breathe.
Hudson High is jam-packed with terrible triggers for my depression. Seeing all those unhappy kids crowded together. Watching the hundred different ways some people just couldn’t help but make others miserable, if not with their fists then with their words, or their clothes or their too-strong perfume or their costly caffeinated beverages.
Too many ways to end up less than.
Another hallway trigger: Solomon. Or rather, the lack of him. Looking for him and not finding him. He didn’t come to school every day. And when he did, he didn’t always stay.
The medication was helping me. I knew it. I felt it. I was already so much better. But the darkness was still there, a black frigid ocean I was precariously balanced above, and there was nothing like the halls of Hudson High to plunge me back in.
So I did what I do whenever I feel that way: I took out my camera. When the world feels like too much, looking through the lens helps me break it down into manageable pieces.
Reality is messy. Reality is horrible. My camera allows me to make something out of that chaos. Something beautiful.
I took a couple pictures of people with their Styrofoam cups. Then I swung by the cafeteria, where they were still serving breakfast for five more minutes. I took a couple pictures of the cafeteria workers, one of whom flashed the most beautiful smile you ever saw. Then the bell for first period rang.
“Thanks.” I waved to them, then made my way to homeroom.
People are what inspire me, as a photographer. I’m not so into landscapes or pretty geometry or action shots. Every time I took a picture of someone, I could feel it, sense it, just out of reach—the things I needed to capture. The story I needed to tell.
The project that would get me the hell out of Hudson.
Outside the cafeteria, I saw a girl standing against a wall. I didn’t know her. She looked barely old enough to be in high school. Based on who she was hanging out with, I figured she was from one of the trailer parks along Joslen Boulevard. Four piercings framed her face: one on each eyebrow, one in each nostril. She was gorgeous, and sad. I raised my camera.
There’s no noncrazy way to say this. Through the lens, I could see her damage. I saw it billow in the air around her, like clouds of black ink. I saw it scuttle across her skin: tiny shadow crabs. The longer I looked, the more I could see. Shapes appeared in the darkness behind her—the things she’d seen, the people she was afraid of.
Shivers went up my spine. They would not stop.
What the hell was going on?
The girl looked up. Locked eyes with me. “Is it okay?” I asked, tapping the camera with one finger.
She shrugged, then nodded. Did her best to smile.
I took the picture.
A tiny glimmer of light. I saw her, and she saw me. I was sad, but so was she.
It was nothing, but it mattered.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Sure,” she told me.
Shivering, I lowered the camera. My spine still tingled. I shut my eyes, hard, as if I could unsee what I’d seen.
Just when I thought I was getting better, something else goes wrong with my brain. Something a little pill might not be able to fix.
“Hey, Ash,” Jewel Gomez said when I joined her at her locker.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m halfway through that book. It’s so fucking—sorry—it’s so good.”
Being around Jewel made me curse more than normal, because she never ever said even the mildest swear word.
“Isn’t it!! I’m so glad people don’t actually know the day they’re going to die. Can you imagine?”
I remembered when Jewel came to Hudson High in ninth grade. All anyone knew about her was that she was super-Christian. So much so that she made people nervous. I’d assumed because of her religion that she’d be homophobic or something, but she was actually the sweetest thing on Earth. To everyone. Which just made people even more nervous around her.
Everyone but me. We both loved books and movies, and loved talking about them—but on a deeper level than most people did.
A voice from behind us cheered, “Hey, ladies.”
“Hey, Sheffield,” I said, without turning around, because no one else in school was ever that happy about anything. And because my heart hadn’t slowed down, and my spine still shivered.
“Where are your blue baseball caps?”
“Oh shit,” I said as insincerely as I could. “Did I forget mine again?”
During baseball and football seasons, pretty much everyone wore a blue baseball cap. It was to show support for the team, they said, although really it was because if you didn’t wear one, you were likely to get bullied, yelled at, or otherwise interrogated by a slick, smiling button-nosed jock who looked like he was already planning his presidential campaign.
“You know you make people uncomfortable,” he said. “When you don’t wear one. Like you think you’re better than us.”
“That sounds like an ‘other people’ problem, rather than a ‘me’ problem,” I said.
Sheffield scoffed. “Later, Ash. Jewel, may the Lord bless and keep you.”
Sheffield shuffled off. Jewel and I rolled our eyes, and headed in opposite directions to get to our homerooms.
Someone ran past me, sobbing.
And then the hallway erupted. Talking, pointing, laughing. I could feel the gossip move through the air like a thunderclap. Phones were passed around. A photo, sent to a bunch of people, each of whom passed it on to a bunch more. Someone shoved it in front of me, without asking if I wanted to see it. And, like an idiot, I looked.
Six swastikas, spray-painted onto the side of Judy Saperstein’s house.
The bell rang, but the crowd barely budged. Everyone had something to say on the subject, and they were all saying it at the same time. Most of them were angry, afraid, pissed off—but more than a few people seemed to find it hilarious.
I went to the window and tried to catch my breath. Outside I saw the same old boring landscape as always: the sloping soccer fields, Hudson’s rotted city sprawl, the mountains across the river beyond.
But then I raised the camera to my eye, and looked again. I saw the dark fog, the billowing black clouds. The longer I looked, the more they took on shape. Became something real. Something terrifying. Buildings rose up into the sky. Shapes flew through the air, flapping wings too big to belong to birds.
Another city. The one that Solomon saw, where monsters walk harmlessly through the streets beside hordes of delicious humans.
The city where I, supposedly, was a princess.
Except it couldn’t be. Because that city wasn’t real. It was all in Solomon’s mind.
“No,” I whispered. The shivering in my spine had become so pronounced I could feel my fingers shaking.
This can’t be real.
This can’t be happening to me.
People say Solomon is suffering from a serious mental illness, the kind that will inevitably lead to his inability to function as an independent human in the world.
It’s because of his other world. His delusions.
But if he sees this—and now I’m seeing it—maybe I’m sick too. Sick with something more serious than depression.
And then the thought came like a whisper into my mind.
The treehouse.
Back when Solomon and I were twelve, something happened in that treehouse in his stepfather’s backyard. Something neither one of us could remember. I ended up in the hospital, with a crack in my skull around my left eye. And Solomon was never the same.
So what if whatever happened to Solomon and me was making us both go crazy?
What if we were both destined to break down, further and further, until there was nothing left?
Because neither of us knew what happened.
And you can’t fight a monster you can’t see.