The Zone System

Everyone in school on those last days posed. Before then, I’d catch them at their desks working, or in the computer lab researching, or in the library reading. They never looked up. On Monday, three days of school left, they made funny faces. On Tuesday, they hugged a lot. The last day of school for seniors, the Wednesday before graduation, everyone looked right into my camera and smiled or grabbed friends and acted as if they would never see each other again—as if they were never going to have a class reunion, as if we were all going to die on graduation day. You could see the fear in their faces, masked by joy, but it was there. I snapped picture after picture even though I didn’t plan on sharing any of them.

“Us! Us!” A group of jazz band girls said. Snap.

“Can you take a picture of us, too?” nearby vo-tech guys said. Snap.

“Hey, Glory! Take a picture of us, willya?” Football cheerleaders draped all over each other. Snap.

On the way to lunch for the very last time, there were three girls who never liked me because of the FEMINISM IS THE RADICAL NOTION THAT WOMEN ARE PEOPLE bumper sticker on my [dad’s] car, one of whom claimed this made me a dyke back in eleventh grade. “Last day at lunch! Come on. Take a shot of us buying our last crappy high school food.”

I did.

But they didn’t know that I focused on the chicken nuggets, soggy fries and lump of macaroni salad on their plates instead of their clueless faces.

It would seem from this that I was popular, and with my camera, I was. My camera kept me safe. Kept me in good standing with people who wanted a picture of themselves. Kept me behind the camera rather than in front of it. I even skipped the one group picture I should have been in for yearbook—which was the yearbook team picture. I didn’t get regular senior pictures taken either. Instead, I submitted a self-portrait with my eyes closed. I had to fight to get them to include it. Luckily, the only pull I had in school was with the yearbook advisor.

The picture looked like me, dead.

I was interested in death the way Ellie was interested in sex. The less adults talked to us about things, the more we want to know, I guess.

Anyway, I knew that one day the picture would be accurate, because everyone dies.

I got my first camera from my mother for my fourth birthday. I wasn’t allowed to use it, but it was mine… for the future, which, looking back, is a bizarre idea when one’s mother doesn’t make it to one’s fifth birthday. But anyway. It was a very simple Leica M5 in a leather case. Not a digital camera. Darla O’Brien believed in film. She believed in emulsion and silver halide. She believed in something called the Zone System, which was developed by two photographers named Ansel Adams and Fred Archer around 1940.

The Zone System divided the tones in a black-and-white photograph into eleven zones between maximum black and maximum white. The challenge was to make an image that represented all eleven zones. Maximum white was 10. Maximum black was 0. Max white was blown out. Max black was nothingness.

Max black was my code for dead. “Max Black” would be what I secretly called the petrified bat because I was picky about saying something was what it wasn’t. The bat was not petrified. Minerals couldn’t have replaced its cells. It was just dead. Zone 0. Max black.

My one regret was that I never photographed the bat before we drank it. It would have made such a great image—so many zones represented, standing at attention, carving themselves into the emulsion. It would have represented me. Glory O’Brien, light as a feather. Glory O’Brien, jarred. Glory O’Brien, faking everyone out looking alive when really I was disintegrating. Glory O’Brien, wings folded, not flying.

I’d taken a picture of the jar, of the picnic table, of Ellie staring into the bat’s mummified eyes, but I never took a shot of the bat itself. Maybe this meant something. Maybe it didn’t. You choose.

Maybe I was avoiding death at the same time as I was obsessed with it.

Humans are weird, right? We’re walking contradictions. We are zone 10 and zone 0 at the same time. We aren’t really sure.

Or, at least, I wasn’t. But that was a secret.

I loved the challenge of the Zone System, but I had never tried it. Darla’s darkroom was off-limits. It was an acrid-smelling shrine in the basement where her secrets lived. And the more my own secrets emerged, the more I wanted to get into that darkroom and compare our notes.

Did she get those dizzying panic attacks too? Was this a sign?

What about not wanting to make friends?

What about not trusting people, in general? Was that normal?

What about feeling lost in the world? Lost in my own future?

What about my curiosity about what she did to herself? Why did she do it? Why did she seal the kitchen door with wet towels to spare me the gas?

Did she really spare me? Was this what spared felt like?