So then I was super into Krista. It was an odd relationship though. We fooled around so much. Sometimes that was the only thing we did. We’d make a plan to go somewhere and I’d drive to her house to pick her up and we’d never leave her bedroom. Her mother didn’t seem to have any problem with this. We were free to hang out, take showers, take hot tubs, whatever we wanted.
Eventually—while we were lying in her bed—I asked Krista: “So your mom’s cool with us hanging out all the time?”
Krista nodded that she was. “We discussed it.”
“What did she say?”
“We both agreed that it was better if I was home and not in the back of some car somewhere. . . .”
“What about your dad?”
“He knows to mind his own business.”
So that was that. It still seemed odd to me though. I was used to the idea that you had to earn certain things from your girlfriend. You’d take her places and do stuff and have long conversations and then you’d do the other stuff. But Krista wasn’t like that. She was into physical things. She loved sports. She loved riding her bike fast. She loved anything that felt good to her body. “If I like someone, I want to feel them,” she told me. “What am I supposed to do, pretend that I don’t?”
• • •
During this same time, Antoinette and Kai were having adventures of their own.
In February, Kai got caught smoking pot in the parking lot with some senior boys. One of them had already been accepted to a prestigious college so there was a big controversy about whether our principal should tell the college or not. The senior and another boy blamed it on Kai, saying it was her idea, and her pot, and that they didn’t actually smoke any. I guess Kai went along with this. I didn’t know the details. It was quickly hushed up.
Not long after that, Antoinette was at a party where a Hillsdale drug dealer accidentally shot himself in the foot. This guy was Hillsdale’s version of Bennett. He was showing off and waving a pistol around and it went off. The police came and an ambulance. And then the police wanted to search everyone at the party. Antoinette refused to be searched. So they arrested her and took her to the police station and called her mother.
The thing about that was: Nothing happened to her. Antoinette didn’t get in trouble or suspended because it was off school grounds on a weekend. And anyway, people were used to Antoinette by now, so it wasn’t a big deal. Of much more interest to our students was that this Hillsdale guy was stupid enough to shoot himself in the foot. This became a running joke. When we played Hillsdale in basketball, the Evergreen students chanted: “Shoot! Shoot! Shoot your foot!” which was considered very funny and a major burn on Hillsdale.
• • •
Naturally, I avoided telling Kai and Antoinette about Krista for as long as I could. I knew what they were going to say, and as soon as they heard, they said it.
“Krista?” said Antoinette. “Krista Hoffman? She’s your new girlfriend? You go from Grace Anderson to Krista Hoffman? What are you, in the Dumb Girl Olympics?”
That got Kai going too. They hit me with the McMansion jokes. And the blond jokes. And then even worse, the sex jokes. I would eventually get these from everybody. The sex jokes started because I stupidly asked Logan if it was bad in some way to have too much sex. I thought this was just between us, but since we were kinda drunk at the time, apparently not. So then I got a lot of “Poor Gavin’s little Gavin” comments. Krista probably wasn’t thrilled about that, but she didn’t care. She was like Antoinette in that way. She didn’t care what people thought. And anyway, we were going out. We were a couple. You couldn’t criticize us for doing what couples were supposed to do. Though you could definitely make fun of me for worrying about it.
• • •
I was still in touch with Richie from Passport Photos that winter. Richie was getting fairly regular assignments from Portland Weekly to take pictures of new restaurants or bands or local events. Richie would ask me to come along. Sometimes he would pay me; most times he wouldn’t. The main thing was, he wanted people to see that he had an assistant. “It makes me look pro,” he said. “And it’s good experience for you.”
Then Richie got another overnight gig. This was in Vancouver, BC, for the same magazine, Travel and Leisure. We drove up in the RAV4, through Seattle and then into Canada. The border guards made us open up our equipment cases, and Richie had to show them the e-mails from his photo editor in New York to prove we had a real job, though we obviously did. Richie had gotten better in that way. He was more confident, more pro. He was still his funny, fast-talking self, but now when he told people he was a photographer, they believed him. I felt like that too, as an assistant.
The gig in Vancouver was to cover a big international art show. Most of the stuff on the SHIT WE HAVE TO HAVE list involved the art museum downtown. The first morning, we took shots outside, of a big sculpture and of some of the foreign tourists in their weird eyeglasses and pointy shoes.
The rest of the day we were inside, shooting the artwork. My favorite was this one room that had three huge car wash cylinders, standing in a row, the ones that spin and have the cloth strips that wipe down your car. Not moving, they looked like three enormous Christmas trees. But then, while you were standing there, one of them would start spinning, going faster and faster, so that the cloth strips would stretch out from the centrifugal force. Then it would slow down and a different one would start to spin. Then another. Then they’d all spin at the same time. I know it sounds sort of pointless, but when you were watching it, and hearing it, and feeling the vibrations in the floor . . . well . . . it was pretty mesmerizing.
Lots of the art pieces were like that. You’d stand there and try to figure out what the point of it was, or if there even was a point. And then you’d be like, Who could have thought of that? And all you could think was: a very strange person.
Richie wasn’t into the art. He thought most of it was bullshit. He liked the people more. He was always taking pictures of the best-looking women and then trying to chat them up. I kept telling him about the car wash cylinders, but they were in a special room, in the basement, and he couldn’t be bothered to go down there. Finally he checked it out, and then he liked it. He took a bunch of pictures of it. He said, “I should have brought my car.”