So then it was summer. That was a relief. My face healed up, and soon I was back at my old job at the Garden Center with my spray hose and rubber boots. I never minded going to work there. People were always cheerful when they were at a nursery. People calm down in the presence of plants. Kai told me a bunch of stuff she had read about this: How plants are actually aware of us and communicate with us and try to help us in various ways—so that we can help them.
The other good thing was I was old enough now to do deliveries. So I would drive around and deliver stuff in the truck. It was fun going to the different neighborhoods around the city. For a couple weeks I was delivering trees every day to this one church across town. They were redoing their landscaping. It was mostly African American people who worked there. Seeing them made me think of Seattle and the church ladies and how brave they had been but also how ordinary. When I’d show up in my truck, the church people would come out and help me unload the shrubs and saplings and fertilizer. They’d offer me some lemonade if it was hot. I would never say anything, but I felt in awe of them, in a way. I’d seen church ladies in action. I knew what they were capable of.
During the week, my friends sometimes stopped by the Garden Center. Richie came by to get flowers for Nicole a couple times. He wanted to use my employee discount. Several months had passed since the success of his Elliot Square photo. His phone had rung constantly for a month or so after it appeared. But things had calmed down. “Fame is a fickle mistress,” he told me, half kidding and half not.
He was still getting gigs, though. Bon Appétit, a food magazine, flew us down to Austin, Texas, for a big National Barbeque Sauce Competition. It was pretty ridiculous, all these overweight Texas people in big hats munching on ribs all day. But one night Richie and I drove out to the Mexican part of town where everyone spoke Spanish. We had dinner in this little place with outdoor tables, and we sat there, with the chickens and the little kids running around, listening to the crickets and the coyotes howl in the distance.
We got some other gigs too, and then Richie got an assignment from the Portland Weekly that he couldn’t do, so he told them to send me. It was to take pictures of this vintage clothes shop that was being torn down to make room for condos. It had been there for thirty years, and the woman who ran it was this nutty, eccentric type. The SHIT WE HAVE TO HAVE list, in my mind, was the store itself, inside and outside, some clothes, some shoes. And then a couple shots of the woman herself, some of her smiling and maybe a couple looking sad, since her shop was closing down.
But things got a little complicated once I got there. For starters, the lady was being super weird and kept saying (to no one): “The photographer is here. The photographer has come.” Then she insisted I address her as Lady Katrina. I was like, “Okay, whatever.” Then she started ordering me around and telling me what to take pictures of, like her entire jewelry collection and some weird old bag she’d had for a hundred years.
I had to say: “Uh, ma’am . . . I mean Lady Katrina . . . this is for the Portland Weekly. They’re only going to use a couple of these. They won’t have room for your entire jewelry collection.”
That didn’t go over well. She got offended and started telling me I was a typical young person and didn’t respect the past. I tried to apologize and calm her down, but she was off in her own little world by then.
Finally I said, “Uh . . . Lady Katrina . . . ? Would you mind standing over there and looking around, like you’re remembering your years here?”
She totally lost it then. She started shrieking and waving her arms around. Then she told me to get out. Some of her lady friends were there by then, and they started yelling at me too. “You rude, rude boy!” they said. I tried to apologize because it was my fault. I should have said it differently. But I didn’t know. It was my first gig! Then she started to cry. Her friends literally pushed me out the door. And then I felt terrible.
I sent the pictures in though. And the woman at the Portland Weekly liked them. And a couple weeks later, I got my first check.
• • •
Meanwhile, my high school friends were doing the summer-party routine. There had been talk at school about how the summer between junior and senior year was supposed to be epic. Your “last great high school summer,” some of the seniors told us. “You better enjoy it.” This made sense, I thought. Since everyone had driver’s licenses and cars and credit cards, you could pretty much do anything. And you weren’t worried about college yet, or dealing with the stresses of leaving home.
Claude and Logan took this to heart. They had regular parties at Logan’s beach house. I went to a couple of these. It was the usual crowd, the rich kids from our school and the other schools, the good-looking people, the tennis-player types. It wasn’t that I disliked these people. It was just so familiar. I could predict what people were going to say before they said it. The girls drank wine and the boys drank beer, and the girls talked about each other and the boys talked about sports. And everyone made fun of people who were ugly or poor or who weren’t like them, laughing at them with their perfect teeth and their highlighted hair and their expensive sunglasses. Still, they were my people, the people I grew up with. So I rolled with it, like I always had, sitting with the guys, watching the girls parade around the pool in their bathing suits.
• • •
It was much more interesting to hang out with Antoinette and Kai. Agenda had half-price dance parties on Tuesday nights in June, so we went to several of those. Bennett Schmidt and some of his buddies were sometimes there. Since Kai and Antoinette were friends with him, I had to be nice to him too. He wasn’t so bad. He knew a lot about music. He was also popular with the girls.
In July, Antoinette went back to Germany to see her dad. After that, she was going to travel around Europe. So then it was me and Kai doing things. That was a little strange at first. We hadn’t hung out that much, just the two of us. At first there wasn’t much to do, but then we went to a party with Britney Vaughn and her friends, which was way crazier than any high school party I’d ever been to. After the first one, I made sure to always have a camera with me whenever I hung around Britney or any other Agenda people. I’d bring the old Canon, which still had a big dent in the casing but worked fine. I’d leave it on the floor or on a bookshelf somewhere and then casually pick it up occasionally and snap a few pictures of people drunkenly rolling on the floor or peeing out the window or making out with someone in the bathtub. There was an art to being inconspicuous like that. The real secret, I realized, was you couldn’t judge people. You just had to be there. You couldn’t be like: Oh my God, I can’t believe you’re doing that! You had to be super chill and not care about anything. And the Agenda types, they all wanted the attention anyway. They loved that someone was taking their picture. So I became part of that world in a new way.
It was also fun to be with Kai. We’d have these crazy, weird nights: fleeing Britney’s parties when the police showed up and then eating french fries in the parking lot of Jack in the Box until four in the morning. I had basically zero parental supervision now, so I could do anything. One night there was a full moon and Kai and I bummed a ride with some other people to the Grayson Hot Springs. These were college students we met at a coffee shop. As soon as we got to the hot springs, Kai ran down the trail, stripped off all her clothes, and plopped down into the mud. So then the college kids did too. And then the bunch of us rolled around and lay there and soaked in the mud. Kai found this cool rock and wouldn’t let me see it, so then I had to wrestle her, to try to get it, and the two of us were squishing around in the mud, trying to get the rock from each other, until we got so tired we had to stop. The college kids only had one small towel in their car, so we messed up their backseat pretty badly.
• • •
That was also the summer that Kai tried to teach me about fashion. She took me around to the various thrift stores and clothing-exchange places. At first I couldn’t stand to not be dressed in Levi’s and cotton shirts. But Kai got me to wear different things, Western shirts and sweaters and old-man shoes instead of Nikes. Slowly I got used to it. It was weird, though, to stand out like that. To have people look at you on the street. But as she kept saying: “Do you want to be a cool young photographer, or do you want to be another high school dork with a camera?”
For a couple weeks in August, Kai and I were together almost every day. I’d get off work and we’d meet up somewhere. At night we’d go to Agenda and dance and talk about people. Also, Kai wrote stuff. She wrote poems and kept journals. Some of her writings, which she was gradually letting me read, were hilarious. She was good at observing people, and seeing the absurdity of things.
One thing though, she still hated Claude and Hanna and those people. At one point, Logan Hewitt had this big end-of-summer party. Everyone was going. Even Hanna was supposedly going, though she’d been AWOL all summer. I thought it would be super fun. I tried to convince Kai to come.
“No,” she said. We were in a booth at a coffee place downtown. She was drawing something in her journal. “Not going.”
“What if I promise to stay with you?” I offered. “For the whole night?”
“No,” she said.
“You wouldn’t have to talk to anyone if you don’t want.”
She continued to draw. “I don’t go places where those people are. Logan Hewitt? Barf.”
I was sitting long-ways in the booth, my back against the wall, sipping the dregs of an old coffee. “But Hanna’s gonna be there,” I said. “And she’s so funny. There’s a reason she’s so popular, you know. She’s hilarious.”
“Not to me she isn’t.”
“But they’re my friends. Can’t you just tolerate them for an hour or two? If only for my benefit?”
“No,” she said, straightening up to better evaluate her drawing. “I can’t tolerate them. They are intolerable. I can’t believe you’re actually friends with them. I can barely tolerate that.”