I still thought about Hanna, though. Even if nobody else did. I had recently begun my first real photo project, Cars at Night, which involved taking pictures of cars parked on the street late at night. I shot them in profile. I took a string and put a paper-clip hook on one end, which I would attach to the door handle of the car I was going to shoot. That way I was always exactly twenty feet away. This made the photos all the same, like mugshots, or passport photos.
I’d drive around in different neighborhoods looking for interesting cars. When I found one, I’d hop out and measure for distance, set up a tripod, and get the shot. Some nights I’d stay out very late. I wanted that to be part of the mood of the project. Things got very quiet on the street at three in the morning. It was just me and the raindrops and the cats. It was during those nights, driving around, looking for cars, that I would let my mind wander. I’d think about my friends, my parents, my future. And Hanna. God, poor Hanna. The golden girl. I still couldn’t believe what had happened to her.
• • •
The other person who still had Hanna on his mind was Bennett Schmidt. He wanted to see her. He had tried calling her family, but they wouldn’t speak to him. So then he asked me if the two of us could go. Could I work it out with the Sloans? This was probably not the best idea, but I went along with it. I called Mrs. Sloan myself, without mentioning Bennett. She gave me the number at the facility. I called and made arrangements for a visit.
So we went, Bennett and me. I drove. Her new place was different from the hospital. It was a residential treatment facility, a big house basically, with carpets and fireplaces, but with the doors locked and security people and nurses on duty 24-7. We signed in and met Hanna in a library. Another woman, a nurse, sat with us and read a magazine while we talked.
Hanna looked worse than before. Her hair was cut shorter and it looked limp and dried out. She kept sighing and breathing in a strange way, like she couldn’t quite get settled. She had become a little bug-eyed, probably from the medication she was taking.
She also wasn’t that happy to see us. There were probably other people she’d rather be visited by than her ex-boyfriend’s tennis partner and the drug dealer she was sleeping with just before she lost her shit.
She didn’t treat Bennett like a former boyfriend, that’s for sure. She didn’t treat me much better. She thanked us for coming and then fell silent. We ended up telling her random news from school, how the basketball team was doing and that Mrs. Jamison, the English teacher, was pregnant. Hanna began to yawn. After twenty minutes it was time to go.
On the drive back home, Bennett didn’t say a word. I didn’t either. It was humiliating to visit someone who was that screwed up and yet was still completely indifferent to you. It was probably worse for Bennett, being in love with her. It was interesting, too, because in the months that followed, Bennett began to wind down his drug-dealing career. Maybe it was that the Sloans were so repulsed by him. Or maybe it was how Hanna dismissed him that night. Or maybe he just grew out of it. But by the end of senior year, Bennett Schmidt was pretty much out of the drug business.
• • •
I shouldn’t say Cars at Night was totally my idea. The beginning of the idea was mine, to take photos of cars while they were “asleep.” But Richie had input too, like using the string with the hook. That was the secret to passport photos, he always claimed. Making them all exactly the same. Same distance. Same light. Same stool. Same backdrop. If you looked at discarded passport photos all day, which Richie and I did sometimes, you saw how the more standard and uniform you could make the format, the more noticeable individual peculiarities became.
I didn’t see Richie very much that winter. He was trying to get better gigs now. He didn’t want to lose ground after his famous Elliot Square photo, so he wouldn’t take just any job. This was good for me. It meant I got all the boring assignments from Portland Weekly. I did something for them almost every week. Which meant I always had some extra money in my pocket.
It was funny, too, because most of the editors at Portland Weekly didn’t know how young I was. They’d send me to some microbrew place or a new wine bar, and I’d have to bluff my way in. This wasn’t that hard. Nobody turned down free publicity. And if you acted like a pro, people didn’t stop to think about how old you were.
When I did see Richie, it was usually at the shop. And then, after the holidays, I started working at Passport Photos myself a couple days a week after school, helping out his uncle when Richie wasn’t around. It was a pretty easy job. I’d clean lenses or do some of the basic repairs. Then at night I’d sweep up, close the cash register, and count the money, if there was any.
• • •
And then one night in February, just as I was locking up, Richie showed up at the store wearing a suit coat and a new white shirt. He pounded on the door and I let him in. He had this stunned, slightly horrified look on his face. I thought he might have been in a car accident.
But no. He slammed a bottle of champagne dramatically on the counter and stared at me with huge eyes. “I just asked Nicole to marry me,” he blurted.
“What did she say?”
“Dude.”
“I know.”
So then we had to celebrate. At first we couldn’t get the champagne bottle open. And when we did, it sprayed all over the place. We poured what was left into two of his uncle’s dirty coffee cups from the back. We toasted and drank. And then we stood there, in the quiet shop, and laughed a little and drank champagne. Richie was basically in shock. But he was “all in,” like he gets. That was Richie’s best quality. When he decided to do something, he did it. Not always perfectly. Not always gracefully. But he got it done.