Rule 15: Find a hobby or something you are passionate about.
Sydney was spending her second Saturday as a single girl in the attic. She should have been out shopping. Or maybe studying. Or getting her hair done. But she didn’t feel like leaving the house, which was definitely saying something. She’d spent the last two years avoiding the house because it had become a hollow shell of what it used to be, with her mother gone ninety percent of the time and her dad trying to be Mr. Mom.
As a way to get her mind off Drew, Sydney was in pursuit of a Rubbermaid tote she’d lugged into the attic some six months ago. It contained several crammed photo albums, one ratty blanket, an empty journal, and a digital camera that had once been considered top of the line but was now sorely out-of-date.
The idea was, find the camera and take up a new hobby as a way of fulfilling the concept behind Rule 15.
Sydney stepped around a leather trunk, bumping into a tower of cardboard boxes. She stilled them with her hands before they toppled over, and moved farther into the room, which ran the length and width of the house.
Mostly there were cardboard boxes and Rubbermaid totes up here. Sydney’s dad filled the boxes, but her mom had always said totes were more practical because they guarded against moisture and bugs.
The tote Sydney was looking for was clear with a top the color of flamingos. It should have been easy to pick out among the brown cardboard and the forest-green totes her mother always bought, but for some reason, Sydney was having a hard time locating it.
And it should have been right there by the door where she left it. Had her mother grabbed it? Maybe to take the camera?
Mrs. Howard used to be an amateur photographer. She would take Sydney out to Birch Falls Park on weekends to take photos of the swans and deer, and the duck pond near the back of the park, where people ice-skated in the winter.
Sydney used to love those outings. It was so routine that it almost became as familiar as the ratty blanket that was also in the flamingo tote. Sydney had slept with that blanket every night until six months ago when she decided she was too old for it. It’d been a gift from her now-deceased grandmother.
Part of her was searching for the tote, not only for the camera but the blanket, too. She’d lost the most familiar thing in her life: Drew. She felt like she was reaching for anything that would be familiar and maybe fill that hollow void in her chest.
Dust swirled in the muted moonlight pouring through the square window at the far end. Sydney wondered what time it was and whether or not she’d ever find this stupid tote. It had to be after nine if the moon was out.
She thought of Drew and wondered where he was and what he was doing. Hopefully, he wasn’t with Nicole Robinson.
“Aha,” she said to the silence when she spotted the pink tote lid peeking out from beneath a sheet. She pulled the sheet back. Dust spiraled in the air and she waved it away. When it settled, she sat on the floor with the tote in front of her and popped open the lid.
Sitting on top of the canary-yellow blanket was the digital camera, exactly where she’d put it six months ago. Did her mother miss those weekend trips to the park? Sydney had barely talked to her mother in weeks. And when they did talk, they didn’t talk about the fun they used to have. Mostly it was about Sydney’s schoolwork, and even then the conversations didn’t last long. They usually went like this:
“How’s school going?” her mom would say.
Sydney would reply, “It’s good. I got an A in—”
Her mom’s BlackBerry or laptop would start dinging with an incoming message. “I have to get that,” her mom would say and then bury herself in her work for another two hours.
Sydney usually gave up at that point.
Now she took the camera in her hands and slid the power button over. The camera let out three chirps while the power light flickered green. The batteries were still good. The screen lit up with the last picture taken.
Sydney’s mouth hung slack when she looked at it.
It was of Sydney and Drew on the back patio, sitting in the bench swing. Their backs were to the camera, but they were looking at each other so their faces were in profile, silhouetted by the flickering orange glow of a fire in the cast-iron pit.
That’d been two summers ago, when their relationship was still new and Sydney’s mother hadn’t yet received her promotion. Sydney never knew her mother had taken this picture. Or that she’d been there in the house watching them.
It was such a beautiful photograph. It reminded Sydney of how good her life was that summer.
I wish there was something I could do to get that back, she thought. That perfection.
But unless Drew took her back and her mother quit SunBery Vitamins, Sydney knew her life would never be that perfect again.