PUP LIMPED THE REST OF the way through his finals, scurrying from exam to exam down the most obscure corridors of the school, and this was how he successfully managed to make it to the last bell of his junior year without running into Izzy or Brody. He spent the first week of summer break looking at the world from behind his camera lens. Day and night he roamed Flanland, shooting roll after roll, shooting obsessively, relentlessly, throwing himself into his portfolio project with a single-mindedness that would have impressed even the most type-A Honors kid. His family didn’t know what to make of it. They weren’t exactly comfortable with the way he would suddenly appear, his stealthy entrance announced with the click of a shutter button, but they were so pleased and surprised that he had an interest other than Cubs baseball that they put up with it. Even when he wasn’t taking photographs, he was thinking about photography. He was reading about photography. He was talking about photography with Abrihet, in late-night marathon phone calls that were so long and intense and wonderful that for a while he could forget about the humiliating conclusion to his relationship with Izzy and the fear that gnawed at him whenever he let himself wonder for too long where Luke was staying and what Luke was doing. All of a sudden, art had become necessary: making it, studying it, thinking about it. Every press of the shutter release felt like a tiny refusal to accept that his life wasn’t completely out of his control, that at least part of his story was his to tell.
Mr. Hughes had gotten special permission from the principal to allow Pup and Abrihet access to the darkroom over the summer to work on their portfolios. They had plans to meet there on a Saturday morning in the second week of break, and Pup couldn’t wait to stand beside her in that tiny space, working in absolute darkness in the belly of their summer-emptied high school, to drop their photo paper in the developing bath, agitating the liquid, creating soft ripples and watching together as their images began to come alive. Each chemical reaction felt like a miracle: With his own hands, he could turn a blank sheet of paper into a tiny mirror, a translation of life into pictures. It was the closest he’d ever come to saying a prayer and feeling like someone was actually listening.
That Saturday morning, Pup arrived at school as planned, camera and film rolls weighing down his backpack, eager to get to work and forget everything that was happening in his real life. He waved to Anthony, the security guard, who glanced up from his Us Weekly magazine to wave back, and headed down the basement stairwell, down the long, empty art corridor toward the darkroom.
But as soon as he opened the door and saw Abrihet working in the soft red glow of the safety light, he knew something was wrong. She agitated her photo paper through the developing chemicals listlessly, her head slightly turned, her gaze fixed on some faraway point. She didn’t even turn around when she heard him come in.
“Abrihet?” Pup hovered near the door, unsure if he should even come in.
“Hey.”
“Are you all right?”
There was a silence, amplified by their great solitude in the massive building.
“My mom’s not coming.” Her voice was barely audible.
“Oh no.” Pup closed the door softly behind him. “Why not?”
She didn’t answer him. She just held the tongs and dragged the photo back and forth in the bath.
“Was it something with the visa?”
She shook her head. “I thought it was my dad. I thought it was his fault. I started screaming at him—I’ve never screamed at my father—and I was screaming at him and my auntie came in and she told me it wasn’t his fault at all. She said it wasn’t my dad and it wasn’t money and it wasn’t even the government or the documents or the application. It was her.” She turned to him suddenly, tears standing in her eyes. “The only reason she’s not here is because she doesn’t want to be here. She doesn’t want to come. She says that some people are meant to go while others are meant to stay. She says she knows I’m in good hands, and that I should come visit her every year, and that she doesn’t want to leave her home, and her country, and all the family we have left there, and her mountains. Her mountains, James! Who wants to be with a mountain more than they want to be with their own daughter?”
Pup just stood there. He didn’t know what to say. All he wanted to do was take the two steps across the room and put his arms around her. But he was held back by the memory of Izzy in the hallway after his Spanish exam. She had shrunk away from his touch with such complete disgust. Don’t touch me.
“I don’t even know why I came here today,” Abrihet said, flicking away a tear as it skidded down her cheek. “I’m not going to regionals.”
“What? But that’s crazy. Why not?”
“I wanted to show her how well I’ve done for myself in this country. How hard I’ve worked, how much I’ve learned. How much the sacrifice was worth it.” She dropped the tongs and reached for her backpack. “But now that she won’t be here to see all that, it doesn’t matter.”
“But that’s bullshit!”
Abrihet froze, her backpack halfway to her shoulder.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s bullshit, Abrihet! You think I’m not going through some shit right now? My brother just . . . my family won’t . . . Izzy doesn’t . . .”
“Izzy? You’re talking about that girl Izzy right now? This isn’t some silly little high school drama, James. This is my life. My mother.”
“That’s not what I . . . I know it is.” He ran a hand through the tangle of his hair. “What about what Mr. Hughes says? About using art to articulate the emergency inside of you?”
“We can’t all be Leonard Cohen, James. I don’t feel like articulating anything. I just feel like crying, okay?” She slid the strap of her backpack onto her shoulder, pushed past him, and opened the door.
“So you’re just going to quit? Do you really think that’s going to make it better?”
“You know what, James?” She turned to look at him, but the light from the hallway was flooding in all around her and he couldn’t make out the features of her face. “You have no idea what this feels like. You still have a mom in your life, okay?”
“And you still have a brother in yours. You think I don’t know what it feels like to miss someone?”
“I think,” she said quietly, “that you don’t even know me, or my family, or my life. I was stupid to believe that you ever could.”
She stepped out into the hall and the door slammed behind her. Pup was alone again in the weak red glow of the safety light. He looked down at Abrihet’s photo paper, where it floated like a dying leaf on the rippling surface of the chemical bath. It was a picture she’d taken at the bus stop where they’d waited together the night of her aunt’s party. Across the street, centered in the frame, was the redbrick apartment building with its rows of grated windows that had been her first home in this country, where she had tossed and turned on her kitchen air mattress, reciting her English words in the strange American brightness, teaching herself to build a wall of language between herself and her mother. Pup picked up the tongs and lifted out the photograph, trying to salvage it, but it was too late. It had been so overexposed, it had returned to the white blankness from where it had started.