SEEING TEACHERS OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL always felt a little weird. At the beginning of his freshman year, Pup had run into his English teacher, Ms. Cole, at the public pool, wearing a bikini and running after one of her kids. For the rest of the school year, she’d be standing at the front of the room in one of her pink cardigan sets, talking about Edgar Allan Poe or whatever, and Pup would think about how awkward it was that he knew what her belly button looked like. But with Mr. Hughes, it was different, mainly because he didn’t really dress or act like a teacher even when he was in school, so you didn’t really expect him to dress or act like one outside of school. Which is why Pup was relatively unfazed when he went to meet his art teacher for coffee one afternoon in the middle of June and saw him leaning against the condiments bar looking like he’d just disembarked from a cruise ship: straw hat, Hawaiian shirt with big green macaws all over it, denim shorts, and a pair of sandals that looked like they were made out of rope.
“Flanagan,” Mr. Hughes said, putting down his newspaper to shake Pup’s hand. “What are you drinking?”
Pup looked up at the menu behind his teacher’s head. Americano? Mocha? Steamer? He panicked, scanning the board for an item he actually recognized.
“Hot chocolate!” he read. “I’ll do one of those.”
“Really? It’s ninety degrees, Flanagan.”
“Oh. Right. What are you drinking?”
“Iced coffee.”
“Huh. Okay, I’ll have an iced hot chocolate.”
Mr. Hughes stared at him, a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. “You’re an odd duck, Flanagan,” he said. “I like it. One iced hot chocolate, coming right up.”
Drinks procured, they chose a table near the front window and sat down. Mr. Hughes looked at his watch.
“I guess we’ll wait a few more minutes for Abby to show up before we start,” he said. “It’s not like her to be late.”
“I don’t think she’s coming.” Pup stuck his straw between the fast-melting ice cubes in his drink.
“Not coming? Why not?”
“She didn’t tell you?”
Mr. Hughes crossed his arms. Two bright-green macaws stared at Pup from the sides of his sleeves. “Tell me what?”
“She’s not coming to regionals.”
“What? Why the hell not?”
“Well, she’s going through some . . . personal problems.”
“Personal problems?” Mr. Hughes laughed. “What’s that supposed to mean? Life itself is one long personal problem!”
“I agree.” Pup slurped his drink.
“Well, did you try to change her mind?”
“Yeah. When we were in the darkroom, we had a big argument about it and everything. But then she just kind of left.”
“She left? Well, why didn’t you run after her?”
“Because she didn’t want to talk to me!”
“Well, have you tried calling her? Or, I’m sorry, I forgot you kids today don’t call each other. Have you tried texting her?”
“Yes.” Pup peered into his drink.
“Well? Did you get a response?”
“No. And for the record, I also did call her. Four times, to be exact.”
“And?”
“She didn’t answer.”
“Well did you leave her a voice mail?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because voice mails are for old people!”
Mr. Hughes ripped his glasses off and pinched the bridge of his nose. Then he stuffed them back on his face. The way he treated his glasses, it was a wonder he didn’t go through twenty pairs a year. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Let me think about this. We’ll talk about this later. For now, let me see what you got.”
Pup took out the folder from his backpack and pushed it across the table. Mr. Hughes opened to the first page, tore off and replaced his glasses a few more times, and began to look through the stack of images. Pup sat across from him, drank his iced hot chocolate, and waited. Mr. Hughes took his time scrutinizing each shot. Sometimes he leaned back, other times he leaned forward, his face contorting into a series of squints, smirks, and scowls. At one point, he even reached into his teacher-satchel-man-purse thing and pulled out a magnifying glass to scrutinize the images even closer. Finally, when Pup was slurping up the last remaining granules of chocolate powder from the bottom of his cup, Mr. Hughes closed the folder and looked up.
“Well,” he said, tearing off his glasses with a sense of finality.
“Well,” Pup said.
“I’m curious, Flanagan. What do you think about this portfolio?”
Pup hated this teacher trick, when they turned the tables on you, asking how you’d grade yourself if it was up to you. But since it wasn’t up to you, the only reason they asked was so that you would insult yourself, saving them the trouble.
“Well, uh, I mean, I’m not an expert, so I don’t know,” he answered. “But I thought some of the pictures came out pretty cool.”
“Pretty cool,” Mr. Hughes repeated, skeptically rubbing his chin.
“I guess.”
“Well. I didn’t think they were cool at all.”
“Oh, totally.” Pup spoke quickly, to cover for his sinking heart. “I get it.”
“I thought they were remarkable.”
“Sorry?” Pup, who’d been staring down at the boomerang pattern that danced across their linoleum table, looked up to meet his teacher in the eye.
“Your attention to detail, your ability to trap a moment in time. Your mastery over lighting, over composition, over tension! And framing! And texture! Your point of view. The way you see people.” He was shaking his head, but not in the way Pup’s teachers usually shook their heads at him. It didn’t look like disappointment. It looked almost like . . . admiration?
“Everyone in these photos, they’re people who are close to you, right?”
“Yeah. Mostly.”
“It’s like, you have found a way to honor them. All of them. To make the unremarkable extraordinary. This one, for example.” He pushed a photo of Pup’s mother across the table, the one he’d taken of her sitting in the kitchen after the dishes had finally been finished for the night and the counter wiped down with Windex. Her head was bowed, her gray hair was pulled back into a little bun at the nape of her neck, her colored pencils were lined up neatly on the table, and she was shading in the scales of a fish from the coloring book he’d bought her at the U of I campus bookstore. “I mean, my god, has the loneliness of motherhood ever been captured so well?”
Loneliness of motherhood? Pup was fairly certain that his mom hadn’t been alone for more than ten minutes in at least forty years, if ever. How could she ever be lonely? He didn’t know what Mr. Hughes meant, but he certainly wasn’t going to argue the point. Besides, he loved that picture too, though he couldn’t have explained why.
“And this one.” He tapped his finger on the corner of the shot of Luke and his parents at the beginning of that terrible fight. “This has so much emotional intimacy that it’s almost painful to look at.”
Mr. Hughes shuffled through the rest of the pictures and then closed the folder.
“You’re part of a big family, that right?”
“Youngest of eight.”
“Used to listening more than you talk?”
Pup smiled. “I figured out a long time ago that in my family, if I try to talk, no one listens anyway.”
“Well, that silence, that watching, that listening—it’s taught you to see like an artist. I’ve been trying to teach kids that kind of seeing for years.”
He pushed the portfolio across the table.
“I want you to hang on to this, Pup. Even after regionals are over. You’ll need it when you’re applying to art programs next year.”
“Art programs?”
“Yes, Pup. There are these things called universities. At them, you can choose to major in art.”
James Flanagan, undergraduate. James Flanagan, bachelor of fine arts. He bit the inside of his cheek to control the stupid grin spreading across his face.
“But don’t look too pleased with yourself, young man,” Mr. Hughes said, waggling his finger at Pup. “You’ve still got one more important job to do.”
“I do?”
“Yes. Convince Abby to change her mind.”