After dinner, I talk to Katrina online. I don’t bring up what she told me. It’s out there. She’ll say something if she wants to. She’s put it behind her. So will I. I bring up David and tell her about mentoring him and how he makes me crazed with his camera.
“What is it about being in front of a camera?”
“You’re giving the world a permanent picture of what you look like,” she says.
“Remember the empty places in the yearbook where they wrote “camera shy”?
“That was yours truly,” she says, “I didn’t show up for mine.”
“I didn’t think there was a choice.” I always assumed you had to be out sick to miss it. Obviously not. I now find out that other people squirm at being photographed too. Then I wonder. When David wields his digital truth box, is my angst related to him or the camera? I don’t trust him. That’s part of it.
But it’s more than that.
Click. In one hundredth of a second, your face is frozen in time for the world to examine.
But do people actually examine you? Do they care? Or is it all in your head? When we had a sleepover, Mel described something she’d read about called “the spotlight effect.”
“You feel like you’re walking around with a giant spotlight on you, and you’re so embarrassed by what you think people see that you shrink away from living up to your potential.”
I took out a flashlight and lit up her face. “You mean like this?”
“Exacto.”
Amber’s face pops into my mind. She’s probably one of the few happy to be in the spotlight. For her it’s probably a turn-on to be photographed. The camera loves her. When her picture is being taken, she probably feels like she’s being watched by an admirer.
Flashback to the picture on her locker door. I make a note to take a closer look at it. Now that I know her, will I see something I didn’t before?
And the pictures David took of me. What did he see? I can’t remember the last time I studied a picture of me, so I go into my dad’s desk drawer and get his camera. I close the door of my room and hold the camera at arm’s length.
Click. Click. Click. Click.
I sit on the edge of the bed studying the pictures, going from one to another, forward and back, knowing I can delete them like a bad sentence, never to exist again except on my mental hard drive.
But I don’t.
I try to figure out who this person is. How good or bad she looks. Like a stranger would. Like David.
Is it just the nose, or is there an overall image problem? How much truth can you see through your own eyes?
“One thing’s for sure,” Mel once said. “Nobody looks at us as hard as we do.”
“If I could draw, I would look in the mirror and put down what I see, as if I were looking at myself as a stranger would,” I told Katrina. “I’d see shadows, the way light hits the planes on my face, the spaces between the eyes and the nose, the cheekbones, the mouth, the chin.”
“Allie!” she said, exasperated. “You don’t have to know everything. I mean, you never will.”
I want to understand myself better, to see my face objectively, like an architect who studies a building, aware of its strengths and its faults, or an artist who is capturing a face on a canvas and has to know every shadow and nuance to capture it accurately. Looking at pictures isn’t enough, but what else I can do?
Katrina answers quickly: “Just live.”