The sky had that faded out, late afternoon look as he laid across his girlfriend's bed. He liked the way she piled it high with stuffed animals and lacy ruffly pillows and comforters. He felt tired sometimes when he laid on her bed. Maybe it was because it was so soft, softer than his no nonsense twin mattress. Maybe it was because school was over and he didn't have to keep up appearances that things were fine. Weren't they? This was grade ten, after all. Things were fine. His parents were dead. He lived with Joey. He wasn't troubled by thoughts of his mother's emaciated face, the cheek bones becoming so prominent like those people who peered through the fences in the concentration camps in those old news reel photos of World War II. He was fine. Only sometimes he forgot that he didn't have to pretend and went on pretending anyway, the smile quick to come to his lips.
"Hey," Ashley breathed her words when they were here alone together. She leaned over him and on him and leaned into him in ways she only hinted at in school. The accidental brush of his sleeve in class, the way her hair would brush across his face as she leaned across a desk to get a pencil. Sometimes he felt more awake when he was here with her, despite the softness all around him. Sometimes he felt electricity flowing from her to him, from her fingertips to his skin. He wanted to sit up and take notice of everything.
"Hey," he echoed her back, and he knew his voice was thick and sleepy when he talked to her, catching in all the right places. Her slow smile in return made his heart beat faster, and he'd sit up a little, reaching toward her to kiss her. Sometimes clouds gathered out the windows and spit snow at them, little grains of sand raining in on their ghostly reflections.
Still, many afternoons were spent alone, just him and his camera, and he began to wonder just what it was he was trying to capture. The minute he put his finger on the button to shoot the picture it was gone. He couldn't hold onto things this way. He thought of the little pictures he'd tried to arrange and manipulate in his father's basement, as if that could change things. He'd been almost puzzled by the memory of his father's anger that day he found the photo album, but he thought maybe now he was starting to understand. None of those photos was free from his meddling. That wasn't the world but some world of his making, and maybe his father realized the errors of his ways before he could begin to comprehend them. The world wasn't one false picture after another, placing the people and the scenery you wanted where you wanted it, taking a dead woman's living image and superimposing it into your world. That wasn't what the world was, and his father understood this. He'd wanted him to understand it, too. He'd wanted him to know that the world was love and the world was pain, it was the metal shelf biting into your back and the cement floor smacking you in the face and the kick in the stomach. That was the world, and you had to find love and beauty in the pain.
And yet, he would take afternoons away from Ashley in favor of his camera. He would stalk the perfect picture until he was dusty and worn out. The slick world under his camera lens wasn't helping him. Could he take the negatives back to Joey's garage and find the faces and the postures that would allow him to say he loved Ashley, the way she wanted him to? Could moving one building to another street let her see into his heart?
Other times he didn't have his camera, he'd just walk alone, brushing her off. In the last periods in school she'd invite him to come over, to go to The Dot, to the mall, the movies, and he'd refuse her, making up lies about having to help Joey with car lot things. The disappointment in her eyes almost gratified him. The hollow look in her eyes meant that he mattered to her. He wondered why he had to test people this way, why he had to court their disappointment. On those days he'd walk along the sidewalks, the buildings surrounding him in their comforting steel and glass.
In the pictures he used to take he wanted them to mean something, the arrangement was never accidental. Maybe it was the half snow covered roof of a shed, the pristine whiteness revealing tar shingles. Maybe it was the shadow of a leaf on the sidewalk, the way they imprinted themselves in iron or rust in the cement. Maybe it was the discarded plastic legs of an old doll sticking out of a wide plastic rubbish barrel. Maybe it was the cracks in the windshields or the knife tears in the leather seats of the cars that ended up on Joey's lot, the radios with no knobs, the gaping empty face of the dashboards that have been ransacked by crack heads or thieves.
He'd always find his way back to Ashley, maybe not with the words on his lips that she wanted to hear. Maybe with jokes and quick laughs and averted gazes. He'd find himself sinking onto her bed, into it, through it, and he felt like he could see all the feathers of the comforters and the cotton and the coil springs, right down to the floorboards. He could see through the roots of the trees and the dirt and the crawling things that lay under where she lay, and looking up to her he wished she would wait until he could find the words that could bring him back to her.