At the moment, Isabel was staring into her locker as if it contained other worlds. Olivia said, “She’s not wearing black.”
Isabel snapped out of her trance and glared at us as if she realized we were talking about her. I looked away quickly, but I still felt her eyes on me.
“Maybe she’s not in mourning anymore,” I said, after we’d gotten out of earshot.
Olivia opened the door for me. “Maybe she’s the only one who ever was.”
Back at my house, I made coffee and cranberry scones for us, and we sat at the kitchen table looking at a stack of Olivia’s latest photos under the yellow ceiling light. To Olivia, photography was a religion; she worshipped her camera and studied the techniques as if they were rules to live by. Seeing her photos, I was almost willing to become a believer, too. She made you feel as though you were right there in the scene.
“He was really cute. You can’t tell me he wasn’t,” she said.
“Are you still talking about Officer No-Smile? What is wrong with you?” I shook my head and shuffled to the next photo. “I’ve never seen you obsess over a real person.”
Olivia grinned and leaned at me over a steaming mug. Taking a bite of scone, she spoke around a mouthful, covering her mouth to keep from spraying me with crumbs. “I think I’m turning into one of those girls who likes uniformed types. Oh, c’mon, you didn’t think he was cute? I’m feeling…I’m feeling the boyfriend urge. We should order pizza sometime. Rachel told me there’s a really cute pizza boy.”
I rolled my eyes again. “All of a sudden you want a boyfriend?”
Olivia didn’t look up from the photos, but I got the idea she was paying a lot of attention to my response. “You don’t?”
I mumbled, “When the right guy comes along, I guess.”
“How will you know if you don’t look?”
“As if you have ever had the guts to talk to a guy. Other than your James Dean poster.” My voice had gotten more combative than I’d intended; I added a laugh at the end to soften the effect. Olivia’s eyebrows drew closer to each other, but she didn’t say anything. For a long time we sat in silence, paging through her photos.
I lingered on a close-up shot of me, Olivia, and Rachel together; her mother had come outside to take it right before school started. Rachel, her freckled face contorted into a wild smile, had one arm firmly wrapped around Olivia’s shoulders and the other around mine; it looked like she was squeezing us into the frame. Like always, she was the glue that held our threesome together: the outgoing one who made sure us quiet ones stuck together through the years.
In the photo, Olivia seemed to belong in the summer, with her olive skin bronzed and green eyes saturated with color. Her teeth made a perfect crescent moon smile for the photo, dimples and all. Next to the two of them, I was the embodiment of winter—dark blonde hair and serious brown eyes, a summer girl faded by cold. I used to think Olivia and I were so similar, both introverts permanently buried in books. But now I realized my seclusion was self-inflicted and Olivia was just painfully shy. This year, it felt like the more time we spent together, the harder it was to stay friends.
“I look stupid in that one,” Olivia said. “Rachel looks insane. And you look angry.”
I looked like someone who wouldn’t take no for an answer—petulant, almost. I liked it. “You don’t look stupid. You look like a princess and I look like an ogre.”
“You don’t look like an ogre.”
“I was bragging,” I told her.
“And Rachel?”
“No, you called it. She does look insane. Or at least highly caffeinated, as per usual.” I looked at the photo again. Really, Rachel looked like a sun, bright and exuding energy, holding us two moons in parallel orbit by the sheer force of her will.
“Did you see that one?” Olivia interrupted my thoughts to point at another one of the photos. It was my wolf, deep in the woods, halfway hidden behind a tree. But she’d managed to get a little sliver of his face perfectly in focus, and his eyes stared right into mine. “You can keep that one. In fact, keep the whole stack. We can put the good ones in a book next time.”
“Thanks,” I replied, and meant it more than I could say. I pointed at the picture. “This is from last week?”
She nodded. I stared at the photo of him—breathtaking, but flat and inadequate in comparison to the real thing. I lightly ran my thumb over it, as if I’d feel his fur. Something knotted in my chest, bitter and sad. I felt Olivia’s eyes on me, and they only made me feel worse, more alone. Once upon a time I would’ve talked to her about it, but now it felt too personal. Something had changed—and I thought it was me.
Olivia handed me a slender stack of prints that she’d separated from the rest. “This is my brag pile.”
Distracted, I paged through them slowly. They were impressive: a fall leaf floating on a puddle, students reflected in the windows of a school bus, an artfully smudgy black-and-white self-portrait of Olivia. I oohed and aahed and then slid the photo of my wolf back on top of them to look at it again.
Olivia made a sort of irritated sound in the back of her throat.
I hurriedly shuffled back to the one of the leaf floating on the puddle. I frowned at it for a moment, trying to imagine the sort of thing Mom would say about a piece of art. I managed, “I like this one. It’s got great…colors.”
She snatched them out of my hands and flicked the wolf photo back at me with such force that it bounced off my chest and onto the floor. “Yeah. Sometimes, Grace, I don’t know why I even…”
Olivia didn’t end the sentence, just shook her head. I didn’t get it. Did she want me to pretend to like the other photos better than the one of my wolf?
“Hello! Anyone home?” It was John, Olivia’s older brother, sparing me from the consequences of whatever I’d done to irritate Olivia. He grinned at me from the front hall, shutting the door behind him. “Hey, good-looking.”
Olivia looked up from her seat at the kitchen table with a frosty expression. “I hope you’re talking about me.”
“Of course,” John said, looking at me. He was handsome in a very conventional way: tall, dark-haired like his sister, but with a face quick to smile and befriend. “It would be in very bad taste to hit on your sister’s best friend. So. It’s four o’clock. How time flies when you’re”—he paused, looking at Olivia leaning over the table with a pile of photographs and me across from her with another stack—“doing nothing. Can’t you do nothing by yourselves?”