A few kids are already scattered around the classroom. Ms. Delani glances toward the door as I walk in, then away, quickly, like a flash went off so brightly it hurt. I wait in the doorway for a second to give her a chance to look again, but she doesn’t move. Maybe she’s waiting for me to go up to her? People start gathering behind me, so I take a few steps toward her and pause by the shelves of art books in the front, trying to figure out what to do.
There’s no way she hasn’t seen me.
Everyone’s streaming in around me, and Ms. Delani is saying hi and smiling and ignoring me standing just a few feet from her. I have no idea what’s happening, but being surrounded by everyone feels a little like drowning, so I walk right in front of her and hover there.
“Hi,” I say.
She glances at me through the red-rimmed glasses that frame her dark eyes.
“Welcome back.”
But she sounds so absent, like I’m someone she vaguely knows.
I stumble to the table where I sat last year, open my notebook, and act like I’m reading something really interesting. Maybe she’s waiting until everyone sits down and class officially starts before she says anything about Ingrid. The last people come in and I pretend not to notice that the seat next to me, Ingrid’s old seat, stays empty.
The bell rings.
Ms. Delani scans the class. I wait for her to look over here, to smile or nod or anything, but it seems like the room ends just to the right of me. She smiles at everybody else, but I, apparently, do not exist. It’s obvious she doesn’t want me here, and I have no idea what to do. I would get my stuff together and leave, but I’d have nowhere to go. I want to crawl under the table and hide there until everyone is gone.
The walls are covered with our final projects from last year. Ingrid is the only one who got three of her pictures up. They’re all next to one another, in the front of the classroom, right in the center. One is a landscape—two slopes, covered in rocks and thorny bushes, with a creek running crookedly through them. One is a still life of a cracked vase. And one is of me. The lighting is really intense and I’m making a strange expression, like a grimace. I’m not looking at the camera. In the darkroom, when Ingrid made a print of it for the first time, we stood back and watched the image of me appear on the wet paper, and Ingrid said, This is so you, it’s so you. And I said, Oh God, it is, even though I hardly recognized myself. I watched shadows form beneath my eyes, an unfamiliar curve darken at the corner of my mouth. It was a harder version of me, a grittier version. Soon I was staring at a face that looked completely unfamiliar, nothing like a girl who grew up in a rich suburb with loving parents and her own bathroom.
Maybe it was a premonition or something, because as I look at it now, it makes more sense.
At first I can’t find any of my pictures, but then I spot one. Ms. Delani must really hate it to have pinned it up where it is, in the only dark corner of the entire room, above a heater that juts out of the wall and blocks part of it from view. Ingrid was amazing at art—she could draw and paint anything and make it look even better than it was—but I thought we were both good at photography.
When I took the picture I was sure it would be amazing. Ingrid and I were taking the BART train to see her older brother, who lives in San Francisco. It was a long ride because we live so far out in the suburbs. When we were passing through Oakland, there was some sort of delay, and for a while the train we were on sat still on the tracks. The engine stopped humming. People shifted in their seats, settled into waiting. I looked out the window, across the freeway, to where the sky looked so vibrantly blue over sad little run-down houses and industrial buildings. I took the picture. But I guess the colors were the beautiful part. In black-and-white it’s just sad, and Ms. Delani is probably right—who wants to look at that? But it’s still so embarrassing to have it stuck in a corner. There are a million pictures up there, but right now I feel like there’s a neon sign around mine. I try to think of some way to sneak it off the wall.
All through class, Ms. Delani smiles while she’s talking about the high expectations she has of her advanced students, smiles so hard her cheeks must hurt. The ancient clock on the wall behind me ticks so slowly. I stare at it for a few seconds, wishing the period over, and notice all the cubbies in the back of the room. I never got to empty mine last year because I missed the final week of school.
Ms. Delani writes review terms on the board—aperture, light meter, shutter speed. I start getting all fidgety, thinking of all the things I have in my cubby. I know I have some old photos, and I think there might be a few of Ingrid. I glance at the clock again, and the minute hand has hardly moved. I should wait until class is over, but I just don’t really care about being polite right now. Ms. Delani isn’t exactly being polite. So I scoot my chair back, ignore the sound of metal scraping against linoleum, and stand up. A couple people turn to see what’s going on, but when they realize it’s me they turn back fast, as if accidental eye contact could be deadly. Ms. Delani just keeps talking like everything’s normal, like she isn’t completely ignoring the fact that Ingrid’s not here. She doesn’t even pause when I walk over to my cubby and start pulling pictures out. Because I’m feeling so daring, I don’t go straight back to my seat. Instead, I take my time sorting through a bunch of old pictures I’d forgotten about. Some of Ingrid’s are mixed in, the ones I wanted copies of, and I look through them until I find my favorite—a hill with grass on it and little wildflowers, blue sky. It must be the most peaceful picture in the world. It’s the setting of a fairy tale, it’s somewhere that can’t exist anymore.