Summer in the Invisible City Read online

  “Like what?” I ask.

  “That New York has become this giant mall,” he says, like it’s common knowledge.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “She works so hard.”

  Allan nods. “She was always very serious about her work, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I think I’m like that, too,” I say. “I’m serious about my work.”

  “You’re in high school, it’s different. Don’t worry, you won’t have to work so hard when you’re older,” he says.

  Which confuses me because that’s not really what I meant.

  After that, we barely talk. I glance up at Allan, strolling down the street with his hands tucked into his pockets. No one would stop and notice him. A stranger walking past would never guess that he has met celebrities and billionaires and journalists and that his artwork has been shown in museums that tourists wait in line to visit.

  When we’re a few blocks from our apartment, I stop. I can’t risk us running into my mom, so I say, “This is fine. I’ll just say good-bye here.”

  “Is your mom home? I’d like to say hi,” he says.

  “She’s teaching until late,” I lie.

  Allan nods, like he understands.

  “Great seeing you, Sadie,” he says. “Will I see you at my opening on Saturday?”

  “Of course.” I beam.

  “Good,” he says, and he pats my upper arm once more before leaving.

  Chapter 21

  “Phaedra wants to come to your dad’s thing this weekend, too,” Izzy announces before class on Friday morning. “That’s okay, right?”

  “Of course,” I say, opening the classroom door. It occurs to me as I do it that this is the first day the door has ever been closed. Benji always leaves it wide open.

  Izzy sees before I do. She clasps her hand to her chest and mutters, “OMG.”

  The photo lab has been transformed. All the chairs and desks are gone, and instead, there are ten four-by-five cameras on tripods, each tagged with a yellow Post-it with a name. I find the one that says my name and stare at it, hypnotized.

  I’d seen a large-format camera once before, when one of the seniors returned it to the photo lab while I was working last year. But I’d never been this up close to one.

  The camera is as big as a human head, and the long skinny tripod legs make it look like a spidery robot. I reach up and touch the giant mechanical lens gently, as if I’m stroking a sleeping monster who might wake up.

  “I didn’t know we were gonna get to use these,” I murmur.

  “Me neither,” Izzy says.

  “Don’t get too excited,” Alexis says, in her usual know-it-all tone. “I’m sure Benji won’t let us take them home.”

  “Actually, you’ll all be taking them home over the weekend.”

  We turn and see that Benji is standing at the back of the room. Maybe he’s been there the whole time but we were too distracted by the cameras to notice.

  “These cameras aren’t just valuable,” he says. “They are part of the history of photography. They connect us to the past.”

  Once everyone is in class, Benji explains how the camera works. The negative is four by five inches, the size of a postcard, so that you can capture more detail than with a regular 35mm camera. While he talks, I marvel at the camera. I love how black and silent it is, like a piece of a spaceship that has fallen right here into the classroom.

  “You are going to use these cameras for your landscape project. You’ll take ten pictures with it over the weekend,” Benji says.

  “Is it even really gonna make a difference if the negative is four by five inches or 35mm?” Sean asks when Benji’s done lecturing. “It’s not like we are going to print enormous pictures. So, what’s the point?”

  Benji smiles cryptically. “You’ll see. This camera captures so much detail. Everything becomes so clear. Clearer than reality in a way. More real than real. It crystallizes the world.”

  I touch the camera tenderly, wiping away a smudge of dust as Benji’s words sink in.

  —

  I go home after class and the afternoon melts away as I move around the apartment taking pictures with the camera. I don’t notice the minutes or hours sliding by. When my mom comes home at six, I’m setting up a still life in the living room. I stop long enough to show her the camera and try to explain what Benji told us. When I’m done, she doesn’t say anything, just gives me a tight, long hug.

  My mom reheats leftovers and I take a break from working just long enough to eat with her. Then, while she’s doing dishes, I make her pose for me with her rubber gloves on so I can take a picture of her with the sink full of dishes behind her.

  After dinner, we go up to the roof so that I can try and take a landscape.

  I set up the camera for a long exposure, while my mom stretches her arms up to the sky and breathes in all that muggy summer air. The day has faded to dusk and the city lights glitter beneath the wide pale sky. If I can capture what I’m seeing, this will be the most beautiful photo ever.

  To take a picture with the four by five, you have to cover yourself with a blanket to protect the film from light. So I throw the cover over myself and focus the camera, watching the image of the city appear on the screen, a tiny replica of the real world.

  The craziest thing about the four by five is that when you look through the lens, the image appears upside down. I can’t remember Benji’s explanation for this. All I know is that right now the real world is blotted out entirely and I’m staring at an upside-down picture. And it feels right. Finally, the city lights can become the wild, messy stars they were always meant to be.

  —

  Later, I lie in bed and do the reading that Benji gave us as homework over the weekend.

  My phone rings, interrupting my thoughts. I close the magazine and reach for it.

  Sam. I sit bolt upright in bed.

  “Hello?” I say, trying to sound not too excited.

  “Hey, did I wake you?” he asks. I can hear noise in the background.

  “No.”

  “So, I’m at this diner with some people,” he says. “I think it’s near where you said you live.”

  “What diner?” I ask.

  “Warszawa. On Avenue A,” he says.

  I know Warszawa. A memory surfaces and I push it down.

  “I know it,” I say. “It’s close.”

  “Want to come meet us?” he asks.

  I wait a second before I answer so I don’t sound too eager. “Sure. I’ll see you soon.”

  After we hang up, I slip into my shoes, careful to be quiet so I don’t wake my mom. She’s a deep sleeper anyway. Sneaking out won’t be hard.

  Chapter 22

  I swore I’d never go back to the Warszawa Diner. That’s where I was when I realized, I mean, really understood in my bones, that Noah was over me.

  In the weeks after we had sex, Noah and I barely spoke. When I passed him in the hall at school, he’d given me low fives and smiles and a part of me thought he was flirting. He didn’t ask me out, or add me on Facebook or anything, but he looked at me in a way that he never had before. And that gave me hope.

  The Upper School Winter Concert was at the end of January. I normally wouldn’t go to music department events, but I knew that Noah would be there because he played in three different bands and I wanted to see him outside of school.

  I blow-dried my hair so it was shiny and neat and wore my favorite lace-up boots even though it hurt to walk for more than three blocks in them.

  I sat in the back of the auditorium with a girl from my science class, Elizabeth, and watched Noah play.

  Onstage, Noah never smiled. The spotlight did amazing things to his already amazing face, moving over his bones like liquid, so you could really see his cheekbones, his deep-set eyes, the dark hole of his mouth. I kn
ow the clarinet isn’t considered a super-sexy instrument, but I couldn’t even look at his hands on it without thinking about his hands on me. Every time his fingers moved or pumped the buttons, I wondered how he knew what to do. Everything about Noah was silent and instinctual.

  The girl in the chair next to Noah was named April. She was in my French class and she always wore one of those big puffy winter jackets with a hood, and knotted her hair in a bun. I always thought of her as kind of plain, but onstage April looked beautiful. Her hair was down and the spotlights made it so shiny. Even her frumpy, long-sleeved black orchestra dress seemed somehow elegant on her when she performed. At one point between songs, Noah leaned in and said something to her and she smiled. Envy torched my heart.

  After the concert, we walked in a big group to Warszawa. Everyone always went there after plays and things because they serve alcohol without carding.

  It was a wet, cold night. The snowstorm the week before had melted and then froze and then melted and then froze and the result was that mountains of old snow, brittle as Styrofoam and as brown as coffee, were stuffed into all the gutters and pressed up against the walls of buildings. My toes froze and grew numb inside the thin leather of my boots, and I had to remind myself that the pain was worth it.

  At the restaurant, we filed in and took over five of the big red pleather booths. I sat with Elizabeth. I wasn’t in Noah’s booth. He hadn’t seen me. He didn’t even know I’d come.

  At one point, he got up to go to the bathroom. I went, too, timing it so I could run into him in the hallway.

  When he came out of the bathroom, I pretended to not know he was coming.

  “Oh, hey,” I said, smiling.

  “Oh, hey,” he repeated. But it sounded totally different the way he said it.

  “You were really good tonight,” I said.

  His eyes jumped to something over my head and then he looked back at me.

  “Uh. Thanks,” he said.

  “So . . .” I said. “Which is your favorite song?”

  “Hmm? My favorite what?” he asked.

  “Your favorite song,” I repeated. But the brightness was draining out of my voice as Noah’s indifference landed harder and harder.

  “I don’t have one,” Noah said, glancing behind me again.

  I looked at his hands. Those clarinet hands. He had a Band-Aid on one of his fingers that I hadn’t noticed when he was onstage.

  “What happened to your finger?” I asked.

  “Aw, nothing,” Noah said, and then slid his hands into his pockets. “Hey, I gotta get back to my table.”

  “Oh, right, yeah,” I stammered, trying to roll my eyes like silly me.

  He patted me on the shoulder as he scooted past and said, “Be good, okay?”

  Be good? I watched him walk back to his table across the restaurant. We had sex! I wanted to scream at his back. You singled me out. You saw all of me. You reached inside me and held my heart; you felt it beat in your palm.

  He slid into a booth with some other kids in his grade and took a slug of a drink from a big glass. Laughed at something someone at his table said. He didn’t care about me. I could see it with my own eyes. And there was nothing I could do to change that. His words played over and over in my head. Be good. Be good.

  Chapter 23

  Twenty minutes later, I’m sliding into a booth at Warszawa next to Sam. He scoots down to make room for me, but the booth is tight and I can feel the side of his leg against the side of mine. I wonder if he can feel it, too.

  “These are my friends, Allison and Greg,” he says, introducing me to the people at the table. They aren’t kids I could pigeonhole as being from one part of the city.

  “We ate already, I’m sorry,” says Allison. She has dyed blond hair and bad skin, and her eyes are the purest blue I’ve ever seen.

  “It’s fine,” I say. There are swivels of grease and ketchup on the empty plates. “I’m not hungry; I ate earlier.”

  “We were starving,” says Greg. “We just walked for two hours.”

  “It was beyond annoying,” Allison adds. “We tried to get into this eighteen-and-up show and they carded, and they never card. So we ended up just walking around forever doing nothing. That’s how we got so hungry.”

  I look at Sam. His chameleon green eyes have shifted again to matching the mint green walls of the diner. It’s the first time I’ve let myself look right at him since I got here.

  “You were with them?” I ask.

  “Yup,” Sam says.

  “Cool,” I say stupidly.

  Sam looks at me and a smile cracks on his face. He bangs my knee with his knee under the table. I’m not sure if it was on purpose or if he was just shifting his weight, but it makes me blush.

  The boy, Greg, scoots out of the booth with a wad of cash to pay at the front. Allison sinks into the booth, closing her eyes.

  “How was New Hampshire?” I ask Sam quietly.

  “Okay,” Sam says, his eyes doing that camera-lens thing where a real emotion flashes in them for a second. “I’ll tell you about it later.”

  “Paid. Let’s go,” Greg announces.

  Allison folds forward, resting her head on the table dramatically. The boy yanks her ponytail flirtatiously but she doesn’t react.

  —

  Outside, on Avenue A, people are tumbling down the street in big groups. It’s after midnight, but it’s a warm, clear Friday night and people are out. Allison steps into the street and hails a taxi. Car headlights light up her white legs so she glows against the dark, dirty city. She and Greg climb in.

  “Did you walk here?” Sam asks me.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I live like ten minutes from here.”

  “Which way?” Sam asks.

  And then we’re walking side by side.

  —

  Sam and I don’t talk about the fact that he’s walking me home. At each corner, I wait to see if he needs to start heading in another direction, but at each corner, he crosses with me.

  I lead us the long way back because I want to stretch out our time together. In the low light, the street looks grainy and dim. Black water glistens in the gutters.

  Sam tells me about his week in New Hampshire and I tell him about my week here, catching up like old friends. He tells me there were thunderstorms every day that he was home, and I tell him it only rained here once. Sam says he went swimming every afternoon, and I tell him that I spent every afternoon in the darkroom, besides the day I had lunch with Allan and Marla. We both can’t believe the summer is already half over.

  Before I’m ready, we’re back on my block. My steps begin to slow down. There are still so many things I want to know about Sam and his trip. Did he see Amanda? Did he think about me?

  I stop walking across the street from my apartment and stare up at my bedroom window. From this angle, even if the light were on, I could only see the ceiling. A strange, small unit of measure of me and my life.

  “That’s my apartment,” I say, pointing to my window.

  “Are you tired?” he asks.

  “Not really,” I say. “Are you?”

  “No,” he says.

  “Do you . . . do you want to come in?” I ask, my heart racing as I say the words.

  Sam looks up at my window, not answering me.

  I panic as I realize I said the wrong thing. I rack my brain for ways to make it better. I could say “Just kidding” or “That’s a stupid idea.”

  But then Sam says, “Sure.”

  —

  Sam and I tiptoe past my mom’s room and into my bedroom. I close the door behind us and turn on my desk lamp. The large format camera rests on its spidery tripod legs in the middle of my room. My bed is unmade and even my wall of postcards is looking sloppy because three of them fell off this week and I forgot to re-pin them. Now I’m se
eing my room through Sam’s eyes, and I’m embarrassed that it’s such a mess.

  I linger awkwardly by my desk. Was it a mistake to invite Sam in? Does Sam think I’m throwing myself at him? Or is this what just friends do?

  “This is the camera you were telling me about?” Sam asks.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty amazing,” I gush.

  “How does it work?”

  “Come here,” I say, stepping toward the camera. “I’ll show you.”

  I pick the lightproof blanket up off the floor and drape it over Sam’s head and the camera, giggling at the site of him half covered in a blanket.

  “Are you messing with me?” he asks, but his voice is muffled.

  I laugh. “I promise, I’m not. Watch.”

  I open the lens and he gasps. I know what he’s seeing: the world flipped upside down.

  I lift up the edge of the blanket and peer underneath to check if it’s in focus. I’m so close to him, I can feel heat coming off his body.

  “I have to focus it,” I say. “Look.”

  Then, Sam lets me step all the way in so we are both underneath the blanket. I’m standing between him and the camera so that the whole front of Sam’s body is pressed against my back. I can feel his breath in my hair, his chest expanding and contracting. I try to focus on the camera, but my body is dissolving.

  The image on the viewfinder shows my desk. All boring stuff, just my laptop, a half-drunk cup of tea, and a stack of handouts. But everything looks magical through the camera’s lens.

  “Why is it upside down?” Sam whispers. When he speaks, I can feel the air of his words like a breeze.

  “It has to do with the mechanics inside,” I explain. “The way that light is being reflected. Regular cameras have mirrors that make things look right side up. There’s no mirror inside of this camera. So, that’s it.”

  “Hmm,” he says.

  Sam reaches out and touches the viewfinder with his pointer finger. I can feel his arm over my shoulder. His face is practically in my hair. He places his left hand on the side of my hip, as if he’s holding me steady, as if he can feel how much my body is melting. We are so close, if he wanted to, he could turn my whole body toward him and we’d be kissing.