All the Little Lights
Page 53

“Do you remember the first time you saw me?” he asked.
I arched a brow. “When you were punching the tree?”
“Yeah.” He looked down at his scarred knuckles. “I don’t want you to think I’m weird or some creepy stalker.” He turned, put on his seat belt, and shifted the car into reverse. “It’ll be easier just to show you.”
We drove to his aunt’s house, and he pulled into the drive. The house was dark, the garage empty.
“Where are they?” I asked.
“Out with Uncle John’s boss. They shouldn’t be too much longer.”
I nodded, following him downstairs to his room in the basement. It looked nothing like it did the last time I was there. It was a regular bedroom, with a full-size bed, a dresser, a desk, and decorations on the wall. The green shag rug had been replaced with an earth-toned modern one.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a new built-in.
“Uncle John made me a bathroom so I didn’t have to shower upstairs.”
“That was really nice.”
Elliott opened a drawer in his desk, taking out a cardboard box with a lid. He stood for a moment with his hands on the lid and then closed his eyes. “Don’t freak out. This is not as weird as it seems.”
“O-okay . . .”
“Remember when I wanted to show you the most beautiful thing I’d ever photographed?”
I nodded.
He picked up the box and carried it to his bed. He lifted the lid, struggling to gather whatever was inside, and then placed a stack of photos, all black and whites and various sizes, on his quilt. He spread them out. Every single one was of me—this year, my freshman year, and very few of them were taken when I was looking at the camera. Then I noticed some photos of me when I was in middle school, and one where I was wearing a dress I hadn’t been able to fit into since the sixth grade.
“Elliott . . .”
“I know. I know what you’re thinking, and it’s creepy. That’s why I haven’t told you.”
“Where did you get these?” I asked, pointing at the photos of me from years before.
“I took them.”
“You took these? They look like magazine photos.”
He smiled, fidgeting. “Thanks. Aunt Leigh bought me my first camera the year I took this one,” he said, pointing at the one of me in the dress. “I’d spend all day outside taking pictures on that thing, then I’d come home and spend all night editing on Uncle John’s old computer. Halfway through the summer, though, I decided to climb this huge oak tree to get a shot of the setting sun. The people who owned the yard the oak tree was in came outside, and I was stuck. They were sad and having a moment I didn’t want to disturb. They were burying something. It was you and your dad. You were burying Goober.”
“You were watching us? You were in the tree?”
“I didn’t mean to, Catherine, I swear.”
“But . . . I sat out there until well after dark. I didn’t see you.”
Elliott cringed. “I waited. I didn’t know what else to do.”
I sat next to the photos, touching each of them. “I remember seeing you walking around the neighborhood and mowing lawns. I saw you looking at me, but you never talked to me.”
“Because I was terrified,” he said with a nervous chuckle.
“Of me?”
“I thought you were the prettiest girl I’d ever seen.”
I sat down on the bed, one of the photos in my hands. “Tell me more.”
“The next summer,” Elliott continued, “I saw you sitting on the porch swing. You saw something in the yard. It was a baby bird. I watched you climb almost to the top of the birch tree just to put it back in its nest. It took you half an hour to get back down, but you did it. In a pink dress.”
He tapped a photo of me sitting on the steps of our front porch, lost in thought. I was eleven or twelve and wearing my dad’s favorite dress. “This is the most beautiful photo I’ve ever taken. I could see it on your face. The pondering of what you’d done, the wonder, the pride.” He breathed out a laugh, nodding his head. “It’s okay, you can make fun of me.”
“No, it’s . . .” I shrugged one shoulder. “Unexpected.”
“And a little creepy?” he asked. He waited for my answer like he was expecting to be punched at any moment.
“I don’t know. Now I have photos of me and my dad I didn’t know existed. What about here?” I asked.
“You were helping your dad fix a broken board on the porch.”
“And here?”
“Admiring the Fentons’ rosebush. You kept coming back to the really big white one, but you didn’t pick it.”
“I thought that house looked familiar. I’ve missed it since they tore it down. It’s just a pile of dirt now. They’re supposed to be building a new one.”
“I miss the lights on the street. Seems like more go out every year,” Elliott said.
“Me too. But it makes the stars easier to see.”
He smiled. “Always looking on the bright side.”
“What were you doing in my backyard that day?” I asked, pointing at a photo of the old oak tree. “The first time I saw you, when you were punching our tree.”
“Blowing off steam.” I waited for him to continue. He seemed embarrassed. “My parents were still fighting a lot. Mom hated Oak Creek, but I was falling for it more every day. I’d asked to stay.”
“The day we met?”
“Yeah. I don’t know. I felt sort of at peace around that oak tree, but that day . . . nothing was peaceful. The longer I sat at the base of the tree, the longer I tried to be calm and mindful, the angrier I got. Before I knew what I was doing, I was throwing punches. It felt good to finally blow off steam. I didn’t know you were home from school, though. Of all the times I’d imagined us meeting, it was never like that.”
“Do you do that a lot? Blow off steam?”
“Not so much anymore. I use to put my fist through doors pretty often. Aunt Leigh threatened to stop letting me visit if I broke another one. She taught me how to channel my anger in a different way. Working out, football, taking pictures, helping Uncle John.”
“Why do you get so angry?”
He shook his head, seeming vexed. “I wish I knew. It just happens. I’m a lot better at controlling it now.”
“I can’t imagine you that angry.”
“I try to keep it reined in. Mom says I’m too much like my dad. Once it’s out . . . it’s out.” He seemed unsettled at the thought.
He sat on the bed next to me, and I shook my head in wonder. There were so many different expressions in the photos—all mine. Angry, bored, sad, lost in thought—so many captured moments of my life.
“Trust me, I see at eighteen that it wasn’t okay for me to take pictures of someone without her consent. I’m happy to give them to you. I’ve never shown them to anyone else. I just . . . at ten, I thought you were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I believe that still. That’s why I told Madison I came back.”
“Because you think I’m beautiful?”
“Because I’ve loved you for almost half my life.”
I turned to look in the mirror that hung on the wall behind his desk. My tawny hair had grown out ten inches since Elliott had taken his first picture of me. I looked like a young woman instead of a girl. My eyes were a boring green—I was perfectly ordinary, not the spectacular beauty he described.