Endangered (6 page)

WE'RE ON THE HIGHWAY, CREEPING THROUGH
rush-hour traffic.

Ocie's tapping on her thigh in a rhythm I still hear in my head even though I've cranked the radio to drown it.
Tap-tap-tap
, stop,
Tap-tap-tap
, stop,
Tap-tap
. . .

I lower the music and say, “If you're nervous, we could talk about it.”

Her tapping increases. “You should concentrate on the road.”

By “road” she means the thirty feet of visible asphalt fading into a torrential downpour that's so bad some drivers angle their cars toward the shoulder, deciding to wait instead of persevere. Looking through my windshield is like looking into a pool, and my wipers fight the water like bad swimmers, breaking the surface long enough to gasp before going under again. One of those fifty-miles-per-hour wind gusts the weatherman warned about swats my car, and I grip the steering wheel with both hands so I don't swerve.

Lightning flashes. The bolt is a crooked electric finger pointing toward
the worst of the storm. I don't need the directions, though. Already going that way.

“When you said you needed my help,” Ocie says, “I didn't think you meant with committing suicide.”

“We aren't going to die.” I hope.

Another gust bounces us in the lane.

“I'm glad you're so confident. What are we doing here?”

“Remember that contest I told you about? The one I need a killer photo for?”

I glance over for a reaction. Ocie's jaw is slack. She stares at the roof of my car; I know this look. Really, she's looking to God for a more satisfactory explanation.

“You're effing crazy, Panda. Driving in this? For a photo? Of what?”

I hesitate. She's not going to take this well. “I'm—I'm not sure yet.”

“Jesus take the wheel. Like, seriously.”

It's true. I have some ideas—what I'd
like
to see when I'm looking through my viewfinder. You never know for sure, not until you're in the moment.

Rain patter and the
thunk-squee, thunk-squee
of my wipers are the only sounds. I need to say something, something that will sell Ocie on today's mission. Something affirming.

“I overreacted about you tutoring Taylor. I'm sorry.”

“You might want to apologize to him, since you made me cancel his session to go storm chasing.”

That will never happen. “This is about us. I shouldn't have been all bitchy about it.”

“Really?”

Maybe. A little. I shrug. “So, you and him are, like, real friends?”

“Not like we are.”

Thunk-squee, thunk-squee

Ocie says, “There's nothing going on between us or anything. If that's what you're thinking.”

“It never even crossed my mind.”

She flinches.

“I just mean you'd have to be pretty stupid to go there with him, O. You know what he's like.”

“Are you sure you do?”

Gripping the wheel tight enough to make my hands ache, I say, “What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means—” But Ocie's phone spasms in her lap, emitting a long, aggravated groan that startles us both. She reads the screen. “Emergency alert! You know this mess is a Hurricane Watch now? Are you listening? Don't you have anything to say?”

I gasp, and catch the word rocketing up my throat before it passes my lips.

I almost say, “Perfect.”

If photographers were soldiers, storm photographers would be our Navy SEALs. The elite shooters who do the things most can't, things most of us shouldn't even try. Storm photography is dangerous for all sorts of reasons. Lightning strikes, flying debris, flash flooding. That stuff kills people who are trying to get
away
from storms; imagine the mortality rate for those going
into
them. Like we're doing now.

We make it to Atlantic Avenue in one piece, a tenuous state. Rain pelts us with greater frequency, peppering so hard I expect a thousand raindrop
dents in my ride when this thing is over. I pull into the empty lot of the Oceanview Inn, a dwarf building wedged between two newer, taller luxury hotels.

Ocie hasn't said much since announcing the Hurricane Watch, but her thigh-tapping has morphed into hand-wringing that makes the skin on her palms and knuckles bright red. I catch the flash of nearby lightning from the corner of my eye, and thunder grumbles overhead, a sound like a dozen boulders rolling in to crush us.

I say, “I don't think we'll need to be here for long.”

“We shouldn't be here at all,” Ocie says, but quietly, like she is talking to herself.

I undo my seat belt, twist into the space between us, and slither into the backseat. My camera bag is there. There's other equipment in the trunk, but I'm losing my nerve the more the crosswinds swipe at my car like a giant cat pawing a ball of yarn.

“Ocie, I need you to drive us onto the boardwalk, just like we do at Christmas, when they have all those lights on the beach.”

She twists in her seat. “I'm pretty sure that's illegal any time other than Christmas.”

“It'll be fine. There aren't any cops out here.”

Two lightning bolts crackle in quick succession.

“I wonder why.” She's already climbing behind the wheel and adjusting the seat to accommodate her short legs. “I should drive us home.”

I crank up the syrup in my sweet voice. “You won't, though, because you're my bestie. I really think the photos I'm going for will win me this contest. I think they're the
only
way I'll win this contest.”

“I don't understand why this contest is such a big deal. Is it for scholarship money or something?”

Ocie does these formulas in her head where she calculates the value of difficult tasks relative to the speed and distance they can propel her beyond the Portside city limits after graduation. Scholarship money means bigger, better schools. Possibly out-of-state schools. If that justifies risking life and limb for her, well: “Yes, there's a couple of thousand dollars of scholarship money in the prize pool.”

She sighs, still looks skeptical. I sweeten the pot. “Do this, and lattes are on me all weekend.”

“Two weeks' worth of lattes, and I'm talking venti. None of that tall crap. If you don't get your picture in fifteen minutes, it wasn't meant to be and we're going home. Deal?”

“Deal.”

Ocie gets us moving, maneuvering toward a gap next to the Oceanview Inn meant for maintenance vehicles. When she turns on the brick-and-concrete boardwalk, I'm transfixed by the view beyond the steel guardrails and the shore, which is half its normal sandy width thanks to the storm stretching high tide into higher tide.

It's almost sunset. What my tribe calls the Golden Hour—the hour after sunrise and before sunset. There's no studio or digital substitute for the beautiful lighting you get during those very narrow windows at dawn and dusk, a time when the best outdoor photos in the world are shot.

What's happening around us isn't that. Not exactly.

There is a gilded spear piercing the angry cloud cover twenty miles offshore. A solitary tower of sunlight, flanked by arcing lightning, is the only evidence there is still a star to warm us. Everything else is forced night, and the contrast where the two meet is astonishing.

This is the shot. “Ocie, stop driving.”

The car halts. I stretch myself across the seat until my back presses
against the door farthest from the ocean. I zoom, trying to crop out visible car parts in-camera, but I'm still getting automotive evidence in my viewfinder. I shoot fast, at least sixty shots. And I know—
KNOW
—none of them is right.

Even with the zoom, it all feels closed in. The pictures aren't
in
the storm. If I were shooting fire, I wouldn't be able to feel the heat.

“Can we go now?” Ocie half yells to be heard over the banshee wind.

No. We can't.

I pull the knob-lever thingy that lowers half of my backseat so I can access more gear in the trunk.

“Panda?”

I grab a tripod and a rain hood for the camera. Then I rip the plastic seal on a disposable poncho and slip it over my head.

“No. No way,” Ocie says. Pleads.

She's not going anywhere without me, though. I'm her anchor.

When I pop the latch and push my door against air that's pushing back, I think maybe she's not the one who needs an anchor. Once I'm on the boardwalk, the door closes on its own, like my car's telling me never come back. I walk in a hunch, shielding my eyes from the moist sand blasting me. More thunder. More lightning. Sounds and signs like final warnings, which I ignore.

The light piercing the cloud diminishes as the storm shifts and the sun continues its westward trajectory. There's no time to set up the tripod, so I shoot without it and pray I get something decent despite the forceful wind. I zoom in, out, forgetting the elemental chaos around me. God, the colors alone. Streaking reds, purples, blues, and golds.

Behind me, chairs held down by rope and bungee ties rattle against the short fence that boxes in a hotel restaurant's outdoor area. On warm and
pretty days, the patio is filled with hungry tourists enjoying their view of the Atlantic. Now it's a storage area for poorly secured storm projectiles. A plastic chair somehow slips its rope, jumps the fence, and skips past me until it collides with the steel rail standing between the boardwalk and the sand. It hits so hard, the chair cracks.

The splintering plastic shakes me. I look to my car and see a scared Ocie twisted in the driver's seat, looking like she's watching my impending doom.

Fine, fine. I check my camera display, I've taken nearly a hundred shots. They'll have to do.

I run to the passenger side of my vehicle and climb in. Ocie's driving before I get my door closed. She takes us a quarter mile up the boardwalk, then swings a left at the giant King Neptune statue to put us back on Atlantic Avenue. The ocean god, flanked by his army of sea turtles and crabs, stares after us. More lightning illuminates the furious gaze some sculptor etched onto the deity's green stone face.

“You ever wonder why he's so mad?” I ask.

Ocie says, “What?”

“Neptune. They made him angry. But why? Is it because the people who come to him always leave, or because he can't?”

“Panda,” Ocie says. “Shut. Up.”

THE STORM PASSES AND WE DRIVE
home on a deserted highway. When we get to the surface streets, my tires bump over broken tree limbs and loose shingles left behind by the wind. We make one stop at Starbucks, where we switch seats and I make the first payment on my latte debt. At Ocie's house, I say, “What do you want to do this weekend?”

Usually this question results in a number of options—mall/movies/whatever—but all she says is “Don't know. I'll text you.”

Meaning she won't. At least not for a day or so while she gets into a space where she can accept any apology I'm willing to give. “Ocie.”

“Yes?”

“You kicked ass tonight.”

She sighs, shakes her head. “White chocolate mocha, nonfat, no whip, delivered to my cranky, un-caffeinated hand on Monday morning.”

I smile. “Done. We cool?”

“You're being kind of
other
right now, but we will be.” She leaves the
car, taking her coffee with her. “I hope you win your contest, since we almost died for it and all.”

“You're exaggerating.”

“You're crazy,” she counters. “But what else is new?”

With that she's gone, and her annoyance with me is a secondary concern. I'm racing home to show my Admirer what a real photographer can do.

Examining the shots on my MacBook's Retina display, my stomach sinks. I'm halfway through the batch and most of it's blurry, poorly composed garbage. There are a few decent shots, but decent isn't good enough.

Worse, these are the pictures taken from the backseat. I knew they wouldn't be exactly what I wanted, but if the pictures I took from a relatively stable position look this bad, what are the ones I took while fighting the storm going to be like?

I speed up my review, moving to the batch taken outdoors. Right away I see they're terrible. Not even good enough to get a decent grade in Digital Photography class. I'm not used to shooting in weather, and in a couple of shots I managed to capture the edges of the camera's rain hood in frame, obscuring what might have been an okay photo otherwise. I could crop . . . but . . . damn it! I'm better than this!

The number of remaining shots is dwindling, and I'm ready to scream from frustration.

Until . . .

My third-to-last shot catches two bolts of forked lightning flanking the sun column, center frame. High waves crash in the foreground, while the water smooths to black glass at the horizon. It's. Freaking. Gorgeous.

I check my last two shots, and they're great, too. Not as dramatic. But still . . .

“Yes! Yes! YES!”

I drop them into Photoshop and do a bit of cleanup. No cheating, though. I simply highlight the best parts of these stills so my Admirer doesn't miss a thing.

I'm nearly vibrating with excitement when I attach the JPGs to an email titled:
TOPPED

In the body, I write:

I click SEND. Hear the swooshing “message sent” sound and sit back, satisfied.

Anything less than congratulations and envy means he's just a hater. I can't wait to hear what he's got to say about such awesome work.

Actually, I end up waiting quite a while.

He doesn't respond at all.

I don't like being ignored. I mean, unless I'm trying to be ignored. Which is most days, yes. Not when I kind of risked my life (and Ocie's . . . she wasn't exaggerating, I guess) to get a damned incredible photo for some
jerk who doesn't even acknowledge how freakin' incredible I am!

The weekend slogs. My parents stop by my room frequently—sometimes solo, sometimes as a team—to make sure I'm “all right.” I'm not, of course, despite my insistence to the contrary. Saturday evening, they suggest dinner at Yard House, my favorite restaurant out in Pembroke. I ask them to bring me a to-go order of kung pao calamari without ever looking away from my laptop. Dad's truck purrs as they leave the driveway, and I keep glancing at the tiny window in the corner of my monitor, my chat friends list.

SecretAdm1r3r never comes online.

Sunday. Still no word from him.

I do go for frozen yogurt. Guess that's something.

The weather's cool in the aftermath of Friday's storm, so the Sweet Frog yogurt shop is a lonely, pastel-colored cave. Plenty of solitude for brooding over a leaning mountain of creamy goodness covered in chips, and nuts, and candy pieces.

Who the hell does he think he is to just go radio silent on me like that?

Who do
I
think he is?

It's been on my mind since this cat-and-mouse nonsense started. More so now that he's giving me the cold shoulder.

He goes to Portside. I'm certain of it.

And he's got skills with a lens.

There's really only one person I might consider good enough to pull off a photo like
Dante
. The same person who openly despises Gray (over total misunderstandings, mind you) and might be up to screwing with me if he found out we were one and the same.

My Digital Photography rival. Marcos Dahmer.

With the edge of my spoon I shave layers off a swirling cake-batter-flavored peak, cause a chocolate-chip avalanche, and imagine the poor people at the melted base of Mount Yogurt screaming in terror at the wrath of their god.

She is displeased.