Taking a Shot (8 page)

Parker Jones and Sasha Marino were up first—the quarterback of the football team and one of the cheerleaders. The photographer and his assistant had them pose under a flower-lined arch, with Parker standing behind and just to the side of Sasha, putting his hands on her hips. It looked as completely forced and unnatural as it possibly could. I’d seen dozens of good pictures of those two over the years—they were completely photogenic—but something told me these would not be among their better shots. They definitely wouldn’t be going on the keeper shelf. The photographer worked them through a series of three other poses, each as awful as the last, before they were done.

When Parker and Sasha walked past us, I realized I was still staring at them. Sasha caught my eye. She smiled, but her eyes kept moving back to the top of my head. I bit down on my tongue so I wouldn’t say anything I might regret. I’d known before I’d ever agreed to come here that these were the types of reactions I would get. Expecting something and experiencing it were two very different things, though.

“Don’t worry about it,” Jamie said quietly in my ear once they were gone. “They’ll get over it. If they don’t move on, then they don’t matter.”

“I’m not worried about them.”

“You are. You’re all tense.” He slid his hand up my back to my shoulder and kneaded, his hands touching my bare skin and making me shiver. “I don’t want you to worry about anything tonight.”

Right. No worrying. That was easy for him to say. Not so easy for me to do. I took a breath and tried to relax into him while we watched the photographer pose the next three couples in the exact same horrible poses he’d put Parker and Sasha in.

“I don’t want to do those poses,” I said to Jamie when the couple in front of us was finishing up. It was bad enough that I was going to be an alien in my prom pictures. I didn’t want this guy’s bad staging to make them even worse than they already would be.

“Okay. Then we won’t do his poses.”

A moment later, the photographer called us over and positioned us beneath the archway. Like everyone else, he kept staring at my head. I was starting to wish I’d given in and worn the scarf as Mom insisted, but more because I hated how they were staring at my head than because of being cold. He looked up at Jamie. “If you’ll stand just behind her like—”

“We’re going to do our own poses, actually,” Jamie interrupted him.

“But, I…” He trailed off when Jamie turned me around to face him, wrapped both his arms around me, and enfolded me in a hug. “Right,” the photographer said. “You’re right, that’s better. Just…here.” He adjusted my arms so I was holding on to Jamie’s rib cage and tilted my head so I was looking toward the camera, my cheek resting on Jamie’s chest. “That’s it. On three…two…one.”

As the camera bulbs flashed, I felt Jamie’s lips press down on the top of my head. My pulse came to a standstill and then jolted back to life. What was he doing? Why would he kiss me like that? No one had kissed me like that other than Daddy, right after he’d shaved my head—not in as long as I could remember.

“Beautiful. Stay right there,” the photographer said. I forced myself not to snap my head back and question Jamie, and the bulbs lit up again. After a few shots, the photographer urged us to try something else.

Jamie tipped my chin up so I could look into his eyes. “Hold on around my neck.”

I had to stretch up on my tiptoes to reach him that way. While I did that, my breathing going haywire, he dropped his head down so that our foreheads were touching and the end of his nose brushed the end of mine.

It was too perfectly sweet and intimate. I couldn’t take it. The way he was looking at me, I felt like I was naked—not just my head, but all over—and he could see every part of me. Surely the camera must see it, too. I turned my eyes away, desperate to find a way to protect my heart from shattering like glass.

“No. No, look at him,” the photographer said. “Just like you were a second ago. It was perfect.”

It
was
perfect, which was why I couldn’t keep doing it without falling apart.

“Just for a minute,” Jamie said quietly.

I raised my gaze up to meet his again, mainly because he’d asked me to, but the sting of tears pressed at the backs of my eyes. He had a tear in his eye, too. The realization of that left me weak-kneed, and only Jamie’s strong arms holding on to me kept me upright.

The photographer snapped a few shots, and then he asked for one more pose. I didn’t want to do another pose. I wanted to walk away from there and not look back. Because even if the camera wasn’t seeing the most hidden, private parts of me, I knew that Jamie was—parts that had been buried so deep that I wasn’t even sure if I’d seen them before myself. The parts where all my fears had been hiding. The parts that weren’t ready to die yet. The parts that still had some hope.

And that was terrifying. I didn’t want to be so vulnerable. So exposed.

I tried to let him go because I needed to walk away and pull myself together again, but Jamie lifted me into his arms before I could. I sucked in a breath, my jaw hanging slack. I put one arm across his shoulders for balance, but I didn’t need to. Jamie wouldn’t drop me. He would never let me get hurt if he could help it—I could feel that in the gentleness of his touch and see it in the concern drawing his eyebrows together.

He sat on the gym floor, keeping me in his arms and positioning me on his lap.

“Yes, that’s exactly what I want,” the photographer said. He directed his assistant over to adjust my legs, wrapping them so that they curled around. She fidgeted with the way the skirt of my gown draped over them before giving a satisfied nod.

When she moved out of the shot, sniffling and brushing away tears of her own, Jamie said, “I want to kiss you.”

I must have misheard him. My whole body trembled, and I shook my head. “What?”

His gaze traveled over my whole face—my eyes, my cheeks, my lips—as though he was memorizing every detail and etching them on to the surface of his mind. “Can I kiss you?”

“I—” I couldn’t breathe for needing to let my tears loose, but I could never tell him no over something I’d been dreaming of for so long. “Yes,” I whispered.

His lips pressed to mine, soft and tender, and the dam holding back my tears burst just as the camera’s flash lit us up. He cupped my cheeks with both hands and used his thumbs to brush away the wetness on my cheeks. Gently, so very gently, he moved his lips over mine. I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t even slow the tears because I was too filled with emotions. They were of every variety, all filtering through me at such a rapid pace I couldn’t even hope to keep up: joy, fear, hope, longing. My sobs kept coming, uncontainable and impossible to explain with words.

Our kiss tasted like cinnamon breath mints and the salt of my tears.

My eyes fluttered open when he broke away from me. His were so blue, so intense, so deep as he stared back at me, still caressing my cheeks with the pads of his thumbs.

“Do I need to apologize?” he asked, his voice cracking on the words.

My gut clenched at the thought of him apologizing for making me feel so incredibly safe and protected and loved. “No. Please don’t.”

Jamie nodded. He kissed me again, on the forehead this time, and I heard the shutter of the camera once more.

A boy whose face I recognized but whose name I couldn’t remember stood over us, holding out a stack of tissues for me. I took them from him and wiped my eyes. “Thank you,” I said, but my voice was all stuffy and watery.

He kept his hand out and reached for mine. “I can help you up, Katie.”

When I was on my feet again, Jamie stood next to me and put his arm around my waist. He turned us, and in the area where the line waiting for the photographer had been, there was now a massive crowd—probably at least a hundred students, many of whom had been my good friends—all of them staring. Or I thought they had been my friends. Maybe they still were. Half of them were crying just as hard as I had been.

My breath caught, and I couldn’t make my legs move. I leaned back into Jamie’s chest.

“Are you all right?” he asked me, his voice soft and sure by my ear.

I nodded.

“I’m right here with you,” he said, and he guided me toward this sea of faces I’d written out of my life.

Before I could process anything that had just happened, I got sucked into the sobbing whirlwind of people I’d thought had written me off as dead. Some reached for me to hold my hand as I passed. Others drew me in for a hug.

“We’ve missed you, Katie,” they said.

They’d missed me? If they’d missed me, why hadn’t they made any effort to see me? To support me when I might be dying? Why had they all been avoiding me like I had the plague? Maybe Mom had been right after all and they just didn’t know how to deal. Maybe they were just as scared as I was.

A few kept saying, “You’re so brave.”

I didn’t feel brave. I had felt terrified every single day since the doctor told me I had cancer, and my fear only seemed to grow by the minute. Even now, I wouldn’t be here at all if not for Jamie—if not for him asking to bring me here, for him holding on to me and lending me his strength. I would be hiding out in my house and letting that fear take root in my mind. Letting it suck all the hope out of me until I wanted to give in.

It took nearly ten minutes for us to get through the throng and back into the main part of the gym, where they had the dance floor and tables and chairs.

Jamie must have sensed my exhaustion because he guided me to a chair and held it out for me. “Let’s sit for a minute.” He said it in a way that made it seem like he was just as tired as I was, but anyone with two eyes could see he was fine. He sat in the chair next to me and took my hand. “You are, you know. Brave,” he added when I gave him a questioning look. “So brave.”

He made me want to be brave.

I COULDN’T SEEM
to take my eyes off Katie the whole night, not even when some of the guys from her school sat down and wanted advice on becoming a pro in their sports or when the girls came over and begged me to sign their arms or…well, some specific other places I had no intention of signing. The girls flirted and tried to get me to dance, but I was only here for Katie. I didn’t want to be rude to them, but I really wasn’t interested in anything they had to offer.

I didn’t mind the requests for autographs so much. I’d gotten used to that by now. Everywhere I went someone wanted a piece of me. It was just the
other
pieces of me they wanted that got to me. It took some work on my part, but eventually, the overzealous girls backed off.

Every time one of the guys cut in for a dance with Katie, or one of the girls came to catch up with her, she seemed even more bewildered by the attention than she had when I’d kissed her. She’d been so sure that none of them cared about her anymore, when the truth was probably just that they didn’t know how to tell her and show her. So often, cancer seems like a death sentence. How was someone our age supposed to react when we found out one of our own was in a battle like that? It just takes some time to adjust, I supposed. God knew I’d needed it.

I still wasn’t sure what had come over me when we had gotten our pictures taken. I just knew that Katie had given a piece of herself in that moment, not only to me but to everyone who had been watching, and I hadn’t been able to stop myself from kissing her. No—I could have stopped if she’d wanted me to. I just didn’t want to stop, and she didn’t ask. I wanted to hold her close and make her feel loved.