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  Deflated and embarrassed, I put the camera on the counter, next to a mound of Snapple caps. "I'll come back later." I swallowed hard, but the taste of misery remained. Maybe my parents and I could split the cost of the repair.

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  "How long are you going to be in town?" she asked. "A couple of weeks." God, that sounded like a long time. She studied me. "Just take it," she said after a long pause. "You can pay me next time you're downtown."

  Was she serious? I checked her face. She was. "Thanks." I tried to smile.

  The beach was colder and foggier than the day before, though the fog did little to muffle the sounds of rushing waves, boat engines, and screaming seagulls. Pounding hammers echoed from a beachfront condo renovation. Camp kids in matching red bathing suits crowded the sand and water. The fog blurred their edges. They looked like something out of a dream.

  It was too cold to swim, but following my surf shop victory, I had no choice but to put on my new bikini and board shorts. Once I'd returned from the restroom (which smelled like raw sewage and had no soap in the dispensers), I dropped the surf shop bag stuffed with my dark clothes on the sand next to my parents, who huddled in their beach chairs, towels over their laps, glaring at the water. Talk about negative energy.

  "I'm going to take some pictures." I took a small step away before adding casually, "My camera cost fifty-three bucks to fix."

  A seagull landed by my mother's feet. She shooed it away. "What's your point?" she asked finally.

  I fiddled with my camera. "I didn't have any money with me. But they said I could come back later...."

  "And you expect us to pay for the camera that you broke." The crease between her eyebrows was huge. Next to her my father closed his eyes.

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  "I didn't say that." So much for their paying half. "But I might need to borrow some money. I'll pay you back when we go home in a couple of weeks."

  "We might not be going home then," she told the ocean.

  "Excuse me?"

  "Your father--the job here...he's going to see if he can stay on a little longer."

  I tensed. "How much longer? 'Cuz I've got that photography class the second week of August, plus Lexie is coming back from the lake. And also, Melissa--you know, The Buzz editor--she talked about having everyone over for a barbecue sometime this summer, and--"

  "Not everything is about you, Madison," my mother interrupted, her lips turning an angry white.

  "I didn't say it was." My hands shook.

  "You think I'm happy?" she said. "You think I want to be here? Right now we're just trying to survive."

  I blinked in astonishment. "Survive? You're sitting on the beach!" I was going to say more, but a group of kids walked by. I looked at the sand.

  "We have no money," my mother snarled once the kids had passed. "Don't you understand ho
  "Stop!" my father pleaded, finally opening his eyes.

  "No, you stop!" she said, turning her anger to him.

  "Both of you stop!" I yelled--even though my father had said only, like, twenty words in the past six months. And then I turned and ran away because, frankly, I'd had enough.

  Maybe divorce isn't such a bad idea after all, I thought, a sob catching in my throat the instant the words formed in my brain.

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  5.

  What sucks about having a blowout fight with your parents on a supposed vacation is that you can't lock yourself in your room or storm off to your best friend's house. Once I reached the parking lot, I hung a left on the sandy street that ran parallel to the water until I reached another parking lot...and entered a different section of the beach. Oh, yeah, I am such a badass.

  Fog hovered over the sand, thick and eerie. I shot some pictures of the kids in the red bathing suits, but I was so upset that it felt like someone else was pushing the button. Still, I kept snapping because it gave me something to do.

  At the beginning of the rock retaining wall, I snapped a picture of a green metal railing. I captured a waterbird dancing at the ocean's edge. Back on the public beach, the kids in red bathing suits looked like an army of ghosts. I zoomed in and took a few shots.

  As I trudged along the sand next to the rocks, icy water nipped at my feet. I barely felt it. The camera remained firmly strapped to

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  my wrist: I hadn't even paid for this repair yet; I certainly couldn't afford another one.

  The sand stopped at a rock outcropping, waves slamming into the side with a slap and a whoosh. The wide public beach seemed very far away, the kids in red a fuzzy blur, the long narrow strip of beach between us deserted. It looked like the end of the world. I could almost imagine what it would feel like to be the last person on earth. If I screamed or laughed or cried, no one would hear me. I had never felt so alone.

  I held up my camera and held it steady. It warmed my hands. I looked at the empty beach, made small and safe within my camera's screen, and I squeezed.

  I sat on the rocks for a while, ignoring the signs that warned me to stay off, almost hoping for a rogue wave to wash me away. Not likely: the surf was pretty tame.

  Once I got too cold, I headed back to the main beach and my parents, who looked both relieved and mad when they spotted me.

  "Can I have the room key?" I mumbled.

  "We were just about to head back," my mother said, pushing herself up from her canvas chair and sticking some things in the beach bag.

  The three of us packed everything without looking at one another and trudged back to the room in silence. When we got to our door, my mother dug through her purse until she found the key.

  She said, "Your father has to make a quick trip to Amerige next week. He'll bring back your suitcase."

  My father put his hand on my shoulder and kept it there until I looked at him.

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  "I'm sorry," he whispered.

  I nodded. There was really nothing else to say.

  For dinner that night, my mother made blackened hot dogs. "Blackened" sounds better than "burnt," which is what they really were. The ketchup was store-brand. Store-brand ketchup is crap. I could live with Target clothes (actually, some of them are pretty cute), cheap makeup, and my mother's cooking. But asking me to give up Heinz? That was crossing the line.

  We didn't talk much at dinner, which was nothing unusual since at home we normally ate in separate rooms: my mom in the kitchen, my dad in the den (oh, sorry--The Library), and me in my room with my friendly computer. It seemed weird, though, to be in one room (my mom at the table, my dad on the bed, me on the couch) and say nothing more than:

  "Is there mustard?" (Dad)

  "No." (Mom) And then to me, after a really, really, really long silence: "I'm going to get a job here. Just so you know."

  After dinner, I took a shower, which turned out to be a surprisingly stressful experience. As I washed my hair with what I swear was bug-spray-scented shampoo, someone in another room flushed a toilet, and the spray scalded my back. I spent the rest of the shower adjusting and readjusting the temperature and pressing myself as close to the tile wall and out of the spray as possible.

  I want to go home, I kept thinking. Please let me go home.

  How much longer did my parents plan on staying? They'd never answered the question. If my mom was really going to get a job--I'd believe it when I saw it--we'd be stuck here for at least

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  a month. Who would hire her for less than that? School started at the beginning of September, in...let's see...fifty-four days. At least we'd be home by then. (Things had to be bad if I was counting the days till I started tenth grade.) Surely they'd give me at least a week (two weeks, two and a half?) to do stuff at home before I went back to school.

  Next, wearing one of my dad's big T-shirts, which was orange and said Dennis's building supply , I took my camera and a blanket outside. Beyond the sliding glass door, a long line of small concrete pads stretched along the length of the building, each patio "furnished" with two white
plastic chairs and a matching plastic table, most of which were draped with beach towels and wet bathing suits. Beyond, a steep dirt hill speckled with scruffy grass blocked the freeway. Car fumes lay heavy in the air. I envied the cars whizzing by on the other side of the dirt divide. If only I could drive away from here.

  I wrapped the blanket around myself, settled onto a slightly damp plastic chair, and turned on my camera, which glowed like a miniature movie screen in my hands. The camera was filled with shots from Amerige: the peer leadership group eating dinner at The Cheesecake Factory; a pack of friends laughing at the school lunch tables, a night at the movies. I was in a few of the shots, smiling along with everybody. That world seemed so far away.

  There were a bunch of pictures taken on the day before we'd left, when I'd gone swimming with the Larstrom girls. Lexie, Brooke, and Kenzie all had long blond hair that turned white in the summer, little blue eyes, pointy noses, and slim, wiry bodies. They looked like the same person at different ages. My coloring was the exact opposite: brown hair, brown eyes, lightly tanned

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  skin. I looked like Lexie's negative.

  There was Brooke jumping into the pool. There were Lexie's long toes, the nails painted to look like ladybugs.

  Oh, well. Even if I were home now, I couldn't hang out with Lexie; her family had gone to their lake house yesterday.

  Next, I zipped to the shots I'd taken today. In the distance, thunder rumbled. I pulled the blanket tighter around me.

  The beach shots weren't very good. Sometimes photographs look better than life. Sometimes life looks better than photographs. The kids in red had appeared so ethereal through the fog, like figures in an impressionistic painting. In the photos, they just looked blurry.

  The fog didn't do much for other pictures I'd taken, either, of rails and steps and birds. All it did was block the sun and make everything look flat and dull.

  And then I got to the last shot, the one I'd taken looking back from the rock outcropping.

  The scene looked just like I remembered: a narrow strip of sand bordered by the rock wall, stretching through the fog until it reached the fuzzy public beach and the tiny dots of people.

  Only one thing was different. There was an old woman standing next to the keep off rocks sign. And she was looking right at me.

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  6.

  When something doesn't fit into your idea of the way things work, you come up with an explanation. Like:

  I was distracted, so I just didn't notice the woman standing there. During the beach walk I'd been really upset, and everyone knows that the mind can play tricks.

  But I was emotional; I wasn't blind. Not only was the woman close--maybe ten feet away--she was dressed weirdly for the beach, in a pink bathrobe and dirty white slippers. Her skin was almost yellow, and she was so thin that her cheeks were sunken. Only her hair looked good: bright white, full and curly, like it had just been set. There was no way I could have missed her. No way.

  So I moved on to rational explanation number two.

  Someone else took the picture. My mother borrowed my camera sometimes (she'd finally stopped asking me where to put the film). Maybe one of my parents took the picture when I was in the beach restroom.

  Only one small problem with this theory: when I'd been in the

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  restroom, my camera had been right with me, in the beach bag. Besides, I remembered taking that very shot, and I was positive I'd been alone.

  That left me with one final, slightly puzzling but still rational explanation.

  Something happened during the repair. By this I meant something technical--or, more specifically, something technical that I didn't understand. I'd always assumed double exposures only happened with film, but maybe it was possible for a digital camera to take one picture on top of another. What was it Larry had said about energy and electrons and digits?

  I'd never seen the woman in the pink bathrobe, but maybe she was in the photo shop during the repair, and the camera went off, and the memory card got jumbled. Or something.

  Yeah, that was it. People go shopping in their bathrobes all the time.

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  7.

  By the next morning, I hadn't forgotten about the old woman, exactly, but I 'd come to view her presence in the photograph as a bit of random weirdness. Frankly, I had too many real-life worries crowding my head to give her much thought. The most immediate of my concerns: I 'd been in town only two days, and I already owed someone money.

  Psychic Photo's purple door was open even though a sign taped to it said please keep door closed. Once again, I felt that weird sense of well-being when I stepped inside, like the air was filled with the faintest, soothing humming, the frequency just outside of my hearing range.

  A man in flowered swim trunks stood at the photo printer. "So I just push this button?" he asked Delilah. His voice was high for a man's.

  "Yup."

  "And then...?"

  "You can crop or zoom, same as last time." She was sitting on

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  a stool, engrossed in something on the counter.

  "What about if I don't like this shot? Do I still need to print it?" He sounded worried.

  "Nope," she mumbled, her eyes still downcast.

  "Then what do I do?"

  "Hit 'next'."

  I pulled the door closed behind me. The bell jingled.

  Delilah looked up. "Hey." She tucked a strand of striped hair behind a twice-pierced ear.

  "I brought your money." I'd found sixty bucks in my wallet-- just enough to cover the repair.

  I crossed to the counter. There was the wooden plank I'd seen the day before, only now it was painted two shades of green. Delilah had glued rows of round objects to the board and decorated them with polka dots and swirls. Loose straws lay scattered around.

  "That's...interesting," I said. "In a good way."

  "It's a lollipop farm. Get it?" She pivoted the plank so I could get a better look, eyes narrowed as if she was testing my reaction.

  I stared at the board, and the round objects seemed to take on a new form. "I do."

  Weird: when I'd seen the umbrellas on the beach, I thought they looked like a field of lollipops. It had seemed like such a random thought at the time--like something that no one else would come up with. If I believed in all that psychic stuff, I'd wonder if maybe...Oh, never mind.

  "It took me weeks to collect enough Snapple caps," Delilah said, brushing one with her fingertip. Her nails were painted midnight blue, and she was wearing all of her silver rings again. "I

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  considered making do with some AriZona Iced Tea, but I was going for uniformity in the design."

  "Why not just buy a case of Snapple?" I asked.

  Delilah wrinkled her nose. "That would be cheating--even if I could afford a case of Snapple, which I can't. My focus right now is on found art."

  "Found art?"

  She checked my face again, considering me once more, before continuing. "I find a bunch of objects--on the street, on the beach--and then I transform them into art. Bottle caps, old napkins, squished pennies from the railroad track--that kind of thing. Last year I found a headless Barbie doll in the sand. It was like she was waiting for me."

  "You mean...trash?"

  "More like recycling. But I like to think of it as a treasure hunt. Finding the materials is the first part of the creative process."

  I felt a spark of recognition. "You know, that's kind of like photography. You never know what you're going to find. You don't make a shot--you discover it."

  "Exactly," she said.

  "What color is your hair naturally?" I blurted, forgetting for the moment that you don't say stuff like that to people you hardly know. For some reason, it felt like I'd known Delilah for years but just hadn't placed her. Like, we'd been in preschool together or gymnastics or Girl Scouts or something and we were just waiting for the moment when we'd figure out how we knew each other.

 
She looked up at her striped bangs. "I've been dying my hair so long, I can't even remember what color it used to be."

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  I stuck a hand in my beach bag, pulled out my plaid wallet, and extracted three twenties. "Anyway, here's the money I owe you.

  She abandoned her art and shuffled through a pile of yellow papers until she found my invoice. "That'll be...twenty-one dollars and twenty cents."

  I shook my head. "It was fifty-three." I didn't want her to discover the error later and think I'd cheated her.

  Her mouth twitched. In addition to the freckles that ran across her nose, there was a faint constellation above her mouth. It looked kind of like the Big Dipper.

  "That was the estimate. This is the actual cost."

  I glanced at the yellow slip. The original amount had been very obviously scratched out.

  "I don't want to get you in trouble," I said--though twenty-one dollars was sounding really, really good to me.

  She raised her pale, feathery eyebrows. "I don't follow."

  "Wouldn't your mother get mad?"

  She hooted. "Funny."

  I didn't really know what she meant by that, but I handed her the cash, suddenly afraid she was going to say she'd been joking and of course I owed her more.

  The guy in the flowered swim trunks was still at the photo machine. "I just zoomed and cropped. Now what do I do?" He rubbed the back of his neck as if he was fending off a stress headache.

  "If you want to save the picture, hit 'save'." Delilah took my bills and handed back some coins.

  The man looked up again. He had a kind face below light, baby-fine hair. "And then what do I do?"

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  "Hit 'next'," Delilah said pleasantly. "Like the last twenty times," she muttered under her breath.

  The bells on the door jingled, and a tall, skinny orange boy came in. Seriously. His wavy hair was bright orange and fell just below his chin, while his pinkish face was splattered with freckles. His pants, cut off at mid-calf, were orange, too. He looked like a walking sunset. At least his T-shirt was white. The skateboard under his arm was a disappointing gray.

  "Mom here?" he asked Delilah.

  "In the back. Getting ready for a reading."

  He rolled his eyes. "Lighting candles and burning incense?"