Page 178 of The Glass Girl

I reach into my backpack and take out the baggies of Polaroids from rehab and the ones I’ve been taking here with the camera Tracy gave me.

Carefully, I tack them to the walls in chronological order and then stand back and look at them.

There’s the story of me.

Puffy and bruised and beaten down in the beginning, andthen, gradually, a lightening, shades of something else, or someone else, trying to break through.

I still haven’t finished last semester’s final project for Ms. Green. I think I’m going to use these instead of the tree, where I tried to hide myself behind branches.

I think I could make a whole diary of the last three months in these Polaroids. I’m sorry if Ms. Green won’t like it. I don’t mind whatever grade I get. But if she wants a self-portrait project, what better than these images of a certain girl who is me? Who started out one way and ended another? I understand now what Tracy meant when she said they were telling a story, one that I was writing about myself without fully realizing it.

The door to the shed opens suddenly, startling me. I jump.

There’s a smartly dressed woman staring at me, an elegant black bag slung over one shoulder.

“You must be Bella,” she says warmly. “Your mother said you were out here. I’m Clara Comstock. I’m an old friend of your grandmother’s.”

“Oh,” I say. “Hello.”

She steps carefully into the shed and looks around.

“Oh, dear,” she says. “Are you really storing Laurel’s work out here? I’m worried about the temperature.”

Her eyes land on my Polaroids. She peers closer at them.

“Very interesting,” she says. “Little bit of a rough start, Isee.”

She motions to the first set of pictures.

“I was in rehab,” I say softly. “I got really hurt.”

She looks over at me.

“I’m an alcoholic.”

It sounds weird, saying that out loud, for the first time, really, to anyone.

She blinks.

“I’m not inexperienced with addiction myself,” she murmurs. “Good for you. Very nice eye.”

She’s moving along the rows of my pictures, leaning close.

“You look like her,” she says finally, turning back to me. “We met at Brearley. Pretending to be perfect little girls in our A-line skirts during the day and then coating our faces with powder and false eyelashes and ratting our hair and pulling on fishnets and boots at night to go to impossibly exciting and dangerous parties with impossibly exciting and dangerous people. And she recorded all of it. Like she did everything. She never wanted to forget a thing. And I want to make sure no one forgets her. There was a period in her twenties when she did some captivating self-portraits. Mostly nudes in abandoned buildings. I’m very interested in those. The exposed self.”

“You’re the curator,” I say. “The one who’s been calling for months.”

“Yes,” she says, smiling. “Your mother finally returned my calls.”

“Okay, but can you come back?” I say. “I’m kind of thinking. I have some homework to finish. I missed a lot of school and I have an art project.”

She holds up her hands. “I’ll go inside. Your mother is making tea. Perhaps when I come out again you can show me Laurel’s work?”

“I guess that would be all right.”

She closes the shed door behind her.

I think about what she said, “the exposed self.”

I look at my photos again, walk along them, touching each image, one by one, with a finger.

Each one contributes to the whole story of me as written sofar. I am too much, too little, too bruised, starry-eyed, scared, wren sparrow roadrunner quail, and one day I hope I look back at all these photographs and think I was beautiful in my brokenness, in all the pieces I keep gathering up and trying to suture back together.

One day.

But for now, I reach into my backpack and slip out my Polaroid, position it in front of me.

Because I don’t want to be a watercolor. I don’t want to wash off, or away.

Click.

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