No Filter, page 20
FOR STEPHANIE
No Filter is a contemporary horror story that includes elements of suicide. If you or a loved one is struggling with thoughts of suicide, please call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988.
Title Page
Dedication
1. The Smudge
2. The Skater
3. The Pizza Place
4. The Actor
5. The Reset
6. The Aunt
7. The Therapist
8. The Cosplayers
9. The Perspective
10. The Subs
11. The Other Tunnel
12. The Camera Shop
13. The Truth
14. The Theater
15. The Library
16. The Rock Star
17. The Boiling Pot
18. The Camera Obscura
19. The Dark Chamber
20. The Test
21. The Girl
22. The Arrival
23. The Escape
24. The Hack
25. The Ambush
26. The Center
27. The Beginning and the End
28. The Real Truth
29. The Lucky One
A Note from the Author
About the Author
Copyright
It’s ruined. Horribly, hideously ruined.
Janessa “Jinx” McCormick sits in front of her computer and glares at the image of strawberry ice cream on the monitor. She is twelve years old, with sharp green eyes and long straight blond hair parted down the middle. She wears her father’s vintage black Nine Inch Nails Pretty Hate Machine T-shirt, which is much too big on her, and a pair of faded blue jeans that she has painstakingly shredded at the knees with a wire brush so they look like she bought them that way. She has a habit of biting her nails, and several fingers that she’s nibbled to the quick are tipped with silver Band-Aids.
Jinx’s computer rests on a mostly bare, white desk beneath the loft bed in her tiny six-by-eight bedroom. It’s an odd Frankenstein PC that she and her friend Blaine cobbled together from spare parts. At the moment, she is using it to edit a photo from a shoot she took yesterday. The current picture wouldn’t have been perfect no matter what. Maybe it could have been, if she was a professional photographer with a studio and a food stylist. But she isn’t yet, and for the time being she’ll live with the less-than-ideal lighting and the lackluster texture of the red strawberry chunks nestled into the pink ice cream.
What she cannot live with is the black smudge that has completely ruined the image. At a glance, it appears to be a fly perched on the ice cream. Obviously, that’s not a great way to sell a food product. But she knows there was no fly when she took the shot. And when she zooms in, the smudge doesn’t actually look like a fly. The trouble is, she can’t tell what it is, and that’s pretty weird.
Jinx shoots with a Canon 5D Mark III DSLR. Not the most cutting-edge camera out there now, but it was the best camera on the market a decade ago, and still has better control over ISO, aperture size, and shutter speed than even the best phone cameras. It also allows for a nearly infinite number of lens types that she could swap in and out to achieve various effects—assuming she could afford to buy them, which she can’t. Regardless, while the camera is a bit old, it still takes really good pictures. So Jinx is able to zoom in incredibly close on the image. If it had been a fly, she would have been able to count the hairs on its legs. But even at that intense magnification, the black smudge is still … just a smudge.
Could it be something on her lens? She takes it out of the case that sits by her feet, holds it up, and examines it carefully. It’s clean.
Of course it is, because she always wipes down her lens before packing it up. Even if there was a smudge during the shot, it was gone before she put it away.
While Jinx is still puzzling out the smudge mystery, her phone lights up. She prefers a clean workspace, so it’s the only thing on her desk besides her computer. When she glances over, she sees a message from Blaine.
Jinxie! We still doing that shoot at the park?
She carefully wipes her lens and places it back in the case before answering.
Yeah see you in 20 min
Jinx looks back at the ice cream image. She could edit out the smudge, but it’s only one photo in a whole set, and the rest are all smudge free. Besides, she promised Mr. Alsobrooks that she’d send him proofs today. So she deletes the image with the blemish, then exports the rest from RAW format to a smaller jpeg size and uploads those to her cloud service. She emails the share link to delvin@scream4icecream.com with a brief note:
Hi Mr. Alsobrooks. Let me know which one you like best and I’ll send the full res —Jinx
Then she puts her computer on standby, grabs her camera bag, and heads downstairs.
Jinx lives in a two-bedroom town house with her aunt Helen. It’s pretty small, but she doesn’t mind because it means there’s less space to clean. The downstairs is one big room, with a couch and TV in one area, and a small dinner table with four chairs in another. Off to one side is a kitchen that Jinx only really uses for making breakfast cereal. Occasionally, Aunt Helen will cook them a meal, but Jinx’s aunt is a nurse who works the graveyard shift. Right now she’s upstairs sleeping, and she probably won’t wake up until about 5:00 p.m. That means Jinx’s dinner time is usually her aunt’s breakfast time. Not that Jinx needs someone to cook for her. She pretty much has the food situation under control.
She pauses at the front door to pull on her black-and-white checkered high-top Vans, and grab her skateboard. When she’s ready to leave the house, she rests her hand on the doorknob and taps a quick sequence on it with her bandaged fingertips:
Tappity-tappity. Tap. Tap. Tappity-tappity. Tap. Tap.
She nods in satisfaction, opens the door, and heads out into the world.
Jinx has grown up her whole life in Greenbelt, Maryland. It was one of the first planned communities in America, built during the Great Depression as a way to spark growth and give people jobs. It’s technically a city, but it’s also the last stop on the Washington DC Metro, so a lot of people commute from Greenbelt to the nation’s capital for work. Even Jinx goes to Smithsonian museums for her school field trips sometimes.
She usually stays in Greenbelt, though. It has pretty much anything she needs. She skates past Buddy Attick Park, which has a big man-made lake that was dug entirely by people with shovels. Not because they didn’t have better tools back in the 1930s, but because it provided more jobs during a time when a lot of people were unemployed.
Past the park, she skates through the church parking lot and down a path next to a huge athletic field, with three baseball diamonds and several tennis courts. After all that, she reaches Roosevelt Center, which has the library, the city pool, a co-op grocery store, a few restaurants, a restored 1930s movie theater, and a community center. It also has a skate park, and that’s where Jinx is meeting Blaine.
Jinx doesn’t really consider herself a skater. She can’t do many tricks and doesn’t go to the park just to skate. For her, a skateboard is a convenient and portable means of travel. A bike would have worked just as well. Except they aren’t quite as portable. Also, she doesn’t have one.
The skate park is empty when she arrives. That’s not surprising because it’s pretty small compared to others in the area. It doesn’t have any ramps, rails, or half-pipes. Just two cement bowls, one that’s shallow for beginners, and one that’s deeper for more experienced skaters. They look like empty, kidney-shaped swimming pools, since before official skate parks existed, that’s what skaters used. The skate bowls are enclosed in a sturdy iron fence with several ALWAYS WEAR A HELMET signs fixed to it.
Of course Blaine isn’t here yet. And she doesn’t expect him for at least ten minutes, because he is never on time for anything. She’s considered coming late herself sometimes, either to give him a taste of his own medicine or just so she doesn’t have to wait as long. But she just … can’t. Even if she’s doing it on purpose and nobody else seems to care, being late stresses her out. It just feels wrong. So she always comes early, and he always comes late.
But at last he arrives. Blaine Chen has broad shoulders and black bangs that hang down from under the same faded purple Ravens cap that he’s had for as long as Jinx can remember. He’s about four years older than her and already in high school. They used to be neighbors back when Jinx lived with her father, and he’s always been sort of a big brother to her. Sometimes he still treats her like a little kid, but it’s nice to know that he’s always looking out for her.
Blaine shows up with another boy, who Jinx doesn’t know very well. Oscar Ekland is tall and thin, with buzzed blond hair and a weird penchant for button-down oxford shirts, even in the humid summer heat. He moved from Sweden a little over a year ago when his dad got a job with the Swedish embassy in DC. He lives in one of the fancy modern town houses over in the Hyattsville Arts District, but he met Blaine at the Melrose skate park right after he got to the US, and kind of glommed on to him. That’s pretty typical for Blaine. His chill, upbeat attitude seems to draw people to him.
“Sorry we’re late, Jinxie.” Blaine gives her a sunny smile that suggests it doesn’t actually trouble him very much. “We were at Oscar’s house and he had to do some chores before his parents would let him out.”
Oscar makes a sour face. “Parents are such a pain.”
Blaine glances worriedly at Jinx, but she’s not going to make a fuss. This isn’t the first time she’s had to listen to other kids complain
So she just ignores Oscar and instead asks Blaine, “So what do you want this shoot to be? Like, action shots?”
“Yeah, absolutely.” He nods. “I had someone try to take some with their phone camera one time, but they all just came out blurry.”
“Yeah, if the subject is moving fast, you have to increase the shutter speed,” says Jinx. “But then you need a wider aperture, which could make the background super blurry, so then you need to bump up the ISO to compensate. But not too much, because the color saturation …”
She trails off when she notices Blaine giving her the raised eyebrow, which he does very well.
“You don’t actually care,” she says.
“Nope,” he agrees cheerfully. “Just make it look cool. I trust you.”
They begin the photo shoot. Blaine doesn’t want Oscar in the shots, so the lanky Swede is goofing around in the shallow beginner bowl while Blaine drops in on the deeper, advanced bowl. He’s only warming up, carving loose figure eights, but Jinx starts taking pictures anyway. She never knows what the perfect shot will be until she goes back and looks at the entire set, so it’s best to take as many as possible. She has several extra SD memory cards if she fills up this one. Granted, she’ll need at least some of those for her afternoon client, but she can go home in between and dump the images onto her computer to free up space.
After a few minutes, Blaine starts getting more serious. First with a couple of blunt to fakies, then some carve grinds and slash grinds on the edge of the bowl. His board scrapes loudly against the lip, followed by the rattle of his wheels as he comes back down. The sound abruptly cuts off when he does a frontside air, then resumes with a sharp smack of rubber on cement when he lands it.
By then, Jinx is in full photographer mode, not just taking the picture that’s there but trying to anticipate the picture that’s about to take place. It helps that she’s been watching Blaine skate for as long as she can remember. She knows all his moves, his preferences, how he likes to do two tricks that he’s very comfortable with, then follow up with one that he’s still working on. He doesn’t land them all and has to do a butt slide now and then. She captures it all in a frenetic series of snaps, taking hundreds of pictures in the space of a few minutes. She knows it will be a pain to go through them all later, but it’s better to have too many shots than too few.
Truthfully, these “action” shoots aren’t her favorite. She much prefers a static image, ideally indoors where she can control the lighting. The constant movement makes it difficult to predict the best framing, and the sun appearing and disappearing behind cloud banks changes the lighting constantly. There’s so much to think about and adjust for every single moment, and she has to be “on” the whole time. It’s really stressful. But she knows this is important to Blaine, and he is important to her, so she pushes through the frustration and anxiety until at last he decides to take a break.
They sit side by side on the rim of the bowl, sharing an energy drink that Oscar grabbed for them from the co-op. The thick summer heat has gotten stifling, and the metal can feels pleasantly cool in Jinx’s hand. She stares down into the empty cement bowl, which is now streaked black with skid marks.
“Anything good?” Blaine asks.
She shrugs. “I’ll send you the proofs and you can decide.”
“Don’t send me everything this time,” he says.
“I know, I know.”
“There were thousands last time.”
“I’ll narrow it down,” she promises.
He thinks a moment. “Did you get any of the butt slides?”
“I got everything.” To other people, that might sound like a boast, but Blaine knows she means it literally.
“Send me some of those, too,” he tells her. “Like some funny embarrassing ones along with the cool ones.”
She nods. “What are you going to do with these anyway?”
“Haven’t decided yet,” he admits. “But you owed me, so I wanted to collect.”
This is how she agreed to pay him back for setting up her computer.
“Are we even now?” she asks.
“Hmm.” He taps his lip thoughtfully. “Depends on how good these are.”
She sighs. “I guess that’s fair.”
“Blaine, you ready?” Oscar calls from the other bowl. “We have to go soon.”
“Yeah, we’re good.” Blaine stands up and stretches.
“Where are you going?” she asks.
“Teenager stuff. Don’t worry about it.”
“Technically, I’m almost a teen,” she objects.
“Sure you are.” He ruffles her hair playfully with one hand, then grabs his board. “See ya later, Jinxie.”
She glares at his broad back as he walks away. She’s annoyed that he ruffled her hair like she’s some little kid. Not because he’s leaving her out of whatever “teenager stuff” he has planned with Oscar, who’s only known him for like less than a year. That’s fine. It’s whatever. She has more important things to do anyway.
Jinx packs up her camera equipment, making sure to carefully wipe the lens as always. Then she heads over to Joey’s, a small pizza shop in Roosevelt Center by the co-op grocery store.
“Hey, Jinx,” says Reese, the girl behind the counter. She’s a senior in high school, so even older than Blaine. She has long, wavy brown hair and a gentle smile. She never treats Jinx like a kid, and Jinx will be sad when she goes off to college next year.
“Hey,” says Jinx.
“The usual?”
“Yes, please.”
Reese hands her a slice of cheese pizza on a paper plate. There are several tables with orange plastic tops, but Jinx eats while standing there at the counter. It’s not that she thinks Joey’s is dirty or anything. This is just easier and less stressful for her.
Behind Reese is a big menu board with images of pizza and calzones that Jinx took a few months ago. Instead of payment for that shoot, Jinx gets a free slice of pizza every time she comes in. This is what she means about having the food situation under control. She takes pictures for nearly all the local businesses, free of charge. And in return, she almost never has to pay for anything.
“Oh, Jinx, is that you?” Ms. Lombardi’s voice comes from the back.
“Yep, it’s me,” calls Jinx.
Ms. Lombardi hurries out, her eyes wide with eagerness. She’s a tall woman with long box braids pulled into a bun. She wears a white JOEY’S apron over her green T-shirt and tan shorts. Her husband’s family, the Lombardis, have owned Joey’s since before Jinx was born, and now Mr. and Ms. Lombardi jointly run the restaurant. At least supposedly. It seems to Jinx that Ms. Lombardi is there a lot more often than her husband.
“I want to add some new items to the menu,” says Ms. Lombardi.
“So you want another photo shoot?” guesses Jinx.
Ms. Lombardi beams at her. “Such a smart girl. And honestly, it’ll be good for you to eat something other than pizza every day.”
Jinx disagrees, but keeps that to herself. “So what are we adding?”
“Subs!” Ms. Lombardi declares, then looks at Jinx expectantly.
“Uh … great?” Jinx ventures, although she can’t see why anyone would order a sub when they can have pizza.
Ms. Lombardi heaves a dramatic sigh. “I know kids your age always want to eat the same thing all the time, but trust me, when you’re a little older, you’ll appreciate some variety.”
Jinx shrugs. She’s certainly not going to argue with one of her clients.
“I’d like to get images of maybe three different types of subs,” says Ms. Lombardi. “A meatball sub to go with the Italian theme. Then maybe something a little healthier, like a veggie sub with hummus, olives, cucumber, tomatoes … Doesn’t that sound delish?”
“Sure,” Jinx says although it actually sounds like something she would never want to eat.
