No Filter, page 4
She really doesn’t like being the focus of the conversation, and just shrugs.
“Okay, okay, can’t y’all see you’re killing the poor girl with kindness?” Bill waves them off. “Now let’s get to work, Ms. Jinx!”
Jinx smiles gratefully. “You bet.”
Discomfort aside, it’s a fun shoot. At first, the three models are a little uptight, so Jinx has them explain their characters to her while she’s continually snapping pictures. It’s amazing to watch how, as they talk, they slowly start to take on the personality traits that they’re describing. By the end, they seem much more comfortable, shouting out lines that the characters say, and generally having a good time with it.
Jinx finds it so interesting how some people can escape themselves with these fictional characters. She would love to be able to do that. To be someone else. Someone fun and brave and free …
But she’s not. She’s just Jinx. And she always will be.
It’s what she deserves.
When Jinx gets home, she quickly resets the house before her aunt wakes up. Then she takes a shower. It’s too early for bed, of course, but she knows the layer of funk she got from the sweaty summer afternoon will distract her while she’s editing the images.
Before she can get to work, though, Aunt Helen wakes up and seems determined to spend the evening with her. Her aunt even makes her specialty dinner: chicken breast stuffed with cream cheese and wrapped in bacon. Extremely greasy, but very delicious. Aunt Helen chews a few lactose pills before they eat.
Once they finish, Jinx washes the dishes and her aunt dries. Jinx never says this, of course, but they always do it this way because when Aunt Helen washes, she doesn’t rinse thoroughly, and Jinx has no interest in tasting soap in her next meal.
“After this, let’s watch a show together,” says Aunt Helen as they work.
“What show?”
“How about the new season of Doctor Who?”
Jinx looks over at her, unable to formulate a response. They can’t watch Doctor Who. Not with just the two of them.
It takes Aunt Helen a moment to realize that she’s said the wrong thing.
“Uh, you know what, forget that idea.”
Jinx wordlessly goes back to doing the dishes. She’ll pretend it never happened.
Aunt Helen stands beside her, staring down at the dish towel in her hands.
“You know, kiddo,” she says quietly. “We can’t do this forever.”
Jinx freezes, the water from the tap spilling over her hands as they grasp the plate she’s been washing.
“Can’t do what?”
It hangs there for a moment. Jinx regrets asking the question because she does not want to hear the answer. She doesn’t want to know what her aunt thinks it is that they can’t do forever, like there’s some kind of choice.
But, thankfully, Aunt Helen just says, “Never mind.”
They finish the dishes in silence. Then, while Jinx is carefully wiping down the counter (her aunt always makes a big mess while cooking), Aunt Helen asks, “Sooo is there anything you want to watch?”
Jinx considers a moment as she squeezes out the sponge and places it on the drying rack. “How about Battle Maidens: Extreme Metal Squad?”
Aunt Helen looks blankly at her. “Huh?”
“It’s an anime.”
“Oh, okay. I didn’t know you were into that kind of stuff.”
“I’m not really,” admits Jinx. “But the clients I had today are really into it.”
“Monica and her cool grad-student friends?” Aunt Helen asks shrewdly.
“Yeah. I thought I might as well check it out so I know what they’re talking about.”
“Sure, why not!” says Aunt Helen. “You know, waaay back in the day, your father and I would stay up late to watch …”
She glances at Jinx, and Jinx is staring at her because Why does she keep bringing stuff like that up?
Aunt Helen shakes her head and forces a smile. “Anyway, anime night it is!”
“Great,” says Jinx.
The show is certainly interesting. And very theatrical. Lots of people loudly declaring things to one another, fists and teeth clenched, with lasers and explosions flying everywhere. Jinx is impressed by how closely Bill was able to reproduce the highly stylized costumes. She does not, however, get any closer to understanding what the show is actually about.
After watching an episode, she and her aunt turn to each other.
“Huh,” says her aunt.
“Maybe we should have started with season one,” says Jinx.
“You think it would have made a difference?”
“Probably not.”
After Battle Maidens, Jinx goes up to her room to start working on photos. She spent so much time the previous night freaking out about the smudge that she didn’t actually finish retouching the ones that came out smudge free. And now she has to work through a ton of Battle Maidens cosplay images, too. Since she has another shoot tomorrow at Joey’s, she doesn’t want to get too far behind. Having a backlog stresses her out.
Jinx is pretty terrible at social media, mostly because she doesn’t care a whole lot. But Blaine convinced her to start using it to promote her photography, so she posts one image per day. Still, she doesn’t comment on other people’s stuff, or even really look at other posts, and she only checks in once or twice a day.
Now, before she begins work in earnest, she checks her app. She sees a bunch of likes and comments with heart emojis for the image she posted of Blaine. Even though he’s the one who talked her into making an account, he hardly ever posts anything himself. Jinx has noticed that a bunch of teenagers follow her, and she’s pretty sure they’re all using her account to stalk Blaine.
That reminds her, she still needs to send him his images. She looks over at her Daily board to see what else needs to happen. In addition to her “Jinx’s Week,” she also has a separate whiteboard labeled “Jinx’s Day” that only shows what needs to happen today. Because even something as simple as “send pix to Blaine” is actually a multistep process that involves editing the images, selecting the best ones, uploading them, then sending the email. Four steps to complete one task. She doesn’t have room to break things down into that much detail on her Week board, so each morning she copies that day’s column from her Week board to her Day board, and expands each task to list all the actions she needs to take. It’s a pretty obvious thing to do, when you think about it.
She pulls up her image folder, which of course is carefully organized into subfolders with the date and project title. Selecting which images to send to Blaine isn’t actually that challenging because so many of them are ruined by the smudge. The same is true for Swapna’s headshots. It’s annoying, but since she took a bunch for both projects, there are plenty left to choose from. None of Blaine’s butt slides survived the smudge, but he only asked for those as an afterthought, so he probably doesn’t care all that much about them anyway.
Once she’s finished sending links to Blaine and Swapna, she turns her attention to today’s images. It was a long shot list, so she knows it’s going to take a while to get through them all. That’s fine, though, because she’s really in the zone. She’s ready to get in there and tweak hundreds, or even thousands, of photos. After the stress she had this morning, it’s going to feel great.
But then she opens the first cosplay image.
“No …”
Jinx launches out of her chair, but it’s a tiny room so there isn’t really anywhere to go. She paces back and forth a few times.
“No, no, no …”
She wants to bite her nails but they’re all covered. She tries to scratch at her scalp, but the bandages prevent that, too. It’s the other reason she wears them. She shakes her hands in helpless frustration and creases her face into a grimace. She wants to … She wants to …
It doesn’t matter what she wants to do. Because she needs to calm down. Seriously. So she takes a slow breath, then forces herself to sit back down and look at the smudge. Which has gotten even bigger.
She clicks through image after image. It’s not just on some of them this time. It’s on most of them. Too many to cherry-pick from the ones that don’t have it. Whole segments of the shoot are smudged. She’s going to need to edit out the smudge, which is a slow and tedious process. Normally, she doesn’t mind retouching, because she feels like she’s making a good thing better. But this time she feels frustrated, almost resentful. She didn’t put the smudge there, yet she has to spend all evening cleaning it up.
What if her camera is glitching? Or what if there’s a dead spot on the mirror? Something like that would be expensive to fix, and she has no money. She can’t ask Aunt Helen for something like that. Her aunt is already working so hard, such long hours. So what should Jinx do? How can she be a good photographer without a good camera? It’s impossible.
But wait—if there’s something wrong with the mirror, why would it only show up sporadically? That doesn’t make any sense. So that’s probably not it. Then what? Every time she looks at the smudge it upsets her in a way she can’t really articulate. Is she feeling anger? Fear? Both at once? She doesn’t know. All she knows is that something about both the smudge and the feeling is just … wrong.
Yet there has to be some explanation, right? So even though she hates looking at the smudge—even though it makes her stomach squirm in a really uncomfortable way—she goes back and looks at it, image by image.
She notices that, just as in the previous batches, the smudge continues to get a tiny bit larger with each shot. It’s not becoming clearer, which is weird, but the outline is shifting. In fact …
The smudge is zoomed in so far that it takes up the entire computer screen. Jinx zooms it out to get a little perspective. She goes back to the first image with the smudge, switches to slideshow view, then starts it up. The images change every few seconds, ice cream, skateboarding, headshot, cosplay … The smudge holds in the center for several shots in a row, then flickers out for one or two, then reappears. The edges are hazy at first, but picture by picture, they coalesce, growing sharper and more certain. Until finally the smudge becomes a clear, recognizable shape.
It’s a person.
Jinx’s skin prickles as she stares at the figure. It floats in the middle of the image, completely disconnected from everything around it, like some kind of dark specter.
Then she thinks, Wait, if it’s a person instead of a random smudge, maybe it’s not getting bigger.
Maybe it’s coming closer.
Jinx stands next to one of the orange Formica tables in Joey’s. She wears a black T-shirt that says DEATH TO THE PIXIES in large white letters. It has a photo of the lead singer of the Pixies, Black Francis, lying on the ground while giving a thumbs-down gesture. Is it meant to be ironic? Self-loathing? Both? The Pixies aren’t telling. Today Jinx’s Band-Aids are olive green. They don’t necessarily coordinate with the shirt; she just realized that she has a lot of green Band-Aids to use up.
She’s already set the clamp lights around the table to provide a nice, bright atmosphere with almost no shadow. Normally, she would still be fussing over them, tweaking the angles until it’s absolutely perfect. But instead, she stares down at the camera in her hands as though it’s haunted.
Is it?
“Okay, Jinx, you ready for the first item?”
Ms. Lombardi’s voice snaps Jinx out of her reverie. She sees the pizza shop owner and Reese come out from the kitchen with trays of meatball sub sandwiches.
“I wasn’t sure of the best way to present them,” says Ms. Lombardi. “So we made a few variations.”
The differences are minor. A little more sauce on one, a little less on another. There are some varieties in the bread choice as well. None of it looks great. Probably because it’s edible. That’s the thing about food photography. To get food that looks like a professional advertisement, it needs to be something you would never actually eat. The meat is never actually cooked, just browned on the outside. That’s why it looks so juicy. Buns are often brushed with a plastic coating to give them a pleasing texture. Even the drops of “moisture” that supposedly run down the side of a nice refreshing beverage are little dollops of glue stuck to the side of the glass. There are a million tricks to make food look presentable enough for commercial photography, and a lot of them also make the food inedible.
While Jinx has heard about many of the techniques that food stylists use, she doesn’t know how to do most of them, and doesn’t have the materials she would need. So she carefully examines her options, and picks the one she thinks will work best. Or maybe the least-bad option, as her aunt would say.
Once she selects the sub and arranges it on the table, she makes a few adjustments to the lights, then mounts her camera on the tripod. She’s about to snap the first set of images, but then pauses, her finger hovering over the button.
What if the smudge shows up again? What if it still looks like a person? What if it’s even closer this time? If it moves every time she takes a picture, does that mean she’d have to stop taking pictures? Could she stop taking pictures? What does it even mean that the smudge person is getting closer? Could it get so close that—
“Jinx? Everything okay?”
Once again, Ms. Lombardi’s voice pulls her out of an inner panic spiral. Jinx can’t let her down. She can’t let Joey’s down. This place is an institution. That’s how her father always described it. An essential part of Greenbelt.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she lies. “Just don’t want to rush. I know how important this is for you.”
“Don’t stress it, Jinx,” Reese says reassuringly. “You always do such a great job.”
Jinx really is going to miss her when she goes to college.
“Okay, here we go.”
She takes a deep breath and snaps the first image.
Normally, she leaves the display turned off on the back of the camera. It’s not a good way to line up a shot, and it’s distracting. But now she turns it on. Just to check.
No smudge.
She sighs in relief.
“Looking good?” Ms. Lombardi asks.
“Looking great,” Jinx tells her truthfully.
Not perfect, but at least free of possibly supernatural shapes.
Feeling a lot better, Jinx dives into the shoot with her usual focus and quiet enthusiasm. They try a couple of different angles, and even swap in one of the other sample subs just to have some options. Every once in a while, Jinx pauses to check the display on the back of the camera. Each time, it remains smudge free.
Really, what was she thinking? A haunted camera? The idea is silly. Childish even. She knows better than to jump to conclusions like that. Her dad always said she had a good head on her shoulders.
Once Jinx has taken a bunch of shots, Ms. Lombardi and Reese hurry back into the kitchen to prepare the veggie sub. While she’s waiting, Jinx sits at the table and picks at the abandoned meatball subs with a fork. They’re pretty cold by now, but she doesn’t mind that so much as she does the sauce, which is messy. She uses the fork to pluck out a meatball from the sodden, red-stained bun.
During her careful meatball extraction, Blaine strolls into the restaurant.
“Oh, hey, Jinxie,” he says. “Doing a shoot for Joey’s?”
She nods. “They’re adding subs for some reason.”
“Subs are better travel food,” he says. “You can’t wrap up a slice and shove it in your bag for later.”
“That’s a good point,” she concedes. “Did you look at your photo set?”
“Yeah, they’re great.” He comes over and picks up a sub, heedless of the drippy mess. “These up for grabs?”
“Yup.”
He takes a big bite, spreading sauce all over his mouth. Jinx’s hands twitch as she fights off the urge to grab a napkin and wipe his face. She’s been told in no uncertain terms that doing so is not okay and one hundred percent a violation of his personal space.
“By the way—” he says around a mouthful of meatball sub.
“Ugh, wait until you finish chewing.” She makes a face and looks away. It’s just too gross. And if there is one person in the universe she doesn’t worry about offending, it’s Blaine.
After taking a moment to chew and swallow, he says, “Anyway, I thought you were going to send me some butt slide shots.”
“Oh, uh, they were all messed up.”
“It’s okay if they don’t look great,” he says. “I just want them for a laugh.”
“No, they’re …” She struggles with how to explain it to him without sounding like either a ridiculous fussbudget or a paranoid kook. “I think there was like a glitch in my camera. A bunch of shots got messed up.”
His eyes widen. “Your dad’s camera?”
She nods.
“Then we have to take it somewhere to get fixed,” he says firmly.
“I think it’s okay now,” she says. “Whatever was going on, it’s not happening anymore.”
“You sure?” he asks.
“Yeah. It’s good now. I double-checked before we started this shoot.”
“Okay, cool,” he says. “I know how important that camera is to you. If anything gets funky with it, let me know and we’ll sort it out.”
She smiles, feeling a little embarrassed by his protective, brotherly tone. “Thanks.”
Ms. Lombardi and Reese come out with a platter of veggie subs.
“Oh, hey, Blaine,” says Ms. Lombardi. “Scavenging the photo shoot?”
He grins impudently at her. “You know me so well, Ms. Lombardi.”
She nods to the tray of cold meatball subs. “Well, have it all if you want.”
“Sweet.” He picks up the tray and slides into a nearby table. Eating two and a half meatball subs is no problem for him.
Ms. Lombardi lays the tray of veggie subs on the table. “Okay, I’ve tried some different arrangements with this one.”
Jinx looks them over carefully. This is the moment she wishes she had some of those glue dewdrops. Fresh vegetables always look better with some water droplets. Or what appear to be water droplets anyway. She’ll just have to do the best she can, as usual.
