No Filter, page 5
She refocuses her camera, then, as an afterthought, turns on the back display to check the last shot she took.
There’s the meatball sandwich.
And right in the center is the smudge.
Jinx stares at it, feeling the tickle of panic rising at the back of her throat. She takes a calming breath. Okay. It’s okay. The glitch or smudge or whatever is still there. Surprising, but she hadn’t checked this last picture, so she hadn’t noticed. And it’s frustrating, for sure. But, hopefully, most of the shots are okay.
Just to make sure, she scrolls backward on the display.
And it’s there.
The smudge.
On every. Single. Shot. Even that first one.
Nothing makes sense anymore. Her face feels strangely cold, and the room airless. She tries another calming breath, but this time it isn’t coming. Her lungs are locked. Her chest is heaving but nothing is getting through.
“Jinx?” Ms. Lombardi gives her a worried look. “You feeling okay?”
“You look really pale,” agrees Reese. “Maybe you should sit down.”
But Jinx can’t sit because Jinx can’t breath. There’s no oxygen in this place. It’s a vacuum. If she even opens her mouth, it will turn her inside out. She has to escape. She has to get air. She has to get away.
“Sorry, I …”
She detaches her camera from the tripod with numb, clumsy fingers.
“I can’t …”
Then she runs out of the pizza shop.
There is a path from Roosevelt Center, beyond the tennis courts and the baseball diamonds. It leads through a wooded area alongside an aqueduct, then into a small clearing with a firefly sanctuary and the occasional deer or fox. Beyond that clearing is a tunnel that cuts beneath Hillside Road. Not a wide cement tunnel, like the one from the cosplay shoot. This tunnel is narrow and made of corrugated metal. It’s always dark and cool in there, even in the middle of a hot summer day.
This is where Jinx goes to feel normal again. Or as normal as she ever feels. She sits on the cold cement ground with her back to the curved metal side, vehemently ignoring the fact that she’s getting grime on her bottom. She pulls her knees in to her chest, wraps her arms around her shins, and interlaces her fingers. Then she squeezes as hard as she can until her shoulders ache. Until her fingers tingle with numbness. Until she feels like she can finally breathe again.
Blaine shows up soon after. He knew she’d be here. He also knew she’d need some time to herself before he arrived, so he didn’t hurry.
He plops down beside her, and they sit in the cool darkness for a few moments.
“So what’s up?” he asks.
“It’s back,” she mutters into her kneecaps, feeling denim threads tickle her lips.
“The glitch?”
“I don’t know if it’s a glitch,” she says. “It looks like …”
She hesitates.
He waits.
She doesn’t know how to say it.
Finally, Blaine asks, “How long have we known each other?”
“My whole life?”
“And have I ever said anything dumb to you?”
“Many times.”
“Exactly. So whatever you’re afraid to say, it can’t be worse than some of the stuff I’ve said.”
“What if it is?”
“Then obviously you’ll have to stop complaining when I say dumb stuff,” he says in a reasonable tone. “That’s just fair.”
She wants to tell him. He’s normally the one person (still alive) that she never holds back from. So what’s stopping her?
Fear. That this might change their friendship. Ruin it. That she might lose him, just like she loses everyone.
“Please tell me?” he asks.
He never says please. It’s too much.
She sighs. “The glitch or whatever. It looks like a person.”
“Huh?”
“See for yourself.”
She picks up her camera from where it’s been nestled in her lap, turns on the display, and gives it to him. She doesn’t normally just hand her camera over to people, but this is Blaine.
The display faintly lights up his face in the dark tunnel as he looks through the pictures. His eyes slowly widen.
“That is just … creepy.”
This simple statement sends a flood of relief through Jinx. It feels like every muscle in her body unkinks all at once.
“Right?” she says, exasperated.
“And you have no idea what’s causing it?” he asks.
“None.”
He nods, frowning thoughtfully. “Well, obviously we have to take it to someone.”
“Like an exorcist?” she asks.
“No, Jinxie, like a camera shop.”
They walk back to Blaine’s place first. The town house clusters in Old Greenbelt are typically two sets of six that face one another, with a small parking lot between them. Each of these clusters is called a court, and each court has its own kind of vibe. Like a mini neighborhood within the larger neighborhood. Blaine’s court used to also be Jinx’s court, before she moved in with her aunt.
Some of the town houses in Greenbelt are brick, some are cinder block, and some are wood frame houses covered in vinyl siding. Each court sticks to the same type of structure but varies in color from one home to the next. The Chen house is light blue vinyl with a white front door. Out front is a small garden that Ms. Chen has been obsessing over as long as Jinx can remember. In fact, Ms. Chen is out there working on it when they arrive. She’s a slender woman with a short black bob. She’s currently dressed in her gardening uniform of coveralls, straw hat, canvas gloves, and bright blue Crocs.
As they draw near, she looks up and says, “Xinyu, fetch me the shears, please.” She has a British accent because she’s from Hong Kong and learned English while studying in the UK.
“Sure,” says Blaine. Xinyu is his Chinese name. It’s pronounced “Zheen-shu,” something that took Jinx a long time to get right.
“Wait here,” he tells Jinx, and ambles into the house.
Ms. Chen watches him go, then mutters wearily, “No, please do take your time, my son. No need to hurry on your mother’s account.” Then she smiles at Jinx. “Hello, Janessa, dear.”
It’s not that Ms. Chen doesn’t know she prefers to be called Jinx. She just thinks it sounds like “something you’d name a cat,” and refuses to use it.
“Hey, Ms. Chen.”
“How’s your aunt?”
“She’s okay. Working a lot.”
“Not too much, I hope? She does have other responsibilities now.”
“She cooked me a great dinner last night,” Jinx says quickly.
Ms. Chen regards her carefully for a moment, then nods. Sometimes, Jinx gets the impression that Ms. Chen doesn’t totally believe that Aunt Helen can handle parenting. Sometimes Jinx wonders if she’s right.
Blaine comes back out with the hedge clippers and hands them to his mother.
“Can I borrow the car?”
“Why?”
“Jinx’s camera is glitching, so I want to take her to a shop and have them look at it.”
“The camera?” Ms. Chen frowns in concern. She also knows how important it is to Jinx. “How far away is the place?”
“I just looked it up,” says Blaine. “It’s over in College Park. By the Rita’s.”
“I guess that’s okay. Just don’t go anywhere else.”
“Except Rita’s?” He gives her a hopeful look.
She rolls her eyes. “I suppose Rita’s is okay since it’s right there. But you had better bring me back a chocolate salted caramel.”
“Are you paying for it?” he asks.
Ms. Chen gives him a hard look. “Are you paying for the gas?”
He winces. “Never mind. Ice cream’s on me.”
“I thought so.”
Blaine and Jinx head to College Park, which is the next town over from Greenbelt but only a fifteen-minute drive away. All the little towns are just satellites of DC, really. A large portion of College Park is taken up by the University of Maryland, but there’s also a bunch of restaurants and stores off campus.
They pull into a somewhat seedy-looking parking lot with a line of stores, including a small pet hospital and a check-cashing place. The sign for the camera shop just says GEORGE’S CAMERAS in simple block letters.
It’s pretty small inside, with a long wooden counter in the back. There are a bunch of cameras on display behind a glass cabinet off to one side. On the other side is a bookcase filled with stuff about photography.
A middle-aged man sits behind the counter, looking at a computer monitor. He has long dreads pulled into a ponytail, and he’s wearing a brightly colored Tour de France T-shirt.
When they enter, he looks up from his computer. “Hey, kids, what can I do for you?”
“My friend’s camera is kind of glitching,” says Blaine. “We were hoping you could take a look at it.”
“Glitching?” the man asks.
Blaine nods to Jinx. “Show him.”
She reluctantly holds out her camera to the man. She’s not comfortable giving it to a stranger, but she recognizes that he may be her best shot at fixing it.
The man accepts the camera with an appropriate level of care. “I’m George, by the way.”
“Jinx,” she says shyly.
He nods appreciatively down at the camera. “Canon 5D Mark III. Very nice.”
Jinx decides maybe he’s okay. “My dad gave it to me.”
“It makes me happy to see young people using a proper camera. Most of them just use their phones these days.”
“Phone cameras are nice,” admits Jinx. “But they don’t have enough manual control. And they have that weird fake depth-of-field thing. Plus, you can’t change the lens.”
George smiles broadly at her. “I like you already, Jinx. Now, what am I looking for?”
“Turn on the display,” she says. “You can scroll through. They’re all like that.”
He lights up the display and frowns at what he sees. He looks at a few more, and his unease grows. Then his eyes suddenly widen and he bursts out in a laugh.
“Man, you two had me going there for a minute. How’d you do it? Slow shutter speed with some overexposure, or what?”
Jinx and Blaine look at each other in confusion.
George catches this. “Oh, wait, this was an accident?”
Jinx feels her face heating up. She picks at her olive-green Band-Aids and looks down at her shoes. She’s not used to feeling like such an amateur.
Blaine steps in, looking a little protective. “Yeah, it was an accident.”
George holds up his hands in a placating gesture. “Sorry, my bad. I thought you two were trolling me. Because these are like those old spirit photographs, you know?”
Jinx doesn’t know. “Spirit photographs?”
He nods eagerly. “Sure. You haven’t heard of them?”
She shakes her head.
“Oh, cool. Let me show you.”
He looks even more excited as he comes from behind the counter and goes over to the bookcase. He scans the shelves for a moment, then pulls out a large coffee-table book and starts paging through it.
“So, back in the mid-1800s, people started really getting into the idea of trying to communicate with the dead. Seances, spirit mediums, stuff like that. They called it Spiritualism, and it was like a huge craze, right? And at that same time, photography was still pretty new. Not a lot of people did it, or understood how it works.”
He opens the book wide to a specific page and lays it flat on the counter for them to look at. It shows a sepia-toned photograph of a woman dressed in very old-fashioned clothing. She’s just sitting and looking off to the side. A little girl stands beside her, but the girl looks weirdly faded. Translucent, like a ghost.
“So there was this dude …” George checks the caption for the photo. “William Mumler, that was it. He starts saying he has this psychic ability to take pictures of people that can show their dead loved ones hanging out with them.”
“And people believed him?” asks Blaine.
“Sure. Photography was so new back then, people thought maybe anything was possible. So they paid good money to get their picture taken by this dude in hopes that their deceased uncle or mother or whoever would be chilling in the background. Maybe then they could feel just a little bit like they’d been reunited with that person.”
Jinx scowls. “So he was taking advantage of them? Didn’t he get in trouble?”
“Sort of,” George says. “They put him on trial, but a bunch of real respectable people came to his defense. Arthur Conan Doyle even wrote a whole thing defending him.”
“The Sherlock Holmes guy?” asks Blaine.
George nods. “Weird, right? His most famous character never believed in supernatural stuff, but he did. Anyway, they couldn’t figure out how Mumler faked the images, so he was acquitted.”
“How did he do it?” asks Jinx.
“We can’t say for sure, but probably by reusing a plate. In those days, images were captured on a thin glass plate covered in silver bromide, which you then developed into the actual photograph. So he probably took one image ahead of time, then used the same plate when the customer came to get their photo taken, which would overlay the new image onto the old one. And because the first image was so faded and ghostly, the person couldn’t really say for sure whether it was the person they actually knew. As long as it looked close, that was good enough for them.”
“But how did he make the original person look like a ghost?” asks Jinx.
“Back then, there was only one shutter speed,” says George. “Very, very slow. A person had to sit for a long time, perfectly still, to get the image to turn out right.”
“So it just didn’t have a long-enough exposure?”
“Probably,” agrees George. “And sometimes he would even make images where the ghost seems to swirl past, which was likely the person slowly walking past the camera during the exposure time. See, that’s one of the amazing things about photography. People think it’s just a single moment frozen in time. But whether it’s several milliseconds or several minutes, it’s actually a span of time, all compressed and flattened into a single image.”
“Like it’s … outside of time?” asks Jinx.
“When you think about it like that,” says George, “it’s no wonder some people believed it could show a dimension of reality beyond our own.”
Jinx’s mind is a welter of new knowledge and feelings. Photography as a portal to the afterlife? As a portal to her father? What is it she’s feeling? Hope? Fear? It’s all so much. She has a difficult time managing it all. Coming here was supposed to make her feel better, but it’s making her feel worse. She wants it to stop. She wants to snatch her camera from George and run out of the store, but that would be rude. He wouldn’t like that. Maybe he wouldn’t like her. This is a real, professional photographer and she wants him to like her. So she forces herself not to grab the camera, not to run. Instead, she just stands there, jaw clenched, knees locked, arms hugging herself as hard as she can.
Blaine catches her shifting mood and puts a reassuring hand on her shoulder. Then he looks almost pleadingly at George. “So what’s wrong with her camera?”
George shakes his head sheepishly. “Oops, sorry, right. I got a little carried away there. Honestly? I’m not sure. I’ve heard of weird digital camera glitches. But they’re rare, one-off things, not something that happens to every single photo in a shoot like this. Not on accident.”
He pauses a moment to take in Jinx, who is almost quivering with suppressed anxiety, and Blaine, who looks desperate to sooth her. Then he sighs.
“Tell you what. Let me take a look at it tonight. Run some diagnostics. If I can’t find anything, I won’t charge you.”
“So you need to keep it?” Jinx wrestles with both the hope that this could be a solution, and the sacrifice it will require with no guarantee of success. “For how long?”
“Depends on whether I find something to fix, and what it would take to fix it.”
Jinx gnaws on her bandaged finger.
“It’s not like you can use it in this state anyway, right?” says Blaine. “Might as well see if he can do something.”
She nods. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Thank you,” Blaine tells George. “This camera is really important.”
“I’ll do what I can,” promises George.
Once they leave George’s shop, they drive over to Rita’s Italian Ice, which is not nearly as close as Blaine made it out to be when he told his mom. Rita’s is open for only half the year, and they only have outdoor seating, at picnic tables. There’s almost always a line, and today is no different.
Jinx gets a cherry Italian ice because for some reason Italian ice makes her feel slightly less like she’s betraying Mr. Alsobrook’s I Scream 4 Ice Cream truck, which comes to Greenbelt every Sunday for the farmers’ market. Blaine gets an orange frozen custard, because he is a strange human.
All the tables are full, so they end up sitting on the curb. Jinx is pretty sure the seats at the picnic tables are just as dirty, so it doesn’t bother her too much.
“Remind me to grab my mom’s chocolate salted caramel on the way out,” says Blaine.
Jinx nods.
“So … you think George can fix your camera?” he asks.
Jinx doesn’t answer. During the drive from the camera shop, an idea slowly began to take hold in her mind. She doesn’t think it’s a good idea, but it keeps coming back to her anyway, again and again. It’s like when she sees something in the house out of place but has to wait until her aunt leaves the room before she can fix it. A nagging irritation that slowly grows more insistent until it becomes almost painful.
“Jinxie?” prompts Blaine.
She doesn’t want to give the thought shape, but she knows that if she does, she’ll at least feel some relief.
So she asks, “What if it doesn’t need to be fixed?”
“How do you mean?”
“I know all that spirit photography stuff was fake. I know that.” She focuses on her cherry red Italian ice so she doesn’t have to look at him. “But I can’t help wondering if … you know …”
