The Rule of Thirds

Chapter Two

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 21: 15 DAYS UNTIL VANTAGE POINT

The first thing I see when I wake up every morning are my dad’s photos. For my 16th birthday, my dad gave me wallpaper. Weird gift, right? Before I saw it, when it was still all rolled up, I was like, Seriously? I ask for an iPhone and I get wallpaper? But then I unrolled it. He had taken hundreds of his photos— some of his favorites and my own, pics of me and him, my mom and him, all three of us together, and ones of he and my mom before I was born—and collaged them in black and white and then had it turned into wallpaper. We spent the weekend of my birthday wallpapering my room. Now, I see him right before I close my eyes, and as soon as I wake up. A constant.

I pull on my jeans and favorite hoodie—my dad’s, light gray with purple lettering, from when he went to Tisch. It’s only two years till I’ll be going there too—at least, I hope so.

Mom’s door is still closed and it’s dark in her room so I tiptoe downstairs. Who knows what time she finally came home from work last night. She cares about the animals, sure, but she gets paid more to work overtime, and we need the money. In the kitchen I grab an apple from the bowl on the counter, pull on my broken-in black boots and slip out the front door. It’s my favorite time of day to shoot, when there’s just enough light, but the world isn’t entirely awake.

I walk to the end of our street where there are usually signs for garage sales stapled to the wooden lamppost. I started shooting garage-sale finds this past summer. I like how random it can be: old type- writers with missing keys, or wooden chests that may have held love letters. I take a picture of the garage sale signs so I’ll have the addresses stored, then turn right onto Waverly, left onto Calcutta and then left again onto Peabody, to the first sale. Within a few minutes, I can see there’s a ton of old stuff— like they’ve lived in the house forever and are finally clearing out all the boxes in the basement they don’t want to take with them. Vintage jars and records and dusty hardcover books. There’s an old desk with a hole cut in its top. I look around and see a balding guy taking a sip of a coffee from a mug that’s shaped like a football.

“Can I take some pics?” I ask, holding up my camera.

“Doesn’t bother me. Stuff’s just sitting here collecting dust anyway,” he says, then nods at the desk. “That’s a sewing machine. My grandmother’s. She had 17 kids, and she used to make all their clothes,” he says. “We’re moving my mother into a nursing home, so this stuff’s got to go.”

After taking a few pictures of the sewing table, I pay 50 cents for an old milk bottle that says Bencher’s in half-scratched-off letters. I imagine it came from a milk delivery company ages ago, back when the blue- uniformed delivery guy used to leave the bottle on your doorstep every few days. In a few weeks this purple wildflower that I love will show up in the ravine, and I’ll put some in the Bencher’s bottle.

The next garage sale has tons of collections: records, stamps, baseball cards. There’s a box of old photo albums. All the pictures have been removed, the white squares where they used to be visible against the yellowed paper. The acetate no longer sticks. I flip the pages and discover one photo left. It’s a square picture, shot in black and white with a white border, from the ’50s, maybe earlier. A young boy, two or three years old, stands in the middle of a snowy front yard at night, a streetlamp glowing overhead. He’s holding a shovel that’s taller than him, and I can barely see his face beneath the furry trim on the hood of his one-piece snowsuit. I lay the album down and take a close-up of the lone photo on the page, the crinkled acetate making the photo look even older than it is. It could work well for my Vantage Point theme: memories.

Then I spot it: The Catcher in the Rye. The cover is shiny silver, with black lettering at the top. I don’t have this edition. It probably seems like a cliché, but The Catcher in the Rye is my favorite book. I thought I’d hate it when it was assigned last year in English class because the main character is a 17-year-old boy—and I didn’t think I’d be able to relate—but Dad convinced me to give it a shot, telling me how much he loved it, how Holden goes to New York, and how he read it when he first moved to the city. Anyway, there’s this part where Holden explains how, when he’s worrying about something, he has to go to the bathroom, only he doesn’t go, because he’s too worried to go and doesn’t want to interrupt his worrying to go. Like how I get with the panic attacks. Anyway, it’s the last book Dad and I read together. Whenever I see a copy, I buy it.