He wished he could stop time and just go inside and look at the inside of her room. Where would she be sitting? Would there be a delay that he had to walk around? What if her roommate—did she have a roommate?—was there too? What color would the couch be? What if she had a thousand stuffed animals, or boy-band posters—and god, as he thought about stuffed animals he thought about her sitting on her bed as they talked, and the idea of seeing her there…if that could ever possibly come to pass—all of it was too much, and before he could reach the Paige steps, he stopped and went back. He could always see her later.

Ben returned to his room that night to find a note on his desk.

Yo,

I’m taking those pictures for that independent study. Any interest in being in them?

A

*  *  *

“I have no idea what I’m doing,” she said.

Ben glowed with discomfort on a gray metal stool.

“What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know, just be there.”

As she bent over and looked through the viewfinder of the camera, Alice wondered whether Ben was sick. His color was okay but he seemed shaky, as though he was back to his first day. Alice held a shutter-release device that looked like a syringe on a long cable, but she kept staring through the viewfinder without squeezing it.

The Art Building smelled of paint thinner and clay, and she was too far away now for him to catch her scent. Behind him on the wall of the studio was pinned a large piece of gray canvas that hung in long, shadowed arcs and reminded Ben of fashion shoots from the eighties.

Every time Alice leaned over to inspect the camera, Ben couldn’t help looking for a second at her chest covered by a loose-fitting chamois shirt, even though he knew she could see his eyes through the viewfinder. She seemed performatively fixated on the camera.

“That’s a nice camera,” Ben said.

“Yeah, Ahmed loaned it to me. He said he never uses it. ‘There are enough beautiful pictures of the school,’ he said.”

Ben didn’t know if he felt usurped by this. “Who else are you taking pictures of?”

“Bunch of people.”

“Why did you ask me?”

Just then she snapped a photo. The camera auto-wound to the next exposure.

“When I was thinking about people to photograph, I just thought that you seem pretty self-conscious a lot of the time, as though you aren’t sure”—snap—“how you come off to other people, and that difference between how you suspect you might come off”—snap—“and how you actually come off is interesting. It gives you”—snap—“a sort of vivid look, and I wondered if I could get that”—snap—“on film.” Snap.