December, Senior Year, Gabriel Gets Acceptance Letter from Rhode Island School of Design
At four o’clock on a gray, slushy afternoon, when the daylight was already leaching out of the sky, Quinn parked her car in the Shipps’ driveway, and, bypassing their front door, headed for the kitchen door instead. She only had an hour before she had to meet Jake, but she wanted to see Gabriel. She felt like she didn’t see him enough these days, and sometimes it made her feel funny, off-balance. The kitchen door was unlocked, as she knew it would be, and once she’d pulled it shut behind her, she was enveloped in the chaos that was the Shipp household. She passed the laundry room, where mounds of clean laundry waited to be folded—they would never be folded—and the kitchen, where a stack of empty pizza boxes sat on the counter—did any family, ever, consume as much pizza as this family? Once in the living room, she encountered the Shipps’ three dogs, lab mixes who hadn’t heard her come in over the noise of the unwatched hockey game on TV, and the rap music thumping from Aiden and Colin’s open bedroom doorway, but who now flung themselves at her with abandon. She petted them, then stepped over a jumble of hockey gear, video-game consoles, and displaced sofa cushions scattered across the living room rug and made her way to the hallway, where two of Gabriel’s brothers were playing soccer.
“Head’s up, Quinn!” Colin shouted, and she threw herself against the wall to avoid a flying soccer ball.
“Is Gabriel home?” she asked. But they didn’t answer. They were savagely athletic, and they were never happier than when they were inflicting the maximum amount of damage on their home or on each other. She unflattened herself from the wall, and, pausing to straighten a childhood picture of the four boys that was hanging askew, she knocked on Gabriel’s door.
“Go away,” he called out. This wasn’t directed at her, though. This was directed at his brothers.
“It’s Quinn,” she called back.
“Come in.”
She opened the door, not to the familiar scene of Gabriel sitting at his desk, scrolling through his photos on his desktop computer, but to Gabriel lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. She came inside, amazed, as always, at the contrast between the rest of the house and Gabriel’s bedroom. In here, it was eclectic, minimalist, uncluttered. And quiet. Blessedly quiet.
“Ahh, I can hear myself think,” Quinn said, letting her backpack slide to the floor and coming over to lie down beside Gabriel on the rug. “What are we looking at?” she asked, following his gaze up to the ceiling.
“That,” Gabriel said, pointing up at a rectangle-like crack. “I’ve never noticed it before. But it’s the exact same shape as Utah.”
“Really?” Quinn studied it. “Hmm. I don’t know. All those big, squarish western states look the same to me.” She slipped her hand into her blue jeans pocket and touched the ring she’d put there before getting out of her car. Jake had given it to her the day before, but she was nervous about showing it to Gabriel. She thought he would think things had gotten too serious between her and Jake. She hated this, not telling him. But Gabriel’s opinion of Jake hadn’t changed since September. She would have to tell him eventually, though. Maybe she’d do it tomorrow.
“That’s definitely Utah,” Gabriel said.
Quinn looked sideways at him. “We haven’t hung out in days,” she said. “Why didn’t you wait for me after school?”
“I thought Jake would hijack you,” he said. There was a crash from outside the room as one of his brothers collided with a wall.
“Well, he didn’t,” Quinn said. “And he’s not the only reason I’ve been busy. I’ve been working on my college applications. We didn’t all apply early decision.” She turned on her side, propped herself up on one elbow, and studied his profile. “And speaking of early decision, shouldn’t you be hearing from RISD soon?”
He was silent, looking at Utah, but one corner of his mouth twitched.
“Wait. You haven’t . . . heard already?”
He smiled.
“You got in,” she breathed.
“I got in.”
“Gabriel!” Quinn yelped. She grabbed him and hugged him with such force that he laughed.
“When did you find out?” she asked, when she let go of him.
“Today. My mom was home when the mail came.”
“You idiot,” she said with a smile. “Why didn’t you text me?”
“I wanted to tell you in person.”
“Okay, fine. But did we have to have a geography lesson first?” she asked, pointing at the ceiling. She sat up. “Come on. I want to read the letter.” She held out her hand for it, and Gabriel got up, opened his top desk drawer, and handed her the envelope. She sat on the floor, leaning her back against his bed, and slid the sheaf of papers out of the envelope. She read the acceptance letter with a glowing satisfaction. Truth be told, when she got her own acceptance letter to Northwestern, almost four months later, she was no more excited than she was right now. After she’d read the letter again, she shuffled through the rest of the documents, including his financial aid offer. It was a generous scholarship, but not a full ride. “Can your parents help you with the rest?” she asked.
“I’ve got three brothers, Quinn. But there are student loans.”
Quinn nodded, putting the papers back into the envelope. “So you’ll figure out the finances, but what about you?” She looked at him carefully. His gray-blue eyes gave nothing away. “Why aren’t you more excited?” she asked. “This is your dream. I thought you’d be bouncing off the walls when you got this.”
“No, it’s good,” he said, coming to sit next to her on the rug. “It’s just . . .”
“What?”
“Have you ever gotten that thing you wanted and worked for and prayed for and then felt . . . I don’t know, nervous? Like, what if it all gets taken away from you? Or, worse, what if you can’t, you know, live up to your own dream?”
“Gabriel, that’s ridiculous. You’ll probably surpass your own dream,” Quinn said.
“Yeah. You’re right. It’s ridiculous,” he said. He smiled at her. “I’m talking nonsense.”
“I’ll miss you. I’ll come visit you,” Quinn said.
“But you’ll be in the Midwest. It won’t be that easy,” he pointed out, referring to her first choice of Northwestern University.
“That’s true. But there are these things called airplanes. I hear they’ve revolutionized travel.”
“Why don’t you apply to Brown?” he asked.
“Because I’m not Ivy League material. As it is, I probably have a better chance of getting hit by a meteorite than I do of getting into Northwestern.”
“You’ll get in,” he said.
“I’m glad you’re so confident.” She bumped her knee against his. “I want to see your portfolio,” she said. He’d promised to show it to her before he submitted it with his application, but somehow he’d kept putting it off.
“It’s standard art school stuff,” he said with a shrug.
“Gabriel, nothing you do is standard. Come on. Please? I want to see what the admissions committee saw,” she said.
He got up and started to go toward his desktop computer and then changed his mind and reached instead for a portfolio case on the shelf above his desk. He stood there for a moment, as if debating whether or not to let her see it, then handed it to her. He sat back down on the floor across from her. She unzipped the portfolio, extracted the stack of photographs from it, and started to shuffle through them carefully, so as not to leave any fingerprints.
“Gabriel,” she said, looking up at him. He was watching her.
“These are . . .” she murmured. “These are of me.” There were twenty of them, all eleven by fourteen inches, all black and white, and all of them, every single one of them, of Quinn. What amazed her, though, was how different they nonetheless managed to be. They were taken during different seasons, at different times of day, in different settings, and in different lighting. And the different moods they captured ranged from serious to playful, melancholy to joyful.
“You remember my taking them, don’t you?” he asked.
“Most of them,” she said, feeling distracted. Because Gabriel was always taking photographs. Of everything. There was never a time, it seemed, when he wasn’t taking them. Yes, she’d known some of them were of her. But she’d gotten the impression, somehow, that he took these when he was experimenting with different lenses, or different filters, or different lighting. She had no idea that he’d developed so many of them, or that they looked so polished, or, in one or two cases, so deliberately unpolished. And yet all of them were astonishingly professional. This wasn’t yearbook stuff. This was in a different category altogether.
She held up one he’d taken in the winter of their junior year. Quinn, in the lower left-hand corner of the photograph, was running in the snow, her hair a blur, speckles of hoarfrost on the branches of the pine tree behind her glinting in the sun, a fence in the background dividing the photograph on a diagonal, leading, almost like an arrow, to the upper right-hand side of the frame where a crow, all blackness against the sky, was sitting on a branch. She put the photo back into the stack and selected another one, this from the spring of that same year. In it, she was sitting on the blue couch in the communications room, bars of light and shadow from the window blinds alternating across her. Her hazel eyes, though, were in a slice of sunlight, and they stared dreamily out into the room beyond. She remembered that day; she’d wanted Gabriel to put away his camera so their meeting could begin. She was glad he hadn’t. Another photograph, from early last summer, was taken before Gabriel left for Chicago. The two of them had spent a lazy Sunday afternoon driving around in her car, listening to the radio, and stopping, at one point, to explore an abandoned barn. Gabriel had taken pictures of her then, and here was one of them. Quinn was standing next to an empty horse stall, her hand resting on the open gate, a broken chair overturned in front of her, drifts of hay scattered around on the floor, and pinpricks of sunshine coming through the holes in the barn wall behind her, casting a spectral light. The last one was a photograph of Quinn sitting in a rowboat on Butternut Lake. It was taken the previous June, at dawn, a few days before Gabriel left for Chicago. The mist was still rising from the lake, and the sun was lighting up Quinn’s hair and part of her face. She had one hand resting on the oarlock, and she was looking away from the camera. She wanted a copy of this one.
She looked up at him. “Gabriel, I look beautiful in this.”
“That’s because you are beautiful.”
She shook her head and shuffled the pictures around a little more. “Why are they all of me?” she asked. And when she looked back at Gabriel, she was struck by how different he looked now. Maybe it was the light in the room, but it was as if he’d changed, in some way she couldn’t put her finger on. He had an opaqueness, a mysteriousness, that was new, or perhaps she’d never noticed it before. She wondered what it would be like to reach over and touch his face, but she pushed the thought away.
“I wanted to do a photo essay,” Gabriel said. “One person. Over time. And you’re the person I saw the most. You know, took the most pictures of. The photo essay is called Quinn, by the way. That was a tough one.”
She smiled and looked back down at the photographs. “You’ve immortalized me. When you’re famous, I’ll say, ‘His RISD application was of me.’” She put the photographs back in the portfolio and handed it to him. They both stood up, and she gave him a hug. “God, I’m going to miss you,” she said into his shoulder. “I love you,” she added, without thinking. And she did.
If her words threw him off-balance, it was only for a moment. “I love you, too,” he said, still serious.
“I gotta go,” Quinn said. They pulled away a little awkwardly. She was meeting Jake at his family’s house for dinner. At the moment, though, she wanted to stay here, in Gabriel’s room, with him. But instead she grabbed her backpack and waved good-bye and ran the gauntlet past his brothers, who were wrestling now, or maybe just throwing each other up against the walls with as much force as possible. By the time she got back into her car, it was almost dark outside.