Episode 5 — Yearbook Immortalisation

At half past three Mrs. Vance called the class together at the far fence for the group photograph, the one that went in the yearbook, and Della understood that there was no version of the day left in which she came out of it well.

The walk back from the office had been the longest of her life, and at the end of it the class had said nothing, which was worse than anything they could have said. They had all heard her. They had heard her say she hated the swan and the mud and the monkey and did not believe a word of the treatment she had sold them, that she wanted a high floor and a letter from a woman who thought she loved owls. There was no serene sentence for it. There was no negotiation. The costume was not damaged this time. It was gone, out over forty poles, and everyone had seen the girl underneath, in a uniform the colour of the end of a long day.

So she did the only thing left to a person who has been completely found out. She tried to disappear.

The photograph would be taken against the far fence, where the ground rose to a rail and beyond the rail was a wide dry paddock, and at the back of the paddock, near a shed, stood a camel, tall and patient and entirely uninterested, chewing at nothing in the slow circular way of an animal that has all afternoon. Della went to the very back, against the rail, behind the tallest students, where a ruined uniform and a found-out face could sink into the crowd and be, for once, nobody.

“Della,” said Mrs. Vance. “Come to the front. You are the lead.”

“I think,” said Della, “the lead belongs with her class.” She stayed at the rail.

Mrs. Vance looked at her for a moment across the arranging crowd, and there was something in the look that Della could not afford to read, so she looked at her own shoes instead, which were no longer white.

Siddharth was setting up the photograph. Of course he was. He had the best phone and the steadiest hand and he had spent the whole day filming, so when a photograph needed taking it fell to him without discussion, and he stood ten feet in front of the class with the phone raised, framing them all, the whole of Class 12 in their whites, and at the back, small, sunk down, hoping to be missed, Della.

“Everyone in,” said Siddharth. “Back row, come up. I can’t see the back row.”

“I am fine here,” said Della.

“I can’t see you.”

“Good,” said Della, and meant it more plainly than she had meant anything all day.

Behind her, over the rail, in the dry paddock, the camel had begun, without hurry, to walk toward the fence.

It walked the way the swan had walked and the capuchin had come down the branch, the way every animal in Greenwood had moved toward her all day, with a slow and patient certainty, as though she were the one thing in the zoo worth crossing a paddock for. She did not see it. She was looking at her shoes, sunk into the back row, waiting for the shutter and the end of the day and the end of the whole thing she had built.

“On three,” said Siddharth. “One.”

The camel reached the fence.

“Two.”

It lowered its long neck over the top rail, above Della’s head, into the back row, in the unbothered way of an animal that has understood, correctly, that there is something here worth reaching for, and what it had understood was the ribbon in Della’s hair, the last clean thing left on her, the one the swan had pulled at that morning and let go, and it took the ribbon in its soft mobile lip and pulled.

Della felt the tug on her scalp and her head went back and her found-out face came up out of the crowd at exactly the wrong moment, eyes wide, mouth open, all of it, the whole real girl on full display, turned up and sideways to find a camel lifting her ribbon off her head at the far fence of Greenwood Municipal Zoo.

“Three,” said Siddharth, and the shutter went.

He got all of it. He got the whole of Class 12 in their whites, smiling, arranged, and at the back, rising out of them, one girl with her ribbon in the air and her real face uncovered, caught mid-horror, mid-truth, not a single part of her composed, the least serene photograph ever taken of a person who had spent three months being serene.

There was a silence at the fence. It was the silence of thirty-one people deciding how to feel.

Then Farhan started to laugh, and it was not the laugh of a person laughing at someone, it was the other kind, the kind that comes when a thing is simply, completely, wonderfully funny, and it went through the class like water through a broken rail, and even Ritika was doing it, holding her sides, and the camel, having got the ribbon, wandered back toward its shed with the trophy, and Della stood at the rail in her ruined uniform with her hair coming loose and understood that she was laughing too.

Not the serene laugh. The other kind. The kind she had not done all day, or, she thought, for three months, since before she had worked out what a good college wanted and become it. It came up out of her the way the truth had come out over the loudspeaker, without permission, and it would not stop, and she stood in the mud-coloured wreck of her mother’s ironing and laughed at a camel at the far fence until her eyes ran.

Ritika came along the rail first. Without a word, she took a clip out of her own hair and pushed it into Della’s, where the ribbon had been. Then she went back to her place.

Mrs. Vance came along the rail and stood beside her.

She had the folder in her hand, the one from the biology room, with the recommendation forms in it, the one clean thing that had survived the whole day, and Della saw it and thought, here, now, this is where it goes away, this is the bill.

“I planned to write,” said Mrs. Vance, “that you were a rare young person, truly at home in the natural world.” She was watching the camel, not Della. “I had the sentence ready months ago. I was very pleased with it.”

“I know,” said Della. There was no point in anything else now.

“You are not at home in the natural world,” Mrs. Vance said. “I heard you. The whole zoo heard you. You want a high floor and a clean sink and no owls.” She opened the folder. “But I have taught for nineteen years, and I have never seen a class follow anyone the way this class followed you today. Into a hippo wallow. Into a negotiation with a monkey. You got them to do things I could not get them to do in a term, and you did it while a bird ate your collar, and you did not once let them see you were afraid.” She took out her pen. “I am not going to recommend a girl who loves nature. There are plenty of those, and most of them are lying. I am going to recommend the one who did not run.”

“Your admit card,” she said.

Della unbuttoned the pocket and handed it over. It was damp, and one corner was gone. Mrs. Vance copied the roll number without a word about the corner.

She wrote, standing at the rail, on the clean page, and Della did not see what she wrote and did not ask.

Down the fence, Siddharth was looking at the photograph on his phone, the one he had taken, the ribbon and the open mouth and the real face, the best thing he had captured all day and the thing he had most wanted, and Della watched him look at it and waited to find out what a boy who has finally got his proof does with it.

He had heard Mrs. Vance. Everyone at the fence had. He had the bird list and the eight years and the proof in his hand, and the letter had gone to a girl who hated owls.

He turned the phone around and held it up so she could see it.

“This one,” he said. “For the yearbook. It’s the best photo I’ve ever taken.” And it was not a threat, and it was not a surrender. It was just true, the way the loudspeaker had been true, and Della looked at her own uncovered face rising out of the back row of Class 12, ribbonless, found out, laughing, and could not, for the life of her, find a single serene thing to say about it.

So she didn’t.

“Yes,” said Della. “That one.”