In Summertime Saga

I was eating cereal and thinking about bike money when Jenny came downstairs looking like she was going somewhere that required being looked at.

Hair done. Side-pony with the lavender tie, pulled tight and smooth. Full makeup. Winged eyeliner, lip gloss, blush that made her cheekbones sharper than they already were. She was wearing a cropped pink tank top with a heart on it and denim shorts that were shorter than the ones she'd worn yesterday and the tank top stopped a good four inches above the waistband and everything in between was stomach, flat and tan.

She walked through the kitchen without looking at me. Standard. She opened the fridge, stared into it, closed it without taking anything. Then she leaned against the counter, held her phone at arm's length, and tilted her head.

Click. She looked at the screen. Her lips pressed together. She deleted it.

She shifted angles. Tilted her chin down. Held the phone higher.

Click. Looked. Deleted.

She turned sideways. Put one hand on the counter behind her. Arched her back slightly so the tank top pulled tighter across her chest. Held the phone out. Adjusted. Adjusted again.

Click. Looked. Her jaw tightened. Deleted.

"Ugh." She tried one more. Different arm, different angle, phone almost touching the ceiling. Click. She stared at the result and her mouth twisted and she dropped the phone to her side and said "fuck" at the kitchen in general.

I ate my cereal. She hadn't noticed I was watching or she had noticed and didn't care. I was furniture. I'd been furniture since I moved into this house and Jenny's relationship to furniture was that it existed and she didn't think about it.

"Take a picture, it'll last longer," she said without looking at me. She was back at the phone, thumbing through the shots she'd deleted.

"Want me to?"

She looked up. Her grey eyes found me at the kitchen table and the look was pure assessment, fast and dismissive, the same look she'd give a dog that had just spoken English. "You know how to use a camera?"

"It's a phone. You point it at the thing."

"Wow. Helpful." She went back to her phone.

"Give it here."

She looked at me again. Longer this time. The dismissal was still there but underneath it was a crack of curiosity.

I held out my hand. She stared at it. Then she walked over and put the phone in my palm and the screen was warm and her lock screen was a photo of herself in a mirror and even the lock screen photo had bad lighting.

I stood up from the table. Looked at the kitchen. The fluorescent light was flat and overhead and it was making everything look like a DMV photo. The living room was better. The front window let in afternoon light that came through at an angle and hit the wall and the couch and made the whole room warmer.

"Come here." I walked to the living room. She followed, arms crossed, one eyebrow up.

I positioned her near the window. "Turn your body toward the light. No, your whole body. Good. Now face me but keep your shoulders angled." I held the phone up. The light was hitting the left side of her face and her jawline was sharp and her eyes were catching it and the pink of the tank top was glowing against her skin.

"Chin up a little."

She lifted her chin. Her neck was long and the choker sat in the hollow of her throat and the light traced the line of her collarbone to the edge of the tank top.

"Shoulder back."

She pulled her right shoulder back and the posture change made the tank top shift and her chest was suddenly the structural center of the frame and I was looking at the shot, at the composition, at the light and shadow and color, and I was also looking at Jenny Cummings standing three feet from me with her chin up and her shoulders back and her entire body aimed at a phone she'd handed to a kid she thought was furniture.

I took the shot. Checked it. Took two more, slightly different angles, one from lower to emphasize the jawline. Then I turned the phone around and showed her.

Jenny took the phone. She looked at the first photo. Her thumb swiped to the second. The third. She looked at them for a long time and her mouth was closed. It had been open with commentary since I'd moved in. Now it was shut and her eyes were moving between the photos and she was quiet.

She looked at me. Then back at the screen. Then at me.

"These are actually good."

"Yeah."

"Like, actually actually good. The lighting is-" She swiped again. "How did you do the thing with the shadow on my jaw?"

"The window. You stand at the right angle and it does the work."

She was still looking at the photos. Her thumb was going back and forth between the second and third shot and her eyes were sharp and focused. Jenny at work. She ran a webcam business and edited content and knew what good angles looked like because she'd spent years trying to find them by holding her phone at arm's length.

"I want more," she said. "Different outfits."

"Okay."

"Stay there." She pointed at me like I was a dog that had done a trick and she wasn't sure yet if it was going to do it again. Then she went upstairs. Her bedroom door opened. Drawers opening and closing. Hangers scraping on a rod.

I stood in the living room with her phone in my hand and the afternoon light coming through the window and I thought about what I knew. In the game, this was the start. The Sluttygram arc. Arthur takes photos for Jenny, Jenny sees his skill, Jenny recruits him deeper into her content operation until the content stops being things you can post on Sluttygram and starts being things you post on platforms with age verification. The photos were the door. I'd just opened it.

She came back down in a different top, white, tighter, cut lower. Same shorts. She'd changed her earrings and added a bracelet and she stood at the bottom of the stairs and said "where do you want me" and I told her by the bookshelf and she went there and I took four more shots and every one of them was better than anything she'd ever gotten from arm's length.

By the third outfit change, she wasn't going upstairs anymore.

She walked into the hallway between the kitchen and the stairs. Her bedroom door was closed but she didn't go into her bedroom. She reached down and pulled her top over her head and she was standing in the hallway in a bra and denim shorts, ten feet from me, with the top bunched in her hand and her stomach bare and the bra was black and her breasts were pushed up by it and she was looking through her phone at the photos while she decided what to wear next.

She glanced up. Saw me seeing her. Her eyes held mine for a second and there was nothing in them that suggested she cared. Or there was everything in them that suggested she cared very much and this was the test, right here, right now: would the kid with the camera lose his composure or would the kid with the camera keep being useful.

I kept being useful. I'd seen women undress at closer range than this. I'd been the reason women undressed at closer range than this. Jenny in a bra in a hallway was Tuesday. My face stayed where it was.

She pulled on a red crop top. Adjusted it. Came back to the living room. I moved her to the wall near the kitchen doorway where the light was different, warmer, and I said "look past me, like there's someone behind my left shoulder" and she did and the shot was the best one yet because her eyes had gone soft and unfocused and her lips were slightly parted and she looked like she was thinking about a person she liked instead of a phone she hated.

"That one," she said when I showed her. She was close to me, leaning in to see the screen, and her hair smelled like vanilla and her arm was against mine and she was warm. "That one's going on Sluttygram."

"Good."

She swiped through all of them. Twelve, maybe fifteen shots. She went slow. I'd seen that look on women before. She'd had me in a box labeled loser, twerp, furniture. The photos didn't fit in the box. So either the photos were wrong or the box was wrong and Jenny wasn't the kind of person who argued with evidence.

"You've done this before," she said. She wasn't asking.

"Taken photos?"

"Taken photos of girls." She was looking at me with the eyebrow up again, but an hour ago the eyebrow had meant you're wasting my time. Now it meant something else.

"A few times."

"Where'd you learn?"

Nowhere I could explain to a twenty-two-year-old who thought I was eighteen and had never left Summerville. "Just kind of figured it out."

She looked at me for another second. Then she looked back at the photos and she picked three and posted them and the phone buzzed three times in a row, quick, likes already coming in, and she smiled at the screen.

"Same time tomorrow?" I said.

Her eyes came up from the phone. She looked at me and the look held. This morning I was cereal and background noise. Now I was the guy who'd given her better photos in an hour than she'd gotten from herself in a year of arm's-length attempts.

"Maybe," she said. She pushed off the wall and walked toward the stairs with her phone in her hand and she was already typing a caption. At the bottom of the stairs she stopped. Didn't turn around. "You're less useless than you look."

"High praise."

"Don't push it, twerp."

She went upstairs. Her door closed. Music started playing behind it, bass through the walls, and I was standing in the living room with the afternoon light and the air smelled like vanilla.

I went back to the kitchen. My cereal was soggy. I ate it anyway. The orange cat was on the stairs again, third step, sprawled out, watching me.

Jenny's phone had buzzed three times in the first ten seconds. She ran a webcam business. She needed content. I could make content. The route was open and I'd walked through it with a steady hand and a camera and the memory of every woman I'd ever photographed in a life that didn't exist anymore.

I finished the cereal. Washed the bowl. Put it in the drying rack next to Debbie's coffee mug from this morning.

Tomorrow she'd come downstairs and hand me the phone again because the photos were good and good photos meant followers and Jenny loved money. And I'd take the photos. And she'd change in the hallway again. And eventually the hallway wouldn't be enough and the content would escalate because that's what content does and that's what Jenny's route does and I'd played it all the way through on a laptop in a life where none of this was real.

She smelled like vanilla and her arm had been warm against mine and she'd looked at me like I was worth recalculating.

I dried the bowl and put it away and went upstairs and the cat on the third step didn't move and I stepped over it again.