I turn on the computer. I open up a browser and search Culler’s name in Google. His site is the first hit. I don’t know why I didn’t do this before, when we were in the car together, because then I would’ve told him how much I admired his work even if I didn’t really, because maybe then he would have kissed me twice. His site loads quickly. The first page is just his name in small black letters against a white background. It doesn’t even say he’s a photographer.

CULLER EVANS

I click through to the next page, which holds his artist’s statement, but no photos yet. I feel like I’m reading a diary entry. It’s what Culler told me in the car but more intimate, somehow. Personal.

ART IS NOT COMPROMISE. IT’S EVOLUTION—A COMBINATION OF BOLD TRUTHS AND LIES THAT YOU MUST BE BRAVE ENOUGH TO LOOK AT AND BRAVE ENOUGH TO SHARE … I BELIEVE IN ART AT ALL COSTS …

I stare at it for a long time before clicking SELECTED PHOTOGRAPHS.

I am not a great judge of art. I honestly don’t know what it is, or if it can be so defined, but these photographs are raw and strange. They begin and end, sad stories. All of them are sad and I wish he was here, so I could ask him about them. Ask him if it means he’s sad.

There’s one set of photos, a collection of a woman in a hospital bed that seems boring at first, nothing, until the final page, which turns all the photographs into an animation and you can see that the person is slowly exhaling. He’s titled it Last Breath and I’m afraid it means what I think it does and then I can’t stop looking, because if this woman is not dying, I’ve decided she is. That makes me feel really weird.

Another series, Compassion, follows a beautiful woman (girlfriend? I hope not) from a distance. He’s shadowing her. She doesn’t know he’s there. I get absorbed in the story of her day as she moves from place to place, until the last photo is of her lying in an alleyway. In the corner of the photo, a shadowy figure retreats. I pause, my breath all caught in my throat.

That can’t be real. Is it?

I end up questioning all of his photographs this way. They’re narratives, definitely. They have beginnings, middles, and ends. They’re all unsettling and private, but the strangest and most compelling thing about them is some of them—a lot of them—I can’t tell if they’re staged.

The angles he uses remind me of eavesdropping.

There is a series of a couple fighting in a kitchen. It’s told backwards, from the end of the fight—she is walking away—to the beginning—they’re smiling and laughing together. Culler calls that one Best Friends. A woman hitting her child in a store, first alone, and then by the last photo there’s an audience and some of them look like they’re enjoying watching it.

Culler calls that set Perfect Day.

Various photographs of people seen in ways no one wants to be seen. And there’s a passiveness about them too—I should be inspired to act, but like the person behind the camera, all I can do is watch. I don’t know how it makes me feel. One of the last sets is of a faceless couple totally fucking, which makes me feel weird. I think I like it. But that angle—I don’t know if they know they’re being photographed. The series is called Apologies.

I want to ask him what that even means.

I click away from the screen and lean back in my chair.

*   *   *

Something about Culler’s kiss has made me so restless.

I keep replaying it in my mind—just the kiss—and then I take it one further. I imagine us having sex on the pavement and it’s amazing. I think of it close. The way I see it in my head, it’s all skin and touching and expert hands. And then my brain pans out and we’re surrounded by all the photographs my father took. And that is when I stop replaying it in my mind.

For a couple of minutes.

I’m not restless enough to call Milo, who I also think of and imagine having sex with Missy because I’m a freak, but restless enough that when Beth starts pressing the haircut thing again, I say, “Fine. Let’s go. Right now.”

We’re in the kitchen. Mom is upstairs in bed, where she’s been for the last five days. That’s not normal. This is a bad week because for all of the planning my dad apparently put into jumping off a building, he forgot their wedding anniversary would be the first post-death event. It’s still not for another couple of weeks, but Mom looked at the calendar and saw it penciled in and it was all over from there.

I overheard her crying about it with Beth the night I got back from the studio. First she wanted to know if he remembered their anniversary and killed himself anyway. Then she wanted to know if he was so full of the idea of dying, he just totally forgot. Then she realized neither was the better option and it all ended with her crawling into bed.

I stood outside the door to her bedroom, wanting to go in and say something, but all I could think about was how much I hated my dad for doing this to us and then I felt so sick and then Beth came out and said, “Where did you put everything from the studio?” I told her he’d gotten rid of it, all of it, and she relaxed and actually said, “Oh, good. That makes it easier.”

And then I crawled into bed.

Which is also when I started thinking about having sex with Culler.

I want to have sex with someone.

What is wrong with me.

Beth and I maintain stony silence in the car. Well, I do. She hums to herself—no radio, because it distracts her—and babbles about what kind of cut I should get.

“You have well-defined cheekbones and sharp features,” she says. “I’ll leave it up to Cory, but if you’re going to keep it long, the least you could do is ask him to thin it out, so it doesn’t bushel around your head.”

Bushel around my head? I hate everything that comes out of this woman’s mouth. I study Beth. Her blond hair—which is already going gray, but dyed to hide it—is cropped tight to her head and she has such an ugly mouth. She has these tiny lips that she somehow turns into red colored squares with lipstick.

“I want to look like Marilyn Monroe,” I tell her.

She laughs. “You’re no Marilyn Monroe.”

The hair salon is just off the mall and it’s called CUTZ, which makes me embarrassed for it, but it’s a nice little place, I guess. It’s all yellow and checkered floors, which clashes horribly with the country music they pipe in through the speakers.

Beth is really weird with me when we’re out in public. She tries to pretend we like each other or at the very least, she likes me and she doesn’t know what the fuck my problem is. She knows Cory, the stylist—an older man with frosted tips, which makes me feel embarrassed for him—and insists he be the one who cuts my hair. She tells him I’m the daughter of one of her oldest and dearest friends and he mouths, the jumper? when he thinks I’m not looking.

She nods and takes a seat in the waiting area.

Cory takes me to the back and washes my hair.

“So what kind of look are you after?” he asks over the water, and I feel really gross for liking how his old-man hands feel massaging my scalp.

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “Marilyn Monroe.”

He laughs. Why does everyone think that’s a joke? He finishes up and takes me back out front. The chair he puts me in is in front of three mirrors and next to the windows, so everyone can look in and see. I hate that. It’s like being put on display.

“Have you always kept it long?” he asks, drawing my wet hair back with his hands. My hair stops just in the middle of my back. It always has. I nod.

Beth looks up from the gossip rag she’s reading. “Doesn’t the length drag her face down? No wonder you’re always so sullen looking, Eddie.”

“You look ready for a change,” Cory tells me.

“Cut it all off,” I say. I imagine myself bald. Shaved head. I almost say that but think better of it. “I mean—short but long. I mean, just different. But short. But long.”

Beth gives Cory a wry look. “Did you get all that?”

Cory ties up my hair into a ponytail. My palms start to sweat. I wipe them on my pants. He notices and says, “Relax. This won’t hurt a bit.”

He grabs the scissors.

I catch sight of myself in the mirror and realize my father will never see me like this. I am becoming a person my father will never get to know. I am trying to force that thought out of my head at the same time Cory cuts the ponytail off. Just like that. Before I’ve even had time to prepare, to change my mind, it’s gone and I’m that person now.

I dig my fingernails into the arm of my chair.

“Hey, kid—are you okay?” Cory says, noticing. “Beth—”

“What’s the problem?” Beth is beside me before I can blink. She takes one look at my face and says, “Eddie, what’s wrong with you?”

I’m not ready to be that person now.