Girls Like You
Photo by Dazzle Jam / Pexels You placed your hand on the pawn shop’s window and leaned closer, as if the camera had released a signal. It was nestled in what looked like a blanket. Above it hung a poster. “$145! PRACTICALLY NEW!”
You’d been there before to sell a gold bracelet your mom had given you. The money had gone to a Foo Fighters concert. Thoughts of your mother’s arthritic hands squeezing a dirty mop had interrupted the melody of every song, and you could have almost heard — over the strumming guitars — water dripping into a bucket.
With your knuckles barely tapping the glass door, you knocked. But the shop was closed for the day. You had begged your mother for a camera. You wanted to submit your work to contests, shoot and curate a portfolio, apply to art school. You had an eye for story; Mr. Tehran had said so. Black-and-white prints of your work were displayed throughout the school: Classmates huddled shoulder to shoulder with their heads bowed in prayer and teachers mid-walk, balancing cups of coffee and stacks of papers. People didn’t have to pose for you to capture them at their best.
But your mother, a Dominican immigrant who’d grown up on a sugar cane plantation, who treated Bounty paper towels like coveted possessions, had made it clear that photography was not a real career. She had come to the United States by boat, trekking from one Caribbean island to the next. This meant you owed her excellence. At the very least, a career in medicine or a law degree. Girls like you were not supposed to take to the arts.
But you couldn’t imagine anything else. In photography class, you had learned to control your breathing, to narrow your focus and attention and direct it at one external object outside of you. To take pictures was to bear witness, to preserve something special, like an ant trapped in the dripping resin of a tree, crystallized in amber. Behind the lens, you were at your most centered. You didn’t have to think about your mother and how much you argued over your Americanness and your lack of God. When you held the lens, you were enough, and what you found attractive or intriguing needn’t be explained.
You turned the corner and passed the neighborhood’s cluster of old Portuguese men who’d spilled onto the sidewalk to chew on their toothpicks and smoke their cigarettes. You wedged between their booming conversations and lingering eyes. What a neat postcard they would make. At the light, breathing into your cold hands and wiggling your toes inside of ripped-up Chuck Taylors, you mulled over the camera. Truth was you couldn’t afford it. You hadn’t sold a single mix CD in months, and it had yet to snow, which meant you hadn’t shoveled,
