Free Bad Girls Don't Die by Katie Alender

else had had the same idea once upon a time. I guess a house like ours brings out people’s creative tendencies. Maybe, in its own wacky way, Kasey’s doll collection could be seen as an expression of creativity, not just a passive consumerist obsession (which is what I call it when I want to get a rise out of her).
    I rolled the film into the coiled silver cage and filled the cylinder with film-developing chemicals. While that processed, I carefully took my camera apart and cleaned the lens.
    When the timer dinged, I unrolled the film and clothespinned it to the cord hanging over the tub. I turned Mom’s old hair dryer to COOL and spent a few minutes drying the film off. It had to be totally waterless—handling it when it was just mostly dry or a little tacky would ruin the images.
    Next I cut the long strip of film into rows of five frames and made a contact sheet. That means you lay the film right onto the photo paper (so they’re in “contact” with each other) and get a whole page of little tiny blackand-white photos. You use that to choose the pictures you want to make larger prints of. You can’t just print everything or you’ll waste a lot of photo paper, and photo paper is expensive. Not every picture is worth blowing up.
    I hit the button and reached for the negative sleeve, then leaned down and held the negatives to the light— expecting to see a whole lot of nothing, after Kasey’s disastrous actions last night.
    A huge breath I didn’t know I’d been holding escaped from my lungs.
    They weren’t ruined.
    I got a piece of photo paper out from the triple-sealed black bag under the sink and set the page of negatives down directly on it, then hit the expose button. The light shined on them for a few seconds, then went off. I grabbed the paper and dropped it into the first tray of chemicals—the developer, which is where the images start to show up on the paper. I love watching this stage, seeing what comes out first.
    I lifted the contact sheet out of the developer and put it in the next tray, the stop bath, which stops the emulsion from reacting to the developer chemicals. From there they go into the fixer, which gets rid of any extra light-sensitive materials left on the paper, and from there they go into a tray of cold water. Then they get inspected by me with my little magnifying glass.
    I set them on the enlarger and turned the timer as far as it would go. I leaned in to look at the photos.
    They were beautiful. You could see black sky, a big white moon, and the pinpricks of tiny stars. The house loomed in the foreground, glowing a kind of milky gray. The whole thing was slightly hazy—which I could assume was Kasey’s fault. Never mind that it was kind of a cool effect . . . I was still totally annoyed.
    Finally I got to the pictures I’d tried to take of the strange light. The image was slightly shaky, thanks to my inability to stand completely still, but there was definitely something there. And the motion blur even helped a little.
    Hmm.
    I leaned in for another look, and noticed a little white dot in the frame—a circle of light that seemed to be floating near the house.
    I’d cleaned my lens right before I went outside, but a spot of dust could have snuck in.
    Well, it was a good picture anyway, and I could fix that white dot if I enlarged it.
    The last couple of photos, the ones close to the end of the reel, were actually ruined. One picture was half clear and half overexposed—you could just see the bay window in the study and part of Kasey’s bedroom window before it faded to bright white. The mysterious glow near the tree was just barely distinguishable from the light leak. And of course, that was the only one where I’d managed to hold still enough that the picture wasn’t blurred.
    I studied the blob of light. In this particular frame I could see that it wasn’t completely shapeless. It was oblong, and had stripes down the sides, and toward the top it got a little narrower and