Free Jumpstart the World by Catherine Ryan Hyde Page B

angry also looked lonely or scared. Usually anger seems to be a feeling that people have all by itself, with no other feelings around it. Or under it. But not in Molly’s pictures. In Molly’s pictures, people felt lots of different feelings, all at the same time.
    And they say the camera doesn’t lie. So I knew life must really be the way it was in Molly’s pictures. Which means there was a whole other layer of life I didn’t even know about until I saw it in her portfolio.
    That’s a lot for a person with a camera to be able to do.
    One of them she won an award for. A national award. It was a picket line, everyone joined together arm in arm to keep the scabs from coming through, and the faces on both sides werejust so fierce. It was like Roman gladiators, except it was here, and now.
    Lonely. Scared.
    So, they weren’t just pictures. I mean … what do I mean? They weren’t just simple pictures whose only job is to look nice. They had something to say. They were each a sort of document of some kind of injustice. Usually people do all this shouting about injustice. But Molly’s photos just froze the injustice, and then it was right there in front of you. And you couldn’t look away anymore. They just presented you with the injustice and then left you to do all the rest of the work on your own. You either cared or you didn’t. But you couldn’t ever pretend again.
    I had no idea, until that exact moment, that a camera could do so much.
    I was so caught up in what they made me feel, and in all the thoughts running laps in my head, I think I actually forgot that Frank was sleeping right across the room on the couch. The whole world, just in that moment, was about the possibility of taking pictures.
    For the first time ever, I knew there was something I really cared enough to do. I actually wanted to be something.
    Then I wondered how I’d ever managed to live my life and be happy without knowing this important thing I wanted to be. Even though it had been just a matter of minutes.
    Still, some minutes are longer than others.

SEVEN
I Don’t Even Know What Top Surgery Is
    I think it was about seven days later that I realized I hadn’t seen Toto in a long time. But maybe it was nine. I should’ve kept better track of him, but he was always hiding someplace or another, and there’s only just so much of the day you can spend on a treasure hunt for your weird cat.
    He had a food dish that I checked a couple of times a day, and if I saw he was low on dry food, I filled it up. All of a sudden one lazy Sunday afternoon it hit me. It wasn’t low, but it should have been. It hadn’t been low for days.
    I hunted.
    I found Toto in the closet, nested in some dirty clothes on the floor. I didn’t exactly have a hamper yet, so the bottom of the closet was temporarily filling the bill.
    He looked up at me in the half-light. Looked at me with that one eye, and my stomach jerked, and I knew something was really wrong. Because he didn’t run away.
    I took the lamp from the bedside table and pulled it as far as the cord would stretch. Shined it in on him.
    He still didn’t run.
    He turned his face up to me, and it wasn’t shaped right at all. It was all lumpy and puffed up on one side. So much that it pushed his nose over in the other direction. So much that his one good eye was partly shut.
    I just stood there for a second, not knowing what to do. The vet we used for Francis was all the way on the other side of town. And he wasn’t open on Sunday anyway. And I didn’t even know how to get Toto into the carrier.
    Then it hit me. Frank.
    I almost ran over there and asked him to help me.
    But then I decided I had to at least put Toto in the carrier. I was on my own now. I didn’t want to be helpless. I couldn’t just rely on Frank for everything. Or maybe I wanted Frank to be proud of me for being able to handle things. I just knew that sooner or later I had to be able to handle my own cat.
    I got the carrier and brought