Free Rosebush by Michele Jaffe Page B

and the memory came flooding back.
    The photography camp had been a special intensive program for high school yearbook and newspaper photographers from around New Jersey. It took place out in the woods, under an enamel-blue sky with evergreens marshaled like sentinels around a series of real log cabins. But despite the rich natural palette, I’d signed up for an old-school black-and-white photography elective where we were working on real film, doing everything from taking the pictures to printing the negatives and the photos. When you develop the actual pictures, you can use red lights in the darkroom so even though it’s dark, you can still see. But when you’re developing the negatives you make the pictures from, it has to be pitch black.
    I’d never experienced anything like that complete darkness and it threw me. I kept blinking, expecting my eyes to adjust, to be able to pick out the outlines of things, maybe a seam of light from the door.
    Nothing. Just pure, all-engulfing dark.
    When that realization settled in, I started to freak out. I felt like the ground was sliding out from under me, like gravity ceased to exist. I knew the table with all my supplies on it was in front of me, but my fingers wouldn’t work, I couldn’t find them. A trickle of sweat ran down my back and my hands and knees began to tremble and it was like someone was clenching my chest. I couldn’t breathe, I had to get out, only there was no out, I couldn’t find the door, the floor was sloping, where was the exit, I was trapped, I was going to die here, I’d never get out, I was—
    I was gasping for air when he spoke from behind me. “Close your eyes,” he said, next to my ear.
    It should have been terrifying to have a strange guy so close to me in the dark, but it wasn’t. It was reassuring. Grounding. I closed my eyes.
    “Now take a nice big breath.”
    I took a breath. And then another.
    “You’re okay,” he went on. “You’re fine. It seems different, but it’s the same as when the lights are on. Everything is still there.”
    Like magic, it was true. I was fine. My hands stopped shaking. I found all my equipment just how I’d laid it out, and I managed to thread the film into the negative-developing tank and seal it up. I wasn’t even the last one done.
    It seems different, but everything is still there. It had been true then, and it would be true now, I told myself.
    When the lights had gone on in the darkroom, I’d looked around to see who had helped me and was astonished when the guy who always sat in the back by himself during critique wearing a fedora and making notes came over and introduced himself.
    “I’m Scott.”
    “I’m grateful. Jane.” I held out my hand.
    “Nice to meet you, Grateful Jane.”
    “No, it’s just Jane.” He raised an eyebrow and I realized he’d been making a joke. “Right, you knew that. Anyway, I am. Grateful, I mean.”
    “No need, Just Jane.”
    “How did you know what to do?”
    “I’m a student of the way that perception impacts reality,” he said, sounding a little pompous. Then he grinned. “Plus I’ve been there. First time I did my own negatives, I totally freaked.”
    He and I sat together at dinner at one of the scarred wooden tables with generations of initials carved into its top, and over institutional pizza and fizz-less soda I learned that he wasn’t shy, just thoughtful, that he lived in the town next to Livingston—“the sketchy town where you and your friends go to buy beer.” He was both the photo editor of his school paper and the head yearbook photographer and dreamed one day of having a gallery of his own. In the meantime, he planned to go to law school because you have to pay the bills somehow and fund it half with scholarships and half by doing commercial photography work. Over the next three weeks and innumerable cups of watery coffee, “Just Jane” was shortened to J. J. and we became good friends. He was more intense and focused than anyone