Part 4

        At five o'clock on the dot, the lights were turned off and my fellow officeworkers headed for the elevator en masse. Everyone else seemed to know each other - which I'd picked up on during the day, but most of the time I was on my own in the back room with the files, so it was only at this point that I heard all of the teasing and joking in full. Each person (myself included) seemed to have a fresh burst of energy, now that the workday was done. The swarm dispersed at the ground floor, with some heading for one parking lot and some another, and one walking over to Thompson Hall to pick up her little girl from the daycare there.
        I took a more direct route across the campus this time - which I should have done that morning, since it was shorter, but I'd followed the main walkways out of sheer habit. I made a note of the time again, just to see how many minutes I shaved off by going this way.
        It had gotten pretty warm over the afternoon, and it felt even warmer to me, after having been cooped up in air conditioning all day (and slightly too-chilly air conditioning at that). I took off my vest, then folded it and draped it over my small purse, between the straps I was carrying it by.
        I put my headphones back in, and let my gaze wander across the wide expanses of sky, where there were only a few thin clouds gathered at the fringes of the horizon. Such a gorgeous shade of blue... and it frustrated me, because I knew film would never quite capture that kind of luminosity. So I didn't even bother taking out my camera on the walk, just let my eyes drink in the color, letting it soak into my skin and my lungs and---
        I gasped and whirled around, only barely avoiding a collision with a blond terror on a much-abused bike, who flew past me almost before I could recognize him - but I knew that laugh already.
        "Caleb!" I screeched, my hand clutching my chest as I tried to catch my breath.
        He skidded dramatically in the gravel of the shoulder, turning himself a full 180 degrees, grinning like crazy. I laughed weakly, still calming my shakiness, but remembering pulling the same stunt on my parents a hundred times. This kid Brian, who lived a few houses down from me when we were little, taught me how to skid like that, he had a gravel driveway, I remember spending probably hours trying to outdo each other...
        "Where were you all day?" he asked, bending over to pick a chunk of gravel out from the treads of his front tire.
        "Working, actually, on campus." Suddenly I remembered his appearance in the house this morning. "Hey, where were you all day? I saw you this morning, why weren't you at school?"
        He grinned broadly. "Teacher's conference day."
        I couldn't help but grin back - for all his impishness, he was a pretty cute kid, very endearing. Like you knew he might very well leave a garter snake under your bedsheets, but he'd do it with such innocent delight that you couldn't stay mad, you'd think it was pretty funny too. "Lucky you. You going home tonight then, or staying around longer?"
        He shrugged. "Grandma lets me stay however long I want to, the bus picks me up whenever the driver sees me there, so it doesn't really matter. Mom and Dad both work late a lot, so I come here after school a lot of times anyway."
        I nodded, plucking a wild daisy from among the field grass next to the road, twirling it idly in my fingers as I continued walking. He pushed his bike along beside me, occasionally pushing the handlebars forward and upward to pop small wheelies. "Where were you riding to?"
        "Just around. Dave and I were gonna work on our fort today, but his mom made him go out shopping."
        I raised an eyebrow, my interest perking up. "You know, I'd been thinking that there must be all sorts of great places around the yard for a fort... where's yours?"
        He eyed me incredulously. "I can't tell you, you're a girl!"
        I rolled my eyes. "Oh please, my cooties wore off years ago."
        He groaned. "It's not cooties I'm worried about, I'm not a baby."
        "What, then?" I was biting back a grin, curious to see what arguments he would give. I may not have had a little brother, but there were plenty of boys in my neighborhood, and I was kind of enjoying the chance to turn the tables a bit.
        "We-e-e-l-l-l-l-l..." he stalled, scuffing up clouds of dust and gravel as he walked. "Well it's just a secret! It's not a secret fort if everyone knows where it is."
        "Yeah, but I'm not everyone. I'm just a single one."
        "Yeah well, the fort location is on a need to know basis only," he stated firmly, obviously proud of the phrase.
        "How good's your security, then?"
        "The best. No way could you get in."
        "You wanna bet?"
        "Yeah! I bet there's no way you can even find it."
        I grinned broadly. "You're on, kid. I'll track it down before the weekend, and leave you a nice little note on the front door. On the inside of the front door."
        "Yeah right."
        "Exactly, that's right."
        "Yeah, well... I'll beat you to the house!!!" he yelled, jumping onto his bike and taking off.
        "Hey!" I called after him, laughing. "That is so not fair!"
        "Your stupid fault for walking!"
        I didn't actually try to keep up with the kid, I took my time walking back - it would have been hopeless, and anyway running was pretty out of the question in these boots. When I did make it back, I saw the bike lying on its side, abandoned in the yard near the porch, but Caleb was nowhere in sight. I'd find him soon enough - a whole fort is pretty difficult to completely conceal.

        Dinner was again delicious, despite Caleb shooting me looks all through the meal that were half threatening and half wary. I finally crossed my eyes at him, which made him loose his composure and giggle. He tried to return the cross-eyed stare, but failed utterly, which brought me up a few points in his book.
        While doing some more work on my room, I thought the evening over for awhile. Strange as I knew it was, it was actually really nice to hang out with a kid for awhile. Things are so much more honest and open with kids than they are when people get older. College especially, things in the dorm would just get ridiculous sometimes, the amount of drama was insane. What with boyfriends and cheating on tests and people hogging the shower and music up too loud and people visiting at all hours of the night and people coming in at three in the morning to puke on the hall floor... and then of course people getting confrontational about it all, being defensive and refusing to take responsibility for whatever they'd done, accusing everyone around them, ugh it could get to be such a mess! Even the people who were all about being honest and opinionated and never holding back on what they thought caused problems, there's a difference between honesty and domineering, which some people just don't seem to get.
        I'd spent a lot of my first semester basically hiding in a corner and keeping my mouth shut.
        Later on, of course, I'd found my niche, I'd starting talking to people in my classes, and discovered some girls in my dorm who I got along with really well. Even some of the people I lived with, that I wouldn't really call friends, I had a lot of really great talks with. That was one of the things I liked best about college, just the insane mash-up of totally different people, all thrown into the same building to live together.
        Dorm lighting, however, is awful for taking pictures in. It's basically impossible to take good pictures inside any building on campus, everything's so dark and thick-walled and fluorescent-lit. I feel so much lighter already, just being in this house. It's much older than the campus buildings (the ones I was always in, anyway, though I think a couple of the buildings are like a hundred years old), but, it was made to be beautiful instead of just practical. That and it wasn't built in the '60s or '70s, which is when a lot of the campus went up - the sleek concrete lines of the architecture do make for great photos, but it's pretty depressing to be around all the time. What's a smooth gray curve against the sky to a camera, is a pitted and pocked discolored grungy slab of cement up close.
        I picked up my camera and looked around the room through the viewfinder, checking out the lighting levels in here. The sun was setting, but since my room was on the western side, a good bit of warm orange light still spilled in through the gauzy lace curtains. The lace caught my interest, I wondered if I could capture the way the light spilled in through the myriad gaps between the white threads... I knelt in front of the window, seeing how close I could get my camera to the lace and still stay in focus... I took one shot, then another, and as my thumb moved to rewind the film, I felt the lever resist the motion. Out of film. I hauled myself up and went over to the desk, flipping up the release lever and winding up the film as I walked. I could still remember when all the hundred tiny procedures of an SLR felt overwhelming, but after just a year and half with this camera, most of the motions were second-nature to me already. I turned my back to the window, keeping the camera in shadow just in case, and opened the back of the camera. I pulled out the spent roll, and slid it into an empty film canister laying on the desk. I dug around in a drawer for a minute until I found a black Sharpie, which I used to make a big X on the lid of the canister - I hate thinking I've grabbed a fresh roll of film, only to open the canister when I'm out somewhere and find that it's already been used. I paused for a minute, considering the two stockpiles of film in the desk drawer - then sighed, and opened up a package of black and white film. I'd be a good little photography student, and work on my weak spots. I popped the film in, started the roll onto the winder, closed it all up and shot a few blank frames.
        I looked back over to the window, and was glad to see that the sun hadn't dropped much lower, I could still take a shot or two through the curtains. As I moved closer to it, I ended up coming at it from more of an angle - and realized the light was catching in some dust motes in the air, falling in visible rays into the room. I grinned broadly and dropped to my knees, praying the camera would pick it up, taking several shots with different settings, hoping to get it. I took a few more through the lace curtains, then sighed contentedly and set the camera aside.
        I set my alarm for the next morning - I wanted to be up early enough to have time to go on a walk with my camera before work. And maybe do a little nosing around for Caleb's fort while I was at it.