Part 6

        After dinner that night, Caleb followed me up to my room, shooting rubberbands stealthily (so he apparently thought) at my back. Fortunately for him, I'd always been a terrible shot with rubberbands, so he was safe from retaliation in that form. I grabbed my digital camera from the dresser and plopped onto the bed, turning it on and flipping through the day's shots, culling out the obviously worthless. Caleb bounced up next to me, peering over my shoulder.
        "Didja find my fort yet?"
        I groaned and rolled my eyes, moving the camera closer to him. "Does it look like it?"
        "Were you really looking for it then?" he asked, both excited and a bit surprised.
        I shrugged. "Kind of. I didn't spend a lot of time out there, and it was my first time even going near the woods."
        He burst into exultant giggles. "You were nooooowhere near it! I knew you couldn't find it!"
        "Hey! I said I wasn't even really trying, I was just looking around a little."
        "Yeah right. You'll never find it."
        "Oh, we'll see... So what kind of fort is it, anyway? A tree fort, or one you built, or in an old shed or something..?"
        "Yeah right, I'm not telling you! It's a secret."
        "Yeah, yeah... Mine were always up in trees, some guys I knew built their own, but the one kid's dad worked at a lumberyard, so he could get all kinds of free wood to use. I had to be a little more creative."
        He scoffed, but I could tell he was intrigued. "Girls suck at building forts. They're always like dollhouses and crap."
        "Not always. My sister's was," I admitted with a giggle. "But she was always way more girly than me. Mine was...well I guess its defenses weren't all that great, it was more of a hide-out than a fort. But the camouflaging was pretty awesome."
        "Why, what'd you use?"
        "Well, I had a couple of different forts, but the main one, the best one, was in this sumac tree at the edge of my backyard, where the yard met the edge of these little woods that ran behind all the houses on the street. A lot of the branches hung really low, it had been partly uprooted I think at one point, and one of the bigger branches bent near the ground. So I stretched smaller branches across from the branch to the ground, and then covered them in field grass I ripped up, so it was like a straw wall almost, but inside the fort there was a little cubby under the branches and grass, that I could store stuff in. I stretched some rope between some of the branches and hung grass over it, to make grass walls, like on a tropical island. Anyway once the grass dried out, it just looked like more dead brush, so it blended in perfectly with everything around it."
        "Cool..." he murmured appreciatively, nodding. "That's a really cool idea."
        "It was, it looked really great... Problem was, whenever it got really windy, all of my walls would completely blow away. I had to make new ones like every week."
        He burst out laughing at that, and I had to laugh too, remembering what ridiculous lengths I went to, trying to keep those walls maintained. Suzy had always been really jealous of my fort though, which had made it all worthwhile at the time.
        "Mine's way better than that though," Caleb affirmed, as he rolled off the bed and started looking at all the photography acutraments on the dresser. "Me an' Dave made the best one ever. We're still working on it, we just got some tar paper to put over the part of the roof we patched so it's more waterproof."
        I nodded, biting back my grin. I wasn't going to give any hint that I knew he was saying more than he'd meant to say about what the thing looked like.
        "I guess we'll put that up this weekend maybe, but my cousins are gonna be staying here then too, so we'll have to sneak out and make sure Dillon and the girls don't try and follow us."
        "That's right, I forgot they were coming... how old are they?"
        "The girls are just babies, I think Sarah's two and Jessica is four or something. Dillon's seven but he's soooo annoying. All he does is ask questions all the time, and he doesn't know how to do anything, he wanted to help us one day but he didn't even know how to hammer a nail in right."
        I nodded sagely, sympathetic. "Are they just staying for the weekend?"
        "Yeah, but I probably won't be here much next week, Mom wants me to go clothes shopping and stuff." He started playing with an empty film canister, trying to get the lid to pop off by squeezing the bottom part. "You take a lot of pictures."
        "Well, that's what I'm going to school for, so I kind of have to, but I like doing it anyway."
        He glanced around the room at the pictures on the walls. "Did you take all those?"
        "Uh-huh. Developed them too, actually, which is the hardest part I think, I'm still not really good at it."
        "How do you do that? Don't you just take them to the store?"
        I laughed half-heartedly. "I wish. But I have to do it myself, for class, since they're teaching us how to do it. It's better anyway though, you have more control over the results, and can get whatever size and type of print you want."
        "So how does it work?"
        "Well..." I thought for a moment, trying to think of how to condense the process in such a way that a kid could get it. "Basically, the pictures go on the film - the film picks up light, so it records what things were light and what were dark. When you develop the film - that's really just dunking it into chemicals, it's a pain because you can't let one part of the film touch another part, or the chemicals don't go on it right. But the chemicals just make it so that the film won't pick up any more light, it just keeps whatever pictures you took on it. Then you put the film into a projector - like the ones you use at school, where it takes what the teacher's writing and blows it up really big? Basically the same thing. You project the picture from the film down, and have to focus it and stuff, then put a piece of paper down under it. The paper works kind of like film does, it remembers where light hits it and where it doesn't. Then you have to dunk it in a couple different chemicals, one makes the places where light didn't hit it turn dark. That's the most fun part, the picture sloooowly appears on this blank sheet of paper, it's really cool to watch."
        "Can I come see sometime?"
        "As long as you promise not to mess with the chemicals, sure. They'll eat your skin if you touch them."
        His eyes went wide. "Coooool..."
        I giggled, shaking my head. "The other chemicals just make the dark areas stop getting darker, and then make it so the paper won't react to light any more, just like you do with the film. Once the paper dries out, your picture's all done."
        "That sounds really complicated."
        "Y'know, it really is, when I explain it all out. It seemed really confusing to me at first, but now I guess I've done it so many times that I don't really think about it. Anyway it's not like I do that for every picture I take, just the ones I think will turn out nice. You can make little test sheets by setting the film right on the paper, and it will make prints of the same size as the film, so you can see little versions of each one all at once."
        "Aren't the rooms all red? Why are they red?"
        "The lights are, yeah. Remember how the film and the paper react to light? That's why - if you did all this in a room with lots of light, it would mess everything up. The paper is made to not see red light though, so a little of it's okay. Actually when you develop film, you can't even have red lights on, it's too sensitive."
        "So you have to do it in a totally dark room? With no lights?"
        "Ye-ah. That's what makes it such a pain. Like you put the film into a canister - like that one over there, the one with the tiny hole in the lid? And dump the chemicals in there, so no light gets in there. But unrolling the film from the little container it comes in, and putting it on those metal reels over there, and putting the reels into the container, all of that you have to do in a room that's totally dark. You know how usually, like at night, your eyes adjust and start seeing a bit of light, and you can see a bit?"
        "Yeah..."
        "That doesn't happen - the room has no light at all. It doesn't make any difference if your eyes are open or closed, you can't see anything."
        "Whoa... that's really creepy. How do you know what you're doing then?"
        "You just kind of have to feel with your hands what you're doing... it's like being totally blind. It's actually kind of scary the first couple times... and I still mess up my film sometimes."
        "Wow..." He was quiet a minute, fiddling with the wire film reels, twisting them back and forth experimentally. "Do the chemicals really eat your skin? Really??"
        I laughed. "They would if you got a lot on you, yeah. Little splashes just burn like crazy, I've done that before.
        "That's so cool!"
        "...not exactly the word I'd use, but all right."