Icebound Hearts

Chapter 5

The photography lab at Pine Ridge Community College occupied a converted storage room in the basement of the arts building, which meant it was too cold in winter, too warm in September, and permanently smelled like fixer no matter how many industrial fans Professor Reyes ran. Maya loved it more than almost any other room she'd ever spent time in, which she was fairly sure said something about her, though she'd never fully worked out what.

"Pin them up," Professor Reyes said, not looking up from the contact sheet she was squinting at through a loupe. "All of them. I want to see the sequence, not just your favorites."

Maya pinned her Friday-night contact sheets to the corkboard in rows the whole game, start to finish, forty-some frames out of the thousand and forty she'd shot, everything from the pregame warmup to the final horn. Professor Reyes came around the table slowly, the way she always did, hands clasped behind her back like a museum docent, saying nothing for what felt like an unreasonably long time.

Elena Reyes was somewhere in her fifties, silver-haired, precise in a way that had nothing to do with being cold — she just didn't waste words, which had terrified Maya for the first three weeks of the semester and which Maya had since come to understand was actually the highest compliment the woman knew how to give: I think you can handle the truth, so I'm not going to dress it up.

"This one," Reyes said finally, tapping a frame near the top row.

It was the one from intros. Jake, mid-stride, looking straight into the lens.

Maya felt her face do something involuntary and hoped it wasn't visible in basement lighting. "That's not for the assignment. I wasn't going to submit that one."

"Why not?"

"It's not — it's not really about the game. It's just a guy looking at a camera."

"It's the only frame on this entire board where the subject is looking directly back at you instead of at the puck, the crowd, or the scoreboard." Reyes straightened up, arms crossing, studying Maya now instead of the photograph. "Every other shot here is competent. Good exposure, good timing, you clearly know your way around a fast shutter. But they're all shots of hockey. This one's a photograph of a person. There's a difference, and you know there's a difference, or you wouldn't have taken it in the first place."

Maya didn't say anything. There wasn't a version of I know exactly who that is and I've been trying not to think about it for three days that felt appropriate to say out loud in a basement classroom.

"That's the thing I keep trying to get you to understand," Reyes went on, moving down the row, tapping two more frames — Coach Carter in the lobby, mid-laugh; Ellie behind the espresso machine, caught candid, unguarded. "You're good at documenting. Genuinely good, better than most students I've had come through here. But you're best when you stop documenting and start *seeing*. This one." She tapped the Jake frame again. "This one, you saw."

"I didn't mean to."

"Nobody means to. That's usually how you know it's real." Reyes went back to her desk, rifling through a folder, and came back with a printed sheet that she handed over without much ceremony, like it was homework instead of what it actually was. "Which is part of why I want you to look at this."

Maya scanned it. A letterhead she didn't recognize at first — a gallery name, an address in the North Loop in Minneapolis, a program title: Emerging Eye: Summer Mentorship & Group Exhibition.

"It's a six-week program," Reyes said. "Working under a photographer named Sam Okafor — documentary and portrait work, does a lot of gallery and editorial stuff, genuinely one of the better eyes working in this state right now. Eight students get selected out of, last year, around two hundred applicants. You work under Sam all summer, and at the end of it, your work goes up in an actual group show. Real gallery. Real opening. People who don't know you, looking at what you made."

Maya's stomach did something complicated — a lift and a drop at the same time, hope and terror arriving in the same breath the way they usually did whenever anything that mattered was actually on the table. "You think I could get in."

"I think you have exactly the kind of eye Sam looks for, and I think if you don't apply, you'll spend the next several years wondering about it, which is a much worse outcome than applying and not getting in." Reyes said it plainly, no softening, the same way she said everything. "The application's due in the spring. Portfolio, statement, three letters. I'll write one."

"It's in the city."

"Yes."

"For the whole summer."

"Also yes." Reyes tilted her head slightly, reading something in Maya's face that Maya hadn't fully decided to let show. "Is that the actual problem, or is 'it's in the city for the whole summer' doing some quiet work for a bigger sentence you haven't said yet?"

Maya looked back at the corkboard — at the rows of hockey photos, at her father laughing in the lobby, at the whole familiar architecture of a life that had never once, not for a single year of it, been entirely her own to shape.

"I don't know yet," she said honestly.

"That's allowed." Reyes tapped the printed sheet still in Maya's hands. "But find out before spring. Deadlines don't care how long it takes you to be honest with yourself."

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Maya walked out into the parking lot forty minutes later with the application sheet folded into her camera bag, cold air biting at her face, the sky already going that early-dark blue it did by five o'clock this time of year. She sat in her car for a minute before starting it, engine off, breath fogging the windshield, the printed sheet balanced on the steering wheel where she could look at it without quite committing to reading it again.

Emerging Eye. Six weeks. A gallery wall. Her name on something, attached to nothing but the work itself.

She thought about the photograph Reyes had tapped twice — Jake, mid-stride, looking straight into her lens like he'd known exactly where to find her before she'd even known she was there to be found and she thought, with a small, guilty jolt, that the timing of all of this felt less like a coincidence and more like the universe trying to make a point she wasn't ready to hear yet.

She put the car in gear and drove home, the application sitting in her bag the entire way, unanswered, and did not, in fact, mention it to a single person that night.