Pinhole
Copyright© 2022 by Fanlon
Chapter 1
It was the first day of my freshman year of high school and I was sitting in the passenger seat of my mother’s brand new 1997 teal green Dodge Grand Caravan. The ‘grand’ designation was important, according to my mother, just like the camel, which is just another name for tan, cloth bucket seats in the middle row. Lincoln High was for grades freshman through senior. My first class, Social Studies, was supposed to start at 7:53 and it was already 7:49 according to the clock on the dashboard of Mom’s new van. To make matters worse, there was a line of a half dozen cars in front of us trying to unload their cargo in the designated unloading zone. From how fast the line was moving, I could tell those kids were just as excited as I was for the first day of school, which was to say not at all. I really should have been, but I didn’t know what was going to happen to me my freshman year yet.
I glanced at the clock again, 7:50. Come on, hurry up, I’m going to be late! My hand subconsciously reached for the seat belt buckle, primed and ready to release myself. I had learned last week that the clock on the dash was about as reliable as the TV weatherman, which only furthered my internal anxiety of being late on my first day. You know what they say about first impressions, if you don’t succeed, try, try again...
I was overly anxious to get inside and to my locker. To make matters worse, as I tried to remember where exactly my locker was, I was drawing a blank. High school was a big deal. These were supposed to be the best years of my life, or so my mother told me. My dad told me that it was actually my college years, but he swore me to secrecy under the punishment of mowed lawns and oil changes on Saturday mornings. My mom was practical, but it was obvious she was one of those popular kids back in her day. Dad, not so much. He was a full-fledged, coke bottle glasses wearing nerd, and proudly so. How those two ended up together, I would never understand.
When my mom finally pulled the van up to the unloading zone, she put the van in park and turned to me with a beaming smile on her face.
“Joshua.” My mother was the only person allowed to call me by my full first name. Everyone else, thankfully, called me Josh. “You’re going to have so much fun,” she told me. Her enthusiasm was infectious but I didn’t have time to reminisce. “These are the best—”
I slammed the passenger door closed and raced toward the front door before she could finish her statement about how great high school was and how amazing it would be for me. I nearly tripped over my own feet in my haste but somehow managed to stay upright by some miracle. My heart was racing by the time I was standing in front of the double doors that led into Lincoln High. I was officially a Lincoln High Squire. I took a deep, calming breath and pushed on the doors.
The door didn’t budge. I pushed again, and again. I tried both doors but they were locked! To my horror, a cute girl with a button nose and dark blonde hair wound in perfect loose curls stepped up beside me. She looked to be my age, or possibly a sophomore but that wasn’t likely. She still had a hint of the boyish figure she was slowly growing out of. She was maybe an inch taller than I was—she had broken the five-foot barrier. I was close, but that milestone had eluded me thus far. She’s definitely a freshman. She didn’t say anything, which only increased my worry about the locked doors. I think she is expecting me to open the door for her, and I can’t even open it for myself! I glanced at her after pushing on both doors again, trying to gauge her reaction to us being locked out. She just stood there, her pink backpack straps hanging over her shoulders, tapping her foot impatiently.
“Are you going to open the door already?” The girl asked, her voice impatient and not at all impressed.
“They won’t open!” I complained and to prove it, I pushed on the doors again.
“Pull.”
“What?”
“You have to pull on the door.” She rolled her eyes, stepped forward and grasped the door handle and pulled ... it opened.
I could have died right there from embarrassment. I heard a few people laughing behind me and risked a glance only to find five huge guys in letterman jackets laughing. I moved over to the side, allowing them to pass by me. Not one of the guys stopped or even looked at me as they entered the school one by one.
“Come on squirt, you’re going to be late,” remarked the last guy, who’d stopped and was holding the door open. He was by far the largest of the group. He had to have been nearly seven feet tall and 300 pounds. From his immense bulk, he was definitely a lineman for the varsity football team. He stood there patiently, watching me. “Are you coming or not? The bell’s about to ring. Hurry up.”
I gulped down the lump that was forming in my throat, nodded, and put one foot in front of the other as I walked through the doors into the chaos that was high school.
“Umm, thanks,” I turned and said to the giant.
“Don’t worry about it,” was all he replied as he strode past me into the throng of bodies milling about in the locker lined hallways.
I had just begun moving towards the stairs that led up to my locker on the second floor, but the bell rang and people started to scatter in all directions, like bugs when a light was suddenly turned on. I took off at a run, but that was short lived, in favor of trying to hug one of the walls to keep from getting run over by the older, larger students. I leaned against the wall, my loaded backpack digging into my shoulders as I pressed as tightly as I could to the wall.
When the halls started to empty, I raced down the hallway to my first class. When I finally found the right door, it was already closed and I could see Mrs. Peterson standing at the front of the class with a clipboard in her hands. I gently tried to turn the doorknob but it was locked. The jiggling of the door caught Mrs. Peterson’s attention and she looked in my direction. She strode over to the door and opened it just enough to look at me.
“What do you need?” she asked me. The look on her face wasn’t angry, but annoyed.
“Mrs. Peterson, this is my first period classroom.”
“Who would you be then?”
“Josh Davis.”
Mrs. Peterson looked at her clipboard, scanning the names listed on it and sure enough, my name was there halfway down the page and she tapped it with the end of her finger.
“It looks like you are correct,” she told me. “And late. Don’t let that become a habit, understood?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Fine, go find a desk,” she said, pivoting to the side to allow me to get past her before she shut the door again.
That’s how my first day went. I was late to every class, except lunch, which you technically couldn’t be late for. I was doing a remarkable job on those first impressions. The one bright side was my photography class. It was the fifth period and directly after lunch. The teacher was a goofy old man named Mr. Watts. He had to be in his seventies by the look of him, with the mentality of a thirty-year-old. He had deep wrinkles on his face, but they shallowed to mere lines when he smiled. He was aging quite well besides that, no hunch or shuffle in his step that I could see. He even had a full head of wild, gray hair. I liked him immediately. He was full of jokes and sarcasm and had the entire class laughing. I knew right away that choosing photography as my one freshman elective was a good decision.
The size of the class was by far the smallest in my schedule. Most of my classes had a minimum of thirty students, some over forty. Mr. Watts’ class only had eighteen kids. Ten guys and eight girls. I only knew two of the kids, both went to junior high with me: Jasen and Tommy Deiter. They were identical twins but thankfully they didn’t try to match their clothes like some girls tended to do. The one surprise was the dark blonde girl who I had made a complete ass of myself in front of before school started. I had learned her name when Mr. Watts took roll call, Laura Satorie. She was tomboyish pretty. She dressed like a tomboy, jeans, and a loose t-shirt, but her hair and makeup were done in such a way that if you even thought of calling her a tomboy, you would be instantly mistaken.
I snuck a couple glances at Laura throughout the class, but she never once looked or acknowledged that I existed. Mr. Watts tried to explain everything we would be doing this semester. The first actual pictures we would be taking were going to be done with a pinhole camera, whatever that was. He also said he would be teaching us about the history of photography and some of the famous photographers of the world. Most of us thought those would be the guys from National Geographic, but it turns out that wasn’t true at all. Sure, those people were good, but the truly great ones were what we were going to learn about. First up on his list, was Ansel Adams.
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