Page 48 of No Offense

Molly

“No, Miss Molly.”

Elijah leaned across Molly’s desk and pressed the receiver, ending her call to his mother before it had even connected. “Please.Pleasedo not call my mom.”

Molly looked into his suddenly pale face and felt that she had no choice but to relent. He was her patron. More than that, he was a child.

“Fine, Elijah,” she said, slowly lowering her handset. “Then tell me the truth about where you got this camera... and why you don’t want your mother knowing about it.”

Elijah let out an exaggeratedly large sigh and slumped in the child-sized chair, which for him was not entirely too small. Like a puppy, his hands and feet were large, but the rest of him hadn’t quite caught up.

“Okay, look. I didn’tjustfind my dad’s camera. I found it a few days ago, and I got this idea: a lot of the girls inschool—the Snappettes, especially—want headshots. Not selfies, but, like, real professional headshots. They have this cheer camp they all go to every summer, and there’s this parade in New York City. It happens around Thanksgiving—”

Molly tried to keep the impatience out of her tone. “The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade?”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s it. It’s this real big deal. They have to send in a headshot for it and also for the camp, or something. I don’t know. So when I found my dad’s camera, I thought, why not start my own business, offering to do headshots for the girls? I mean, I can do it way more cheaply than the regular guy they use. Plus, like, they know me. I’m not some creep—”

“Elijah. Is this story going anywhere?”

“Oh, yeah.” He reached into the pocket of his skinny jeans and pulled something from it. “Sorry. So, anyway, I started my own business. See?”

He passed Molly a stiff black business card that had the words ELIJAHTRUJOS,FREELANCEPHOTOGRAPHERembossed on it in elegant silver print. Beneath the words was his cell phone number.

“I handed those out at school, and you wouldn’t believe the number of Snappettes who started texting me, asking if I could do their headshots for the application thingie. So that’s where I was last night.”

“Where?” Molly was confused.

“At one of their houses,” he said, reaching for the Leica—but not to take it from her, only so that he could show her the photos he’d taken. There was a small display screen onthe back of the camera. “Doing their headshots for the application. See?”

He switched some buttons, and photos began to appear on the tiny screen. Molly realized she was looking at the inside of a Little Bridge Island living room—she recognized the shiplap walls and nautical-themed décor—in which several girls wearing Snappette uniforms were posing for the camera, sometimes together, sometimes alone. She recognized John’s daughter, Katie Hartwell, right away. The other two girls were unfamiliar.

“See,” Elijah said, as he flicked through the photos. “It was hard to get the light right, because it was so dark in there.”

Molly could see that behind each girl was a bank of sliding glass doors—not unlike Mrs. Tifton’s French doors—leading to the backyard. Since the photos were taken at night (there was a digital date stamp on the top right-hand corner of the screen, indicating that the photos had been taken the evening before), the glass was dark, except for the girls’ reflection. Elijah had apparently realized this at some point and tried to get around it by having the girls pose in front of a white wall on the other side of the room.

“I really feel like I captured the essence of each girl’s personality,” he said as he showed Molly the photos of which he was most proud. “Like Katie, for instance? She’s really extroverted, so having her do that handstand was just a last-minute thing that I came up with, but I think works great.”

“Fine, Elijah,” Molly said. “But if this is all you were doing last night, why didn’t you want me calling your mom?”

“Oh, er, well, because I sort of lied about finding thiscamera in a box of junk my dad left behind.” Elijah had the grace to look embarrassed. “I mean, hedidleave it behind—just like he left me, my mom, and everything else heshouldcare about. But it turns out he wants the camera back. My mom’s been looking for it to send to him because he keeps asking for it. But I stole it and hid it in my room. I don’t feel like he deserves to have it back after leaving us like that.”

Molly frowned at him. “Elijah,” she said, in mock disapproval.

“I know. I know! But he doesn’t even send child-support payments. The guy’s a loser. I should getsomethingfrom him. And, anyway, if my mom found out I had his cameraandI was using it to take pictures of girls, she’d kill me.”

Molly actually thought that Mrs. Trujos would be relieved—at least about the girls—because it showed that Elijah was finally coming out of his shell and spending face time with people his own age.

But she didn’t say so because she sensed Elijah was getting a little bit of a thrill out of his disobedience. Instead, she kept looking at his photos, which weren’t bad—it would be difficult to take a bad photo with such a high-quality camera—until she saw something curious and cried, “Elijah! Stop!”

He stopped scrolling through the photos. “What? Why? What’s wrong?”

“Go back a photo or two. I thought I saw something—there!”

Molly took the camera from his hands. At first she thought she’d imagined it.

But as she looked more closely at one of his photos of the girls standing in front of the sliding doors, she saw precisely what she thought she’d seen.

And what she saw gave her goose bumps, even though she was wearing a cardigan, as usual, to guard against the chill of the library’s strong air-conditioning.