Summer in the Invisible City by Juliana Romano

ceiling was a blinding white bulb behind him. His face was in shadow. His lips were damp. His body was a tent that I was hiding underneath, and it was warm and dense and slow in the tent. He kissed me in a way that felt like so much more than a kiss. It felt like we were talking or dancing or seeing through each other’s skin to our insides.
    It all felt so right. The way he pulled my jeans off with the light still on. The feeling of his hands on my stomach, my thigh, my knee, my ankle. He was easy to do things with. I thought I’d have been afraid, but Noah was so unafraid that I just followed his lead. We got closer and closer together, kissing and rolling around, and I was pulling him toward me as if I’d known him my whole life. Then he lifted off of me, and I opened my eyes to see him put on a condom. That was the only moment I really saw any of the parts of him I’d been touching.
    When we were having sex, I felt certain that Noah loved me. He held on to me like he needed me, like he’d beenseeing me in the hallways every day and wondering about me. I felt as if he knew everything about me, even things about my mom and our little apartment. It was like he knew I barely had a father and he could see the hole that Allan left in my heart, and he cared about all of it. It felt like he wanted to make it all better. And it seemed like he could. At one point, I felt him grab on to my foot and it felt small in his hand, and he squeezed it so tight he cracked the knuckles in my toes.

Chapter 11
    When we show up for class the next day, Benji has scribbled a quote from the night’s reading across the board.
“A photograph is a constructed object. What it shows the viewer is not necessarily the truth. It is, after all, nothing more than an arrangement of light and shadow.”
    â€œWhat does this mean?” Benji asks, tapping his marker against the whiteboard.
    Nobody raises their hand.
    â€œIt’s from the reading,” Benji presses. “Did anyone understand the essay? What does it mean that a photograph doesn’t necessarily show the truth?”
    I raise my hand and Benji waves his marker at me. “Yes?”
    â€œI took it to mean that a picture is a real thing. Like it’s a piece of paper and it actually exists, but the image on it could be made up or not totally real,” I say.
    The truth is, I thought about the essay all night. I read it twice and lay in bed wondering if all the things the writer said about the photos were true. It seemed to me like he wassaying that photography shows us the world but also lifts off and away from the world at the same time.
    â€œGreat, Sadie,” Benji says. “Nice explanation. Can anyone add to that?”
    Izzy looks at me and rolls her eyes.
    â€œWhat?” I whisper.
    She mouths something back, but I can’ t understand her at all.
    â€”
    After we discuss the reading, we pin up our photographs from the street photography assignment. Today is our first real group critique. Everyone’s pictures all together are so similar they practically blend. Other than me, everyone took pictures on the street. I took mine inside of a subway car on the ride back from Willa’s last week.
    At first, I had been afraid to pull out my camera on the subway. I didn’t want some creepy old guy to start talking to me and asking me questions about the Leica. But, it was a quiet afternoon and I could tell no one in that car was going to bother me. So I took out the camera, and I even pulled out my light meter and my gray card, and took a whole roll of film between Eighty-Sixth Street and Astor Place.
    The best picture from that roll, the one that I printed for today, ended up being this one I took of a little boy sleeping on his grandmother’s lap, his cheek smeared sweetly against her thigh. I was surprised when I printed the photograph to see how good the lighting looked. I think of subway light as being really bad, but in