Viola in Reel Life Read Online Free PDF

My dad just likes the emotions he captures on film and doesn’t quite know when to cut away and let the moment speak for itself. As I watch them onscreen, my eyes fill with tears. A year is a very long time to be without them. I wonder how I’ll get through it.
    I bet they won’t even miss me after a while. I’ve been Princess Snark lately. (That’s what Mom calls me when I’m just so over their badgering me about everything.) I can’t help it. I have zero patience. Really. Zero. I can hardly stand myself sometimes, much less other people. I think it comes from trying to be perfect. Although I can’t reach perfection, I drive myself crazy trying. Sometimes I wonder what will happen to me. If I keep worrying like this, I’ll grind my teeth down into flat nubs like my violin teacher, Mrs. Doughty. She has teeth so tiny, you’d think she’s part gerbil.
    My mom says Mrs. D lost all her teeth from grinding (!) and now wears dentures, which scared me todeath, like that could happen to me and then what? Mrs. Doughty’s teeth issues were enough to motivate me to get a bite guard, but I don’t think I’ll wear it here. I don’t want to be blah beige bedding/bad picture/bite guard girl. Can you imagine that ?
    I fast-forward to the footage of the buildings of the Prefect Academy. The gold letters on the sign came through clearly as I grabbed the late-afternoon light on the wood. Nice effect. I open the shot up wide and fill the screen with the slow pan of the fields. My hand is much steadier on this sequence.
    Then I see a very weird thing. There’s something on the screen that I didn’t notice when I was filming the field outside.
    In the distance, beyond the field, on the far property line of the school, I see something red move. A bird? I slow down the speed and look closely. It’s not a bird. It’s a woman. Strange. I don’t remember a woman in the shot, and I don’t remember anything red. She moves into the shot in full.
    The woman wears a drop-waist red dress and a black velvet cloche hat. Her blond sausage curls bounce on the tops of her shoulders. She has matching red lips and tucks a small clutch purse under her arm. She wears black gloves with tiny bows on the wrists. She lightsa cigarette and, turning away from the camera, puffs. She looks up into the sky, just as I did when filming the Indiana clouds.
    “Whatcha doing?” Romy leans over my shoulder and looks at the screen.
    I almost jump out of my skin.
    “Sorry,” she says. “I interrupted. You were concentrating.”
    “It’s okay,” I tell her, but I say it in a way that she knows it’s not. “Romy, don’t take this wrong, but I sort of need privacy when I’m editing.”
    Romy slinks away, her feelings hurt. I will make it up to her later. Right now, I can’t worry about Romy because something crazy is going on here. I shot this footage this afternoon, and at that time there was no lady in the field. And here, on my screen, she walks in daylight. How did I miss her? What is going on?
    I minimize the shot and save it. I’m too frazzled to figure this out right now.
    Marisol looks up from her magazine. “Everything okay over there?” she says to me.
    “Yeah,” I lie.
    I turn the computer off. I look around at my roommates. For a moment, I consider telling them about what I’ve seen but they’d think I was nuts. And there’s one thingI know after day one at the Prefect Academy—don’t give anybody a reason to label you because whatever happens on the first day sticks. Just ask Harlowe Jenkins from Quad 3, who is now known as Throw-up Girl because she hurled in the bushes outside the picnic tent after she tried mango chutney for the first time on her hot dog. I bet she wishes she’d have stuck with ketchup.

THREE
    WHEN I’M HOME IN BROOKLYN AND HAVING A CRISIS , I call Andrew and he either comes over to my house or I go over to his. But he’s a million miles away, so I text him.
    Me: Are you there? Mayday.
    AB: What’s up?
    Me: