Lux: The New Girl Read online

  Before leaving her old apartment, she’d cried and begged to stay and promised her mom that she would change. But her mom just said, “I can’t do this with you anymore, Lux.” Lux hoped that if she could stay out of fights and avoid trouble for the rest of the semester, then maybe she could move back home.

  * * *

  The baby’s room was small and dark, lit only by an elephant-shaped night-light. Penny, Lux’s new stepmom, sat in a rocking chair in a far corner of the room. Lux waved.

  Penny smiled. She was curvy and light-skinned, with fluffy brown hair she always pushed back with a headband, and she had on a tight pair of yoga pants. Even though she’d only just had this baby two weeks ago, Lux could imagine the grossest boys in her old class calling Penny a MILF.

  “This is your baby sister, Lillia,” Penny said softly, turning a little so Lux could see the face of the sleeping baby. Lux had met Penny only once before, so she felt like a complete stranger, and though the kid looked cute, it didn’t change anything. It definitely didn’t make Lux think of either of them as family. She felt heat creep up her neck the way it always did before she said or did something she regretted, so she knew she needed an excuse to get away from them fast.

  “I gotta go get unpacked,” Lux said. “But I’ll see you at dinner, I guess?”

  Penny looked a little disappointed, but Lux didn’t have it in her to get any closer, to coo at or cuddle with the kid.

  Back in her room, Lux sat on the bed and scrolled through her phone. She saw photos of Bree and Simone and the rest of the girls from her old school, and it pissed her off that they hadn’t gotten in trouble, but her whole life had changed. A minute later, she decided to unfollow everyone who went to her old school. She needed a fresh start, and dwelling on the past wouldn’t help her move on.

  Lillia wailed loudly in the next room, so Lux put her headphones on again and turned her music way up before lying down on her bed. As she rolled over onto her stomach and got ready to hit the unfollow button on someone else’s page, she got a notification that she’d been tagged.

  She tapped through to see what it could be, and then she froze. She watched as the on-screen version of herself climbed on top of Simone Harding and began hitting her over and over again.

  Lux sat straight up, then jumped out of bed. She paced from her big, too-bright window to her bedroom door and back. She played the video again and again, cringing at her on-screen self. She almost didn’t believe she had that kind of rage inside her.

  “Dammit.” She didn’t know what would happen if this spread the way these fight videos sometimes did. But she knew exactly what would happen if her father saw the video—she could kiss the possibility of moving back in with her mother goodbye.

  She tried to figure out if someone watching the video would recognize her. Her dark brown skin could be seen pretty clearly, and so could the twists she always wore with the wooden beads at the ends. But her face never showed up front and center. From this angle, she tried to tell herself, she could have been any black girl in Brooklyn.

  She soothed herself with this half-truth as she untagged herself. Then she sat on the edge of her bed and continued to quietly panic. There were at least twenty girls in that locker room, and more than half of them took photos and videos of that fight. Lux wondered if anyone else would post it. She wondered if anyone important would see it. She wondered if she’d be untagging herself for the rest of her life.

  When her dad called her to dinner, she went and ate everything on her plate, making polite conversation with Penny, even though it made her feel like a huge phony.

  But after dinner, Lux played all of her favorite sad songs and cried like she had with her mother, staring through her new, huge window. She’d only been away from home for a few hours and already everything was falling apart. She wished she’d never punched Simone. She hated to admit it, but she wanted her mom.

  When she calmed down, she dried her eyes and pulled out her camera. She took photo after photo of the still-twinkling lights of the city until she got too tired to stand. And just before she fell asleep, she pulled out her phone to text her mom.

  I hate it here. I want to come home.

  Genevieve texted back a few minutes later. I’m sorry, honey. I really am. But you should have thought about that before you got into that fight.

  LUX’S JOURNAL

  —February 20—

  I’m at Dad’s. It sucks.

  Lillia is loud, and Dad is being a jerk, and I hope Penny knows she’ll never be my mom.

  I need to get out of here.

  I also can’t believe that someone would tag me in that video. I mean, who does that? And since Dad’s always talking about how I gotta work extra hard as a black woman to make sure I’m representing myself well, he CANNOT find out about it. Something like this—physical proof that I’m not the perfect, disciplined kid he wants everyone to think I am—is his worst nightmare. I heard Mom talking to him about military school, and I could SO see him sending me away if he sees that video.

  I just need to keep my head down, stay outta trouble, and try to make this work till June so I can move back in with Mom. But it’s not gonna be easy.

  I need a plan.

  HOW I’M GOING TO GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE

  Do whatever Dad says.

  Get into that new school.

  Make GOOD friends. The kind of girls who don’t get into trouble. The kind of girls who get good grades and have hobbies and that people like.

  Join some kinda club or something. Joiners keep busy and don’t have time for drama.

  Stay AWAY from boys.

  Make sure no one knows about that video.

  “So, Miss Lawson, tell me why it is you want to attend Augusta Savage School of the Arts.”

  Lux didn’t feel like sucking up to these people. But she knew what she had to do to get out of her father’s apartment, and acing this interview would be step one. (Knowing the only other option was military school definitely motivated her, too.) Once Lux had made her mind up about something, she couldn’t be stopped—and she did nothing halfway. It was why she’d won nearly every single fight she’d ever been in. And why Simone Harding was walking around with a broken nose.

  Lux cleared her throat and pulled an old photo album out of her backpack. She knew from reading the school’s website last night that she needed to show them a portfolio, but she didn’t have time to put together something like that, so this would have to do.

  “I’ve loved photography for as long as I can remember,” Lux said. She flipped through the album, showing off black-and-white portraits of old men and women playing chess at Washington Square Park, bright images of kids jumping into the white spray of water from open fire hydrants, and close-ups of sweet-faced pit bulls at the animal shelter where Lux liked to spend her Saturday mornings.

  Her father sat beside her in front of the admissions board; a mean-looking bald man, a woman with a curly Afro, and a person with piercings up and down both their ears were staring back at them from a short table. They’d introduced themselves when Lux and her father first arrived, but Lux’s nerves had already erased their names from her memory. Luke leaned forward to look at the album, too.

  It felt like she’d opened up her heart for all four of them to see.

  “I’m mostly self-taught,” Lux continued, “but I’d love to learn real techniques.” She flipped another page and noticed her hand shaking. She quickly tucked it into her lap. “You might have noticed I love taking portraits. I want to learn how to better capture people naturally. You know, when they’re not posing or posed.”

  “Yes, I can see that,” the woman with the Afro said. She smiled and pulled the album away from Lux, sliding it closer to their side of the table.

  “How long have you been doing this kind of work?” the pierced admissio
ns person asked.

  “I got serious about it a year and a half ago. I started watching tutorials on YouTube and checking out books from the library about it. That kind of thing. But I probably took my first photo when I was ten. My grandpa gave me an old film camera and turned the closet under his stairs into a darkroom, just for me.”

  Lux swallowed hard and avoided her father’s eyes. His dad had passed away a year and a half ago and left Lux all of his cameras. This explained how her mom knew she might want to go to a school where she could take pictures. But Lux wondered if her father had even remembered that she loved photography.

  “We understand you were expelled from your last school for fighting,” the woman with the Afro said next. “How do we know that behavior wouldn’t happen here?”

  Lux saw her dad tense in the chair next to her. He said, “She’s living with me now. So it won’t.” Lux got annoyed that he’d spoken for her, but she took a deep breath and nodded.

  “He’s right, it won’t, but not just because I’m living with him. I know I’ve run out of chances and options. So if things go badly here, I’ll have nowhere else to go,” she said firmly, looking at each of them. “I want this to be a real fresh start, and if you give me the chance to prove that I’ve changed, I won’t let you down. I promise.”

  They all nodded, but they didn’t seem convinced. Lux knew that her plea might not mean much to them, but she only made promises she planned to keep.

  “Why should we accept you into Savage when there is a waiting list full of kids who have been working on their craft since they were in primary school?” the bald man asked next, with a frown. She looked squarely at the guy’s bald head, and then at each of the piercings in the ears of the person next to him, and finally at the last woman’s big, bushy hair. She thought about the last year—the divorce, the fights, the expulsions—and everything else that had gone wrong. This could be her opportunity to do something well and maybe even get something right.

  She wanted to say that taking photos made it easier for her to breathe. But she worried that wouldn’t make any sense. So she thought of something that would.

  “There are probably five hundred photos in that album,” Lux said. “And these are just Polaroids and pictures I shot with the film cameras I got from my grandfather.” She reached into her bag and pulled out the digital camera she’d saved up for all last spring—the one she bought for cheap from a green-haired boy she’d fought another girl over, and then only spent the first month of summer kissing. “That doesn’t include the hundreds I have on my DSLR”—she held the camera high—“or the thousands I have saved in the cloud. You should pick me because those kids that have been making art since they were five probably started doing it because someone made them. Someone else thought they should take ballet or learn to sing or play the damn violin or whatever.” She hadn’t meant to swear, but it slipped out, anyway. Her father barely flinched, but she knew she wouldn’t hear the end of it once they were out of this office. She held her face still, didn’t apologize, and kept talking. She had a point to make. “Those kids are probably living out their parents’ failed dreams or something. But this?” Lux jabbed her finger in the direction of the photo album. “This all came directly from me.”

  Lux’s heart wouldn’t stop pounding after saying all that. She hadn’t been that honest in months. And that’s what scared her most of all—that she’d told the truth and they could still decide they didn’t want her.

  Lux woke up Monday morning to her father’s voice spilling into her room.

  “Luxana. Up. Be dressed and in the kitchen by oh seven hundred.”

  Lux groaned and looked at her clock. It was 6:45 a.m.

  “You want me to be ready in fifteen minutes?” she whined. “Seriously? What for?”

  “Look at the note on your desk.”

  Lux couldn’t help it. She smiled at the ceiling before hopping out of bed.

  Her dad used to leave her notes every morning when they lived together. Silly drawings, funny quotes, sometimes just ones that said things like, Shine today, Luxana Ruby Lawson. She didn’t think she’d ever get those notes back after he left. But maybe she was wrong.

  Lux found a slip of yellow paper on her desk that read: Got an email from Augusta Savage admissions late last night. You’re in, baby girl! Good job.

  “I’m what?” Lux shouted, and she could hear her dad laughing from the kitchen.

  * * *

  As Lux stepped into the kitchen, she could tell her father had a big lecture/pep-talk/first-day-threat-sesh prepared. And Penny looked frazzled because Lillia was screaming. The whole scene seemed like it would stress Lux out. So she just grabbed a banana and got out of the apartment as quickly as possible, but she tucked the note into her pocket. Lux wanted to keep the glimpse of the old version of her dad with her.

  On the way to school, she read over the list she’d written in her journal, made one small change, then she recited it over and over to the beat of the song blaring in her headphones. Listen to Dad. Go to school. Make friends. Join a club. No boys.

  When she saw the school again, though, with its flying flags and murals along the doors, most of the list flew from her mind.

  Lux hadn’t noticed it when she came in for her interview, but Augusta Savage School of the Arts was in a short, colorful building, and it looked a little out of place. It sat squeezed between a dental office and a grocery store, on a tiny one-way street in Harlem. It seemed too cheerful and bright to belong on the otherwise gray block. Lux liked that about it—she didn’t feel like she fit in, either. She felt more excited than she wanted to admit. The school looked like it gave out second chances: a place where she might find her place. Lux had only one thought filling her head as she walked through the school’s front doors. The final item on her list, she realized, was the most important one. No one could know.

  No one could know the real reason she had to transfer in the middle of the year or what had happened at her old school. No one could know how often she got angry, or that videos and photos of her latest fight existed. No one could find out about Simone’s broken nose. She’d been at enough schools to know that if people knew your history, you never got a real chance to start over.

  She tried not to look lost or bring any attention to herself, but everyone else seemed to be doing the opposite. Lux noticed a rainbow’s worth of dyed hair, too many piercings to count, and dozens of instrument-toting and wildly dressed students as she walked a short distance down the main hall. When she found her locker, she unzipped her backpack and used her phone’s camera to check her makeup. Her pink lip gloss popped under the florescent lights. She looked good, she thought, especially for someone who’d only had fifteen minutes to get ready.

  Lux opened her camera bag, checking to see which lenses she had with her. She didn’t have some of the ones she might need, and she felt more amateurish than ever, but she turned to scan the hallway with her camera in hand. She hoped taking a few photos would help her feel calm, or at least more like herself.

  “Hey,” she heard a kinda cute guy say to her. “You dropped this.” He was handing her a lens cap. His hazel eyes were peeking out from his gingerbread-brown face, and his messy charcoal-black hair made him look like trouble. Dark-haired guys were a weakness of hers, but boys were a complication she couldn’t afford.

  She could look, she told herself. She just wouldn’t touch. “Thanks,” she said, taking the cap from him and slipping it back into her camera bag. “Can I take your photo?”

  He smirked and looked her up and down. Without blinking, she looked right back.

  “Sure,” he said. “You new?”

  Lux shrugged and lifted her camera, loving the weight of it. It made her feel invisible and seen all at once.

  “Don’t smile,” she said, which always worked like a charm to break down whatever people tended to build in front of their faces the second
they knew someone planned to take their picture.

  The guy said, “What?” and laughed.

  She snapped the photo. That single click eased a bit of tension out of her body. She wanted to take more pictures, but she didn’t want him to think she was weird. She also worried he’d do something to piss her off and the whole turning-over-a-new-leaf thing she had going would be ruined on her first day. So she just said, “Thanks again.”

  She moved through the hall that way, using the camera to introduce and calm herself all at once. And she knew what they were thinking: Who’s the new girl taking pictures of whoever she wants? Where did she come from? And maybe even, Who does she think she is?

  Lux sometimes wondered the same things about herself. In the past year, she’d tried being a loner, tried blending in, and tried fighting back. Now she would try being someone completely different. Someone likable. Someone who tried new things, and made friends, and who didn’t get angry all the time. She hoped it would work.

  * * *

  Just before first period, Lux found a copy of the school paper in the girls’ bathroom. As she walked to class, she flipped through it, scanning the photos more than the articles themselves. She could see that the photographer had talent, but they kind of lacked . . . range. The photos, no matter the subject, were taken from far away. It made everything seem big and important, but Lux thought getting closer for certain moments might make the stories seem more personal and the students more human.

  She thought that maybe, if given the chance, she could do better. I do need to join a club, she thought. And how perfect would being the newspaper photographer be? She imagined how she would have shot a story on the second page about the fine-arts students’ last show.