CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“A true hero is not someone who does a heroic act under extreme pressure;
It is someone who does heroic acts time and time again,
simply because he can!”
As clearly a work of absolute brilliance Explosion Man was, it still wasn’t the best thing to come out of my first semester back at Uni. Even more surprisingly it wasn’t even the best thing to come out of an assignment!
Half way through the semester, my nature photography tutor decided to drop a bomb shell of his own on the class. It was decided that instead of an exam that year, we would be given an unexpected major assignment. We would be required to split into groups of two, and hand in a portfolio of ten photographs under the title “Unnatural Nature”. Our only guidance was that the photos could not include any man made items; they had to be completely natural.
Now if you have read the rest of my story up to now, then you would struggle to see how I could consider an assignment like this to be the best thing to happen to me in a whole semester of university.
Well the reality is of course at first it wasn’t. While most people in the class were forming natural groups of two with friends, or just other class mates, I sat in my usual spot in the back corner nearly having a panic attack. I burst out in sweat, and began breathing heavily like I had just gotten my head stuck inside a plastic bag for five minutes (or more likely someone had stuck my head in a plastic bag and held it on until I fainted – that’s how it usually happened).
Most times when situations like this had come up before, most people would find friends to form their groups, then the several Friendless Freddie’s of us would all sit looking uncomfortable trying to spot who would be left over. If there was an even number of Nigel No Friends then you would slowly slide over to who ever was closest and say “I guess were stuck with each other” and the other guy would reply “I guess” then you would both make faces like the teacher had just told us that no body would be given permission to leave the room until everyone picked somebody else’s nose and ate what ever you could find in there, most likely a huge gooey booger, which looked like a slug which had been smashed with a hammer. Then you would proceed to do as much of the work as possible without talking to that person and therefore guarantee yourself a crap mark.
The alternative was worse. In this case there would be an odd number of Nevil Nobody Likes in the class, usually three. The other two would then proceed to look around and both agree that they would rather work together than have to end up with me.
I would then sit as quiet as a dead mouse hoping that no one would notice me being on my own, and just as I was starting to think I might get away with it, the teacher would suddenly pipe up
“Jason Domey! Where is your partner?”
“I haven’t got one miss…….I’ll have to do it on my own” I’d optimistically reply
“No you will not” She would respond “I’ll find you a group to join”
“Ok”
“Christian and Julian (it wasn’t always Christian and Julian, but it would always be the two kids in the class I hated the most) let Jason Domey join your group”
“Awwwwegghhhh do we have to miss?” they would whine in unison
“Yes you do have to”
I would then eek my way over to where they were sitting, and one of them would say
“I can’t believe we get stuck with a Lenny Loser Dickless wonder like you” and the other would offer encouragement in the form of
“We’re going to make you pay for this”
They would then make me do the entire assignment by myself and then beat the shit out of me for getting them a shit mark.
On this day I was following the usual routine, only problem was that no one else was. So in no time at all I was the only person sitting all alone. The rest of the class had quickly congregated into their pairings, and by now were sitting in groups of all sorts of sizes busily discussing their initial ideas.
I on the other hand was busily having severe heart pains at the pressing prospect of admitting to the teacher that I was incapable of finding a partner. However just before I reluctantly made my assault to the teacher’s desk something quite unexpected happened.
A beautiful girl from where the biggest student congregation was, separated from her group and walked over to me, she then sat in the chair in front of me but backwards on the chair, so that her legs were spread on either side of the back rest with her arms crossed on top.
She starred at me straight into my eyes, which precluded me from looking up her skirt which I could tell must be showing a very exposed pubic region with her oh so short skirt and legs spread like a peanut butter sandwich. She starred at me for what seemed like two minutes without either of us saying a word, until she eventually broke a very uncomfortable silence.
“Hi” She said with a cheer in her voice
“Hi” I shyly responded
“So”
“So”
“Do you have a partner yet?”
“No”
“Do you want one?”
“Do you want to be my partner” I hesitantly replied
“I’d love to! Thanks for asking”
“But you”
“So you’re Jason aren’t you?”
“Yes”
“I’m Hannah………..I know daggy name” She replied as she reached out and shook my hand
“Nnniiiiiiiiiiccceee……..firm hand shake you got there Jas, you’re pretty fit bloke aren’t you, do you work out?”
“I just go on lots of walks….run sometimes too”
“Coooool…I’m a walker too…..mostly go for bushwalks or somewhere by the water. I just love getting out in nature…you know what I mean? Well deeeerrrr, nature photography class! Obviously!”
“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE OOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRRR” the bell screamed
“So hey, here is my number and address” She said as she began scribbling down her details “can I have yours?”
“Oh…ok” I wrote down mine too, she took my piece of paper and studied what I wrote briefly
“Hey same neighborhood! We’ll be able to hang out heaps and do it really well”
“Ok”
“Well cool, great to meet you Jas, talk to you soon ok?”
“Ok”
With that she jumped up and left the room. I sat there dumfounded. What the fuck just happened? Did that beautiful outgoing girl really just decide she wanted to be my partner on this?
I sat there until the class room began to fill up with the next class – then I decided that being in the wrong class when it commenced was one embarrassment that I didn’t need, so I eventually got up and left - feeling very serene.
I should probably tell you what Hannah looks like. She is a very pretty girl, but I would say she is a weird kind of pretty. First impressions of her when she just walks into the room is wow, wow, wow, breath gone like a punch in the guts. Then she gets closer to you and you think, yeah very, very nice, but maybe not as nice as you thought when you saw her from ten meters away. So you leave her company that day not really necessarily thinking about her. Then one day, on a day like this day for me, she comes up to you real close and talks to you. And you actually get to study her face, with her enormous eyes, and that smile which could light up a black hole, and you realize, hang on this is one god damn attractive femalie, how did I miss that before?
Hannah possesses a number of your stereotypical male masturbation fantasy weapons of choice. She has blonde hair, a very nice skinny figure but with enough in the butt and breast area to keep you more than interested. However her blond hair is extremely curly and wild, her body is cracking but your attention is often drawn completely away from it by her wild dress sense, full of colors and clothes in weird shapes and sizes. Then again her dress sense is constantly changing. One day she will be wearing baggy cargo pants with a huge long t-shirt over the top and her hair as wild as a starving monkey in a banana shop, and no one will really notice her. Then the next day she will come to class in a short mini skirt, a midrift singlet, with her hair combed straight and she will become the centre of attention like there is some tractor beam emanating from her, and the whole class will stare at her all day, even the girls.
I guess she just decides at the start of the day how she feels like being treated that day, attention or no attention. It must be nice being able to manipulate people like that. Maybe that’s why she did it, just that feeling of power at being able to affect the way people around you feel emotionally.
That night I had one of my stock standard boring nights in front of crap television. It was a cold night, with rain falling outside, so I decided to have a shower to warm myself up.
You know what it’s like when you’re in the shower and the phone rings? You hear it from the first ring, but you only sort of hear it, and don’t really register it until about ring three or four, then you wait for about two or three more rings trying to decide whether to get out of the shower or not. However in two or three rings you somehow have time to run through a thousand possibilities about who it may be in your head, from your mother or father, to some random girl who wants to tell you she secretly loves you, or someone from a hospital telling you someone is about to die and just wants to talk to you one more time, or a telemarketer, a radio competition, a wrong number, a guy wanting to tell you he has a secret crush on you (eew), a prank call, a brother wanting to take the piss out of you over something, etc etc.
Until you finally decide there are enough good possibilities on that list to make it a call you want to get. So you make that mad rush out of the shower, through the room getting everything wet, and managing to step on the one thing in the room which is both important and not water resistant, and then fall over onto the floor as you reach out for the handset, snatch it off and pull it to your ear just in time to hear the phone hang up at the other end.
Of course this convinces you that whether good or bad, that was a call that you just absolutely must have answered. You check the caller ID – private number, this just both makes you want to bash yourself in the head with the receiver and convinces you for certain that it was an important call; I mean who is not important that feels the need to privatize their numbers? Arrogant bastards!
So you sit and stare at the phone, praying to god and the devil and Allah that whoever it was will call you back one more time, just in case, I mean this is life or death after all. You stand there with a prayer in your mind and hope in your heart just long enough for all the water on your body to transport itself onto your porno magazine collection strategically located directly below you. Until you finally give in and accept that the love of your life will call her back up guy and they’ll be shagging before you’re dressed again, and that your father is dying and you wont get that one last chance to say “Fuck you, you miserable old bastard!”
So you stagger back to the bathroom, with the carpet feeling surprisingly gross being all wet, and getting all your old dirt and crumbs stuck to your foot. By then you’re basically dry but out of habit you reach out for a towel to dry yourself off, when the phone starts to ring again.
Now you know that this time you heard the first ring, this time you’re already out of the shower and within five steps of the phone, so you know you have time to casually pick up a towel and wrap it around yourself, before strolling back across the room and scooping up your receiver well and truly in time for a jolly old chat.
This however, is not the decision you make. Spurred on by a lethal cocktail of frustration, curiosity, determination, and stupidity, you attempt to break the world record for the five meter sprint, then pull off a full stretch swan dive and smash the phone into your ear before the third ring is heard around the land of your apartment. You then proceed to answer the phone with heavy breath, while now completely drying off on your bed, guaranteeing a night sleeping in a wet patch not acquired in one of the two or three possible fun ways. You then are fortunate enough to say “No I don’t want to change my long distance phone company, look at my phone records you fucking moron, I haven’t made a long distance call in my entire life, I don’t even make local calls, so fuck off, and fuck you, and fuck your company and fuck fucking fuck you fuck”.
Does that happen to you? It still manages to happen to me regularly, and I only get about four calls a month. How on this wide, wide universe do they bloody well know when you’re in the shower?
So any how that’s not what happened to me that night. Most of it happened, although I didn’t get to say that “fuck fucking fuck you fuck” bit, because it wasn’t a phone company or telemarketer trying to find out how often I buy laundry detergent and would I like to try new ‘summer sunshine stick it where the sun don’t shine’ laundry powder. Instead I had the following exchange.
“He uh ha uh uh ha llo” I answered with my little remaining breath, from my short dash across the room
“Hi, is that Jason?” Replied a female voice somewhat hesitantly
“Yes”
“Oh hi this is Hannah, how are you tonight?” She said, now much more cheerfully
“Ok”
“Cool…….. I’m doing pretty good tonight……..did you just get home?........Just I called a couple of minutes ago and nobody answered”
“Sorry…..I just got out of the shower”
“Hhhhmmmm….reaaally….so does that mean your still naked? She asked in a sinister tone
“well………..yeah…….I guess”
“Hhhhhhhhmmmm………I guess I shouldn’t have called……I should have just come on over”
“O………K”
“Really…you don’t mind?.......Ok I’ll be around in five minutes…seeya then”
“Wait but” I said as I heard the phone hang up at her end “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck”
So started the most frantic five minutes of my life!
I don’t have much stuff, but when you have an apartment smaller than Jennifer Lopez’s arse it can still get very, very messy, and with that little space and furniture its bloody hard to clean adequately in an extremely quick time.
I had to prioritize. First thing – all the (wet) porn under the bed, then jam absolutely everything else possible under the bed. That was about three things! It was already pretty jam packed with a bunch of other useless shit. Then pile everything else up as tightly as possible into the corner behind the door.
I was just finishing up when there was a knock on the door, Hannah!
“Holy fucking shit forgot one thing……getting dressed!” I screamed at my brain (god I hate my brain sometimes).
“Thank god for the spray painted window” (see what smart things I’m capable of when I don’t use my brain?)
“Just a minute” I yelled at the door
Then I frantically grabbed at the pile behind the door to find some clothes, throwing stuff all over the room until it was far messier than it had been before I started cleaning up. I whacked on a pair of sweat pants and a t-shirt and opened the door looking like I had just taken a nap on the back of a truck driving down a rocky road.
.. ..
“Hi Jas……hey…you said you were nude…..never would have come around if you were going to put clothes on” She said as she walked in
“Ok”
“Just kidding mate…..what have you been up to?”
“Just a bit of cleaning up”
“Oh looks like you did a good job”
“Thanks”
“Man…..this place is a dump…..never thought I’d find someone with a place as crappy as mine” She said as she gave herself a tour of the place, which of course only required her to do a circle on the spot “Are you paying your way through school just with tax payer handouts too?”
“Yeah”
“God bless working folk”
“I kn”
“Heeeey……I like your blinds……very alternative modernist!” She said as she looked at my spray painted window
“Thanks”
“So there Mr Domey…..do you want to get down to it?”
“Get down to what?”
“Our assignment!.........What did you think I meant…..having a quick fuck on this so called bed of yours?” She said very seriously, before suddenly bursting out into fits of laughter
“No”
“Hey it’s ok Jas…don’t worry….I just usually wait until after we’ve finished our assignment before I fuck my partners!” She said as she walked past me, giving my cheek a little pinch on her way to sitting on my bed with a huge smile on her face
“Ok”
“Ha ha ha ha ha ha” she laughed again “Don’t worry Jas…..I’m not that crazy……I’ll probably even wait until you stab me until I stab you……so come over here and sit next to me…..unless you have some other place to sit hiding in this apartment somewhere”
I went over and sat down on the bed. She was sitting right in the middle of the bed, so I tried to sit as far away from her as possible, right up against the wall. She responded to this by immediately sliding over right up next to me, so that our legs were touching just gently.
It was only now that I noticed she was again wearing a really short skirt with her legs wide apart.
“Damn I knew I should have put a mirror opposite my bed!” I thought to myself
She was also wearing a low cut singlet showing some ample cleavage which I couldn’t help to look down at from where we were sitting. Well I guess I could have looked her in her eyes, but that’s a bit hard when sitting so close.
“So why did you decide to be my partner?” I asked after what seemed like an hour of uncomfortable silence, but in reality was probably only two or three seconds.
“Fuck you” I thought to myself. I was saving that question for a really bad uncomfortable silence, not the first minor one. She had been there one minute and I’d already used all of my conversation ideas.
.. ..
“I was wondering when you were going to ask that” she replied
“So”
“You're really a quiet one aren’t you?”
“I guess”
“Well lets be serious for a second……..you’re a really quiet guy, super quiet, quiet as a mouse, quiet as an empty house”
“Ok”
“That’s why I picked you”
“Because I’m quiet?”
“Yes”
“But why?”
“Listen I’ve known a lot of people in my life…and I can tell you something about yourself that you probably don’t even know…..quiet people are always….one hundred percent of the time…..the creative ones…..are the imaginative ones…..and are the original ones!”
“You really think?”
“Absolutely…hey I’ve only known you for less than a day, and you’ve barely said ten words to me in total….but I can tell you fit the mold”
“Really?”
“Yeah! I mean look….you have a floor covered in junk…but I can see at least ten drawings you’ve done of some super hero…..you have a window spray painted black instead of blinds….your surrounded by creativity. Me I’m just a try hard creator….I love trying to express myself creatively….but I just do it in the obvious stereotypical ways….like a pierced nostril….or taking up art classes. I picked you because I want to drain your brain of all those wonderful…unusual….amazing ideas that I know you have all day. See my theory is……the only way a guy like you gets through the day without sticking a Swiss army knife into your jugular…..is by retreating into fantasy worlds……where magical things happen. You don’t know how lucky you are. People like me….we’re stuck with plain boring old reality. We dream of just five minutes of time in your mind!”
“I don’t feel all that lucky”
“Hey man….grass is always greener…..that’s why you make friends with your neighbor”
“And you don’t care that I’m quiet?”
“Well if you haven’t noticed yet…I’ll give you the hot tip……..are you ready?........(I nodded)…….here’s my big secret………I talk lots!.....it’s nice to have someone to spend time with who’s not competing with me for airtime all of the time!……..Besides….spend enough time with me and I promise you you’ll start to find your voice!” she said, and I
I smiled
“Ok Serious talk time over…..fulltime……now lets get a pick axe out and crack open that big beautiful skull of yours!”
Now this may surprise all you readers out there, but I had actually already given quite a lot of thought to this project. Nothing like fear of embarrassment in front of a hot girl to motivate you to get some work done!
“So spill….I know you have some ideas going for a jog in your mind already” She blurted out
“Ok” I started slowly “the way I figure it……..is……….um”
“Yes”
“Well the title’s Unnatural nature right?”
“Yeah”
“So what’s the obvious thing people are going to photograph?”
“I don’t know” she replied looking like she genuinely didn’t have any ideas
“They’re going to walk around the bush or a lake or something and try to take photos of some weird looking flowers…..or plants…or trees…or animals, bugs or something…..or try to get a photo of a four leaf clover….you know things like that”
“Yeah of course….that’s all you really can do….isn’t it? I mean it’s unnatural nature….your supposed to take photos of things that come in nature that look unnatural”
“Well we’re not!”
“We’re not?” She didn’t look too convinced
“We’re going to take photos of very ordinary natural things” I said smiling
“And?”
“We’re then going to make the prints unnatural”
“Ok……I’m starting to like the sound of this” she replied now with that big beaming smile of hers going
“See that way its unnatural nature!”
“Ok….but how are we going to make the prints unnatural?”
So I laid down my plan for her. See with the development of black and white photography it’s all about the exposure of light to a piece of photo paper. Photo paper is designed so that any light which comes into contact with turns the paper slowly black. A little bit of light and you get light grey and the longer the light is exposed to the paper the darker it will be.
So you take a negative and put it inside this machine which shines light through it onto the paper. Because the negative is the opposite of what you photographed, the sections of the picture which are bright or white, will be dark or black on the negative, therefore less light flows through and causes less grey on the photo paper. Of course the reverse is also true, sections which are black or dark will be light on the negative, so more light flows through and the photo in that section will come out darker.
This was the key to my plan. We would take a usual nice negative of a nature photo and manipulate the way the light shines through onto the paper to produce an unnatural looking picture – Unnatural Nature!
My idea was that we would take a series of photos, which were from a distance, but had one element to them which we wanted to highlight, or to make the focus. We could then add some effects to the print my messing around with the flow of the light to create a pattern of some sort which would draw your eye to the focal point. I just hadn’t decided what to make the theme of our focus points.
“It should be like a human body part!” Hannah suddenly suggested
“That’s not a bad idea………. I like that” I replied
“Oh oh oh oh oh I’ve got it!” She said with a huge smile on her face
“Yes”
“It should be nude body parts………just sort of poking through a bush…….or the hole in a tree!”
“I guess it has to be doesn’t it……clothes are man made……..so it could be like our hands or eyes or something”
“I was thinking more along the lines of a breast, or a penis, or a vagina!”
“That sounds great……only……we don’t have any nude models” I said in a tone suggesting that there was no chance in hell that that was going to be what we did
“Yeah we do…….you and me!”
“Hhhhmmmmm…….yeah……..well no, no we don’t”
“Well I’ll do it even if you’re too chicken”
“You would actually let me take photos of you in the nude for the whole class to see?”
“Yeah……of course……I don’t mind…..I’m not shy about my body – people see me naked all the time…..I don’t have any issues like that with my body”
“Are you sure?…..I mean we can come up with something else”
“I’m totally sure….absolutely……besides it’s only going to be bits of my body at a time….no one will even know it’s me…….except you of course…….it will probably actually just look like we went to an extra special effort and went out and hired a model!”
And so transpired an event which several days earlier would have seemed about as likely as me being abducted by aliens and taken back to their home planet and worshipped as a god; I got to spend nearly four whole hours in the woods with a gorgeous naked girl!
She didn’t even feel the need to put on clothes between shots, she just walked around like that the whole time, bending over, sitting down, standing around, jumping over loose rocks down the forest path, whatever she would normally of done if she was clothed. By the end of the day I don’t think there was a single milicentermetre of her skin which I hadn’t seen extensively.
She never even once showed any hint of embarrassment or modesty, even when I was quite clearly having a good old perve, she would actually smile and wink when she caught me starring at her pink, then again having studied her body I am quite certain she has nothing to be embarrassed about, but she never even acted at all like this wasn’t just the normal way people spend days with her. I felt as lucky as a champion race horse retired to stud.
We had taken about thirty rolls of film by the time she finally pulled her summer dress back over herself. We would walk around for ages to find a suitable location. Then we would take any photo we could think of at each spot. For example if we found a pretty spot with a section of foliage offering a window through the wall of shrubs and trees, then we would take photos from a bunch angles, sometime the ‘window’ in the middle or top corner, or what ever we could think of.
We would almost all the time take them with one of Hannah’s lovely body parts (quite often one of the most naughty parts) just showing enough so that there was no mistaking what it was, but only if you studied the photo looking for it. To the untrained or uninformed eye, they were just intended to look like a nice nature shot like you may find on a post card. Occasionally Hannah even talked me into being the model (she has a great ability to make me pack my bags for a guilt trip), but when she was starring down the lens and I was exposing my physical imperfections it would just be my hand, or eye, or at least some part of me that didn’t require me to strip. Actually Hannah was quite sweet and kept telling me I had a great body and should show it off, I know she was lying though, it must be much easier to be confident in your body when you have the ability to make the opposite sex ruin a pair of underwear just by looking at you!
At the end of the day I also actually got the guts to suggest that we get a bunch of close ups of her full body – head to toe. Not just so I could sneak a couple off to hide under my mattress to keep me company on my frequent lonely nights at home, or because I would probably in my entire life never again get such an incredibly opportunity to just study a gorgeous naked female right up close, but honestly mostly because I wanted to use them artistically in my last new idea for the project.
I decided that we should take the pictures and separate them into body parts. Then when we put them all together for presentation we would do it so it sort of formed a whole body. So like on the top would be one showing hair, then ears, then nose, an ear to one side, a smile below it, then a breast, a hand to the side, stomach, vaginal region, and at the bottom a foot (that was just my run down in case you didn’t know what order body parts go in). Then in the middle I had an idea how to use one of the full body shots spliced together with a general nature shot.
After we had picked out which of each photo we wanted to use, it was time to make them ‘unnatural’. The way we did this was experimenting with different ways to manipulate the light flow onto the photographic paper.
We tried all sorts of methods. Crumpled up pieces of cling wrap (it’s amazing how many times cling wrap has affected my life!) or cellophane, or paper, which we would spread all over the page, trying to make a pattern which would spiral your eye towards our body part. Sometimes we would make a circle pattern like hypnotists spin to take people under their control, or have the spread get more and more dense as it got closer to our focus, or sometimes we would have straight lines pointing out our vagina marks the spot.
We cut out patterns from paper which we laid over the paper or we’d spin the paper as the light shone on it to create a shadowy streaky effect, and just a shit load of trial and error.
After quite a long time in the red glow of the dark room, we finally got a feel of what worked and what didn’t, and the results started looking unbelievable. I’d never been more proud of something I had created. Hannah seemed more than pleased too. I got more hugs in a couple of hours in that dark room than I had received the entire rest of my life combined.
Eventually after asking Hannah seventeen times if she was absolutely completely truly undeniably utterly unrestrainedly positively with chocolate sauce on top definitely, definitely sure she didn’t mind that we could use a full body full frontal nude shot of her, and receiving sixteen variations on the answer “Yes I’m sure, please, please stop fucking asking me already”, I set to work on the big centre piece.
I matched an extremely captivating photo of a massive Morton Bay Fig Tree Hannah had taken, which was almost daunting in the way it dominated the photo, dark and menacing, with branches which seemed to be reaching out to grab you, with just one ray of sunshine flowing through highlighted by the forest dust, like a ray of hope to inspire you to overcome the enormous beast of a tree bearing down on you. Along side a gorgeous photo of Hannah, well all the nude photos of her were fantastic as you could imagine, but this one was my favorite, it was one where I clicked the photo right as there was a loud squawk from a black crow, which sounded like the high pitched wail of a man in the moment of his death at the hands of a foe, which understandingly scared the shit out of her for a second, which was just enough time to capture an amazing photo of her with her natural sexuality so obvious but with this shocking frightened expression on her face.
Then I cut a spiral type pattern out of a piece of paper and the opposite of the pattern. Then I made the exposure of the tree at first over the whole photo, but then only in the areas which the pattern allowed, then the reverse, Hannah over it all and then Hannah more pronounced on the opposite of the spiral. The result ended up being one of the few things in my life which far exceed my initial expectations.
At first glance the final photo looked like someone had somehow eaten a whole pile of negatives and photographic chemicals and vomited them all over the photo paper, not really resembling anything. But then if you focused on just the tree it suddenly jumped from the page and it was all you could see, then again if you focused just at Hannah she would jump from the page and the tree would be a distant memory, lost in the spiral pattern which dominated everything. Then if you unfocused again and tried not to concentrate on either of the images you would see a haunting image, dark and moody with the frightened ghost like image of Hannah looking up towards this ray of light fighting its way through the tree, only rather than offering a ray of hope it is seemingly a ray of evil and a source of horror for the girl. All this with the incredible pattern and tone changes all over.
By the time our big hand in day had arrived we had set our ten photos all together and the result was quite spectacular (even if I do surprisingly say so myself), and I was able to walk into class holding it in front of me really looking forward to going into a classroom for the first time in my life.
The teacher had set up around the classroom hooks so that everyone could hang their projects and we could check out what everyone else had done. “Just as I thought….everyone else has done the obvious” I gleefully said to Hannah. Then all the students started to walk around and look at the photos. There must have been six or seven projects which had at least one close up photo of an ugly insect! Soon enough though pretty much everyone was congregated around mine and Hannah’s work, and we were more than excited to hear comments such as
“Wow”
“Cool”
“These are niiiiiiiiiice”
“Fucking shit fuck, fuck shit…….why didn’t I fucking do something more like this”
“Not Bad” and about twelve different versions of
“Oh my god! I can’t believe they have Hannah nude in these”
Hannah just looked over at me with a smile and raised eyebrows and said “and you wanted to know why I picked you for my partner”.
