Shooting the Moon by Frances O'Roark Dowell Read Free Book Online

sat plush in the middle, beaming, a fat full moon on a beautiful night.
    â€œNow will you watch me ride my bike?” Cindy asked.
    â€œSure,” I told her, tucking the pictures back into the envelope. Usually I would have found an excuse to go home, but I was feeling good. I had developed and printed a roll of film. And maybe even better than that, TJ had asked me to do it, which meant he believed I could. I don’t know why he believed it, but he did. So now
we
had something in common, even though we were so far away from each other.
    â€œCome on,” Cindy groused at me from the doorway. “Let’s get going!”
    I picked up the envelope and followed her out the door. “Okay, okay, you don’t have to be such a grouch.”
    But I was smiling as I said it. I guess I was in a generous mood.

seven
    TJ’s next so-called letter came two weeks later. I ripped open the padded envelope, hoping this time there’d be a note with some real news in it, some good old-fashioned descriptions of rifle reports or a hand grenade rolling across a jungle path, something that would give me a real feel for what it was like to be TJ right then. It might be tough for me to actually get a job as an ambulance driver in Vietnam, but if TJ would just write me a real letter, it would be like I was there in Vietnam, right beside him.
    But all that envelope contained was two rolls of film in their little black canisters with their littlegray caps. His letter to my parents was as boring as the one before it had been. The food was bad; the nurses were nice, a couple of them were even pretty; he’d been riding some in the medevac helicopter, which was the helicopter that went to pick up wounded soldiers. That last part had the potential to be interesting, only TJ didn’t describe an actual time when he’d ridden the helicopter out to a battle scene. My seventh-grade English teacher, Mrs. Robertson, would have deducted ten points for lack of specific detail.
    Because I was a natural in the darkroom, I decided to try developing the film alone, without Sgt. Byrd there to guide me through every step. I felt nervous about it, but I reasoned that I couldn’t depend on Sgt. Byrd to be there to help me the entire time TJ was in Vietnam. And I didn’t make a single mistake, if you don’t count dropping the film spool lid in the dark closet and having to get down on my hands and knees to find it and then dropping the second roll of film in the dark, before I’d even unspooled it, and having to scramble around twenty minutes before I found it by kneeling on it.
    But I didn’t expose the film, and that was all that counted. When I finished getting it on the spool and into the canister and got the lid on tight, I mixed the developer and poured it into the canister. I poured out the developer after ten minutes, poured in the vinegary-smelling stop solution. After that came the fixer. Then I rinsed off all the chemicals, pulled out the negatives, and hung them up to dry from the clothesline strung across the room, and went out to talk to Private Hollister.
    â€œI wish TJ would write me a real letter,” I told him after we’d sat down across from each other at his desk and he began to deal the cards for a game of gin. “I don’t even know if he got the pictures I developed for him.”
    â€œWhen did you send them?”
    â€œA week ago.”
    â€œHe ain’t got the package yet, then. Or he’s just getting it right about now.”
    â€œWell, you’d think he’d want to see how I did on the first roll of film before he sent me any more.” I leaned back in my chair, thinking about how badlyI wanted to hear what TJ had to say about the job I did with his film. He’d only asked for contact sheets, where each negative was printed in miniature, so you could see all your pictures from a roll of film on one sheet of paper. I’d done a sheet for him, but