Autumn looked at her watch and, by the light of the red bulb hanging from the ceiling, saw it was nearly eleven o'clock. She yawned. She'd been pulling some late nights recently, and she intended to get in bed as soon as she was done developing this last batch of film.

She was kneeling next to the tub in the cramped bathroom she shared with her sister, watching the three chemical baths lined up in trays at the bottom of the tub. Immersed in each bath was a photograph at one stage or another of development. She'd already developed two and a half rolls of film since setting up her makeshift developing laboratory earlier in the evening; the pervasive red light was starting to hurt her eyes.

She could have just as easily, and much more cheaply, used the lab at school, but she enjoyed having her own equipment and chemicals. Photography wasn't just a class to her, it was her hobby; and it was nice to be able to develop her film any time she wanted without worrying about the lines outside the school development lab. Besides, the basic chemicals and equipment were relatively cheap, and she had a friend who worked at a film shop and printing lab who gave her a discount on most of the stuff she needed.

She moved one of the developing eight-by-ten prints around in its bath with a pair of wooden tongs, trying to distinguish what picture it was. She snapped so many pictures sometimes, she would develop them later with no memory of actually taking them. In those cases, it was fun to watch the forms gradually take shape on the paper, like reading little bits of her own history that had passed out of memory long ago.

She recognized this particular shot, though. This was the one she'd taken of Terry during lunch, his Physics book in his lap and a half-eaten bagel in his hand. She smiled. It was a good shot, better than she'd thought, in fact. Terry was comical in his concentration. Autumn began brainstorming yearbook captions again. She didn't think she'd have any trouble getting this shot approved for either the yearbook or the "day-in-the-life" section of Wolverine Tracks, Westridge's monthly student newspaper.

She stirred the chemicals a little and frowned at the picture. This was the final bath, so the shot of Terry should have been fully developed, but that didn't seem to be the case. She pulled the photograph out of the bath with the tongs and hung it with a clothespin from the line she had strung across the tub, alongside numerous other shots drying in the bathroom's close air.

Her first thought had been that the photo was out-of-focus - either she hadn't focused properly when taking it or she'd rushed the projection of the negative onto the light-sensitive paper. Now though, she doubted either was the case. While it was true that Terry himself was slightly out of focus, blurry around the edges, nothing else in the shot was. Even the book in Terry's lap and the bagel in his hand, objects in the same "focus-plane" as Terry himself, were sharply defined. But Terry wasn't. The blur wasn't bad, but it was noticeable. It gave him almost a shimmer around the edges.

In fact, if he hadn't been so distinctly solid inside the exterior blur, Autumn would have thought she was looking at a picture of a ghost.

"Hm." She shrugged and shuffled through the pile of negatives stacked on the sink. She found the strip with Terry's picture in it and knelt down in front of the enlarger she had set up on the floor. She inserted the negative into the carrier and slid a sheet of light-sensitive paper underneath the lens. Being extra careful that the shot was perfectly focused, she projected the image from the negative 7onto the paper. That done, she moved the photo to the first bath.

While she waited for the remaining shots to finish cycling through, she looked at the pictures she already had strung up. There were all sorts in this bunch - candid shots, photos from the Drama Room, pictures of her protesting mother and sister. Most of them were focused perfectly. Autumn was a meticulous focuser, and took pride in the fact that she usually didn't need the camera's auto-focus. Besides, even if she hadn't been fully confident in her manual focusing abilities, she'd never seen a picture blur like this one had.

In a few more minutes, the rest of the pictures were done, including the second print of Terry eating lunch. She knew before she pulled it out of the last tray and hung it from the clothesline that whatever had gone wrong with the first print had been repeated on the second. Terry was still blurry while the rest of the world around him was still sharply in focus.

"Strange," Autumn muttered, tapping the first print with her tongs. She couldn't believe her camera was the problem. If it was, why was this the only shot affected?

"Curiouser and curioser. Is the problem you then, Mr. Todd?"

Ridiculous, she knew, but after a couple hours in her makeshift darkroom, with everything cramped and painted a deep, blood red, things seemed possible that wouldn't seem so in daylight. Even that an old friend might be emanating some peculiar type of radiation, the kind that turned him into a shimmering ghost on film.

She shook her head. Maybe this would make more sense in the morning. Her brain was tired now. Time to give it a rest.

She reached for the bulb hanging above the sink, and, in the moment after she'd stopped its red glow but before she'd opened the door to the lighted hallway outside the bathroom, the image of Terry's picture hung in her night-blinded vision, like a nagging question that won't go away just because you've closed your eyes.