Read From Bad to Cursed for Free Online Page B

envelope.
    “I dropped off my stuff a few minutes ago,” I said, “but it was a mistake. I need it back.”
    She didn’t move. “Are you Alexis Warren?”
    I nodded and stood there panting until she took a step back.
    “Come in,” she said, with a sweep of her arm.
    I went straight for the table, but the blue envelope was gone.
    “It’s over here,” she said, walking to a worktable with a daylight lamp shining down on my portfolio. “It’s the first one I opened.”
    “Oh, no,” I said.
    The woman gave me a pointed look. “Generally, if you want your work lost in the crowd, you don’t submit it in an eye-catching envelope.”
    The book was open to the very last picture, a close-up of the grille of a rusted old car. I’d cleaned the hood ornament and grille until they were as brilliant as the day the car was made, but left the rest of the rust, grime, and cobwebs.
    “That’s nice,” she mused. Never before had the word “nice” stung so sharply. What she meant was: Nice—but forgettable.
    But that was the least of my worries. If she’d seen that photo, that meant she’d seen the others. The ones I’d never meant to show anyone—much less a judging panel full of strangers.
    I grabbed the book and pushed it back in my tote bag. “I’m sorry,” I said. “There’s been a mistake. I withdraw.”
    The woman gazed down at the table where my pictures had been, almost like she was still looking at them. “What a shame,” she said. “All right, then. Good night.”
    If she’d pressed for details, I wouldn’t have given them to her. But her easy dismissal bugged me. “It’s just that there are pictures in here I didn’t mean to include.”
    She glanced at me sideways. “Which ones?”
    “Some that are…personal.”
    “All of your photographs should be personal,” she said.
    “I guess I could take them out,” I said, “and leave the rest of the book.”
    “You’d lose.”
    I’m pretty sure my mouth fell open right about then.
    “Bring it here,” she said, motioning me over. Something in her manner made me obey. She flipped directly to the first of the photos I would have removed. “Do you mean these?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “This is you?”
    Yes. It was a self-portrait, taken in a mirror: me sitting next to my new camera as warily as the bride and groom in an arranged marriage. It had taken forever to set up that picture, because my collarbone and wrist were broken. I was all bandaged up; there was a cut on my cheek, and some of my hair had been singed off, but I hadn’t been to the salon to get it trimmed yet. I’d spent a frustrating hour trying to understand all of the camera’s fancy automatic settings, and I still wasn’t sure if I’d gotten it right.
    I looked wild, battered, exhausted—but it was a good picture.
    She flipped the page.
    The two facing pages had pictures of my parents. I’d based them on that old painting, American Gothic, of two farmers just standing there. For the first one, I’d made them stand in front of the town house, dressed in their work clothes. It was about forty degrees out, and neither of them had a jacket. Mom is trying to smile through the cold. Dad is stoic, favoring his right leg the way he does when his leg injuries bother him (yet another Because of Kasey) . They look miserable but determined.
    The second one is the same pose, but they’re standing in front of the burned out shell of our old house. The pillars that once held up the roof of the porch jut out of the ground, looking like they fought their way to the surface, zebra-streaked with ash and scorch marks. Beyond lies all that remained of the grand front hallway—the first couple of stairs, the frame of the basement door, the fireplace against the back wall.
    I waited for a reaction, but she wordlessly turned the page.
    The next photo was a close-up of two naked wrists, lit sharply from one side, causing the crisscrossed scar tissue to stand out in vivid relief. I had to fight