He was looking at me.

No, more like staring at me—as open as the old camera he was holding, a camera with a big hole where the lens was supposed to be, and the insides exposed. And I stared right back at him, taking in all his colors.

Edges of sand-colored hair, soft, vein-blue eyes, and the green cover of the paperback book he was also holding.

I was fourth in line at the camera store, waiting to pick up some prints I’d ordered weeks ago, and before I knew it, I felt it coming on again, that same tug of war, the two sides of my overcrowded head going at it—numbers on the left, images and colors on the right, each trying to get my complete attention—when the two sides of my brain did something they never did. They called a fifteen- second truce and pounded out a strange joint mission in two short words, like an S.O.S.

Rescue.

Him.

“Hey, Aiden.” A man I recognized as the owner of the shop, one of the last of the small camera stores left in the San Fernando Valley, appeared out of a back room and greeted him.

Aiden. I repeated the name to myself.

“Are we buying or selling today?” The owner said.

“Selling,” Aiden said, his tall frame just a little bent over. “Wish I didn’t have to.” The camera was silver and black, and his fingers wrapped lovingly around the spot where the missing lens had once sat. He moved it gently across the counter toward the owner, the leather shoulder strap trailing behind.

“You sure you want to sell it? It’s a rare model, you know,” the owner asked.

“I know, my dad bought it in Japan. I just . . .”

“And what happened to the lens?”

“Lost it. Went overboard, actually. Can you believe it?” He shook his head. “My hands froze, I guess.”

“Bad luck,” the owner said, and Aiden nodded.

“I’ll make out a check for you,” I heard the owner say. I looked up at the flat screen television above the counter. The weather guy on Channel 7 was going on about the heat wave, and the graphics below him pulsed across the screen.

Los Angeles, July 2009: One for the record books.

Froze? It was only the first week of July, but already the mercury hadn’t budged from its mid-nineties spot, a killer heat mixed with Santa Ana winds. Even inside the store I could smell the stale smoke of the distant fires in the hills and canyons that surrounded the valley.

The television screen abruptly went black, and there was a weird quiet. One customer left and three people remained in line. Counting down. Numbers were good. They organized the world for me. My father, Miles, used to make my brother, Jordan, go along with me whenever I went outside to play. “Safety in numbers,” Miles had cautioned. But I’d mixed it up. Somehow, I’d heard “Safety is numbers,” and that’s how it stayed, fixed in my mind—that numbers would always be safe. But my right brain disagreed now, as usual, and nudged me to pull out my camera.

Snap a random photograph.

“Eww, terrible,” someone a few feet ahead of me said, then took out some photos from a canary yellow Kodak envelope. She held the photos up to the ceiling light and inspected them. I could see that the photos were mostly dark and grainy, amateur attempts and flash failures, mistakes. “C-ra-ppy, aren’t they?” the girl said to the per- son standing next to her in line.

Suddenly the girl’s voice and stick-straight hair were completely familiar. It sounded exactly like my best friend, even though she’d been MIA for a couple of months now.

I edged up to get a closer look. “Bryn?”

“Yes. It’s me, Maddie.” She turned and said my name, loud. “This is kizzz-mit,” Bryn exclaimed, and she turned again, this time toward Aiden. In the corner, I saw Aiden tilting his head just slightly in our direction, a movement so tiny, almost indiscernible, but I could tell he was listening to what we were saying.

“What is?”

“Us bumping into each other, of course.” I’d met Bryn the summer my parents had sent me to a horseback riding camp in Ojai. Bryn’s mother had also coerced her into going, and we gravitated toward each other, the only two non-equestrians, both choking with laughter when we lagged behind all the other girls on the horse trails, and we’d been friends ever since, but I hadn’t seen her in a long time. “Definitely kizzz-mit.” She repeated. She was always looking up the origin of words and names and had a theory that people lived up to the meaning of their names, but kismet was more than just a word for Bryn.

“Sure, I remember. Kismet. There are no accidents, no coincidences, just the very powerful hand of fate, right?” She’d also told me that the origin of the word was the Arabic word qisma.

Bryn frowned. “You can joke about it all you want, but–” She glanced at Aiden again. Bryn looked exactly the same, her long blonde hair flat-ironed, her purple bra showing beneath her spaghetti-strap camisole. Her voice was husky, almost hoarse, a little like one of the Power Bars she was always munching on, salty-sweet. Only her face was thinner, the mascara in clumps on her lower lashes. But she looked at me closely and broke out in a smile. “I see you’re wearing the pomegranate T-shirt I gave you, the one I brought for you from that London museum my mom dragged me to.” The shirt was a little faded from washings, but the print, a graphic reproduction of an old, botanical illustration, was still bright, a pomegranate hanging from its stem, along with a cross-section of the fruit, exposing the ruby-red seeds…

I stole another quick glance at Aiden. His gaze was still steady on me. He looked just a little older than Jordan. Twenty-one? That would make him barely four years older than me. His lashes were long and dark, but his beauty wasn’t simple, as though he was the trick answer to a multiple-choice question on a math test, none of the above. I forgot about Bryn and began to march right over toward him.

But before I reached him I felt a vibration, the store windows starting to rattle and then violently shake. What sounded like a thunderclap followed and there was the roar of a fast gush of water at my feet. In a second, water was everywhere, rising quickly and more than a foot high, and the current almost knocked me right off my feet.