Leap of Faith

Day Twenty-Seven

*~*~* Cate *~*~*

Since helping Liam Lexton finish his physics project, I could finally concentrate on mine. If only I knew what I wanted to do. I could go down the route of photographing a physics phenomenon, but that just seemed too easy. I wanted something a little more challenging. I’d spent most of last night thinking about ideas, and it still occupied my thoughts today. I had been walking around with my thinking face on, and it was starting to annoy me that I was frowning in concentration too much.

“You should smile more,” TJ tells me as we walk towards the soccer field. He suddenly stops walking and, instead, starts babbling nonsensically. “Not that you don’t smile enough, because you do, and you look beautiful when you do… it’s just a well-known fact that you use more muscles to frown.”

I roll my eyes. “I know,” I say as I nudge him to start walking again. “It takes seventeen muscles to smile and forty-two to frown.”

“It’s actually forty-three,” TJ corrects me. I look up at him, wondering how he would know the exact number. It’s not exactly the type of thing people walk around knowing. He shrugs. “I like weird facts. Did you know giraffes only sleep for about four hours a day?”

“I didn’t,” I laugh. “And it’s kinda strange, yet cool, that you do know that.”

When we reach the soccer field TJ kisses my cheek and heads for the locker room to change. I sit at the player’s bench and take out the camera I had bought with me, double checking that I had enough film for the game.

I’m a little old fashioned when it comes to photography. Yeah, I have a digital camera, although I don’t use it often. With the camera on my cell phone, it seemed pointless to carry a second camera, but it didn’t stop me from buying myself a Polaroid camera on my birthday last year. That said, I always preferred my old school camera, where I’d have to spend hours after school developing the film. There was something therapeutic in watching the photographs develop and seeing the results always gave me that warm feeling of accomplishment. Sometimes it was hard to convince myself that I had taken the picture. Does that sound really egotistical?

I set the camera on the bench next to me and pull out my note book. The soccer team had to be here an hour before the game started, and for some reason I had agreed to wait around while TJ changed and warmed up. Knowing that I’d get bored quickly, I brought some work to complete. I finished my math homework pretty quickly, and swiftly moved on to choosing my physics project topic.

I’d been so engrossed in thinking up ideas that I hadn’t noticed that the Capshaw team was on the field until I heard TJ’s voice shouting my name frantically. I looked up just in time to see the soccer ball heading towards me. Or, to be more specific, it was making a beeline for my head. I screamed and slid of the bench, my hands covering my face as I tried to protect myself.

“You ok?” I heard someone ask with pure amusement lacing their voice. I looked up to see Coach Yeeles standing next to me, his arms crossed over his chest as he kept his gaze on the field. “Camera Girl, are you alright?”

“Yes, Coach,” I say as I get up, wiping invisible dirt from my jeans. “By the way, my name is Cate.”