“Uhhh, no,” Cam admits. He grins and looks up at me from the notebook. “But I have a feeling you’re about to remind me.”
“It was a monument made to memorialize the state of California officially joining the Union.”
“Union,” Cam says. “Got it.”
“Turns out, there are a lot of reference entries for Harvey Milk and unions. Did you know one of Harvey Milk’s biggest movements as an activist was to lead a boycott over a beer company whose union workers were on strike?”
“Hmm. Union…union.” Cam taps his chin in thought. He pulls a face. “That’s a little bit of a stretch, V. It might be something, though.”
I turn to the next page in my notes. “Okay, well, how about this? Do you know where the Stonewall riots took place?”
“New York City?”
“At the Stonewall Inn,” I tell him. “In Greenwich Village.”
I let Cam work out the next connection.
“And you found the clock fountain along the Greenwich Steps,” he says slowly.
“Wefound it there, yeah.”
Cam motions to the open books around me. “So…what does this mean? What do we do?”
I check my phone. “First we keep our twelve p.m. appointment upstairs. But maybe these facts, these little gay history footnotes, can be a sort of confirmation system for each drawing. I’m not sure yet.”
Cam helps me pack up the books and place them on the return cart. When we arrive at the sixth floor, I’m almost relieved to see a different librarian working at the check-in desk. Like as long as no one here officially recognizes me from before, I’m in the clear. The man seats us at a different row of tables, this time packed not with two but ten boxes of city archives.
“What is all this?” Cam asks.
“Every city park archive from 1970 through 1985,” I say. “At least, whatever they kept around at that time. Oh, and be careful—we found a used tissue the last time we were here.”
I hand Cam a pair of white gloves and a pencil stub. He immediately tucks the pencil stub behind his ear, which looks simultaneously stupid and strangely hot. He then makes a show of putting on the gloves like a doctor heading into surgery, except the gloves at the library don’t snap the way medical gloves do, and, thank God, this time he just looks stupid.
“Okay, which images are we looking for again?”
I pull up Gilbert Baker’s drawing on my phone, zooming in and scrolling to the four remaining images we haven’t yet figured out. There’s the eagle with the shield. The head in the sink. The three women in the middle of what must be debilitating menstrual cramps. And, of course, the woman with the necklace, wearing that long floral dress.
“She’s holding something,” Cam points out. “Right there. In the hand closer to the screaming ladies. Is it…glasses?”
“I think it’s one of those fancy masks, like the ones people wear at a masquerade party.”
“Maybe,” Cam says. He squints. “It looks more like binoculars to me.”
“But it has that long handle!” I say. “See, it goes all the way from her hand to her hip almost.”
“Hmm. Let’s put a pin in that for now.” Cam pulls off a lid from one of the boxes. “So. We set aside anything that could be a match?”
“Yes. Anything that could be a match.”
The two of us get started.
As the minutes collect into the first hour, it becomes clear that working with Cam is undeniably different than working with the yearbook crew. Cam has always struck me as the type of group partner who would want to goof off and talk the whole time. But here he’s quiet and methodical. He doesn’t even mind going through the occasional disgusting unidentified object.
“The Three Shades,” Cam says an hour and a half into our appointment. He taps the bottom right corner of the scroll between us.
“Oh.” I put down my stack of photographs and look closer at the drawing of the women. All three figures are rendered in slightly different styles—one in basic line work, one with some shading, and one almost entirely in shadow.
“I guess they are in three shades,” I say. “I hadn’t noticed that part before.”
