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Andy Trudeau's mother had been rooting through the attic, in one of her occasional bouts of organization that inevitably turned up mementos from her son's boyhood. This time there had been a five-year lapse, and she had to be running out of stuff. But no -- she always found something, and would call on her son to take it away. The boxes she handed him were getting smaller, at least.
He didn't tell her how much of it he then got rid of, but he felt duty-bound to at least go through the stuff. But with the insanity his life had become — especially when Internal Affairs started coming after him — he had had neither the time nor the desire to pick through his mother's recent finds. The box had sat on his dining room table for almost a month.
Then one night, after scouring the metro section for any reporting on the police department, he tossed aside the newspaper in frustration and his mother's box caught his eye. Suddenly deciding he had nothing better to do than to delve into a simpler time, he pulled it over and opened it.
He didn't expect to find so much of Prue in there, but he should have. Mom had said it was stuff from high school. So it was: report cards, honor roll notices as well as a detention notice or two ... and an envelope containing six eight-by-ten, black-and-white photographs of Andy himself. The Andy of those photos was 18 years old, and he smiled and laughed and in one photo tried (to grown-up Andy's amusement) to look pensive and meaningful, posing on a January day in the park, all for the girl behind the lens.
That was Prue, of course. The camera, a fancy 35mm deal that she had saved up for, was seemingly a permanent extension of Prue through their senior year. That Saturday in January, Andy had rolled his eyes when she dragged the camera along to the park. Then she coaxed him into being her subject. She took several rolls of film and would have gone for more, he had no doubt, determined as she was to get it right, to practice her craft, but when rain began to splatter down, they ran for Andy's car, protecting her equipment with their jackets.
And in the warm, dry car ... well, they were teenagers in love. That Andy in the photos was one lucky kid. He had good reason to smile.
A few weeks later, Prue gave him these eight-by-ten prints for Valentine's Day. She had developed them herself, choosing what she thought were the best ones from all those she had taken -- including the lone shot in which she had used her tripod, set the timer and run to join him.
To Andy's novice eye, the photos were more than just the usual point-and-shoot amateur snapshots. "These are really good!"
"You sound surprised," Prue said.
"I kinda am," he said, earning himself a smack on the arm. "No, I mean it," he continued. "You've been working on this photography stuff for months and you've barely shown me any of it. How was I supposed to know?"
"Okay," she admitted, "I wanted to surprise you. But you could at least pretend that you had faith in me all along."
"I did, okay? I should know that anything you set your mind to, you're gonna get."
"No kidding. I got the best boyfriend in school, right?"
The conversation was interrupted at that point by dramatized retching from an eavesdropping Phoebe, and Prue chasing her little sister away in a fury. The Manor was always too crowded.
Anything you set your mind to, you're gonna get. When, Andy now wondered, did she stop setting her mind on becoming a photographer? He hadn't asked in these past months, even during their too-short time of dating again. It could have been the witch thing ... but no. She was pretty settled into her career at Bucklands before Grams's death, as far as Andy knew. At some point, she just put the camera away, and he didn't know why.
He studied the long-haired girl hugging him in the timer-taken picture. Younger, more awkward than the woman he knew today, but one thing remained the same: that girl's, that woman's, ferocious determination. When it came to photography, in fact -- and he hadn't thought about this in years, but now it came rushing back -- when Prue employed her skills for the yearbook, no one expected that to be any kind of battle. But it became one -- even if through adult eyes, it now seemed more of a minor skirmish.
As she had explained it, "I'm tired of opening the yearbook every year and seeing the same popular kids in front of the camera at every dance, every game ..."
"Prue," said her sister Piper, who happened to be in the Manor's kitchen with them during this particular tirade, "you are one of the popular kids who always gets her picture in."
"Yeah, well, it shouldn't just be me, or Andy, or the Hertz girls, or the football stars. Everybody should get their chance. And if I'm the photographer, they will."
But the editor of the yearbook was less democratically-minded. Andy heard plenty about Prue's arguments with that guy. She dug in her heels, took great pictures that were hard to turn down, and in the end, the pages of that yearbook featured a broader swath of the student population than they had the year before. Prue had even seemed to reserve her finest photographic moments for some of those kids who faced mocking and bullying every day. In the face of the harshness of high school, those kind of kids only had each other, and Prue had given them, in a book for all to see, photos of them having fun, enjoying each others' company -- the happiest kind of memories to keep.
Prue could have got her photos in the yearbook just because she was class president, just because she was a cheerleader, just because she was a good photographer. But she used that high-school power to do what she thought was right. That was Prue.
It had been a year of mysteries and turmoil and surprises since they had found each other again. And now Andy knew the truth, the whole truth.
Looking at these pictures, he realized he should never have been surprised.
Of course, Prue being a witch with supernatural powers, that was nothing he ever would have dreamed was real. And the danger she and her sisters lived with stunned him.
But Prue, with fierce dedication -- and with a big streak of perfectionism -- using her gifts to protect the innocent, to right wrongs? That was no surprise: That was the woman he loved.
He had been honest when he had told her that he couldn't handle the danger and strangeness of witchcraft -- that he didn't think they could make a life together. But maybe he needed to let her know that in some part of him, hope still lived. A part of him still believed that with time, he would find acceptance, and they'd find each other again.
Looking at those happy, lucky kids on a winter's day in the park so many years ago, he didn't want to give up on their future so easily.
"Maybe I could live with it," Andy said aloud to the empty room. He gave one last look at the photos before he slipped them back into their envelope and added with a wry smile, "I might just surprise myself."