by Matt Burns
Will nodded. “I like it.” Then he looked at me. “Can we do that?”
“But you guys don’t know that much about football. You only practiced for, like, a month. You never played in a game.”
“What the hell do you know about music?” said Luke. “You’ve been playing the same one song on my brother’s guitar since sixth grade.”
It didn’t seem worth it to correct him that I had actually mastered two guitar tabs since sixth grade. And I didn’t feel like explaining all the Elliott Smith music I’d been listening to since Alex introduced me to him. “I mean, I guess we might be able to use some of the football stuff. Maybe in one of the flashbacks the singer plays football. Or, I guess, maybe his band plays music in a halftime show. But, like, I don’t know if it should be all gory. Like, I mean, horror is so . . .” I shrugged.
“Wait, what?” said Will. “Since when is it not a horror movie? I thought that was your whole idea.”
“I don’t know. I mean, horror movies are kind of all the same. It’s always the same structure and you know everyone’s gonna die. What’s the point? They’re just not interesting. Like, The Royal Tenenbaums or The Virgin Suicides? Or Anna Karenina? Those stories are more complicated and interesting.”
“What?” said Luke.
“You haven’t seen those movies?” I said.
“Let’s just do a horror movie. What are you talking about?”
“How are we gonna do those special effects?” I said. “How are you gonna make a knife go into a football player’s neck?”
“How we always do them: ketchup and that splatter thing we made from tubes at Home Depot. That thing looks ridiculous.”
“It looks like shit.”
“Remember when it sprayed all over the wall in my room? That was the best.”
“If we do a serious movie without crappy effects,” I said, “then we don’t even have to worry about them looking horrible and taking people out of the story.”
“You’re the only one worrying,” Luke said. “Let’s just make a dumb movie where me and Will fight again and fall into a pool.”
“That’s the whole story?” I said. “That’s a ninety-minute narrative to you?” I got hot and tense. We were already off track on my production schedule and I needed to steer us back. We couldn’t give up already and make another five-minute waste of time that no one ever wants to watch and gets lost forever. “Why are you making this so hard? I feel like I’m in one of those documentaries about a cursed movie production that spiraled into disaster, like Hearts of Darkness or something.”
Luke raised an eyebrow. “You think us sitting in your basement talking is as hard as filming Apocalypse Now in the jungle in the Philippines?”
Goddamn it. It was really annoying when Luke understood references I’d intended to sail over his head and make him feel clueless. “Look,” I said, “you guys haven’t even seen Breathless, so you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You just told us you haven’t seen it, either,” Luke said. “You just said that. Your argument makes no sense.”
“I downloaded Breathless.”
“Yeah, that’s the same thing,” Luke said, laughing. “Like how I’ve been to China. Well, I mean, I’ve seen Shanghai Knights.”
Will laughed. I shook my head and squeezed my eyes shut. “Let’s put it on right now. It’ll be good. It’s, like, a really important film.”
I connected my hard drive to my Xbox and started Breathless, sitting on the far edge of the couch a few feet from the guys. The movie’s in black and white, and it uses these crazy jump cuts, so time is rapidly shifting around. It’s not like any regular American movie. It’s really interesting. Better than most of the garbage movies they make now.
“Why are we watching this?” Luke said five minutes in. “Halloween is in, like, three days, so I don’t know why we’re watching a movie that’s not about graphic murders. When did all this even happen? When did you start hating horror movies? Is some creepy eccentric billionaire paying you to make him a movie starring a bunch of young boys and you have to follow his orders very precisely or else he’ll, like, lock you in a giant fucking birdcage?”
Will laughed.
“Yes,” I said through gritted teeth. It wasn’t worth trying to explain Alex to them. They’d make stupid comments and it would get complicated and annoying.
Luke said, “Seriously, what happened to pink-eye-blaster Kevin?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied.
Will said, “That was, like, the thing you invented where you took an empty Mountain Dew bottle and ripped ass into it all through Final Destination 2 and then you puffed your farts out of it at our faces.”
“Did Godard blast his shit particles into his friends’ eyeballs while he directed Breathless?” Luke said. I didn’t respond. He added, “You know this whole mind-set of thinking modern movies are bad makes no sense, right? If you were around in Truffaut’s time, you’d be shitting on his movies, calling them mainstream trash and obsessing over the 1920s, but if you were alive then, you’d say all films were a new fad of mainstream shit and you’d argue that blurry-ass 1820s photographs were better, and you could run with that annoying stance all the way back to being a caveman complaining about the first drawing and saying life was better before art existed at all.”
I paused a moment, waiting for the perfect counterargument to find me. “Uh . . . no?”
“You’re not gonna be this weird on the south Georgia trip, are you?” Luke said.
“I’m not being weird.” I turned Breathless back on, but it was hard to pay attention because I could see, out of the corner of my eye, Luke and Will texting and not watching any of it.
I stopped the movie again. “Fine. Why don’t we just try writing something?” They stared at me. “It’ll be fun,” I barked. “Okay? Let’s just kick around ideas to get started. Anything. Whatever ideas you guys want.” I was trying to be an inspiring leader, but I could hear my tone was more like a ruthless sweatshop owner. I considered shouting at them, I’m being a cool boss here, you goddamned idiots, but figured that probably wasn’t the best thing for morale.
Before they kicked around any ideas, Luke’s phone rang. He answered it, then said to me, “Yo, what’s your house number?”
“Why?”
“Jen and Haley are gonna pick us up here so we can all go over to the game together.”
“Uh,” I said. “Since when?”
“What’s your address?”
“Can you stop screwing around and pay attention?” It was like my plan to make something to impress Alex was a long line of dominoes I’d carefully arranged, and Luke was flicking pieces out at the start, sabotaging every other step down the line. “We’re supposed to work on this all night to have a solid outline, so next week we can divide up the scenes and each start writing. Then we’ll put all the scenes together and polish the whole script. We have to get that done in the next couple of weeks to stay on track.”
Luke paused for a second. “Is it 2015 Lakewind?”
I just stared at him. Friends were better before cell phones.
“Kevin’s buffering,” he said into the phone. “Something’s going on with his connection. Just go down Randal Parkway, make a right at the neighborhood sign that looks like a wiener, then it’s the first street on the left.”
I sighed and turned to Will. “Are you gonna help me work on the script?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Sweet. What ideas do you have?”
“Oh,” he said. “I don’t know. What you guys said earlier sounded good.” He licked the Bagel Bite grease off his fingers. “Do you have any Sprite?”
I couldn’t deal with them. Luke has the attention span of a cricket and Will is just kind of there. I’d have to continue doing the whole thing myself. They started playing pool and talking about the football game they were going to. It was hard to feel like I even knew them anymore. They didn’t feel like friends
. More like people who happened to be in my basement.
I switched the input away from the movie and sat there on the couch, staring at commercials on TV, waiting for them to leave. I was silent and pretty sure I looked extremely sullen, but neither one of them seemed to notice.
The doorbell rang and Luke looked at me. “Can we go let them in?”
I grunted and sulked upstairs. Luke and Will still didn’t notice my exaggerated annoyance. How come Mom can notice I’m feeling off when I stare into the open fridge for one extra second, but my two best friends are oblivious when I completely stop talking to them?
Kate and her friend Courtney had already opened the front door. Jen and Haley stood in my doorway like holograms. “These girls are here for you boys,” said Courtney, giggling.
“Have fun at the game,” I said. “I hope our team gets the most concussions or whatever.” Then I turned around to go back down to the basement.
“Dude, come on,” Luke said. “Game’s this way.”
“Yeah, I know. Welp. I’ll probably see you at school on Monday.”
“Kevin, come on!” said Jen, which was weird because I’d never spoken to her in my life. What did she want with me? “You’ll have fun.”
“You don’t want to go to the game?” whined Kate, tugging on my shirt and making weird duck lips at me. “All high-schoolers go to the football games to kiss under the bleachers.”
I nodded at her, wishing it were more common for healthy teenage boys’ hearts to spontaneously combust; I wished to be a pile of ash.
“If he stays here by himself,” said Courtney, “he’ll probably play with himself.” Then she motioned jerking off with her right hand, and with her left hand made this weird tickling gesture that I’d never seen before and which very much creeped me out.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Who teaches you this stuff?”
Jen and Haley laughed. I’d definitely been planning to masturbate that night, but it would be hard to focus when just minutes before, my little sister’s friend had demonstrated to some girls from school what I’d be doing, and she did it using a more advanced technique than I knew.
“Fine,” I said. “Forget it. Whatever. I’ll go.”
Freshman year we never went to any football games, so walking into the stadium, I had no idea what to do. It was starting to get cold outside, but we left my house so suddenly, I didn’t think to get a sweatshirt. I was in a T-shirt and shorts, surrounded by people in hoodies and jeans. I felt like I’d walked onto the set of a Japanese game show. All the overhead lights were on. I didn’t know what I should be looking at. I stayed at the back of our group. There were tons of open seats up at the top of the bleachers, but we walked past all that prime real estate and headed straight into the crowded student section, jamming our way through bodies until we got to the sophomore area. We were surrounded by people I had no interest in seeing outside of a classroom setting between the hours of 8:40 and 3:40, Monday through Friday, and I was sure they felt the same about me.
We settled on a spot and I stood on the very edge of the bleachers between the aisle and Will. Through some unspoken pact, everyone had decided to stand up the entire game. We’d all be happier sitting down, but I guess no one wanted to be the first person to do it. Everyone in the student section went insane every time something happened on the field. Some of them were painted and holding signs. How could anyone actually care? What difference would winning or losing this game make to anyone who was just watching it from the stands?
I tried to figure it out for a while, standing there observing everyone and wondering if my thoughts were profound or if I was just being an idiot and needed to stop thinking so much. It’s tough for a fifteen-year-old guy to determine if he’s the physical manifestation of Holden Caulfield or just a run-of-the-mill pompous jackass. Luke and Will clearly weren’t thinking about anything. They were chanting and screaming for Sam and Patrick the whole time. I wondered if Haley and Jen were jealous.
Once our team finally scored a touchdown, all the guys freaked out and formed this mosh pit, jumping up and down and smashing into each other. Luke and Will dove into it and I watched. They looked like gorillas or cavemen or — or — I couldn’t think straight enough over the noise of screaming teenagers and the school band’s abrasive, jarring honks to decide what sort of uneducated beasts they exactly reminded me of. I couldn’t focus, couldn’t stop thinking about how bizarre the football game was. How strange the idea of sports was, like some pretend version of war. I wanted to stop thinking all those cyclical thoughts I knew a hundred million other guys exactly like me had already had. So ten minutes later, when our team scored again, I pushed myself into the mosh pit.
I don’t know if fun is the right word for it. It was kind of satisfying, at least for the first few seconds, because I stopped overanalyzing high-school football culture, since my brain was fully occupied trying to keep me alive.
All of a sudden, James Dunne, whose personality is defined by his pet snake, looked at me like I had a spider on my face and said, “Holy shit, dude, I’m sorry! Are you okay?”
“Uh, yeah?” I didn’t know what he was talking about.
All the other guys turned and stared at me. Their eyes lit up and someone said, “What the hell happened?”
I reached up and felt my forehead. It was covered in blood.
“It’s fine,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”
James Dunne said, “Dude, I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
I covered my forehead with my hands and squeezed my way out to the aisle, then ran up the stairs and into the bathroom to look at my face in the filthy mirror under the buzzing fluorescent lights. James Dunne had elbowed a ripe zit on my forehead and it had burst like a fire hydrant.
I wanted to wash it off, but the faucet spewed a yellow liquid that looked like pure E. coli. So I dabbed my forehead with dry paper towels until it was mostly clean. It was calm in the bathroom. Quiet and still. It reeked of stagnant piss and week-old turds, sure, but that was a fair price to pay for some solitude.
Two kids — probably in middle school — came in. As soon as they saw me, they started laughing, then smacked each other’s arms to stop, which made them crack up harder. I felt my face turn red. Goddamn it. Maybe they weren’t actually laughing at me — I had no way to know. It didn’t matter, though, because even if they were laughing at some unrelated inside joke, the sound of them cackling reminded me how pathetic and out of place I was.
There were still fifteen minutes left in the game, but I didn’t feel like going back to the student section and having to explain to everyone a million times that I was fine, it looked worse than it was, and it was really just one meaningless zit on the zit-covered forehead of Accutane Kevin. So when I left the bathroom, I went down to the parking lot, sat on the back bumper of Haley’s mom’s car, and folded my goose-bumped arms across my chest and squeezed them tight to keep from shivering.
This group of six freshmen was standing around talking and laughing and drinking those slushies from the gas station that kids put vodka in. I could have sworn those kids were complete losers. They spent the mornings sitting on the floor by their lockers drawing weird pictures of anime-style dragons, and it was verified school lore that three of the guys, on separate occasions, had been caught watching hentai in the computer lab. But apparently those freaks went to football games and were part of a group of friends that included girls. Yet there I was, alone with my frigid nipples chafing against my T-shirt, trying to convince myself I was cooler than them.
I imagined what Alex was doing. Wearing a big, old T-shirt, leaning against her kitchen counter reading a French novel while Bright Eyes played and tea heated up in the microwave. Later she would call me and we’d talk about the pointlessness of homecoming, how weird it was to see my friends wearing suits before they went to the dance, why I’d never go to another football game again. She’d ask me questions and she’d think my responses were funny. I tried to
remember those lines for when I’d see her next.
A river of my excited classmates flooded down to the parking lot. Before I could see her, I heard Haley say, “He probably called his parents. We should just go without him.”
They stepped around the car and saw me. I stared at them, frozen, like they’d caught me trimming my pubes with the family scissors.
“Oh,” said Haley. “What happened to you? Are you okay? We were worried.”
“Uh, yeah, no,” I said. “It’s not a big deal. Like, nothing happened.”
Luke said they were going to meet Sam and Patrick and some of the other players at Waffle House to celebrate the win. I told them I should probably just head home, since my house was on the way to Waffle House anyway.
Luke started trying to persuade me to go, but Jen said, “Whatever. Just let him do what he wants,” and I crawled into the way-back seat.
They dropped me off at my house and I was relieved to no longer be a fifth wheel to their double date, or whatever that outing was. Luke and Will still hadn’t explained their relationships with Jen or Haley or any of those other girls who’d suddenly been promoted from background extras to guest stars in the high-school TV show that happened around me.
I walked inside, told my parents I had fun and it was “good,” and then sat down behind them on the family room computer and put my headphones on. I had to do the iPLEDGE thing to assure the government that I had not had sex in the past month. I thought for a while, trying to recall if perhaps I’d had a few sexual encounters and forgotten about them because they were so commonplace for a guy like me. Had I banged a few babes in the locker room before school? While waiting in Mom’s minivan in the Kroger parking lot, had I gotten downright nasty with a couple of nymphomaniacs? I was pretty sure I hadn’t, so I told the government it could relax.
I went upstairs to my room and closed the door. My brain replayed the scene of those two kids laughing at me — or near me — or whatever — in the football stadium bathroom and I got nervous for a second, like I was worried they’d pop out from behind my bookshelf and laugh again and I still wouldn’t know if it was about me. Had I always been this paranoid and self-conscious? In middle school, did I cringe and tense up any time I heard laughter in the halls? Or was I the kid laughing at everyone else? When I’d fake being sick, was I just exploiting a loophole to stay in bed watching TV all day, or was there a reason I didn’t want to go?