She was never going to figure it out. She was going to live here, at this stool, filled with artistic frustrations until there was nothing left of her but bones and withered dreams and—
Thwack. The counter surface rattled as a heavy plate was set—silverware and all—right next to Rachel’s head. “I see you’re still feeling sorry for yourself.”
Rachel popped her head up. It was Jeanie. Jeanie didn’t take shit from anyone, and most particularly not from any of Rachel’s sulks.
Rachel put her head back down. Her voice came out muffled, vibrating against the linoleum counter. “I’m not feeling sorry for myself.”
“You are. I can tell. Your eyebrows pucker and your whole face looks like a question mark. I know you’re feeling sorry for yourself.”
Jeanie couldn’t even see her face right now. Rachel was going to argue the point, belabor it even, but she caught a whiff of the matzo ball soup. Nobody made matzo ball soup like Factor’s. Rachel had grown up with her father’s lamb al pastor, her mother’s ful medames, but it was this matzo ball soup that got her every time.
Jeanie tsked. “Come on. You’ve got a customer. Order up.”
Rachel turned around to see a tall blond head poking out from one side of a booth. “You have got to be kidding me.”
Jeanie hummed, like she’d heard that before. And, to be honest, she had. “I never kid about work.”
Rachel picked up the plate, taking it over to the booth where Diesel sat. She clattered it down on his table. “What are you doing here?”
Diesel took up his whole side of the booth bench, his limbs were so long and his body so oversized. He cracked a smile like he’d seen the sun come out after a couple of days of rain. “I heard you worked here!”
Rachel watched his face, checking for any signs of flickering sarcasm. But he held his goofy grin. She understood how he was the kind of boy to break up chorus lines and ruin friendships. When he was genuinely interested, Diesel gave out his full attention.
“I’ve worked here for three years, Diesel. That is literally not news.” Rachel put her hand on her hip, like that would dissuade his cheerfulness.
“Yes, but I just found out.” Diesel gestured to the other bench. “Wanna sit?”
“Dude, I’m working.”
“Hello, ma’am. Is Rachel free for a break?” Diesel was looking at Jeanie, giving her big, pathetic puppy dog eyes. It should have looked cartoonish. Instead he looked handsome and lost, the way a fairy-tale prince might as he went searching for his one true love.
God, did beautiful people annoy Rachel.
Jeanie looked over Diesel once, then looked at Rachel. “He a creep?”
Rachel wished she could have lied in that moment. “No. He’s not.”
“Do you know him?”
Rachel shrugged. “We go to school together.”
“Take your break.” Jeanie didn’t say it like it was a suggestion.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Diesel called out as Jeanie walked away.
Jeanie rolled her eyes and kept moving.
“Ass-kissing doesn’t work with her.” Rachel slid into the opposite booth bench from Diesel.
Diesel laughed, like that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “I like that.”
“Seriously? You live your life coasting on charm and a smile and you like when people are immune to it?”
“Of course.” Diesel took an enormous bite of his pastrami sandwich. “When people bend to your will when you’re nice to them, you end up respecting anyone who sees through the smile.”
“You’re talking about Maddie, aren’t you?” Rachel was eyeing the pickle on Diesel’s plate. It smelled sharp and vinegary and perfect.
Diesel caught her looking. He offered it to her wordlessly. And despite herself, Rachel took it. It had the perfect level of crunch.
“Man, you know about that?”
“Yes, even film weirdos hear the same rumors as everyone else.”
“Oh, that was shitty to assume. Sorry.” Diesel nodded into his sandwich, humming a little like he’d suddenly figured out how good the pastrami was here. “Yeah, she’s totally immune. Also, she’s really small. I feel like small people are really powerful.”
“Says the guy who looks like he could smash a watermelon between his two bare hands.”
“But I’ve got to duck to go into buildings. And I could never sneak around anywhere. I’m too tall.”
“What a difficult life you must have had.” Rachel rolled her eyes.
“I like you.” Diesel said it so simply, so plainly.
“Are you kidding me?”
“Nope.”
Rachel put her head into her hands.
“Wanna hang out sometime?” Diesel said this as he slurped his soup.
Rachel must have heard him wrong. Must have been the soup noise garbling the words that were actually coming out of his mouth. “What?”
“We could play Mario Kart.”
“You do know I’m not straight, right?”
“Yup.” Diesel kept slurping his soup, noodles and all. He must have been saving the matzo for last. “I don’t ask girls I like to play Mario Kart.”
“That might be your first mistake. What do you ask them to do?” Rachel watched as Diesel opened his mouth to respond. “Never mind, please don’t answer that. I don’t want to know.”
Diesel nodded. “Fair enough.”
“Look, I gotta get back to work.”
Diesel grinned like he’d just found out about all the cat videos on the internet. “Rad.”
Rachel didn’t want to feel so much better after hanging out with a meathead for ten minutes who probably spent more time working out—or working on his tan or his bleached hair—than on his actual future. But she did. He was calming, grounding, annoying.
He was solid, and not just because he was a foot taller than Rachel.
Rachel wasn’t even a quarter of the way there, most of the time. She was always thinking, always planning. Her next film, her current film. Projects she’d need a big budget for, the kind that required studio money. Projects she could practically film now with a phone camera, a couple of lights, and a lot of duct tape and dreams. Dreams that she now had less than a month to complete.
Rachel heard the bell ring by the kitchen for an order coming up. She walked over, grabbed the plates, and loaded up the train in her arms.
It was going to be a long April.
9
On Location
Rachel
When Rachel pulled up to the modest one-story bungalow in her beat-ass car, it was yet another thing that she hadn’t been expecting when it came to Sana Khan. The house had a seventies vibe, small and beige with a low, sloping brown roof. The watered-down version of what had once passed for high design. Cookie-cutter Americana in bungalow form. Like The Virgin Suicides come to life. But way less creepy, obviously.
It was the kind of place you bought because you could afford it, not because you particularly loved it. And something about that shifted more of the footing underneath Rachel’s feet when it came to Sana. Because the house was such an unexpected data point, such a radical departure from what Rachel expected of Sana.
Who was this girl?
Rachel rang the bell. She tapped her foot as she waited.
The door swung open and Rachel hardly had time to process Sana before she started talking.
“So sorry, my mom’s out on night shoots, which are basically the worst because she gets no sleep and then she needs lots of coffee and then I don’t get any coffee and then we’re both terrible in the morning. On the bright side, we’ve got the house to ourselves, as long as you don’t mind being here alone?” Sana was breathless by the time she’d stopped speaking. She looked ready to go on, when she must have remembered that Rachel wasn’t one of her real friends, so she snapped her mouth shut, quickly and efficiently. She blinked up at Rachel, as though waiting for a response.
Rachel hunched her shoulders. “Um. I though
t we’d see a movie in the park?”
Sana’s eyes went wide. “Oh! Sorry! Okay. Wait, come in! I’ve got to grab my keys and stuff.”
Sana practically bounced as she led Rachel through her home. Rachel looked around. This was an original house with all the original suburban fixtures. Wood paneling, ceiling beams, even a brick fireplace. Everything was old and cozy—a mixture of purchases made for practicality and ones that had been worn into something that the owners clearly loved. A TV hooked up to an old PS3 and a VHS player. A lumpy, mottled afghan that somebody had attempted to make into a large square but seemed possibly triangular or trapezoidal. A stack of old National Geographics teetering dangerously close to another stack of library checkouts—mostly old DVDs that Rachel didn’t recognize with a couple of VHS cassettes interspersed between.
And photos, photos everywhere. Of Sana and another woman. The other woman looked too young to be Sana’s mother—her deep brown face smooth and only lined where she smiled at the outer corners of her eyes. But she had to have been related to Sana—she had the same sloping, elegant nose. Same heavy, straight brows. And the same wry twinkle in her eye. Rachel felt uncomfortable, also though she was seeing more than she ever wanted to, as though she was bearing witness to more than she ought to be allowed to.
That was the filmmaker’s curse.
Rachel couldn’t help but see the signs and signifiers everywhere she went. Once she’d learned how to set a stage, she had learned how to read a person’s life like one. It was a blessing when it came to films. It was a curse when it came to interacting with others. Or not feeling ashamed of her own home situation. Not that it was really her fault, her home situation. But it was hers regardless, and she’d have to live with it for now.
“Do you want something to drink?” Sana, ponytail swishing along with her bright tone, interrupted Rachel’s thoughts. “Water? Tea? I make dark tea, it’s good.”
Rachel took a deep breath, trying to steady herself. Unfortunately she ended up taking a deep inhale of Sana’s house. Except that wasn’t the scent of house. It was Sana. She smelled like jasmine and sunshine. Like too-warm concrete and the salty air from the ocean. And orange blossoms.
She smelled like summer.
“No,” said Rachel, at a loss for any other words. “The movie starts at eight, but we need to get tickets before then.”
Sana frowned. “Okay.”
“And I’m not thirsty.” Oh God, that was an accidentally sexual comment, why was she saying accidentally sexual comments. She had to fill the void that her accidentally sexual comment had created. But Rachel had nothing to say. Rachel just stared at Sana, hoping she would get this information via brain waves or something.
“I’ll just grab my wallet.” Sana, clad in vintage jeans and a soft, navy T-shirt, moved into the back of the house at a surprisingly agile pace for someone whose foot was encased in a black boot.
Sana returned, shoving her phone into one back pocket of her jeans and a wallet in the other. She tilted her head toward the door. “What’s on the docket for tonight?”
Rachel cleared her throat. “I thought we’d start at the very beginning.”
“The very best place to start.” Sana’s mouth twitched, like she’d told herself a good joke. She grabbed her keys from a hook by the door.
Rachel stopped what she had been doing—which was following behind Sana to the door—and stared. “Did you just quote The Sound of Music at me?”
“You teed it up so nicely, I couldn’t help myself.” Sana shrugged.
Rachel must have entered an alternate universe. There was no other explanation for it. For this joking, movie-referencing Sana. In old jeans and with what could be construed as dirty hair. Still shiny and straight, but definitely not freshly pressed. “Pretty in Pink. I thought we’d start with Pretty in Pink. They’re doing a showing over at a park in Chinatown.”
And then maybe, afterward, Rachel would find out where she’d left the universe she had previously occupied and entered this one where Sana had a cozy middle-class home in Studio City instead of a stately mansion up in the hills. A place that looked like it was occasionally cleaned by either Sana or her mother, rather than by professionals on a weekly or biweekly basis.
“That is a classic,” said Sana thoughtfully.
From the way Sana’s mouth twisted to one side, Rachel couldn’t help but wonder if there was something else on Sana’s mind that she wasn’t saying out loud. “Have you already seen it?”
“Not in years.” Sana locked the door behind them both. She half hobbled, half skipped toward Rachel’s car. “Are all of these movies you want me to watch gonna be, like, conventional Hollywood movies?”
“No, not all of them. Some of them are indie, too.” Rachel swung open the door on the driver’s side and got in.
Sana’s mouth slanted into a disapproving expression. She slid into her own seat and yanked the passenger’s door closed. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Then for the love of God, please say what you mean.” Rachel hunched over the wheel and turned the ignition. She could hear the irritation and confusion in her voice.
“Are these all gonna be white people movies?”
Rachel swung around so fast she hit her head on her window visor. Holy shit did that hurt.
“Oh no.” Sana leaned over, as close as she could get to inspecting Rachel’s head without touching. “Are you okay?”
“It’s fine.” Just injured my pride. “I’m fine.”
“You sure you don’t need any ice?” Sana bit her lip. “I can run back inside real quick.”
“NO.” Rachel cleared her throat. She hadn’t meant to be that forceful, but she didn’t want Sana, like, ministering to her wounds, or something totally embarrassing. “Can we head to the movie now, please?”
Sana, mercifully, released her lip. She buckled herself into the passenger’s seat. “Okay. As long as I can choose the movie for the next time.”
“Fine. You pick next time.” Fucking Sana.
Sana
Sana looked over at Rachel. She had this serious, intent expression on her face and it made Sana want to lean in and ask what Rachel was thinking. Her eyebrows were furrowed and she was watching the line with so much focus, so much determination.
They were slowly creeping toward the front and Sana wasn’t sure whether to get out her wallet now, or when it was closer to the time they’d have to actually pay. She discreetly felt for her wallet in her back pocket. Sana thought she ought to pay for at least her ticket and probably Rachel’s too, but she didn’t want to cross some unspoken line with Rachel.
Too many rules that were too easy to break now.
The line snaked around the park, winding from the entrance down Spring Street and almost to the station for the Gold Line train that ran from East LA through downtown, back out to Pasadena. They had already had a good ten minutes of waiting. Another ten more and Sana was sure she’d go nuts. But couldn’t think of anything else to say. All she knew was that she was standing in line to go to a movie next to Rachel Recht and Rachel wasn’t yelling at her or glaring at her or telling her to get out already.
It was such a miracle that Sana didn’t want to say anything and screw it up.
Sana continued to glance at Rachel, trying to figure out if Rachel was staring off into space as a way to ignore Sana or because she felt as uncomfortable as Sana did. Sana’s body vibrated with unspoken words, unspent energy. Her booted up foot rocked against the pavement, back and forth.
Rachel looked up and Sana was unfortunately caught, staring like a total creep. Sana blinked a couple of times. Rachel was making an expression like she’d taken a bite of what she thought was vanilla ice cream but had turned out to be sour cream.
“What is it?” All of that attention, all of that focus that had been directed at the front of the line was now squarely on Sana.
“Nothing.” Sana swallowed. She had to keep eye contact. She had to keep breathing like everything was nor
mal, like this was fine. Like she had conversations every day with Rachel about how she wasn’t staring at her at all.
Rachel’s expression deepened into a frown. “You were staring.”
Oh help. “I was just looking off into space.”
“Sure.” But Rachel’s eyes went sharp, keen. Like she hadn’t bought that excuse at all. “You said your mom was working a night shoot.”
“Yeah.” Sana shrugged. Act like staring isn’t a big deal and she’ll lose interest. Act like you’re totally cool, like everything is okay, okay, okay.
If only Rachel would stop looking directly back at Sana. “What does she do?”
“She’s a production designer. The production designer, on this big shoot.” Sana was too proud of her mom to censor herself on this, to confine herself to one-word answers. She wanted to see the impressed surprise coat Rachel’s face. “She started as a carpenter. Worked her way up.”
“No shit,” said Rachel, no small amount of awe in her own voice.
Sana liked that Rachel knew how impressive it was. How much steel and determination it took to get from where Mom had started to where she was now. Sana couldn’t keep the pride out of her voice, didn’t want to, when she said, “She’s pretty incredible.”
“Did she always know she wanted to make movies?”
Sana laughed. An easy laugh. The first she’d had all night. Possibly the first she’d had in weeks; she couldn’t remember the last time she’d honestly laughed. “No. She knew she didn’t want to starve.”
“Starve?” Rachel shook her head. “Am I missing something? Your mom’s in charge of production design on a big shoot. Isn’t your dad on TV all the time? Don’t you go to Royce?”
“By the grace of my grandparents’ forgiveness.” Sana shrugged. That was an understatement.
“Forgiveness for what?” Rachel took a step forward as the line surged ahead.
For living life on her own terms. For not following the chosen path. For not living a life they could be proud of, that they could brag about at family gatherings and at social functions. In short, for being the opposite of everything that Sana had strived to do her whole life. Farrah never needed to prove herself to anyone. Sana needed to prove herself to everyone. “For getting a divorce at twenty. Or maybe for getting pregnant at nineteen. Or maybe for running away with me in tow after she got the divorce. Who knows, really.”
Tell Me How You Really Feel Page 9