The Great American Whatever

by Tim Federle

  “One sec, Venessa. This is important.”

  “I mean,” I go, hoping the song will get even louder. Bring on the cymbals. “I’m not sure if I’m gay or what. I might be bi.”

  Geoff snort-laughs and punches my shoulder. “Yeah,” he says, “and I might be European.”

  I don’t totally know what this means, other than: Geoff is not European.

  He puts his hat back on. “Quinn, I’ve known for, like, ever. Unless you’re confessing that you’re in love with me—” He stops. His face goes a little white. “Oh God, I mean—if you are, I’d be flattered, but—”

  “Ew, Geoff. Please. You name your farts. Seriously.”

  We laugh. We laugh hard. He heads back to the counter, just as his manager gets a call on her cell. When she crouches behind the seasonal drink display in order to take it, she thinks that nobody’s watching her, but I am. I see everything. It’s haunting. It is not a gift to see everything, believe me.

  “Okay, I guess I’m . . . heading home, then,” I say. Turns out this is a very minor scene. Might even end up on the cutting-room floor. I like that.

  “No,” Geoff goes, after he rings up another customer, “you’re getting a phone at the Verizon store and then you’re texting me which foreign film we’re seeing tonight.”

  I hate foreign films. “Who said I want to see a foreign film tonight?” I don’t want to have to read at a movie.

  “My bad,” Geoff says, resting his elbows on the counter. “I thought all gay dudes were, like, obsessed with foreign films.” He is teasing.

  “Geoff, keep your voice down.” I look around again. “Relax.”

  “You relax, you big queen,” he says. I gasp again. He is totally poking fun at me. He is totally the best.

  I turn to the parking lot, shaky, but then: “Hey,” I say, back to Geoff, “what happened to your mustache?”

  Okay, imagine the theme music to Jaws, because his manager is BACK. She takes a rag and wipes down the counter, and when she sees that Geoff isn’t busy, she literally puts his hand on the rag to take over, and then she looks at me like I’m in her living room ruining Christmas morning.

  “The mustache,” the manager says—to me!—“wasn’t professional-looking.”

  Geoff gently puts his head against the refrigerated food case and closes his eyes like he’s really embarrassed. I take a step toward him. He looks up. The manager turns to the next customer. Geoff winks at me.

  “See you later—girlfriend,” he says.

  “Geoff. I’ll kill you.”

  But there we go again. Laughing.

  I pivot away, and hold the icy cup up to my neck in preparation for the smack of heat outside. But just before I’m out the door, Geoff goes “Psst!” like we’re seven years old, making a couch-cushion fort in his basement. Back when our parents were friends and our big sisters took ballet together and we weren’t gay or straight, we were just Quinny and Geoffy.

  “Yeah?” I say.

  “Amir Turani,” Geoff says, louder than Annabeth would have directed him to speak, “thinks you have a cute butt.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  I’m late for Staring Practice.

  “Like I said,” my therapist goes, adjusting her laptop screen and giving me a nostril view that one could describe as “vivid.” “We can use your remaining time however you’d like, Quinn.”

  We’re thirty minutes into our regular forty-five-minute Skype session, but we’re really just three minutes into it; see, it wasn’t till Geoff and I had taken seats in the almost sadistically powerful air-conditioning of his Corolla and each had a foot-long hoagie (I waited for his lunch break) that I even realized I was missing the only Thursday therapy session I’ve ever actually wanted to have.

  You’ve never seen a guy pedal home so fast. Sparks flew from my wheels, at least in my mind.

  “I’ve just got a ton to figure out today,” I say, still willing my heart to slow down.

  “Start from the beginning, then.”

  I can barely concentrate, though, because hovering just above my laptop screen is Amir’s handwriting on the slip of Celebrity paper.

  Incoming boner.

  “I met a guy,” I say, in a quiet way. “At this party.”

  My therapist barely conceals a smile. “I see.” She stares, and stares. Dammit. She has picked up on my techniques and mastered them.

  “Am I allowed to, like, talk about sex stuff with you?” Gah. I want to slam my computer screen shut. My therapist is the stepmom of this second-tier boy at school. She sees me for a “deeply discounted” rate because her son was friends with Annabeth, and they feel bad for us.

  “Of course you can talk about sex stuff,” she says. “For many people, that’s all they talk about.”

  Wow. “Okay,” I say. I look out my window. No lemonade stand in sight. “So this college guy said I have a nice butt.” Gah. I can’t believe I’m saying this to a, like, mom-lady. “I mean, he didn’t say it to me—he said it through friends. That I have an okay butt or whatever. Through Geoff’s sister.”

  “I see,” my therapist says, and I take over staring duties to make her talk. It works. “People have long noticed you for your looks, Quinn, but now one particular boy has. How are you feeling about that?” I lower the volume on my computer. Mom is snoozing in the sunroom, but suddenly I develop a theory that the air vents in our house deliver sound better than I’ve made note of recently, since I’m so frequently in earplugs.

  “Well, I don’t know how to communicate with him,” I say.

  “Most people start with honesty.” She laughs—a therapist joke, I guess. Hard to tell. Her side of the screen is always blurry because I truly believe people over the age of fifty aren’t willing to splurge for good Internet. “Okay, that’s not always true,” she says. I have her pegged at fifty-three, by the way. “But it’s best to start with honesty. I advocate for honesty.”

  “No,” I say, talking faster than I mean to. “I mean: I literally don’t know how to get ahold of him.”

  “Might this be the time to finally power your phone back up? Would you like to turn it on during this session? Together?”

  No way. “I’m not even sure where it is, to be honest. It’s somewhere here, but I don’t know where. But I’m not ready.” I say that part loud, because he who’s loudest wins, at least according to Dad.

  So, scratch that theory, actually.

  “All right, then,” my therapist says. I don’t remember about what.

  “The problem is, I have this amazing idea,” I say. “I kind of want to ask Amir out, but not like on a date, but like on a group situation, I mean.”

  “Could you send out an e-mail?”

  I wave my hands. “I hate e-mail. Nobody checks e-mail.”

  She begins playing almost flirtily with her silk scarf. That’s a first. “Go old-fashioned, then,” she says. “It’s very Quinn Roberts to buck trends. Ask him out through Geoff. That could be charming to an older man.”

  I chuckle. “ ‘An older man,’ that’s hilarious. Amir’s only, like, nineteen, I bet.”

  “The difference between a sixteen-year-old and a nineteen-year-old can be substantial, Quinn,” she says, even though I’m seventeen this Sunday. “But I’ll leave that for you to discover.”

  Great. Now my stomach is a wooden roller coaster going off the rails. I don’t want to discover anything. I want to just write it exactly the way I’d like it to play out onscreen.

  “Unfortunately, our time today is up,” she says. “But when you have a chance, I really do need you to ask your mom to open the mail sometime soon. We’re now about three months behind on payment, and at some point—”

  “Totally clear,” I say. “I’ll mention it to her today. See? I’m making a note of it right now.”

  I jiggle my arm just enough in the camera’s frame so that it looks as if I’m writing something down on my desk. But I’m not. What I’m mainly doing is I’m thinking, Thank God Mom’s disability checks
just get deposited straight to her bank account.

  “Thank you,” my therapist says.

  Her buzzer goes off, and she winces. This makes me happy. I have entertained her.

  She likes me.

  “Quinn, I have to get that,” she says.

  “Of course.”

  I’m already opening another tab on my screen, anyway: this torrent site to rip a few movies to binge on tonight.

  “But I wanted to say something,” she says.

  “Uh-huh.”

  I consider downloading The Philadelphia Story. Maybe I could study Cary Grant and actually, you know, learn something about romance. I’ve never tried to woo a guy before. The closest I’ve come is that I once poured chocolate milk over Tommy “the Tank” Foster’s mashed potatoes, in third grade.

  LIFE HACK: Never pour chocolate milk over the mashed potatoes of anyone nicknamed “the Tank.”

  “Quinn, I’m logging off now, but—”

  “Great, so, next Thursday.”

  “—did you hear what I just said? A moment ago.”

  “Oh.” Shit. Minimize screen. Click back to Skype. Blink. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” my therapist says. “But I said something important.”

  Jesus, maybe that school counselor of mine was right. Maybe multitasking is a dangerous myth.

  “Okay?” I say.

  “I said I’m proud of you.”

  It’s so quiet in my room that I think I can hear Mom snoring downstairs. Our vents really are connected. I knew it.

  “For what?” I say. My therapist has never been proud of me.

  “I shouldn’t really say this,” she says, “but—this is our first session in which you didn’t mention your sister.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  When I was ten years old, a new family moved in across the street. It caused a stir. Most people don’t move to Pittsburgh.

  Tiffany Devlin was my age, but I was immediately more interested in her substantially older brother. He was tall, and nice. At ten years old, nice wasn’t the first adjective I’d have used to describe grown-up men. Loud, maybe. Or sad. But not nice.

  Tiffany’s twenty-two-year-old brother, Ricky Devlin—Tiffany was a “wonderful surprise,” I remember her mom saying once to my mom—had helped his family move in, but he was only staying for the summer. “Just the summer.”

  “Why?” I asked Ricky once, weeks later, when he was babysitting me and Tiffany and Annabeth. “Why would you move in with your parents?” This boggled my mind—willingly living with your mom and dad, once you don’t have to anymore.

  “Well, I’m a screenwriter,” he said.

  “Don’t movie people live in Hollywood?” Annabeth said, because Annabeth intuitively knew everything. Always.

  “The ones who sell screenplays do,” Ricky said, and that answered that. Something about it wasn’t pathetic though. Ricky was golden, perfect.

  He stayed in the Devlins’ attic, and when it would get really hot, he’d put an oscillating fan in the center of the floor and hold a stick of deodorant up to it to give the room a “clean scent.” Which apparently really stuck with me, ha. Ricky had a photo of the Hollywood sign taped to the sloped wall. He drank a lot of green juices and was always smiling, and he was never loud and never sad.

  I wouldn’t have consciously known Ricky was gay, but he must have been. Please, he ate raw almonds before it was trendy to, he didn’t have a beer gut, and when he cried at the end of The Shawshank Redemption, he didn’t wipe away his tears. I was embarrassed for him, and then I wasn’t.

  I fell in love with movies that summer.

  I mean, if Ricky had been in love with dentistry, I’d have a whole other story. Maybe I wouldn’t even see my life as a story at all, but I do. Ricky showed me how.

  We started by screening the basics, something I’d never done with Dad. Classic films like Old Yeller. Man, how I bawled at that one. I guess I used to let people see me cry. While Annabeth and Tiffany were busy downstairs playing “fashion runway” or “house” or whatever, Ricky and I would go to the attic and watch like ten movies a weekend.

  Nothing about it was creepy, so get your mind outta the gutter.

  He taught me about this mythic story structure that a lot of screenwriters use. I was comforted by the idea of a time-tested way of telling a satisfying tale—because that was the summer when Mom and Dad started openly fighting, and when Annabeth became obsessed with “achievement” as a general concept, and when my A.D.D. began showing up in all sorts of mysterious and charming ways. That was the summer, I mean, when I started to not like the way my life story was going.

  But if I used Ricky’s time-tested method to plan out my plots, I’d always be able to find my way back home again.

  Ricky printed out his version of the Hero’s Journey for me once, and from then on out, whenever we’d hit a mythic story beat in a movie we were watching, he’d pause it and go, “See! That’s the hero ‘deciding to go.’ That’s the hero’s journey, Quinny.”

  He made me promise to keep it safe.

  RICKY DEVLIN’S HERO’S JOURNEY

  We meet the hero in his ordinary world (at home, at school, etc.).

  Hero gets called to action (aka the inciting incident).

  Hero refuses the call to adventure (stays at home, makes excuses, plays video games instead, etc.).

  Hero decides to go because: whatever.

  Hero gets into a ton of trouble, but also has adventures and meets allies.

  Shit happens.

  Worse shit happens.

  The worst shit happens and the hero’s life is basically over.

  But then the hero thinks of something amazing to break into the third act of the screenplay.

  And he does.

  And he learns something vital and true that he didn’t even know was possible.

  And he goes home smarter, if a little beaten up.

  And I’m using “he” generally, but obviously a hero can be a she.

  And if it’s written really well and comes in under 110 pages, the screenwriter gets a house in the Hollywood Hills with a small pool.

  “So does everybody have a pool in Hollywood?” I became enamored of the idea of having my own little pool. I was going to make it in the shape of a Q, and the slash at the bottom of the Q was going to be the hot tub.

  “Not everybody,” Ricky said. “Only people who sell screenplays.”

  And so I started making up little scripts for movies, basically because I wanted a hot tub, ha. “These are good,” Ricky said. He’d shown me how to format them on Mom’s clunky old laptop, from the days when she worked for Alcoa, before she got injured and the disability checks starting rolling in. “But you need somebody to film them for you!” Ricky said. “Otherwise it’s just words, and not a movie.”

  He wouldn’t help me film the movies, himself. He was busy “re-revising” his screenplay—which was about this family whose house accidentally burns to the ground, and when it does, they discover a secret chamber in the basement that leads to an entirely other world where there’s no such thing as fire. (Working title: No Such Thing As Fire.)

  At the time I thought it was the best idea since, oh, Star Wars. I was Ricky’s first fangirl.

  “Get your big sister to shoot your little screenplays,” he suggested. “You guys can be a pint-size moviemaking team, like the Coen Brothers.”

  That did it. I had found my “call to adventure.” I had bypassed “the refusal.” Hell, I was already on step four of my hero’s journey; I loved the Coen Brothers, so that was all he had to say. Basically, when I was ten, I was obsessed with anything that had the f-word in it.

  Annabeth always had better phones than I did; she was older. So that’s how it started. She had a pretty good camera phone. And we had these endless summers—the kind of summers where you almost want school to start back up again—because we were the only kids whose parents didn’t pay for camp at the Y. We just had us and our imaginations and a house with sp
otty air-conditioning.

  My sister doesn’t do anything half assed, so she went to the library and got out books on how to edit movies, and she started making me read my ten-page screenplays out loud to her, and only her. (After Annabeth and I teamed up, I never let anyone else see my first drafts. Too exposed. You can’t trust most people.)

  Then we went back to school that fall, and Annabeth started developing these bumps en route to boobs, and Ricky went away to Hollywood, became somebody, and never looked back. And never came back.

  Somehow, he’s still that golden guy to me, though, even now. The one who’d still bail me out today, if I really needed it.

  Annabeth kept adding other skills to her repertoire that year, but not me. I’m not a particularly original thinker, I’m not, but I loved the order and formula and maybe even the safety of a script, with its margins and standards. So I stuck with it.

  I just hate actually filming stuff, because immediately my vision gets crushed. You want a scene to take place on the sunniest, most beautiful day of the year, and suddenly a cloud passes over. Vision ruined.

  So we’d get my miniscreenplays where we’d want them and I’d hand them off to Annabeth, and in her spare time she’d cast it and shoot it and edit it, and I’d see the final product and judge it and hate it and criticize it. But secretly I also loved it, because those were my words! People were saying my words!

  Eventually, years into the whole thing, we even had an official company name: Q & A Productions. Nice, right? A fourth-tier art nerd at school even designed a pretty slick logo for us, and that was my identity: the silver Q of Q & A. You know, when A wasn’t at Model U.N. or French Club or pep squad, or studying, or doing the hundred other things she seemed to get lost in, nearly as much as making our movies.

  Anyway, you know what’s a really stupid name? Q Productions. Just that. Because what is a Q without an A?

  That’s actually the most confusing part about being alive without knowing the end of your own hero’s journey. You never know if it’s time to go home or head into battle. You never know if you’ve already faced your biggest monster.