The Great American Whatever

by Tim Federle

  “Sorry?” I say.

  “For driving you right in front of your high school on summer break.” I check his face. Nope. No pity. “You must want to get as far away from it as possible!” He still doesn’t know. They didn’t tell him. Carly and Geoff have allowed that to be my final trick of the night.

  “It’s green,” I say, when the light changes and reflects off his glasses. You can tell he really needs them, because, in the angle he’s using to stare at me, his eyes take on this distorted old-fashioned-Coke-bottle quality. He really does need his glasses and I really don’t need mine.

  “The light,” I say when he’s still looking at me as if I am the dead kid whose face is spray-painted into the spackled wall of my school, “is green.”

  Somebody honks. Amir’s engine revs up. We pull away, but my thoughts don’t. My thoughts linger back at the school, like smoke. They smolder. And yet they are without heat. They are a fire without ashes. My thoughts are one great big nothing.

  • • •

  It takes us weirdly forever to find parking, and then the line to the front of the theater is Jack-Rabbit-roller-coaster deep, and so by the time we get to the ticket counter and find out they’re down to one remaining seat, Amir looks like he’s going to lose his mind.

  “It’s cool,” I say, because it really is. I don’t think I can handle a Japanese film right now. Anytime I have to read, my mind instantly wanders, and I don’t want my mind instantly wandering. I want my mind instantly obliterated.

  She just . . . she genuinely looked like a dog. My beautiful sister. As if an art director said to a gang of middle schoolers: Please paint a dog on the side of the school and tie a black ribbon around its ears. And voilà, they nailed it.

  “Well, should we get a frozen yogurt or something?” Amir says, and yes, we absolutely should. That’s a great idea.

  I take the liberty of tasting three different samples at the yogurt place, and it isn’t until I’m filling up my official froyo cup with way too many opposing flavors that I see what I’m doing: giving my brain an intentional overload. “Yes,” I just keep saying at the counter, when the girl asks which toppings I want, and so after graham cracker crumbs and this raspberry sauce thing and gummy bears and kiwi and white chocolate chips, Amir puts his hand very gently on my lower back, not like we’re moving up in line but like he’s saying, That’s enough, Quinn.

  And this is the moment I fall in love with him.

  He pays for us. We find weird chairs that have these impractical little tufts of butt padding. Approximately one bite into my yogurt, I look at the thing as if I’m coming out of a particularly vivid hypnotism session, and I start giggling. It looks disgusting. “Holy shit.”

  “Is right,” he says.

  “What did you get?”

  “An extremely sensible peanut butter and chocolate combo. Solid. Classic.”

  I instinctively reach my spoon across to try his. There isn’t a person in my life who I can’t do this with. My life is best friends or nobody. My life is Geoff.

  Amir pulls his cup away. “Say please,” he says in this twangy way that gives please like four separate syllables and gives me like one solid boner, and so I say, “P-l-eas-e,” and take a bite. I don’t even offer him any of mine, because, really.

  “So where are you going next week?” I say.

  “Wait, did Carly tell you I’m leaving town?”

  “No, you did.”

  “Oh.” He laughs too hard. Wasn’t a good line and wasn’t even a line.

  The music in here is blasting, really blasting, so that I have to lean forward a bit to hear him. I’m okay with this.

  “I got into this writing workshop thing,” he says, rolling his eyes again. I want him to own how hot he is.

  “Oh, no way.”

  “Way.”

  He eats frozen yogurt slower than anybody on earth.

  “So, like,” I say, “what kind of writing workshop?”

  “Ah, it’s lame. Do you read novels? Don’t answer that. Nobody ever gives the answer I want.”

  Man, do I get that. Try being a screenwriter and watching your nearly perfect sequence get obliterated by a passing airplane, in the middle of a scene that’s supposed to take place in the eighteen hundreds.

  “I love novels,” I say, loudly, louder than the music level even calls for.

  “O . . . kay,” he says, not believing me, which he shouldn’t. I don’t love novels, or: I don’t like anything assigned to me.

  Crap, now he’s saying something about San Francisco.

  “I love San Francisco,” I say. Everything is love or hate with me these days. I hope I just like or dislike some stuff in my seventeens and eighteens.

  Oh my God, I turn seventeen tomorrow. Holy shit, that sounds old.

  “Oh, you’ve been to SF?” he goes, but I haven’t been, and this brain-freezing business is no joke. I shake it off.

  “Sorry. I’m, like, distracted by how cold this is.” I hold up my goop. We laugh. “I’ve never been to San Francisco, but there’s a preeetty campy Bond scene filmed there, over the Golden Gate Bridge, which you have to visit.”

  “Bond?”

  “James Bon—oh. Ha-ha.”

  He set me up. Clever guy.

  “Anyway,” he goes, “my writing workshop isn’t in San Francisco proper. It’s going to be farther down on the peninsula.”

  I’ve never totally understood peninsulas. It’s like: Are you an island? Pick what you are, peninsulas!

  I’ve spaced out again. He’s staring at me. “I’m sorry,” I say, too confidently tossing my cup across the room and absolutely missing the garbage can by nothing less than a yard. We crack up. I pick it up, wipe off my hands, and turn back to see Amir making a big frowny face and pointing at my stomach. When I look down, there is a full-on gummy worm attached to my shirt by means of chocolate sauce.

  “Oh, no way,” I say at my shirt.

  “Way,” Amir goes. Somehow, in the span of twenty seconds, he’s acquired a little thing of warm water and a towel from the front counter. He’s squatting low, dabbing at my shirt and kind of fixing me up. It is the sweetest thing.

  “I think that should take out most of the stain,” he says, looking up at me.

  Some bro-types are leering at us, and Amir says, “Shall we?” and motions to the door, and I say, “Duh,” and we’re on the muggy street in two seconds flat.

  “You said you were sorry back there,” Amir goes, “immediately after you spilled chocolate sauce on yourself like an adorable invalid and directly before we were nearly hate-crimed into the history books.”

  “Whoa, you are a writer,” I’m saying, but really I’m stalling, because I can’t remember what I’m sorry about. So much, really. Everything.

  “Ha,” he goes. “Don’t tell my straight-ass parents I’m a writer. They think I’m going to San Francisco to intern for a startup. They don’t approve of my clandestine plan to write the great Iranian-American novel, heh.”

  It’s coming to me now. When I was zoning and brain freezing, he mentioned San Francisco in regards to this writing program. I can fake this.

  “So . . . will you know other people . . . at the, like, your writing program?”

  “Eh, I can tell you more about the program later. We should decide what we want to do tonight.”

  Oh, that’s nice. I thought that yogurt and a wardrobe malfunction was sort of “it” for our first date.

  “Crazy idea,” Amir says, grabbing my shoulder and steering me into an alley between two brick buildings. Oh my God, is he going to kiss me? Is this it? I still have gummy bear, etc., breath. “Do you like to bowl?”

  I hate to bowl. But the poetry of it all. Mom beating Dad on their first date.

  “I. Love. Bowling,” I say, and Amir takes my hand, and a field of fireflies appears inside my chest and they all light up at once.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  We’re three rounds into bowling and I don’t really totally understand
how the scoring works, but for whatever reason I’ve been able to turn this into a running bit, like I’m Goldie Hawn in some eighties screwball comedy.

  “You’re up,” I say to Amir, after another of my bowling balls goes straight into the gutter. I did not inherit my parents’ genes for this pastime, and in one brief, shining moment, I wonder if perhaps I am adopted. Somehow that would make Annabeth’s death feel not so personal.

  Amir has a whole stance and everything, where he holds the ball close to him like the thing is a fragile baby, and when he releases it, he grunts a little—not as a joke—and the ball knocks down five of the pins, which for me would be cause to go to Disney World, but seems to genuinely bum him out a bit.

  “I thought that was a triumph,” I say, but his “Thanks” suggests he’s a straight-A student who’s never happy with anything but the best. Jesus. Wait’ll he sees the inside of my house.

  “Were you a straight-A student in high school?”

  “Still am,” he goes, sitting down again. His shirt is a little too tight and his chest strains against it, and I’m saying this is a great thing.

  “That’s gotta be a lot of pressure.”

  The group next to us lets out the kind of whoop and hoot that only Pittsburghers know how to do. Seriously, you wouldn’t believe the pride and commitment to sports if you didn’t live here, and even then.

  “Quinn,” Amir says, poking my knee with his finger.

  “Yeah?”

  “I said, You’ve gotta be a pretty good student, too, right? I mean, you’re so quick.”

  “You should see me in gym class. I could challenge that notion.”

  “Ha, see. Quick.”

  I don’t need Amir knowing how I just coast by academically, so I do that thing where I pretend to cough.

  “Do you want some nachos or something?” Amir goes, and I say, “Or something,” because I like when dialogue echoes in movies, but I’m secretly hoping he really does bring back nachos specifically.

  He walks away and I study him. I’m the only person in this incredibly loud bowling alley who doesn’t have his phone out, multitasking. Amir’s jeans are just a little too baggy, so when they hang down, some underwear is sticking out, and it’s the boxer variety, which just drives me delirious.

  “Nachos,” he says, back with a plate of the grossest and most wonderful looking dinner I’ve had in a while. “Do you like jalapeños?”

  “Love ’em,” I say, because I like them.

  “Okay, go to town,” he says. “Jalapeños, licorice, humidity.”

  “Things you hate?”

  “Bingo.”

  A group of not-naturally-blond girls stumble into our area, and I feel offended, somehow, but when Amir leaps up and goes, “Would you guys like this lane? We’re just having a snack,” somehow I end up liking them.

  “Cool, whatever,” one of them goes, followed by a chorus of “Whatevs, sure,” and Amir and I are taking the nachos to a little snack bar area that feels a million miles from the school cafeteria.

  “So, what do they want you to do?” I say. Dammit, Quinn, set him up better. You’re getting all “Geoff” with your lack of context.

  “What does who wan—”

  “Yeah, sorry, sorry, I should have set that up better. What do your parents want you to, like, study?”

  He runs his hands through his mop-head. “Oh, them.”

  “I mean, we don’t have to—”

  Crunch. Crunch. Nachooooos.

  “No, it’s fine. It’s fine. My dad’s in finance and my mom is a fund-raiser on the Dallas scene.”

  “Oh, cool,” I say.

  “Yeah, cool if I go into finance.”

  “Have you always wanted to be a novelist?”

  “Ever since I read Roald Dahl, yeah.”

  “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory!”

  “Actually, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I think Willie Wonka was just the film title.”

  “Oh,” I go, “right.”

  Nothing, followed by nothing, and then: “What are your other favorite movies that were books first?” he says.

  He has had three chips, total. I have had something like a thousand.

  “Well,” I say, “there are the obvious ones: The Shining, uh, Carrie, Talented Mr. Ripley. . . .”

  “So are you just crazy obsessed with movies or do you actually want to make them someday?”

  Wow. I’m a little insulted and don’t even have a right to be. If I don’t tell him about Annabeth, I can’t be pissed he doesn’t know about Q & A Productions, but this is my thing about why I think relationships—boyfriends, friends, anything—are such a hassle. I’ve lived for almost seventeen years. That is so much to catch somebody up about. I want people just to arrive in my life fully informed of my tastes and fears. The lists are pretty short, definitely memorizable. I wish they could be distributed to would-be suitors ahead of time, so they could rule themselves out. Or in! I’m open to “in,” too!

  “Uh, yeah,” I say, “I guess I’d like to make movies someday.”

  I discreetly check my shirt and notice only the chocolate ghost stain, with no nacho cheese sauce in sight, and when I look up again, Amir goes, “Can I get you a drink?” But his eyes are shiny shiny shiny, like there’s another set of eyes behind them. He’s up to something.

  “I’m good, thanks,” I say, holding up a bottle of water.

  “No, I mean,” he goes, leaning in on his elbows. His T-shirt tugs at the collar. His chest. He has a really nice chest. You could land a helicopter on it. “Do you want a beer?”

  I try to play it cool. I so want a beer. I also don’t want to get in trouble or caught or something. I’m already out way too late, already worried my mom has called Geoff’s mom, asking where he and I went to dinner.

  “Definitely,” I say, just like that, loud, and he slaps his hands down on the table and goes, “Cool.”

  I watch his baggy jeans and tight T-shirt walk away, and I’m looking at my forearms and thinking how hairless and sticky they are, on account of this disgusting table, and he’s back faster than I could have guessed. Time is relative, these days.

  “At your service, monsieur.” Amir places the plastic cup down in front of me, and perhaps he is a secret magician, because as I reach for it, he says, “Go slow,” as if he absolutely and without a doubt knows this is my first beer ever.

  I’m sipping and sipping and waiting for it to be good, and I go, “How about you? Favorite book-to-movie adaptations?”—and, by the way, Amir’s slow about eating food, but half his beer is gone in two gulps.

  “See, I don’t have your extensive knowledge,” he goes. “I think the only adaptation I’m confident I’ve seen is The Ten Commandments,” which is a pretty good joke, so I throw it a laugh.

  I take another sip of beer. Nope. Still gross. “Hey,” I go, “will you look a movie thing up? On your phone?”

  “Sure, Mom,” he says. My face can’t hide any lies, so Amir goes, “I’m teasing, Quinn,” really soft and sweet, and he taps his knee into mine under this table and goes, “Okay, what am I looking up?”

  “Okay, Google ‘Ricky Devlin new movie.’ ”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Oh, just some guy.” A golden guy. “Like, an old babysitter.”

  The screen above our heads is broadcasting this vintage Pittsburgh Pirates game—it’s like a twenty-four-seven loop of the “best games ever”—and there’s a table of guys two nachos over who are reacting to it as if in this very moment they can’t believe the home run that is currently being home runned.

  “Okay, there’s a bunch of results,” Amir goes. “You want to see?”

  I take a really big swig of beer, developing a new theory that maybe it tastes better in large quantities, and when that proves false but exhilarating, I burp a little as I’m saying, “No, just read one to me,” and he goes, “Easy, slugger.”

  I put the beer down and pick at my nails. Difficult, as they’re already n
early picked to kingdom come.

  “Okay, so, here’s something from Deadline, a few months ago—”

  “Perfect, yeah, read that.”

  “ ‘No Such Thing As Fire and Battle-Ax III: Scorpion’s Fury screenwriter Ricky Devlin’s spec script, South Hills Apprentice, was acquired by Relativity Studios in a deal brokered by WME. Script centers around a college dropout, home for the summer, who develops a bond with a complicated, antisocial child—and ends up learning lessons about death, life, and’—hey.” Amir looks up from his iPhone. “You have a little something.”

  I can’t tell what he means about the little something. I am only puzzling together that I am the complicated, antisocial child around whom this screenplay is based, and that perhaps this sounds like the worst movie ever. How could Ricky Devlin be dumb enough to write an autobiographical screenplay about us and actually sell the damn thing?

  Amir’s reaching across and swiping something from my lip, and I wince away. I wince away. Just like Geoff did to my mom on the counter.

  “It’s just a beer mustache,” Amir says, putting his phone on camera mode and flipping it to show me. I look like some “math nerd” in a porn—these ridiculous glasses, this haircut utterly lacking in style, this white froth mustache foaming me up like some kid Einstein.

  Oh my God. Kid Einstein. One of my first movies ever with Annabeth.

  I had this idea: What if Einstein and Freud and Hitler and Earhart (Amelia) had all been kids together, what if they’d been in school together? Kid Einstein, Kid Hitler, Kid Freud, and Kid Earhart, who’d be played by nobody, because the joke was: Even in middle school, Amelia Earhart was always missing.

  “What if we don’t cast anybody?” Annabeth offered, after I read her the first draft of my script. Always her, only her. “What if we cut all of Amelia’s scenes?” It was her idea. All my best ideas were actually her ideas. Did you know that?

  Oops. My beer’s all gone.

  “Hey,” Amir says. He’s next to me on this sticky banquet. Everything is sticky. His arm is around my shoulder, and I can smell his deodorant. I want to be attracted to this. I should be, but I’m not. He’s my exact same height, but he’s so much stronger than I am that I feel like he could crush me, and I know that seeing Annabeth’s face on the side of the building should have wrecked me tonight but it didn’t. It numbed me. What’s wrecking me is the breathtakingly stupid stuff. The stuff I don’t plan on—how Annabeth is the only person in the world who would appreciate a Kid Einstein reference. How she’s the only person I’d be brave enough to share a first draft with.