The Great American Whatever

by Tim Federle

  “I see you people,” Ricky Devlin says to them. “Give me another minute.” The twinkle is gone again, replaced by two little pinpricks called tired eyes. He looks like an old picture of himself, with a bad filter thrown on top that’s giving him not an eternal tan but rather a speckled crust.

  “Just help me with, like, one thing,” I say to him. “When you get stuck with a scene, do you always go back to the formula?” I reach for my phone. I want to take notes.

  Somebody hands Ricky Devlin some big-ass earphones. “You want the truth?”

  “Of course,” I say.

  “This is the fourth screenplay I sold.”

  “Okay?” I open up the Notes app on my phone. “That’s awesome.”

  “And it’s the first one where I threw out all the rules and just wrote from, like, my heart. No rules. No three-act structure. I wrote it on spec in one weekend, and my agents sold it the next Thursday. Fuck the inciting incident. Fuck the page count. Just write the truth.”

  I can’t be hearing this. “Um.” This is awful news. Ricky Devlin’s screenwriting basics are my Bible. This is . . . a test. Yes, this is classic. He is the impostor. He is donning a false mask. Do not trust this.

  “Quinny,” he says, but I’m moaning a little bit, “I really have to get back to set, which is sort of killing me. But like I said, you can—”

  “It’s my birthday,” I say. I push away from the table and grab his arm. I am a madman.

  “That’s right,” Ricky Devlin says. He touches my hand. “You made us celebrate your entire birthday week when I sat for you guys. So funny.”

  “They’re tearing down the Liberty,” I say.

  “They’re—wait, what?”

  You sometimes don’t remember something until you’re standing in front of it. It was Ricky Devlin who introduced me to the Liberty. He cried at The Shawshank Redemption. I was embarrassed for him, and then I wasn’t.

  I pull my hand out from beneath his.

  “Yeah, or they’re renting it out,” I say. “It got shut down. The rich guy who financed the Liberty died.”

  Ricky Devlin rolls his eyes. “Jesus, I leave this town and the whole thing goes to pot.” I’ll say this: Ricky Devlin has amazing arms. They are huge, almost quadlike. He was skinny like me when he was closer to my age. Can I have his arms someday, without also having the bald spot? He got to keep his sister, so can I keep my hair?

  “I loved the Liberty,” Ricky Devlin says. He shakes his head in a way that’s too over the top, like when your high school counselor pretends to care that your dad left your mom on her fortieth birthday.

  A loud bell goes off, a school bell almost. Ricky Devlin stands up and backs away.

  “Let me sign something for you, for your birthday.”

  All this time I had Ricky Devlin pegged as the God figure who would one day return as a majestic, helpful spirit, with eternally thick hair and eyes that twinkle endlessly. . . .

  “Here,” he says. He has torn off a corner of a paper. He has signed it for me. “Stick around and stay on the fringes. And keep in touch, Quinny.”

  “Okay.”

  But I don’t stick around. I watch Ricky Devlin take a glance back at me and bite his lip and then exit the tent, back out to the floodlights, and I look around and steal a few handfuls of soy sauce packets, Mom’s favorite condiment, and then open his note, which he folded in half like a Celebrity clue.

  “Happy Birthday to Quinny Roberts, who grew up,” Ricky’s autograph says. “From your old friend RD.”

  He has gone Hollywood on me.

  He has written down his e-mail address and dated the note at the top—and seeing my birthday like that, I realize the six-month anniversary of Annabeth’s death is almost here. She and I never missed a half birthday. We grew up in a household that never skipped an opportunity for sweets. A neighbor would die and mom would take us out for sundaes: to celebrate “the life they had,” as if she even knew the names of their kids.

  As if Amir even knew the names of everyone on his own boat tonight.

  I fold up Ricky Devlin’s note and slide it into my pocket and head for the exit, and I step right onto the next sputtering shuttle that’s leaving for the T. And instead of reinstating all my social networking apps, I power down my new phone and close my eyes and save up my energy to confront a guy I don’t even know anymore, who has somehow figured into this particular birthday being the biggest letdown since the 1977 Exorcist sequel.

  But mostly I’m thinking: Ricky Devlin isn’t the golden guy of my past, or even my future. He isn’t going to rescue me. I’m on my own here, and maybe I don’t see everything after all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The scale of my life is all warped.

  I’d been in my room for so many months that I’ve begun to think that humans only need about ten square feet of living space. A twin-size bed, a closet with a broken hinge, a mini-fridge. And so standing here on Geoff’s lawn—the greenest lawn in all the land—I can’t even imagine what you do with all that space inside. And that’s saying something, because I don’t even have to.

  I grew up in that house.

  They kept track of how tall I was growing with little pencil marks in the door frame of their perfect, gleaming kitchen.

  His dad taught me how to drive.

  His sister used to dress me up in tutus.

  The incomplete full-length film that I was eighty-five pages into writing, last fall, would have starred a young boy who wore tutus and army boots and was a superhero in his own mind. An eight-year-old ideally would have played him, the last age you can be without being self-conscious. It’s true. Once you hit nine, it’s all downhill, because you start noticing things other than the comics and your own belly button, and that sadness of growing subtly older sets in right around when you turn ten, which is why society has created such a big deal out of “double digits.”

  We make a huge-ass deal out of “double digits” because if we didn’t, kids would just start walking into traffic. We trick them into thinking double digits is when the glory years hit.

  Incorrect.

  Take it from a double-digit virgin.

  Last September Annabeth cast a redheaded kid down the block to play the tutu-and-boots-wearing superhero, whose character’s code name in the movie, by the way, is “Double Digits,” which is also the name of the movie. Our last one together. It was a dark comedy: The kid is part of a society where when you turn double digits, you are sent into battle. It’s like a younger Hunger Games but doesn’t take itself so seriously. God, that film could have used some authentic laughs and not just the kind you get by putting old sitcom stars in funny wigs.

  Double Digits was my most ambitious effort, and I had the whole thing plotted out. Or, most of it. I used Ricky Devlin’s guide, but I hadn’t finished the last fifteen-ish pages of the script, and Annabeth and I fought over that all this past September and October. She said if I wasn’t going to write that college character recommendation for Mrs. Wadsworth to sign, “Can you at least finish your screenplay?”

  We nearly killed each other on every film, even the five-minute jokey ones. I suppose it took an hour-long dark comedy for me to literally murder my sister.

  “Jesus Christ, you look like a murderer, standing there.”

  “Oh,” I say, turning to find my potentially former best friend, who’s idling next to me at the curb in front of his ginormous house. “Why aren’t you inside?”

  He rolls his eyes. “Sorry, Quinn, my character can’t always be where you want him to be.” He pulls into the drive and cuts the engine. “Should we go in?”

  “How long were you guys lying to me?” I say, staying put. I want this moment to play out right here on the lawn. “You and me and Annabeth were a club of three,” I say. “That was all I had.” It comes out stilted. Not even Pacino could pull this junk off.

  Geoff’s eyes go wide. “Yeah, Carly just texted me about what happened on the boat,” he goes. “I’m gonna kill
her. Let’s not do this out here.”

  “No, seriously,” I say, working myself up. Making a neighbor’s dog growl. “When were you going to tell me you were sneaking around with my dead sister?”

  “Well, she wasn’t exactly dead at the time.”

  I open Geoff’s car door.

  EXT. GEOFF’S PERFECT LAWN – NIGHT

  Quinn takes Geoff by the lapels and flings him onto the lawn. He straddles Geoff and digs his knee right between Geoff’s ribs.

  QUINN

  Seriously. Explain yourself so that I don’t freak out.

  GEOFF

  We didn’t want to tell you. We were afraid you would overreact. Like, you know: right now.

  I reach for Geoff’s lapels, but what kind of kid wears lapels? He’s in a T-shirt. His seat belt is still on, and I don’t fling him onto the lawn. I simply grab some fabric, and goddammit we both start laughing.

  “This isn’t funny,” I say. I say it again, “This isn’t funny,” to convince myself, and then I collapse onto the grass and bring my heel down into it, one-two-three, until I hit dirt, and Geoff goes, “At least leave my lawn alone. That thing is my mom’s pride and joy,” and when I look up at him one tear accidentally falls from my eye like Demi Moore in Ghost (massively underrated performance/film), and Geoff goes: “Come on, birthday boy, let’s go inside.”

  So we do. We head to his basement, which is finished within an inch of its life. The whole thing feels like a showroom; you have to take off your shoes and everything.

  “When were you going to tell me?” I say, again.

  Geoff sits on a sofa that’s equally beautiful and uncomfortable.

  “We didn’t, like, know how to. Seriously. It was like friggin’ Romeo and Juliet the way we had to sneak aroun—”

  “Oh my God, the fact that you’re even referring to the two of you as a ‘we.’ ” I pick up a fake metal apple from a ceramic bowl.

  “Dude, we knew you’d freak out. We just, like, instinctively knew you wouldn’t support us. That you’d be this, like, weird kind of jealous.” I go to say, That’s so not fair, but he keeps barreling on. “You were so tired of Annabeth getting everything handed to her first in life that we were like: If he finds out we’re in a relationship before he even comes out of the closet, himself . . .”

  I almost throw the apple at his mom’s wall. “I wouldn’t have been jealous!” I say. “I would have appreciated you being honest with me!”

  Geoff’s lips sputter. “You’re so full of shit, Q.”

  “Give me one example of how I’ve been anything less than a best frien—”

  “Sometimes it feels like all you care about is your screenplays. Or cared.”

  He is hugging a sofa cushion, and when I un-blur my eyes, I realize he is actually using it for protection.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t think I’m ever getting back to my screenplay. I don’t have a reason to.”

  “That’s actually,” Geoff says. “This is an awkward segue—but that’s why I wanted you to come over tonight.” He puts the pillow aside slowly as if setting down a weapon outside a hostage situation. “A package showed up at my house this week. Like, for you. I’ve been trying to find a way to . . . Just, hold on.”

  Geoff disappears for a moment into a storage room in their basement, one of four in the house. This house practically has more storage rooms than my house does rooms, period.

  I walk over to Geoff’s family’s treadmill and I look up at this stone fireplace thing they’ve got, and my eyes rest on the mantel, where an expensive-looking Chinese vase sits shiny and still. The vase looks so familiar, and when I realize why, it wallops me hard like some sports metaphor involving a stray ball that I won’t even attempt.

  “I’ll be right back,” Geoff calls. “Stay there.”

  Annabeth’s ashes sit in a vase just like this, in our sunroom.

  It was a gift from Geoff’s mom to my mom. Literally it’s the same exact vase, with the same exact “vaguely Oriental” pattern but in a different color. Probably bought on the same day at the same store.

  Geoff’s mom said she knew Annabeth’s favorite color was orange—an odd color for an odd girl—and that she wanted us to have it in case we decided to keep Annabeth’s ashes on display.

  She’d brought it to the memorial, I was told. I was not at the memorial.

  I’d promised my mom I’d say some remarks that day, but, like everything in my life, I put it off until the very last moment. Another promise that became another lie. And so instead of ad-libbing and making a blubbering fool of myself in front of all the first-tiers at school, I was on the floor of my bathroom, wearing earplugs, with my forehead pressed against the coolness of my toilet.

  “Okay,” Geoff says, entering the room again just as the rage bubbles up in me like when you add Mentos to Coke and it explodes like a geyser.

  It comes to me, that is, why I am the kind of mad known as sad.

  There is so much about Annabeth’s life that will never be: She will never share an Oscar with me. She will never have her kids call me Uncle Win. She will never have kids.

  And I was kind of getting used to that concept.

  But now, this, too: This idea that there are things about Annabeth that actually happened that I’ll never know? That she and Geoff were sneaking around behind my back merely points out the grimmest truth of all: That there are hours and days and months from her life, an autobiography she’ll never get to share with me. She didn’t keep a diary that I know of. She called our films her diary, but I think she did it just to humor me.

  “Um . . . Quinn?”

  Something about Annabeth having this secret with my best and only friend underlines how now she’s been relegated to sitting there in an urn in the sunroom, forever not able to answer my questions.

  “Why were you so snippy with me at the coffee shop?” I say to Geoff. I can’t look at him. I am typing 6-6-6 into the treadmill, just to have the distraction of a beep.

  “It was our anniversary,” he says.

  “What?”

  “When you came to Loco Mocha yesterday, it was my anniversary with Annabeth. It would have been a year. I was really upset that I couldn’t share that, like, heaviness with you.”

  “Wait, you were seriously officially dating?”

  “Yeah, when we could sneak in time behind your back, which actually wasn’t that hard. You never notice anything if it’s not about you.”

  I step off the treadmill and back Geoff into the sofa.

  “We were in love with each other,” he says.

  I am holding so many feelings inside that my body is the second Civil War. “Just stop talking. For a second. Okay?”

  Geoff’s eyes spill over. “I lost her too, you know. You don’t own the trademark on mourning your sister.”

  I reach to touch him, and a breeze sweeps through the basement—Annabeth’s ghost? I’m thinking—but it’s not. It’s the vortex created by the door at the top of his stairs opening, and I hear his mom’s voice: “Geoff, everything okay down there?” and God love the kid, he goes, “No,” and he is crying and not trying to hide the brokenness from his mom, “it’s not,” and she scurries down the stairs and comes to the French doors leading to the basement. She is in a silk robe. Her hair is up and although she is thin, my mom is prettier.

  “Quinn,” she says.

  I turn away and put the metal apple down, afraid I may launch it at any moment.

  “I told him,” Geoff says, “but I don’t think he believes me.”

  “No, I do,” I’m saying, but then he says: “Tell him, Mom. Tell him how in love with Annabeth I was.”

  I can’t handle this. Hell, I could barely handle that Annabeth never got to have a boyfriend, but now this: that Annabeth was in love with somebody and then had that taken away from her? It’s too tragic.

  “I just can’t. This is so not like you guys to keep something from me.”

  “This is exactly why we didn’t tell you,” Geoff
says. He gets up from the sofa.

  “Boys,” his mom says. She used to say the same thing when we were in sixth grade and we would tell sex jokes in the backseat of yet another brand-new Toyota. Sex jokes that we thought his mom wouldn’t “get.”

  “The whole world isn’t yours to decide, Quinn,” Geoff says, and when he’s jabbing his finger into my chest, that’s when I notice the strange manila envelope in his other hand, the thing he retrieved from storage.

  “Boys,” his mom says again, “come on. Let’s cool down and meet up again tomorrow.”

  “Mom, get out of here. It’s fine,” Geoff says, but it isn’t, and he’s scaring me. Geoff is the optimist. Geoff isn’t the one to jab or get violent. His parents had a no-hitting rule.

  Mine didn’t.

  “Were you ever going to tell me?” I say. From overhead, we must look like a pretty good setup to a pretty dynamic scene: the aging architect in the robe, the weird kid in the fake glasses, the best friend with the mystery envelope. It’s not a bad scenario, if only I knew the ending.

  “No,” Geoff says, “because when Annabeth went to college, we were going to break up.”

  He falls back into the couch and puts his head in his hands and plainly sobs, and as he sobs, goobs of snot and spittle fall from his face like Fallingwater, the field trip all Pennsylvanian children are required to take at least twice, and when the goobs fall forth, they land on the manila envelope by his feet, with a return address from Los Angeles, with the word CONGRATS printed across the front, and with my name, QUINN ROBERTS, written above Geoff’s address—the word URGENT stamped in red ink.

  “What the hell is that?” I say.

  “Language,” Geoff’s mom says, and the three of us somehow laugh. As if hell is the worst thing I’ve ever said, or the worst concept I’ve ever imagined. Hell is your big sister losing her virginity to your best friend and neither one of them being confident enough to share that news with you because you are, in fact, the monster of this picture. Godzilla got to be the title role, but, my God, he was still the monster. Still the antagonist. Still the wickedest. That is me. The creature who destroys villages and has to be tiptoed around.