The Great American Whatever

by Tim Federle

  But then something changes.

  Amir’s voice gets stronger and softer, at the same time, and I’m able to hear that his writing is stilted but ambitious, which describes perhaps the opposite of my whole life—articulate but lazy. You can tell he has created a world that he believes in, or wants his readers to, and by the end of page one, I am able to appreciate the fact that he is attempting something. That he is, at least, not hibernating.

  “Okay, blah,” he goes, swinging back around, “end of page one. That’s it. Ahh, I want to kill myself.”

  “Don’t say that, it was wonderful.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” he says, but he’s not exactly looking away from me. “Your turn,” he goes, setting the laptop on my legs. “Page one of your screenplay.”

  “No,” I say, somehow working a lighthearted laugh into the proceedings. “Seriously, no way.”

  “Then you’re not getting laid,” he goes, as if he’s punishing me, which he is.

  We have a staring contest and dammit he wins. Trumpets, trumpets, trumpets.

  I open up a new tab and type in my cloud password and scroll through all my screenplays—and for a moment I truly do debate reading from Double Digits. When I open up the first page, I can’t help at least smile at how very me it is.

  But then I read this jokey character description that always made her giggle—the first scene of the screenplay started with me describing the title character as “a fierce young warrior, and I don’t mean ‘gay’ fierce”—and right here on this sofa, I can hear Annabeth cackling at that turn of phrase, and just, no: “I’m not doing this, Amir,” I say, letting my eyes rest on the phrase fierce young warrior. “Only my sister got to hear my bad line readings.”

  I look over the laptop screen and Amir is pulling off his mesh shorts. “Are you sure you won’t even read one page?” he says. He is in purple briefs. He is beautiful. He is both a badger and a butterfly.

  Trumpets, trumpets, trumpets. (beat) (beat) (beat)

  I lick my lips, not to flirt but to prepare. I close my eyes and count backward from ten, telling myself I’ll know by the time I hit “one.” But I know by the time I hit “nine.”

  “I’m just not ready,” I say. I look up. The smallest saliva bubble has formed on Amir’s lips, and I don’t care. His imperfections are his perfections. Ten beautiful fingers creep up over his computer, and when the screen clamps silently shut, the trumpets continue to play for one more moment, as if Elmer Bernstein’s little orchestra of tiny people is trapped inside the laptop. Amir is shirtless, his tank top has disappeared, his hat is on the floor, his hair is matted down. He is smiling, but it is a sex smile, not any other kind. I know this instantly because nobody has ever smiled at me like this, and so it must be that.

  “Well, I still think you’re a genius,” he says, and I go, “Careful. If you keep saying that, I might believe you.”

  He takes the laptop and puts it on his coffee table. It is in this moment that I understand that Amir is not a genius, himself—at least not at storytelling. I replay the first page of his novel in my mind, and I decide that a future in “business” might be good for Amir. He is not a genius, and rereading the first page of Double Digits to myself makes me wonder if in some small way I’ve been comparing myself to the great filmmakers too early in my career. Amir is older than me, but I am a more talented writer; this I know.

  If he feels confident enough to even try writing “the great Iranian-American novel,” maybe I shouldn’t give up so easily on attempting my own personal, like, great American whatever.

  “How much of your novel did you have to submit before getting accepted into the San Francisco thing?” I ask. I can feel my lip twitching.

  He karate-chops a cushion. “None of it.”

  “What?”

  “Evan’s brother runs the program, and I got in as a favor, and I never submitted any writing. So. Can we not talk about this right now?”

  I nod.

  He pulls me up and grabs the bottom ridge of my shirt, and I feel an air-conditioned coolness on my stomach and I jut my elbows down and push his hands away.

  “What?” he goes. “Do you not want to do this?”

  His breath smells like breath, not unpleasant but definitely human.

  “I’m really self-conscious about my body,” I say, but he takes my hands and leads me out of the bright-ass living room.

  He does not have an AC in his bedroom, but then he barely has a bed: A mattress sits on the floor, with a paisley sheet thrown across, with boxes surrounding it, with boy clothes piled on a chair. “I packed everything up,” he goes, and then: “Is it too hot in here?” and I say: “No, not at all,” because I am freezing, as if I have a fever. My riverboat chest has hit an iceberg after all.

  He pulls my shirt off over my head, and I hunch my shoulders in and wish I had my bangs back, to brush down into my face. And when he takes off my glasses and then his own, and tries mine on without asking, and goes, “Wait, are these fakes?” I want to yell that everything is, Amir. Everything is fake.

  He puts his glasses back on and places mine on the mattress. “You shouldn’t be self-conscious of your body,” he says. “Like, at all.” His fingers are tracing the bony tracks of my chest.

  I am completely hard only as a reaction to physical touch but not out of anticipation or even horniness. I am kind of petrified I will do everything wrong. Evan the Ex is so much older than I am. They must have had tricks, techniques, and inside jokes. Even in the bedroom. God knows I’ve seen enough porn to at least have a basic sense of the etiquette and approach to this stuff, but then again, I’ve watched a lot of YouTubes of Olympic divers, too—those bathing suits, those bathing suits—and I’m no closer to flipping off a forty-foot platform than I am to winning an Oscar.

  “Hey,” Amir says, and he kisses my nose, “distracted boy.”

  I kiss him back, this time with a medium amount of tongue, and we fall onto his mattress, and a streetlight spills into the room through blinds that make Amir look like a beautiful striped zebra—as exotic and endangered as every boy has ever felt to me.

  “I’m so sad,” I say, to buy some time, but also to try out what that sounds like, and he goes: “Aww, about me leaving?” And I say: “No—sorry. I mean, yes. But I am so sad that my sister and my best friend didn’t trust me enough to tell me they were, like, a thing.”

  In all these months I have never once said I am sad, not out loud, maybe because it’s so obvious that it seems a little on the nose to verbalize. I hate being ordinary.

  But now that I’ve said it, it pulses like a blue bug zapper. I am sad. Pulse. Pulse. Pulse. Zap.

  “Do you want to, like, talk about it?”

  “Nah,” I say. “I just wanted to name it.”

  “Okay.” Pause. He places his hand on my stomach, dangerously close to Boner Zone. “I still think you’re adorable.”

  “More making out,” I say, sniffing, “less talking.”

  And that’s the cue to have epic sex—it just is—but then we don’t have even normal sex. Not at all. We talk. We talk about what it’s like to be embarrassed about being somebody’s kid, and we talk about how strangely coordinated we both were at Little League, and we talk about what we think happens to somebody’s, like, soul, when they die (“Absolutely nothing,” we both conclude).

  And we talk about how weird it is to burn a loved one into a fine powder and then put her into a fifteen-dollar orange jar, and what it’s like to be young but feel old, and why we both want to tell stories, and why Pittsburgh is wonderful. We talk about Evan and we talk about my dad. We talk about how both our balloons got caught on the guardrail of the roof on the night we met, and we talk about how neither of us really believes in signs or coincidences, except: The way we say it, I think we’re both still holding out hope that perhaps, perhaps.

  Fully an hour later we’re talking about how Amir is semi-allergic to lactose and about how I am fully allergic to optimism, and though it’s my bes
t piece of dialogue all week, neither of us even smiles at it.

  At some point I nod off, and at another point I wake up and he is looking right at me, and I say, “I don’t think this is going to happen tonight,” and he goes, “I sort of figured that out an hour ago,” and then it’s his turn to drift off, as though I am keeping guard of the campsite so he can get a few winks in before the bears return, before life happens again.

  My mouth is dry because it has said too many words. I put my shirt back on. I walk out to the living room, and I’m not exactly proud of this, but I find Amir’s laptop and I open the screen, and when there is no password to have to guess at (I would have tried “Evan123” and then “evan4ever”), I hit mute on Elmer Bernstein’s violins and I open Amir’s Morning Pages daily diary and I scroll and I scroll and I see something shocking and true involving me.

  I see that in the days since Amir met me, he hasn’t written about Quinn Roberts. Not even once. He has written only about Evan, but maybe all my years of faking an uptight-detective voice for my mom have paid off, because I feel I have solved a true mystery: Amir has always been the younger guy. Finally, with me, he can be older. He can even the score. He is not my prop, tonight—I am his. That is all this is or was, not that Amir and I were ever enough of a thing to even be a was.

  “Um,” he says. He is somehow standing before me in those purple briefs. I fumble to x out of his Morning Pages Word document, and I say, “Sorry, just checking my e-mail,” and he squinches his face up at me again and goes, “Uh, okay,” and bends down to pick up his shorts and his tank top and his hat. And he hands me back my fake glasses.

  • • •

  Other than reminding me to buckle up, Amir wordlessly drives me back home, but before I get out he turns down NPR and goes: “The great escape,” and I say, “I’m sorry?” and he says: “The Bernstein score. At my place. That’s what I was playing for you.”

  “Oh, right,” I say, of course, “The Great Escape. Good movie.”

  “Yeah,” he says.

  The porch lights aren’t flashing tonight, and so I give myself the luxury of one more minute, and go, “Trivia.”

  He laughs. “Okay, Trivia. Can’t wait.”

  “First question: Am I a joke to you?”

  “Uh. What?”

  “Sorry. Just: Have I just been, like, some anonymous kid to potentially fuck around with just so you could get even with Evan?”

  Amir takes my hand and puts it on his lap. He is completely hard. “Does this,” he says, “feel anonymous to you?”

  And because I am not expecting it at all—because I had completely given up on the idea of losing my virginity tonight—this time, I don’t write a sex scene. I just have one.

  He unbuckles himself and reclines his seat, and I mount him as if he is, in fact, that escaped and exotic zebra: I’m fumbling for his zipper, exploring the scar on his stomach, kissing him so hard our teeth clatter, or maybe that’s just because I’m freezing cold, again, and absolutely shaking.

  “Do you want me to turn the heat on?” he whispers, like my mom might be hiding in the backseat, and I say, “No, I want you to drive us down the street, with your headlights off.”

  I climb off him back into my seat, cross my legs like a lady at a beauty salon, and touch my swollen lips, which I discover are smiling, which are burning like something alive and rubbed raw by a real live man’s face.

  Two minutes later we are parked beneath an ancient weeping willow on an abandoned lot, naked in the backseat of Amir’s Saturn, our limbs intertwined like mixed-race pretzels, the moon so overcast that for one brief, funny moment, I think that if a cop approached the car with a flashlight, we might look like siblings with the same exact color skin and height, wrestling.

  When Amir pulls off one of his socks to clean us up, we laugh—“We kept our socks on,” we say at the same time, and then, “Jinx”—and he goes, “That doesn’t always happen with two people, just FYI: the, uh, ‘finishing at the same time’ thing.”

  I go, “Cool,” pull my lucky boxers back up, and scramble into the front seat, where I look up to see not a lost bird outside Amir’s windshield, but instead a black ribbon, tied to the willow tree we’d nearly driven into. And I am not freezing anymore.

  We kiss one more time, and the way he goes, “Obviously we’re keeping in touch,” after the little drive back up to my house, and the way I go, “Obviously, duh,” back, makes me understand that I am somehow not at all sad that I am never going to see him again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Mom must be in her bedroom, because the sunroom light is off. The house feels burglarized, somehow, unsettlingly altered by the mere act of cleaning it.

  I wash Amir off my hands. There’s a silver dollar on the kitchen counter with a Post-it note on it: “More loot for my birthday boy,” it says. Our house is a strange nighttime pirate cove. Mom’s parents left her nothing when they died, and yet now it is as if our old house is bleeding treasure at every turn.

  I’m walking up the stairs, and each of its steps is behaving tonight. In the humidity they have stopped crying out and have decided to cooperate. Though I’ve gotten used to coasting right by Annabeth’s room, I’ve still never gone back in, but tonight I look at the door and I feel it pulsing. Pulse. Pulse. Pulse. Zap.

  I feel it asking me to enter, as if to say: We are the same now. We are no longer virgins. And so I go in.

  I open the door and this is it: Her room is the final showdown. I know this instantly. It must be. Her room is the secret monster I haven’t met yet. This is the level I must pass.

  I am Ripley and her room is the Alien Queen (Aliens).

  I am Rocky Balboa and her room is Apollo Creed (Rocky).

  I am Dirty Harry and her room is the Scorpio Killer (Dirty Harry).

  Ever notice that in the old days, they just named the villain or the protagonist right in the title? The title of my movie might just be Quinn, the rare film in which the audience isn’t sure at the end if the lead was the good guy or the bad guy.

  I walk to her bed and I fall to my knees in a silent crash. The Elmer Bernstein trumpets start back up in my head, a loop that drives me nuts. I bury my face in Annabeth’s scratchy polyester comforter, and I slide down and droop over and melt into the floor, and I am suddenly looking at a metal box. I don’t know this metal box.

  I pull it out from beneath her bed and I lift the box’s cover. There is an orange-and-gray-striped diary inside, and I hold it tight and feel that I cannot be here: I cannot do this in this room. I stand up and power walk across the hall to my room, which is precisely three hundred times as hot as Annabeth’s.

  We got our twin beds on the exact same day—they were actually a matching set—and so I re-create the scene back in my sister’s room and I lie on the floor next to my bed and I open her diary to a random page.

  “Dream Schools,” it says at the top. She has made a graph, which is so her. Under “Dream Schools” she has listed seven of them. She has written “Dream Majors” next to “Dream Schools” and created an orderly column, and her dream majors were Communications “and/or” Spanish.

  My sister’s dream major was Spanish? She was dating Geoff and her dream major was Spanish? And what else that I’ll never know.

  Here is what she never said in her diary, because I’m flipping through it now so fast, the pages might start smoking and I wouldn’t blink: She never said her dream major was Cinema Studies. She never said her dream major was Filmmaking. She never said she wanted that. This genuinely surprises me.

  I page through in order to find something happier. And I do. I see the phrase “Win is driving me F’ING NUTS today,” from like two years ago, and now, now, now I burst into tears, happy tears, happy to read a new truth from my sister. I never thought I’d get to hear a new truth from her.

  And then more: “G. says Win looked at him funny today and that he hopes when Win comes out to him it’s not as a confession that he’s in love with him,” and then, on
another page, “G. didn’t want to have sex (he said he doesn’t want it to throw off the dynamic between us??) but I pushed and he relented and we had completely awkward and actually PAINFUL but also kind of funny sex and I WANT MORE MWAHAHA,” and I look at the wall like I’m in a sitcom and can’t believe the straitlaced sister character just said that. I wait for the laugh track, but I’m still hearing only trumpets. I flip to another page and it says: “G. is VAGUELY desperate for Win to apply to this film contest so he can be out of our hair this summer and we won’t have to sneak arouuuunnnnnd anymore,” and I don’t let myself register any of that, none of it, and instead I turn five pages ahead to find: “G. and I talked about breaking up when I go away to school, but it is hard to imagine meeting somebody who is as good of a fit for me.”

  This is the only revelation that makes me mad, because you know who was the perfect fit for her? I was.

  People used to think we were twins, even.

  I close the box and also my eyes, and I slide the box beneath my twin-size bed and it hits something with the very same clack that the photo of Amir and Evan made, when my elbow went on a secret mission tonight to knock over their photo.

  I push Annabeth’s box out of the way and squint, but it’s endlessly dark beneath my bed, and so I reach my arm beneath it and feel around, and when I grab the thing that made the clack, it’s as if I’ve found the sword or the poison, one or the other: the weapon or elixir that is meant to send the hero of every screenplay home reborn. Because there’s no place, of course, like home.

  Except, I’m already home.

  The trumpets in my head are now manic, blatting all over the place, Elmer Bernstein’s arms sagging in exhaustion after conducting this insane orchestra not of tiny people but of huge ones, of demons, of Ricky and my father and most of all of me.

  It’s my old cell phone. I have found it.

  I pull it out from beneath my bed, and I shake the dust bunnies from my arm, and when I stand, the floors give and hum, and maybe I should have shut my door, because I’m making enough ruckus in here that when I sit on my bed and look at this black box recorder that holds Annabeth’s final message to me like a dead girl’s fist, Mom is just above the movie frame, in the doorway, looking at me like I am no longer a virgin.