Play Me

by Laura Ruby

I treat her to breakfast at a local diner and watch her plow through a spinach and cheese omelette, two sausages, two pieces of toast, and all of my bacon. While she gets coffees for the road, I check my cell phone. There are twelve messages: six from my dad, four from Marty, one each from Rory and Joe. I call my dad.

  “Eddy! We’ve been out of our minds! I was about to call the police!”

  “I took a little road trip with Gina. It’s no big deal.”

  “No big deal! You’re gone for days without telling anyone and it’s no big deal? The only reason we don’t have the FBI out hunting for you is because of your mother. She called last night to let us know where you were and that you were safe.”

  “I hope you don’t expect me to thank her for that.”

  My dad sighs on the other end. “I expect you to be careful driving. And I expect you to get home in one piece, do you hear me?”

  We set off. Fifty miles down. Only thirteen hundred more to go. Gina isn’t in the mood to sleep, so we spend the miles talking about different things. Music, movies, why she wants to go to college, why I don’t. How Rory and Joe and I became friends in the first place. The Meatball. Tippi Hedren.

  “I miss her,” I say.

  “Lucinda?”

  “I was talking about Tippi. But yeah, Lucinda.”

  “Why her? I mean, you’ve gone out with a lot of girls. So why’d you flip for her?”

  “She’s different.”

  “How?”

  “She didn’t flip for me, I guess.”

  “Typical.”

  “No, I mean it. She didn’t try to impress me or anyone. She was impressive all on her own. Do you know she volunteers at an animal shelter? And she’s an amazing dancer. She can speak Spanish, she can play tennis. She’s beautiful without making a big deal about it.”

  Gina shifts in her seat. “She sounds perfect.”

  “Yeah.”

  She kicks off her shoes and puts her feet up on the dash. “I used to think you were perfect.”

  I laugh. “Right.”

  “I did, though, when we first started hanging out.”

  “Now you’re just mocking on me.”

  “No, I’m not. Why wouldn’t I think you were perfect? You’re smart, you’re funny, you’re already making films when most people are just trying to get through earth science. You had that weird little brother who you loved so much. And that crazy bird.”

  I glance at her and remember the way she was before Riot Grrl took over. The long hair before it was cut and dyed pitch black, the lips before they were always painted red or green or blue. She was almost…sweet then. Almost. And now, with her hair tucked behind her ears and her skin scrubbed of makeup, I can just about make it out. That sweetness.

  “But you’re not perfect,” she says. “I found that out.”

  I take a deep breath. “I’m sorry I was such a jerk to you.”

  She waves her hand at me. “Idiot. Keep your sorry. I don’t need it. What I’m saying is that nobody’s perfect. Not even Lucinda.”

  “I know that.”

  “But listen to how you described her. That sounds like a character in a movie, not a real person.”

  “But she is a real person. I saw her do everything I said.”

  “Yeah, but what about everything else, what about the real stuff? Was she ever a slob? A bitch? Did she chew with her mouth open? Did she pick her toenails? Make bad jokes? Hate her dad?”

  I think about how much Lucinda wanted to get away. How she complained about her family. How she wiped the tennis courts with that girl Penelope.

  “No,” I say.

  “But you said you loved her.”

  “I did. I do.”

  “But how can you say that if you only knew her a couple of months? If you’ve never even seen her in a bad mood?”

  I’m starting to get annoyed now. “What if she doesn’t have bad moods? What if she’s just a generally cool person who doesn’t pick her toenails or chew with her mouth open?”

  She pulls her feet off the dashboard and twists to face me. “People like that don’t exist, Eddy. They’re just figments of our imagination. You didn’t know her. She just fit the picture in your head.”

  I glance away from the road to tell her that she’s got it all wrong, that I’m not so bloody stupid, that I know Lucinda or at least knew enough to know I loved her, when Gina screams, “Look out!”

  In the windshield, the truck looms. I know it’s impossible, but I see the whole thing frame by frame, a series of snapshots, like I’m editing a movie.

  The skid marks on the pavement.

  The truck’s red lights in front of me.

  The white headlights in the rearview.

  Gina with her arm thrown over her face.

  My foot stomping down on the brake.

  The truck in front getting bigger and bigger, filling the windshield a shot at a time.

  I can’t stop the crash, but I can turn the wheel.

  And I do.

  The Return of the King

  I spent three days in the hospital. Mild concussion, broken nose, seven stitches in my forehead. I missed my own graduation. I don’t consider it a big loss.

  The cops said that I did something unusual during the crash. Instead of turning the SUV to the left, away from myself, I turned to the right.

  “You took the hit instead of your passenger,” the cops told me. “Usually happens the other way around.”

  “So my instincts are screwed up.”

  The cop looked at Gina, who was curled up in the chair next to my bed. “Or maybe your instincts are just fine.”

  When I got home from the hospital, there were a few messages from my mom. She loved me. She hoped I was okay. She’d call again Saturday. She promised.

  And then there was a message from Lucinda. She’d heard about the accident, she said, she wanted to make sure I was all right. I don’t trust myself enough to call either of them back.

  The day I get out of the hospital, I go to the junkyard to get what’s left of my life from my totaled car. (The place was called Nirvana, if you can believe that.) When I come home empty-handed, no one asks any questions. I guess no one was surprised I had nothing left. Maybe they thought I deserved it.

  I get a job at Video World and Rory and I get through the boring summer nights pretending we’re in a Kevin Smith movie, Clerks III. We make top-ten lists to pass the time. One night I’m giving my list of the best all-time car crashes when the bell over the door chimes. Joe.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “Hey,” I say.

  Rory looks from Joe to me to Joe again. “Uh,” he says. “I have to take these movies to the back room. And then I, uh, have to stay there. To do stuff. So.” He grabs a stack of DVDs and practically sprints away.

  After Rory’s made his escape, Joe says, “Smells better in here.”

  “Don’t tell Rory, but I hid air fresheners in some of the DVD cases. They’re everywhere.”

  “Smart.”

  “You would too if you had to spend twenty-five hours a week at Smellovideo.” I grab the random receipts left by the customers and crumple them in a ball. “You gained some weight back.”

  He puts his hand to his cheek. “Yeah. Eating again.”

  “That’s a good thing,” I say.

  “MTV. They didn’t want me to look so…”

  “Skeletal?”

  “Dead.”

  “Ah.”

  He sets some movies on the counter. Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Branaugh’s Henry V. Always the highbrow stuff for Joe.

  I take the movies. “Any good?”

  “Incredible,” he says.

  “Did Lucinda think so?”

  I almost laugh at the look on his face. Almost.

  “How did you…?” he says, then stops himself. “Okay. You should know that I wanted it. But she didn’t. So. We didn’t.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not before, anyway. Not while you guys were…whatever.”
>
  He didn’t need to add that last bit, but there it is. I suppose he figured he should be the one to tell me, be up-front about it. But I think he said it more because he wanted to, the way I wanted to say her name out loud a couple of months ago, not because I wanted to be honest so much as I wanted to grind his face in it.

  I can hear Gina’s voice in my head: Karma’s a bitch.

  “I hate your guts,” I tell him. He starts nodding, but I say, “No, not for Lucinda. Not why you think. I hate you because you’re better than I am.”

  He blinks his huge bug eyes. “I’m not.”

  “Yeah, you are.”

  He stares for a minute. “It’s only because you’re greedy.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s true,” Joe says. “Riot Grrl was great until you started dreaming about money and all that crap. Stick to the story.”

  “What story?”

  “Whatever the story is. The story’s the important thing. People forget that. They get distracted by sex and superpowers and special effects. But none of that works unless it fits with the story.”

  Easy for him to say. Mr. I’m-Going-to-Be-Famous-on-MTV. But maybe he believes this stuff. Maybe you need to believe in something.

  He unfolds his arms and looks around the dusty and decrepit place that has become my home away from home. Emotions flash across his face: pity, guilt, whatever. “Listen, Ed. I’m sorry.”

  Now I do laugh. “Yeah, you should be.”

  “No, not about that. About Lucinda.” He looks like he means what he says. He probably does. Mostly. And maybe the accident did more damage than I thought. I should want to rip his throat out with my teeth for being with Lucinda, but I feel sorry for him. He’s a wuss. She’ll roast his heart on a spit.

  “If it makes you feel any better, she’s leaving,” he says.

  “She already left,” I say. “I mean, she’s still here, but…”

  “She’s just killing time,” he says. “I know that.”

  I don’t think he does. “Okay.”

  “Well,” he says. “I guess I’ll see you around.”

  “Yeah. Good luck with school. And with your Bible show.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t let them mess with it.”

  “I won’t.” He jams his hands in his pockets and turns to go. Stops. Turns again. Says: “You know, Riot Grrl 16? That was the right way to end things. Even if some people didn’t understand it.”

  I nod. “Thanks, man.”

  “See ya,” he says.

  “Yeah. See ya.”

  I watch that bony, brainy pumpkin head walk out the door and wonder if I’ll ever see him again. The chance I won’t makes my throat tight and dry, like I hadn’t had water in days.

  So, we’re all a bunch of wusses. As soon as the door chimes again, Rory scurries out from the back like a small animal from its burrow. “So what happened? I didn’t hear any noise, and it doesn’t look like you guys used the displays to beat the hell out of each other.”

  “Nah. Lucinda sucked the fight out of both of us.”

  “I was going to tell you.”

  “You didn’t have to. And I was the one who screwed it up anyway.”

  Rory fidgets with the stacks of videos lying everywhere, shuffling copies of The Prisoner of Azkaban, Spider-Man, Sin City, Scary Movie 5, A History of Violence, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

  “Who do you think it was?” he says.

  “Who?”

  “The Tin Man.”

  The Tin Man’s been on my mind, too. After I got out of the hospital, I allowed myself one last visit to the MTV site, but the Tin Man hadn’t posted in weeks. Seems he was gone, off to see the wizard.

  “That’s the giant cosmic joke,” I say. “I don’t think I’ll ever know who it was.”

  “Freaking internet.”

  “Yeah. If no one knows who you are, you can be as big an ass as you want.”

  “Stupid technology is taking this place down, too.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “Well, not this minute, probably not this year or the next, but eventually. Netflix, Blockbuster, pay-per-view, YouTube, they’re all killing us. Soon everyone will be getting their movies through the mail or through the cables or through the little chips Hollywood implants in our heads. Won’t need us anymore.”

  Rory’s folks have owned this store his whole life. “What will your parents do?”

  “I don’t know. They love this. I know it’s hard to tell sometimes. If they loved it so much, why don’t they get some new posters?” He gestures to a cardboard Terminator yellowing in the corner. “But I guess they’ll have to find something else.”

  “Like us.”

  “Nah, we’ll keep making movies.”

  I appreciate the “we.” In August, Rory’s going to school for film editing. I’ll be the only one left here trying to figure out how I’m going to deal with the next seven decades. Dad says I can apply to film school for next semester, but I’m too depressed to look at the applications.

  Rory sniffs the air. “Have you been spraying some kind of disinfectant stuff around?”

  “No, why?”

  “Funny. I’m not smelling vomit anymore.”

  I take Eternal Sunshine from the pile. “Is it okay if I borrow this one?”

  When I get home, Marty’s old Toyota’s in the driveway. They’ve been over more and more since my accident. I’ve overheard some talk about all of us moving in together. Probably a good idea. The Meatball could use two parents. And Tippi Hedren would like the company.

  I walk into the house. For once, the Meatball isn’t dead. He’s sitting on the couch in the living room, reading his favorite book, the one with the toe tag on the cover. Tippi Hedren is perched on his head. I don’t know how he coaxed her from her cage without losing a single body part, but he did.

  Tippi says, “The human head is roughly the size and weight of a roast chicken.”

  “I taught her that,” says the Meatball.

  “No kidding.”

  “She was singing before. Something about liking it hot. It’s difficult to concentrate when she’s singing.”

  “And when she’s standing on your head.”

  “I like her on my head. Makes me feel taller.” He closes his book. “I decided not to die today.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I didn’t feel like it. But I think maybe you should try it.”

  “That’s okay, Meat. I came close enough once.”

  He puts his fingers up to his head and Tippi steps aboard. He gets up from the couch and points. “Here. Lie down on the floor.”

  I’m about to argue, but if it’s going to make Meat happy, what the hell. Besides, I’m so beat down that the floor seems like the perfect place for me to be.

  “Now, close your eyes and be still. Don’t even move your eyeballs. That’s the trick. Don’t even try to see anything. Breathe slowly, as slowly as you can so that your chest doesn’t go up and down so much.” He’s so close to me and I can feel his breath on my ear and smell the Frito-and-pee smell of Tippi’s feet. “You don’t have to worry about anything ’cause you’re dead, see?” he says. “There’s nothing you can do but lie here. That’s your only job. Being nice and still and quiet. Doesn’t that feel good? Don’t answer.”

  I do what he says, breathing slowly in and out, keeping my eyes unfocused under my lids. I remember trying the same thing all those years ago when I was on Law & Order, but this feels different because I’m doing it for myself. No one is standing there waiting to scream, “Cut!”

  I’m so relaxed I’m nearly asleep when suddenly Meatball grabs me by the shoulders and shakes me. “Eddy! Wake up! Eddy! What’s wrong? Did you have a heart attack? Did you hit your head? Eddy! Do you hear me?” He shakes me so hard my teeth rattle like dice in my already-bruised head.

  “Ow,” I say, opening my eyes. Marty and Dad are standing in the doorway, watching. “That’s good, Meat. I’
m okay.”

  Meatball smiles, something he does about once a year. “I saved you.”

  “Yeah, Meat. You did.”

  Marty lets me borrow his car. It’s a warm night, raining just enough to jewel the windshield, not enough to need the wipers. I don’t have to go far. A McMansion to top all McMansions. This time I ring the bell.

  Gina answers the door. Her hair’s in pigtails. She’s wearing denim cutoffs over blue and white striped tights. “If it isn’t my stunt driver,” she says.

  “Got some free time?”

  She steps onto the porch and closes the door behind her. “Before you ask, I’m not going on another road trip with you.”

  “Nah. No more road trips.”

  “And I’m not sleeping with you,” she adds.

  “I don’t want you to.”

  “Really,” she says, not a question.

  “You know what I mean.”

  She points to the chairs around the cold, ashy fire pit. We sit across from each other. It takes me a while to say what I have to say. Truth is, I’m feeling a little tired. Like I’m living my own personal version of Lord of the Rings—there are a lot of little endings, and this isn’t even the last one.

  Still, I show her the digital camera I just bought, a cheapie, about three hundred dollars. “I’m starting a new show.”

  “Yeah?” she says. “What’s the show called?”

  “I don’t know yet. I was wondering if you wanted to help me with it.”

  “You know I will. When do we start?”

  “How about now?”

  “But it’s dark. And you don’t have any lights.”

  “That’s all right,” I tell her. “Doesn’t matter.”

  “If you say so. Where do you want me?”

  “Right where you are.”

  I size up our positions. Then I hand her the camera. Confusion flashes on her face, but for only a second. She’s smart, that Gina.

  She takes the camera and points it at me.

  The End

  Maybe you don’t want to hear from me. Maybe you think I deserved everything I got. But I have one more story, and then I’ll shut up. Forever if you want me to.

  Let me tell you about Nirvana.

  You can’t miss it from the highway because a 1950s tow truck teeters like a toy on the roof. Bodhi—short for Bodhisattva—is the official greeter. He’s a border collie or maybe an old bath mat; it’s hard to tell. Anyway, his job is to herd you into the front office, which he does by walking alongside you and leaning into your shins. I’m actually relieved—I don’t have to worry about where I need to be; I have a guide. As I’m herded, I pass the Wreck of the Week, parked out front on the piss-colored grass. This week it’s some kind of red truck twisted into an impossible L shape, its back end sticking up like a cat’s tail. Guess the make and the model and you win an official Nirvana baseball cap.