“The spider or the superhero?”
Katy rolls her eyes, pulling open the trunk of her car. “Neither. You act like you’re completely over love.”
“Um,” I say. “I think I’d have to have been under or in it, ever, to be over love. Pretty sure making out with Acrobat-Tongue Grant in seventh grade doesn’t count as love.”
“My point exactly,” Katy says before her head disappears into the trunk of her car.
“What are you looking for?” I ask when she comes up for air a few seconds later.
“My silver bracelet—the one I always wear? I’ve told you that, like, three times,” she says, irritated.
“Oh, right,” I say, though I have no memory of this.
“Just the way I told you we were hanging out after school and then I had to chase down the bus for two blocks to stop you from leaving with it. Exercise-induced asthma is no joke. And what senior even voluntarily takes the bus? God.”
She’s joking, but I can hear the annoyance in Katy’s voice. I have been a little out of it all day. Apparently, two nights tossing and turning will do that to a person.
“It was not two blocks,” I argue. “Anyway, I forgot. Sorry. And taking the bus is not voluntary—I told you my mom wouldn’t let me have the car this morning. She wouldn’t even let me out of her sight all day yesterday.”
“Attachment disorder. I don’t think I’ve seen a more severe case of it,” Katy says in a know-it-all voice, shaking her head as she shuts the trunk. “When one individual is unreasonably and detrimentally attached to another.” Katy’s mother is a clinical psychologist, which is where Katy picks up phrases that sound like they’ve come from some yellowing medical textbook. It really should have turned my best friend into the best-adjusted seventeen-year-old in all of Lyndale, but it has only served as fuel for her lifelong hypochondria. Katy doesn’t get headaches; she gets migraines. Anaphylaxis instead of allergies. Influenza instead of a cold. Everything is a Psychological Episode.
I’ve always suspected this had something to do with Katy’s father leaving, remarrying by the time she was five, and sending gifts in lieu of visiting. Her mother works long, hard hours, but she does respond to crises. If Katy wants attention, she—or someone she knows—had better be On the Brink.
We maneuver our way through the parking lot, sticking close together so we don’t lose each other. There is one other high school in town—Meridian—and it seems their entire student population had the same idea of crashing the mall, too.
I don’t really know anyone from Meridian High, while Katy can’t go anywhere without seeing people she knows.
Within seconds of getting into the movie theater lobby, Katy is kicking a girl in the kneebow, and they are squealing and hugging and talking about community theater stuff. I never feel more out of place than when I’m among Katy’s other friends. They, like Katy, are a certain breed of people: bright, confident, funny. They talk louder than they have to; they grab one another’s shoulders and hands and cheeks. They exclaim and lunge and weep and enunciate. I feel lonely in such a specific way around them—like only half of me has shown up.
Some of Katy’s friends are nice enough—once or twice, someone came up and started talking to me as if we knew each other, though Katy wasn’t even there. I didn’t want to be rude, but I could only stare at them listlessly before mumbling something and escaping. When I told Katy about it, she said it sounded like so-and-so from Meridian, and not to worry about it.
Still, these ones—a girl with white-blond hair and her boyfriend—are acting as if I’m invisible, so I tell Katy I’m going to get our tickets and then head for the concession area. I’m looking around for the shortest line to join when I see him.
A hundred-watt smile.
Tall. Skinny.
The boy from the bus.
And he’s looking right at me.
Before I think better of it, I am making my way over to him. He’s standing behind the concession counter but not manning a register.
“Hey!” I exclaim as I reach him. “It’s you!”
“Hi!” he says brightly, looking just as pleased to see me. That warm feeling twirls in my stomach again. Where does a person learn to smile like that? On anybody else, it would look goofy, but he’s pulling it off.
He adjusts his black cap, the Cineplex’s logo—CINEXPERIENCE—stamped across it and on the rest of his uniform.
“Are you okay? You just disappeared after the accident, and you weren’t at the hospital. I was…looking for you.”
His eyes twinkle a little bit when I say that. And they’re gray, the closest to silver a human’s eyes are allowed to be. I didn’t notice that two nights ago. “You were?”
My face gets warm, ears hot.
“Well, kind of. I mean, I wasn’t. The nurse…my…” Shut up, Addie. I need a diversion. “So you work here?”
He looks down at his black CINEXPERIENCE T-shirt, then back up at me. “How awkward would it be if I didn’t and I was wearing this?”
I laugh. “Well, it seems like a fun place to work. Cheap Movie Mondays excluded,” I say just as—as if on cue—someone’s shoulder rams into mine, pushing me forward.
“Shit, sorry!” the person says. I turn around and see that the voice belongs to an Indian guy with short black hair and dark rectangular glasses. He is carrying about five bags of popcorn, three supersized drinks, and a bag of cotton candy. No wonder he didn’t see where he was going.
“That’s okay,” I say, about to turn away when the boy’s expression suddenly changes. His eyes widen in something like surprise or recognition or confusion.
“Hey…there,” he says. He’s looking at me now in a way that can only be described as gaping, and it’s making me uncomfortable. I want to go back to talking to Bus Boy, who is also witnessing this.
“Am I in your way?” I ask at last, because I can’t think of why else he’d still be standing here. That seems to shake him out of his stupor.
“No, um, you’re fine,” the boy says, readjusting his grip on the bags of popcorn in his arms. Another second’s hesitation. “Well, bye,” he says, and takes a step backward.
“Dude, we’re going in without you!” a male voice calls from somewhere across the lobby, presumably to him, and then breaks into a fit of snickers.
The Indian boy rolls his eyes, sighs, and finally turns around to head back to his friends. There are so many people clustered throughout the lobby that I lose him before I see which group he joins.
I turn back to Bus Boy, who is looking at me with an amused expression.
“Sorry, that was weird,” I say to Bus Boy as a woman wearing the same black CINEXPERIENCE shirt he is reaches across him on the counter for a pile of napkins. She glances up at me. “What’d you say?” she asks, giving me a look that is both puzzled and impatient.
“Um, nothing,” I say, waiting for her to realize that I was not talking to her.
She pauses a second, then narrows her eyes at me and goes back to work. Is she annoyed at me for distracting Bus Boy from his work?
“Maybe I should let you—” I start to say, but before I can finish speaking, someone is grabbing my arm and yanking me across the lobby.
“Katy! Why are you yanking me?”
“And why are you spacing out in some corner of the lobby when you were supposed to be getting us tickets? Look how much longer the line is now!” We stop at the end of a line on the opposite side of the lobby from where I just saw Bus Boy. “I know you haven’t been sleeping well and are possibly concussed and yada yada yada, but I swear it’s like you’re having a Psychological Episode.”
“I found him!” I say, completely ignoring her previous statements. “Bus Boy! I just saw him.”
Katy finally releases her iron grip on my jacket sleeve. “You saw him here? Why would he be here? Did you talk to him?”
I nod, unable to stop the grin from spreading across my face. “Not for long, but yeah.”
“So what’s his name
? Did you get his number?”
“I was getting to it when someone dragged me away,” I say.
“I didn’t even see him,” Katy says, a frown creasing her face. “Where is he?”
I look back across the lobby, but there are too many people in the way. “He’s all the way on the other side.”
“I did really want to see this movie, but we can blow it off to chat him up, if you want,” Katy says, wriggling her eyebrows at me.
I give a long-suffering sigh. “No, let’s see the movie.” The lady at the counter didn’t look amused by me hanging around to talk, and I don’t want Bus Boy to get in trouble, but I act like I’m making the ultimate sacrifice for Katy’s benefit. “The things I do for you.”
She bumps my shoulder with hers. “The things I do for you. You don’t even know.”
As we wait, she starts telling me about how she’d been hanging out with Mitch Enns yesterday and had just driven him home—“Hanging out sounds a lot like making out,” I interrupt to point out—when she realized her bracelet was gone. I feel guilty for not remembering when she first told me it was missing, because she sounds more upset about it than I’ve seen her about anything in months. But she lights up quickly when she recognizes someone in the line next to ours. “Addie, this is Lena from Act! Out!”
Me and the girl wearing a winter jacket over a spandex volleyball uniform exchange polite “Nice to meet yous,” but she and Katy do most of the talking while our respective lines inch forward. I’m still mildly annoyed that I didn’t get to say a proper goodbye to Bus Boy. Not to mention find out his name.
We are apparently doomed to minute-long conversations. Still, I’m relieved he’s okay. And the fact that he lives in Lyndale means I have a good chance of seeing him again.
I replay today’s conversation in my mind.
My mind hitches a little on his smile. The way it starts so slowly and then stretches, magnifying quickly across his face. Maybe I am having a Psychological Episode because it makes me think of physics: How quickly does the twitch of lip corners accelerate into the kind of smile that makes a stomach somersault?
Another question: Am I so starved for male attention, as Katy claims, that I overreact every time a boy smiles at me?
We reach the counter, and Katy is starting to spout off our order when I realize that it’s not that I’m desperate or lame or lovesick.
His smile makes me feel something I’ve never felt before.
BEFORE
Early July
(eighteen months ago)
Thick air sticks to my body, hanging on so tightly it’s hard to believe other seasons exist that aren’t summer. I sigh with relief as I enter the air-conditioned movie store, my phone buzzing in the pocket of my dress. I try to tuck my hair out of my face, but it is prime frizz season and my hair won’t be reasoned with. I inherited my mom’s aversion to heat and the same tight ringlets as my father’s sisters from St. Vincent, so July is always a delight.
The store looks dead, which isn’t a surprise, since nobody really borrows DVDs anymore. At Home Movies is the last of its kind in Lyndale, and adults like my mom who have lived here forever and can remember the days of video stores and ice cream trucks and children playing in the streets till sundown are weirdly nostalgic and protective of it.
Though the checkout area is empty, I can hear movement, muttering going on underneath the counter. I’m enjoying the store’s miraculous coolness too much to wonder about the source of the sound. I pull my phone out and brace myself for one of twenty texts from my mom, reminding me to grab one thing or the other for our family movie night. Or one of twenty texts from Katy, detailing her, by my count, decade-long road trip.
The message is a picture of four pairs of bare feet on asphalt, a crowd of toes. I pick out Katy’s feet by the black nail polish she started sporting when school let out. In another picture, she’s standing beside a road sign that says CURVES AHEAD, pouting seductively and holding her hands up like a show queen. The silver bracelet her dad sent her three years ago that she never takes off is catching sunlight, so it looks like she’s giving off both angelic glow and sex appeal. It’s very confusing.
There is no actual text. No Missing you, boo! or How are you holding up? which I don’t expect from Katy to begin with. But I do expect some sympathy, if only out of consideration for my plight. She is exactly where I want to be at this moment. In a car, breeze blowing though her piss-straight hair (her words, not mine), on her way to New York City for three whole weeks. A trip being funded by Katy’s dad, of course. New York is, like, seven hours from Maine, but Katy and her theater friends are making a whole trip out of it, stopping over at Hampton Beach and a million other places. I, on the other hand, am picking up DVDs for a movie night with my mom and older brother.
I spent all of April and May pleading with my parents to let me go on the trip with Katy, and all of June pouting when they refused, derailing my plans for a great summer and possibly my only chance to see New York before I move there. If they let me move there.
Being stuck at home is bad enough, but it was during the summer when Dad left four years ago, so July and August are famously gloomy in my family. Katy says it’s like our version of seasonal affective disorder.
Maybe it makes me a horrible person—I get that it’s sad my parents aren’t together—but I don’t feel as upset about it as everyone else in my family does. It just feels like so long ago.
Still, we rallied last week for an awkward dinner at Café Amore to celebrate my sixteenth birthday and Caleb’s high school graduation a couple of weeks ago. My parents are always self-conscious when we’re out anywhere as a family. We used to get a lot of weird looks from strangers, acquaintances staring too long, squeezing my mom’s shoulder as they passed or patting Caleb’s head uninvited. When I was younger, there were even times I wondered whether it was because my dad is black and my mom is white. But the weirdness happened even when my parents weren’t around. I got strange looks from classmates’ parents and the occasional special treatment from teachers; it was sympathy more than gawking. I guess my mom being on Channel Se7en makes her moderately famous in a smallish town, and the gossip about my parents splitting up was big news at some point. The odd attention happens much less now, but I remember my parents hated it then and still seem wary of it happening again. So our celebratory dinner basically consisted of uncomfortable small talk, Caleb looking like there were a million places he’d rather be, and me overcompensating to make everyone feel more at ease.
On weekday mornings for the next two months, I’ll have lessons at the home of Clarence, a retired viola instructor Mrs. Dubois introduced me to last year. Mostly, it’s an excuse to play for Clarence, since her arthritis prevents her from doing so now and she says recordings never sound the same. So I’ll play pieces I’m working on and she’ll give me notes and we’ll talk music for an hour. Then I’ll spend the rest of the day biding time, practicing, and reading (something off next year’s reading list so I’ll be ahead in English class in the fall) before doing it all over again.
The one and only relief about being home this summer is not being crushed in a car with Katy’s the-yuh-trical friends. I was drawn to Katy for her energy, her commitment to being herself, but some ugly, secret part of me wonders whether I’m Katy’s best friend because she needs someone she doesn’t have to compete with. For Juilliard, for attention. Whether the moment something or someone better comes along, she’ll move on to that. Because if there’s one thing Katy is good at, it’s moving on.
I push the thought out of my mind now and stare at a shelf of movies with foreign names. My mother’s exact orders: “Something emotional but uplifting.” Nothing against the foreign film industry, but none of these covers really scream “uplifting” to me. Maybe because I’m not fluent in Hungarian.
The last couple of weeks, Mom has unsuccessfully insisted on family movie nights with me and my brother. Unsuccessfully because we’re not the kind of family that does we
ll with bonding time and shared space and basic eye contact. Such advanced stuff is for TV families. My brother likes to keep to himself, holed up in his room, and I like classical music and imagining myself someplace far away. There’s not a whole lot of overlap between us.
Right then I hear a noise from the checkout section and turn to watch a boy leap over the counter and hurry toward me.
“Hi!” he shouts, smiling, and a little out of breath. “Welcome to At Home Movies! Can I help you find anything?”
I blink at him, alarmed. “Yeah, I’m looking for a movie?”
The boy laughs, and the wave of hair at the front of his head bops. He smooths his hands over his shirt and says, “Sorry. My dad makes us greet every customer with enthusiasm, but I didn’t notice you come in.”
He’s got the enthusiasm part, all right.
“That’s okay,” I say.
“What are you looking for?”
I tell him my mom asked for a foreign film that is emotional but uplifting. He frowns at the collection of DVDs on the wall.
Finally he says, “Does she like slashers?”
His response is so unexpected that I burst out laughing. “I’ve never asked, but I’m going to guess no.”
He isn’t laughing when he says, “That’s too bad.” He starts to walk toward another section, and I follow him, curious. “There’s this Italian guy, Rinieri Ciano?” I shake my head no. I have not been indoctrinated into the world of slasher films. “He makes some of the best—like, just sick movies. He’s a legend.”
There’s a good chance I’m gaping at him, because he quickly adds, “I don’t mean disturbing or scary. ‘Sick’ as in ‘good.’ In fact, I’d classify them as comedy. Satire. They are horrodies—horror comedies. It’s ketchup and blue string for veins, stuffed socks for intestines.”
Everyone We've Been Page 3