I’m going to kill him.
“Why, Felix? Why?”
“Oh, come on. You know you love it.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I don’t.”
We’re in line for lunch in the cafeteria, where at least all the staring is concentrated in one place at one time. By now, there isn’t a single being at this school—not the kids nobody talks to, not even the French teacher who won’t let you address her in English—who doesn’t know. All morning, people have been asking me questions I can’t answer.
When do they start filming? Is everyone else doing it too?
My standard response is to shrug, while in my mind, I’m curled up at the back of a closet with the door closed, pleading go away go away go away.
Felix, though, grins at them, all teeth and confidence. His face is so bright and open, his enthusiasm so uncomplicated, that for a second, I see the world he sees. It’s not a bad world. I’m sure it would be a lovely place to visit.
“Haven’t you been waiting for this?” he says to me as he grabs a bowl of pudding. “I mean, I’ve got plans! If I can get two new videos online by the time they come . . .” His eyes light up. “Actually, they could shoot me shooting the videos!”
Felix is a first-generation American, says the Five at Six website. The son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, he’s already navigating a tricky multicultural, bilingual landscape. Will his parents’ American dream for him happen?
When I worry about how well I know this stuff, I think of Felix. If I have it memorized, you can bet your ass he has it framed on the wall. (Well, that’s not quite fair. I’ve been in Felix’s room. He does have it framed on the wall.) Judging from his daily photo blog and the video clips he posts of himself performing original songs on his electronic keyboard, Felix would like nothing better than cameras following him 24/7.
We reach the cash register and when we’re both done paying, I start to follow him toward our usual table. “Oh,” he says, looking over his shoulder at me. “I’m having a screening party on Saturday. To watch Six and Eleven. You have to be there.”
I frown hard at him. “Do you have any idea how narcissistic that is?”
Felix’s smile drops, but only a little. “I thought it would help people get used to the idea of the cameras being around.”
He’s not watching where he’s going and when he turns forward again, he almost walks right into another kid.
Oh. Not another kid.
Nate Hunter.
How do I sum up Nate Hunter? Let’s just say that if I merely exist around here, Nate blazes, through hallways and classrooms and the swimming pool. He blinds and dazzles, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Nathaniel is about as “homegrown” as you can get; he lives with his mother, who is young and single, and his grandparents, the owners of a long-established local farm.
Felix and Nate stare at each other, frozen by some invisible force field between them. If I could snap a picture, it would be a study of opposites: Nate is blond and green-eyed, pale and lanky, his hair short and even vertical in places, while Felix is dark and small and shaggy-headed. This kind of moment with Nate happens sometimes, when Felix is distracted and not on his guard. Usually, I grab Felix and snap him out of it, but right now we’ve both got these damn trays in our hands. It’s extra awkward today, given the news about the film. All I can do is stand there and watch, and wince.
Felix tries to like everyone and be the universal buddy, but I know if there’s one person he would want to make disappear from the planet, it’s the guy who was once like a brother to him.
Nate looks away from Felix, then quickly around the room as if searching for someone, anyone, else. His gaze lands on me for a split second, then jumps off as quickly as possible. That’s all I rate.
I remember what Leslie said, that Nate actually called them to see if there would be a third film. Well, of course he did. He’s got the best story out of the five of us. His will be the most dramatic “Then” and “Now” footage, and all I can feel is angry. For what he did to my best friend, and what he did to himself.
Nate continues to search the cafeteria beyond Felix, then, apparently finding what he was looking for, moves away.
“Come on,” I say, walking in front of Felix. I snag our table and he follows, still a bit dazed. We eat in silence for about a minute, both trying very hard not to look over to Nate’s table, which is filled with other swim team guys and their assorted female counterparts.
“Hey, Justine,” says a voice, and I glance up to see Ian standing there with his tray, my face reflected in his thick-framed so-uncool-they’re-cool glasses. He tosses his head to flick back a lock of curly black hair. “Do you have room?”
There’s just Felix and me at the table, so duh we have room. But I just nod and slide down the bench to make space for him.
Felix shoots me a look, one eyebrow raised, and in return I pop my eyes at him so he gets the hint. “Oops,” he says to me, too dramatically, “I forgot napkins. Be right back.” He gets up and walks toward the napkins, but stops on his way to chat with two guys at another table.
Ian sits and shakes up his bottle of juice, which is something that always drove me crazy (I like the froth, he’d say), then slides his straw wrapper down to an accordion. Those hands. I remind myself that those hands used to stroke my hair, rub my shoulders, hold my face right before he kissed me. I do this because clearly, I’m a masochist.
“How do you feel about this movie thing?” Ian asks, and the fact that he’s the first person to care, the first person to consider that maybe the news is strange and difficult, pierces me a little.
“I’m not sure,” I reply, the closest thing to the truth I’ve got at the moment.
Ian smiles, takes a bite of his hamburger, then considers while he chews. “I can totally understand how it would be weird. But I’ve got to tell you, I thought the first two movies were awesome.”
We’d never talked about the films. I kept waiting for him to ask about them, but he never did. I took that to mean he wasn’t interested and I sort of loved that.
“I haven’t seen them in a while,” he continues. “But I remember how funny they are.” He glances at me, then down at his burger. “How funny you are.”
“Oh yeah? Funny good or funny bad?” I try to make it sound like I’m teasing, not fishing.
“All good,” Ian says.
Would you care to elaborate? I want to ask. Because it was my understanding that for him, being funny did not equal being totally hot and datable.
Instead I shrug and mumble, “I never know who’s seen them and who hasn’t.”
“My parents bought the DVDs. It made them so proud that it was our town and our school. For a while they begged me to be friends with Nate so he’d have more kids to stick up for him.”
We laugh. It’s hard to remember a time when Nate Hunter needed charity buddies.
Then we’re silent, and I’m trying to think of what else to say during this sweet, surprise treasure of a few minutes together.
“Well,” Ian finally says. “I think it’ll be cool to have the cameras around again.”
Something about his manner feels off. Then comes the thought I shouldn’t have but do anyway, because we already know I’m a masochist: Is this news about the film the only reason he came over to sit with me? I don’t know what to do with that. Let’s just toss that under the table with those hard, runty french fries that always end up on the floor.
Instead, I’d like to make him laugh somehow. If I can say one thing that will make him bust out, it’ll rocket me onto a high so lovely I can make it through the rest of the day. See? I really can be that kind of girl.
“Smile!” he’d always say to me during those seven weeks he was my boyfriend. We’d be out somewhere, doing something categorized as Fun. We’d be in a group of people and someone just said something hilarious. We’d be kissing, his hands so warm and mine so cold. Then he’d stop and look at me, and brush
my hair away from my eyes and examine my face like he’d never seen it before, and say it. Smile.
I couldn’t. Not just like that, on cue, as if taking direction. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was, I thought I was smiling.
He’s gulping down his juice in a very unsexy way I’ll ignore, and I’m about to chirp something at him when the notion hits: Whatever we are, or might possibly, miraculously, be again, would be part of the new movie. There would be no escaping it.
A girl from my biology class is suddenly next to me. “Hey, Justine,” she says. “I heard about the documentary. Do you know if they’re going to need interns or assistants or anything?”
“I really don’t,” I reply, trying to sound disappointed for her, “but I’ll let you know what I find out.” I look over to Nate’s table again. Nobody’s coming up to him like they are with me. Although with Nate, maybe you have to request an audience in writing. I don’t know how popularity works.
Felix returns with a handful of napkins and follows my gaze. After a thoughtful moment, he asks, “Do you think Keira will do it, after last time?”
Oh. Yeah. That is the bonus winner-take-all question.
Then I realize why Felix has asked this. Normally, Keira would be at the Nate Etcetera table. But she’s not there.
“Has anyone seen her this morning?” I ask.
“She wasn’t in homeroom,” says Ian.
So Keira has skipped school, probably knowing what was in store. Smart girl, they always say about Keira, and today she does not disappoint.
Felix is waiting for me after school in a window booth on the second floor of Muddy Joe’s, the bakery/coffeehouse/laptop mecca in town. It’s the realm of college students too cool to hang out on campus and they’re all LBNF: Loud But Not Funny. The space looks great but has terrible acoustics. You can’t even hear yourself drink.
“Hey,” I say as I sit down across from Felix, who has his computer open on the table. “Thanks for the assist at lunch.”
“Just spreading the joy because, guess what? My visitors more than doubled since news broke about the film.”
He slides the laptop over so I can see the screen. It’s a graph of traffic statistics for Felix’s blog, where he posts a lot of sci-fi fan art and stills from The Big Lebowski, with what he thinks is brilliant commentary but is really stuff like, “The Dude is the bomb, yo!” And then there are videos of him performing original songs on his electronic keyboard while sitting on the floor of his bedroom. His music is either brilliant or awful, I’m still not sure. I tell him it’s the former.
“I’m happy you’re so happy,” I say.
“I hope my stats will climb even more between now and the start of production. Lance said they’ll be here in a month.”
“Maybe that’s enough time for me to figure out a hobby.”
Felix tilts his head and regards me with a sad familiarity. “You watch a lot of movies. Even the old ones nobody’s heard of. Being a film buff—that’s a hobby, isn’t it?”
“I think that involves way too much lying around in sweatpants to count.”
“If you start a hobby now, won’t it be obvious you’re just doing it for the cameras?”
I shrug. Yeah, maybe. Probably. That could be my “story.” Justine at sixteen, trying to find something to keep her from dying of boredom.
I glance out the window, which overlooks the sidewalk in front of Muddy Joe’s. One of the employees is on her break. She’s leaning against a tree with her apron thrown over one shoulder, smoking a cigarette. It’s this striking, almost bittersweet picture because she looks totally at peace with the world, but it’s wicked cold and I know she only gets a few minutes before having to go back to the kitchen to decorate five hundred red velvet cupcakes or something.
“Be right back,” I suddenly say to Felix. I grab my jacket and head downstairs. Outside, the snappy air hits me hard, but I try to look unfazed.
The girl tips up her chin in greeting. “Justine, right?”
“Hey.” I have no idea what her name is although she’s waited on me countless times, and they even wear name tags.
“What’s up?”
“Would you . . . can I . . . bum a cigarette?”
She smiles at me in this condescending, Oh, you little high schooler way. After a long few seconds where I get the sense I’m being appraised, she produces the pack and holds it out to me. I hook my finger around a cigarette and slide it out. She’s ready with a lighter and a hand cupped around it, and I lean forward to get the thing started.
I don’t smoke. Olivia does, sometimes, and she taught me how to do it one night when we were home alone during a thunderstorm and the power was out. I didn’t feel one way or another about it, which I took to be a sign that it wasn’t worth the trouble.
I take a drag on the cigarette, avoiding Felix’s What the hell? face in the window above. I blow the smoke out slowly, remembering Olivia’s coaching. Fight back a cough. It feels a little great. Even shivering and with the bakery girl watching, I get a sensation like, I could do this. It would give me something. All the people who wanted me to be some kind of symbol of youth in revolt would expect nothing less.
I’m on my third drag when I turn my head casually and see this sudden weirdness: the petite figure of Rory Gold walking down the street, her too-big, aggressively puffy down coat zippered all the way to her chin. She stops dead when she sees me. I’m wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt that says “STOP WARS” in the Star Wars logo, and the familiar blank look on Rory’s face stabs me a little right on the O.
Rory Gold and I have not spoken in almost five years. To my credit, or at least I like to think, for the last year I’ve been meaning to change that.
There are best friends Justine, whose parents are enjoying professional success, and Rory, whose family is struggling with recent job layoffs. The two families have been close since the girls were babies. Will their friendship be affected by their changing economic situations?
I wonder how the press release might read for this new film. I wonder how Lance and Leslie will figure out what happened, what I did to my friend, and how that story will get told.
I’m so surprised that I blurt out, “Hi,” before I can remember all the reasons not to.
Rory says, “Hi,” softly. Her eyes shift to the cigarette in my hand, which I didn’t have time to hide.
We’re caught like this for many more seconds. I notice Rory’s just got her dark blond hair cut again, super short like it’s been since we were eleven, and the style flatters the bold features she’s grown into.
My tobacco benefactor is done with her smoke and walks past us, smirking, to get back indoors.
Then Rory speaks, addressing the cigarette. “Smoking causes one in five American deaths. It kills more people in the U.S. than AIDS, drugs, homicides, fires, and auto accidents combined.”
“I don’t really smoke,” I sputter. “I was just . . .” She’s locked on to it like RoboGirl with a targeting system. It still unnerves me when she does this stuff, so I add, “Did you talk to Lance and Leslie? Are you doing the film this time around?”
Now she looks at me, actually at my eyes—no longer than a blink—then at the hedge next to me.
“Yes. My parents feel strongly that I should continue.”
“Mine too.” I throw the half-smoked cigarette on the ground now and rub it out with my foot the way I’ve seen Olivia do. Rory watches me. These long pauses feel way too familiar, even though it’s been years.
“Well, maybe I’ll see you, then,” I offer, “when they start shooting.”
Now Rory’s eyes meet mine once more. They dart away, as if trying to escape, then back. It’s strange to see her face straight on like that.
She asks, “Are you going to do to me what you did last time?” Her voice isn’t accusing at all. It’s mostly flat, as always, with the slightest twist of curiosity, like she’s asking me what I’m having for dinner. Eyes away, and back again. I can tell this i
s work for her. I heard that a therapist at school has been helping her with social skills. “I would just like to know,” she adds, “so I can make a plan for how to deal with that.”
I used to hate Rory’s directness. It irritated the hell out of me. But right now I can’t think of anything more refreshing.
“No, I’m not. I mean—”
She cuts me off. “I’m going to be assertive here and say, please don’t. It hurts too much.”
Then she turns and continues on. If Rory thinks about these things, if she’s at all typical in certain kinds of ways, I’m sure she’s muttering bitch on her way down the street.
THREE
Being the daughter of a local pediatrician has its insider moments, for sure. My father often gives me sealed, unmarked envelopes to pass on to the school nurse—medical forms and get-out-of-gym notes, stuff like that. I could be privy to a lot of juicy gossip, if I were a different kind of person and could steam open an envelope.
A few mornings after the Day Everyone Heard, I walk into the nurse’s office with two small letters. When Mrs. Underwood sees me, she looks relieved.
“Oh good,” she says. “I’ve been waiting for these. Let me check to make sure they’re complete. Can you hang out for a minute?”
“Sure,” I say, expecting this. Dad has a bad habit of leaving important things blank, and then I have to bring the whatever-it-is back to him.
As soon as Mrs. Underwood is distracted with the envelopes, I scope out the office. There are two doors against the rear wall, each leading to a small room with a cot. The door to one is ajar and the light is on. Just inside I can see a pair of long legs in jeans stretched out on the bed, crossed at the ankles. Black leather Mary Janes with embroidered flowers and chunky heels. Shoes that look familiar because I’ll admit, I’ve admired them before.
Then I remember something Felix said to me about Keira the other day.
She went to the nurse with a headache again. That’s the third trip in a week.
I wasn’t prepared to care about how often Keira Jones goes to the nurse or leaves early or looks depressed or hangs her head or breathes. But the fact that she’s acting like anything besides the confident, bright, and gorgeous light she’s known to be is pretty damn interesting.
You Look Different in Real Life Page 2