You Look Different in Real Life

by Jennifer Castle

  “Lance is nearly three times our age and would get arrested for even looking at us the wrong way,” Rory had said, pressing her fingertip hard into the corner of the puzzle box, over and over. “But I’ve heard my mother say he’s handsome.”

  I follow everyone into the living room and when Lance and Leslie nab the couch, leaving a cushion-length space between them, I’m left with the overstuffed chair-and-a-half that makes me feel like someone just blasted me with a shrink ray. My mom comes in with a steaming plate and there’s a burst of scone-related rhapsody.

  The light catches on the chunky ring on Leslie’s finger as she reaches for her scone. She and Lance got married in Hawaii right after they finished shooting Five at Eleven but before the film actually came out. They must have had a short honeymoon period.

  Now we’ve all got coffee and my mother drags in a dining room chair, settling in next to me.

  “You guys got here just in time for the thaw,” Mom says. “Two weeks ago, there was snow everywhere.”

  “Well, that’s the way it works now that we live in Los Angeles,” says Lance. “We’re big-time filmmakers, we can order the weather around.”

  Leslie rolls her eyes but my mother and Lance laugh. Then they’re all looking at me like I’m supposed to add something snappy.

  “I’m sorry your last movie tanked,” I blurt out. Probably a little more snap in there than they wanted, but oh well.

  It’s silent, and then my mother shakes her head. “That was rude, Justine.”

  “No, Diana, it’s cool,” says Lance. “That’s not anything we haven’t heard from the most important people in Hollywood.” He pauses, takes a sip of coffee. “Yup, our film tanked. That’s actually putting it nicely.”

  “Apparently we need to stick to documentaries,” says Leslie. “Although I have to say, I really loved the whole process of writing a script, casting it, doing retakes. My original dream was to direct fiction films, you know.” She sighs. “I hope someday we get a second chance.”

  We’re all quiet again. Lance looks at Leslie with a mix of annoyance and affection, then chirps, “In the meantime, we’ve got another story to tell! That of you, Justine, and your friends. I can’t tell you how grateful we are that you decided to participate.”

  The word friends takes me by surprise, a little slap that stings. I don’t know what hurts more. The thought of Rory shuffling past me in the hallways at school, me being afraid to even say hello to Keira that day in the nurse’s office, or Nate’s gaze bouncing off me in the cafeteria as if I could just be ignored out of existence.

  “So, how are you doing?” asks Leslie, leaning forward to the edge of the couch. “Both of you. Since the divorce.”

  Mom and I look at each other and she jerks her chin toward me in a You go ahead gesture. I have no idea what to say to this.

  “You know it happened a while ago, right? I was, like, twelve.”

  “A tender age for you,” says Leslie, giving a nod that I recognize as her Prod Nod. The one that says, I may or may not be interested in what you’re saying, but I really want you to keep saying it.

  “I guess it was. But my parents breaking up was kind of mellow. Dad lives right in town and I’m there half the time.”

  “We had an amicable split,” adds my mother, proudly. “In fact, Jeff still comes over for dinner every week. We’re still a family.”

  Argh. I’d heard that so many times in the year after the divorce. That, along with its hideous inbred cousins: “We both love you no matter what” and “Divorce does not define us.”

  Leslie looks at me and I just smile blandly, backing my mother up. Then she glances at Lance, and he gives the tiniest eyebrow raise, which I think, if my eyebrow-to-English skills are as sharp as they ever were, means There goes that idea.

  “Have you been shooting home video during the last few years?” asks Lance. We all know he’s talking about the camera they gave each family when they finished shooting Eleven. The expectations were obvious.

  “Oh, yes,” says my mom with a smile. “As much as she’d let us. I have some stuff saved and labeled for you. We can look at it whenever.”

  “Fantastic,” says Leslie. She turns to me and adds, “Justine, if there’s anything you took yourself, even with your phone, we’d love to see it.”

  “Okay,” I say, and leave it at that. I have more than “anything.” I have quite a bit. But I haven’t yet decided to share.

  We’re all quiet for a few seconds and then Lance says, “Well, then. I think we’re ready to get this girl on camera.”

  “I love it,” says Leslie, looking around, even though there’s really nothing special about my room. The walls are teal green, because I liked that color for six minutes three years ago, and the only thing breaking up the obnoxiousness of it is my bookcase full of DVD’s, my bulletin board, and a big denim chair.

  I don’t respond to Leslie because I’m too busy sizing up the unnervingly tall person in the corner. His name is Kenny, and he’s the sound guy. Lance and Leslie called him in from the car after we were finished with our getting-reacquainted session. Now he adjusts the boom microphone on a stand and I’m reminded of how much the mic looks like something you’d use to dust window blinds: a furry gray thing attached to a long metal pole. When we were six, we’d take turns petting it and giving it names.

  Lance walks over to the chair and asks me, “Is this where you want to sit?” I nod. “Can we move it away from the window? There’s some glare.” Then he does it before I answer, to a spot underneath my bulletin board.

  Fortunately, I’ve already prepped that, knowing it would be in a shot. I removed some of the weirder stuff, the celebrity tabloid headlines I like to cut out and post out of context, the collages where I take two magazine ads and blend them together into one extremely screwed-up one. Front and center are a few pictures of Felix and me, and one of my cat, Blue. Then I’ve carefully posted a few of the photos I’ve taken with my cell phone and printed out. A shot of a trail leading off into woods. One of Olivia in a yoga pose, talking on the phone to a boyfriend. They are fuzzy and low-res, and the colors are off, and I think that’s what makes you look twice.

  “You should learn how to do photo editing,” my mom said one day, peering at them. But I liked when they came out this way, random yet perfect.

  “Are you all right?” asks Leslie now, and I snap out of it.

  “Yeah. Well, you know. Jitters.”

  “You? Of all people?” She smiles warmly, but her comment has just made things worse. It has just made the ceiling lower, the floor higher, the walls closer.

  “Can we get started? I’ll be fine once we start.”

  “Is it cool if I put a mic on you?” asks Kenny, stepping close. I nod. We’re all quiet, serious, as he attaches the tiny microphone to the collar of my sweater—a lavalier microphone, I know they call it—and it’s a strangely intimate gesture, as if he’s pinning me with newly gifted jewelry. Kenny then hands me the wireless transmitter, so I can clip it on the waistband of my jeans. I run the cord under my sweater and plug it in. Amazing how quickly this stuff comes back to me.

  The transmitter will send my voice into Kenny’s mixer, a big electronic box with enough knobs, jacks, and cables to stump a bomb squad. He wears it in a case slung across his chest and it looks heavy, unwieldy, but he’ll never complain. He’ll just listen with his headphones and make sure every sound that goes through the mixer on its way to Lance’s camera is sound they’d want in the film.

  “Can you sit down and then talk for me?” Kenny asks.

  What? Oh. He wants to test the mic. I sink into the chair. “My name is Justine Connolly. Are you ready to rock?”

  Lance and Leslie laugh, and Kenny grins while he fiddles with the mixer, but the tension-break is over in a nanosecond and now, if anything, the Dread is worse.

  Blue, who’s been curled on the floor by the heating vent, jumps into my lap. He is black and because I’m wearing black, I actually wonder if the
cat will make me look fatter.

  “Is it okay if Lance and I sit on the bed?” asks Leslie. “It’s a good angle.”

  “Sure,” I say, swallowing what feels like ash in my throat, it’s so dry. I don’t remember being like this before.

  “Try to forget that we’re filming and that this is a documentary,” says Leslie, picking up on how nervous I am. “We’ve known you since you were six years old, Justine, and we really want to know how you’re doing.”

  In one of my interviews for Five at Six, I’m lying on the grass with my head resting on my hands. They shot it while standing on a ladder above me. I wiggle my legs a lot and stare up at the sky, squinting into the sun and scratching my behind way too much.

  In Five at Eleven there’s a scene where I’m standing in front of a full-length mirror with a guitar strapped on, playing chords and talking at the same time.

  Who the hell was that kid? Didn’t she know how it would all look?

  Of course, it looked fine. It looked fantastic, actually. But now it seems impossible that I could re-create that fantasticness.

  Whether I can or not, here is Leslie nodding at me, then at Lance, and then I know he’s recording and I’m looking down to pet the cat, imaging how the shot must look on the camera’s little LCD display.

  “Justine,” says Leslie. Her voice catches and sounds froggy. She clears it and tries again. “Tell me about a typical day for you.”

  “A typical day for me would be . . .” I pause, glad I remembered to start it off like that, so it will sound better when edited. “I get up. I go to school. After school I come home, or go to my dad’s, or walk around Main Street, or hang out at Muddy Joe’s with Felix.” What else do I do? “I go online or watch movies in my room. Homework, of course.” Wow. In other words, a typical day for me is a staggeringly boring pile of crap.

  Leslie pauses, glancing at her notebook. I can’t read her face. “Are you doing any afterschool activities?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “I thought you played guitar.” She’s tried to frame that softly, curious and floating, but it still hits hard.

  An image jump-cuts into my head. I’m thirteen, seated on a small stage in a church basement without windows, sweating and suffocating from heat and all-over panic. I’m holding a guitar. There are dozens of faces fixed on me, including my parents and sister in a back row. I’m playing “Scarborough Fair” and although I’ve been practicing this song for weeks and I know the chords by heart, my fingers aren’t doing what they’re supposed to. My voice is soft and scratchy, and the ages-old air inside the church seems to be swallowing it up. I’d been taking guitar lessons for two years, and there were seven-year-olds at the music school who played circles around me.

  “Practice makes better,” my dad said to me afterward. “Keep it up and by next year, you’ll sound amazing.”

  But it wasn’t that I sounded awful. It was that I didn’t like it. My guitar gave me no joy. The thing with strings didn’t call to me from its closed case in the corner while I played video games or trudged through homework. So after that total fail of a recital, I’d stopped taking lessons and never played again.

  “Justine?” says Leslie.

  I’ve been spacing out, staring blankly at the wall behind Leslie’s head. On camera.

  “Any hobbies you want to tell us about?” asks Leslie. Her brow is crinkled with a careful, pleasant interest.

  But I’ve got nada. I give a Nada Shrug. Leslie glances at her notebook.

  “So what about guys? Do you have a boyfriend?”

  Now I snort. Involuntary reflex.

  “Negative.” The only truth I will give them. There’s no way they can know about Ian.

  “Okay,” she says. “Should we try something else?”

  I nod.

  “I hear you’re not friends with Rory anymore. What happened there?”

  I look at her accusingly. Try something else was supposed to mean a softie question about school or what music I like to listen to.

  “We grew apart.”

  “Full sentence?”

  “Rory and I grew apart, I guess.” Pull this one together, wise-ass. “Don’t look so shocked. Are you still friends with the people you played with when you were little?”

  “That’s different. You and Rory . . . you seemed special. I remember when her mother called me a few years ago to tell me about the diagnosis. I thought, well, at least she’s got Justine. You two had been friends since you were babies.”

  Now I’m angry. I don’t remember Leslie making judgments like this, but I guess after ten years she’s invested.

  “Our moms had been friends since we were babies.”

  “Did something happen in particular? Did she do something?”

  I don’t answer. I let the silence hang there. An image of Rory comes back to me, from five years ago.

  I’m glad you want to go to this movie with me, Justine. I like having popcorn but I can’t eat a whole one and now we can share.

  We were eleven and it was a month before Lance and Leslie were coming to start shooting the second film.

  “Make an effort with Rory,” my mother had urged. “You don’t want to seem cruel, especially in the film. Her mom is still one of my best friends.”

  It had been close to a year since we’d hung out, with me preferring to spend my time with a couple of other friends. Normal friends, I remember thinking. When we went to that movie, some boring historical drama, she kept looking over at me and touching my arm, like she wanted to make sure I was still there. That it was real, having her friend back.

  During the two months that Lance and Leslie were in town with their cameras, Rory and I did all the things we used to. Which wasn’t much, but I know to her it seemed like an embarrassment of riches. We hung out at her house and did puzzles. We went for walks in the woods. I didn’t sit with her in the cafeteria, because I couldn’t risk losing my friends, but I’d meet her after school and we’d get snacks at the Stewart’s convenience store. Lance and Leslie filmed us doing all this.

  Another image fades in, as I stare at that lens again.

  Rory waiting for me outside our middle school, in her hands a fresh five-dollar bill earmarked for salt and vinegar potato chips and an iced tea at the convenience store. And then her face after I told her I couldn’t go anymore, that I had something else after school every single day from now on. Her face, not getting it, as she asked me when I was free. On the weekends, maybe? As soon as school ends for the year?

  I didn’t have to see her face when she called to invite me to that summer’s Renaissance Faire. This is when I finally told her we weren’t friends anymore and to stop calling and stop talking to me, period.

  “You must have been relieved to find out,” Leslie is saying.

  “What?” I shake my head, coming back from Mars.

  “About Rory being on the autism spectrum.”

  “Oh.”

  I’d done some searching online. Things made sense. But it had been too late and in the end, it wouldn’t have mattered. Rory was Rory. I was me. I didn’t want to hang around her anymore and by then, I had Felix.

  Leslie taps Lance on the leg, who pulls away from the camera and says, “What? What do you want me to do?”

  “We need to stop. Or at least, take a break.”

  “You think?” he snarls.

  “Don’t be an asshole about it.”

  “I’m sorry, Les. I’m just getting a little frustrated and tired.”

  “Tired of what?” I ask. Tired of me? I know what they must be thinking. This can’t be the same girl. The eleven-year-old who expertly mimicked famous movie lines and liked to answer Leslie’s questions as a made-up hippie character named Starlight Lovepeace.

  Leslie rubs one of her eyes wearily. “This is the third interview we’ve done where we’re not feeling . . . we’re not getting the kind of material we’d like. It was the same with Nate and Keira.”

  Something about the way sh
e says this enrages me.

  “Maybe you should just write us a script,” I say, “and we’ll follow it.”

  Leslie looks quickly at me, then at Lance, and Lance takes the camera off pause.

  “That’s not what I meant, Justine.” Leslie smoothly steps out of the way and into the corner of my room.

  “What kind of material do you want? What are you not getting?”

  “We wish you guys would open up more. It’s like we keep hitting these dead ends with everyone. There’s so much you don’t want to talk about.”

  “Uh, yeah. Because we’re teenagers.” And as soon as I say this, I know I’ve given them another great sound bite. Dammit.

  “I guess we were just expecting to have . . . more to shoot,” says Leslie. “With you.”

  “Our producers at Independent Eye really wanted you to be positioned as the focus,” adds Lance.

  “The focus? What, like, the star?”

  Leslie shrugs. “You’ve always been the most popular one.”

  I know this is true. I know Felix would be jealous to hear this. Nate too, probably.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I don’t have a story this time around.” It comes out sounding pissy and I like that.

  Lance turns off the camera now and replaces the lens cap, so I know it’s not coming back on. The room expands to normal size. I can breathe. But there’s this overwhelming feeling of having let someone down. Who? Them? Myself? I feel a tickle in my nose like I might cry, but no no no, none of that, young lady. That is so not an option right now.

  Leslie has been examining me, carefully, with concern. I get the feeling this might be who she really is, when she’s not playing producer.

  “Justine,” she says evenly. “Everyone has a story. It’s simply a question of finding it.”

  I want to help them. I want to help myself. I’m not sure if those are the same things in this situation, but I’m feeling a little desperate.

  “The community theater is doing a musical in June,” I say softly. “I could . . . you know . . . audition. That would be something.”

  Lance and Leslie share a sad, knowing kind of look.

  “We don’t feel comfortable with that,” says Leslie. “We’ve never created a situation to shoot. We’ve always tried to focus on naturally occurring scenes.”