Rory looks at Lance and Leslie. “Is that why you came down here with them? So you could say all that to me on camera?”
“These guys? No. They . . . just followed me. It’s my Follow Day.”
Rory blinks slowly. Aimee is frozen in place on the other side of the room. It suddenly seems possible that we could all stand here silent forever. The world could end and they’d find us petrified like this, covered in ash. I still haven’t said the words. Why can’t I just say them? The camera watches me, knowing. Judging. I want to push farther into the room and grab Rory by the shoulders and just tell her. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Instead, I feel myself retreating.
Before I know it, I’m in the hallway again and walking as fast as I can without actually running, because we’re not supposed to run in school and my body’s conditioned to obey this rule. Multiple footsteps are behind me, and together we all drum a rhythm on the floor. There’s light over by the stairway, through the window of the door to outside, and I stop there. Let them catch up to me. Let them catch me.
“Justine,” says Leslie, panting, her face filled with concern. “Are you okay?”
It seems genuine and this makes me feel so ashamed. “I’m fine.” We’re silent.
“You didn’t plan to run into Rory like that?”
“No. That was an accident.”
Lance and Leslie exchange a glance, one of those quick, wordless conversations they often have.
“A fantastic accident,” says Lance. He’s still shooting, but he’s also grinning like he just got a surprise treat in his cereal box. “I can’t believe we got that.”
“It’s the best thing we’ve shot since we started,” says Leslie, and for a second I feel really flattered. Like maybe I’ve got my groove back.
“I’m sorry you didn’t get more. I wanted to say more.”
“Oh, Justine,” says Leslie, putting her hand on my arm. “That’s real life. We almost never get to finish a conversation the way we want to.”
“Next time you see Rory, maybe you can pick up where you left off,” says Lance.
“But I’m confused,” says Leslie. “What were you talking about in there?”
I sink down onto the second-to-bottom step. Leslie does the same, and it surprises me, how different this one little gesture feels. She’s not standing near the camera, observing. She’s participating. Lance shifts a bit with the camera, and Kenny with him. But Leslie is right here, so I look at her face, which seems interested in what I might say.
And I talk.
I tell her about the new friends when I was eleven, and about my mother’s request, and being with Rory during the time they were shooting, and then about the ditching. I describe what it’s been like to see Rory alone every day at school, and how heavy five years’ worth of guilt can be. I even tell them about feeling jealous that Rory found some place where she belongs.
When I’m done, they’re all quiet and I close my eyes to the feeling of relief. It’s all out. It’s messy and gross and they probably wouldn’t come near it except to poke at it with a long stick, but I don’t care. I feel better instantly. The footage they got today, the thought that Ian might be hoping for screen time—all things to toss and turn about later.
This is where somebody might say something along the lines of, “It’s okay, Justine. We all do things we regret.”
Instead, Lance asks: “Les, what do you think?”
“I’m thinking we can use the narration as voiceover later. Right? She was looking at me and not off camera, so we’d have to.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” says Lance.
I used to tune out this kind of chatter between them. It always seemed boring. Just put the camera back on me, will you? But now I understand what they’re doing. They’re thinking about both sides of the process at once. While they’re shooting they have to mentally edit too. I don’t know how I know this. But I can see it in my head as if I’ve tapped into some psychic wire between Lance and Leslie.
“We have to include that in the first rough cut,” says Leslie.
“You’re already doing a rough cut?” I ask.
“The people at Independent Eye want to see footage every few weeks,” Lance says.
“The suits,” Leslie adds, smiling.
“Our producers,” says Lance, shooting her a serious look, and Leslie’s smile goes away. “They need to see if we’re on the right track.”
So this is their punishment for the Five at Eleven fallout. No more artistic carte blanche. They’re being monitored now, which is maybe a small price to pay to continue the series. Or a huge one.
“Thank you, Justine,” says Leslie. “Thank you for giving so much of yourself today.” They needed this.
I didn’t plan on the giving, but on the other hand, they didn’t force me to hand anything over.
So how, and why, do I keep doing exactly that?
Rory uses a metal skeleton key to open the tall wood-and-glass cabinet. It’s an antique piece, lovely in that cold, untouchable way. Not something you’d expect to find in an eleven-year-old girl’s bedroom.
“This is my Tudor Monarchs collection,” she says a bit anxiously, running a hand through her dark blond hair. It’s cut short and elfin, just like her best friend Justine’s. “It’s about three years’ worth of stuff, ever since I was eight and the school librarian gave me a biography of Henry VIII. It was five hundred pages long and I read it in like a day.”
There’s a cut to a drawing by Rory of King Henry. It’s pretty terrible, almost a caricature, but Rory’s had it matted and framed. Surrounding it are six smaller, equally unrecognizable portraits of his famous wives. Now Rory unscrolls a paper banner on which she’s created a computer-generated flowchart of Tudor-era family and political relationships. “I have another one of the timeline, but I’m still fiddling with it.”
What follows is a series of shots where Rory’s showing off the various treasures of her collection—books and figurines, a “Bloody Mary” Christmas ornament, replica jewelry—pulling them out of the glass cabinet one by one, then replacing them carefully when done. The montage ends with Rory emerging from the closet wearing a floor-length Queen Elizabeth I costume, complete with ruffled collar and curly red wig.
She spins for the camera and laughs. “I’m going to be volunteering at the Ren Faire this summer!”
In the next shot, she’s sitting on her bed in the gown, fingering the curves of the collar. “Why do I like this stuff so much?” she asks, in response to a question. “Because it’s full of characters who are more interesting than the ones in any fiction book I’ve read, except these were real people. The more I learn about them, the more I learn about people in general.”
There’s a cut to Rory walking up the front steps to a house, still dressed in her costume. We know from earlier scenes that this is my house. “It’s the Spring Carnival at school,” she says toward the camera. “Justine and I are going together.”
She knocks. After a few moments, I open the door. Look her up and down with an expression of pure wonder, but not the good kind.
“What. Are. You. Wearing?” I ask.
“I’m Queen Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, sometimes known as Good Queen Bess.”
“You look ridiculous.”
Rory pauses. “Do I?”
“Was this the thing you spent six months’ worth of allowance on?
“Yes,” says Rory. “You’re supposed to dress up at a carnival.”
I glance at the camera, then turn back to smile at her, a little forced. “It’s not . . . that kind of carnival. This isn’t the Renaissance.”
Rory nods slowly, frowning, as if filing a mental note. “Sorry,” she says. “Do you want me to change?”
The question seems too large for the moment. A guilty look travels across my face.
“Come on,” I say, almost tenderly now. “You can borrow something of mine.”
Rory turns to pick up the hem of her gown and when she does, the came
ra catches the disappointment on her face. But she follows me into the house and the door closes behind us.
It was the last scene in Five at Eleven with Rory and me together.
I never saw her in that costume again, and I have no idea if her collection has grown to two more cabinets or five more or twenty. But this is a small town with a thick grapevine, and I know that at some point, Rory discovered an online community of people all over the world who, like her, have a thing for that particular pocket of history. Every year they have some big convention and at the last one, Rory was asked to be on one of the panels. On the heels of that, she started the school History Club, and it even has a few members.
Rory has a passion. She gets recognition for it. It connects her with people.
I have never felt so jealous in my life.
EIGHT
Don’t! Mess! Don’t! Mess! Don’t mess with the best! ’Cuz the best don’t mess!
If you think that cheer sounds stupid, imagine it shouted against hundreds of feet stomping on ancient wooden bleachers, pounding an echo across the grungy tile and glass surrounding the college pool. I look down at the water from my perch near the top of the bleachers, the way it’s jiggling slightly, like Jell-O. I bet the world is blissfully muffled down there, and that’s the draw. Maybe that’s worth wearing a Speedo in front of all these people.
I’m sitting with Felix, and this is some kind of important swim meet for our high school boys’ team—our school doesn’t have its own pool, so the team swims here. We’re supposed to care about who wins and who goes splashing away in shame and defeat. This is my first time at an event like this. And really, I’m not here by choice.
I look for Lance and Kenny and there they are, standing in the aisle alongside the bleachers. Lance is panning the crowd as it whips up this inane cheering. Felix is actually participating while I actually am not. The only reason I’m even mouthing the words, sort of, is because we’ve got Leslie positioned in the aisle next to us, shooting the smaller camera they sometimes use for extra footage in big crowd scenes.
Here comes the team out of the locker room wearing sweatshirts and track pants. There’s Nate, rolling his neck and his arms around. He raises his hand to the crowd and smiles, and they go crazy.
Several rows below us and off to the side, I see Rory. She’s sitting by herself with headphones on, reading a book, which makes me suddenly burst out laughing. If I could do that, I would. But Rory doesn’t care that it looks ridiculous. She’s not even doing it because she wants to make a statement or create a terrific shot. It’s just what she wants at the moment. I’d like more than anything to climb down, sit next to her, and crack open a book of my own.
“Ah, her Royal Highness has finally graced us with her presence,” says Felix, nudging me and pointing with his chin toward the door. Keira has just entered with two of her friends. The front row is full but people make room for them, and their heads disappear into the crowd.
So we all got the same call from Leslie the night before. It’s always Leslie, when they want us to do something special.
“We’d like all four of you to attend Nate’s swim meet,” she’d said to me on the phone. It had been a week since my Follow Day. In that time, they’d done Nate, Keira, and Rory.
“Isn’t that against your usual, you know, method?” I’d asked.
“Yes, we wouldn’t normally be asking this. We’d try to find an organic situation where you’re all together. But things are different than they were five years ago. Your high school is much bigger than middle school and your interests are, well, varied. We need to have all five of you in the same place at the same time, at least once.”
“But I don’t go to these things. Neither do most normal people.”
“Can’t you just pretend . . . I mean, suppose . . . Felix asked you to go? Just as something to do on a Friday night.”
So I had supposed, and now I’m here. Watching Nate Hunter take off his sweats. Okay, I will objectively admit that he is a beautiful boy. But I admire him the way I’d admire a male model in a magazine underwear ad, glossy and glistening yet one-dimensional and ultimately, not real. He’s got lines on his body that seem carved by some high-precision tool. I let myself look for only a moment.
True to form, Lance and Kenny are quickly poolside, just close enough to get good shots without disturbing the Swimming Messiah.
Leslie pans the crowd with her camera, then suddenly travels to the other side of the bleachers, where Keira is sitting. With the cameras distracted and Felix engrossed in the meet, I decide to step outside so I can regain my hearing for a minute.
The hallway of the college gym is decorated with trophy cases and banners, and I start reading about a student named Maeve O’Bannon who, back in 1978, apparently did superhuman things with a volleyball. On the other side of the doors to the pool, I hear a starting horn and splashes and more cheers, and then the opening and thudding closed of the heavy metal door. I look up.
It’s Keira. She’s wearing a khaki shirt dress with a big buckle and high brown leather boots, and anyone else would look overdressed for a swim meet, but with her you get the sense this is maybe something she just wears around the house.
“Oh,” she says, bored and distracted. Like this is her version of Hi.
“I’m hiding out,” I say.
“I’m taking a very long trip to the restroom,” she says without any twist of sarcasm, and starts walking toward it. She has to pass me on the way, though, and I offer her a smile as she goes by. She smiles back, but only half as much.
I don’t know why it’s so important for me to talk to Keira. I’d liked the way Leslie had whined, “None of you guys have anything to do with one another anymore,” on the phone last night. Taken some pleasure in it.
But for me, Keira is different. Maybe I’m just like everyone else, caught by her mysterious tractor beam of charisma.
“How has it been, so far?” I call after her as she’s reaching for the restroom door. Now she stops and really looks at me, almost amused.
“It’s great. Terrific. Just lovely.” She smiles for a second. A fake smile. An almost mean smile. “And how about you? You always seem to have so much fun with this.”
When Keira says the word fun her brow crinkles and she bites down hard on the f.
“Do I?” I ask.
“Don’t you?” says Keira, and now she snorts. It’s a haughty little sound. She swings open the restroom door and moves through it, letting it slam.
Keira Jones hates me. She hates me, and I have no idea why.
I liked it a lot better when I thought she didn’t care about me.
I would leave this place. Right now. Except my stuff is back at the bleachers and something drives me forward into the restroom. Keira’s just standing at the sink, staring blankly into the mirror, as I step inside and let the door slam just like she did.
“What did I ever do to you?” I ask, and there’s something about addressing the back of her head that lets me be brave. “You haven’t lowered yourself to look at me, let alone talk to me, since we were eleven years old. What exactly is your problem?”
Keira does glance at me now, but in the mirror. It’s disconcerting. At least I have her attention.
“My problem?” she asks, genuinely surprised. “Aren’t you the one who pulled a total diva in Journalism?”
When I don’t answer, she turns to face me head-on.
“Do you have any idea how that made Nate feel? That you wouldn’t do a simple group project with him on camera?”
Her face is softer now, and she reaches up to her hair with both hands, twists it behind her head into a temporary bun. This seems like a pretty weird thing to do in the middle of what I see as a face-off, but then again, it is Keira.
How would Nate feel?
“Why do you care so much about how he feels?” I ask. “Are you guys going out? Or maybe just doing it?” As soon as it comes out of my mouth, I cringe. I may think hateful things like that
all the time, but I know better than to say them.
Keira’s expression hardens into a look of contempt, a strange mixture of anger, pity, and disgust. Then she releases her hair and walks past me out of the restroom.
I stare at the door after it closes behind her, the straight, clean lines of it, wishing everything in the universe could be so neat. There’s cheering coming from inside the pool area and I really, really just want to hang out here by myself, but eventually I’ll be missed. When I think of people calling me a diva, it hurts, and my absence from the pool will just reinforce that.
I go back and sit down just in time to catch another starting horn and there’s Nate, diving off the block and into the water, disappearing for a second before popping up, and wow, he’s fast. I look over at Felix, who is watching him too.
There’s one of the cameras. On me.
“Go Nate!” I find myself yelling.
Before I can think of why I bothered, the race is over and Nate has won.
Three days later, it’s Felix’s Follow Day and he’s invited/cajoled/begged me to hang out with him after school. We take the bus to his house, the crew riding along in the way-back row of seats, then we all walk a few blocks to the used music and video store on Main Street.
It’s weird to be in town with the camera in tow. At school, people have gotten used to it. But here, it’s still exciting. Some people, film students and older locals mostly, look at us knowingly. Others have no idea what’s going on and take a moment to watch. I put on mental blinders and pay no attention.
We’re at the record store for five minutes, Felix and I browsing through the 99-cent DVD bin, when I glance up to see Ian moving toward the opposite corner of the store. He’s examining, with great interest, the New Mint in Box Never Opened! wall of comic book action figures. This strikes me as off, because I know he doesn’t like action figures and, in fact, considers them a stupid waste of money.
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