After a few moments, he turns and sees me looking at him. And seems surprised.
“Justine!”
“Hey.”
“What are you guys doing here?” he says, coming over. Felix shoots me a sideways glance and moves to another aisle, but the crew stays with me.
“I’m doing my weekly check for movie bargains.” Then I point with my thumb at the crew. “Plus there’s this.”
He looks at the crew and acts surprised again.
But it’s suddenly so obvious.
He is totally not surprised. He has totally followed us in here.
It feels like my stomach drops about a hundred feet. Equilibrium vanishes so quickly, I could tip over.
Ian raises his hand in a wave. “Hi, folks,” he says.
Leslie, Lance, and Kenny all murmur hello. Leslie surveys Ian with an alert curiosity. Yes, this is someone you haven’t shot me speaking to yet. A guy. Move along because there’s nothing to see here.
“Find anything good?” Ian asks, leaning in to look over my shoulder. I can smell his hair and despite everything else I’m feeling, there’s that unpushawayable Oh God can I please just put my face in it and breathe for a few minutes?
I pull out the DVD I was just handling. It’s Love Actually, which was one of my favorite Christmas movies until I realized that both main female characters end up miserable and two of the male characters fall in love with their maids.
I hold it up to him because I don’t seem to be able to speak. My mind is busy with some other questions, not the least of which is, Do I do this now?
I look at his face in profile and think about the first time he kissed me. Felix and I had run into him and his buddy Milo at a pizza place one afternoon, which led to us all sitting together and then deciding to drive to a swimming hole up the mountain. Felix and Milo went wading in the water, but Ian and I took a walk, then found a tree that had fallen across a stream. We sat on it and talked for a while, our legs dangling over the rushing water, and he asked if he could put his arm around me because he was worried I might fall.
“Yes,” I said. “But you look less sturdy than I do.”
Then he put his arm around me and his lips on mine, in the same motion. Like the kiss was an extra bonus he threw in for free at the last second. It was so random but the second it happened, it felt like something I’d been waiting for.
“Sorry,” he’d said. “I just realized how interesting and cool you are, and I couldn’t not kiss you.”
“That is so cheesy, I might puke,” I’d said. “You really will have to keep me from falling.”
“Velveeta all the way, baby, and proud of it.” Then his face got serious. “Would you want to come back here with me next weekend? We could go for a walk to the falls.”
So I did, and we did, and suddenly we were a couple. Everything about it was fast and unexpected. Which now makes me extremely, heartsickeningly suspicious.
Now, Ian takes the Love Actually DVD out of my hand and looks at it. “Oh, yeah. The one with all the English people.”
It would be so easy for me to stay in this scene with him. We could look through movies and make smart-ass comments, and it would probably come off pretty funny and entertaining. Something Lance and Leslie would keep in the film. Maybe my story could be a love story. And whatever happens with it, at least it’s happening.
I picture the suits around their big conference table, watching the next crop of footage. Liking the romance angle.
And then the notion hits. This moment isn’t meant for me. It’s meant for Ian and for Lance and Leslie and also for the money people, and I’m just some kind of device.
I grab the DVD out of his hands, stuff it back in the bin, and march out of the store. Ian follows. Lance and Leslie follow. I look up at them, ready to tell them to ease off, to leave me alone for a few minutes, but the sun hits me so warm as I step outside and the light blinds me a little, like an instant reminder of here and now and in those two seconds I lose, Ian and the crew have caught up to me.
“Justine! What’s going on?” he asks.
Okay, Ian. You want this? You got it. I spin to face him.
“Did you go out with me because of them?” I motion to Lance, Leslie, and Kenny.
“What?”
“The film. Did you do it because you wanted to be part of the film?”
Ian looks horrified. “God, no! What kind of asshole do you think I am?”
“That depends. What kind of asshole shows up in a store he hates because of their overuse of unrecyclable plastic, just because there’s a film crew with the ex he dumped for no good reason?”
Ian steadies himself with a long breath in, then out. “I was in the bookstore,” he says, pointing across the street, “and I saw all of you go in and . . . I don’t know. I was curious.” He looks down at the ground now. “I thought it would be fun to be on camera with you.”
“And before . . . when we got together . . . ?”
Ian closes his eyes and scrunches up his face, and his body seems to want to be very small. “Look,” he says as he opens his eyes and they meet mine. “I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t crossed my mind. The film itself, I mean. But it didn’t matter one way or another to me. I was like, whatever, about it. I’ve just always thought you were so cool, in the movies and in real life, and I wanted to get to know you.”
“But then you didn’t like what you found when you got there.”
“I told you that night. I just feel like we were meant to be friends. Can’t it be that simple?”
Ian now looks over my shoulder at something far away. Maybe the ridge, where he wishes he could be hiking with a girl who doesn’t wear high-tops and complain about her knees.
I don’t know how to answer this question of his. Simple for him, sure. Simple for me . . . no. If he had said, Yes, you got me. I’m an evil schemer who hooked up with you because I thought you were going to be in a movie, then dumped you when it looked like the movie wasn’t happening, then started hanging around again when shooting started . . . I would have been devastated, betrayed, all that. But I also would have something else to blame.
Something else to blame besides me.
“I don’t want to be friends with you,” I finally say. “It hurts too much.”
Ian takes one slow step toward me, then freezes. I guess it’s all he dares offer now. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
Now I just shrug, not willing to meet him in that raw place. “I didn’t mean to disappoint you.”
Felix has edged his way onto the sidewalk in front of the store now, and I can see he’s in Fierce Protective Friend mode. He doesn’t even care that the camera’s strayed from him on his Follow Day. “Let’s go,” says Felix, and takes me by the hand away from Ian. I’m so glad for the assisted exit, I want to wrap myself around his arm.
After we’ve walked a few storefronts down, I turn to check on the crew. They haven’t moved, and they’re not shooting us. The camera’s pointed at Ian, standing by himself on the steps of the store, staring again at the mountains in the distance. I know, as surely as I know anything, that I will never speak to him again.
NINE
On one of the main country roads that run through town, there’s a sign for Hunter Farms. Olivia and I always refer to it as the Cannibal Apple. On it, an apple with a face and arms and legs is holding a smaller, apparently less evolved apple without a face or arms or legs, which has a big bite eaten out of it. “HUNTER FARMS! JUST ONE MORE MILE AHEAD!” says the Cannibal Apple ecstatically in a speech balloon, like this is where everyone on the planet is headed.
There’s nothing too special about Hunter Farms. It’s one of several that dot the map around here, doing big fall business with the U-Pick crowds and quietly selling fresh things to locals the rest of the time. But every family seems to latch onto “their” farm, and Hunter has been ours for as long as I can remember. I’m guessing that originally, this was because of Nate and Felix, and our connection through t
he Five At films. In a small town like ours, that’s all it takes for lifelong produce loyalty.
It’s Friday. Felix has agreed to accompany me to the art house theater one town over, which is something I like to do on weekends, usually by myself, when everyone else is lining up at the mall to see the newest craptacular blockbuster. The crew is meeting us there, which probably explains why Felix was so eager to see a film in Farsi he’s never heard of. I’m on my way to get him at the farm, where he still works part-time when his dad needs more hands, like right now during spring tree-pruning season.
I used to feel weird about coming here. Because of Nate. Because he might be around. But Felix always assured me that Golden Boy was never on-site. When I saw the abandoned rabbit hutches behind the farm store, I started to believe it.
What happened to the rabbits? I’m always wondering about this. When Nate traded 4-H for ab crunches, did the bunnies end up as collateral damage? Felix’s mom says they were “given away,” but that could be one of those euphemisms like “being sent to live on a farm in the country.” When an animal is already living on a farm in the country, what lie do you use to pretend something horrible didn’t happen to it?
I veer into the circular driveway of the farm store and stop the car on an intentionally random angle, just because I can. In summer, the big doors are open to the road and the ice cream window has a line ten deep and you can’t find a parking space, but until then, everything’s boarded up except for a small side door with a sign that says, a little too desperately, “Yes! We’re Open!”
Suddenly, two people burst through the farm store door: Nate and his grandmother. I’ve always admired Mrs. Hunter. She dresses like she’s forever on her way to a yoga class, and is in the paper every other week as a member of some committee. By contrast, I think I’ve seen Nate’s mom two or three times in the last five years, even though they all live together in the big brick house on the hill above one of the orchards.
Mrs. Hunter is talking to Nate and looks mad. Nate is not talking back and looks haggard. He checks out my car and sees who’s in it. But his gaze doesn’t ricochet off me the way it usually does. He holds it there. Just staring.
Mrs. Hunter continues talking, her voice raised enough so I can hear a bit through the closed windows. I catch the words help and important. Nate’s still looking at me with an expression I can only describe as pleading. It’s the distantly familiar version of Nate Hunter, like when a song samples an older one and you can’t name it, but you know you know it from somewhere.
I find myself responding to him with a moronic, yet somehow appropriate, shrug. It’s enough to count as some kind of exchange. Something passes between us. Then he turns and starts up the gravel driveway toward the house with his grandmother on his heels. I watch him walk. It’s not the same walk he has at school.
Not that I notice his walk, of course. I hate him, remember? But just so you know, this walk is the walk of a young boy being nagged by his grandmother about something. It’s as if he’s curling further into his inner eleven-year-old with every step.
The passenger door of the car opens suddenly and Felix is sliding in. He looks freshly changed, into one of his signature polo shirts and a crisp pair of jeans.
“How was it?” I ask.
“I used to love apple trees,” he replies, a little dazed. “No more.”
After I pull onto the road, I say, “I just saw Nate being bitched out by his grandmother. I wanted to be entertained by it, but I actually felt kind of bad for him.”
“Oh, yeah,” says Felix, perking up, a knowing edge to his voice.
“Scoop?” I ask. Felix does not talk to Nate, but Felix’s mother talks to everybody.
“Mrs. Hunter wants Nate to spend some time working at the farm. With, you know. The crew around. Free advertising, and all that.”
“Yuck,” I say.
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Felix shrug. “Times are tough. The farm needs all the exposure it can get.”
“They’re not bugging you about it.”
Felix doesn’t answer. His silence is suspicious.
“What is it?” I ask. “What are you about to tell me?”
“They’re not bugging me about it because I’ve got other things going on.” I catch him looking down at his phone. “I got a call from Leslie today.”
It’s been two days since Lance and Leslie had a big meeting with their producers, and I haven’t heard a peep. Which has been kind of nice and kind of devastating at the same time.
“Did they talk about Independent Eye?” I ask.
“They got some notes,” says Felix. “Maybe they’ll tell you more at the theater. We talked a bit about me. The Independent Eye people talked about me.”
The thought of a bunch of cable channel executives sitting around a table, drinking espresso and discussing the five of us like they know us, like they own us somehow, has kept the hair on the back of my neck standing on end for days. Even now, I clench my hands around the steering wheel.
“They’re thinking my blog should be part of the online presence for the film, and they’d like to do something with one of my songs.”
“Ah, so they know how to get you,” I say.
“Well, I don’t kid myself with the music thing. I know I’m not that good. Yet. But what I have that others don’t is an existing stage. People will see me. Important people, who could actually help me with my career. How else am I going to show my parents I can make a living this way? They want me to find something more . . . reliable. In other words, corporate and mind-numbing and not who I am.”
I take my eyes off the road for just a second to glance at him and in that second, he appears different. I always thought of Felix’s hunger for the spotlight as something desperate and a little annoying, but now I get it. He is chronically unseen, even by his own family.
“You know what it means?” Felix continues. “It means maybe this time, they’ll actually care about me. It’s always been you or Keira or Nate. Rory and me . . . they never really focused on us because we weren’t that interesting. But now, apparently I am.”
Felix looks overjoyed. I wish I could offer him any one of a thousand other things to feel this way about: a tricked-out new keyboard, perhaps, or a girlfriend.
“Felix, you’ve always been interesting,” I say. “More than most people.”
“Well then, now it’s official.”
We drive in silence for a few seconds. So Felix is more interesting to them than he was. Does this mean I am less interesting? Well, that’s no surprise. The best I can do here is be a good friend.
“That’s great,” I finally say to Felix. “You deserve that.”
“I’m so happy that I don’t even care that Leslie and Lance are asking us to do what they want us to do.” He pauses. “You will, though, Justine. You will totally hate it.”
He’s right. I do hate it. I hate it so much, I’m still trying to figure out how my mouth even formed the sounds of Okay that brought me here.
In the corner of the school library, underneath one of the dusty bubble skylights, there’s a table where there was never a table. The bookshelves have been moved around to make room for this thing, which was dragged over from another part of the library. It’s a larger, taller version of the one we sat at in kindergarten.
Lance and Kenny are tinkering with some lights they brought in, and somewhere, far enough away so we can’t see her but not so far that she can’t hear everything that’s going on, is the librarian, Mrs. Abruzzo. It’s after school but I’m sure she doesn’t mind sticking around for this.
This. I am the first one to arrive for this.
This being all five of us around the table. Nate, Felix, Keira, Rory, and me. Together. Talking, ideally. We’ll see.
I wanted to get here early so I could suss out the situation. The others are probably dallying at their lockers or in the bathroom, but not me. I need to make sure the distasteful thing we’re about to do, have all somehow agree
d to do, is a distasteful thing I can mentally prepare for.
Felix is next to arrive. He winks at me, hugs Leslie quickly, then moves over to Lance and Kenny.
Rory enters right after him. She looks at me and registers absolutely no reaction, which for her doesn’t necessarily mean a damn thing, but still. Ouch.
“The folks at Independent Eye aren’t completely satisfied with what we’ve shot so far,” said Leslie after we got out of the movie that night. “That one little bit we got with you and Rory was the best. They want you interacting.”
Maybe I agreed because I feel so responsible for this turn of events. As for the others? Nate and Felix—no surprise there. Rory, as always, is willing to go along with anything if it makes people happy. And Keira. Well, that’s a mystery.
Here she comes now. Nate too. He’s got his hand protectively on her back and I feel this instant Huh? Of course, they’re friends. I know that. But there’s something about the way he leans his body toward hers, a graceful curve, that seems truly intimate.
Nate smiles at Rory, who gives him the same non-look she gave me. He registers Felix and looks instantly, nervously, away. He must see me out of the corner of his eye, but he does not turn.
Yeah, this is going to be a blast.
But it’s Keira who surprises me. She bends down to set her leather messenger bag on the floor, and when she stands up, her face is neon-bright with energy.
“Hey, girl,” she practically sings to Leslie, and they kiss each other on the cheek. Then Keira turns to see Rory standing on the other side of Leslie.
“Rory,” she says warmly, like she hasn’t ignored her in the hallway every day for years but is seeing her for the first time in a long while and oh, she’s missed her so very much. Rory smiles shyly. Even Rory knows that when Keira Jones talks to you, it’s a big deal.
I’m ready for her to ignore me like Nate did, and suddenly my left thumbnail desperately needs to be picked at. But Keira approaches, her arms outstretched.
“Justine, hi,” she says, and gives me the quickest of hugs. I’m not sure her hands actually touch my body, but the motion is there, swift and expert, and I’m guessing that’s supposed to count. The shadow of our almost-girlfight in the bathroom that day flickers across her face.
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