Extra Life

by Derek Nikitas

  “There’s a really delicate matrix here, Russ…”

  “Too late for that. The past past is already gone.”

  “What? How?” He kept squirming, eyes flitting around.

  “First of all, you and 2.0 got to school on time. In real life, you were late, and that triggered all sorts of stuff that isn’t happening now…”

  “But this is real life,” he whined. “I’ve been busting my butt to keep things normal here. I tried to call you—”

  “Everything in your house was going haywire. I had to get out.”

  His cheeks went so red I thought they’d start bleeding. “My house? What’s wrong at my house?”

  “Chill, Connie. Your house is fine. I mean mysterious emails and phone calls from fax machines. The video game I tried to play. All of it was these weird tech problems. And it was tech that sent me back in time in the first place. That app or program or whatever it was—the Pastime Project. I’m thinking there might be a screw up in the system.”

  “Anomalies,” he muttered. “Corruptions. Bad code in the program.”

  “But like you said—”

  “A virus…” he went on, ignoring me.

  “—this is real life.”

  “Real life has viruses,” he noted. “Did you know our human DNA is actually encoded with residual viral material? Mitochondrial DNA? Endosymbiosis? Look it up. Viruses are part of us. Just like operating systems that gradually draw bad code off the Internet.”

  “If that’s how you want to look at it,” I said, “then I’m here to do a virus scan.”

  “What does that even mean, Russ?” He kept peeking over my shoulder in the direction 2.0 had headed. Probably worried that Other Me would come back and find us chatting in the hall. Good thinking, Connie. I seriously doubted a meeting of Russes would cause a black hole, but it would still be hella awkward.

  And was it Russes or Russi?

  “I just need you to stay like you’ve been,” I said. “Keep close to 2.0, don’t let him run into Paige or Savannah. Got it?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it never happened, last time,” I lied. “The Other Me wants everybody to get together to make the video, but it didn’t happen during the first take, so it shouldn’t now, right?”

  “No, I guess not, but…”

  “Where’s your copy of the video script—the one I gave you this morning?”

  That wasn’t technically right. 2.0 gave him the script, not me. Connie caught the continuity error, and it made him take a step back from me, as if he just realized I was an impostor.

  “Why do you want it?” he said.

  “You were supposed to have a fight this morning, because you didn’t really want to do the shoot.” My bullshit was piling up, nice and thick, but I had to take Connie out of the equation, for his own sake. “You admitted it, so I got mad, and I didn’t give you the script. The shoot never happened. But this time—I guess you didn’t say anything to him?”

  Connie studied me. I could see belief easing over his face. I had picked the best possible fiction because what I told him was what was in his heart. He reached behind his head and withdrew the rolled-up script from his backpack. But then he hesitated and pressed it against his chest.

  “Keep 2.0 away from the Silver Bullet this afternoon, all right?” I said. “Now that things have gone a different way, he might change his mind and show up there.”

  Connie nodded. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going back to your house to wait it out.” Neither one of us wanted to discuss what that meant—wait it out. Seven p.m. would come around again, and there was no way of knowing what the hour would bring.

  “Please don’t get anything on my Dr. Who shirt, please.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I assured him.

  A new text buzzed on my phone, and Connie was too busy wringing the script in his hands to notice. I took a sideways glance at the screen. One p.m., exactly on schedule, the message from Savannah’s blocked number. okay 2:30 Slver bullet gr8 script! —sl

  She was in, just like before, my second chance to get it right. The adrenaline rush, all over again. Except this time it felt a bit like Savannah was praising a script written by some other dude whose chops we both admired. I wasn’t the me I was before anymore. But I could still make this work. Fixing my mistakes was the whole point of this leap.

  “All right, hand over the script,” I told Connie.

  He sighed, averted his eyes, and made no move to give it to me.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “We should—we should do an even trade,” he finally said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The phone, dude. You’re not supposed to have it.”

  I could see his point. As long as I had the phone, Russ 2.0 would keep rampaging around. He’d get more and more erratic. No doubt he’d show up at the Silver Bullet anyway, since he wouldn’t know if Savannah texted him or not. And that would ruin my plan.

  Still, I needed that phone. It was my only connection to the Pastime Project. My only possible source of answers. After all, Video Russ wouldn’t have sent me back here without an escape plan.

  “Russ, come on. You’re messing with the timeline,” Connie said.

  “All right, all right,” I said, and snatched for the script. Connie resisted, but I couldn’t blame him for his lack of trust, especially since my grabbiness was a slight-of-hand trick meant to distract him from seeing me delete Savannah’s message with my thumb. When Russ 2.0 got the phone back, there would be no trace of her text.

  I offered the cell over, and Connie took it, letting go of the script as he did.

  “How are you going to explain having it?” I asked.

  “I know your—his combo. I’ll slip it into the mess of papers at the bottom of his locker. He’ll think it just fell down there and he missed it the first five times he checked.”

  “You think I’m that dumb?”

  “It’s kinda more believable than the truth,” he said.

  Connie slid the phone in his pocket. Being without that lifeline was another kind of naked for me, but giving it up would offer a better chance of keeping them off my case. I still had six hours to get it back, and I knew where to find it.

  I waited while Connie walked away. At the cafeteria doorway, he took one skeptical glance back at me, and I smiled. As soon as he was out of sight, I ducked back into the alcove, retrieved the camera, and made my escape.

  OUTSIDE THE Silver Bullet, Bobby Keene-Parker’s Rapide zoomed up curbside. He stood from his car and posed with one elbow on the roof, as if expecting a team of paparazzi to memorialize the occasion. Too bad for Bobby, he was alone.

  Except for me. I was already inside the diner and ahead of schedule, courtesy of Azalea Taxi and a chunk of the twenty bucks on loan from Connie’s R2-D2 bank. I was in the middle of rewarding myself with a double-decker cheeseburger and a milkshake. I sat in the same booth where I found Savannah and Bobby last time.

  Fifteen minutes till Savannah dropped in. Maybe less, if she showed early.

  Everything according to The Plan.

  Now, if I was Savannah, this was the part where Bobby would scope me out, saddle up beside me and unfurl a killer pick-up line. But I was just a dude in clown jeans and a sweaty nerd shirt. So he sat as far from me as he could, just inside the door, at the lunch counter.

  No time now to psyche myself up. I napkined the ketchup off my mouth and moseyed over to him like some big-time talent agent. “Bobby, hey, it’s Rusty, how you doing?” I said. Held up my palm, came close to slapping him on the back.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  Widening my grin, I rolled right into the pitch. “Your publicist told me you were headed over here, so I said, you know what, I’ll just meet him instead of getting all tangled up in the hubbub down at the studio. No biggie.”

  Bobby gave his stool a slight tilt in my direction. “Who’re you, again?”

  “Rusty V
ale. Writer. Flew in from LA this morning. Phil Cole thought it’d be great if you and me sat down for a spell to go over this spec script I’m polishing up. He thinks this one’s a real showcase for you, and I have to admit, that’s exactly the reason I wrote it.”

  Philip Cole was a random producer whose name I remembered from Cape Twilight’s opening credits. I could’ve name-dropped Father Dearest himself, Marv Parker, but I wanted to inflate Bobby’s ego, not crush it.

  I smacked the script down on the counter. My name and address were on the cover page, according to all the formatting guidelines. I swept my hand over the title, “Honor Thy Father,” to direct his attention to those words. My smile came on as a wince.

  “Man, I read so many of those things…” Bobby groaned, not even glancing at it.

  “Let me pitch it in two words,” I said. “Emmy Award.”

  “Yeah, I hear they just hand those out like sleeping pills.”

  All right, so I launched into the synopsis. Sold it straight to his soul. All Bobby needed was one juicy episode to prove everybody wrong. His career wasn’t just a sham. He had the soul of Marlon Brando, reincarnated. I just knew it, I told him.

  Picture this, Bobby: your character Reece’s estranged father comes back into the picture, gut-wrenching arguments, and then the kicker, the poignant third-act twist: your character realizes his own sexuality is far from decided. This shocker opens up a hundred new possibilities for where Reece can go from there. Maybe he’ll even get to kiss a girl or two in future episodes, just to shake things up.

  When Bobby grabbed my wrist to stop the pitch, I knew I had him.

  “Wait,” he said. “So he thinks he might not even be gay?”

  “You want to give your character room to grow for future episodes, right?”

  “I’d rather the bastard got shot in the head, knock me out of my contract.” But still he picked up the script, leafed through it as casually as possible. I had taken the liberty of marking his scenes in green highlighter so he wouldn’t have to bother with the stuff that didn’t pertain to him.

  One specific moment snagged his attention. He moved his mouth as he read. At the bottom of page twenty-six, he chuckled, though I couldn’t remember writing any funny lines there. From down the counter, my buddy, Sally, the waitress winked at me.

  “This is grade A cheese, Rusty Vale,” he said. “It’s kind of amazing. But one question.”

  “What’s that?” I asked. Five minutes to spare before Savannah, and I had this puppy in the bag. I knew it, Sally knew it, and Bobby was coming around.

  “What’s with that line of b.s. y’all fed me just now?” he asked.

  “Pardon?” Crack in my voice. The burger in my stomach was considering a rerun.

  “First off, I didn’t tell nobody I was coming here. Second, Phil Cole left the show last season. He’s doing telenovelas down in Mexico now. And you? You’re a high-school kid with a Carolina drawl and a Cape Fear address. You ain’t got one single day of LA sun on your skin.”

  My accent and my cover page had betrayed me. I tried my best to laugh it off. “Well, ha—you know,” I said. “That’s my pitch. I make up stories, right? I play a character, just like you. Think how all this will sound next year in Variety: ‘Keene-Parker discovers high school writing prodigy in Cape Fear greasy spoon.’”

  Sally called out in protest: “Sugar, my spoons are spic and span!”

  “Just an expression, Sal!”

  Bobby flipped though the pages one-handed, musing. In his other hand was that lighter of his, the top scraping open and shut to show his apprehension. He sighed and said, “I don’t like bullshit.”

  “Let’s be for real, then,” I said, then I sucked in a long breath to keep from passing out. “Your dad is a hack. Rough to admit, but there it is. We both know it. He’s been popping out inferior fare since the start. The Kindling? The book was a hundred times better. You’re a hundred times better. Jump out of that nest, man. This is your leap. Bob, you gotta take it.”

  “Eh,” he said, scratching the back of his neck.

  Deep in the zone, I didn’t hear the jingle bell chime at the entrance door, but I couldn’t miss Savannah Lark stepping up behind us, right on cue. “Russ,” she said, widening her eyes on Bobby’s back. “Is that…?”

  “Bobby Keene-Parker,” I said, “meet Savannah Lark.”

  He swiveled around in his seat, and the admiration was instantly mutual. I was a bona fide director, even with the camera still in its bag. Meticulous timing, perfect blocking, my own stable of actors: A-list star and budding ingénue, enacting their meet-cute.

  “She’s my girlfriend,” I added, for good measure. “And another rising star.”

  The girlfriend bit was a risk, but Savannah didn’t bat an eye, and Bobby’s Alpha Male rivalry hormones kicked right in, as I expected. All I had to do now was stand back and let the chemistry between them react.

  I stood there telling myself that the cosmos had literally folded itself around backwards to make this happen. We gathered together in a booth, got to talking about Savannah’s guest shot on Cape Twilight. Savannah showed Bobby a demo reel clip on her iPhone, a local spot she did for an Italian restaurant, playing hostess and narrator. The host site was called YouView—some new knockoff of YouTube, I figured.

  When the moment was ripe, I butted in: “Don’t you love when the big stars do those little one-off videos, like on Funny or Die? You know the one with Jay-Z teaching those Korean kindergartners? It really humanizes you, for the fans.”

  Bobby listened, but his male gaze was zeroed on Savannah, just as I hoped.

  I said, “Savannah and I were gonna shoot this short script I wrote. Just a scene about a motorcycle stunt man who wants to…”

  My starlet burst into light, finally realizing what I was driving at. “Wouldn’t it be crazy!” she said. “Bobby Keene-Parker in our movie?”

  Man, she was good. And she said our movie.

  “Dunno,” Bobby said. “I’m pretty beat. Been at the gun range all morning. Y’all ever been out shooting, Rusty? Across the river in Leland? They’ll let you pop off whatever you want. I unloaded a .357 Magnum today. Dirty Harry, the next generation.”

  “You got a future action franchise on your hands with that,” I said. “But listen, if you could take like an hour, hour and a half, tops, we can do this thing. You and Savannah. Like I said, your character is the son of a motorcycle stunt man who died in a fiery crash, and you want to eclipse his glory with your own record-breaker. Savannah’s your best friend, and you’re saying goodbye, just in case you don’t make it, but you’re both secretly in love with each other, even though she’s totally against the risk you’re taking. She hates everything your father stood for. It would be a great break from your Cape Twilight stuff.”

  I scooped the video camera from its bag.

  “Y’all got a script or am I s’posed to improvise?” Bobby asked.

  And that was it—off and running. No science in the world could explain how I got here, reliving a moment I thought I lost, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to sit around brooding on the paradoxes and let a miracle fizzle away.

  Action.

  Bobby flubbed a few lines but covered it with graceful improv. He played my cocky/vulnerable stunt guy better than he ever played his Cape Twilight character, in my humble opinion. And Savannah was perfect, understated, empathetic. Every line she spoke welled up in her throat but never quite gushed forth until the finale.

  Between takes, Sally the waitress clapped.

  Bobby said, “You gotta write a speaking role for Savannah here in that Cape script you showed me.”

  I mostly kept my wits in check. Just once, I went into the men’s room, spiked an imaginary football, did a frantically silent touchdown dance, and collected myself again.

  There was a nagging worry in the back of my mind that Russ 2.0 or Connie or Paige would show up and wreck my moment, but I was betting I’d changed circumstances enough to keep them a
t their distance. Connie sure as heck didn’t want to show up, and his only job was to keep Russ at home. Doing this shoot alone meant I was my own cinematographer, but losing Paige’s perspective was a small price.

  Because, I mean, Bobby Keene-Parker was in my student video, people. Guaranteed million hits online, even if I didn’t win the internship. Plus, with that spec Cape Twilight script in his hands? Who knew, I might even get hired outright at the studio.

  Two hours lapsed before I said, “That’s a wrap.”

  Bobby’s eyes were damp with emotion. All that father/son soul-search dialog was kicking in. My words, worming into his psyche and breaking him down. In a way it was too easy, having this psychological advantage over him—simply knowing things about him he didn’t think I knew. I could glimpse into his soul.

  “Some heavy lifting you put in there,” he said. Dabbed his eyes with a napkin.

  “Thanks, Bobby. I can’t tell you how much—”

  “Y’all got what you wanted, yeah?” he asked.

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “Then let’s leave it at that?” he suggested, going suddenly stiff.

  “Okay, but…”

  His clenched jaw muscles told me not to push the issue one more inch.

  I’d just coaxed out the best performance of this guy’s career, but now it felt more like I whipped his ass in a high-stakes game of Settlers of Catan. He slapped down some cash for his meal, stood from the booth, nodded a terse goodbye at Savannah, popped his sunglasses on.

  She and I didn’t say a word to each other until he was out the door.

  “That went… well?” I said.

  “Uh, yeah. Look under his arm,” she said.

  Through the diner window I saw him headed to his car. Tucked into his right armpit was a stack of paper. Bobby Keene-Parker, one of the biggest teen-demographic cable TV stars in the world at that precise moment, had taken my Cape Twilight spec script with him.

  We watched him rev the engine three times and peel off down the street, just like before. Except in this new, alternate take, he didn’t have Savannah Lark in the passenger seat of his Rapide. Savannah Lark was still in the booth with me.