“Meeting on a Ferris wheel, high in the sky, where no one can see them,” he said quietly. “Private and dangerous . . . perfect.”
Like I mentioned before, The Third Man is Lou’s favorite movie, and my dad’s too. My mom loves Bette Davis’s self-confidence in All About Eve, while I can’t get enough of Pulp Fiction, especially the character Butch, a boxer who fights off some very icky guys in a basement. All in all, the best way to say it is that we’re a family of movie geeks, and based on that, I started the Classic Movie Club.
The Fep Prep student body was less than enthusiastic, to say the least.
The only other member was Fep Prep’s (maybe the world’s) most unpopular sophomore, Doug Stuffins.
His name, by a twist of fate, perfectly defines what he looks like and who he is—incredibly puffy, his three-hundred-pound body stuffed full of junk food, and incredibly smart, his giant brain stuffed full of movie information.
I met Doug during our freshman year in homeroom—my R last name seated near his S last name—when he turned to me as the teacher droned on about something, and whispered, “You look like an Italian film actress from the sixties.”
“I do?” I whispered back. “Which one?”
“All of them,” he said with a wink of his piggy eye.
When I sat across from him the next day, he waved and said, “Ciao, bella”—“Hi, beautiful” in Italian—not in a flirty way, but appreciatively. He’d paid me two nice compliments in two days, and for a girl with a very real issue with her very Italian nose, there are few better ways to start a friendship. We talked every day, covering all of the essential subjects—his lousy home life, my super close relationship with my family, the stunning lack of romance in our lives. The one thing we never discussed, maybe out of sensitivity for each other’s feelings, was our unpopularity—his by decree of the student body, mine mostly by choice. I probably wouldn’t have had a problem dating; I didn’t like how I looked, but some guys seemed to be okay with it. But the insularity of my family had gotten into my bones, and so I never pursued a bunch of friends. Doug was different than other kids because, in his isolation, he was the same as me. We bonded over being outsiders and, of course, over movies.
Doug knows more about movies than any kid in the world—maybe any adult in the world, except for his hero, film critic Roger Ebert. He talks about movies constantly to anyone who will listen, and doesn’t seem to know (or care) how to shut it off. Sometimes he quotes movies that most people have never heard of, much less seen, which makes him sound sort of insane. He’s constantly, frenetically tapping on his laptop, and when I ask what he’s working on, he always says the same thing—it was going to be the greatest screenplay ever written, an epic story about a tortured hero. I asked if I could read it and he said maybe when he was done, but no peeking—Orson Welles and Quentin Tarantino never let anyone see their work in progress, either.
And then there’s his obsession with the movie About Face.
It’s a black-and-white comedy made during World War II starring an obscure comedian called Charlie “Chuckles” Huckleman, who wrote and directed it. Doug has an original About Face script he “scored” (his word) on eBay that he’s continually studying, which he calls “the highest form of the craft” (also his words). To sum it up, Charlie Huckleman plays a guy called Dinwiddy who stinks at being a soldier—too cheerful to be disciplined, too uncoordinated to march in a straight line, and too timid to shoot a gun. Through it all, he’s harassed by a bulldog sergeant who’s frustrated by his lack of military ability. The big joke of the movie is that when the sergeant orders “about face,” which means turn around, Dinwiddy always turns the wrong way and bumps into another soldier. Doug explained that Dinwiddy’s failure to turn correctly seemed like a B-movie gag but was actually an unspoken antiwar statement. That, in fact, the entire movie was a metaphor for why civilized people should turn away from violence.
Unfortunately, Fep Prep, too, has its share of uncivilized people.
Doubly unfortunate, Doug’s ever-ballooning weight and nonstop movie chatter make him a constant target of teasing and harassment.
Since the beginning of our sophomore year, he’s been picked on mercilessly by Billy Shniper, a.k.a. “Bully the Kid.”
Billy-slash-Bully has blond, spiky hair, eyes set too close together, and balloonlike biceps, and he is as relentless as a starving shark when it comes to baiting, circling, and cornering a victim. Once he finds his torture groove, he gets jacked up and jumpy, his skin flushes red, and he begins to giggle—a creepy, choking laugh, like a hyena being strangled, which echoes through school. Every time I hear it, I know some poor kid is being teased to death. More often than not, that kid is Doug Stuffins.
But Doug is kind of amazing.
He takes it like a statue, showing no emotion whatsoever.
Even while Billy calls him names (fat ass, freak, effing loser) or pokes his belly (“It’s like vanilla pudding!”) or yanks away his laptop, Doug stands perfectly still with a look on his face like he’s elsewhere. This cool calmness makes Bully meaner, which is when he zeros in on Doug’s movie obsession. The insults are weak and stupid, but they hit Doug where it hurts, which is the genius of a bully—to locate a person’s most sensitive feelings and then exploit them in a public way. Bully spews his idiotic commentary and chokes on his hyena laugh while Doug remains motionless, waiting for it to end.
Finally, when Billy loses interest and drifts away, Doug picks up his laptop and finds a quiet place to write.
A few weeks ago, I found him under the old oak tree on the south side of Fep Prep, his chubby fingers a tapping blur.
I sat next to him in silence, and then put a hand on his shoulder, and he squinted into the sun without turning to me.
“Sara Jane,” he said quietly. “Do you want to go to the spring dance with me?”
Other than being forced to climb the knotted rope in gym class, there was probably nothing in the world Doug considered as torturous as attending a high school dance. He knew I wanted to go and was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for me—tight dress pants, tucked-in shirt, and hours of hip-hop in the school gymnasium. I gave his arm a gentle punch and told him that I knew he didn’t really want to go. He blushed and grinned, saying, “Well, nobody’s perfect.”
I thought for a second. “Sunset Boulevard?”
“Some Like it Hot,” he said, pleased with the obscurity of his movie quote as he huffed to his feet and waddled away, whistling.
I watched him go, impressed that even after being persecuted by Bully the Kid, Doug could find it in himself to whistle about, well . . . anything.
In my bleak, dateless state, I never whistled anymore.
Also, I never hummed or sang to myself.
My iPod currently moaned with only the saddest, most self-indulgent songs.
The wicked irony is that, in general, I roll my eyes at books, TV, and movies that depict people my age stuck in some moody teenage dilemma. If they’re rich kids, they’re moody rich kids, if they’re vampire kids, they’re moody vampire kids, if they’re postapocalyptic kids . . . you get the picture. The thing that bugs me most is that very few people my age even have time to be moody. We’re busting our butts doing tons of homework, or forming classic movie clubs, or working part time, or just, I don’t know—dealing with an existence thick with expectations. According to Doug, there are three or four kids at Fep Prep so worried about their futures that they worked themselves into a state of exhaustion and weirdness and had to be prescription medicated to deal with it.
Our lives are not the ones our parents lived when they were our ages.
Theirs were simpler, slower, and analog.
Ours are complicated, competitive, and digital.
My generation is the smartest, hardest working, most wired and interconnected ever. It’s not easy, but it’s exciting, because we’re in training to take over the world.
And yet—
And yet, for maybe the first tim
e in my life, what I wanted most was to luxuriate in my own moodiness, to listen to sad songs and think about how tragic it was that I didn’t have a date. I considered it pathetic that I could count on one hand the number of times I had been kissed, or kissed someone, since Walter J. Thurber pressed his lips against mine three years ago. I was mortified by the realization that I was three weeks from turning sixteen and had never had a real boyfriend. Despite what was happening in my family, or maybe because of it, I was experiencing a profound sense of aloneness—an overwhelming feeling that I would never find a person who had been made especially for me. It was an isolating sensation, as if I were the only girl in the history of the universe who had ever felt this way. What I wanted was to connect with someone who was not a family member, not a Doug-type friend, but instead a person who was similar to me in good ways and completely different in other ways. And also someone who would just sort of, well—adore me.
I was so me-centric that I sometimes found myself staring into space.
Other times I floated in a warm pool of self-pity, absolutely sure that I was destined to be alone forever.
And then I re-met Max Kissberg.
7
TO SHAKE OFF MY FUNK over the upcoming dance that I would positively, absolutely not be attending, I decided to focus my energy on recruiting that coveted third member for the Classic Movie Club. My big brainstorm was a pathetic sign-up sheet and pencil-on-a-string that I taped next to the office, labeled with the optimistic headline “JOIN THE CLASSIC MOVIE CLUB AND DISCOVER WORLDS UNKNOWN!”
It hung there for a couple of days.
Every time I checked it, the page was depressingly blank.
Finally, someone stole the pencil.
My literature teacher, Ms. Ishikawa, is also the Fep Prep activities coordinator. She pulled me aside, wrinkled her little hamster nose, and warned that unless I fulfilled the three-member rule for all clubs, funding for movie rentals and use of the theater room would be canceled. All I could think of was how bad it would reflect on my well-roundedness if I couldn’t successfully organize a club where all someone had to do was sit in a dark room, stare at a screen, and eat snacks. Finally, facing the inevitable, I trudged past the office, glanced at the sign-up sheet—and there it was.
max kissberg, printed in red ink.
At first, the name didn’t ring a bell.
After all, it had been three years since Gina’s thirteenth birthday party, when he told me not to pay attention to world-class knuckleheads.
And then, rolling the name around in my mind, I vaguely recalled a tiny kid with monster braces who had moved to the suburbs. If he hadn’t spoken to me at Gina’s birthday party, I wouldn’t have remembered him at all, except for an extra blip of memory that came out of nowhere. We were even younger than at the party, maybe nine or ten, and there had been a school talent show where Max played a part in a scene with some other kids. I remembered his little body swallowed up in a huge pinstripe suit, his hair slicked back, and a little mustache drawn in black pencil under his nose. He was onstage, and I remembered that I knew his lines as he uttered them—they were from a movie I had watched with my parents countless times, with my dad’s running commentary of what, in the film, seemed “legit” and what was “phony.” Max had been playing Vito Corleone from The Godfather; he displayed a sly sense of danger that hushed the audience. As I stared at Max’s name on the sign-up sheet, I recited his lines from memory—
“I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse,” I murmured.
“What kind of offer?” a voice said.
I turned and looked up at a face smiling down at me that I found a little familiar and very attractive, and then looked closer at the curly hair and imagined thick glasses covering the warm brown eyes. What threw me off was how tall he was—at least half a foot taller than me—but there was no denying it was him.
“Max?” I said.
“Sara Jane, right? I remember you.”
“I remember you, too,” I said, my throat going dry.
I was suddenly hyperaware of how I looked (or didn’t look), wearing distressed (in a real way, not in a fashionable way) jeans, one of my dad’s beat-up Cubs T-shirts, and a pair of ratty Chuck Taylors. I couldn’t for the life of me remember when I’d last brushed my hair, and I licked my glossless lips trying to think of something cool to say. Max, on the other hand, looked like he could star on a TV show as the hot new guy in school—tan, just muscular enough not to be annoying, wearing a vintage motorcycle T-shirt and jeans that were not distressed, faded, or ripped, but normal and blue. It wasn’t exactly love at first sight since I’d seen him before. Maybe it was love at second look, since we were both older now and I was seeing a different Max, a Max who wasn’t a little boy anymore but with the same confident smile. Finally I said the stupidest, most obvious thing that popped into my brain. “Um, well . . . you grew.”
Max laughed a little. “You too.”
“You had glasses,” I said, realizing that I was examining his face as if it were a fascinating work of art. “And braces . . .”
“Contacts,” he said, overblinking, and then tapped an index finger on his teeth. “My braces came off last year, finally. It feels like my teeth got out of prison.”
“I’m so jealous,” I said, squeezing my lips over my mouth, hiding my supposedly-but-not-really-invisible braces. “I feel like I was born with these things.”
“It sucks but it’s worth it,” he said, and then I felt him inspecting my face, traveling from my mouth to my nose (how could he miss it?) to my eyes, where he paused and smiled, nodding at the sign-up sheet. “So are you in this thing?”
“The Classic Movie Club? Yeah, well . . . I guess so.”
“It’s a cool idea,” he said.
“It was my idea!” I said, hearing my words fly out too fast and too loud. I cleared my throat and held back a blush. “I’m, uh . . . I’m the president.”
“You are?” he said, looking at me in a way that gave me good goose bumps. “Hey, have you watched any gangster flicks? I’m into film noir . . . the old black-and-white stuff. The dialogue is fast and smart, and there’s always a wiseguy who you know is dead from the first time you see him. He either likes being a criminal too much and wants to be the boss or can’t outrun his criminal past no matter how hard he tries.”
I told him that the club (i.e., Doug and I) had seen several gangster movies, the most recent being The Public Enemy, and how I’d felt that the main character was doomed from the first scene. Max was surprised I even knew about the movie. He told me it was one of his favorites and that it was based on an actual guy, a bad-to-the-bone thug who ran a big criminal operation in Chicago during Prohibition.
I said, “That was the no-alcohol law, right?”
Max nodded, saying how criminal gangs raked in enormous amounts of cash by making and selling illegal alcohol, and then paused, grinning. “You can tell me to shut up anytime you want.”
“What?” I said, staring into his eyes, and then realized I was staring. “No, no! It’s really interesting. How do you know so much about it?”
He shrugged. “I like history. My mom always says, if you don’t understand what happened in the past, how can you understand what’s happening now?” Max was right, and it reminded me of what Willy said about my dad and Uncle Buddy, about their history and making it my business. Before I could reply, his phone buzzed. “My mom,” he said, glancing at the screen. “Since we moved back to the city, she thinks I’m going to be randomly shot or kidnapped.”
“What does your dad think?”
“Hard to tell. I haven’t spoken to him in a while. My parents got divorced a couple of months ago and he took off for California with his girlfriend.”
“Geez . . . that . . . sucks,” I said, and blushed. The lameness of my reply made me feel like one of the world-class knuckleheads he’d referred to so long ago.
“It does, worse than braces. My mom was determined to move back to the city, even if
it meant me transferring to another school with what, only two months left until summer break? But hey, at least I got to escape the suburbs,” he said cheerfully, but fake cheerfully, like he was trying too hard. He put on a half smile and said, “So, when are we getting together?”
“Together?” I tried and failed to get a wild strand of hair behind my ear, and asked, “For what?”
Max’s half smile became a real one. “A classic movie?”
“Oh, right, of course! Uh . . . soon,” I said. “Tomorrow?”
“Awesome. What are we watching?”
“Oh, um, well, we’re watching . . . we’re watching . . .” I scanned my brain for the title of any movie I’d ever seen, and came up blank until Doug’s chubby grin filled my mind. “We’re watching About Face,” I said. “It’s genius. You’ll love it.”
Max nodded and said, “I trust you,” and walked down the hallway. At the exit, he turned and waved.
I waved back casually, like I was the coolest chick in the world.
I waited until he disappeared.
When I was absolutely sure he was gone, I did an excited little Muhammad Ali shuffle move and threw a one-two left hook combination in the air.
• • •
Talking to my mom and dad about boys I liked (who usually had no idea I even existed) always made me feel weird. I couldn’t help bringing up the subject, but then felt shy or silly as soon as I had. My parents seemed to sense my anxiety, and would tiptoe to the edge of a question, asking something decidedly neutral like, “What color is his hair?” I wanted to confess my deepest feelings, to discuss my crush like an adult, but then I’d chicken out and become a kid again, settling for something meaningless like, “Brown. He’s got brown hair.”
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