Boy Proof

by Cecil Castellucci

  “My nose came off.”

  “It shouldn’t have come off.”

  “Okay, I pulled it off so I could eat my soup. I’m putting it back on.”

  “Did you go through my drawers?” he asks, motioning at the open drawer.

  “Yeah, you used a different kind of adhesive from the one I have in my bag.”

  “Ah, you must be Victoria. Ursula told me about you.”

  He comes over and examines my work. Makes a slight color adjustment of the nose, blending in the edges. Then nods to himself.

  “Good work,” he says. Then he extends his hand. “I’m Jacques. I heard you were telling the producer you could do my job better than I can.”

  I feel kind of stupid hearing my words thrown back at me, but I look at him even-steven.

  “I know how to do this. My dad taught me, and he is the best.”

  “I know who your father is. He’s one of the best. I am another one of the best.”

  “Then why are you supervising makeup on a Movie of the Week?” I ask.

  He stares me down. His face changes. Then it challenges.

  “Grab the noses and ears and follow me.”

  “Really?” I say.

  “Really. They’ve just called in thirty new extras and I could use a hand.”

  On the dot, a car honks outside.

  “Who’s that?” Mom says.

  “People,” I say, and open the door.

  “Where are you going?” Mom says. She’s got a script in her hand. She’s got a lot of scripts on the table next to her. She’s been getting a lot of scripts lately.

  “Out,” I say, grabbing my keys and swinging out the front door.

  “Victoria, when you . . .” but I don’t hear the rest because I am already walking to the car.

  Max’s car is an old dark-green Ford Mustang. Of course it is.

  Nelly is in the front seat. She smiles at me and waves. I can already see that I’m going to be in the back seat all night.

  Nelly is wearing makeup, not just the peach-smelling lip-gloss she usually wears. She glitters. She glows. She looks great. I would want to kiss her if I were a boy. Max probably wants to kiss her. She is wearing a halter and a small shrug sweater. She must be wearing her contact lenses, because her glasses are nowhere to be found.

  Max looks the same as usual. Black on black.

  I am wearing my best Egg cloak, but I feel as though I’m underdressed.

  “Let’s go,” Max says, and points the car toward downtown.

  “So, downtown used to be way more sketchy than it is now,” Nelly informs Max. She’s smiling all the time. She jokes with him and slaps his knee or hits his arm playfully.

  “Yeah, I know all about downtown,” Max says gently to Nelly. “My dad’s new documentary is about Los Angeles in the teens and twenties.”

  He obviously doesn’t want to embarrass her. Max is not that careful with me.

  “Oh,” Nelly says. “Your dad makes movies?”

  I can tell by the question that Nelly is always looking for her big break in Hollywood.

  “I’m thinking about really seriously pursuing an acting career,” Nelly says.

  “He makes documentaries,” I say from the back seat. “Maybe you’ve heard of them? It’s nonfiction.”

  Nelly throws me a look.

  I slump back into my seat, dark clouds forming over my head. I am already miserable.

  “Yeah, documentaries,” Max says.

  “So you’re almost nineteen?” Nelly asks, changing the subject tactfully.

  “Yeah,” Max says. “My parents travel a lot for their movies. I’ve traveled all over the world with them. I’ve lived in Africa, India, the Middle East, France. I’ve been to Russia, Mongolia, and New Zealand. I missed a year of school because of an embassy bombing.”

  “You were there?” Nelly asks.

  “No,” Max says. “But the school was closed.”

  “Is that where you got your scar?” Nelly asks.

  I sit up. Scar? I never noticed any scar on Max Carter.

  “What scar?” I ask.

  “The one on his stomach,” Nelly says.

  Max glances at me in the rearview mirror. Our eyes lock. Then he looks back at the road. Nelly has seen Max Carter’s stomach.

  “No, I got that in Jerusalem.” He doesn’t need to say anything more about it.

  “You’ve been all over,” Nelly says.

  “Not everywhere. Not Alaska. Not Antarctica. Not Tierra del Fuego,” Max says. “How about you? Where have you been, Nelly?”

  “Oh. Nowhere. Seattle. Tijuana. San Francisco. Phoenix,” Nelly says. “I plan on traveling when I’m older.”

  “How about you, Egg?”

  “My mom was on location and we went to Prague. I dunno, Tasmania once. And she did a commercial in Tokyo and I went.”

  “Ah, Tokyo,” Max says.

  “I don’t understand,” I say. “If you’ve been to all those cool places, why on earth would you decide to come to Melrose Prep?”

  “I thought it might be fun,” he says. “It’s like a social experiment: a year of American high school in Hollywood. It was too good to pass up.”

  “Fun!” I snort. “If I had lived in all those places, I would just keep going. I would never let the dust settle on my shoes. Home is just a momentary place you need to rest your eyes.”

  “I told you, Egg. I’m an ethnographer. I’m interested in people,” Max says.

  Then he takes a sideways glance at Nelly, and it dawns on me that he’s probably come to finish out senior year of high school just to meet girls.

  “Well, I can’t wait to get out of high school,” I say.

  “Est unusquisque faber ipsae suae fortunae,” Max says.

  “Why do you do that?” I ask. “Latin is a dead language.”

  “Maybe it shouldn’t be,” Max says.

  “Egg is only just sixteen,” Nelly says, ignoring Max’s annoying Latin.

  “It doesn’t mean I’m a baby. It means I skipped a grade,” I say.

  “Oh, that explains a lot,” Max says, and turns on the radio. “You know, Egg, you look like a traveler.”

  It’s a high compliment. I take it because Nelly wants it, and even though she’s seen his stomach, Max gave the compliment to me.

  “Yeah, I’m a traveler,” I say with a laugh. It sounds like a tribe in a TV show or movie I might like. “Maybe I’ll skip college and just travel.”

  “Really?” Nelly asks. This interests her and she turns around. She’s behaving like a friend. “Are you serious? ’Cause my dad flipped out when I told him that I don’t want to go to college right away.”

  “Well, conveniently, I don’t have a dad at home and I could care less what my mom thinks about my plans,” I say.

  I’m surprised I’m saying such things; it disregards everything I’ve ever felt about going to college. College has always been my goal, the one thing I’ve been sure of.

  “Well, I’m going to take acting classes and go for it,” Nelly says. “I mean, Hollywood is all about being young. I don’t want to waste my young years in college. I can always go later.”

  I can see Max’s shoulders tense up a bit. He pats his shirt pocket, which I know holds his small sketchbook. I know he’s itching to write down what Nelly just said.

  “I thought you were different, Nelly,” I say. I almost admire her gumption.

  “Yeah, well, you try being really smart and really pretty,” Nelly says, insulting me without realizing it. “I mean, I want to win an Oscar, not a Nobel Prize. You know? And now that it’s actually time to go to college, I’m not ready yet.”

  “How about you, Max?” I say.

  “I’ve done my traveling for now. I want to settle down,” he says. “I’ve never really had a group of friends. I want to know what that’s like.”

  “You have like a billion friends at school,” I say. “You talk to everyone.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” he says.

&
nbsp; I notice that Max is grinding his teeth and that he looks like he wants to say more.

  Nelly doesn’t seem to notice anything out of the ordinary. She is looking out the window, eyes fixed on her own future.

  “What are you trying to say?” I ask.

  “I want to make my mark,” he says.

  But what target, I wonder, are you going to hit?

  The bass hits me right in the middle of my chest when we walk in the door of the Buns Not Guns show. We get X’s on our hands demarking our under-twenty-one status and head inside to the art/performance space. It is in a loft on the ground floor of a huge old building that looks like it was used as the set of Blade Runner. Most of the windows on the upper floors are boarded-over or broken. Gentrification hasn’t quite hit this side of downtown.

  “Who are these people?” Nelly asks.

  “They certainly don’t go to Melrose,” I say.

  “Want some water?” Max says, raising his voice above the band.

  I nod. It is easier than trying to be heard. Max heads off to the bar and I’m standing there with Nelly. She whips out her journalist’s notebook and starts taking notes and giving me orders. She’s moved from new-friend mode to overachiever-student-editor mode.

  “I need you to get pictures of the bands and the art and the organizers,” she says.

  “I know what pictures to take,” I say. “I don’t need you to tell me.”

  “Well then, get your camera out and start snapping,” she says.

  She tugs on my camera strap. She probably means it to be friendly, playful. But to me it’s aggressive. I bore a football-size hole in her head with my laser-adjusted eye.

  Nelly removes her shrug and reveals her perfect, perky cleavage. That’s when Max joins us again. I take my water from his hand. Max’s eyes drift down to Nelly’s breasts and then back up again. That puts me right in my place. Pretty on the outside wins over pretty on the inside. I want to go home and leave them alone, but I’m downtown and I don’t want to take the bus home. I wouldn’t even know which bus to take from here.

  Mental note: Adventurers always know all bus routes and bus schedules.

  “We should move up front, don’t you think?” Nelly says, grabbing Max’s hand and holding it and pulling him into the crowd up by the band, purposely leaving me behind.

  I don’t bother following them. I push away the feelings of being the third wheel. I remind myself that I am here on assignment.

  I walk around and look at the art. It’s very dramatic. I pick up the literature. It makes a lot of sense. I take a few pamphlets and stuff them in my bag. Then I take my camera out. Being a loner has its advantages when taking pictures. It allows you to get close up without ever being seen.

  I shoot: The punk boys dressed in military camouflage. The shirtless lead singer with the self-cutting on his chest. The boy in drag. The tattooed couple. The piercings.

  A boy with a kind of grown-out Mohawk, a knapsack, geek glasses, and tons of buttons on his suspenders comes up to me.

  “What are you? Goth?” he asks.

  “Post-apocalyptic,” I answer.

  “Cool,” he says.

  I snap his picture.

  I find Max and Nelly in the crowd. Nelly is dancing provocatively and keeps taking Max’s arm and trying to put it around her waist. He doesn’t oblige her. But it looks like he might want to. It looks like he has before. I notice him turn and scan the crowd. Is he looking for me? I duck behind a pole so he doesn’t catch me watching them.

  Has he kissed her? Has he held those breasts?

  People pushing to get closer to the stage jostle me. Even they don’t see me. I’m invisible. I get it. I blend further into the crowd so I don’t have to watch Max and Nelly anymore.

  It’s going to be a long night.

  I am sorting through a bunch of contact sheets, selecting the shots I want to blow up into prints.

  So far, I like: The pile of elf ears. The production assistants sifting the snow from the rafters. My mother with a gruesome look on her face as she does her vocal warm-ups between takes.

  I take the eyepiece magnifier and start on the second set. It’s from the Buns Not Guns show. I mark a circle around a girl puking into the toilet in the crumbling bathroom. She looks so young, fresh-faced, like a baby. Her throwing up is like a coming-of-age story.

  “What’s this?” Max says.

  “Contact sheets,” I say, pointing out the obvious. I don’t look up at him. I scan the next sheet.

  “Can I look?” he says.

  “Knock yourself out,” I say.

  “These are amazing,” Max says.

  I ignore the compliment.

  “That warehouse space where the show was is an art gallery, too,” Max says.

  “I read their manifesto,” I say. “It was kind of idealistic.”

  “At least it’s an alternative to doom and gloom. It’s action. The concept is simple. Buns. Not. Guns. It’s something you can get behind,” Max says. “I like the idea that you can provide food instead of weapons; it’s something hopeful. I mean, I do stuff that sometimes seems like it’s a big waste of time.”

  I’m intrigued. I look up from my eyepiece for a second.

  “Like what?” I ask.

  “I volunteer at the library to help a kid with his reading and math.”

  “The drop in the bucket theory,” I say. “If everyone contributes a drop, then soon enough the bucket will be full.”

  “Exactly,” Max says. “I knew you’d get it.”

  I look back at my contact sheet.

  My eye hits an image of Max, magnified and just for me. He looks classic. Out of time. The picture could be from any era. He is looking right at the camera, right into the lens with those smart eyes. Behind Max is the blur of the crowd, moving like a frenzied mob, like an animal. In all that chaos his eyes managed to look right at me.

  I don’t circle the picture.

  Ms. Dicostanzo is speaking too loudly to us. Nelly is whispering something to Max, who is doodling in his sketchbook. She keeps leaning closer and closer to him. Her chair might fall over.

  I will it to fall over. I use my dormant mutant powers to force the chair to fall over. It doesn’t.

  Max has a smile on his face, but he’s not looking at Nelly, just at the paper at the end of his black felt-tip pen.

  “We really do have the most gifted staff this year. Bravo! Again!” Ms. Dicostanzo is clapping. She’s a real positive-energy enforcer. She would be good to have in your army in the Terminal Earth future.

  “Egg, this photograph is timeless.”

  She holds up the photograph of the underage girl throwing up in the bathroom with her peace patches on her bomber jacket.

  “Thanks.” I love it when I get compliments.

  “But this is the cover.” She holds up Max’s political drawing of the girl throwing up in the bathroom with her bomber jacket full of patches like “Go! Green!” and “Peace on Earth” and “Buns Not Guns.” At her feet is a six-pack of alcohol with labels like “Big Brother” and “Corporate Greed” and “War” and “Environmental Damage,” then the puke coming out of her mouth forms the word “Hope” in perfectly small cursive.

  It is exactly like the photograph I took, only it’s politicized and cartoonified.

  I have other pictures I took in this issue of the school paper, but that roll from the Buns Not Guns show, that roll was my favorite. It was the closest that I ever got to my heart. To my eye. To my voice. With that picture, it was as though I was finally learning how to speak.

  Max looks up at me and mouths the words “I’m sorry.”

  I don’t want to believe him.

  Knock, knock. Catburglar is trying to send you an instant message. Would you like to accept it?

  Catburglar: I really liked those pictures from the Buns Not Guns show, Egg. You’ve really got a great eye.

  Eggtoria: Yeah, so do you. Thanks for stealing my fucking picture, Max.

  Catburgla
r: I didn’t steal it. I just got so inspired when you showed me the contact sheets. It just summed everything up. Youth. Disillusionment. Despair.

  Eggtoria: Well, that’s the last time I show you anything of mine to get inspired by.

  Catburglar: Don’t do that.

  Eggtoria: I’m mad at you.

  Catburglar: You’re mad at everything.

  I don’t respond. I continue surfing the Web. But Max doesn’t give up.

  Catburglar: Listen. I’m really, really sorry about the drawing I did based on your pic. I can talk to Dicostanzo about it.

  Eggtoria: Whatever.

  Catburgler: No. You have every right to be mad. Think of it as me paying you homage.

  He sounds like he’s being sincere. I still ignore him.

  Catburglar: Don’t stop showing me your contact sheets. Your eye is really inspiring to me.

  Eggtoria: OK! I’m over it.

  Catburglar: :)

  I log off. Max Carter must be crazy. There is nothing inspiring about me, not even my GPA.

  The night of the screening is finally here.

  I head through the courtyard to the guest-list table. Past the mountains of chocolate éclairs and pastry puffs. Past the table of baked Brie and crudités. Past the over-worn red carpet to Eduardo.

  “Doors open in five minutes. I think it’s going to be a madhouse.” He points to the line already forming by the gate.

  “Do you see Saba Greer anywhere?” I say.

  “Oh, Lordy no!” Eduardo says. “Don’t be crude! She’s a whiskey. They don’t wait in line.”

  “Whiskey?” I say.

  “Yeah. They get whisked in,” Eduardo says.

  It must be an expression that he’s made up and is hoping will catch on. I don’t think it’s going to work.

  My mom is not a whiskey. She is standing in the line talking casually while signing an autograph for some stranger who has recognized her. She notices me at the desk and waves with her clutch purse. I look down at the guest list, pretending to be checking something important. I’m embarrassed for her. Maybe I should have whisked her in so she wouldn’t be so obviously uncool in front of Lark Austin.