by William Bell
I was nearing my final paragraph, where my hero, an eighty-year-old arthritic janitor from Congo, would reveal the name of the murderer who had cut the throats (from right to left, proving he was left-handed) of every registered delegate at the Ohio automobile insurance brokers’ convention—all 125 of them.
“How’s the story coming?” Vanni asked, peering at my screen and feigning interest.
She’s really desperate now, I thought. A direct question from Vanni in one of her philosophical moods was almost unheard of.
“Look, old pal, old buddy, leave me alone. I don’t have the time.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw her link her fingers behind her head and lean back even farther. It drove the librarian, Ms. Kahn, nuts if you “used two legs” of the chair instead of four.
“Ah, well, time,” Vanni remarked casually in her world-weary way. “What is time? I mean, people act as if it’s a thing, an object in the universe, like this chair Ms. Kahn thinks I’m ruining. But really, the only thing time has in common with an article of furniture is that both are human inventions.”
Tucking her thick hair behind her ear in a futile gesture—it sprang free immediately—she looked over at me.
“THE END!” I typed, then banged the Save key triumphantly. “Done!” I crowed. “In spite of the distractions of a certain”—I jabbed a function key, sending the story to the printer—“bothersome female philosopher—or philosophess.”
“Didja spell-check it?” Vanni asked casually.
“Ah, shoot.”
“Not too late. You have”—Vanni consulted her watch, apparently having decided that time did exist—“six minutes.”
I frantically launched the spell checker and blasted through the story. It seemed like every second word had been misspelled.
“Oh, well, I got all the and’s and but’s and the’s right,” I muttered, saving the changes. As the printer churned out the last page, the buzzer sounded to end the period.
Vanni took off for her next class, and I carried my masterpiece of detective fiction to Mrs. Cleaver, who was gathering papers from her desk and shoving them into a huge leather briefcase. I handed my story to her and she smiled.
Cleaver, I was convinced, didn’t have a mean bone in her very short, very thin body. Always cheerful and encouraging, she gave you the impression that she liked everything you wrote, which, in a weird way, made you want to make it better—and which today, after my whirlwind effort to slam together a half-baked story, made me feel guilty. In a gentle manner, as we groaned in protest, she pushed us to revise and then revise again. I sometimes imagined what kind of conversations she and Locheed had in the staff room—if they talked at all. You could hand Locheed a verse from the Qur’an or the Bible and he’d find something to sneer about.
“Ah,” Cleaver said. “Jake’s latest foray into hard-boiled crime fiction.” She took the sheaf of freshly printed pages in her tiny hand and added it to her stack. “Whodunnit?”
“You’ll have to read it. I think it’s a prize-winner,” I joked. “I’m expecting a call any minute.”
Her smile grew wider. “Let me know as soon as you hear anything. I’ll wait by the phone.”
“See you tomorrow,” I said, turning toward the door at the far end of the library just in time to see Alba come in. Today, her honey-coloured hair was pulled back into a ponytail secured with a dark blue ribbon. She wore a tight, rose-coloured sweater over navy cargo pants and pink leather sandals. Alba was the only girl in the school whose clothing I could remember at the end of the day.
When we saw each other in class or in the halls, she never referred to my letters or our meeting at the bridge. I didn’t know if I was making any headway with her or not. I didn’t know if she liked guys or not. So I continued to be positive, taking her lack of response to be one notch better than rejection. I hung my hopes on that one notch.
She stood beside the library door like a work of art set down in the middle of an auto-repair shop and scanned the room as I stared at her, holding my breath. Her eyes met mine and she smiled. I felt the heat rise into my neck and face as she came forward.
“Jake,” she began breathily, “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
Her perfume, as usual, made me dizzy. Her nearness paralyzed my tongue. “Oh,” I managed to blurt.
“I need to talk to you. It’s really, really important. And private,” she added mysteriously, looking around to see if she had been overheard.
“Okay,” I replied. “What’s it about?”
“Not here. Can you meet me after rehearsal today?”
Can the sun find the energy to rise tomorrow morning? I wanted to ask. Does the grass bend when the wind blows?
“Sure,” I said. “Where?”
“At the bridge. We’ll be alone there.”
“Great.”
“See you then.” And with that, she hurried away, leaving a trail of scent that would melt the heart of a warlock.
SCREENPLAY: “THE SECRET LOVERS”
by
JAKE BLANCHARD
FADE IN:
EXT. THE BRIDGE OVER THE HUMBOLT RIVER—DAY—HIGH SUMMER
The afternoon sun bathes the trees with gold. A gentle breeze stirs the leaves. Butterflies flutter. Birds sing. The brook burbles beneath the bridge.
JAKE stands in the middle of the bridge, lost in thought, elbows on the wooden railing, his manly, chiselled profile lit by the sun.
SOUND of footsteps on the planking. JAKE turns to see ALBA running toward him. They embrace. JAKE kisses ALBA’s hair, her face, her lips.
ALBA
Darling! I thought the day would never end.
JAKE
No matter, my love. We’re together now.
That’s all that—
CHAPTER FIVE
“GOD! I THOUGHT PANOFSKY would never shut up. He explains things in detail, then explains them all over again. In more detail. He thinks we’re deaf, or stupid, or I don’t know what.”
I had gone to the bridge in lots of time to meet Alba. Too much time. I had been waiting since school got out, even though I knew her rehearsal would take an hour and a half at least. It was a sunny afternoon, with a light breeze. I was sitting at the edge of the river where I had stood not many days before, repeating Vanni’s lines to Alba. I was tossing stones into the riffle and daydreaming a torrid movie scene.
When I heard Alba’s voice I hurriedly climbed back up the bank and stepped onto the bridge, painfully conscious that Vanni wasn’t with me this time.
“Er, hi,” I said.
“I mean,” Alba ranted, sounding anything but romantic, “we know the play, right? We told him that we had studied it in school. But he acts like we’ve never heard of the Bard of Avonlea.”
“I think it’s Avon.”
Alba’s brows creased with displeasure. “Whatever.”
I cursed myself for correcting her. “It’s nice to see you again,” I said. “I’m beginning to think of this as our bridge.”
The sun was behind Alba, adding gold to her hair—and making me squint.
“Anyway, Jake,” she said, dropping her eyes as she rested her hand on the railing. “Thanks for coming.”
“You’re welcome,” I said—like a store clerk clinching a sale. I mentally kicked myself. Think! I commanded my brain.
“I … this is difficult,” she went on. “I have something to discuss with you.” She turned and looked down into the trees that flanked the river.
My heart began to thump so loudly I was sure she could hear it. Could this be, I hardly dared to ask myself, what I’d been hoping for? Did she share my feelings? She hadn’t seemed to, but she had never spurned me. Maybe all this time it was shyness that had made her seem unenthusiastic. She certainly seemed shy now. She must have liked my letters after all. I said a silent thank-you to Vanni.
“It’s hard to talk about,” Alba murmured, barely audible above the purling river, which, thank goodness, had receded to its norm
al state.
Take your time, I wanted to say, but my mouth had dried up.
“It’s about … love,” she said, softly. “I know I can say this to you.”
My pulse hammered in my ears. I wanted to jump a mile into the air and yell, “Hooray!” I stepped a little closer to her so that we were side by side at the railing, shoulders touching. I felt her heat through our clothing.
“Because you’ll understand. I can tell from your letters, and from our conversation here that day, that you’re not afraid to speak of love. You’re different from the others. You have a poetic soul.”
“Yes, I do understand. I feel the same way.”
“I knew you would, Jake.” She turned and put her hand on my arm. “I’m … I’m in love, for the first time in my life.”
She smiled shyly, eyes downcast. God, she was beautiful. She looked so vulnerable at that moment.
“And so am I,” I said softly.
“But it’s hard for me to express my feelings, you know?”
Tears formed at the corners of my eyes. I ached to embrace her, but I told myself to wait.
“Yes.”
“That’s why I need your help,” Alba was saying.
“It’s all right,” I reassured her, all my nervousness swept away by a warm tide of euphoria. “You can tell me. You can say it.”
“I’m in love with a boy at York.”
I nodded to encourage her.
“I think you know him.”
You bet I do, I thought.
“You know Chad, don’t you?” Alba asked.
At first, for one numb moment, the name didn’t register. I had been waiting, yearning, to hear “Jake” cross those perfect lips, the lips that I had been desperate to kiss since our first conversation—or, if not my name, that simple, magical pronoun “you.”
But the wave of happiness crested, and crashed, and disappeared.
“Chad,” I spluttered. “I see.”
“I knew you would, Jake. That’s why I came to you.”
“I see.”
“He’s everything to me,” Alba said. “I can’t get him out of my mind.”
I suppose that if I had to, I’d admit that Bromley was the male counterpart of Alba—tall, lean, good-looking in a movie-star sort of way and, as if all that wasn’t enough, rich.
“I see.”
“But he doesn’t know I exist!” Alba almost wailed, dropping her hand.
How could any male human being not know you exist? I wanted to ask her. Instead I said, “I know what you mean.”
“So I thought, if I could find a way to talk to Chad when we’re alone, explain how I feel, maybe I could win him over. Maybe—and I hardly dare to think so—he feels the same way about me and can’t find a way to let me know.”
“I see.”
“You know what boys are like.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, scuffing the planks with the toe of my shoe. “I do.”
“But I don’t know what to say. How to begin.”
“Right.”
“That’s why I need your help.”
“Me?” I blurted. “What help can I be?”
“You’re so good with words, Jake. You’ve proved that to me.”
“But I—”
“I was thinking I could talk to Chad alone at one of our rehearsals. Panofsky wants us to practise our lines together, just the two of us, right on the set, so we can get used to our surroundings and each other. He’s even told us to do the scene playing each other’s parts. He says we have to know all the lines, not just our own. You see? It’s the perfect opportunity.”
“But—”
“You could hang back in the wings, behind me, and tell me what to say to him, like a prompter.”
I was starting to get dizzy. Had Alba known all along that someone was under the bridge that day, feeding me lines? The forest around me began to revolve. “Well, I don’t know …”
Then she put a hand on each of my shoulders and held me with those wide grey eyes. The fragrance of her perfume, her lipstick—her—made me drunk. Her lips parted slightly.
“Please?”
I seethed with jealousy and disappointment and anger. So she liked guys after all—but not the guy standing in front of her now. I wanted to push her off the bridge, watch her flail in the water. I wanted to run down to the river and save her, and hold her, kiss warmth back into her lips. I wanted to shout at her that she was an idiot to fall for an empty bag like Bromley, to shake some sense into her. I yearned to press against her, kiss her hair. I fantasized Bromley tearing down York Street in his gleaming German-engineered coupe, swerving, skidding across the pavement and cartwheeling into the ditch in a howling, screeching confusion of tortured metal—then exploding in a fireball.
I lowered my eyes, breaking Alba’s magnetic hold.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll help.”
SCREENPLAY: “JAKE, BEREFT”
by
JAKE BLANCHARD
FADE IN:
EXT. A DESERTED URBAN PARKING LOT—DAY
CUE MUSIC: a funeral march
Fog. Decrepit brick buildings surround the parking lot.
CAMERA on a high rooftop.
Seen from above, a MALE FIGURE emerges from the mist, head covered, hands deep in the pockets of his hoodie, shoulders slumped. It is JAKE. He walks slowly, diagonally, across the lot. The fog swallows him again.
HOLD MUSIC
FADE OUT
CHAPTER SIX
“AWAY OUT OF HERE with that,” Vanni scoffed.
“I know it sounds crazy,” I countered, “but—”
“Crazy, is it? Every word that comes out of your mouth lately seems insane. But this goes way beyond nuts. It’s demented !”
We were at our usual table by the window in the Blue Note—Vanni with a carton of 100 per cent pure juice of some kind and a low-fat muffin, me with a lukewarm latte and a sticky bun. The surly waiter was waiting in the corner, ready to insult the next customer unwise enough to come in out of the blustery wind.
“I admit it’s complicated.”
“Complicated, is it? Let me get this straight,” Vanni said, setting down her juice with more force than necessary and tearing her muffin in half. “You want me to hide in the wings during their rehearsal and whisper words of love to you.”
“Right.”
“You are also hiding in the wings.”
“Yes.”
“You in turn pass on my words to Her Loveliness, who is not hiding in the wings.”
“Correct.”
“Her Loveliness knows you’re there, because she asked you to help her, but she doesn’t know I’m there. She in turn speaks my words—always supposing everyone concerned has perfect hearing—to Chadwick Bromley the Stuck-Up, who doesn’t know you’re there or I’m there and who thinks that Alba is saying her own words.”
“Yes.”
“It’ll be like passing buckets of water along a relay line at a fire.”
“Perfect simile,” I said. “See, that’s why—”
“Never mind your pathetic flattery. I’m not finished. Lord Stuck-Up is swept away by the force of my poetic utterances and falls in love with Her Loveliness.”
“That’s the strategy.”
“Stratagem. Your brain is so Alba-addled that you’re thinking backwards. What’s the net result of this plan—if it works? Alba and Dimwick are in love! You’ve been away with the fairies, you have. Do you not see the flaw, you thick fool? What will you do then?”
“I haven’t worked that out yet.”
“You haven’t worked—? Ach, why am I not surprised?”
Vanni popped a bit of muffin into her mouth and chomped on it for a moment.
“I’ve just thought of another problem,” she continued. “You say Her—”
“Stop calling her that.”
“You say Alba and Prince Charming are rehearsing?”
“Yes.”
“Then she’ll be up on the balcony, won’t sh
e? How can anyone hear all the furtive whispering that’ll be going on? She won’t hear us from the wings, and there isn’t enough room for the three of us on the balcony even if we could conceal ourselves. You built the thing. You ought to know.”
“No sweat. Panofsky wants them to reverse roles as part of the rehearsal. Alba will be below; he’ll be above.”
Vanni groaned. “Jaysus. To complete the absurdity, we’ll have a male Juliet and a female Romeo!”
I had no answer for that, so I kept my mouth shut.
“And you’re still stuck with a plan that gets you the opposite of what you want: Chad in love with Alba, who is already in love with Chad.”
I said nothing. Vanni’s eyes flared. “Don’t tell me.”
“What?”
“Eejit! You’ve persuaded yourself that Alba will recognize your generosity, your selflessness, realize she’s given her heart to the wrong man, and in a flash of insight—which, believe me, would be uncharacteristic of her—discover that it’s you she loved all along.”
“Well, when you put it like that,” I said.
“You really think she’ll love you out of gratitude? That only happens in the movies.”
“What choice do I have?”
“Listen, Jake. Here’s a news bulletin for you: love isn’t self-sacrificing. It’s the opposite. It’s blind, and it’s selfish.”
Vanni’s face had become flushed with anger and frustration, as if she’d lost patience with a stubborn, dimwitted child. She slurped the last drops of juice from the container.
“Calm down,” I said. “It’s a moronic idea, I admit. But I promised.”
“You talked yourself into a mess and you want me to talk you out of it. Literally.”
I smiled. “What are friends for?”
“Don’t try to charm me.”
“Help me dig myself out of this hole, and I promise it’s the last favour I’ll ever ask.”
Vanni laughed, her mirth edged with bitterness. “There you go again.”
