You Look Different in Real Life

by Jennifer Castle

  DEDICATION

  For Bill,

  because we see the world

  through the same lens

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Other Books by Jennifer Castle

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ONE

  Sometimes, I hit pause at a random moment when I’m on film and stare at my eyes, and try to figure out why they chose me.

  With the others, it’s obvious. Rory says those accidentally hilarious things, and Felix keeps bursting into song. Keira reads an advanced-level social studies textbook aloud. Then there’s Nate, with that whole Johnny Appleseed vibe. Maybe I was picked because my favorite answer to their questions was “Grrrr,” or because I wore pajamas to school three days in a row, or simply because they needed a girl with brown hair. It could have been all of these things, or none of them. So I search those eyes, those eyes I once saw the world through, and remind myself they’re the same ones I see it through now. But in all the searching, I’ve never found the spark that says, Watch this one.

  I’m guessing Ian Reid didn’t find it either, and this is why he dumped me.

  “You’re awesome, Justine,” he said as we sat in his vintage Jeep, not going inside to the party we were supposed to be going inside to. “But I feel like we’re better off as friends.”

  Translated, I’m pretty sure that means: The thought of kissing you—or touching you at all, really—makes me want to hurl, and when you look at me with love you resemble a chipmunk.

  My heart doubled over from the punch, hacked a bit, then fell to the floor of its little heart studio apartment.

  But on the outside, I just nodded and spun out words like okay and fine and cool. That was before Christmas and now it’s March, and there isn’t a single hour when I’m not thinking about the fact that for seven weeks I had someone, and then I didn’t, and how that works exactly.

  This hour, I’m pondering it while sitting on a low stone wall outside the town library. It’s snowing again, falling in bite-size chunks so fluffy they look fake. I’ve got an overdue copy of The Graduate on DVD tucked inside my parka and I’ll go in and return it, eventually. Well, yes, the stone is cold down there. Very, in fact. But this is so peaceful, with my mother at the supermarket and thus out of nagging range, and I love the way Main Street looks before the plows come through. The air feels eerie-hushed, and above me, everything is colorless, a striking shade of utter blank.

  In the distance to the west, I can see our town’s mountains. They’re not normal mountains with peaks. They’re ridge mountains, low and wide and gracefully deformed. You know they’re beautiful but have no idea why. On top of one is a stone tower visible from miles away with windows that look like eyes, and if you stare at it long enough, it always seems to be staring back.

  I imagine that Ian is here, perched on the wall beside me, with his arm around my waist, his chin on my shoulder, and this time I don’t care how we look or that some idiot might yell, “Get a room!” No, wait. We lie down on the lawn and make snow angels. I know that’s the stuff of trite Hollywood movies but maybe that’s where I went wrong. Maybe that’s what he wanted.

  When we got together, people called us JustIan. The sun looked different in the sky, like it recognized me.

  And with that thought, the hurt comes again. It’s a familiar hurt, and literal too. It starts at my belly button and pushes into me, as if someone’s trying to dig a tunnel straight through to my back but dammit, there are all these organs in the way.

  “Justine?”

  The voice pops against the stillness of the air. Sharp and high. Familiar, but not really.

  I turn toward the voice. There’s a man and a woman standing five feet in front of me, wearing ankle-length puffy down coats and matching fleece hats right out of the clearance pages of an outerwear catalog. He’s in black; she’s in silver. They’re each holding a cup from the chain coffee place across the street.

  Then I realize who these people are, and the cramp goes supernova inside me.

  “Is that you, Justine?” the woman asks again.

  I don’t see how I can deny it.

  “Yeah, it’s me.” I force myself to say her name. “Leslie?”

  In that moment as her eyes widen, her brows lift—her face expands in every direction—I think about how I’ve seen her over the last five years, in pictures, but she hasn’t seen me, and that makes me feel a tiny bit powerful.

  “Oh my God!” she says, quickly passing her cup to the guy, her husband, Lance, and stepping forward. Her hands fly toward my cheeks, and I let them land, feeling the jolt of warmth transferred from her cup; then they jump to my shoulders to bring me in for a hug. My stomach still hurts, and for an instant, ridiculously, I think maybe she’ll notice.

  “You’re so grown up,” she says, squeezing tight. Her breath used to smell like cigarettes; now it stinks of a Cinnamon Dolce latte.

  “That’s what happens,” I say, and throw a look at Lance, who just winks. Lance is the kind of guy who can get away with a wink regardless of unfortunate outerwear.

  When Leslie releases me, I ask the question.

  “What are you guys doing here?”

  “What do you think?” asks Lance.

  Uh-uh. I need them to say it. I look at Leslie.

  Taking the cue, she says, “We’ve got the go-ahead for Five at Sixteen.”

  “Five at Sixteen,” I echo.

  In December, after my birthday, I was expecting the phone call, but it didn’t come. Then the holidays paraded by, and nothing. Winter dragged on. At the end of every day without hearing Lance or Leslie’s voice, breathing got 0.5 percent easier for me.

  “I didn’t think it was going to happen,” I say after a slow-motion moment. It’s all I can do not to ask, Who’s going to give you any more money after last time and that other movie you made that just plain sucked?

  “Neither did we. But it was meant to be, Justine, and it’s happening. We’re in town for a few days to talk to people at your school and line up somewhere to live for a few months.”

  “We were going to call you and your parents tomorrow,” adds Lance.

  “Running into you like this—it’s just so perfect!” continues Leslie. “I saw your face from across the street and instantly knew it was you. Like I said, meant to be! I have a feeling this film is going to be kick-ass.”

  For the record, Leslie is way too old to say things like “kick-ass.”

  “You will be part of it, won’t you?” adds Lance. At least he’s actually asking.

  “Have you talked to the others?” I nonanswer.

  “Just Nate so far, because he called us last week,” says Leslie. “They’re all on board over there. You were next on my list, because if we don’t have you . . . Well. That’s a lot not
to have.”

  They’re wrong and don’t know it. “When would you start?”

  “We’ll begin preproduction next month,” she says. “But we need paperwork signed in the next week or so, to keep things rolling.”

  I know my line here should be, Of course I’ll sign your paperwork! Why would I not? In some alternate reality, I might add, I can’t wait for you to slice open my life for the world to examine and poke at with sharp instruments!

  I don’t say that.

  We’re all silent for a few long seconds.

  Finally, Lance says, “We should let you go, Justine. We’re due at the Realtor’s office up the street. We’ll talk later, yes?”

  I just nod. Leslie touches her cheek to mine and squeezes my shoulder, and I wonder if that’s some new version of good-bye they’re beta testing in Los Angeles. Lance pats me on the back, in the same way he’s always patted me on the back. Then they are gone, gliding away from me like graceful, overdressed angels of doom.

  My mother steps through the kitchen door with two steaming cups of cocoa and a bowl of popcorn, as if we were in a scene from a feminine-hygiene-product commercial. In this commercial, I sit at the table and she puts my drink and snack in front of me, then eases into my sister Olivia’s usual chair across from mine.

  “You think I should do it,” I say to her. It comes out sounding like an accusation, which it sort of is.

  “I do. But the decision is yours.” As she leans down to blow on her cocoa, I notice the streaks of gray hair now woven through her blond highlights. When she came to pick me up at the library and I told her about seeing Lance and Leslie, her eyes, which have looked so tired lately, suddenly sparkled to life.

  I don’t know what to say next, so I blurt out the first moronic thing that comes to mind.

  “I always thought I’d be thin in time for this one.”

  Instead of coming up with a You’re not fat! or You look great, my mom stares into her cocoa, then offers an encouraging smile. “You could still lose a few pounds before they start shooting.”

  She thinks she’s being helpful. That’s my mother, in a nutshell. I just shrug and make a mental note to seethe about it later.

  After a few moments I say, “Leslie said that if they don’t have me, that’s a lot not to have.”

  “Oh, I agree with that. So do the people who loved the first two films. I know that’s hard for you to hear.”

  A line from one of the reviews my mother keeps in a scrapbook ticker-tapes across my mind: The real breakout star of Five at Six is the sharp-tongued yet funny and sweet Justine, whose early rebellion gives you a sign of things to come.

  Things to come. Gah.

  “The intrusion will be a problem,” I say. Grasping. “I’m supposed to be getting my school act together, remember?”

  “It’ll just be for a month or two.”

  “Why is it so important to you?” I’m curious to hear what she’ll actually admit.

  Mom thinks for a moment, her expression warm but a little pained, and I’m glad for the pained part.

  “I guess I still believe in it. The original idea of it. From the very beginning, it seemed like such an honor.”

  That sounds sincere but I know there’s more. After the last time, her custom birthday cake business got a nice bump from the exposure. Now she’s branched out into cupcakes and what she calls “food art,” which mostly means bananas on sticks with candy faces, and she could use the free advertising. Then there’s the thing she won’t mention:

  It made us all kind of famous for a while.

  “You’ll feel better after the whole idea settles in,” says Mom now. I can see she’s hiding a flash of excitement behind the concern. “I have to get started on a T. rex with red frosting.”

  I go upstairs to my room and open my laptop, unable to shake that dark-shadow feeling.

  The original idea of it.

  My hands, which seem to be much more motivated than the rest of me, open a Web browser and type the address I know so well but refuse to bookmark.

  Here it comes, loading into place: the website for the Five At movies. I used to go on here a lot, watching video clips of the films or interviews with Lance and Leslie. Every time I went back, I’d expect to see something new. Like it might tell me secrets I didn’t already know about myself. When I realized it never would, I stopped. But now I’m here again, and it’s like the site has been waiting for me all this time, that home page with the familiar logos of the first two films. Dangling them. You know you want to.

  Five at Six. The word six is carefully designed to look like some kid’s doodle, colored faux-sloppy with red crayon. In the Five at Eleven logo, the word eleven is written in chunky block letters with alternating polka dots and stripes.

  Then there’s the tagline:

  The award-winning documentary film series that’s captured hearts and minds everywhere.

  As corny and cringeworthy as ever. But I click on the Five at Six logo, which brings up a page of information about that movie, and start to read.

  Five six-year-olds, all assigned to the same table in their kindergarten classroom in a college town in New York’s Hudson Valley . . .

  For the record, that’s bullshit. I remember us getting moved to that table together right before the cameras came in. After they’d interviewed a hundred kids in a converted janitor’s closet, then twenty-five, then twelve, before finally finding five in one class who they liked best. Five of us, with the right shapes to fit together and make some bigger picture.

  Who are they? What do they care about? What are their hopes and plans, and what are their families’ hopes and plans for them? What can five kids and their families, their school and community, tell us about our times? Filmmakers Lance and Leslie Rodgers create a brilliant portrait of these children and their world, and ultimately our world . . . and begin what will become a most amazing journey for all of us.

  The “most amazing journey” thing always makes me want to laugh, or barf, or larf. Maybe Lance and Leslie think it’s amazing. First, their humble credit-card-funded documentary was the toast of the film festival circuit and hit theaters in several big cities. After it ended up on cable TV and won a bunch of little statues, they announced their idea—and the big funding to go with it—to do a follow-up documentary every five years until we were twenty-one.

  They never asked us to commit for three more films. They just assumed we would. So far, they’ve assumed right.

  On the page titled “The Kids,” there’s a picture of each of us at six years old, paired with one from when we were eleven. At six, I have shoulder-length, straight light brown hair with a barrette to keep it off my face. I’m looking at something above the camera with an arched eyebrow, a slightly slanted expression of Are you freaking kidding me?

  The photo next to it shows me with a short pixie cut, my hair brown-black then, my mouth open in the process of saying something, because in the second movie I was always saying something. Of the five of us, I’m the one who’d visibly changed the most. People thought that at eleven I’d dyed my hair and wow, that is so rad and how did her parents feel? Truth is, it just got darker naturally. But I didn’t correct them.

  I try to imagine what the new picture will be. My hair is once again shoulder-length. Sometimes I use a single barrette to keep it off my face. So it’s possible that I could just look like a larger version of my kindergarten self.

  Shudder.

  I’ve had five years, since they shot Five at Eleven, to get ready for this. After what happened that time around, I was sure the amazing journey had screeched to a halt, sparks flying, brakes burning.

  This is not a soap opera, folks. This is my life.

  And it is absolutely, positively as unamazing as you can get.

  TWO

  The next morning, my sister, Olivia, drops me off at school on her way to class. She’s a freshman at the college now but has discovered that zipping through her old haunts is a quickie feel-good fix. Like
, she may still be living at home and failing two classes and been through three boyfriends already, but at least she’s not in high school anymore.

  “I’m stopping by Dad’s house tonight. I really can’t break the news yet?” she asks as I get out of the car. It’s my father’s handed-down Saab station wagon, which has turned out to be a surprisingly awesome set of wheels, even if it does have a forever-stink of moldy bagels and spilled coffee. She calls it Sob or, alternately, S.O.B., depending on whether or not it starts on a cold morning.

  “I know it’s torture for you, but no, you really can’t.”

  We’ve decided not to tell Dad about Lance and Leslie until we can all be together to talk about it. Olivia makes a pouty face and starts to drive away, then screeches to a stop. I hear the whirr of the passenger side window lowering and see Olivia’s oversize black sunglasses peeking out.

  “Hey, Justine?” she yells.

  “Yeah?”

  “You can just say no if you want to!”

  Despite the big round shades covering her eyes, Olivia is able to deliver a glance loaded with meaning, and then she speeds off.

  You can just say no. Is that true?

  My cell phone chimes with another text message—I’ve gotten about a dozen so far this morning and that’s an alarming statistical spike—and I head inside to check them. Once I step into the main entrance lobby, I look up at the rushing current of students moving past me. Most of them are doing something unusual in my direction: smiling, or flicking their eyes sideways, or actually saying hi.

  I know a lot of people. Some of them I hang out with and consider friends. Fortunately, it’s been five years since Five at Eleven and most kids have forgotten that my face was ever on a movie poster. There’s no reason for anybody to dislike me—at least I hope that’s the case—but I’m nothing special. I just sort of exist at this school.

  All that’s about to change, because when I glance down at the first message, I see it’s from a girl in my homeroom and it says, SO excited about the movie!

  Oh, crap. Word is out. And I know, instantly, how that word got a jet-powered blastoff on its speedy journey through the cell phones and social networks of our student body.