“We don’t watch TV because there’s no interaction there,” Keira’s father is saying in his booming English-professor voice. He’s a tall, stunning African-American man. Everything he says sounds automatically correct. “How can we use our imagination or problem-solving skills if we’re just passive consumers of a medium? Instead, my family plays. We play games, we play with toys, we read books to one another, we do activities outside. It’s old-fashioned and we like it.”
Then we see Nate. He’s sitting in a miniature plastic chair covered with cartoon characters, eating dry cereal out of a bowl, two feet from a giant TV blaring cartoons.
Everyone in Felix’s basement cracks up, just like they’re supposed to.
The camera pans over to Nate’s mother, sitting at a nearby table in her dental hygienist’s scrubs, talking on the phone. For a full ten seconds all we hear is her saying, “I know . . . Oh my God . . . yeah, as if . . . ,” to whoever’s on the other end, and Nate crunching his cereal so loud I wonder if that wasn’t juiced up in the editing room.
I glance over to Felix, but his face is too shadowed for me to read his expression.
One of the kids on a couch yells, “Go, Nate!” and I know what’s coming next. That will be Rory and me, dressed in princess costumes, dancing around my kitchen while The Nutcracker blasts through the stereo.
This is an excellent time for me to go to the bathroom.
For a few minutes, I just listen to the audio I know so well. And then, laughter from Felix’s basement audience. Ian, surely part of that laughter. I cover my ears.
I’ve been in there a while—too long, apparently—when Felix knocks on the door.
“Justine? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Can I come in?”
“Uh, no? Gross.”
“I know you’re not doing anything in there.” He’s right, of course. I’m sitting on the toilet, but it’s closed and I’m dressed.
I sigh and unlock the door. Felix enters, shuts the door behind him, and leans on the sink. It’s a salmon-colored thing, with chipped gold-toned fixtures, lost in the seventies. The rest of the Cortez house has been beautifully remodeled, but Felix refuses to let them alter the retro-cool vibe in the basement.
“You’re missing the best parts,” he says.
“Felix, I’ve seen this movie. So have you. I wonder who’s seen it more?”
He shrugs. “It’s different when it’s not just you in the room.”
“It’s different when you know it’s all going to happen again.”
For a second, I forget that I’m not going to be part of it. Then I remember and realize I’m going to have to tell him.
“It’s nice to talk to someone who gets it,” he says softly. Then he looks me square in the eye. “Let’s go out this week. I’ll buy you dinner.”
And now we’ve got this again.
“We’ve been through that stuff before, Felix.”
“But I like you so much!”
I can’t even feel flattered.
“I like you too,” I tell him. “You’re one of my favorite people in history. But, uh, how fake would that look, that you and I start dating right before shooting starts? Lance would probably force us to dump each other just so nobody would accuse him of setting it up.”
“So if they weren’t coming, you would say yes?”
Okay, I walked right into that, and now I have to tell him the thing he doesn’t want to hear.
“No, Felix. I wouldn’t. I don’t think of you that way and I don’t think you think of me that way either.”
“I’ve always thought of you that way, Justine. Forget that total douche Ian. You and me, we have a connection.”
“Yeah, courtesy of Lance and Leslie ten years ago.”
The thing I won’t tell him is that, fabricated or not, I love our connection. Talking to Felix is sometimes like talking to myself.
In the years after Five at Six, we were always in different classes and when I did see Felix, at school or around town, we were both too shy or weirded out to say anything to each other. Then Five at Eleven was released. There was all the attention and the controversy, and then suddenly there was no more of either, and one day in the cafeteria I found an apple cider donut in my backpack.
It was tucked into a Ziploc bag with a bow, alongside a sugar-dusted note that said, simply:
You look sad. Please don’t be.
I held the donut in my hand and thought about what I did to Rory, and Keira’s face in that scene in the film, and my dad moving out, and then put those thoughts away in a place so deep inside me, they could bang and bang and I wouldn’t hear a thing.
I ate the donut, licked the note clean. After school I asked my mom to drive me to the Hunter Farms store and found Felix in the back room, arranging strawberries in green paper containers.
“Hi,” I said to him.
He turned and smiled, and just like that, I wasn’t alone anymore.
Now, Felix is staring at the wall—also salmon, with iridescent gold flecks in it. “I would feel this way without the films, I swear.”
So would I, I’m about to tell him. But I stop myself. Felix grows suddenly quiet and I don’t know if it’s because he knows I’m going to say that, or because he’s listening to the movie in the other room. It’s Nate’s voice, answering questions on-screen.
“Listen, I could use some advice,” Felix says after a few moments, taking a deep breath. “Nate emailed me after our little standoff in the caf.”
“What? Contact?” I ask, exaggerated, but Felix remains serious.
“He wants us to agree not to talk about certain things on camera, when shooting starts. You know Leslie will ask why we’re not friends anymore. I mean, in Five at Eleven there’s that whole scene with us down at the pond, catching salamanders, like we’re freaking Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.”
I try not to think about that scene, because it reminds me of Rory.
“But we were never real buddies,” he continues. “My parents work for his grandparents, so I’m basically hired help. Sometimes I think when we were little, they all bribed me to spend time with him. His mom was always giving me his old toys.”
Now, of course, I’m dying to hear more because this is the most Felix has ever talked about Nate, but he’s come to me for help and this feels good and I don’t want to blow it.
“So what do you want my advice on?”
“Well, you’re always great at avoiding the question when Leslie asks something you don’t want to answer.”
“Am I?”
“You make some funny smart-ass comment and it’s like gold, and then nobody cares that you didn’t answer. They only care that you gave them something good on camera. I need some tips in case I get into a corner. Because I’m not like you. I find myself wanting to please them so bad, I’ll tell them anything.”
“You make it sound like torture.”
Then we look at each other and laugh. We both know that it is a little like torture. Or, a lot.
“I guess that’s the difference between you and me,” I say, and think hard about how to put this into words. “You like to please them. I like to piss them off.”
Felix snorts, then smiles and takes my hand. “The real difference, Justine, is that pissing them off is your way of trying to please them.”
This statement rolls over me like something big and fast with a hundred wheels. I can’t recover from it right away, and I can’t deal with what it means, and I don’t want Felix to know either.
Finally, I compose myself and offer this: “Try to think of every question they ask you as the setup to a joke.”
“Oh, that’s good,” says Felix, taking his notebook out of his back pocket.
As he writes, it echoes in my head. Pissing them off is your way of trying to please them. Something rises in me.
“I have something to tell you,” I say. Felix lifts one eyebrow into his hungry, gossip-munching look. I take a breath deep enough t
o push all the words out. “I’m not going to do the movie.”
His face is empty for a few seconds. Then he bursts into laughter. I’d be totally insulted by this reaction if I didn’t expect it.
“Ha! Good one.”
“I’m serious, Felix.”
“Let me see.”
He leans in to examine my face now. I keep my mouth in a flat line and nod slightly. He leans out.
“Hmm. Well, maybe you are. For the moment. But there’s no way you’ll stick to that.”
An F-sound dances on my lips and I know it would feel so good to say the word, to throw it at him. Candy good. But post-Ian, I’ve been fighting my potty mouth tendencies.
Instead I just say, “I can prove you wrong.”
He smiles. “Keira said no too.”
“How do you know?”
“I have my sources. But I guess Leslie talked her into it.”
“Of course she did,” I say. Leslie’s left me two messages that I haven’t returned.
A sudden roar of laughter from the other room draws Felix’s attention from me, and without a word he bursts back through the bathroom door to check it out. I follow him.
There’s me on the sheet-screen. I’m standing on a makeshift stage in our elementary school cafeteria, wearing red top-to-bottom long johns. Our teacher is off to the right, giving me line cues as I perform the lead role in our kindergarten version of The Emperor’s New Clothes.
A few of the kids in Felix’s basement turn around to see me hovering nearby, their faces alight with pure entertainment. One of them flashes me a thumbs-up, and I just smile politely. It always feels strange and a little wrong to take credit. What was I doing, besides getting up, going to school, doing my thing, living through the day? I wasn’t trying to amuse. At least, I don’t think so.
I move a bit so I can see Ian’s face. He’s grinning, totally enjoying what he’s seeing.
Felix turns to me with both eyebrows raised. “You need this,” he says, almost tenderly. “You just don’t know it.”
“You don’t know what I don’t know!” Yeah, that sounds moronic but whatever. I rocket toward the stairs and up, up, up to the outside world.
In no time I’m driving back to Dad’s, thinking about the totally screwed-up-edness of people watching me and for some reason enjoying themselves. The rhythm of the tires against the uneven road slowly curls itself into a pattern of almost-words.
The pattern sounds like, Felix is right, Felix is right, Felix is right.
The next afternoon, there’s a message in my email inbox from an address I don’t recognize. No subject line either.
Justine,
Please change your mind about the movie. I think I understand why you’re saying no. You may not be able to see it now, but good things will come out of it. I’m sure about that.
We are part of a whole, and without you, nothing will work. If you’re doubting that this came from one of us, then I’ll just say:
Five stickers under the table. Yours was the polar bear.
See you soon, I hope.
The first thing I do, of course, is feel tremendously creeped out.
Then I think, This is a trick from Lance or Leslie.
But they wouldn’t do this. They would potentially ask one of the others to do it, but my gut feeling says that’s not the case here.
There was a day in kindergarten, after shooting ended, when our teacher had to duck out for an hour and left an aide in charge. The aide was new and young, and many of the kids saw their chance to mess around. Rory, Felix, Nate, Keira, and I all decided to do sticker art on the floor. (It was my idea. I wonder if they remember that too.) A few of the stickers ended up on the rough underbelly of our table. Yes, mine was the polar bear.
I look at the email address again. I didn’t notice this before, but the first part is “lancehasbananabreath.” I laugh. Who else would remember that? And who else would care whether or not I say yes or no? Felix. This is from Felix. And although he gave himself away, he managed to get me where I’m most vulnerable.
Part of a whole.
Well, dammit.
I go down to the kitchen to stress-chug a whole can of diet soda before I call Leslie and tell her I’ve changed my mind.
FIVE
My morose princess!” says Amelia as I slide into her chair. “The usual trim today?”
Amelia is the hippest hairstylist in town in the un-hippest salon in town, a cruddy little place wedged between a comic book shop and an insurance office. She will tell you that because she has a couple of piercings and a borderline offensive tattoo on her neck, nobody else would hire her. But I know that as soon as the secret’s out—that she doesn’t suck the way everyone else does and actually knows what to do with hair—she’ll soon be able to buy the shop for herself.
“I need something,” I say, shaking my head hard, my hair falling loose and a little wild so it says Style Me! like one of those big disembodied Barbie heads. It’s been two weeks since I agreed to do the film, and it’s taken me this long to get up the courage for this.
“Anything in particular?”
“Just different. Maybe a little surprising.”
Amelia bites back a smile and runs her fingers through my hair. Her eyes grow intense, and okay, I’m a little scared now, but it’s already too late.
“Are you sure?” she asks.
“Yes, I’m sure.” I’m so glad to feel this way about anything.
Lance and Leslie will be here any minute.
They’re coming to shoot their first sit-down interview with me, and my mother is making scones. She does this when she’s nervous about impressing someone. They are Mango-Anxiety scones.
Olivia, who has chosen not to sign the paperwork because she doesn’t want to appear in the film for one freaking second, as she so clearly put it, has agreed to stay away all day.
I’m still cleaning up my room, aka taking most of my dirty clothes, shoving them into my closet, and trying to get the door closed, when I hear the doorbell and freeze. The sound of Mom’s footsteps from the kitchen to the foyer, the grinding noise the front doorknob always makes when you turn it. Then a chorus of high, loud voices.
I’ve thought about this and have decided I’ll wait until Mom calls me down, like I was so engrossed in something I completely forgot we were expecting visitors. But now that I’m standing by for my cue, it all feels sort of Scarlett O’Hara.
Mom yells, “Justine! Lance and Leslie are here!”
I check myself in the mirror. Outfit looks uninspired but functional: blue jeans and a black V-neck sweater, with my special-occasion silver-toned sneakers. It’s rare for me to wear something completely plain like this, unadorned by a graphic or funny comment. I feel naked and overdressed at the same time.
Mentally, I trim twenty pounds off my body. If I’d lost the twenty pounds I’d wanted to lose but somehow couldn’t—because, let’s be honest, I just didn’t try hard enough—would my face be less round, my chin pointier? Would this part of my hips be gone? Would I look like how people imagined I would look? Or rather . . . how I imagined I would look?
The fact that I go right to thinking about people aka audiences makes me mad, and the fact that I don’t know how to change that makes me even madder. But what can I do? They’ve got what they’ve got and maybe that should be my punishment. For not having the willpower, for being so lazy. I deserve for them to see me on-screen and whisper to whoever’s sitting next to them, Whoa. She chunked out.
I’ve taken a preemptive Zantac for my stomach, which I know won’t actually help but it’s nice knowing it’s in there.
Then I make my way down the stairs. Not too fast, not too slow. Leslie, Lance, and my mom are waiting at the bottom in our foyer.
When Leslie sees me, she blurts out, “Justine. Oh my God!”
“Hey,” I say.
Now Lance looks up but his face is stone. His eyes travel slowly from my head down to my toes before he cracks one side of his mouth
amusedly upward.
“I almost didn’t recognize you,” says Leslie, trying to hide the shock in her voice. I wish I could take a picture of the contrast between her expression and her husband’s.
“That’s been happening,” I say.
She steps toward me, tentatively like she’s not sure it’s really me, and reaches out to touch my hair.
“What’s a color nobody’s ever seen you wear?” Amelia asked me at the salon.
“Pink.” It popped out of my mouth like a bubble, catching a rainbow with the light.
So now my hair is chin-length, sliced into choppy chunks with the help of a razor blade. The pink that streaks through it is dark, dramatic, a shade you might see in a once-a-year sunset.
It’s so not me that it’s suddenly, totally me.
I can tell Leslie’s fighting a battle: Wanting to Seem Excited vs. Being Inwardly Horrified. My mom had the same satisfying reaction. Finally Leslie just says, “Well, then,” and pulls me into a hug.
Leslie has her long blond hair in a neat ponytail, with a rhinestone-studded headband looking pretty but unnecessary. When she draws back and turns to say something to my mother, I notice a frown line between her eyes, which was obscured by the hat that day outside the library, and it’s much deeper than the one I remember. In the pictures I’ve seen of her at the premiere of their last film, the frown line is not even there, and I wonder how much makeup it takes to spackle up a crevice like that.
Lance steps forward and gives me a quick hug, grinning like he just won a grand prize. Ethically, he’s not allowed to encourage us to look or dress a certain way. But I’m guessing he likes it when things work out for him in that area. The ratty superhero T-shirt I wore every day in Five at Six and that gray fedora I was partial to at eleven. Now this, with the pink streaks.
With his head uncovered, I can see Lance has less hair than he used to but it suits him, and he also looks deeply tanned. I flash on a conversation I had with Rory when we were eleven.
“Don’t you think Lance is kind of a hottie?” I asked her as we were sitting on the floor of her room, doing a particularly brutal puzzle that was nothing but a photo of sand.
You Look Different in Real Life Page 4
