You Look Different in Real Life

by Jennifer Castle

  I shrug. “That it would change me. That instead of my life shaping a film, a film would shape my life.”

  Dad is quiet and I can see him swallow hard. After a few seconds he says, “We didn’t consider that. But I guess this time around, I’ve noticed. I just didn’t notice that I was noticing.”

  My dad. The pediatrician who can tell in an instant if a kid has, like, lactose intolerance, but can’t see that a decision he made a decade ago has altered his own child forever.

  “I’m sorry for that,” he continues. “But let me ask you this. If you could, knowing what you do now, would you undo it? Would you time-travel and stop us from signing that first contract?”

  The line of cars has slowed, as it always does leading up to the state park entrance, and my mind slows with it. That is a truly excellent question he’s asked me. I can’t answer it lightly.

  “I’ll let you know after the weekend,” I finally say, and he laughs.

  After we pass the park, the other cars have peeled off and we’re on our own, pointed ever-so-slightly downhill now as we reach the other side of the ridge.

  “There. That’s it,” I say. Nailed to a tree up ahead is a wooden sign that reads “AIKYA LODGE” in letters so ornate, you’d have no idea what they said if you didn’t already know. Dad turns down the road, which very quickly goes from paved to pebbles to dirt. Another minute and we pull up to the lodge. It’s all wood and looks like something you’d see in Frontierland at Disney World. I’m instantly suspicious.

  “Nice,” Dad says. Lance and Leslie’s SUV is already parked there, along with another car I don’t recognize. We get out of the car and I pull my backpack from the trunk.

  “I’d like to walk you in,” he says. “Is that allowed?”

  “I’m allowing it,” I say, and smile at him to let him know the conversation we just had made a difference. We walk up the steps to the wraparound porch and a pair of oversize double doors. Ridiculously oversize, like giants live here.

  The door opens and a woman steps out onto the porch, her face eager, expectant. She’s willowy tall and wears a T-shirt with a long denim skirt. It’s been a while since I saw someone pull off a long denim skirt like that, and I have a feeling this person will be impressive.

  “Hello, there! You must be Justine! I’m Pam.” She doesn’t look like a Pam. “I’ll be leading the workshop.” We shake hands and hers is bony, ice cold. She does the same with my dad and then ushers us into the foyer of the house.

  The first thing I see, to the left off the foyer, is a huge room with an enormous stone fireplace, reaching to the top of a cathedral ceiling. Three low, almost shapeless couches form a semicircle across from the fireplace, and a large Oriental rug covers the floor in the space between.

  “Just put your bag down here,” says Pam, pointing to the base of a staircase. “I’ll show you to your room in a minute.”

  “Are we the first ones?” I ask.

  “Everyone else is in the kitchen.”

  And now I can hear the vump-vump-vump of something being chopped, and a clang of metal utensils. Pam brings us through the fireplace room and into the biggest kitchen I’ve ever seen. It seems built for Paul Bunyan, if Paul Bunyan watched a lot of Food Network shows and really loved to cook.

  Nate and Keira stand at the massive kitchen island, cutting vegetables. Rory is stirring something at a six-burner stove. Lance floats nearby with the camera, and Kenny holds the boom mic in between two stained glass chandeliers hanging from the ceiling.

  Leslie stands in the corner, biting her pinky nail.

  “And here’s Justine,” says Pam, introducing me onto this very strange stage.

  Leslie comes over and gives me a hug, touching her cheek to mine for a long second, not saying a word.

  “This is my favorite icebreaker,” says Pam. “Putting people to work in the kitchen together. Together, we’re making stew. Together, we will eat it.” I have a feeling she says this word, together, more than will be humanly tolerable.

  Nate and Keira look up briefly at me, then back down, and I see that the food-prep is a good way to avoid making eye contact. Rory glances up in my direction and actually meets my father’s eyes. He smiles at her and she smiles at him, ever so briefly, before turning back to the stove.

  I feel Dad’s hand on my shoulder. “Everything good here?” he asks softly.

  “You can go. I’ll see you on Sunday.”

  “I would say have fun, but I have a feeling that’s not quite appropriate.” He rumples my hair, probably wanting to kiss me on the cheek but also not wanting to embarrass me, and then he’s gone, back through the great room. I hear the front door open, then close.

  Turning back to Leslie, I ask, “Felix not here yet?”

  “Running late, apparently,” says Leslie. “Let’s get you settled in.”

  She takes my hand and leads me back toward the foyer, and I catch a glimpse of Pam giving Leslie a dirty look. I can already see the friction: two women, both with agendas to follow. This might end up being really fantastic.

  Upstairs, there’s just one long hallway with several doors. We turn into the second one, which is a smallish room with two sets of bunk beds and one tall faux-rustic wooden dresser with four drawers. “The girls are in here. You and Rory and Keira.”

  “We’re sharing?”

  “Part of the workshop.”

  This had totally not occurred to me, that I might be sharing a room with two people who dislike me. Was that in the brochure? Could that have been on the packing list, under comfortable pants and slippers, a note along the lines of, Be prepared not to sleep because you’ll feel the hostility of your bunkmates thick in the air like humidity? Also, maybe they could have added some practical tips like: Bring some Beano in case you have gas during the night and don’t want anyone to hear.

  There’s a large but sleek black leather bag on one of the lower beds. Surely Keira’s. On the other, a stuffed brown and white horse rests against the pillow. Misty! Rory’s horse. Rory’s horse, which I know so well, and the sight of it would fill me with a long unspooling of memories, if it weren’t looking at me suspiciously.

  “I guess I’m on top somewhere.” I look at Leslie. “Where are you sleeping?”

  “Down the hall, with Lance. I have to sleep on a top bunk too, if it makes you feel any better.”

  “Nate and Felix?”

  “Right there.” She points to the door across the hall.

  “Just the two of them?”

  “Uh-huh.” She looks at me nervously. So she knows how epically unhappy Felix will be about this. Then Leslie lights up with a smile, turned on like a switch, and chirps, “Can you believe Kenny gets a whole bunk room to himself?”

  I know it’s hard to screw up the process of taking a fresh loaf out of a bread maker and slicing it, but damn if this isn’t the best bread-slicing job I’ve ever done. The pieces are perfectly shaped. I’m not sure people are sufficiently appreciating that, as they grab theirs and dip them into the stew. The stew! That’s all we can talk about, because it keeps us from having to talk about anything else.

  “Exactly the kind of meal you should eat at a big wooden table,” says Felix. His dad’s pickup truck deposited him and his keyboard a few minutes before the food was ready, and Felix only had time to mumble apologies about a problem at the farm before sliding into a seat. He has not yet been upstairs.

  Lance, Leslie, and Kenny have postponed their stew enjoyment so they can shoot us eating.

  The table is round and, again, mammoth-sized. So much that we’re able to spread out and it feels like we’re not actually sitting next to anybody but just vaguely sharing a universe with them.

  “Usually, there’s more people eating here, right?” I ask Pam.

  “Yes. Our standard group is about a dozen. Then I have a coleader here.”

  Silence. This is where we’d all check our cell phones, if we had them. I’m already feeling the tug of something missing, like a phantom limb, and I�
��m sure everyone else is too. Keira keeps reaching for the front pocket of her jeans, then stopping herself. But there’s a decent chance the outside world is, in fact, still there and surviving without us.

  “This is a good time for me to go over what we’ll be doing during the next twelve hours or so. I don’t like to plan further than that.”

  More silence. We’re even chewing quietly. It’s driving me crazy and yet, I’m doing it too.

  “After dinner, we’ll wash up, then build a campfire out back for a facilitated activity. Then bedtime, because we’ll be up early for breakfast and an outdoor excursion.”

  “Outdoor excursion?” asks Nate. “Is that a fancy word for a hike?”

  “It’s a fancy word for bouldering, if you must know.”

  “Cool,” he says with a grin. “I like bouldering.” None of us agrees with him.

  “After that,” continues Pam, “well, we’ll cover it when the time comes.”

  “Aikya Lodge,” says Keira randomly. “It sounds Japanese.”

  “It’s Sanskrit,” says Rory, her mouth full of bread. “I looked it up.”

  “That’s right,” replies Pam. “It means unity.”

  Dead air again. Pam looks to Leslie.

  “Pam,” says Leslie, “why don’t you tell us about your background and how you started the retreats. This is a more natural setting than an interview later.”

  Pam nods and seems relieved. The story of her life is more detailed and less interesting than I imagined, but it fills up the rest of dinnertime. I play my part, listening carefully while wishing I were somewhere else—in the Bahamas, perhaps, or getting a root canal.

  When we’re all done eating, we clear our own plates and Pam asks Rory and me to do the dishes together at one sink, Felix and Keira at the other. Nate gets to wipe down and sweep up.

  The routine of the dishes task—she washes, I dry—keeps Rory and me focused on something other than the awkwardness between us, and I wonder if that’s part of the plan. We don’t even have to talk, but I can’t help myself.

  “You brought Misty,” I say, as she hands me a dish. I enfold it in a towel, gently, because these dishes look expensive. I don’t want her to think I’m making fun of her, so I add, “It was cool to see her again. She looks pretty good.”

  “She got restuffed recently,” says Rory in her deadpan. “And washed. And her eye fixed.” She stops washing for a moment, then glances sideways at me and starts again. “Did you bring Angel Dog?”

  Ah. Angel Dog is a black stuffed poodle wearing a fairy costume that I won at the county fair one year. My dad paid off the carnie at the Clown Head Water Balloon race so it was only him and me playing, and he let me win, and I pretended I didn’t know that. Rory was with us, and within minutes she had planned out an elaborate future for our favorite stuffed animals. Angel Dog and Misty were going to shack up in a purple castle somewhere and have androgynous horse-dog babies. Once, I suggested that Angel Dog may not be down with interspecies romance, and Rory freaked out about that. I had questioned her vision, and she couldn’t deal; it was a pattern that had repeated itself so many times during the course of our friendship.

  “No,” I say. I don’t add that Angel Dog is lost-on-purpose somewhere in our basement playroom.

  Rory is silent and still for a moment, staring warmly at the dish in her hand. “That’s a shame,” she finally says, and resumes her washing. “It would have been good to see him again too.”

  I look up and see the boom mic hovering above us, and the camera, which has caught this whole exchange. Leslie is not biting her pinky nail anymore.

  TWELVE

  Are you kidding me?” asks Felix, standing outside his room, still holding his backpack and keyboard case. I’ve accompanied him up along with Pam, Leslie, and Lance, but the others are downstairs. “Nobody told us about this!”

  “This is part of the program,” says Pam. “Besides, we don’t have the space to give everyone a private room. Kenny and I each have one and that’s only by default.”

  “Can I share with Kenny?” says Felix, brightening, ignoring the irony that it would be less awkward for him to share a room with Kenny than with Nate. I look over at Lance, who clearly wants to help talk Felix down but also doesn’t want to stop the camera for even a second.

  “Just by virtue of this objection,” Pam says evenly, “I’m thinking that it’s important for you and Nate to share a room. This is why we’re here. You don’t have to talk to each other. You just have to sleep. Share some space.”

  Something occurs to me and I turn to Leslie. “Are you guys going to shoot in the rooms?”

  Leslie looks at Felix, who returns the look imploringly, and says, “No. Not tonight at least. Tomorrow, maybe, for just a few minutes. If everyone’s okay with it.”

  “If everyone hasn’t left by then,” mumbles Felix, and he picks up his bags.

  “Keep your keyboard for now,” says Leslie. “We’d like you to have it at the campfire.”

  Felix’s reaction starts off as a glare, then morphs into a caged-animal thing. Like he wants to heave the keyboard case at someone’s head but knows he shouldn’t. So now, he just nods, tosses his backpack into the room, closes the door, and walks way too slowly downstairs with his keyboard.

  Nate, Keira, and Rory are waiting on the couches in the living room, and even with the size of the house, I’m sure they’ve heard everything. Nate stares at the ceiling when Felix walks in but lowers his eyes when I enter. Those eyes, so deep green, meet mine and hold me there for a second. There’s something in them that looks and feels achingly familiar. Something personal. A memory, maybe.

  Or a reflection.

  A few dozen yards from the house is the campfire ring, a small circle of small stones inside a larger circle of larger stones. Low canvas chairs fill the space between the two circles.

  “Wood’s over there,” says Pam, pointing to a shed. “Who knows how to build a fire?”

  We’re bundled up in jackets, hats, gloves. It’s chillier than I expected, on the mountain at night in May. I’m just hoping there will be marshmallows involved at some point.

  Felix walks to the shed, grabs as many pieces of wood as he can, then glances back at Nate, the only other guy here who doesn’t already have something in his hands. Nate takes the cue and goes to the shed. Felix steps aside just as Nate gets there. Now Keira moves in behind Nate to get some wood, and I feel lame so I follow suit. Rory just bends down and pets one of the rocks.

  “Are these naturally shaped like this?” she asks nobody.

  Then Felix is directing us to put the wood in certain configurations, and I can see that Nate sort of has his own ideas but is afraid to contradict him. Leslie, Lance, and Kenny get to stand in the background, not helping. Observing. Leslie’s got her camera and is shooting us from a different angle. Pam is arranging the chairs, taking away all but six of them, moving them closer together so they’re clustered around one side of the ring.

  “Lighter?” asks Felix proudly. We’ve made a pile of wood that seems intricate yet haphazard. Pam hands him a box of matches and he snickers. “Of course. This is not a Cortez family bonfire.”

  “Just be glad we don’t have to rub two sticks together,” I say.

  Pretty soon, the fire is going. Pam has grabbed the middle chair and I score the one next to her. Felix sits next to me and I feel padded. And now, the heat from the flames drifts toward me, the smell that is family camping trips from before my parents split up, and Girl Scouts from when I was enthusiastic about things. Through the flames, I see Nate’s face on the other side of our C of canvas chairs, deep orange reflected on his cheeks and hair.

  We all stare at the fire for a while. It’s hypnotic and, again, keeps us from making eye contact.

  “What is it about a campfire?” asks Pam, and I recognize that teachery way of asking a question that’s crafted to sound like she’s just wondering. But she’s not wondering. She knows exactly what she wants to hear.


  “Warm,” says Felix at the same time that Keira says, “Beautiful,” and they exchange a quick, embarrassed glance.

  Leslie moves around the circle with her camera, while Lance and Kenny stay put behind Pam.

  “Universal,” says Pam. “I like to think a fire connects us to our history as humans. Our ancestors needed it so they wouldn’t die of cold, so they could cook their meat. We don’t need it for that anymore, but we’re still drawn. So I’d like to ask you each to share a memory of fire. It can be anything.”

  There’s a pause, and then Rory says, her voice clear and even, “When I was eight, my next-door neighbor’s house burned down.”

  Nate turns to her. “I remember that. The Schneiders, right?”

  “They were so mean to me. I was glad they had to move.”

  Now it’s Nate’s turn to talk about when they burn brush at the farm, and then Keira mentions reading in front of the fireplace. Felix recalls the fire-eaters at the circus, which seems a little forced, like he’s trying to come up with something different from the others. When everyone’s spoken but me, I’ve had enough time to decide on the most interesting fire memory I’ve got: the time Olivia taught me how to put out a match with my fingers, but purposely left out the part where you lick them, so when I tried it, I got burned.

  “Literally and figuratively,” I say, and everyone laughs, and this makes me happier than I care to show.

  “Okay,” says Pam after we all settle again. “I’ve got an activity I want us to do together. It’s one of my favorites. I’d like each of you to think of one true fact about yourself, and then one lie. The rest of us will try to guess which is which.” She pauses dramatically, as if we’re supposed to react, but nobody does. “Don’t be obvious.”

  “So we’re trying to trick one another?” asks Keira.

  “Not trick. Just . . . challenge. Maybe surprise.” Pam looks at Nate. “Even if someone knows you very well, try to come up with something they won’t figure out easily.”

  I’ve got a question: “Does it have to be something profound, or really any kind of information, like I’m wearing day-of-the-week underwear?”