You Look Different in Real Life

by Jennifer Castle

  “Hey!” I shout.

  “I almost didn’t find it,” says Olivia as she rolls down the window.

  “Give us a minute,” I say, and run back inside, leaving the door open. Nate is flying down the stairs two at a time, holding his backpack and mine.

  Now Leslie and Lance and Pam and Kenny are standing in the foyer, with the exact looks on their faces that I had imagined. Lance still has the camera running and Kenny positions the boom mic. It’s like I scripted this and now we’re acting it out.

  Rory and Felix are coming up behind them now, Felix chewing a mouthful of food.

  “What’s going on?” asks Leslie slowly.

  “We’re off to find Keira,” I say, as no-nonsense as I can.

  “What? No. I don’t think that’s—”

  “You’ll tell us where she went,” interrupts Nate.

  Leslie looks at him, stung. Completely betrayed. “How do I know where she went?”

  “Please,” he says. “You know. You struck a deal with her. Now we’d like you to strike a deal with us.”

  Lance and Leslie exchange a look, then turn to us with the raised eyebrows and tilted heads of Go on.

  “We’d like you to give us the same information you gave Keira,” says Nate, now sounding as friendly as if he were ordering a box of cookies from a Girl Scout. “About her mom.”

  Leslie looks at me and I nod. It feels a little weird having Nate say this, since I’m the one who thought of it, but I have to admit it sounds better coming from him.

  “What’s the alternative?” asks Lance.

  “We leave anyway, and we drop out of the film completely.” Nate pauses, looking at his hands for a moment. It’s so obvious, even voiced by Nate, that this bargaining chip was my brainchild. “But if you give us some help here, we’ll come back, and we can talk about our experience, and maybe you’ll still have a story to tell.”

  Now, I let myself glance at Rory and Felix, who I have kept as blurs in my peripheral vision. Rory seems fascinated, her mouth open a bit, like she’s transfixed by a TV show. Felix. Well, Felix’s features have hardened into something decidedly un-Felix.

  Leslie leans heavily against the staircase banister and opens one palm. She seems quite taken with it for a moment, as if she forgot what her own hand looks like. Lance is shooting her with the camera. “This has gotten so crazy,” she says. “I don’t understand why.” She looks at Nate with a resolve I haven’t yet seen. “It’s important to you, that you find her. Right?”

  Nate raises his eyes to the ceiling, takes a deep breath. “Yes.”

  Leslie turns to Lance and shrugs, then says simply: “We need to let them go.” It could mean so many things. She straightens up. “Let me get a pen and paper.”

  As Leslie walks back to the kitchen, Felix steps up to me. His cheeks flushed. “You and Nate?”

  “I didn’t plan that. I’m still in denial about it.” Then, an idea. “Do you want to come?”

  Felix looks at Nate and their eyes bounce away from each other. Felix shifts his gaze to Lance and the camera. “No. I need to . . . be here.”

  “I’m not sure how much here will be left after we’re gone,” I say, but Felix shakes his head sadly.

  Leslie comes back into the foyer and hands Nate an envelope. “That’s everything we gave her. I’m going from memory because all my notes were in my phone and Keira has that, but it’s the best I can do.”

  “Thank you,” says Nate sincerely.

  “I’m sorry this was such a disaster,” says Leslie.

  At that, Pam gives her a dirty look. “Nothing is a disaster once you have time to reflect on it. I’m sorry this workshop wasn’t fruitful in the way we’d all hoped.”

  I’m tempted to say something trite like Oh, it was, I really feel like I grew, but what’s the point? Instead, I just take my backpack from Nate and step onto the porch.

  “Wait!” yells Rory. She’s walking slowly down the stairs. I had no idea she’d even gone up there. She’s clutching Misty to her neck, looking unsure of herself, forcing one step in front of the other toward us. “I want to come too.”

  “Rory,” I say, “I don’t think—”

  She stops cold. “You don’t think what? You don’t want me along?”

  For two months, I’ve been hoping for a situation where Rory actually wants to be in my company. Why am I discouraging her?

  “There’s no real plan here. No schedule. No routine. Can you handle that?”

  Her eyes widen for a moment, but her body gets more rigid with what seems like resolve.

  “I want to be part of whatever you’re doing.”

  She forces a totally practiced smile that I’m sure she’s run through in a mirror countless times, and it suddenly seems impossible that we could leave Rory behind. Of course, she needs to come with us. Besides, she’s useful when it comes to certain things, like getting unlost.

  “Okay,” I say. She walks past me to Olivia’s car, gets into the backseat, slams the door shut. I see Olivia turn to say something to her.

  Now Nate is moving down the steps to the car, leaving me to face the crew and Pam and Felix alone. Felix is staring at the stripes on his polo shirt, his hands shoved into his pockets.

  “I know this changes everything,” I say, but I’m not sure to whom.

  Felix takes a deep breath and then, without raising his head to look at me, walks swiftly in the direction of the car. We all watch him climb into the backseat as Rory and Nate slide over to make room.

  There is nothing else to say. Pam has a disappointed-schoolteacher thing going on. Lance and Kenny have the camera and mic on Leslie as she sags against the banister again. Turning away from all of them is so easy, yet so difficult. I do it quickly and walk to the car.

  Rory, Nate, and Felix accordioned into the backseat together look uncomfortable in every possible way. How funny that they’ve left me to ride shotgun, like they trust me to be in charge here. Like I know how to lead them. I slide in and give Olivia a kiss on the cheek.

  “Thanks for coming.”

  “As if I would miss this.”

  Olivia starts the car and begins to back out.

  “Wait!” shouts Leslie. She’s running down the front walk.

  “Should I keep driving?” asks Olivia, and I nod yes. We need to get out of here.

  “Just a second!” yells Leslie again. “Please!”

  “Okay, stop,” I say, and Olivia slams on the brakes. There’s something about Leslie’s face now, a rawness in her voice. When Leslie sees that we’ve actually stopped, she holds up a single finger as a sign for us to hang on, then rushes back into the house.

  “I would love it if she went in to get us some money,” says Nate.

  But when Leslie reappears, hurrying toward the car, she’s carrying a canvas case with a long strap. I’ve seen it before.

  It’s her camera bag.

  She circles around the front of the car and when I see she’s headed for my window, I roll it down.

  “Here,” says Leslie, breathless. She shoves the bag through the window and I take it.

  There are a few things I could ask here. Such as, What do you want me to do with this? Or Why or How or When? But the weight of the bag in my hand, the way it feels like I’ve just had a severed arm reattached, makes those questions redundant.

  Leslie stands back from the car and in lieu of a wave, shoots us the most bittersweet look I have ever seen. It almost makes me want to invite her along for the ride. But she is not one of us.

  “Now?” asks Olivia, slapping the leg she’s got on the brake.

  “Now,” I answer, and the Aikya Lodge begins disappearing from sight.

  Information that we do actually have:

  1. Keira’s mom’s last known address was in Manhattan on West Forty-Seventh Street.

  Minor technicalities we have to work around:

  2. The fact that she is probably not living there anymore.

  3. The fact that we have no way to c
ontact her.

  4. The fact that she may not even be using the same name.

  But first things first. We’re on our way to Nate’s so he can sneak into his house and get his wallet and phone. Then he can call Keira at Leslie’s number. If Keira sees it’s him, she may answer. At least, this is what he believes. I’m not so sure.

  Nate is driving now. I don’t know why Olivia seemed eager to hand him the keys to Sob; she’s never let me drive it, and I got my license a few weeks before he did. But I’m too grateful to be annoyed right now, because when we dropped Olivia at the library on campus, she handed me all twenty-three dollars of cash from her wallet.

  I’m still in the front passenger seat, and I’ve got the camera rolling so I can shoot Mountain Ridge as we rumble through it. The tenements disguised as off-campus student housing, the achingly cute historic buildings converted into chic restaurants. I pan across the three competing artisan craft stores on Main, and the shop with all the tie-dye clothing displayed on the sidewalk, like it puked the 1960s right into the street.

  I turn to the backseat and point the camera at Felix.

  “You’ve done that, like, ten times already,” he says grumpily. He’s sitting with his arms crossed, pressed against one door, as far as possible from where Rory has Velcroed herself to the opposite side. We survived the drive down the mountain thanks to Nate, who distracted us from the palpable layer of What the Hell Do We Do Now? in the air by recounting the entire weekend to my sister, while I shot him and tried to keep the camera still and also not get nauseous. Now I stop the camera and nestle it into my lap. I don’t want to overdo it.

  We drive south from town and pass the Cannibal Apple sign. A minute later, before we get to the Hunter Farms store we all know so well, Nate turns down a dirt road I’ve forgotten was even there. We bump our way past some outbuildings until we reach the back of his house. I’ve seen it from the road and the orchards, but never this close. It’s set deep onto the property with a view of the mountains, and has always seemed like something out of a movie set.

  Nate pulls the car up to the back door alongside a beat-up sedan. “Looks like only my mom is home,” he says. “This should be easy. Keep it running.”

  Keep it running, like this is a getaway car. Then Nate is quickly gone, into the house. I turn to look at Felix. He’s staring at the place with what I can best describe as reluctant longing.

  “When was the last time you were inside?” I ask.

  “Can’t remember,” he says, shrugging extra casually. “It was years ago.”

  For a minute, we’re silent. If we had our cell phones, we’d be messing around on them to momentarily check out of this situation. But I’m getting used to that feeling of being stuck in the here and now.

  We hear something slam somewhere, a truck door perhaps. Felix and I both slouch down in our seats. Rory looks at us, puzzled, then follows our lead.

  “Wait a minute,” I say. “Why are we hiding?”

  “I’m hiding because my dad could be around,” says Felix. “You’re hiding because you have a lot of guilt about starting this thing and it’s making you jumpy.”

  I’m about to ask him to elaborate when Nate emerges from the house, gingerly closing the back door, then running on his toes to the car. He slides in, throws the gear shift into reverse, and in seconds the Hunter house is becoming a distant icon again.

  “Done,” says Nate simply.

  “Nobody saw you?”

  “Nope,” says Nate. “But they’ve contacted our families by now, don’t you think? We should call them ourselves to do some damage control.” Nate hands me his cell phone and turns onto a road that will lead us quickly to the thruway. “I want to get moving but we can stop at a rest area later, and then I’ll try Keira.”

  It feels weird to be holding Nate’s phone. I instantly think about how much time it spends in Nate’s pocket, and then try to unthink that.

  “You seem to have this all figured out,” I say.

  “Well, you got us out of Aikya Lodge. I figured, the least I can do is fill in some gaps.” He smiles sideways at me.

  “So what’s next, Captain?”

  “We can be in the city in two hours. We’ll meet up with Keira, take it from there.”

  “Have you ever driven in the city?”

  Nate’s smile vanishes. I see his upper arms tense under the fabric of his forest green T-shirt. “No.”

  “Have you ever even driven on the thruway?”

  “A few times. With my grandparents in the car. Just chill, okay? I can be a rock star driver if you stop making me nervous with questions about it.”

  “Can I make you nervous with questions about something else?” Nate warily lifts his eyebrows. “What if we can’t find Keira before tonight? Should we just come home?”

  Truth is, I’m embarrassed that I’m asking all this now instead of anticipating it from the beginning. I was focused on getting out and had faith that the rest would fall into place.

  “I’ve got someone to call, if it comes to that. Remember Dylan Boone? He graduated two years ago? Now he’s at NYU.”

  Dylan Boone, another swim team star.

  “Is he the one who came out of the closet, like, two days after he left Mountain Ridge?”

  “Surprising absolutely no one,” says Nate. “He’s a good guy. We’ve kept in touch. I’m sure we can crash at his dorm room if we have to.”

  Dylan Boone, who could have gotten an athletic scholarship to any college he wanted, but chose to go to school in Greenwich Village. It gave me a new respect for him.

  “Who waits until they leave Mountain Ridge to come out anyway?” I wonder aloud. “I mean, honestly. We have our own Pride parade.”

  Nate and Felix shrug. After a few moments, it’s Rory who speaks.

  “There are a million reasons, Justine,” she says matter-of-factly, and suddenly I feel this surge of holy shit. Is Rory a lesbian? If she is, she’s done a genius job of hiding it, because we used to talk about kissing boys all the time. Rory was almost scientifically obsessed with this, creating what she thought was a hyperrealistic set of fake lips involving a balloon and hair gel. It would have been perfect if not for the taste of rubber.

  In the stiff silence that follows, I dial my mother. When she picks up and I say, “Hey, Mom,” and she says, “Justine,” in that way that really hits hard on the S, I know she’s already spoken to Leslie.

  I tell her the facts and only the facts: I’m fine, better than fine, and we’re going to the city and we’ll be back tonight or tomorrow and this is Nate’s phone but don’t call it unless there’s a really, really good reason to.

  “Okay?” I ask. There’s no answer. “Okay,” I say then. Not as a question, but as a good-bye.

  I hang up and offer the phone to Felix, who shakes his head. “Not ready yet,” he says. “Ana will be running the Dominican Curse Marathon by now.”

  But he takes the phone and hands it to Rory, who starts dialing.

  Olivia has only two caseless CDs in her car and they’re both awful, but Nate has thought to grab not just his phone and charger but also the cable to plug it into the stereo system. His seamless integration of Road Trip Entertainment into our quick getaway—impressive. Once we’ve gone through the tollbooth at the Mountain Ridge exit and are headed south on the thruway, Nate hands me the cable.

  “There’s a playlist on there called Away Meets,” he says. “I listen to it on the team bus. It’s a good place to start.”

  I start scrolling through his phone, pretending to be looking for the playlist but really just checking out his music library. Nate’s taste falls squarely in the Not Bad to Incredibly Incredible range.

  “The soundtrack to Grease?” I ask. I expect him to be embarrassed, but he just smiles and shrugs.

  “I’m a T-Bird at heart.”

  I laugh, but Rory and Felix don’t join me.

  “Actually, it was Felix who first got me into that movie. Remember, dude?”

  Fel
ix looks out the window, presses his nose to the glass so it goes crooked and reminds me of a Picasso painting. “Yeah, I remember.”

  The pain evident on Felix’s face brings me back to reality. Nate hurt him, so bad he had to bait new companions with apple cider donuts.

  I turn back to the phone, find the playlist Nate’s talking about, and press the play button. The music fills the car, seeps into the awkward empty spaces between the four of us. It feels a little like oxygen. I can breathe more easily. So I take out the camera and start shooting again.

  Here are the familiar landmarks that mean we’re headed away from home, south toward something interesting. A horse farm. A billboard advertising a nearby water park, which stays up year-round and always depresses me in winter. We can’t see our ridge anymore, just distant hills that belong to other towns.

  I swivel around to get a shot of Rory. She’s found one of Olivia’s fashion magazines on the floor of the backseat, the pages rumpled, the skin of the cover celebrity mottled with red slushie stains. From Rory’s look of concentration as she reads, you’d think she was studying Tolstoy.

  Felix has closed his eyes. I’m pretty sure he’s just pretending to sleep.

  Nate bobs his head to the music and seems more relaxed about the highway driving, a light-years-away look in his eyes. If I were Leslie, I’d ask him what he’s thinking about. But I’m just me. I suddenly understand this about myself: I like to watch. I like to let the thing I see through the lens tell me whatever it wants to say.

  FIFTEEN

  SOLOMON TOWNSEND MEMORIAL REST AREA. 2 MILES.

  Yeah, someday I should look up who these people actually are.

  “Let’s stop here,” says Nate. “I’d like to call Keira.”

  Once we’ve exited the thruway and pulled into a parking space, Nate turns to me, then holds out his hand for the phone, which I had been holding. I give it to him. It’s strange to have this silent language between us.

  “Here goes,” he murmurs. We’re all quiet as he dials Leslie’s number. We can hear the ringing on the other end. Ringing and ringing. “Should I leave a message?”

  I shake my head. Now we hear Leslie and her voice mail greeting. It doesn’t seem right to be leaving messages for Keira on Leslie’s phone, even if Keira could retrieve them.