You Look Different in Real Life

by Jennifer Castle

  “Come on,” says Nate finally, scrambling up and nudging my shin with his foot. “I hope you were serious about the bagels.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I bet you forgot you have this,” says Felix, clutching the iPod and reaching to turn up the volume on the car stereo. He’s riding shotgun next to Nate, who’s behind the wheel.

  Now here comes classic David Bowie through the speakers. Those first powerful electronic chords, instantly tapping your inner pipeline, not wasting time with any slow buildup. Nate laughs and just says, “Shit, yeah.” Felix beams at him and turns to look out the window, nodding to the music. I’m about to ask whether this song is called “We Can Be Heroes” or just “Heroes,” because I’ve never looked it up, but I don’t want to interrupt this silent conversation between them.

  I peek through the camera’s viewfinder—I’m back to using this rather than the LCD display, there’s something much more immediate about it—and frame a shot of the East River on our right, sunlight bouncing off the water, a bridge in the middle distance. The song provides the perfect soundtrack, the car traveling at the exact speed of its rhythm, and I keep recording even though the second battery’s starting to run low. Rory sits next to me, and Keira’s on the other side of Rory. We’ll be home in ninety minutes.

  After Nate and I left the playground, after we came back to the apartment with bagels, after we all ate and washed up and called our parents to let them know we were still alive and well and on the way home, we sat on the steps of the building while Keira said good-bye to Mrs. Jones.

  “You don’t want to stay for a little while?” Nate asked her. Keira shook her head, lacing her fingers a little awkwardly through her mom’s hand. “There’s time now,” she said. Mrs. Jones did not take her eyes off Keira once in a three-minute period, and I know this because I was filming it.

  All morning, Rory kept glancing at me when she thought I couldn’t see her. I’m not sure what to do about that.

  Keira has fallen asleep and Nate and Felix are quiet in the front seat. I’ve set the camera down so I can just stare out the window, too tired to think about anything except the scenery. When the song changes to something much slower, Rory taps me on the leg.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Can you turn on the camera?” she asks.

  I take off the lens cap and slip my hand back in the strap, press record, and look at her expectantly.

  “Last night you said you were sorry about blowing me off. About our friendship.”

  “Yes,” I say. I’m not sure where she’s going with this, but I keep the shot framed on her, her face so close and unfiltered.

  “How do you know I wouldn’t have gotten sick of you at some point?” She asks this scientifically, with no accusation. I can tell Felix and Nate are listening intently but neither of them turns around.

  “Maybe you would have,” I say. “Maybe you would have dumped me.”

  “That wouldn’t have happened. You were my only friend. I was a difficult person to be with and still, you stayed around.”

  I realize she’s just trying to understand the situation. Looking at all sides in order to see it as a whole.

  “We’re just talking hypothetically here,” I urge. “Just pretend, like this is a story in a book or something.”

  Rory considers that. “If I had been the one to dump you, would you have wanted me to apologize?” she asks.

  “If I missed you as a friend, yes.”

  “And you would have forgiven me, if I’d done that?”

  “Yes . . . but, Rory, this is really about you. If you think we’re done and we should go back to ignoring each other, then I’m okay with doing that.”

  “But you’d rather not.”

  “No,” I say. “I’d rather not.”

  Now Rory bites her lip. “Me neither.”

  She leans in and hugs me, sideways and quickly, and on camera it looks weird because her face just gets closer closer closer, then disappears, then reappears. But actually, it’s perfect.

  I turn the camera off.

  “Did you get it all?” she asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Because that’s why I didn’t say it last night. I wanted to do it when you could shoot it. Because I know that’s better. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  Rory folds her hands into her lap and bows her head.

  “You know that email I sent you?” she suddenly asks, looking at the gross car floor mat. “When I heard you weren’t going to do the film?”

  “That was you?”

  She raises her head to look at me again, even more surprised than I am. “Yeah. I thought you’d figure that out right away.”

  “No, I assumed it was Felix.”

  “Oh. Well. It was me.”

  “You said we were part of a whole.”

  “We are. And I can’t stand missing puzzle pieces. Remember?”

  Now we look at each other and smile at the same time. One thing has closed and another has opened, and I’m not sure which is which, but it doesn’t matter.

  “I remember, Rory. I so totally remember.”

  It’s almost ten o’clock by the time we see signs for the Mountain Ridge exit. I can’t believe it’s still Sunday morning. The rest of the day may as well be the rest of my life, the hours unfurling with possibilities and uncertainty.

  The first stop is Keira’s. Nobody discussed this. It just seemed the obvious choice. When we pull up to the house, Mr. Jones steps out the front door wearing running pants, a sweatshirt, and sneakers, as if he’s not waiting for us at all but just on his way to work out. He takes a few steps forward, then stops at the last stone of the front walk.

  “Good luck,” says Nate to Keira.

  “I won’t need it,” Keira says with determination.

  She opens the car door and turns to glance directly at me, giving the slightest of smiles, before she climbs out. I don’t know what will happen the next time I see her. Will she say hi to me? Hug me? Ignore me completely? Any of these things seems possible. I guess I’ll just have to stay tuned.

  Keira walks slowly to her dad. Nate doesn’t back up right away. It’s only when Mr. Jones reaches out for her, not hugging but putting a firm and protective hand on her shoulder, maybe making sure she’s really there, and Keira nods, that Nate feels okay to leave.

  “Who’s next?”

  “May as well get this over with,” says Felix. “Although if anyone else is interested in a last-minute trip to, say, Canada, for about a month, I might be up for that.”

  I pat the top of Felix’s head as Nate drives deeper into town. We both know that, unfortunately, Felix is only half-kidding. The iPod has dialed up some melancholy one-hit-wonder from a few years back, so unoriginal it’s catchy.

  “I’m not sure why this is on here,” says Nate.

  “Uh, because you’re a tween girl at heart?” asks Felix, and they both laugh. I don’t think I’ve heard them laughing at the same time in years. It’s like pure glee, uncorked. At least, to me.

  But Felix gets quiet quickly as we pull onto his street, and he sighs.

  “One thing at a time,” says Nate, full of extra meanings.

  The car stops in front of the house and after Felix jumps out, I do too. Nobody’s come out of the house to greet us, which feels like an ominous sign.

  “I love you,” I say to him, and his eyes fill with tears. He circles me into a Felix bear hug.

  “You rattle my world,” he whispers.

  We let each other go and after he turns, I don’t see his face again. Just his slightly hunched figure under the backpack, carrying a keyboard case with both hands, moving reluctantly toward the front door. I think of how much farther Felix has to go, beyond that door and his living room and his parents and the disorienting maze of his own head. I wonder if it’s further than the rest of us have to go, or if it’s really just a question of direction.

  At Rory’s house, I exit the car along with her. Nate does too. Rory’s
parents rush outside and aren’t bound by paving stones, the way Mr. Jones seemed to be, but close the distance between themselves and their daughter as quickly as possible. There’s an instant three-way hug.

  Mrs. Gold draws away and smoothes Rory’s hair, then spots me over her shoulder. She’s not sure what to say or even how to react. Rory follows her gaze, then steps toward me. She slips her hand in mine and it feels just the same as it used to.

  “Justine made everything okay,” she says. I’m glad for all the ways this is true.

  “You should have seen her in the city,” I add. “So brave. Really strong.”

  Rory’s mom’s smile turns inward so she’s biting her lips, like she’s trying to contain something. “I knew she could be,” she says. Anything else Rory wants to share with her parents is totally up to her.

  Nate shakes hands with Rory’s mom, then dad, before they all turn and go into the house. Nate opens the driver’s door and pauses. Oh. Duh. He’s waiting for me to change seats so we don’t have a cab-driver-esque situation for the final leg of the trip.

  I climb into the front passenger seat, and he gets behind the wheel, and we are driving in silence again. It should take only a few minutes to get to Hunter Farms. I don’t want us to. I wish we could drive all day, although to where I have no idea.

  Do I want this because I don’t want to go home yet? Or do I want it because I want to be with him for a little while longer?

  Ugh, it’s so much easier to just stare out the window.

  “No more shooting?” asks Nate after a little while.

  “It doesn’t feel necessary right now.”

  That sounded kind of cryptic but Nate doesn’t question. We drive on.

  “The Cannibal Apple sign,” I say as we pass it.

  “That?” He thinks about it, then laughs. “Never saw it that way. You know, I’m the one who came up with the idea for that sign.”

  “I’ve felt sorry for that poor helpless fruit for, like, years.”

  “I was imagining a world where everything was apples. The creatures, the food, the buildings. It didn’t seem cannibalistic to me. Just . . . uncomplicated. I used to pretend I lived in that world, actually. I’d go out into the orchard and lie under a tree and see all of it. Felix too.”

  He pauses, clearly lost in the memory. Takes a deep breath in, then out.

  “God, I feel like I just got a piece of myself back. With him. Do you feel that way about Rory?”

  A rush of heat into my eyes, the middle of my forehead. I refuse to cry in front of Nate Hunter twice in one day. But I am able to say, “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  Now here we are at the driveway to the house, and Nate makes the turn more slowly than seems necessary. When he brings the car to a stop, he takes an extra few moments to put it in park, to pull up the parking brake higher than I’ve ever seen it go. We sit, watching the back of the house. Nobody comes out.

  “Mom works Sundays,” he says, “and my grandparents are still at church.”

  “Did you want them to be waiting by the door for you?”

  He shrugs. “I’m glad they trust me, I guess. Besides, now I can get Ratso all situated without having to do the whole permission thing first.”

  I pick up the backpack from where’s it’s been nestled on the floor of the front passenger seat and hand it to him. He slowly unzips it and peers inside.

  “It’s okay, little dude,” says Nate, then reaches his hand in to pet the rabbit. He turns to me. “Wanna come with us to the barn?”

  I answer by jumping out of the car.

  The barn is a few hundred yards behind the house. Inside, there are three stalls with goats, who appear way too excited to see us.

  “They think it’s time to go into the pens by the store,” he says. The goats watch him with their disturbing horizontal pupils and such a familiarity, I get the feeling he comes here more often than anyone knows. Nate leads me to a stall at the back of the barn. It’s empty and scrubbed clean.

  “Can you help me with some hay?” he asks, opening the stall door. We grab some from a bale on the ground and pile it into the stall. He puts the rabbit inside and closes the door. “You’ll have to hang here for a bit,” he says to Ratso. “I’ll be back with some food and water.” The rabbit just looks at the wall.

  We stand there in the middle of the barn, which smells like mildew and damp fur, and there’s this awful What next? hanging in the air between us.

  “Do you have a minute?” Nate finally asks.

  Yes, I have a minute. I have many. I have millions, for you right now.

  “I really need to get going. . . .” And why I say stuff like that at moments like this, I’ll never understand.

  “There’s just something I want to show you,” says Nate.

  He indicates with his head for me to follow him, and I do. Into a far corner of the barn, where wooden shelves contain animal feed and unlabeled metal cans. Nate grabs a ladder that looks like he made it as a kid with toy tools, and positions it against the wall of shelves.

  “Hold this,” he says, and I do. He climbs the ladder and with each step, I’m convinced it’s going to break and he’ll fall backward onto me. Which wouldn’t be a terrible thing, but probably best to avoid anyway. When he reaches the top shelf, he moves some containers aside and produces a rusted coffee can. It rattles as he climbs back down. I step aside as he makes the jump to the floor.

  “You asked me about the footage Lance gave me,” he says. He peels off the plastic lid and reaches in, pulls out a digital videotape. “This is it.”

  The way he holds the tape, clutches it really, tells me the emotions and experiences recorded on it haven’t worn off in the years it sat on a dusty barn shelf.

  “So, not destroyed,” I say.

  “I couldn’t. Even stuff like this, you can’t let go of.”

  The fact that he’s kept it, the fact that he’s showing it to me—I can’t imagine anything more intimate. Except this:

  “Here,” says Nate, holding it out on his open palm. “Take it.”

  “What . . . why?”

  “When you give the other footage to Lance and Leslie, give them this too. They’ll know what it means. It’s part of the story and I’m ready for it to be told.”

  I see how, at a certain point, keeping the tape could hurt a lot more than letting it go out into the world. I take it from him and slip it into the front pocket of my jeans.

  Silence. I stare at our feet and remember his sneaker tapping against mine on the playground. Any more animals to tuck away in their new homes? Any more coffee cans full of secrets?

  “I guess I should head over to Lance and Leslie’s. Give them their stuff back.”

  “Do you want me to come with you?”

  I do, but I don’t. “I think I need to go on my own,” I say, with genuine regret. He nods. He gets it.

  There should be more here. I don’t know who it’s supposed to come from.

  Finally, I just mutter, “See you,” and turn and walk out of the barn, resisting the overwhelming urge to look back.

  Outside, the light is extra bright, screaming at me like Find a way to stay longer, bonehead! After my eyes adjust, after I move through that cloud of regret, I turn the corner to the side of the barn and start walking back to the car.

  What will happen when we see each other at school? Will it be like nothing’s changed, when, in fact, everything has? I can’t imagine it another way. I can’t imagine how we could possibly keep things the way they are at this very moment. Or were. Because the moment is already over.

  “Justine!” calls Nate.

  I turn to see him rounding the corner of the barn toward me. Doing that walk-jog thing where you want to run but don’t want to run. He stops when he reaches me and takes a deep breath.

  “I forgot to say thanks. . . .” He holds out his arms. Without even thinking about it, I’m opening mine to him and then we are holding each other. I feel the familiar reflex to pull away but ignore it, becaus
e he’s not pulling away either. His shoulder, his neck, his ear. He’s so warm, and it could be that I’ve been cold my whole life.

  The hug lasts a few seconds and then Nate breaks apart first.

  “Thanks for what?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” he says, and we laugh. “I guess there’s just so much that wouldn’t have happened this weekend, if it weren’t for you.”

  I’m about to give him a You’re welcome but it feels like another lame-ass substitute for all the things I really want to say. Suddenly, I’m so sick of not saying them, and all the rest too. Sick of watching and not doing. Of wanting and not taking.

  “No,” I say.

  “No?”

  “This,” I say, and lean forward. I’m not sure what’s going to happen and I haven’t thought through the consequences. But now Nate’s leaning forward too.

  And here, his lips.

  His lips, which taste new yet familiar, scary but safe. It’s like taking off and landing at the same time. I give myself over to this blood-thudding rush of contradictions.

  My hands are in Nate’s hair and his hands are on the back of my neck. I’m unsteady on my feet and maybe he senses this, because suddenly he’s pressing me against the side of the barn and kissing me harder. I kiss back harder.

  After a few moments I open my eyes and see the ridge in the distance. The tower, straighter and taller than ever, watchful and protective. Always staring back.

  When Nate finally steps away from me, I feel shaken loose.

  “Whoa,” he says.

  “Is that good?”

  “That’s good.”

  We move back toward each other and meet halfway, and kiss again several times quickly, as if to get in as much as we can before this good wears off.

  “Can you stay awhile?” he asks, his voice a little wobbly.

  I don’t know how to deal with what just happened, so my old impulses take over. “I should go do what I have to do. Lance and Leslie, then home.”