Anywhere but Here (12 page)

I peer in the direction of her voice. She's facing the road, perched halfway down the slope of the ditch, her arms wrapped around her knees, a joint dangling from her fingers. “Are you sitting down there by yourself?”

“Like an island,” she says.

I look from her to the gravel road. I can't walk all the way home. I definitely don't want to go back to the party yet. It's been three months. Lauren must be over our breakup by now, no matter what Lex was hollering about. It would be a relief to talk to someone normal.

“Can I join you?”

She shrugs. “Free country.”

I take a running step to cross the swamp water at the bottom of the ditch. Once I'm settled, I turn to look at her more closely. This isn't the usual Lauren.

“Why are you staring at me like that?” she asks.

“It's a bit weird.”

“What is?”

“You sitting here by yourself, smoking pot.”

“I'm having a sit-in-the-ditch night,” she says, flicking a lighter and taking a long drag as if to prove herself.

“You don't smoke.”

“I do now. It's relaxing.”

“Where are your friends?”

“Who knows?” she says, with a smirk that should belong to someone else. Someone more sardonic. Me, for example.

“Lex was causing a bit of a scene at the party back there.”

Lauren sighs. For a few minutes, she tries unsuccessfully to blow a smoke ring. “She's overprotective these days. Why does she think it's her job to look after me?”

I have no answer for that. Taking Lauren's joint from her lips, I attempt my own smoke ring. I'm a spectacular failure. They can probably hear me hacking from the next town over.

When I can breathe again, we listen to some guys shouting from the party, followed by a loud, rolling laugh that seems to bounce over us and down the road.

For a while, I fool around with my camera's night vision and Lauren tries to blow smoke rings on film. When a frog croaks from beneath our feet, we both jump and I almost send the camera flying into the mud. It croaks a second time, as if claiming the ditch for itself. Lauren was never a fan of slimy things, but she makes no move to leave.

“You're going to get dirty sitting here,” I say. I can already
feel dampness soaking through the seat of my jeans. “Your butt will be wet.”

“Don't care,” she says.

I squint at her. “Who are you, exactly, and what have you done with the real Lauren?” The Lauren I knew would need a gun at her head before she agreed to sit in the mud, let alone smoke pot.

“This is me. With a little extra thrown in.” She turns and puts a hand on my arm. “The real Lauren has changed,” she whispers. “Changing every day.”

She seems to think this is hysterically funny. I have to put an arm across her to keep her from sliding into the water. She wraps a hand around my arm and leans her head on my shoulder. Then, just for a second, I feel it: warmth, like one of those bonfire embers. It's not the spark of chemistry. It's more the familiar pressure of her skin and the comfort of knowing exactly where I am.

I let my cheek rest against the top of her head. Lauren and I could actually be friends. I could list her in the rolling credits one day. Maybe get her tickets to a red-carpet event. If she could get away from her husband and four kids for the weekend.

Maybe she's thinking the same things because neither of us moves.

Eventually, she says, “You know, Cole, life is about choices.” She punctuates her words with conductor-like waves of the joint.

“That's deep.”

She ignores my sarcasm. “Today, I had two choices. It was the very last day I had two choices. And you know what I did?”

“What?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

Apparently, I'm not good at ditch-sitting conversations. I have no idea what we're talking about. “So . . . tomorrow?”

“Nope. Tomorrow's too late. I didn't choose today, so now there's only one choice.”

“One choice,” I repeat. “And that is . . . ?”

“That is . . .” Lauren pauses. “Entirely my choice to make.”

This seems to be the end of the topic and I have to say, I'm a bit relieved. I'm not sure I could handle any more girl logic right now. Sometimes it's better just to sit. And touch shoulders. And breathe the night air with its trace of campfire smoke and be content to stay where you are. Even if that does happen to be in a ditch.

“I miss you,” she whispers after a while. Thankfully, it doesn't feel like a demand, the way it did in her living room a few weeks ago. It doesn't feel like an invitation or a complaint either. Just a statement. A simple statement.

“Me too,” I say.

“It wouldn't have worked, would it?” she says.

I shake my head.

I suppose I should move. Leaning against my ex-girlfriend in the dark is not a step toward separating myself or building my new, independent life. It's comfortable here, though. I stay, feeling the warmth of her arm against mine in the cooling air, until a car rounds the bend from the gravel pit and its headlights blind me.

Lauren sits up.

“Thanks,” she says, squaring her shoulders. She pats her hair. The headlights sweep across our bodies like prison yard searchlights, then the tires crunch to a stop on the gravel. Blinking the spots from my eyes and reclaiming my arm, I peer at the window. It's Greg.

“What are you guys doing out here?” he asks. He's looking only at Lauren. “Why are you in a ditch?”

So I'm not the only one who thought that was strange.

“We're . . . meditating,” she says.

He gives her a lopsided smile. “When a night has gotten that far, it's usually time to head home. You want a ride?”

She turns to me, and I shrug. What am I going to do? Invite her to continue sharing her ditch with me? Offer her a ride in Hannah's mom's Saturn?

“All right,” she says to Greg. “Very gentlemanly of you.”

“Hey—I was gentlemanly. Didn't I just save you from sliding into the mud a minute ago?”

She looks at me as if I've just mentioned her underwear in public. Standing, pausing to brush the dirt off her ass like the real Lauren would, she steps across the ditch and onto the road with only a mild waver.

“You're very sweet. Thank you,” she coos at Greg. Then she closes the car door and the wheels spin on the gravel and they're gone. Leaving me alone in the ditch.

Which may be where I belong. By myself in the dark, responsible for no one, with nobody expecting anything from me. As I ponder whether this ditch is my ideal habitat, another car rounds the corner. I stand when I recognize the Saturn. It skids to a stop just ahead of me, the window rolls down, and Hannah leans from the passenger seat.

“Cole! Climb in—we're going to Dallas's!”

Which is the last thing I want to do, but there are only so many routes out of a ditch near a gravel pit in the middle of the night. I end up squished beside Dallas and two giggling girls in the backseat.

Halfway to Dallas's house, one of the girls pukes.

I must have done something very wrong in a past life.

A couple weeks into the new school year, I have another counselor's appointment. Everyone gets one, just like every kindergartener gets a measles vaccine. I guess they're trying to inoculate us against our own stupidity.

I'm the lucky guy with his appointment booked just as people are switching classes, giving them plenty of time to gawk at me through the glass. Squirming a little, I remember what happened with Ms. Gladwell at our botched appointment last spring. The fall. The accidental embrace. Then Dallas walks by, pumping his fist at me. I turn purple.

“Did you research the film school?” Ms. Gladwell asks when
she emerges from the inner office. “And are you okay? You look flushed.”

I ignore that last part.

“I downloaded the application info. I'm supposed to submit a short film by January,” I tell her as she motions me inside.

It's time to get serious about this short. And I'm all fired up by a book I found about a Scottish guy named John Grierson. He wasn't from a big city, and he wasn't rich. He was smart as hell, though.

This is what Grierson did: met Robert Flaherty (the
Nanook of the North
filmmaker) in Hollywood; invented the word “documentary”; went home to Scotland and started a movement in support of documentary film; got invited to Canada to create a report on filmmaking; became head of Canada's new National Film Board; made all the Canadian news movies about World War II, controlling what tons of people thought about the war; built one of the biggest film studios in the entire world.

The whole time I've been reading his story, I've been trying to decide whether it's hopeful. Take one: Yes, his story's inspiring. We were both born to normal families in small towns, and so there's hope that I might eventually escape Webster and create a monumental film studio, help invent a genre, and/or possibly change the trajectory of all filmmaking.

Take two: Everything's already been done, Grierson was
way
more brilliant than I can ever hope to be, and I was born in the wrong era.

“A short film. Quite an undertaking,” Ms. Gladwell says. “What's your approach?”

I don't feel like explaining my Webster-as-web idea. It won't sound right, and she'll give suggestions, and I'll want to trash the entire thing.

Ms. Gladwell takes my silence to mean I need “guidance.”

“Let's brainstorm a little, Cole,” she says.

Or we could slice ourselves with razors. “That's okay. I'm working on some ideas. And I'm going to be late for class . . .”

“I'll write you a note,” she says.

Great. Perfect.
Please excuse Cole's tardiness. He was confronting deep-seated emotional issues in the counselor's office.

“Come on. Toss out some ideas,” Ms. Gladwell prods. When did she get so forceful? I peer at her. She looks different. More . . . rosy.

“Did you get your hair cut or something?”

“Nope.” She pushes a piece of paper toward me.

“If you're not ready to work on actual ideas, why don't we talk about the reasons you want to go to film school? Write a list. It doesn't have to make sense or look perfect. Just jot down whatever comes to mind.”

Why would anyone want to make docs? Unless you're
Michael Moore, it doesn't get you famous. Or rich. Just look at John Grierson. After building one of the world's largest film studios for the Canadian government, he got hauled in front of a tribunal because one of his secretaries turned out to have Russian spy connections. People accused Grierson of being a communist. Which was bad, in those days. Really bad.

I must look doubtful.

“Anything you want,” Ms. Gladwell says. “It can even be private. I won't look.” She turns toward her bookshelf and starts flipping through a text.

I pick up the pen. I draw a spaceship shooting at alien invaders.

Okay. A list. I may as well get it over with.

Leave Webster

Make money

Work with cool people

Escape Dad, girlfriend, paella

Give autographs

Meet hot chicks

She did say it was private. I glance over my notes, then up at Ms. Gladwell, who's pretending to be absorbed in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
.

I go back to my list. It's not going to cut it. Most of it's not even true.

I try again.

I think of why I love watching docs. Why my dad and I can spend an entire Saturday night watching the History Channel.

Show things in unexpected ways.

Show people things they wouldn't otherwise see.

Go behind appearances, to expose the truth.

Even a subject as ridiculous as a bear-proof suit can make you see things in a new way. I mean, Dad was right. That grizzly-obsessed guy was an idiot. But he was so passionate about his project that his friends tromped around in the mountains helping him test his ideas. And then he inspired another guy to pick up a camera and film the whole thing. Somewhere, in the footage of a guy flailing around in body armor, trying to achieve an unreasonable dream, there's a universal truth to be found.

“Let's see what you've got,” Ms. Gladwell says.

“Hey! You said it would be private.” This when she's already snatched the paper out of my hands.

“I lied,” she says. There's definitely something different about her.

“Well, I wouldn't go with the hot chicks angle in your application letter,” she says.

“It was a joke.”

“I think this is what you need,” she says, circling an entry. “Expose the truth. Are there filmmakers doing that now? People you admire?”

“Yeah. Some.” Expose the truth. It sounds so pretentious when she says it out loud. And yet . . . When I talked about Uganda, I wonder if Lauren and Greg would have understood better if I'd used those words instead.

“Well, even in Webster, things are often more complicated than they seem,” Ms. Gladwell says. “Everyone has a unique story.”

“That's sort of what I was thinking.” Or is it? My short is going to show the similarities in their stories, not the uniqueness. I'm exploring the ways in which they're all equally stuck.

Ms. Gladwell writes me a note on the distinctive pink counseling office paper. My deep thoughts about a meaningful film career go fluttering away as she hands it to me.

I can already hear Dallas as I pass the paper to the math teacher. “Hey, Owens, ya pregnant? Anorexic?”

I take the note reluctantly. “Thanks, Ms. Gladwell. You've been a big help.”

She looks tremendously pleased with herself.

•   •   •

After Canada gave him the shaft, Grierson went back to Europe and worked on films for a decade or so. As I sit with Greg in the school lobby during lunch hour, filming the general chaos around me, I'm thinking Europe might be a good destination. I should move to Paris. Or Munich. Rome.