Extra Life (2 page)

(See, I was just about to toss y’all a
Back to the Future
reference, how I was running late that morning and sorry I couldn’t hitch a skateboard ride off the back of a truck like Michael J. Fox. Except that zinger would’ve went
woosh
, right over your head, even if you did catch the movie. Because where you come from, it’s not called
Back to the Future
. It’s called
Spaceman from Pluto
, starring Eric Stoltz, and it was stinker nobody bothered to go see.)

So, yeah. That morning, late for school but not in any hurry. I wasn’t going to sweat it, even on a muggy coastal morning dusted all over with pollen. I’d been in way worse trouble than a tardy slip. Like especially that trespassing and vandalism arrest that got me tossed out of public school in the first place. What a punishment, right? Kinda-sorta expelled, forced to enroll in an exclusive private school that’s as ritzy as Cape Fear gets.

But that was two years back, my freshman year, and I was now fully rehabilitated, partly because of the positive influence of my best friend, Conrad Bower. And Conrad’s house was where I was headed that morning.

I found him pacing the creaky wood floors of his plantation porch, adjusting his shouldered backpack because the thing was ballooning with junk. His house was in the antebellum district off Market Street. An imposing house with peeling white paint, it was shadowed by trees strewn with Spanish moss like a creepy text font. Way too much house for just my man Connie and his mom, but it wasn’t supposed to be just the two of them.

“Crap, Russ, crap—we’re late,” he said to me, all White Rabbit. My full name is Horace Vale,
Horace
after my maternal great-grandfather, a dusty history hand-me-down.
Russ
was better, a sleazy Seventies exploitation filmmaker name. The kind of name even dogs could pronounce.

“You could’ve taken off without me, you know,” I told him.

“No, not hardly. How many times did you press snooze?”

“I don’t know—two or three?” I said.

“And what time did you get up?”

“I don’t know—seven-fifty?”

“That doesn’t add up,” he decided. “Your alarm is set for seven and each delay is nine minutes, so two or three delays—”

“I get it. My math sucks, and we’re late for school, so let’s move.”

Connie made it all the way down two porch steps before he stopped and said, “I mean, what if it was something serious that held you up, an accident or something, and you needed my help? I’d want to know. Or you’d get here and I wouldn’t be around. What would you think? ”

On the sidewalk, I did my best
let’s-go
lean.

But then Connie did it anyway, his usual deal. He scurried back up the steps, jiggled the doorknob to check that it was locked. This time of day, his mom was still gone on her nursing shift at New Hanover Regional, so it was Connie’s job to make sure the house was secure.

He hesitated, as usual, unlocked the door, and told me he’d be right back. He would now comb through his house testing window locks, oven dials, the freezer door—
check, check, check
—making sure he hadn’t forgotten any book, pen, or touchscreen device he could’ve conceivably shoved into his backpack.

Every morning, I was supposed to budget time for this. It used to irritate the crap out of me, but we all have our morning rituals. Mine was fixing a hot mug of coffee for my dad and marching it up the steep attic steps to his office, where he’d be slumped asleep over his desk in front of a triptych of computer monitors, debugging software.

This chore started two months earlier after Dad was laid off from his techie software job at Rush Fiberoptics, where he applied Game Theory and Quantum Mechanics to software applications. What was still sci-fi in reality my Dad could make doable in cyberspace—prototype trial runs for the eventual real deal, when the tech finally caught up to his imagination. He was freelance now—and by
freelance
I mean just farting around for free.

I’d wake Dad with the java delivery, then head back down to the kitchen for a kale smoothie debriefing with Mom, fresh from her dawn jog. We’d consult the giant white board where our weekly schedules were laid out in marker, moment by moment. Dry-erase marker, but if I dared to actually erase anything, I risked being sentenced to a five-mile jog-along with Mom.

Every morning the same, like
Groundhog’s Day.

So now, while I waited for Connie to finish indulging his OCD, I fished my cell from my cargo shorts and scanned the recent texts. All seven were from Connie, minutes before I arrived.
Russ, dude, where r u?
and so forth.

It always gave me a chill, reading an old text after you’ve already talked to the sender, you know? A strange blip in time—the past flashing back on you. Like how my grandma still had Grandpa talking on her answering machine message, even though he died five years ago.

Brooding too much on the shadowy side of things could make you downright mental, like my friend Conrad here. His house-check compulsion was a thing I didn’t bitch about or chide him for because it had to do with his dad. Connie’s father wasn’t holed away in an attic like mine. He was dead—Afghanistan, helicopter—and these safety checks were how Conrad fit that terrible fact into place, every morning of his life.

I couldn’t imagine what it was like, even if Connie and I were close. He and I might not have even been friends if I hadn’t at first been paying penance for a shitty prank I played on him once, and also if we weren’t both such ridiculous movie buffs, especially the classic ones before CGI spoiled all the fun of questionable practical effects. We weren’t Luddites—I mean, we caught all the latest stuff, but we’d also seen
Evil Dead III:
Army of Darkness
so many times we could play dialog karaoke with the mute on. “
Klaatu Barada Necktie”
and etcetera.

(Connie would mention that gibberish
Evil Dead
line is actually a reference to a major plot point in a Fifties space-robot movie called
The Day the Earth Stood Still
. We could do this all day, really, but you can just add these movies to your queue for later.)

We barely ever watched a movie apart, and we hardly ever skipped our three-hour post-credits debate, even after the crappiest flicks. Sometimes we even recorded our own commentary tracks. Yep, we were
that
in love with our own opinions—especially Connie with his plot logic nit-picks, his
“how could the mother possibly not remember giving birth to twins, especially if one was a werewolf?”

The difference between us was, I was a wannabe filmmaker. I loved the indie/hand-held/slice-of-life/stark reality stuff, the grassroots, DIY, guerrilla-shoot tactics. Connie was a fanboy who binged on sci-fi and fantasy, bursting with special effects and wonky philosophy—his current obsession being that
SyFy
show about the teens from all different time periods mysteriously awakening from cryogenic sleep inside the same boldly-going spacecraft. He had elaborate theories about how the show would turn out.

Honestly, I wasn’t exactly eager to earn my geek badge, not in a public ceremony, anyway, but at least Connie’s viewing taste was a step up from Cape Fear’s most popular current television output—the CW’s
Cape Twilight Blues.
It wasn’t even a horror show, just a teen soap opera, pretty much the first wholesome series they’ve made around here in years, if you think a bunch of snarky, back-stabbing, bed-hopping, twenty-something supermodels pretending to be teenagers is
wholesome
.

Over the last two seasons, just about every glossy magazine in the world had a cover spread of one of the six dreamy stars of
Cape Twilight
. Every dude I knew had a secret crush on the show’s lead actresses—Morgana Avalon or Clarice Louise-Best, or both, or neither, depending on the most recent episode.

I wish I was above all the hype. But in a town like Cape Fear, living that close to shimmering star power, when I saw Morgana or Clarice or even Bobby Keene-Parker in the flesh, squeezing oranges at the Harris Teeter or seated at a movie two rows behind me? It seemed like more than this town deserved, a permanent backstage pass. I always felt on the verge of breakout fame myself, and that’s exactly the type of hunger that can turn you into a cannibal.

And I had the taste for it, bad. Like, when I think about the first home video I ever shot: eight years old, in the backyard with a setup on a tripod, and my dad’s supposed to be watching me. I got it all worked out. I’m fixing to jump off the roof onto a trampoline, then bounce into our pool, get it all on tape, send it to
America’s Funniest Videos,
and win ten thousand bucks.

Well, I hit the aluminum pool rim and broke my arm in two places. I edited out the part when I’m rolling around in agony, just so it would still be funny.
AFV
actually
did
run it, as part of one of those musical montages where they show twenty-nine other trampoline mishaps in thirty second. My
one second
of fame.

And no cash prize. Those only go to genius pets and slapstick babies.

Sorry, I took a few detours there. Let me wind us back to the starting point.

So, time’s ticking, and finally Connie stumbled back out of his house looking dazed. The humidity was already making his glasses slip down his nose. “Ready?” he said, like
I
was the hold-up. For an answer, I slapped a rolled stack of printed pages to his chest. Three-hole punched, clasped with two brads. Connie grabbed it, gulping melodramatically.

The pages were my original short movie script, a dialog sketch with just two actors. My big Broadcasting class project. Connie was going to play a fictional guy planning to triumphantly pull off the same motorcycle stunt that killed his daredevil father. The scenario goes like this: he’s having lunch one last time with his female friend since Kindergarten, he’s desperate to tell her that he’s in love with her, that he’s doing the jump for her, because it might be his last chance to spill his guts, but she’s too wrapped up in her college scholarship prospects to notice his inner crisis—you get the idea.

This video project was the only school assignment that got me pumped, made me wish I could fast-forward through the day and get the camera rolling. It was going to be my contest entry for the internship at Silver Screen Studios, my
future
.

“Your lines are all highlighted in green,” I told Connie.

“We’re really going to go through with this?” he said, leafing through the pages. His brown and white bowling shirt would have to settle for his costume, since there was neither time nor budget for a change.

“Right after school. I got permission to shoot at The Silver Bullet and everything.”

“Shoot what bullet?” he asked.

“The
diner,
the one called The Silver Bullet,” I said. We’d been talking about it for weeks.

I knew what Connie was doing. He was just hoping if he pretended the planning never happened, the inevitable would just disappear. But I wasn’t about to back down. Yeah, I admit my dead-dad-daredevil storyline cut a little too close to Connie’s real-life tragedy. But all that was off-camera, since I didn’t have the budget or know-how to record the actual motorcycle stunt anyway.

Really, the stunt-boy character was more me than him, or at least a mash-up of the two of us. Besides, acting out the part would be good for Connie, therapeutic. He’d already agreed in theory. I wrote this part for him, to
help
him, and he knew it.

“Just study your lines. You don’t need to act. You just need to
be.
”

“But who’s going to do the other part, the girl?”

“Leave that up to me. This thing’s in the can by sundown.”

He wasn’t really listening. Something else seemed to be on his mind. He shot a glance back toward his second-story bedroom window.

“You locked the front door, Connie, I promise.”

“No, it’s not that,” he said. “More like—déjà vu. Like we did this before.”

“It’s just performance jitters,” I assured him, and off we went.