Last Night at the Circle Cinema (10 page)

“Are you annoyed that we have no idea how it ends?” I asked Olivia.

She shrugged. “I guess. I don't know. I hardly watched.”

I'd had a credit at the Slice, which I guessed Bertucci knew about. He also knew that I loved a bargain, so the combination of my gift card and the Slice's Twelve after Twelve for Twelve made it all the more likely that I wouldn't say no, even though I'd told Lissa I'd be sneaking into her house.

I went to the bathroom—again—after ordering and came back to find Olivia and Bertucci mid-discussion.

“I think the question really, though, is whether they could actually do it,” Olivia said and grabbed a pile of white napkins from the dispenser. She was always taking more than she needed.

“Do what?” I had asked.

“You know perfectly well what I'm talking about,” Olivia said over her shoulder as she left to retrieve our twelve slices—no choices, just a dozen of whatever they had left before closing—from the counter.

I didn't, but I could guess. “Kill someone?” Olivia nodded. I opened my mouth to say something, but Olivia interrupted.

“Oh, please. Codman, you couldn't do it.”

I had slammed my hand on the table. “I fucking could.” Why had I felt the need to make that clear? Why was I competitive over a theoretical crime? “In myriad ways.”

Olivia grinned but also sighed. “Yeah, maybe, but you'd blab about it afterward. AND have to pee during it, so ... ”

“Could you?” I asked her, though we both knew the answer was obviously no.

We looked at Bertucci. The caustic fluorescent lights bore down from directly above the table, shadowing his eyes.

He took a slow, deliberate breath. “You know, I actually think I could.”

“We know you could plan it,” I said, and Olivia nodded, the same terror in her eyes as when the butcher in
The Rashomon Effect
had wielded his cleaver.

“No, I know you know that part,” Bertucci had said. “I guess what I'm adding to that is I believe I have the ability to do it.”

15

Bertucci

“It sounds kind of labor-intensive,” Livvy said as she grunted. She was whacking the ball against the practice wall by the courts at school, her arms tense. She was so focused.

“Yeah, but it's worth it in the end,” I said. I sucked a little enjoyment out of watching her effort on the court. She excelled, and I had always found that alluring.

She was out of breath and came over to me panting. “So we—and by ‘we' I mean ‘you'—pick a phrase.”

“Right. Well, which is scarier? ‘I know' or ‘We see you'?” I asked, studying her eyes. She never wore makeup, and her eyes were bright against her flushed skin. She had a pimple forming on her chin and she reached for it, scratching at it and leaving a mark.

“‘We see you' is too summer campy, like a peephole or something. ‘I know' is ambiguous and definitely scary.”

“So we break into his bathroom at home and write ‘I know' on the mirror in Vaseline.”

“Vaseline?”

“Because he won't see it if we do it with a light touch—until he showers, at which point the steam will bring up the message.”

“What about his vent fan? You know Codman's anal about stuff like that.”

“I'll disconnect it. It'll take weeks before his parents can agree on who should be responsible for calling an electrician.”

Livvy nodded, sitting next to me on the bench. Our legs touched, and I could feel the heat from her on my knee and thigh. Did I think about making a move? I wish I could say that I did, but by then I'd moved on from anything like that. “And then we do the same on his car window or something?”

I went on to explain how I'd create an e-mail account and text or e-mail all day with the same message. How I'd get a few people in my college classes to call him too. “He won't recognize their voices.”

It wasn't a particularly good prank, but if Livvy noticed my efforts were slipping, she never said as much. I was already into UC–Berkeley, and everyone had seen the newspaper article about my scholarship and grant, so she knew I was able to slack off. I was keen to prank Codman mainly because it would give me an excuse to see him a bit—even if he didn't know that I was there. He'd been distant, spending time with Lissa, which I thought was a waste because he'd told me it wasn't anything real, nothing but easy and physical. Plus, it was clear to me that he had feelings for Livvy, the kind he'd regret not acting on as an adult. I didn't want him going through life wishing he'd done things differently.

I looked at Livvy in the early spring light, her hair matted with sweat, tennis racket on her lap as she strummed it like a guitar and sang. I found it difficult to believe that anyone wouldn't have feelings for her.

The clearest reason for loving Olivia wasn't how she looked, although that didn't hurt. The main reason I found her irresistible was how competent she was at almost everything. Yes, she got As and played tennis on a competitive level, and she could sing not just in tune but so sweetly it felt like a pickax to the heart sometimes. If my mother vomited—and she did after the chemo—Livvy just dealt with it. And if Codman suggested hiking Killer Hill one afternoon, Livvy, in no more than flip-flops, would succeed, often beating us to the top. She didn't even ask for accolades, which I know I admired because so much of the work I did got reviewed or published or graded. Despite the fact that certain things came easily to me—research or escalators or applied physics or test-taking—they never felt easy. My whole system required work. It was exhausting.

“She's like competence porn,” Codman had said, and I'd wanted to object because mentioning porn and Livvy in the same sentence seemed disrespectful, but on the other hand, Codman was right.

“Do you resent her?”

“How can you resent greatness?” Codman, who had been next to me on Killer Hill, had said as he watched Livvy scale a rock face and wave, her cheeks the color of Braeburn apples. She was great and honest.

In light of this, I shouldn't have been surprised that Livvy had told Codman about the prank before it was fully executed, and he'd just written it off. Looking back, it shouldn't have shocked me that Livvy also excelled at such a gruesome conversation like the one the three of us had had in the pizza place.

“Obviously, you could do the disappearing weapon trick, with an icicle or something,” Livvy had suggested, discussing murder as if we were going over game theory. “We get these huge ones hanging from the eaves outside my bathroom.”

“God, Livvy,” I said, and my tone was somewhere between condemnation and excitement.

Codman spoke up. “Is it bad that I find you sexy when you talk like that?”

“God, Codman,” I said. “You find girls who talk about industrial mold appealing—of course murder has you reeled in.”

Codman grinned. He padded his pizza with one of the useless waxy napkins that came out in clumps from the dispenser. “Maybe the key is to make it look accidental.” He looked from Livvy's face to mine as he folded his slice in half and shoved a big mouthful in. “Open for debate—did she fall or was she pushed kind of thing.”

Livvy reached for another piece of the broccoli and garlic.

“Aren't you eating, Bertucci?” Codman asked.

“It's called gluten, Nutlump,” I said.

“It's called I-bought-you-a-Greek-salad, douche,” he said back. He didn't say Nutmotor or Nutbutter.

“Oh, right. Sorry.” I took a forkful but let it hover near my mouth. I wasn't hungry after the stunning amount of Twizzlers I'd put away, and my appetite wasn't great at that point to begin with, which I figured at least Livvy understood. She had the grace not to mention that Twizzlers contained gluten anyway.

“I'll eat it if you don't want to,” she said and took the fork from my hands, letting the feta and lettuce fall into her mouth. “I think there's another part of this you'd have to consider,” she said.

This was something else I liked about her; she was always evaluating, wondering if she was missing something. Most of the time she wasn't. Codman beat her to the punch.

“I'm right there with you,” he said. “The thing you'd have to decide is who—if anyone—you tell.”

16

Livvy

I unrolled my ugly athletic socks from their little ball and slid my feet into them. If you play competitive tennis, you always have extra socks—and maybe some grip tape or sunstick—on you at all times. Immediately, I felt a bit warmer and a bit better, though that feeling of ease evaporated when I heard footsteps at the end of the hall.

“I know you're there!” I yelled, not sure if I was yelling to Codman or Bertucci or even some other person who could have chosen tonight of all nights to investigate the Circle's abandoned innards. “Codman!” I said. And then, “Alex!”

It wasn't the first time the three of us had gone to some relic of a place. Bertucci had a fondness for abandoned places. Those photos online of wrecked hotels, deserted theme parks with giant clown heads on their side, gardens sprouting where they shouldn't, half-built subdivisions left to rot—Bertucci could get lost in those for hours.

On the way to my parent's house on the beach, we stopped in Lakeville only because Bertucci had read about Kiddie Land, a park that had never been finished. But what we found was a tony assisted-living development called Mahogany Way, with a sign that boasted “Learning in Your Golden Years!” That inspired us to sing the Beatles' “Golden Slumbers” in such harmony in the slim sunshine that I got teary and had to turn away.

“Where are my ghouls?” Bertucci asked when actual people had waved. “Lakeville, you disappoint.”

Codman and I hoped Lakeville might be the sister town to our industrial Brookville. But it wasn't.

It was like the town that time forgot, with a diner made from an old train car with prices that suggested entire decades had passed, plus real grilled cheese and malts. There was a general store with an overgrown lake in back. There were out-of-date vehicles parked—or abandoned—by the crooked sidewalk. A discarded beach ball, colors long sun-bleached, blew from one side of the road to the other as though kicked by a ghost.

At the general store, Codman had wanted veggie jerky, which I'd insisted they wouldn't have.

“You are such a small-town snob,” he'd said to me and marched up the wooden plank steps. The store was all shifted angles, falling in on itself, though it was fully stocked with beer and bologna in waxy packages and gum and candy in fruit crates by the old-time cash register. Of course Codman hadn't been able locate any item that was certified vegan, so he settled on a splotchy banana. He held it but didn't eat it as we left the store and wandered to the back.

The lake sort of appeared out of nowhere, as though it had been a field that had flooded overnight and had never gone back to being the way it was.

Bertucci had rolled up his pants and waded in. “I grow old, I grow old!” he shouted. “See? Wearing my trousers rolled.”

I stared at him, not getting whatever reference he was making. Codman only shrugged.

“Enough poetry, Nutter,” Codman had said. “Now
this
is the perfect place for a murder.” He didn't join Bertucci in the water.

“Stop it,” I'd said, because I could sort of imagine it too clearly. Two guys, a girl, an empty diner, a dead body floating in a leech-infested lake no one would see for ages.

“Do your parents know where you are?” Bertucci asked in a thick English accent, his odd gray eyes narrowed. He hunched over, trailing his fingers in the murk.

“Of course,” I said, though they didn't. I'd wanted to surprise them at the house since they had accused me of not being interested in them anymore, which was partially true, and also they were too busy being angry with each other or overly polite, which was just as bad, and I couldn't stand being around either version. Another part—something they didn't want to see—was that I felt like I was too busy taking care of everything—them included—to dash off to the beach house for the weekend. My older brother had taken a job in Europe. I had exams and secret plans to do a gap year working in a hospice center, which I knew my mother would find depressing and therefore neg. And I was—at least I felt I was—taking care of Bertucci.

Codman had been retreating into Planet Lissa, spending less time with us, and Bertucci seemed like he was fading. Not miserable, exactly, but like old photos in the sun, hardly showing up at all. He moved slowly, lumbering as though he wore a knight's costume underwater, almost unable to shift his weight.

“Lakeville's just a town in the off-season,” I rationalized. “I bet in the summer it's all kids with dripping ice cream cones and sunblock everywhere. Myriad good times.”

“Band name,” Codman mumbled, almost by instinct. None of us elaborated.

I looked at the far side of the lake, but the few cabins that were there didn't look shuttered for the season, more like shuttered for eternity with something rotting inside. I shivered and jiggled my keys.

“I think there were actually Lakeville murders back in the 1970s,” Codman said. He put his hands on my shoulders, and had Bertucci not been there I felt sure I could have had the guts to turn around and kiss Codman. Again. But I didn't.

Instead I said, “There were no such things, and we are getting back in the car.”

My parents weren't even at the house when we got there. In fact they never showed up, which wasn't that unusual. My mom got paged to work, or my dad had some crucial meeting. Codman made tuna and pickle sandwiches for us with cans he found in the pantry, and just pickle and cheese for Bertucci, who came up from the beach with sandy hands and began to peel away the cheese from the bread.

“What were you doing?” I asked.