Last Night at the Circle Cinema (11 page)

“Burying a body, I hope,” Codman said.

“Not quite,” Bertucci said but didn't elaborate.

••••

I listened again for footsteps in the movie theater but heard nothing except the
ping ping ping
of rain dripping onto metal. The air conditioning vents outside, maybe. What would they put here after they tore the place down? How long would the building stand here, empty? How would we explain all the nights here, this night in particular, after there was nothing left standing to prove anything?

Footsteps again.

“You know I can hear you, right?” I shouted, and I tried to make my voice angry instead of scared. I was good at taking care of other people, but I hated the idea that I might need that too. The footsteps were heavy, the kind made with boots like the ones Bertucci wore. I always thought those boots made him look like a Beatle or at the very least English but were actually steel-toed, which I knew from the time he'd gotten over-enthused at a bowling alley and kicked through the wall. I whipped around, sure I would see him in the brown boots, his head tilted to one side, his gray eyes eerily glowing.

But he wasn't behind me.

“Codman!” I yelled and then paused to give him a chance to answer me. Without thinking, took out my phone and texted them both.
This isn't funny.
I waited for a reply.

Codman pinged me back.
Is it supposed to be?

I shrugged even though no one could see me do it and thought about things that were supposed to be fun but weren't. When I was younger, my older brother had made me go on roller coasters with him. I'd gone because I didn't want him to be alone, even though they terrified me and I loathed the physical sensation of moving so fast. I had no intention of going on another one when Codman and Bertucci had planned the Senior Skip Day. The class had left Brookville campus in early May for National Bank Pavilion Park, a combination waterslide and amusement park where I'd planned on eating cotton candy and sitting on my butt while everyone else sprinted from one sickening ride to the next.

Other people found amusement parks enthralling, the kind of fun that required shrieking and jumping up and down with excitement. “I'm just not feeling it,” I'd told Bertucci.

“Anhedonia,” Bertucci said. “I am familiar with the concept. The inability to experience pleasure from activities usually found enjoyable.”

I wrinkled my forehead. “It's not that bad,” I'd said and laughed, which made Bertucci frown. Maybe he'd thought we'd shared that idea. “I just don't want to ride the Big Twister or Thumper.” I pointed to the enormous looping coasters on the far edge of the park.

“What do you want to do?” Codman asked.

“Something safe. Bumper cars?”

So we ran there, and I had expected to drive and bump, but Bertucci couldn't just experience the ride as it was. He'd used the bumper cars to explain Newton's three laws of motion.

“First law! Every object in motion continues to be motion and every object at rest continues to be at rest unless an outside force acts upon it.”

“How about three laws of shutting up?” Codman hackled but Bertucci ignored him.

He wedged his bumper car against Codman's, pinning him in a corner. “That, my short friend, is what I have just done to you.”

I swiveled my steering wheel. I'd chosen a bright pink car that was completely not my style but one my mother might have chosen for me: cheery, available, open.

“The greater the mass of an object, the harder it is to change its speed,” I yelled, and Bertucci clapped his hands in agreement, encouraging commentary from onlookers.

“Livvy's got quite a brain, y'all,” Bertucci shouted.

I blushed, but the truth was I liked it. I enjoyed being in a car that wasn't my color and having someone feel so strongly about me—and science, I guess—that he had to yell about it. I looked at Codman. He was kind of helpless in the corner, still stuck, and kept getting slammed by all of the other cars who found his entrapment hysterical.

Bertucci's eyes were electric as he stood up in his purple glittery car, defying the amusement park rules about keeping your seat on the seat at all times. “Newton's third law! Gather 'round, friends .... For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

The attendant came over to yell at him, and I cringed as though it were my fault. But Bertucci talked faster, knowing our ride was nearly done. He leaped from one car to the next, finally landing on mine. I gripped his ankle so he'd stay.

“If two of these fine bumper cars are traveling at the same speed and carrying the same amount of weight and they hit,” he began and squished himself next to me and took control of the wheel. “They will bounce off and move an equal distance away from each other.” He leaped up and all eyes were on him—he was the best show in town—and he'd managed to create this sort of jovial atmosphere. He bounced over to Codman's car, freeing it easily, which made Codman roll his eyes.

“Anyway, as my time here is limited I will close with this: based on the second law, if there's a difference in the amount of weight carried in these two cars, the car with less weight ... Livvy, that'd be you,” he said as he smashed into my car head on. “That lighter car will travel farther away from the point of impact than the car carrying more weight.”

I had wound up all the way on the other side of the ride, breathless, amazed at the whirlwind that was Bertucci. I was actually happy until we moved on to the roller coaster.

Bertucci explained the flume ride to me in physics and angles and degrees, so I went and semi-enjoyed myself. But I'd flat-out refused to go on the Big Twister. Bertucci and Codman had gone not once but three times, deep in discussion in between. I never knew what they were talking about; I didn't have time to ask, though it looked as though they were plotting something.

••••

On those rides I'd had to go on with my brother as a kid, I'd just talked to myself aloud to get through it, which was what I found myself doing at the Circle as I walked in my socks, wet clogs now in my bag. I found it comforting to ramble, to hear my own voice almost as proof that I wasn't stuck in Lakeville or on some coaster ride, that I was alive.

I texted back.
If it's not fun, why do it?
Only this time no one responded. It wasn't like I expected fun, exactly.

“I know how you feel, Bertucci,” I said to no one or everyone. “I get it. You hid your feelings. I did, too. We all did. Isn't that right, Codman?”

I said all of that loudly, waiting to see if anyone answered, but I didn't go into more details. The clock on the theater's wall ticked loudly, though I doubted it had the correct time. I wanted to talk about specifics, but I couldn't. About how I had cried to Marta in the middle of trying on graduation dresses. It was just too much. Bertucci. Codman. The funeral. Leaving. About waiting for a text or phone call from Codman these past weeks. None had come until the one asking if we were still going to meet tonight at the Circle.

Codman didn't answer my shouts, so I switched. I pulled the e-mail printout from my back pocket, my hands shaking. Unfolding it, I studied the words again, reading aloud.

“Hey, Bertucci!” I said instead. “I'm here now. I've stuck it out so far. Now what?”

No one answered. I could envision Codman unloading his inner demons onto Bertucci, Bertucci listening. Was it possible for them to gang up on me? Was that the downfall of triangular friendships?

I cupped my hands megaphone-style and tried once more. “Codman!”

Nothing.

I felt for my phone and texted Bertucci.

Do u know I read that book u not so cleverly left on my bedside table? In case you didn't know, we already have Goffman's books. Or, my parents do. And sure, yeah, everyone has their own definition of you. But you helped them create that!

Though I hadn't told him directly, I enjoyed Bertucci's markings, his notes in the margins. They were little peepholes into his brain—a place that always was kind of off-limits. Goffman's point was that we're all kind of actors. That we have props and costumes and everything. “
Think about those girls at school,
” he'd written, “
the ones at the center table in the caf, the ones using the same props as the others to try and blend.”
But I got the feeling that Bertucci's goal wasn't that.

I kept texting him.

U want to appear the same to everyone, B, but u can't. U can't control your audience, don't u know that?

Bertucci's manic bouncing from one bumper car to the next, his pranks, it was all a ruse. A sideshow so distracting it made it impossible to focus on the real person putting it on.

I had the feeling, standing there in the murky abandoned Circle dankness, that I might be wrong. Maybe he could control us. Maybe I was doing exactly what he wanted all along. But there was more, all the stuff I had never told him. How I'd pictured kissing him, even going out with him, how I knew we would connect and then, ultimately, shatter. How his intensity frightened me, and I didn't think I could handle hurting him if it came to that.

After everything that had happened, I was left with knowing I loved them both. Entirely differently, but still. Did they know that? Would I ever be able to tell them?

I shook my head. I knew the answer.

17

Codman

The murky Exit sign glow illuminated only the carpeted floor underneath it. I paused there, looking at my shaking hands. Without seeing him, I felt Bertucci in earshot. “Come on,” I said. He didn't answer. “It's the last night,” I reminded him. “Show yourself.”

Slowly, he appeared from behind a corner, more in shadow than in front of me. He knew it was the end, maybe, and couldn't figure out how to leave.

The thing I couldn't wrap my head around was this idea that everything we did in high school, anything I had done up until now, would end. Papers, tests, long-term projects, even high school itself. And yet we were expected to show up every day. When I stood looking at the world map in Livvy's room—it took up an entire wall, and she had color-coordinated thumbtacks marking the places she'd been or wanted to go—I pictured her in all these backdrops, but somehow always without us. Bertucci would be all the way across the United States. And me—what the hell would I do? What would I ever do that was permanent?

“You know I know you better than anyone,” I told Bertucci. A month before, I'd watched him go through his room, packing things away, doing the pre-college cleanup.

“It's not a competition,” he said.

“I thought you said everything's a competition.” On the floor, just out of reach of my foot, I saw an object. Bertucci didn't push it to me, so I bent down and snagged it. “Ah, the
Brookville Baton
. What a stupid name.” Bertucci rolled his eyes. “I know, you explained it to me—the baton, the passing of one year to the next. Whatever.”

The yearbook weighed a solid two pounds and was filled with faces I'd never see again, but I held it anyway. In the back were the senior pages I couldn't bear to look at and ads that were semi-pathetic but paid for the much of the cost.

“So, I'm guessing you joined yearbook committee not for your college apps but just to get to me,” I said to Bertucci.

He nodded.

I flipped to the back to find the advertising page that got me to the Circle in the first place.

Had I forgotten? No. Not exactly. But I hadn't planned on showing up after everything that had gone down in May. But there it was, for all to see: The Plan, as we'd called it. Buried there, next to the Clock Shoppe and some sporting goods store no one went to anymore.

I felt in my pocket for a pen so I could draw something infantile on the candid shot the rest of the yearbook committee had stuck at the back, of Bertucci in the science lab. I'd seen it when I'd studied the book at my house, searching for evidence of what had happened to us this year. But now when I flipped to it, there was only a carefully cut-out window where Bertucci's face used to be.

“Why'd you do that?”

Bertucci hardly looked at me.

I thumbed through the black-and-white pages, the few color shots, the underclassmen in group shots, people I'd never know or never have anything in common with except attending the same school. “I didn't even get in the candids.”

“Score one for me.”

“I thought you said it wasn't a competition.”

Bertucci crossed his arms and looked at me. “I lied.”

We used to put on fake coaching voices, giving each other lame pep talks (“You're gonna go in there and order pepperoni, and when you think you got nothin' left, you're gonna find a Sprite.”). I waited for him to use the voice now. “Anyway, you have nothing to worry about. You're an honorable guy. The key is to leave your mark on the world.”