Last Night at the Circle Cinema (16 page)

I flinched when Codman used the word
unhinged
because it was a word I thought about in relation to Bertucci but never brought up for fear of how he'd react. Either he'd deny it and be pissed at me or agree and be sad, and neither of those options seemed like the way to go.

“You have a sort of Robin Hood complex,” I had said as I watched Bertucci sling his arm around a parking meter as though it were a friend of some kind.

Codman bent down to tie the laces on his Golas, the English indoor soccer shoes he eventually bought five stores after the incident at Ski 'n' Golf. They had fluorescent orange stripes on the sides that glowed even brighter in the early summer light.

“Can you believe this is our last June together?” Bertucci asked. We had only a couple of weeks left of junior year.

I had frowned, eager to disprove his statement. “Just because we graduate next year doesn't mean we won't be together in some way, shape, or form.”

The bookstore's awning unfurled with a mechanical whir, and someone unlocked the door from inside. “Do I have time to poke around?” I asked.

Bertucci shook his head. “No. Time is of the essence here.”

Codman sighed. “Well, this essence better involve food at some point.” He paused. “And a bathroom.”

“That's it,” I told Codman. “We're all chipping in and buying you your very own porta-potty for your birthday this year.”

“Don't get me anything,” Bertucci said. “Just continue these good deeds that we are about to put forth into the universe.” He patted his full pockets.

“Just how long are we waiting here, anyway?” Codman asked.

Bertucci didn't answer, but I followed his gaze across the street. The church steeple rose above the buildings, reaching high as though trying to puncture the white-blue sky. There was a huge clock on the face of the church, but I doubted Bertucci could see the Roman numerals from where we were.

Codman started humming “Phantom Limb,” and I started singing even though I never knew exactly what the lyrics were due to the fact that the Shins were hard-core mumblers.

And then, the minute the clock began to sound, we all stood at attention. Whether we knew it or not then, we took Bertucci's ideas seriously, almost reverently.
Bong. Bong
. Eight of them.

“Nine,” Bertucci said. “Go!”

“The key is to make sure no one has those minutes where they're searching for change, or wondering if their meter is going to expire while they're in getting dog food or at the ATM,” Bertucci told us. He was out of breath, already starting to sweat, the dark spots freckling his red T-shirt.

Armed with parking cards, quarters, dimes, and just enough nickels for the older meters by the library, the three of us worked like synchronized swimmers, filling meters, leaving the photocopied note on the windshield, and dashing up side streets to follow Bertucci's hand-drawn map he'd made the night before, while Codman was at his house presumably asleep and I was very much not asleep due to Bertucci's numerous texts reporting his progress.

He'd done his research with the town's layout but not where the meters were or how they varied by rate or credit card or Brookville parking pass. Plus, we all knew that the first Saturday in June was the busiest shopping day; stores had their sidewalk sales, the church bake sale kept families coming in droves until every last Krispy Treat and poorly-constructed M&M cookie was sold. Nine hours of work.

“I hope this pays off,” I told Codman as he systematically pinched coins from a bag Bertucci had given him and pressed them into twin meters.

“I thought we were just doing this to be nice, not for profit,” Codman said.

“Ah, Codman, my young friend,” Bertucci had said, “Don't you know by now everything has a price?”

“But not necessarily,” Codman said. “Read the note.”

“I did,” I said. “At three in the morning.”

“The key is to turn off your phone, Olivia,” Codman told me. “He can't get to you if you don't have it on.”

Bertucci coughed. “Ahem. I am right here. And also? I can get to you both at all times. I'll haunt you when I'm gone. Anyway, Liv, you only read the early draft.”

He handed me one of the bright yellow fliers he'd been leaving under windshield wipers.

It's your lucky day. No, really!

Please forgive our trespasses! We are but poor
and innocent youths trying to help you and to help
ourselves at the same time.

We have fed your meter and will continue to do so all day!

You might choose just to see me as an angel, someone who
is looking out for you and your best interests.

Or you might decide that our services are worth
something to you. If this is the case, please
leave your donation in the lockbox between __________
and __________.

“Please tell me the blanks are intentional,” I said.

“That's my job—what do you think I've been doing?” Codman displayed his marker-stained left hand.

“The lockboxes are equidistant and—” Bertucci started, but I cut him off.

“You have a dumb typo,” I said. “Right here. ‘We have fed,' et cetera. ‘We' this and ‘we' that, but then it says ‘me.'”

“No, you're wrong,” Bertucci insisted, anxious to keep moving.

I shoved it too close to his face, and he batted it away. “
You might see me as an angel
,” I read.

Bertucci looked genuinely surprised and studied a few copies before accepting it. “Just cross it off.”

“Just ignore it,” Codman said. “No one'll notice.”

“Just black it out,” Bertucci insisted and handed me a Sharpie from the depths of one of his pockets.

From Elm to Main, zigzagging from the drugstore's back exit to the supermarket, we ran, filling meters and leaving notes, sometimes being met by drivers about to put money in or who'd just driven up. They were thrilled. Grateful. Sometimes annoyed only because they were confused.

“Is this a ploy to get me to pay you double?” one guy in a suit asked outside the dry cleaners. We explained. He looked skeptical. Bertucci stepped in.

“Sir, I can assure you there is no ill will here,” Bertucci said. I loved his language. He appeared grown up, older sometimes than actual grown-ups. “You can decide to pay or not. There's no judgment here.”

“So this is just an act of goodwill?” the suit guy asked.

“Exactly,” Bertucci said, and we moved on. Later, he would check each of the sixteen lockboxes he'd left between buildings or the ground. I had asked him if he was concerned about someone stealing them—they weren't bolted down or secured in any way—but Bertucci shrugged and told me he had this idea that people would overlook them.

I had nodded. “At Passover my dad used to hide the afikomen—that's the matzo for those non-Jews among us,” I said. “And he'd sometimes put it right on the mantel, displayed like artwork.”

“And you didn't notice, did you?” Bertucci asked. He craned his body across an SUV to stick a flier under the wiper. “No, that's the thing,” he went on. “People just go about their days not really noticing. It is my prediction that the boxes will contain the funds for college apps or what-have-you and then some, and that they will be intact, unopened, and not tampered with at the six o'clock bell.”

And he was right. No one bothered to notice. Or they did—because they put coins or dollar bills, even a twenty—inside the lockboxes, but they didn't steal anything. Codman thought this was because people are good at heart, but Bertucci insisted that it was because those involved either donated funds or didn't, and those not involved were too focused elsewhere to even see the box right in front of them.

The sun was slipping down behind the spire, still high enough that I was hot, but the day was fading, and I felt the sting of what Bertucci had said earlier—this was our last first Saturday in June together. It was difficult not to do the countdown to the end of life as we knew it.

The outdoor lawn selection at the hardware store was set up like a mock barbecue, and the three of us collapsed into the mesh chairs. “Pass the ketchup,” Codman said, and I mimed chucking the bottle at him while Bertucci examined the contents of the boxes.

“Looky here—a note back.” He unfolded it and read, “I have to leave my therapy sessions in the middle to feed the fifteen-minute meter. This causes me great anxiety, which is why I am in therapy in the first place. This ten-dollar bill is my gratitude. I hate to bother you, but would you mind doing this again every other Saturday morning from 10:00 to 10:50? I would be most grateful. You
are
an angel!” Bertucci looked smug. Codman rolled his eyes.

“Guess you have to say no, huh?” I'd asked.

Bertucci had looked at me with a wrinkled forehead. “No. I will absolutely do this until further notice.”

I had to leave for tennis practice and go right from there to Marta's, and I felt left out already, as though worlds of events and conversation would take place in my absence. Bertucci read my mind. “Codman, we must say nothing of import while Livvy is off with her other friends.”

Codman drew an X on his chest and I followed his finger with my eyes. “I promise. Nothing. We'll be boring paralyzed mimes.”

“Band name!” Bertucci said. “Boring Paralyzed Mimes. Live from Des Moines!”

“BPM. College band with one hit that crosses the mellow musings of Ryan Adams with Icelandic instrumental,” I quipped.

Codman grinned at me, his face golden in the fading light.

I began to walk away and Bertucci used his hands as a megaphone. “Album title:
Need I Say More?
”

I wound my way through the jammed parking lot, the meters now expiring and flicking to red like matching metronomes. I stretched my arms high above my head out of habit. I looked back, and Codman was doing the same thing, not because he saw me doing it but because he'd adopted the stretch as his own. It's a shoulder-opener for serves and lobs.

It was comforting, seeing parts of yourself in other people. Bertucci showed up in Codman, or traits of mine were displayed—when Codman used the words
in fact
, words that he'd mocked me for early in our friendship that now were second nature to him. I knew no matter how much distance we'd have between us after graduation, I would always use the word
myriad
and find foreign rap songs cool, wisps of Bertucci that had seeped into my life and that I didn't even need to hold onto to keep. They were just there.

I sometimes wished I'd been aware of adopting those ticks, the way Codman stretched two-syllable words into three—
he-lo-oo!
But I think I knew that's not the way things happened—you just woke up one day and had that habit, said those words that way or paused as though you were the one who originated it. You didn't know how or why someone had become part of you, it just was that way.

Even though I didn't bring it up, I knew things would have to change between us. That they would even if I didn't want them to.

“We're a triangle,” I'd said to Bertucci one winter afternoon at Lady Foot Locker. He was reshelving all the shoes no one had wanted, checking to make sure both were in the box, that the box was labeled correctly, and that there was room on the shelf. I felt stupid for saying it, aware suddenly of how my voice sounded in the people-less store. I also knew that if Codman were there I never would have said it. It was possible I didn't want to be a triangle with Codman. Just a pair. No shape at all. Bertucci flipped a pair of ugly sport flip-flops around and slapped the cover on the box. “J. Wetzel remarked that triangle geometry has more miracles per square meter than any other area of mathematics.”

“Should I ask who J. Wetzel is?”

“You should think about properties of the triangle,” Bertucci said and on my arm sketched
a
²
+
b
²
=
c
^2.

“You're giving me the Pythagorean theory as arm graffiti?”

“That's us,” he said and went back to shelving. “Pythagorean triple.”

Outside the store, I had shielded my eyes from the glare. I could see Bertucci pick his hand up from the table, hardly a wave, but enough of one so I knew he directed it at me.

••••

At the Circle, I thought about Bertucci's hands, how still they were. No matter how fast he spoke or how much his mind raced, his hands were calm. Large and still. I took a few more steps inside the dark stairway, stepped away from the safety of the door, concentrating on my breathing as the cries reverberated from the stairwell.
Rarrr. Ennnnh.

With every baby cry, my panic grew, my heart responding exactly the way I'd learned in Bio. We are designed to rescue, designed to need to go to the cry.

The darkness closed up around me, and I could not see my hands or feet or where I stepped. I could only hear the cry.

It wasn't an infant. It was a cat.

If roller coasters topped of the list of things I loathed and mushy French toast came second, then cats would be third. But I found myself doing that instinctive cat kissy noise to get the thing to come over. I couldn't get my bearings in the blackness, and I didn't turn around for fear of getting so disoriented I'd be stuck in the bowels of the cinema forever.

“You can't stay in here,” I said, probably to myself as well as the cat. How long could a cat last in a basement? Could it see the pipes or whatever else was down there? Were there rogue mice on which it could live?

After several minutes of embarrassing kissing noises, I felt a small swish of air and then a lithe body swirling around my ankles.

“Please be a cat and not an opossum,” I told it. I backed up and the animal followed me, stepping onto my backpack and then out the door. It looked up at me, its eyes the same peculiar shade of gray as Bertucci's. “Oh, are you Bertucci?” I asked. The cat tilted its head as though it understood, and this time a little bell—the kind that suggested fairies or elves—rang out.