Playing Keira (7 page)

“I haven’t seen them in a while,” he continues. “But I remember how funny they are.” He glances at me, then down at his burger. “How funny
you
are.”

“Oh yeah? Funny good or funny bad?” I try to make it sound like I’m teasing, not fishing.

“All good,” Ian says.

Would you care to elaborate?
I want to ask. Because it was my understanding that for him, being funny did not equal being totally hot and datable.

Instead I shrug and mumble, “I never know who’s seen them and who hasn’t.”

“My parents bought the DVDs. It made them so proud that it was our town and our school. For a while they begged me to be friends with Nate so he’d have more kids to stick up for him.”

We laugh. It’s hard to remember a time when Nate Hunter needed charity buddies.

Then we’re silent, and I’m trying to think of what else to say during this sweet, surprise treasure of a few minutes together.

“Well,” Ian finally says. “I think it’ll be cool to have the cameras around again.”

Something about his manner feels off. Then comes the thought I shouldn’t have but do anyway, because we already know I’m a masochist: Is this news about the film the only reason he came over to sit with me? I don’t know what to do with that. Let’s just toss that under the table with those hard, runty french fries that always end up on the floor.

Instead, I’d like to make him laugh somehow. If I can say one thing that will make him bust out, it’ll rocket me onto a high so lovely I can make it through the rest of the day.
See? I really can be that kind of girl
.

“Smile!” he’d always say to me during those seven weeks he was my boyfriend. We’d be out somewhere, doing something categorized as Fun. We’d be in a group of people and someone just said something hilarious. We’d be kissing, his hands so warm and mine so cold. Then he’d stop and look at me, and brush my hair away from my eyes and examine my face like he’d never seen it before, and say it.
Smile
.

I couldn’t. Not just like that, on cue, as if taking direction. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was, I thought I
was
smiling.

He’s gulping down his juice in a very unsexy way I’ll ignore, and I’m about to chirp something at him when the notion hits: Whatever we are, or might possibly, miraculously, be again, would be part of the new movie. There would be no escaping it.

A girl from my biology class is suddenly next to me. “Hey, Justine,” she says. “I heard about the documentary. Do you know if they’re going to need interns or assistants or anything?”

“I really don’t,” I reply, trying to sound disappointed for her, “but I’ll let you know what I find out.” I look over to Nate’s table again. Nobody’s coming up to him like they are with me. Although with Nate, maybe you have to request an audience in writing. I don’t know how popularity works.

Felix returns with a handful of napkins and follows my gaze. After a thoughtful moment, he asks, “Do you think Keira will do it, after last time?”

Oh. Yeah. That is the bonus winner-take-all question.

Then I realize why Felix has asked this. Normally, Keira would be at the Nate Etcetera table. But she’s not there.

“Has anyone seen her this morning?” I ask.

“She wasn’t in homeroom,” says Ian.

So Keira has skipped school, probably knowing what was in store. Smart girl, they always say about Keira, and today she does not disappoint.

Felix is waiting for me after school in a window booth on the second floor of Muddy Joe’s, the bakery/coffeehouse/laptop mecca in town. It’s the realm of college students too cool to hang out on campus and they’re all LBNF: Loud But Not Funny. The space looks great but has terrible acoustics. You can’t even hear yourself drink.

“Hey,” I say as I sit down across from Felix, who has his computer open on the table. “Thanks for the assist at lunch.”

“Just spreading the joy because, guess what? My visitors more than doubled since news broke about the film.”

He slides the laptop over so I can see the screen. It’s a graph of traffic statistics for Felix’s blog, where he posts a lot of sci-fi fan art and stills from
The Big Lebowski
, with what he thinks is brilliant commentary but is really stuff like, “The Dude is the bomb, yo!” And then there are videos of him performing original songs on his electronic keyboard while sitting on the floor of his bedroom. His music is either brilliant or awful, I’m still not sure. I tell him it’s the former.

“I’m happy you’re so happy,” I say.

“I hope my stats will climb even more between now and the start of production. Lance said they’ll be here in a month.”

“Maybe that’s enough time for me to figure out a hobby.”

Felix tilts his head and regards me with a sad familiarity. “You watch a lot of movies. Even the old ones nobody’s heard of. Being a film buff—that’s a hobby, isn’t it?”

“I think that involves way too much lying around in sweatpants to count.”

“If you start a hobby now, won’t it be obvious you’re just doing it for the cameras?”

I shrug. Yeah, maybe. Probably. That could be my “story.” Justine at sixteen, trying to find something to keep her from dying of boredom.

I glance out the window, which overlooks the sidewalk in front of Muddy Joe’s. One of the employees is on her break. She’s leaning against a tree with her apron thrown over one shoulder, smoking a cigarette. It’s this striking, almost bittersweet picture because she looks totally at peace with the world, but it’s wicked cold and I know she only gets a few minutes before having to go back to the kitchen to decorate five hundred red velvet cupcakes or something.

“Be right back,” I suddenly say to Felix. I grab my jacket and head downstairs. Outside, the snappy air hits me hard, but I try to look unfazed.

The girl tips up her chin in greeting. “Justine, right?”

“Hey.” I have no idea what her name is although she’s waited on me countless times, and they even wear name tags.

“What’s up?”

“Would you . . . can I . . . bum a cigarette?”

She smiles at me in this condescending,
Oh, you little high schooler
way. After a long few seconds where I get the sense I’m being appraised, she produces the pack and holds it out to me. I hook my finger around a cigarette and slide it out. She’s ready with a lighter and a hand cupped around it, and I lean forward to get the thing started.

I don’t smoke. Olivia does, sometimes, and she taught me how to do it one night when we were home alone during a thunderstorm and the power was out. I didn’t feel one way or another about it, which I took to be a sign that it wasn’t worth the trouble.

I take a drag on the cigarette, avoiding Felix’s
What the hell?
face in the window above. I blow the smoke out slowly, remembering Olivia’s coaching. Fight back a cough. It feels a little great. Even shivering and with the bakery girl watching, I get a sensation like,
I could do this
. It would give me something. All the people who wanted me to be some kind of symbol of youth in revolt would expect nothing less.

I’m on my third drag when I turn my head casually and see this sudden weirdness: the petite figure of Rory Gold walking down the street, her too-big, aggressively puffy down coat zippered all the way to her chin. She stops dead when she sees me. I’m wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt that says “STOP WARS” in the
Star Wars
logo, and the familiar blank look on Rory’s face stabs me a little right on the
O
.

Rory Gold and I have not spoken in almost five years. To my credit, or at least I like to think, for the last year I’ve been meaning to change that.

There are best friends Justine, whose parents are enjoying professional success, and Rory, whose family is struggling with recent job layoffs. The two families have been close since the girls were babies. Will their friendship be affected by their changing economic situations?

I wonder how the press release might read for this new film. I wonder how Lance and Leslie will figure out what happened, what I did to my friend, and how that story will get told.

I’m so surprised that I blurt out, “Hi,” before I can remember all the reasons not to.

Rory says, “Hi,” softly. Her eyes shift to the cigarette in my hand, which I didn’t have time to hide.

We’re caught like this for many more seconds. I notice Rory’s just got her dark blond hair cut again, super short like it’s been since we were eleven, and the style flatters the bold features she’s grown into.

My tobacco benefactor is done with her smoke and walks past us, smirking, to get back indoors.

Then Rory speaks, addressing the cigarette. “Smoking causes one in five American deaths. It kills more people in the U.S. than AIDS, drugs, homicides, fires, and auto accidents combined.”

“I don’t really smoke,” I sputter. “I was just . . .” She’s locked on to it like RoboGirl with a targeting system. It still unnerves me when she does this stuff, so I add, “Did you talk to Lance and Leslie? Are you doing the film this time around?”

Now she looks at me, actually at my eyes—no longer than a blink—then at the hedge next to me.

“Yes. My parents feel strongly that I should continue.”

“Mine too.” I throw the half-smoked cigarette on the ground now and rub it out with my foot the way I’ve seen Olivia do. Rory watches me. These long pauses feel way too familiar, even though it’s been years.

“Well, maybe I’ll see you, then,” I offer, “when they start shooting.”

Now Rory’s eyes meet mine once more. They dart away, as if trying to escape, then back. It’s strange to see her face straight on like that.

She asks, “Are you going to do to me what you did last time?” Her voice isn’t accusing at all. It’s mostly flat, as always, with the slightest twist of curiosity, like she’s asking me what I’m having for dinner. Eyes away, and back again. I can tell this is work for her. I heard that a therapist at school has been helping her with social skills. “I would just like to know,” she adds, “so I can make a plan for how to deal with that.”

I used to hate Rory’s directness. It irritated the hell out of me. But right now I can’t think of anything more refreshing.

“No, I’m not. I mean—”

She cuts me off. “I’m going to be assertive here and say, please don’t. It hurts too much.”

Then she turns and continues on. If Rory thinks about these things, if she’s at all typical in certain kinds of ways, I’m sure she’s muttering
bitch
on her way down the street.

Angelique Hanesworth

JENNIFER CASTLE
’s first novel,
The Beginning of After
, was named an American Library Association Best Fiction for Young Adults selection and a Chicago Public Library “Best of the Best” Book. She wrote many unproduced movie and TV scripts before returning to her first love, fiction . . . but she’s still hooked on film and the way we can find and tell our stories with images. She lives with her family in New York’s Hudson Valley. You can visit her online at www.jennifercastle.com.

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