Extra Life (23 page)

Stage Six had the
Cape Twilight Blues
logo on its door. Under that, a paper taped up that read:
Crew Only! Shooting in Progress!
Bobby stopped his car just outside. He watched the building, taking long drags on his cigarette. Savannah took the opportunity to pull a compact out of her purse and touch up some blemishes only she could see.

Finally, Bobby said, “Funny, I don’t know you folks, but I feel like I do, like I met y’all in another life or something. You believe in that? Past life experiences?”

“
Absolutely
,” Savannah said, tucking her shoulders bashfully.

“
This
,” Bobby said, stabbing a finger at my script on the dashboard. “Y’all really opened something in my soul with this. You know, I ain’t really talked to my father in forever. We say crap to each other every day, but never really
talk,
know what I mean? He thinks I’m some kind of sissy, which is why he did what he did to my character.”

“Hey, there’s no shame—” 3.0 chimed in.

“Shut up,” Bobby snapped. “That’s not what this is about.”

Bobby shook off his nerves, took a few boxing jabs at the steering wheel. His sudden mood change was like a bad fart with the windows up. It made all of us squirm. Savannah, his muse, stroked his arm two-handed. “That’s a good thing, Bobby,” she told him. “You should have more creative control. My agent says that’s important.”

“Right,” he said. “I deserve some recognition from that bastard. Y’all heard he left my ma when she was still pregnant with me? How sick is that? Pop the glove box a sec.” Bobby motioned to where Savannah’s knees touched the dash.

She opened it, and a black pistol practically dropped into her cupped hands. Before she could even let out a gasp, Bobby snatched the gun and slipped it into an inside pocket of his jacket.

“That’s a prop gun, right?” 3.0 said, a second before I would’ve.

“From the shooting range this morning, remember?” Bobby said. “I told you. Can’t keep the damn thing in the car where somebody could steal it. It ain’t actually loaded, so don’t freak.”

We chuckled nervously. Bobby had it in him to crash his car against a phone pole, so I didn’t much like the idea of his waltzing around with a concealed weapon. Suddenly the movie magic had gone a little stale.

Bobby pushed his swan door open and up, and got out.

Savannah checked her makeup in the mirror one more time while Bobby went around to open her door. I touched her shoulder and said, “He’s making me a little nervous. Maybe it’s better if you stay—”

“Are you
kidding
me?” she said. “Once in a lifetime.”

And then Bobby had her door open, and she was getting out. When it was just the two of us in the car, 3.0 barked at me through his teeth, “Tell me what’s going to happen in there. This is all a rerun for you, but I’m winging it here, so clue me in quick.”

Bobby rapped on my window. Show time.

“We’ll be fine,” I told my clone.

“You’re lying. You think I don’t know when
I’m
lying?”

“I’m two steps ahead of Bobby, literally,” I said, which was not exactly the truth, either. I’d never been in this moment before. But I had insights, I understood motivations, and ninety percent of getting into trouble was the surprise factor.

Bobby Parker wasn’t going to surprise me. I was on full alert.

“I just don’t think—” 3.0 started.

“Then stay in the car.”

“Hell, no. Once in a lifetime, like Savannah said? Or twice, for you.”

I looked at my double but didn’t see myself. He was a separate person with a different history. We were nothing more than twins after all, two different minds. I mean, what happens when a worm, chopped in half, becomes two fresh worms and they meet each other in the mulch, months later?

Do they recognize themselves?

B
OBBY LED
us into the sound stage. And there on the set was
Cape Twilight
star Morgana Avalon’s television bedroom with its four-poster bed wrapped in frilly lace, an impossible stack of childhood teddy bears on top of the dresser. And on the edge of the bed was Morgana herself, long bronzed legs stretching out from her silk pajama shorts, one pink slipper dangling from her upturned toes. She was chatting away on her cell phone.

I couldn’t quite enjoy the spectacle. I was too on guard.

Three cameras set up, but all of them were currently unmanned. The studio lights were dim, some of them fluttering, some dark. It looked like a break in the taping schedule. A few crew members muttered to each other through headphone mics, but nobody paid any attention to Morgana. Or us, for that matter.

Bobby headed for a metal staircase along one sidewall and we followed. At the top was a narrow platform and a door marked
Production Office.
Russ
3.0 and I waited a few steps down while Bobby pressed a buzzer. Savannah was eager at his side, raising her heels up and down. A canned voice spoke through a speaker: “Yeah?”

I’d heard the infamous Marv Parker enough times on DVD extras to recognize his voice. He sounded, as usual, like he’d just swallowed a cocktail of tacks and BB pellets. As soon as he spoke, Bobby morphed into his TV character. He was all stutters and stoop shouldered, timid as a lap dog.

“Mr. Parker—Dad—it’s me, Bobby.”

The door lock disengaged automatically and we all piled into a room that was hardly bigger than Mr. Yesterly’s office in the broadcasting room back at school. Same dented aluminum desk, too. I expected Movie Marv to have three levels of waiting rooms, secretaries, security guards, a mahogany desk, and one of those giant old-world globes that’s actually a secret liquor cabinet.

The only nod to his empire was the array of movie posters on the wall, all Parker Productions, blockbusters and turkeys alike. Kind of like my room, except these posters were in nice gold frames, not tacked up with pushpins.

When Marv stood up behind his desk, his head nearly broke through the drop-down ceiling panels. With his full beard, thick black arm hair, and tan vest, he looked exactly like a bear who had eaten a fisherman and then put on his clothes. “What’s the problem?” Marv asked.

Bobby said, “Just wanted to introduce some folks.”

“No time,” Marv said. “Full shooting schedule, and everything’s backed up because of all the glitches.”

“Glitches?” I blurted. Couldn’t help it.

“Power outages,” Marv explained. “Whole Eastern Seaboard’s on the fritz. Probably a covert terrorist attack or the government making us think there’s one. So who’re you, Mr. Glitches?” Marv’s question was aimed at me. He was staring me down, waiting. 3.0 and I had been in the room for at least a minute and Marv apparently hadn’t noticed, or cared, that we were the same person twice.

Before I could answer, Bobby whipped something out of his jacket and aimed it at his father. Savannah gasped. Too fast for me to react, and all my plans about keeping a step ahead of Bobby were exposed as complete delusions.

But what he drew wasn’t his gun. It was my script, and he tossed it across the room. It fluttered in the air and landed in a pile of other papers on Marv’s desk. Bobby said, “There’s
Cape Twilight
’s first Emmy Award, right there.” There was a quiver in his voice. Trying his damndest to act the part of the Bobby Keene-Parker we knew from the diner and
Access Hollywood
red carpet interviews.

“Oh, yeah? Where’d you scrounge this up?” his dad asked.

“These guys right here, the Vale Brothers. Russ and Sith.”

Apparently, Bobby mistook me for Darth Vader.

Marv Parker finally took a gander at us.

“Twins?” he asked. “And what are you guys, twelve years old?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Bobby said. “They’re gold, and you—” (his voice cracked on
you
) “—are gonna want to produce that script, early next season.”

“Am I?” Marv said.

“You are. I figure it’s time for me to be giving creative input,” Bobby said, rolling his shoulders back a bit for effect.

“And who’s the broad?” Marv asked with a creepy smirk.

“Savannah,” Bobby said. He put his arm around her waist and lashed her to his side so roughly that she cried out in surprise.

This whole charade was getting way too personal—family stuff we didn’t need to witness. Even if I was in the middle of a pitch meeting for my script, I wanted so bad to tip my proverbial hat and exit stage left, let them work it out between themselves. But I wasn’t about to leave without Savannah. It appeared I’d have to un-knot her from Bobby’s arm if I was going to get her away from here.

The look on Marv Parker’s face as he studied his son, it was the expression a kid gets when he fries ants with a magnifying glass.

“Tell you what,” Marv said. “You obviously got a real package deal here, Bobby Boy. You take your twin scriptwriters and you prove your collective chops by racking up a coupla million bucks in foreign and domestic profits on some cheap thriller pictures, build your own studio, score three hit dramas on one network, and
then
we’ll talk about your
creative input
. Till then,
read your lines
like every other pretty face around here.”

It was too small a room for this much pent-up aggression. If Bobby’s brain was a corn kernel, we would’ve heard it pop. But all he said was, “That’s not fair.”

“
Fair
?” Marv said. One of the veins in his forehead got red and round and fat.

I slipped my dad’s cell from my pocket. 3:56, more than three full minutes till four o’clock, which was the next half-life point, according to my dad’s theory. If something drastic happened here, if I dissed every warning Video Russ sent me, if I warped through space-time yet again, the leap might only take me back three hours. And if that was the case, anything that happened before four p.m., anything I hadn’t already fixed in this time line, would be out of my reach forever.

Bobby inhaled a deep, defiant breath.

His grizzly bear father sat back down, lifted my script off his desk, and tossed it in a nearby wastebasket. All I could think was Bobby, over and over, always crashing in the same car.

“You’re right, Mr. Parker,” I jumped in. “That script is trash. It’s a first draft, really. We—my brother and me—we banged it out in like ten minutes. I’m deeply sorry for bringing it to your attention before it was really ready.”

“What the hell?” Bobby asked me, clenching his jaw. Those smoldering eyes that girls
so
loved looked more like three-alarm fires from my perspective. He wasn’t even bothering to fuss with his lighter, which worried me more than anything.

“We could stand to do some more work on it,” I admitted.

Marv snorted and said to his son, “Where’d you pick these twins up, anyway? Boyz R Us?”

“
What the hell
?” Bobby said again, this time to his father.

“It’s the girl!” 3.0 jumped in. He kept glancing at me for guidance. “She’s why. My friend Savannah here. She’s beautiful, don’t you think, Mr. Parker? See, she asked Bobby to talk up our script and he just couldn’t resist her. You know how it is. She’s got a lot of charm.”

What a save. Wished I’d thought of it, though, in a way, I did. Savannah had both her arms wrapped around Bobby’s left bicep. He was her hero, her protector, and Bobby was the biggest Alpha Male in the room, if you didn’t count his pops. Never mind the useless Vale Brothers.

“Her
charm
, huh?” Marv said. “Is that what they call it these days? Back when I scooped Bobby’s old lady straight off the bar top—”

Two minutes to go. Might as well have been a decade.

“Damn you, old man,” Bobby snarled. He jerked out of Savannah’s grasp, shoved his hand inside his jacket. If his life went a different way, he might’ve been the next Hollywood gunslinger—cop dramas, westerns, spy flicks, you name it. But instead, all that gun range practice led up to this moment, drawing his weapon and aiming straight for his father. In that instant, I was almost positive Bobby had also been lying about the gun being empty.