Only in the Movies (18 page)

In the main office I stood at Mrs. Zhou’s desk, waiting while she chopsticked the last few noodles from a bowl into her mouth. She slurped and put down the bowl, then looked me up and down. I followed her gaze, noticing for the first time a wide green smear across my T-shirt and a fist-sized ketchup-and-mustard stain on my upper leg.

Just then, the door to Pelletier’s office opened. “Jake,”
she said. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you.” She looked me over. “What happened?”

“I, er, fell.”

“Well, come on in. This won’t take long.”

Her office hadn’t changed much since the day my father had persuaded her to let me enrol in York. The Persian rug still decorated the floor, and the brass lamp stood on her desk, illuminating a sheaf of papers. She went behind the desk and sat down. She didn’t invite me to take a chair.

“It’s about your appeal,” she began.

“Yes?”

“I wanted to let you know that it’s been upheld.”

“Which means what?” I asked, a bit too abruptly, I knew, but I was nervous.

“Which means you prevailed.”

“So …”

“So your grade—or, as you so eloquently put it in your, um, presentation to the Appeal Board, your
production’s
grade—has been changed to an A.”

“This is official?”

“Jake, I
am
the principal.”

“You’re not going to change your mind?”

“Certainly not.”

The rush of relief carried my breath away. I stood silently for a minute.

Then I felt the anger rising like heat through a soldering iron. Just shut up, thank her and get out, I told myself.

“It’s too bad the three of us—Alba, Chad and I—had to go through all this agony,” I said evenly.

Pelletier’s face softened. “Jake, take a seat. No, close the door first.”

I did as she asked.

“I want to tell you something,” she began, “but I need your assurance that you’ll keep this in confidence.”

“Okay.”

“The original grade was the result of, well, some heavy lobbying on the part of one of the grading teachers. The rest of us allowed ourselves to be too much influenced by him. We made a mistake.”

“You mean Mr. Panofsky.”

“We needn’t name names. That’s not the point.”

“You mean Mr. Panofsky.”

“He takes professional standards very seriously, Jake. And he’s fiercely proud of the school’s reputation. It wasn’t personal.”

“It’s my future. It couldn’t
not
be personal.”

“I’m asking you to put this behind you.”

I forced myself to calm down a little. “Okay,” I said, not sure I meant it.

“I don’t want you to hold this against Mr. Panofsky.”

I looked directly into her eyes, on the edge of telling her she might as well ask the rain not to fall.

“I’ll try.”

The principal stood up. “Good.”

I went to the door. Before I opened it I heard her voice behind me. “Jake, I want you to know I’ve never regretted bending the rules a little so you could come to York. I’ll be sorry, in a way, to see you graduate.”

I turned, nodded and let myself out of the office.

As I passed Mrs. Zhou’s desk, she grinned mischievously. “Starting a new fashion trend, Jake?” she asked, pointing to the grass stain on my shirt and the ketchup on my pants.

I laughed, my relief finally finding some expression. “Yeah, what do you think? Pretty stylish?”

“Well, they used to put egg and beer in shampoo, so why not?”

On my way down the hall a thought elbowed its way into my mind. It was the Vulture who had stuck up for Chad, Alba and me.

Life was funny sometimes.

T
HAT DAY
I
STAYED LATE
in the workshop, having got special permission to remain after the security system kicked in. I needed to take stock of things and absorb the good news, and the best way I knew to put my mind on an even keel was to work with my hands, so I puttered away on the
Pirates
set until well after suppertime.

At home, I dragged myself into the kitchen and forced down a plate of meatloaf Mom had kept warm in the oven. She hadn’t burned the edges too badly this time. I washed it down as well as I could with water, then took a coffee up to my room.

I still felt guilty about Vanni. She hadn’t been avoiding me lately, but she had definitely been keeping her distance, which was ironic because I had been doing the same. I didn’t blame her. She was probably wondering what kind of fool she had picked for a friend. Someone who switched love
interests the way a bee moves from one flower to another. A guy who blind-sided her with a declaration of love for her, knowing she was lesbian.

I decided to call her and tell her about the Appeal Board decision. She didn’t answer her cell, so I left a message. I put on some music and settled into my easy chair to read. Then Vanni’s book on the shelf above my desk caught my eye. I had been so preoccupied lately that I hadn’t read her poems carefully. I took down the book, recalling the day at the Blue Note when she told me she was about to be a published author. She had been so proud. Vanni was brilliant. And funny.

What a loser you are, Jake, I said to myself. You find the perfect girl, except for one thing.

Although she had unknowingly got the details mixed up, Vanni had been right. We were both in love with someone we couldn’t have. It was a classic love triangle, the basis for hundreds of screenplays.

I opened the book to the title page and read the inscription Vanni had written:

I didn’t understand the quotation. Well, Vanni, I thought, I can’t apologize again for upsetting you, but at least I can try to work out the meaning of what you wrote for me. She had told me the poet’s name. I sat at my desk and went online. I didn’t know how to spell the last name, so I tried a few variations: Dunn, Dunne, Done, Dun.

“Do you mean John Donne?” the search engine asked, mocking me.

John Donne was a sixteenth-century English poet and Protestant minister—a playboy in his youth and a preacher later. I read the brief biography, then searched the long list of his poems. No help. All I had was the one line. Now that I knew his name, I investigated a few more sites. It took a while to nail down the title of the poem I was after. It was called “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” Great, I muttered. This is going to be one of those poems that send you to the dictionary at least twice per line. I printed it off and pulled my dictionary from the shelf above my desk.

Valediction: a farewell.

Okay, a goodbye poem. Strange title, though. I struggled through the nine stanzas. Somebody was dying at the start, and that was about all I got. I slipped downstairs for another cup of Mom’s prize-losing coffee and returned to my task. My parents were glued to the tube watching the eleven o’clock news.

Back at my desk, I reread the poem—a few times. There was nobody at death’s door after all. It was a simile. The speaker in the poem was going away, and he was telling his lover not to cry. Let their parting be as quiet and gentle as the soul leaving the body. That explained the title. I reread the poem several times. I couldn’t say I got all the rest, but I thought I understood the stanza where Vanni had found the line she quoted in my copy of her book.

What are you trying to tell me, Vanni? “
Our two souls, which are one
” suggested … what? Our friendship? Okay.

I got up and stretched and paced my room for a few minutes to increase the blood flow to my brain. I still wasn’t getting it. I sat down and read the poem out loud, slowly and carefully, the way the Vulture had taught us.

And that was when a certain line jumped out at me: “
To tell the laity our love
.”

That didn’t sound like friendship.

But Vanni hadn’t quoted the whole poem—just one line. What she was saying was in that line, “
like gold to aery thinness beat
.” Another simile. What was like gold beaten to the thinness of air? The “expansion.” The expansion of what? “
Our two souls
.”

So, I was back to the idea that the two souls are “one.” They’re united. United in friendship?

That wasn’t what the poem said. The poem said “
our love
.”

I gasped. My heart rate leapt into a higher gear.

I snatched at my cellphone, sending it spinning and clattering off my desk to the floor. Cursing, I got down on my hands and knees, fished around among the dust balls and retrieved the phone. My hands shook so hard I could hardly hit the redial button.

She answered after four rings.

Still on my knees I almost shouted, “Vanni! I’ve been reading ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.’ I wanted to know what ‘
Like gold to aery thinness beat
’ means.”

“Didja, now?”

“You love me! I figured it out!”

“It took you long enough.”

I
F YOU WERE TO LOOK UP THE WORD
“awkward” in the dictionary, you’d find a picture of Vanni and me on the morning after our life-changing telephone conversation. I’d been waiting at her locker since I arrived—earlier than usual—at school. A few minutes before nine I caught sight of her walking down the hall toward me.

She wore her usual outfit, carried her bag in the usual way. But she seemed different, as if I was seeing her for the first time. Her thick black hair, as unruly as ever, was held at the back of her neck by a silver pin, and the effect was to emphasize her face—her light brown skin, those beautiful dark eyes, the full red lips with their ironic curve, the I’m-here-get-used-to-it nose.

“Hi,” she said, smiling, embarrassed.

“Hi.”

She set down her carryall and opened her locker. We
stood close together, flat-footed, shy and goofy, while people streamed past us paying us no notice as they scurried to class.

“You’d better kiss me and end the suspense,” she murmured.

“Good idea,” I said, and woodenly moved to do as she suggested.

“Mind the nose,” she said. “Don’t damage yourself.”

In reply I kissed her—but first on the nose, right on the little bump in the middle, then I pressed my lips against her mouth. Without breaking contact I slowly slid my arms around her waist and drew her in as she put her arms around my neck.

The buzzer right above her locker sounded, rattling my eardrums. Vanni broke the kiss.

“In the movies, people usually hear bluebirds tweeting or angels singing,” I commented.

Vanni laughed and gathered her stuff, and we headed off to the Vulture’s class.

We skipped the joys of lunch in the riotous cafeteria and headed across the street to the Blue Note, taking our usual table by the greasy window, warm with spring sun. We sat down, shrugging our coats onto the backs of our chairs. The waiter approached, wearing his bored look like a formal suit, and stood insolently by the table.

“I’ll have the usual,” I said. “We’re celebrating.”

He held his pen above the order pad, prepared to wait me out.

“Barbecued elephant ears on a sesame-seed bun,” I said. “Heavy on the mustard. A cup of beef blood to drink.”

Vanni smirked. “Hot soya milk and a butter croissant, please,” she said. “Ignore this peasant. He’s unduly frisky today.”

The waiter gave me one last chance. I ordered a cappuccino and a raisin bun. “Hold the alfalfa sprouts,” I added.

Vanni and I made small talk until our food and drinks arrived, then I said, “I want to ask you something.”

“Do I have to answer?”

“Yes.”

“All right.”

“Why did you tell me you were a lesbian?”

She tore a chunk off her croissant. “Strictly speaking, I didn’t.”

“But you let me believe it.”

“True enough,” she admitted, popping the bread into her mouth.

“So why?”

“It’s pretty complicated,” she replied. “It involves psychology and everything.”

I waited.

“I guess it was one of those things that gets out of control, then it’s too late to stop it,” she said. “Remember, we were talking about the love letter you asked me to help you write?”

“Yes.”

“I was wishing the letter had been written to me, not to Alba. Then you asked me if I had a boyfriend. I said the first thing that jumped into my mind: ‘Are you applying for the job?’ I was being sarcastic—I was hiding my anger that you were in love with Alba—but at the same time I wished you
would
apply for the job. Then, because I felt so rejected,
I had to pretend I didn’t care, so I said I wasn’t interested in boys. Which was true, in a way. I wasn’t interested in boys in the plural; I was only attracted to one boy. You. You formed the obvious conclusion. And, yes, I let you.”

“You’re right,” I said. “It is complicated.”

Vanni took a gulp of her soya milk, looking relieved, as if she had just completed a very difficult task.

“But I understand,” I added.

“Once the words were out of my mouth, it was hard to get them back in again,” Vanni explained needlessly. “Sometimes I talk before I think.”

“You told me one other fib,” I pointed out.

“Away with that.”

“It’s true. You said one time that love isn’t self-sacrificing. It’s selfish.”

Vanni looked down at the crumbs on her plate, then she raised her eyes to mine, smiling. “Guilty as charged, m’lord.”

“But you proved yourself wrong. You helped me. Over and over again. When you knew I was after another girl.”

“Ah, there was nothing on TV anyway,” she said. “I’d nothing better to do.”

“Ha. Admit it: you did it because you love me.”

“True.”

“And I was too thick to realize.”

“Also true.”

“And too self-centred.”

Vanni said nothing.

“You can stop me any time,” I said.

“You forgot something while you were busy tearing yourself down.”

“What?”

“You helped Alba when she was trying to win the heart of the gallant Mr. Bromley.”