Only in the Movies (8 page)

She stopped, stepped to the railing and looked down. She was wearing a burgundy leather bomber jacket, white denims and western boots the same deep red as her coat. Her hair was plaited in a French braid, and diamond studs winked in her earlobes.

“Oh, there you are,” she said. “Hi.”

I stole a glance at Vanni, streaks of river clay in her hair, on her face and dress, one shoe off and the other gripped in her mucky hand. I swore I could see steam coming out of her ears, feel the sharp darts shooting from her eyes as she spat more mud from her mouth.

“What’s that noise?” Alba asked.

“Er, nothing,” I said. “Just the river. I’ve been waiting for you. But seeing you at last makes the wait worthwhile.”

Vanni shot me a look of approval.

“Thank you for meeting me,” I added.

“Well, this
is
on my way home.”

Meaning she hadn’t intended to see me at all? I wondered. I squared my shoulders and told myself to be positive. I tilted my head in Vanni’s direction, silently asking, What now?

“Alba, I’ve never met a girl like you,” Vanni whispered.

“Alba, I’ve never met a girl like you,” I parroted, putting my heart into it, speaking the words with all the emotion I could summon up.

“What?” she asked.

I raised my voice. “I said I’ve never met a girl like you.”

“Eh? I can’t hear you. That stupid river is making too much noise.”

“I’VE NEVER MET A GIRL LIKE YOU!”

“Oh.”

Vanni began to speak again and I echoed her, adjusting my volume. “Ever since that first day, when we sat together in drama class, I’ve felt drawn to you, the way a wave is pulled to the shore, as if we were meant to be together.”

“Really? Me? You mean like Fate?”

I made the mistake of looking at Vanni, who was dramatically rolling her eyes. I gazed up at Alba again, at her long golden braid, her beautiful grey eyes waiting for my next line. It came right away.

“Yes, exactly like Fate. And if Fate is a goddess, I’ll pray to her tonight to thank her for bringing you into my life.”

“Play with who?”

“NOT PLAY.
PRAY
.”

“You don’t have to yell.”

“Sorry.”

I modulated my voice again, wondering if words of love sound as sweet when you’re almost bellowing. I repeated the line.

Alba asked, “Do you believe in Fate?”

“If she brought you to me, then I believe in her.”

There was a pause, then Alba spoke again. “Is
Casablanca
still your favourite movie?”

Keeping my face toward Alba, I flicked my eyes to the shadow under the bridge, thrown off by her question. Vanni extended her hand as if offering me her open palm. Over to you, Jake.

“Er, yes,” I replied. “The greatest, most romantic movie ever. Someday,” I added, back on track and making it up myself, “I’d like to write a screenplay, updating
Casablanca
. And I’ll picture you in my mind when I write the new Ingrid Bergman part.”

“She’s much better looking than me,” Alba demurred from the bridge.

I recognized a cue when I heard one. “No, you’re lovelier by far,” I said, and Vanni joined in smoothly, so I kept going without a hitch. “When I see you up there now, your face framed by the sky and the trees of autumn, I can think of a dozen movies I’d like to write for you.”

“Really?”

“But you’re not like other actresses,” I said, conscious that Vanni was whispering with a lot more passion than before. “You’ve got depth, a soul. That’s what I sensed in you the first time we met. My soul—”

“Mine’s gone with the wind,” Alba said.

“Huh?” I exclaimed before I could stop myself. Baffled, I glanced at Vanni. She shrugged, held her hands out to her sides as if to say, I don’t get it either.

“My favourite movie,” Alba continued, as though explaining it to a child. “
Gone with the Wind
. You know, Leslie Howard, the Civil War?”

I caught on. “Ah, I see. ‘
Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn
.’”

“Well, that’s not a very nice thing to say!” Alba shot back heatedly. “I didn’t criticize
your
—”

“No, no! You don’t understand! I’m quoting from the movie. Remember? Rhett says to Scarlett, ‘
Frankly, my
—’”

“Oh,” Alba said doubtfully. “I forgot that part.”

She looked around, as though something had caught her attention. The mood had been broken. I had ruined it. And as if on cue, laughter burst from the trees, in the direction of the school, and four ninth-graders loped toward us, punching shoulders, shoving each other. They clattered over the bridge, giving Alba an exaggerated once-over as they passed.

“I’ve got to get going,” Alba said. “Nice talking to you, Jake.” She smiled and began to walk toward the far bank, the sway of her hips brushing further thoughts from my mind.

“Farewell,” I said, gallantly, I hoped.

When she was gone, I kicked the ground as hard as I could. Just when I had been getting into the scene, making headway, things had fallen apart. Those damn niners with their stupid antics and stupider smirks and remarks.

“I could use a hand here,” Vanni called out. “If you’re not too busy.”

“No sarcasm, Vanni. I’m not in the mood,” I said, taking her by the arm to steady her as we struggled up the slimy bank.

“You gave it a good try,” she said slipping her shoe onto a muddy foot.

“Do you think I got anywhere?”

“Certainly. You made your feelings plain.”

“I—you—did that in my letters.”

“Person to person is best.”

“You’re just trying to make me feel better.”

“True. Is it working?” she asked as we crunched along the path toward the school.

“Sort of.”

But as we walked I replayed the scene on the movie screen behind my eyes. For a moment there, when Vanni was feeding me my lines, she sounded very passionate, as if she really did mean what she was saying, as if she too had fallen in love with Alba.

Oh, no, I thought. Things have gotten
really
complicated.

I didn’t have the nerve to ask Vanni right out if she had feelings for Alba. Was Vanni my rival, too, like the guys who followed Alba around the school like brainless ducklings? Was I like a character in one of those pathetic old teen movies where two best friends are in love with the same girl? With, you might say, modern variations?

Alba wouldn’t be attracted to Vanni, though. Would she? When I thought about it, Alba didn’t seem to have a boyfriend. None of the guys at York seemed to be doing any better with her than I was.

It was weird competing against a girl for a girl. Was I odd man out in an odd love triangle?

“D
IDJEVER WONDER,”
Vanni asked lazily, tilting back her chair, “where the story goes when you delete it?”

We were in creative writing class, which was held in the library’s computer centre. Mrs. Cleaver was conferring at her desk with two girls who were working together on an endless fantasy novel involving gnomes, pretty princesses, two unicorns, intergalactic travel and a precocious beagle named Ernie. I knew the plot because the girls had read a bit of the tale out loud and given an outline during the sharing circle two days before. I had suggested substituting a gerbil for the beagle. “Gerbils are cuter,” I claimed, having no idea what I was talking about. “And smarter. Most people don’t realize how intelligent gerbils are.” Other students—the ones not whispering behind their screens—worked away on their own projects or used the computers to make forbidden forays into chat rooms or websites with free games.

Attempting to ignore all this, I tapped furiously away at my keyboard, pounding out the last scene of what I would have freely admitted was a mind-bendingly lame short story. A couple of days had passed since the fiasco at the bridge, and I was racing the clock to the end of the period, when the story was due.

“No,” I said in answer to Vanni’s question, to head off what promised to be one of her rambles.

“Really?” she replied.

“Really.”
Tap, tap, tap
.

“Hmm.”

I refused to bite. I couldn’t let Vanni get started or I’d be led astray.

“It must go somewhere,” Vanni mused, gazing at the ceiling. “It’s a law of the universe or something, isn’t it? Everything has to be
somewhere
.”

Tap, tap, tap
. My fingers flew. I glanced up at the clock. I might just get the last scene done on time.

“I mean, it stands to reason.”

Tap, tap
.

“Funny expression, that. ‘Stands to reason.’”

I kept my eyes on the screen, which was slowly filling up with type, each boring sentence taking me toward my goal.

“See, the story I’ve written on my word processor is real, right? It must be—I can read it on the screen, show it to someone. It has places and characters and events and so on. Once you’ve read it, you remember it. You can talk about it. Ergo, it
must
have a certain kind of reality. So I’m wondering, if I delete it—I mean really erase it so it’s not recoverable—where does it go? How could something that was
there suddenly be
not
there? How could something real suddenly be
not
real?”

Tap, tap, tap
. I had no intention of asking her what “ergo” meant. Vanni turned in her chair to make sure Mrs. Cleaver was still occupied. She turned back.

“Didjever wonder—”

“No, Vanni,” I said. “I don’t wonder about the things you wonder about. Most of the time I don’t even understand them.” I cursed under my breath. She had hooked me again.

Vanni allowed a few moments to pass before she spoke again. “Imagine where our civilization would be today if every member of the human race, throughout recorded history—and unrecorded history, for that matter—possessed your relentless, aggressive curiosity. You’re such a plodder.”

I was nearing my final paragraph, where my hero, an eighty-year-old arthritic janitor from Congo, would reveal the name of the murderer who had cut the throats (from right to left, proving he was left-handed) of every registered delegate at the Ohio automobile insurance brokers’ convention—all 125 of them.

“How’s the story coming?” Vanni asked, peering at my screen and feigning interest.

She’s really desperate now, I thought. A direct question from Vanni in one of her philosophical moods was almost unheard of.

“Look, old pal, old buddy, leave me alone. I don’t have the time.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw her link her fingers behind her head and lean back even farther. It drove the librarian, Ms. Kahn, nuts if you “used two legs” of the chair instead of four.

“Ah, well, time,” Vanni remarked casually in her world-weary way. “What
is
time? I mean, people act as if it’s a thing, an object in the universe, like this chair Ms. Kahn thinks I’m ruining. But really, the only thing time has in common with an article of furniture is that both are human inventions.”

Tucking her thick hair behind her ear in a futile gesture—it sprang free immediately—she looked over at me.

“THE END!” I typed, then banged the Save key triumphantly. “Done!” I crowed. “In spite of the distractions of a certain”—I jabbed a function key, sending the story to the printer—“bothersome female philosopher—or philosophess.”

“Didja spell-check it?” Vanni asked casually.

“Ah, shoot.”

“Not too late. You have”—Vanni consulted her watch, apparently having decided that time
did
exist—“six minutes.”

I frantically launched the spell checker and blasted through the story. It seemed like every second word had been misspelled.

“Oh, well, I got all the
and
’s and
but
’s and
the
’s right,” I muttered, saving the changes. As the printer churned out the last page, the buzzer sounded to end the period.

Vanni took off for her next class, and I carried my masterpiece of detective fiction to Mrs. Cleaver, who was gathering papers from her desk and shoving them into a huge leather briefcase. I handed my story to her and she smiled.

Cleaver, I was convinced, didn’t have a mean bone in her very short, very thin body. Always cheerful and encouraging, she gave you the impression that she liked everything you wrote, which, in a weird way, made you want to make
it better—and which today, after my whirlwind effort to slam together a half-baked story, made me feel guilty. In a gentle manner, as we groaned in protest, she pushed us to revise and then revise again. I sometimes imagined what kind of conversations she and Locheed had in the staff room—if they talked at all. You could hand Locheed a verse from the Qur’an or the Bible and he’d find something to sneer about.

“Ah,” Cleaver said. “Jake’s latest foray into hard-boiled crime fiction.” She took the sheaf of freshly printed pages in her tiny hand and added it to her stack. “Whodunnit?”

“You’ll have to read it. I think it’s a prize-winner,” I joked. “I’m expecting a call any minute.”

Her smile grew wider. “Let me know as soon as you hear anything. I’ll wait by the phone.”

“See you tomorrow,” I said, turning toward the door at the far end of the library just in time to see Alba come in. Today, her honey-coloured hair was pulled back into a ponytail secured with a dark blue ribbon. She wore a tight, rose-coloured sweater over navy cargo pants and pink leather sandals. Alba was the only girl in the school whose clothing I could remember at the end of the day.

When we saw each other in class or in the halls, she never referred to my letters or our meeting at the bridge. I didn’t know if I was making any headway with her or not. I didn’t know if she liked guys or not. So I continued to be positive, taking her lack of response to be one notch better than rejection. I hung my hopes on that one notch.

She stood beside the library door like a work of art set down in the middle of an auto-repair shop and scanned the room as I stared at her, holding my breath. Her eyes met
mine and she smiled. I felt the heat rise into my neck and face as she came forward.

“Jake,” she began breathily, “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

Her perfume, as usual, made me dizzy. Her nearness paralyzed my tongue. “Oh,” I managed to blurt.