Movieland

Chapter 18

"Your girl's late."

JP nibbled a Boston cream donut.

"How long on average does it take you to eat a donut?" I asked. "When we were kids you put the entire thing in your mouth, like Chunk. Now you're eating it like a bird."

He held up the half that remained. "Chocolate? Custard? Inside a lightly fried dough? Why rush it?"

I paced because my feet would start kicking things if I didn't. Heist movies stressed me out. I watched Ocean's 11 through webbed fingers. I made Dad tell me how The Sting ended. It was either nachos or Inception, but one of them caused me to have heart palpitations.

The only movie Dad refused to talk about prior to watching was The Usual Suspects.

"Movies aren't everything," he said, "But this particular experience is important. If I told you, you'd never forgive me. Art reflects life. Life informs art. The blurred lines are where we live."

"Where is she?" I grumbled.

JP finished his donut and dusted his fingers on his jeans. He stretched and cracked his knuckles. "Honestly, we could do it with both of us. Just have to move faster."

The hallway looked like a cast of extras happy to be in a movie. None of the conversations looked real. Or they all looked too real, too forced. Someone laughed and pointed at himself and then mimed an explosion in his face and then laughed again. The response from his friends was the picture in a dictionary for gut-busting. Shea Serrano, his signature still on my cast, walked by with Alex Lightman. Shea said, "I tell people I'm 6'3" on the Internet all the time. Twitter. Facebook. Instagram. Everybody buys it."

Lightman played center on the basketball team. He was a legit 6'5". Shea's shaved head barely reached Alex's shoulders.

Across the hallway from us, Michele Banner sat on a bench and cried into a stapled stack of papers covered in red slashes. She was a freshman who received an early advance into A/V thanks to her home video of a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly.

The one-minute warning bell chimed.

"Seriously," I said. "We'll push until Monday."

"And leave Frankie for even longer?" JP said, annoyed. "You're a shitty friend."

"If we get caught there's no booth and no movie-verse and Frankie's an orc slave for the rest of his life. Or stuck in Groundhog's Day."

"Hey, Michele," JP said.

She lifted her head. Two black lines ran down her cheeks like a clown. He handed her a napkin. "Slivovitz is a hack. She failed half of my class last year, including Macklin. You know where she's at now?"

Michele sniffled and wiped her face. "Harvard?"

"Yale. Rowing team. Invented some app that tells you when to drink water. Will probably solve climate change." He reached for the paper and Michelle handed it to him. "High school is bullshit. Learn, but also learn how to learn. Make friends. Be active socially. Play a sport. Two left feet like me? Join a club. No clubs that make sense? Make your own. Duff Baskett, that dude with a chin like Travolta? He loves squirrels the way some people love pudding packs. So, he made the LHS Squirrel Club. They meet once a week to feed squirrels. Ms. Genero isn't so keen on it but who is she to stunt his passion? What do you love?"

She blew her nose into the napkin. It sounded like a bicycle horn. "Movies."

JP and I laughed. "Incredible," I said.

"How do we not have a movie club?" JP asked.

"We didn't slow down to make one."

Michele stood up. "I can make one. Sissy Spinelli would help me, too. And Jon Snope. Although, he'd probably just want to watch Standard Lane movies all the time."