“Well, seeing that not going to Fall Fling isn’t an option, I guess I don’t have a choice.” I sighed. “Meet me on The Ramp at lunch on Monday and you can start then. But I’m telling you, I don’t care what my father says—if I see that you’re trying to make me look bad, the deal’s off. Got it?”
“Got it,” he replied, nibbling away on the black side of another cookie.
“And don’t think that this means that all of a sudden we’re like
friends
, or anything,” I said. “It’s strictly business. Oh, and in case you didn’t know, Asher and I are super serious, so if you were thinking of using this documentary thing as a way to, you know,
hit on me
or anything, it’s not going to work.”
“Don’t worry,” Geek Boy said. “Like you said, it’s strictly business. But who knows—maybe this’ll be the start of a long and rewarding working relationship and we’ll be Woody and Jean Doumanian.”
“Huh?”
“Woody Allen and his producing partner,” he explained.
Woody Allen . . . the name sounded vaguely familiar. “Does he go to our school?”
Geek Boy looked like he was going to throw up all the deli food he had just eaten. “Woody Allen was only the greatest director of the twentieth century.”
“So he’s dead now?” I asked.
“No. He’s still alive. It’s just that his movies aren’t as good as they used to be. They’re decent, because he’s Woody, but nothing like his classics.”
“Oh.”
“
Annie Hall
?
Manhattan
?”
I shrugged.
“
Hannah and Her Sisters
?” he asked with disbelief.
“Hannah doesn’t have any sisters. She’s got an older brother, Warren. He goes to Stanford.”
“It’s the name of one of Woody’s movies,” he explained.
“Oh.” I shrugged. “Never saw it.”
He continued looking queasy and sighed.
Sheesh—
someone
was taking this movie stuff
way
too seriously. “What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said as he stood up and put out his hand. “So we have a deal?”
I put mine out as well. “I guess so.”
As I walked him to what he called the Neilmobile (Hello? Can you
get
cheesier than that?) I tried to look at the bright side of things: helping Geek Boy fulfill his dream of getting into USC film school had to balance out whatever bad karma I may have had.
Not that I had any, of course.
chapter four:
josh
I don’t know who was more excited about the documentary—Steven or my mom.
“Dude, you’re
so
right—the more I think about it, the more I realize this thing is totally going to change our lives,” said Steven that Saturday afternoon as the two of us sat on the kitchen floor unraveling the cables for the microphones we’d be using on Monday.
“Yeah,” I said glumly. “If we survive it.” Already I had received a three-page single-spaced e-mail from Dylan about the documentary. There needed to be a makeup and wardrobe budget (yeah, right); I couldn’t shoot her if she was PMSing and therefore retaining water (whatever
that
meant); she had approval over which of her friends were on camera—the list went on and on. We hadn’t even started and she was making the biggest stars in Hollywood look easygoing. “Forget about getting it done,” I said. “I’ll be happy if I can just stop her from texting me every five minutes with yet another demand. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea—”
“Dude! What are you talking about?! This is what we’ve been waiting for,” Steven said as he wiped the sweat off his face with the vintage Sundance Film Festival ’02 T-shirt he had scored on eBay. “The chance to let all those popular girls see what they’ve been missing by dating jocks.”
“He’s right, honey,” said Mom as she fixed him a plate of brown rice and veggies even though we had stopped at In-N-Out Burger less than an hour before on our way back from the rental place. “Your father was a jock and look how that turned out.” Dad had been on the tennis team at UCLA, which is where they met.
“Everyone knows that it’s always the unpopular guys who end up with the best chicks,” announced Steven.
“Yeah, in, like, a John Hughes movie,” I replied.
“Or a Woody Allen one,” Mom added.
She
did
have a point.
Steven stood up and walked over to the baby-blue linoleum table that Mom had gotten at the Santa Monica flea market right after we moved. If Mom wasn’t at the Learning Annex, she was at a flea market. “Look at Spielberg, dude—are you going to sit there and tell me that even though she’s pushing fifty, Kate Capshaw isn’t still a total fox? No offense about the age thing, Sandy.” Mom liked my friends to call her by her first name—something about putting everyone on an even playing field. At forty-five, Mom was still looking pretty good herself. In fact, ever since she had stopped straightening her brown hair and let it grow so that it was now long and curly, she looked more like a poet (yet another Learning Annex course) and less like a lady who spent her days lunching, which is what she used to do before the divorce.
“No offense taken, Steven,” said Mom. “In fact, just last night I was reading that perimenopause is when women really begin to step into their sexual power.”
“Mom.” I blushed. “Please. We have company.”
That was another by-product of the divorce: really
open
communication. That part I could’ve done without sometimes.
“Once you go nerd, you don’t go back,” Steven said.
“It’s true,” said my mom, who had recently started dating an accountant named Larry from the Intro to Persian Mystic Poetry class she had taken a few months earlier. “I can’t begin to explain the difference when you’re with someone who’s taken the time to read
The Female Body: An Owner’s Manual
—”
“Okay, moving on,” I said, in hopes of stopping her before she embarrassed me a lot rather than her usual little. It was great to see Mom happy again after those last few years with Dad, but in my opinion, she was taking this rediscover-your-inner-self thing a little too seriously. “All I care about is getting the footage so I can get into USC and hopefully get a scholarship. I’m not in this for dates.” At least not with Dylan or any of her equally stuck-up friends. Now, Amy Loubalu—that was another story. Amy was as perfect as the cinematography in
The Godfather
. The way her brown hair swung just so when she walked. And her eyes, which were on the violet side of blue, a color so unique that even the Crayola people wouldn’t have been able to come up with a name for it. And her incredible organizational skills—the way she made sure to use the same color pen for whatever notebook she was writing in, so that everything about English was red, and physics was green, and—
“Josh? What do you think?” I heard my mom say.
“Huh?” Whenever Amy popped into my head—which was more and more often since she had changed lockers and was now four down from me—I tended to lose track of time.
“I asked if you wanted me to take you to Loehmann’s and get you a few new pairs of slacks, now that your social circle is going to be widening so much,” she said.
“Thanks, Mom, but I think I’ll be fine in jeans.” The only person I knew who wore “slacks” was my eighty-five-year-old grandfather in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Just then my phone buzzed. When I picked it up, there was yet another text from Dylan.
Trying to get in to see my colorist to get my roots done today but if not will have to hold off on shooting till I do
.
And by the time I was done dealing with Dylan, I was going to
feel
like I was eighty-five.
I like to think of myself as a pretty calm, cool, and collected guy—think George Clooney circa
Out of Sight,
without the movie-star looks—but by the time third period rolled around that Monday, I had already gone through an entire roll of Tums.
“Here,” Steven whispered from the desk next to me in calculus, holding out a box of Mike and Ikes. “Have some of these. They’ll settle your stomach.”
“No, thanks,” I whispered back. “I think they’ll just make me throw up,” I said. Maybe it was better to just
dream
of one day becoming a director instead of actually becoming a director.
By lunch, my upset stomach had been joined by a buzzing in my head. “Maybe we should hold off on starting until I go to the doctor and get an MRI,” I announced to the guys as we stood at the entrance of the cafeteria with all our gear, which included two video cameras, two booms, and a handful of lights. “I might have a brain tumor.”
“Maybe you’re just wimping out,” replied Steven as he hoisted the boom from one arm to another, almost decapitating Sloane Simons in the process.
“Or maybe it’s MS,” I added. “It says on WebMD that ringing in the head is also a symptom of MS.”
“Or maybe you’re just wimping out,” said Steven.
“You know, studies have shown that high levels of stress can indeed manifest into all sorts of diseases,” argued Ari as he laid the cables on the ground. I could always depend on Ari to back me up on medical issues.
Steven pointed to my inhaler, which I had been holding in my hand like a good-luck charm all day. “Just take another hit off that thing and let’s get on with it already.”
I did as I was told and immediately felt better. “So are we ready?”
“I was
born
ready,” said Steven.
“You were
born
to get your butt kicked,” replied Ari. “Josh, maybe Hannah Mornell was right—maybe a look at
un
popularity would be more interesting.”
I shook my head and stood up tall, which was a rare occurrence seeing that slumping was my default mode. “No. This is our opportunity to make a difference, like Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in
All the President’s Men
when they exposed Watergate. Or Sally Field as Norma Rae in
Norma Rae
when she got better working conditions for the factory workers.” I stood up even taller. “We’ve come too far—we can’t turn back now.”
“We haven’t even started,” corrected Ari.
“We’re starting right now,” I said. “Come on.”
With that, the three of us walked across the cafeteria with the same amount of purpose as if it were downtown Baghdad and we were part of the
ABC World News Tonight
team.
I just prayed we didn’t step on any land mines on the way.
From the second we got up on The Ramp, it became clear that Dylan Schoenfield made Mrs. Tashlock, my trig teacher junior year who took points off if your paper had any creases in it, seem like the most easygoing person on the planet.
“Here’s a few more do’s and don’ts,” she said as we sat at a table with her, Hannah and Lola, and their three very bland-looking salads. Not one of them had bacon bits or croutons on them. “Josh.
Josh
. Are you listening to me?”
I wasn’t. I was too busy gazing down at the cafeteria floor from this new vantage point. I hadn’t really had a chance to take it in when I was up here before. I think I had expected it to look like the view from an airplane, but it wasn’t all that different. The people on the main floor looked exactly like they always did. It was a bit disappointing, to be honest.
“Sorry. What?” I asked, turning my attention back to her.
She thrust a few typed pages in my hand.
“‘Rule number 22: Do NOT shoot me from the right’,” I read.
“
How come?”
“Because I don’t want anyone to see the hideous chicken-pox scar on my eyelid,” she replied, undoing her blonde ponytail and smoothing it out so it fell in front of her face.
“What scar?” I asked.
She yanked her hair off her face and leaned forward.
“Watch it!” I yelped, yanking her open Diet Coke can out of the way before it could spill on the expensive postdivorce-guilt camera my dad had bought me.
“
This
scar,” said Dylan as she pointed to her eyelid.
Steven leaned in for a better look. “I don’t see anything.”
“Welcome to my world,” grumbled Lola, who was chewing each small forkful of salad at least fifty times before she swallowed. What was up with girls and the food stuff? I bet Amy Loubalu didn’t have weird food stuff going on. As beautiful and graceful as she was, I had a hunch that not only wasn’t she afraid of meat, but that she could jam three fries in her mouth and still look great.
“Look—there’s Asher,” Dylan said.
He was walking up The Ramp carrying a tray with two pieces of pizza, three cartons of milk, onion rings, and a cupcake.
“Asher!” she yelled, waving. Who knew such a tiny body could contain such a loud voice?
Like the other day, he tried to ignore her and keep walking.
“Babe! Over here!” she yelled louder.
He looked at his table of surfer buds and with a sigh trudged toward us. “Hey,” he said with the amount of enthusiasm usually reserved for a dentist visit.
“Sit next to me,” she said, pushing Ari off his seat so Asher could have it.
He looked like he’d rather do anything but. “Nah, I’m going to sit with my hombres,” he replied, gesturing with his chin at the next table.
“Oh,” she said, looking disappointed. “Text me later, then?”
He shrugged. “I guess,” he replied as he walked away.
“We’re really good at making sure we don’t spend every minute together,” Dylan explained. “’Cause that’s
so
not healthy.”
“Yeah, codependence is a killer,” said Steven.
As Dylan settled back in her chair, she looked at Steven as if just noticing his existence for the first time. “Um, I don’t mean to be rude, but who exactly are you?”
“I’m Steven Blecher, the sound guy.”
She gave him a blank look.
“You paid me twenty bucks freshman year to dissect your fetal pig for you in biology, remember?”
“Vaguely.” She turned to Ari. “And you are?”