Only in the Movies (7 page)

In the end, the boy’s hopes came crashing down. But that didn’t change my mind. I was going to let Alba know how I felt about her, because if I didn’t I’d regret it for the rest of my life.

“What’s this brilliant idea you mentioned the other day?” Vanni inquired.

We were in creative writing class. Mrs. Cleaver had paired us up to “brainstorm.”

“You’re going to be a published poet soon,” I began.

“Shhh! Someone might hear.”

“How are you at writing letters?”

In a low voice I explained my plan. Vanni wasn’t impressed.

“It would be fraud,” she said.

“Come on, Vanni, we’re not talking about identity theft here.”

“But you’d be tricking—What’s her name again?”

“You know her name. Alba.”

“Right, Alba. You’d be deceiving her, pretending something I wrote was created by you.”

“No, it wouldn’t be like that. I’d write the letter and you’d improve it. Think of it as editing. A minor rewrite. Like we do in this class all the time.”

“Well …”

“Please?”

“You say you fell in love with this Alba person after—what?—a twenty-minute conversation?”

“I think we’re soulmates.”

Vanni smirked. “Spare me.”

“No, really. I mean it.”

“Twenty minutes. You’re a deep one, you are.”

“Does that mean you’ll help?”

“I guess so. But you’ll owe me.”

“Of course. And you have to promise not to say anything about the letters.”

“Wait a minute. ‘Letters’? With an
s
? I thought we were talking about
one
letter.”

“
S
is one letter.”

“Don’t be clever. It doesn’t suit you.”

“So do you promise?”

“Oh, all right. And there was me, so eager to tell everyone at York that I’m ghostwriting a love letter.”

Mrs. Cleaver called the class to order.

“Quick,” Vanni said. “We need to come up with the idea we’ve supposedly been brainstorming.”

“How about a guy who falls in love at first sight with a girl whose name means ‘dawn’?”

“She’d never believe it.”

I
T HADN’T TAKEN THE GUYS
at York long to home in on Alba like heat-seeking missiles. Whenever I caught sight of her in the halls, there was someone with her, chatting her up—Brent Longman, Students’ Council exec and fledgling politician; or Emile Dupuis, with his black scarf and I’m an-artist-too-bad-about-you manner; or Chadwick Bromley, with his soap-opera-star looks, who, like Alba, wanted to be an actor. They were all in the graduating class and drove flashy cars. Every smile she gave them was a needle in my heart. I felt that I had already lost ground, that if I didn’t get into the competition soon, I’d miss my chance forever. I began to bug Vanni about the letter I had written for her to revise, and one Friday she finally came through.

I read the letter a second time before I said anything to Vanni.

“This is nothing like what I wrote.”

“I took a few liberties.”

“A few liberties? This isn’t even about love,” I protested. “It’s about … tourism or something.”

“It’s about your
emotions
,” Vanni replied. “You told me—”

“I know what I told you, but I was expecting it to be about me and her, like my letter, not about the ocean.”

“It
is
about you and her. What did you expect—‘Dear Alba, I think you’re hot. I’d really like to pop the buttons on your bra’?”

“Bras don’t have buttons.”

“How would you know?”

“I read a lot.”

I looked over the letter once more, telling myself I had asked for this, then I began to see what Vanni was trying for in her flowery descriptions. She
was
talking about feelings. She was showing Alba that I could be sensitive, even poetic.

“I guess you’re right,” I admitted. “Thanks.”

I copied out the letter, and later that day, during drama class, while Alba was doing an improv with three other kids, I slipped it into her backpack.

But for all the difference it made, I might as well have sent her a dead mouse. Days went by without any acknowledgment from Alba that I had poured my heart out to her. When I was able to find her alone in class or in the halls and say hello to her, she was friendly but cool and reserved. What was going on? I wondered. Did she get love letters so often she just ignored them? Had I offended her? Was she playing hard to get? She didn’t need to—she
was
hard to get. Then began the paranoid fear that somehow my letter had fallen from her backpack and she hadn’t seen it at all. Maybe
somebody would find it lying in the hall or on the playing field, laugh and share the joke with the whole school. I imagined someone reading it over the morning announcements to hilarious laughter. I’d have to leave town.

Why didn’t I just ask her if she had received the letter? I couldn’t have said.

Desperate, I decided to write another one. To be safe, I would mail it to her house. I already knew her neighbourhood—the upscale area called Maple Heights that bordered the east side of the river and park—and it was easy enough to get her address from the online reverse telephone directory.

This time I just jotted down a few ideas, hoping Vanni could flesh them out for me, and the next day, at our usual table in the cafeteria during lunch, I showed her what I had written. As she read, she twisted the unruly ends of her hair around her finger, or rested her chin on her thumb and slowly tapped the end of her very long nose with her index finger.

“Well,” she said, looking up. “Quite the challenge you’ve set for me.”

“It’s awful, isn’t it? That’s why I need your help.”

“Don’t try to butter me up.”

I could almost see the wheels and cogs and levers slip smoothly into motion as she began the process of turning my rough, stumbling phrases into graceful sentences. No, I thought, that’s the wrong metaphor. Vanni’s brain wasn’t a machine or a computer; it was more like a house of magic, where mysterious transformations took place in the dark.

“Didja come up with this one—‘I really like your hair’—all by yourself?” she asked.

“Didn’t even need the thesaurus.”

She continued to read. Vanni’s gentle mockery didn’t bug me anymore. It was her style, I had learned, and she only used it with people she liked. If someone took a verbal shot at her or, worse, made a comment about her nose, she cut them to bits before they knew what hit them. She had left more than one guy who made the mistake of thinking he was clever standing with his mouth open, mesmerized by her verbal swordplay after he called her Hatchet Face or Eagle Beak.

“Vanni,” I said as she took up her pencil and began to jot a few notes, “don’t answer this if you don’t want to, but … do you have a boyfriend?”

Her head snapped up. Her eyes bored into mine. “Why? Are you applying for the job?”

I held up my hands, palms out, to placate her. “Just wondering.”

“The answer is no.”

“Okay.”

“Boys aren’t my thing,” she added, deadpan.

Talk about being blindsided, suckerpunched, what Vanni herself would call gobsmacked. The background roar of a few hundred munching, yakking teenagers, the clatter of cutlery and crockery, all fell away. I held her eyes. When Vanni kidded or mocked, they crinkled at the corners. Not now.

I flashed back to random scenes of times I had been with her, searching for any clue that I should have picked up, but couldn’t recall anything. Not that I would have known what to look for.

“You mean—?” I began to ask, to confirm what I thought she was telling me.

Still she held my eyes, her face calm and serious, and didn’t reply.

“I didn’t realize,” I stumbled.

There was a long pause.

“It doesn’t make any difference to me,” I said finally.

Her face hardened. “That’s generous of you.”

“Because you’re my friend.”

The firm line of her lips softened. Her eyes warmed a little.

“You are,” I said quietly.

“Well,” she said, smiling, “don’t let it get around.”

I
N MY SECOND LETTER
I had asked Alba to meet me, and I had chosen the perfect spot. Each day, on her way home, she walked across the playing field to the gravel path along the riverbank. The trail followed the river through the trees for about a half a kilometre, then led over a wooden bridge to the far bank, where a stairway switchbacked up the steep bluff through the trees to her street. The bridge was the perfect rendezvous, I explained to Vanni.

“There’s a flat spot beside the river that’s visible from the railing. I can stand there and you can hide under the bridge—”

“Like a troll?”

“—and whisper to me what to say to her.”

“You’re daft.”

“No, really. It’ll work.”

“You’re soft in the head.”

“If I’m with her alone I’ll get tongue-tied. You know that.”

“‘If I’m with her alone.’ Didja hear yourself?”

“Please, Vanni.”

“This is a far cry from writing a letter,” she pointed out.

“You’ll be like those people at the United Nations.”

Vanni heaved a monumental sigh and gave me a blank look. “Not for the first time, Jake, you’ve lost me.”

“Simultaneous translators,” I said. “You’ll be like one of them.”

She shook her head in disgust.

“Okay, you’re right,” I conceded. “Bad simile. It doesn’t make sense to me, either, now that I think about it. But you know what I mean.”

“You got this brilliant idea from
Romeo and Juliet
, didn’t you? The balcony scene.”

“Yeah.”

“Except Romeo didn’t have anyone coaching him.”

“He didn’t need anyone. He had Shakespeare.”

Vanni rolled her eyes and shook her head slowly. “
That
doesn’t make any sense, either.”

“See? That’s why I need you.”

“You’ve lost your mind.”

“‘
Mad for her love
,’” I said, smiling.

“Now you’re quoting Polonius, from
Hamlet
.”

“Pretty good, eh?”

“Not really. Hamlet’s lover dies,” Vanni pointed out. “And so does he.”

We got to the chosen spot half an hour early. It had rained for two days, and the gravel path along the river was pocked
with puddles, each reflecting sky and forest. The trees hung sodden and limp, as if they couldn’t wait to shed their leaves and be done with it.

Stepping carefully down the muddy bank, we made our way to the positions I had selected. If I craned my neck I could make out a bit of the path, so I’d be able to see Alba coming. I stood on a flat, grassy area by the rushing water. Vanni slipped and slid as she gingerly picked her way under the bridge. It was constructed of timbers, with a plank bed that allowed rain to drip through, so the sloping ground beneath was treacherously boggy.

My stomach fluttered like a leaf. I checked the path again. No Alba. Would she come? I wondered.

“Vanni, maybe we should—”

“Ahh! Ahh! Aarrgh!”

I turned just in time to see Vanni standing rigid, feet together, a startled expression on her face, her arms straight out from her shoulders and windmilling frantically as she slid backwards down the bank. “Ah! Ah!” she shrieked again. Then, as if a rope had been looped around them and suddenly jerked, her feet darted from under her and she crashed nose first into the mire, sending up an explosion of mud and water.

Heaving herself onto her hands and knees, glaring in my direction, she spat out a mouthful of mud. Her face and the front of her dress were dripping with ooze. A blob dropped from the end of her nose and plopped onto the ground. One of her shoes had come off.

“My nose!” she exclaimed, wiping clay from her face, smearing more sludge across her cheeks. “Where’s my bloody shoe?” She got carefully to her feet, struggling, legs
apart, to regain her balance, and took a step toward the missing clog, which had rolled down the bank. The greasy clay beat her again. Her feet slid apart and she dropped like a bag of cement onto her backside with a loud squelch. “Ow! My bum!” she howled, looking at me over her shoulder. “Don’t you say a single word. If you laugh, I’ll drown you in that creek.”

Through the trees I saw someone walking our way.

“Quick! Here she comes!”

“Grand,” was all Vanni managed, once more scrambling drunkenly to her feet. She wiped her hands on her sweater and shook her head in disgust.

“No, it’s okay,” she said snarkily. “I can manage on my own.”

But I wasn’t listening. Alba was looking around—for me, I hoped—as she approached the bridge. Her feet thumped on the planks. I waited until she was halfway across before I called out to her.

“Greetings, Pilgrim,” I offered, using the affectionate name Romeo called Juliet.