The Danger of Being Me (19 page)

A thin steel chain hung around this oldest woman's neck.  And dangling from it, carved out of what looked like blue jasper, was a
cornicello
.  The Italian horn.

"Yeah," Amber said next to me, startling me back into my own skull.  "That's my Nonna."

I turned to her.  In the half-decade since the photo was taken, Amber had assumed more of her grandmother's features.  If the picture was any indication of how she'd look in another fifty years, then she was lucky indeed.

She watched me for a long moment, then glanced to the photo.  Her eyes lingered there, her expression darkening for one more fleeting instant.  But then she smiled again, sadly but truly, and took my hand to lead me back into the living room with her.  The game was back on.  The Flyers were trying to capitalize on a power play.

"Hey," I said as she reached the sofa. "It'll be okay."

A smile flickered across her lips.  She looked at me, and nodded.  I could see that she didn't believe me.  But that was fine with me.  She didn't need to believe.

Blake arrived fifteen minutes later.  The crew ventured out to the back patio to set up the ground shoot.  Amber headed up to her bedroom for her balcony scenes, and once Blake and Charlie had their blocking on the patio worked out, I cut back through the living room toward the foyer.  On my way, I spotted Amber's cellphone resting on the endtable next to the sofa.  At no point had I decided that I was going to meddle in her private affairs.

I just picked up the cellphone, scrolled through her list of received calls, jotted down the number that had come in before Blake's, and returned the phone to the endtable.

6.

On Friday afternoon, I pushed through the heavy door into the newsroom.

I maneuvered through the clusters of teenagers to find Ethan and Ben stooped over the movie reviews page.  Ben gestured across the sheet.  "If you move
Avalon Rising
to the top left, you can build the page around it."

"I get it, Ben," Ethan sighed.  "You want your writing above the fold."

Ben shrugged.  "It's the strongest piece on the page."

Ethan rolled his eyes, turning toward the door so Ben couldn't see it.  His gaze landed on me, and he twitched a beleaguered grin.  "The Fuckin Snitch," he hailed me.

"Do I look like a piece of wizarding athletic equipment to you?" I demanded, smirking back at him.

He barked out a loud laugh at that.  "Slumming it down here with the proletariat?"

I leaned against the counter.  "Just for the afternoon," I said, looking up at the assignment board. At my other side, Winnie shuffled panels of paper around the poetry page.

Ethan turned away from Ben.  He seemed relieved to be rescued from Ben's company, and resentful of having been condemned to it.  Because despite writing so little, Ben still somehow held a notoriously high opinion of what he did produce.  So this wasn't the first time that he and Ethan had sparred over word-count and layout.

"You've been holed up in the A/V suite all week," Ethan said, and he was right.  Blake and I had spent four and five hours a night over the past four days piecing together a final cut.  We had the first two-thirds of the movie in the can, but the last seven minutes were proving trickier than I'd anticipated.  "You do whatever it is you have to do," Ethan said, grinning at me, "but you better come out of there with the next
Trainspotting
."

Ben snorted, flashed a sardonic smirk.  I glanced past Ethan, found Ben engrossed in the layout page in front of him.  "So far we're a little ahead of schedule," I told Ethan, watching Ben stare at the disembodied block of his article.  "But Blake begged off this afternoon."

Then I looked back to Ethan.  "Family obligations."

"Bollocks," Ethan laughed.  "He's trying to shag that
boricua
from his cousin's party."

"She was his cousin, too," I shrugged.  "Does that make it a family obligation?"

Ben faked a theatrical shudder.

"Oh, please," Helen called to him from her table.  "You would so shag your cousin if she gave you a greenlight."

Ben shot her a glance.  "I'd shag your cousin if she gave me a greenlight."

"My cousin is your cousin, nitwit," she said.

I twitched grinned at that and watched Ethan, who watched Ben.  Instead of answering with an equal and opposite wisecrack, Ben glared at Helen before turning back to the layout page.  Helen rolled her eyes at Ben's back and looked to Ethan with an expression of pity, like he alone could understand this burden they shared.

Then she turned back to her own layout page.

"Hold on a second," Ethan said.  He turned to me, and both of his eyebrows shot up.  "These two are related?"

"By marriage," Ben and Helen insisted in synchrony, each of them refusing to look at the other.

Ethan looked at Helen, then looked at Ben.  Neither looked back, and Ben suddenly flicked his pen onto the counter without a word, bludgeoning his way across the room.  He rounded the center table, flung open his locker door, and dug through the accumulated junk in his locker for something that he had more than likely thrown away months ago.  Ethan grinned at me.  "I feel like I could have done so much with that piece of information."

Then he hiked his shoulders.  "I take it to mean that since you're done editing for the week you'll be hanging out with the crew at the Morris this evening."  He turned back to the movie review layout page.  "I haven't properly humiliated you in a round of nine-ball in a fortnight."

"Can't," I said.  I felt myself grinning.  I couldn't help it.  Ethan glanced sideways at me, and waited for the rest.

So I told him, "Got a date tonight."

"Oh, so now it
is
a date?" He shot back, laughing. "You two are officially an item?"

"We—" I said, and then stopped.  I stared at him for a few seconds second, considering my choice of words.  "I guess we are," I told him, laughing at myself.  "Yesterday was the two-week anniversary of our first fight."

"That's the sticky-note anniversary." Ethan said.

He looked at me, and gave me solemn nod.  I laughed.  I couldn't help it.  He flashed an impossibly knowing grin then, one that was complicated and unfathomable, like he'd just seen some piece of an incomprehensible puzzle settle into place.  Maybe he was just glad to be distracted from Ben's purple prose.  I shook my head at myself.

"If you could see fit to postpone my humiliation until tomorrow night," I suggested, "I'm sure that I could talk Amber into coming out with our little consortium."

"Oh, no, sir," Ethan laughed.  "We are not getting into the habit of rescheduling group activities around your love life."  I watched him, feeling a little like he was putting me in a position to choose between Amber and my friends.  Then he continued, "But I'm sure we're all going to hang out again tomorrow night, and I'm sure we could find our way to the Morris again.  And if Amber happens to be with you when you show up," he said with a shrug, "then all the better."  He glanced back down to the layout page, as if the blocks of text might have rearranged themselves.  "We have to make sure she can hang with the crew."

A smile tugged at my lips.  "I'm sure she'll manage."

Ethan turned back to me, tilting his head like he was looking over a pair of glasses that he wasn't wearing.  Then he flicked his eyebrows as if to say:
we'll see
.  I laughed at that, and turned back toward the assignment board.

"I have to get out of here in a couple of minutes," I said, finding the block in the middle of the bottom of the board reserved for the movie review page.  "Laureate luncheon.  I just stopped in to see if there was anything I could knock out over the weekend."  I noticed that a certain new release was absent from the board.  Ethan had almost certainly left it off because he was keeping it for himself, but I offered anyway, "I could write up
Dark City
if you wanted."

He didn't even bother to look at the board when he laughed.  "You must have smoked that
Spice World
review after all."  He tried to shift the panel of Ben's article to a new position on the page, but it was like trying to find fit a billiard table into a bathroom.  "Nobody took
Chairman of the Board
yet," he told me.  And indeed, no one had.  "You can have that if you're looking for a quickie."

"
Chair
—" I scoffed.  "I thought we were friends."

He grinned down at his page.  "Friends don't let friends single-handedly deal with narcissistic prima don—"

Ben decided at just that moment that whatever he had expected to find was no longer buried in the bowels of his locker.  He stood in a rush, kicked aside a textbook that had thrown itself onto the floor, tried to shove the locker door closed.  It bounced off of the stack of pages spilling out of the bottom of the closet, rattling in protest.  Ben crouched heatedly, pulling the pages free in two bulging fistfuls, and used his elbow to slam the locker shut.

The sharp clang of the metal door closing acted like a mute button on the conversation.  Ben stared at the blue metal of his locker door, a scarlet flush creeping out of his collar and turning the back of his neck the glowing color of a sunburn.  He didn't bother to look over his shoulder.  He knew he'd find a dozen teenagers staring at his back, and Helen with her vindictive sneer.  The only sound in the room was the furious rasp of Ben's streaming breath.

Finally, mercifully, he turned away from his locker.  He stepped around the far side of the center table, refusing to look down at the floor or up at any of his fellow students.  He stalked silently to the door, emptying one fistful of pages into the trashcan and then the other.  Then he pulled the door open and emptied out into the hallway.

The noise didn't return with another pressing of the mute button.  It swelled as if the volume had been raised from zero back to normal, and within seconds, the room was buzzing again.  I turned away from the door to find Ethan, who stared at the door for an extra second.

"Tell you what," he said.  "Ben's write-up for
Avalon Rising
is irredeemable garbage.  It's fucking up my page."  He plucked the oversized panel off the layout page by the corner as if it were a tissue he'd used to blow his nose.  He offered it to me, and I took it.  "Give me something better by Monday afternoon so I'll have an excuse to toss it."

I held the offending piece of writing and nodded.  I didn't tell him that Amber and I had already decided on Wednesday that we were going to see
Avalon Rising
this evening.  Then he flashed that complicated, unfathomable smile again, and I was sure that he knew anyway.

Of course he knew.

I shot back my own grin, and turned to leave.  I passed behind Winnie and glanced over her shoulder, and saw that one poem had already been pasted into place on her layout page.  A column wide and running the full length of the right margin was the text of Regina's poem.  "Mind Out of Time," she had called it.  I saw the title in 14-point font, the byline below it, smaller and italicized, and my eye was drawn to lines about fuchsia velvet and saturnine fogbanks and honey and death and a sea of ice.  I saw the ravings of an insane man ranting in a gibberish language.

"You're printing it," I said, pointing out the obvious.

Winnie glanced back at me.  She seemed to want to defend her decision, like she thought I might be offended.  "It's really good," she said.  As if I needed to be convinced of the poem's merits.  Then, as if the point needed to be driven home, she added: "she's really good."

"I know," I said.  I was mostly surprised that I was not at all surprised by my sister's extraordinary talent.  I read through a few more lines, overwhelmed all over again by her imagery and vision.  I knew nothing about this girl who lived upstairs from me, but I should.  The variables that had shaped me had shaped her.  It only made sense that she should be able to do what I could do.

I smiled, laughed once, told Winnie, "change the name on mine.  Print it under a pseudonym. 
Anthony Fuchs
."

"Good name," she said, looking at me.  "Sounds like a minor character out of a metamodern novel."

I nodded, and grinned.  "It does, doesn't it?"

7.

Four minutes later, I reached the second floor lobby and crossed to the library.

A flyer taped to the door announced that the Laureate luncheon would begin at 3:30.  I was nineteen minutes early.  I pulled open the glass doors, stepped through the security sensors, passing the circulation desk toward the reading section.  The tables had been cleared out.  Two dozen chairs in three rows faced a narrow lectern.

Behind that the half-circle bay window looked out over the courtyard.  I had to grin that at the aesthetic staging of a speaker backlit by a pale blue sky and velvet afternoon light, outlined by the broad arch of the window frame.

It was damn-near poetic in itself.

Behind the third row stood a long banquet table laden with a snacks on platters under plastic lids.  Each bore the Altomonte Italian Market logo.  The seals had already been broken.  I snuck the lid off a tray of assorted pastries, pulled out a sfogliatelle, popped it into my mouth.  As I picked out a zeppole, I heard my name nearby: "Michael."

I looked up, my mouth full of flaky dough and ricotta.  I fumbled to replace the lid with one hand and hold onto my purloined pastry with the other.  I spotted Mrs. Kraven to the right of the window, standing with a dark-haired man in his thirties and a scrawny older woman whose upswept silver hair made her look older than she probably was.  Not far from them, Dr. Lombardi hunched over a table, rifling through a stack of pages.

Mrs. Kraven and the man beside her watched me.  I gave up on the lid, stuffed the zeppole into my mouth, chewed it up along with the remains of the sfogliatelle, and swallowed.  Mrs. Kraven laughed as I rounded the table.

"This is Michael Everett," she told the man.  He wore rectangular eyeglasses and a mop of hair that fell across his forehead.  He was a writer or a teacher; I knew that much.  And I was almost certain that he was both, and that he wanted people to know it.  "He's one of our entrants."