The Great American Whatever (14 page)

He walks away and I study him. I'm the only person in this incredibly loud bowling alley who doesn't have his phone out, multitasking. Amir's jeans are just a little too baggy, so when they hang down, some underwear is sticking out, and it's the boxer variety, which just drives me delirious.

“Nachos,” he says, back with a plate of the grossest and most wonderful looking dinner I've had in a while. “Do you like jalapeños?”

“Love 'em,” I say, because I like them.

“Okay, go to town,” he says. “Jalapeños, licorice, humidity.”

“Things you hate?”

“Bingo.”

A group of not-naturally-blond girls stumble into our area, and I feel offended, somehow, but when Amir leaps up and goes, “Would you guys like this lane? We're just having a snack,” somehow I end up liking them.

“Cool, whatever,” one of them goes, followed by a chorus of “Whatevs, sure,” and Amir and I are taking the nachos to a little snack bar area that feels a million miles from the school cafeteria.

“So, what do they
want
you to do?” I say. Dammit, Quinn, set him up better. You're getting all “Geoff” with your lack of context.

“What does
who
wan—”

“Yeah, sorry, sorry, I should have set that up better. What do your parents want you to, like, study?”

He runs his hands through his mop-head. “Oh, them.”

“I mean, we don't have to—”

Crunch. Crunch. Nachooooos.

“No, it's fine. It's fine. My dad's in finance and my mom is a fund-raiser on the Dallas scene.”

“Oh, cool,” I say.

“Yeah, cool if I go into finance.”

“Have you always wanted to be a novelist?”

“Ever since I read Roald Dahl, yeah.”

“Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory!”

“Actually, Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory
. I think
Willie Wonka
was just the film title.”

“Oh,” I go, “right.”

Nothing, followed by nothing, and then: “What are your other favorite movies that were books first?” he says.

He has had three chips, total. I have had something like a thousand.

“Well,” I say, “there are the obvious ones:
The Shining
, uh,
Carrie, Talented Mr. Ripley. . . .
”

“So are you just crazy obsessed with movies or do you actually want to make them someday?”

Wow. I'm a little insulted and don't even have a right to be. If I don't tell him about Annabeth, I can't be pissed he doesn't know about Q & A Productions, but this is my thing about why I think relationships—boyfriends, friends, anything—are such a hassle. I've lived for almost seventeen
years
. That is
so much
to catch somebody up about. I want people just to arrive in my life fully informed of my tastes and fears. The lists are pretty short, definitely memorizable. I wish they could be distributed to would-be suitors ahead of time, so they could rule themselves out. Or in! I'm open to “in,” too!

“Uh, yeah,” I say, “I guess I'd like to make movies someday.”

I discreetly check my shirt and notice only the chocolate ghost stain, with no nacho cheese sauce in sight, and when I look up again, Amir goes, “Can I get you a drink?” But his eyes are shiny shiny shiny, like there's another set of eyes behind them. He's up to something.

“I'm good, thanks,” I say, holding up a bottle of water.

“No, I mean,” he goes, leaning in on his elbows. His T-shirt tugs at the collar. His chest. He has a really nice chest. You could land a helicopter on it. “Do you want a beer?”

I try to play it cool. I so want a beer. I also don't want to get in trouble or caught or something. I'm already out way too late, already worried my mom has called Geoff's mom, asking where he and I went to dinner.

“Definitely,” I say, just like that, loud, and he slaps his hands down on the table and goes, “Cool.”

I watch his baggy jeans and tight T-shirt walk away, and I'm looking at my forearms and thinking how hairless and sticky they are, on account of this disgusting table, and he's back faster than I could have guessed. Time is relative, these days.

“At your service,
monsieur
.” Amir places the plastic cup down in front of me, and perhaps he is a secret magician, because as I reach for it, he says, “Go slow,” as if he absolutely and without a doubt knows this is my first beer ever.

I'm sipping and sipping and waiting for it to be good, and I go, “How about you? Favorite book-to-movie adaptations?”—and, by the way, Amir's slow about eating food, but half his beer is gone in two gulps.

“See, I don't have your extensive knowledge,” he goes. “I think the only adaptation I'm confident I've seen is
The Ten Commandments
,” which is a pretty good joke, so I throw it a laugh.

I take another sip of beer. Nope. Still gross. “Hey,” I go, “will you look a movie thing up? On your phone?”

“Sure,
Mom
,” he says. My face can't hide any lies, so Amir goes, “I'm teasing, Quinn,” really soft and sweet, and he taps his knee into mine under this table and goes, “Okay, what am I looking up?”

“Okay, Google ‘Ricky Devlin new movie.' ”

“Who's that?”

“Oh, just some guy.” A golden guy. “Like, an old babysitter.”

The screen above our heads is broadcasting this vintage Pittsburgh Pirates game—it's like a twenty-four-seven loop of the “best games ever”—and there's a table of guys two nachos over who are reacting to it as if in this very moment they can't believe the home run that is currently being home runned.

“Okay, there's a bunch of results,” Amir goes. “You want to see?”

I take a really big swig of beer, developing a new theory that maybe it tastes better in large quantities, and when that proves false but exhilarating, I burp a little as I'm saying, “No, just read one to me,” and he goes, “Easy, slugger.”

I put the beer down and pick at my nails. Difficult, as they're already nearly picked to kingdom come.

“Okay, so, here's something from
Deadline,
a few months ago
—
”

“Perfect, yeah, read that.”

“ ‘
No Such Thing As Fire
and
Battle-Ax III: Scorpion's Fury
screenwriter Ricky Devlin's spec script,
South Hills Apprentice,
was acquired by Relativity Studios in a deal brokered by WME. Script centers around a college dropout, home for the summer, who develops a bond with a complicated, antisocial child—and ends up learning lessons about death, life, and'—
hey
.” Amir looks up from his iPhone. “You have a little something.”

I can't tell what he means about the little something. I am only puzzling together that
I
am the complicated, antisocial child around whom this screenplay is based, and that perhaps this sounds like the worst movie ever. How could Ricky Devlin be dumb enough to write an autobiographical screenplay about us and actually
sell
the damn thing?

Amir's reaching across and swiping something from my lip, and I wince away. I wince away. Just like Geoff did to my mom on the counter.

“It's just a beer mustache,” Amir says, putting his phone on camera mode and flipping it to show me. I look like some “math nerd” in a porn—these ridiculous glasses, this haircut utterly lacking in style, this white froth mustache foaming me up like some kid Einstein.

Oh my God.
Kid Einstein.
One of my first movies ever with Annabeth.

I had this idea: What if Einstein and Freud and Hitler and Earhart (Amelia) had all been kids together, what if they'd been in school together? Kid Einstein, Kid Hitler, Kid Freud, and Kid Earhart, who'd be played by nobody, because the joke was: Even in middle school, Amelia Earhart was always missing.

“What if we don't cast anybody?” Annabeth offered, after I read her the first draft of my script. Always her, only her. “What if we cut all of Amelia's scenes?” It was her idea. All my best ideas were actually her ideas. Did you know that?

Oops. My beer's all gone.

“Hey,” Amir says. He's next to me on this sticky banquet. Everything is sticky. His arm is around my shoulder, and I can smell his deodorant. I want to be attracted to this. I should be, but I'm not. He's my exact same height, but he's so much stronger than I am that I feel like he could crush me, and I know that seeing Annabeth's face on the side of the building should have wrecked me tonight but it didn't. It numbed me. What's wrecking me is the breathtakingly stupid stuff. The stuff I don't plan on—how Annabeth is the only person in the world who would appreciate a Kid Einstein reference. How she's the only person I'd be brave enough to share a first draft with.

“I want another beer,” I say, and Amir, who's doing that super-gentle shoulder rub maneuver where just a guy's thumb is going up and down, goes, “Aw, Win, maybe that's enough for tonight?”

I whip my head so hard to look at him that our glasses almost smack, and I say, “What did you call me?”

“Um,
Win
. You know, short for Quinn, I guess?”

That's what she called me. That was ours; she called me Win and nobody else did, and I want to stand up and knock this table over and eat everybody's nachos and run out of this place screaming, but instead I play it like a Western and I grit my jaw and I say through my teeth: “I would really like another beer.” Amir scoots over to say, “Here, you can finish mine and then we should go,” and I don't even wait for half the sentence to be gone before I'm gulping his down, and you know what? My theory is right. At a certain moment, when you drink through enough of it, beer starts to become a kind of buzzing neutral.

“Whoa, there,” Amir says when I leap up and knock my hip really, really hard against the edge of the table. I think the sound escaping me is a laugh, but oh God, it's not; it's the weak inbred cousin of laughter, and I don't do this. I only cry alone.

The table next to us has left behind a bunch of half-empty beers, and, ladies and gentlemen, guess who chugs them all, one after the other, germs and dignity be damned?

Twenty seconds later Amir's got me under his arm, limping a little bit to the parking lot. I should probably be thankful that he is sweet enough to smile at me and say, “That's amazing, you've still got the little beer mustache going,” but instead of thinking it's sweet, I'm just seeing
Kid Einstein
on the megaplex screen of my mind, and I say, “I think I need to go home.” And other than Amir buckling me in, that's the last thing I remember.

A
ccording to local sources, I slept in my bathtub last night.

“Jesus,” I say, “
Christ
.”

This is the kind of hangover people write horror movies about, movies that are never funded because they're too graphic. If you don't know what a hangover feels like, congrats. You are smarter than I am. It's like a sledgehammer eloped with a swing set and they honeymooned in your head.

I lift my foot to turn the water on with my toe, and after it cools down a bit, I let it drench my legs. That's when I notice I'm still in my one good pair of underwear, and just that.

“Um . . . Amir?” I call out, louder than a smart kid would. These walls are so thin. Mom can probably hear every last detail of my life.

Nothing. Okay, so he's not here. Oh my God, thank God.

When my legs have been chilled enough so that I guess they start circulating the blood back up in a way that's vaguely “refreshing,” I see the pile of last night's cologned clothes, sitting next to the commode. Something is sticking out of the pocket of my jean shorts, which are hanging off the toilet plunger.

The glamour of it all.

I reach for my shirt so I can dry off my hands, and when I pull the note out of my shorts, I discover a message written in small, serial-killer block letters on thick graph paper. The paper of somebody who wants to be remembered.

“Win, if I can call you that?”
Hoo boy. I turn the water off to prep for this moment.
“Thank you for being so honest with me last night. Thank you for feeling comfortable enough to cry in front of me. Feel better. Sleep it off. Let's hang again before I go west, young man. —Amir.”

And then:
“P.S. Thank you especially for finally telling me about your sister.”

Oh God.

I place the note on the lid of my toilet. I hold my breath to dunk my head under, and I am forced to wonder how long it might take to drown. Not that I'd have the nerve for it. Please, I squeal when I pop zits.

So when I'm up again, and cradling my face in my hands, the weight and the throbbing of all these questions begin to push through and pool at my eyelids, and the first question I'm seeing is: What
did
I tell him last night, about Annabeth, on the ride back to my house? Does he now know the things only the police and my mom and my therapist know?

I try to stand but it doesn't work out so hot, and so I'm back to sitting with all these thoughts about so many different maybes, which crowd into one another like horrible party guests making trouble in a bathroom.

Maybe
I finally told somebody about how I had gotten into a huge fight with my sister on the morning of December twentieth, about how she was prioritizing everything else—including, of course, her college applications—over shooting my unfinished screenplay last fall.

Maybe
I told Amir how I sent her a text that day, after she stopped me in the hallway outside calculus and said: “I'm canceling the shoot after school. I'm free last period and I wanna do some Christmas shopping,” and my temper revved up zero to red-hot, and I said: “I can't believe you. I bet the
Coen
Brothers would never cancel an important shoot day,” and Annabeth snorted and said: “We're not the Coen Brothers. They co-direct their films—
and
they finish their screenplays first,” and my teacher said: “Class started thirty seconds ago, Mr. Roberts.”