The Great American Whatever (21 page)

It comes to me, that is, why I am the kind of mad known as sad.

There is so much about Annabeth's life that will never be: She will never share an Oscar with me. She will never have her kids call me Uncle Win. She will never have kids.

And I was kind of getting used to that concept.

But now, this,
too
: This idea that there are things about Annabeth that actually
happened
that I'll never know? That she and Geoff were sneaking around behind my back merely points out the grimmest truth of all: That there are hours and days and months from her life, an autobiography she'll never get to share with me. She didn't keep a diary that I know of. She called our films her diary, but I think she did it just to humor me.

“Um . . . Quinn?”

Something about Annabeth having this secret with my best and only friend underlines how now she's been relegated to sitting there in an urn in the sunroom, forever not able to answer my questions.

“Why were you so snippy with me at the coffee shop?” I say to Geoff. I can't look at him. I am typing 6-6-6 into the treadmill, just to have the distraction of a beep.

“It was our anniversary,” he says.

“What?”

“When you came to Loco Mocha yesterday, it was my anniversary with Annabeth. It would have been a year. I was really upset that I couldn't share that, like, heaviness with you.”

“Wait, you were seriously officially
dating
?”

“Yeah, when we could sneak in time behind your back, which actually wasn't that hard. You never notice anything if it's not about you.”

I step off the treadmill and back Geoff into the sofa.

“We were in
love
with each other,” he says.

I am holding so many feelings inside that my body is the second Civil War. “Just stop
talking
. For a
second
.
Okay?
”

Geoff's eyes spill over. “I lost her too, you know. You don't own the trademark on mourning your sister.”

I reach to touch him, and a breeze sweeps through the basement—
Annabeth's ghost?
I'm thinking—but it's not. It's the vortex created by the door at the top of his stairs opening, and I hear his mom's voice: “Geoff, everything okay down there?” and God love the kid, he goes, “No,” and he is crying and not trying to hide the brokenness from his mom, “it's not,” and she scurries down the stairs and comes to the French doors leading to the basement. She is in a silk robe. Her hair is up and although she is thin, my mom is prettier.

“Quinn,” she says.

I turn away and put the metal apple down, afraid I may launch it at any moment.

“I told him,” Geoff says, “but I don't think he believes me.”

“No, I do,” I'm saying, but then he says: “Tell him, Mom. Tell him how in love with Annabeth I was.”

I can't handle this. Hell, I could barely handle that Annabeth never got to have a boyfriend, but now this: that Annabeth was in
love
with somebody and then had that taken away from her? It's too tragic.

“I just can't. This is so not like you guys to keep something from me.”

“This is exactly why we didn't tell you,” Geoff says. He gets up from the sofa.

“Boys,” his mom says. She used to say the same thing when we were in sixth grade and we would tell sex jokes in the backseat of yet another brand-new Toyota. Sex jokes that we thought his mom wouldn't “get.”

“The whole world isn't yours to decide, Quinn,” Geoff says, and when he's jabbing his finger into my chest, that's when I notice the strange manila envelope in his other hand, the thing he retrieved from storage.

“
Boys
,” his mom says again, “come on. Let's cool down and meet up again tomorrow.”

“Mom, get out of here. It's fine,” Geoff says, but it isn't, and he's scaring me. Geoff is the optimist. Geoff isn't the one to jab or get violent. His parents had a no-hitting rule.

Mine didn't.

“Were you ever going to tell me?” I say. From overhead, we must look like a pretty good setup to a pretty dynamic scene: the aging architect in the robe, the weird kid in the fake glasses, the best friend with the mystery envelope. It's not a bad scenario, if only I knew the ending.

“No,” Geoff says, “because when Annabeth went to college, we were going to break up.”

He falls back into the couch and puts his head in his hands and plainly sobs, and as he sobs, goobs of snot and spittle fall from his face like Fallingwater, the field trip all Pennsylvanian children are required to take at least twice, and when the goobs fall forth, they land on the manila envelope by his feet, with a return address from Los Angeles, with the word
CONGRATS
printed across the front, and with my name,
QUINN ROBERTS
, written above Geoff's address—the word
URGENT
stamped in red ink.

“What the hell is that?” I say.

“Language,” Geoff's mom says, and the three of us somehow laugh. As if
hell
is the worst thing I've ever said, or the worst concept I've ever imagined. Hell is your big sister losing her virginity to your best friend and neither one of them being confident enough to share that news with you because you are, in fact, the monster of this picture. Godzilla got to be the title role, but, my God, he was still the monster. Still the antagonist. Still the wickedest. That is me. The creature who destroys villages and has to be tiptoed around.

“Open it,” Geoff says. “Happy fucking birthday.” He looks up like a little boy might. His mom wants to say “Language,” again, but she doesn't.

I reach for the envelope. My hands are shuddering. I am hungry or perhaps horny. I have never wondered what Geoff would look like naked, but now, suddenly, knowing that he has had sex makes me feel as if I'm meeting a celebrity.

“Why?” I ask, when I open the envelope and my eyes scan the letter. I don't even know what I mean, but that is the word. “Why?” I say again as I read the one-pager from the Los Angeles Society of Young Filmmakers.

“Dear Mr. Roberts,”
it says—as if I'm my dad.
“Thank you for applying to the Los Angeles Society of Young Filmmakers summer lab!”

“I didn't apply to this lab,” I say. “I never finished the applic—what the hell is this?”

“Keep reading,” Geoff says. His cheeks are stained a translucent white, either zit medication running from the tears or maybe just sunblock. No. Definitely sunblock. Geoff doesn't need zit medication.

“I'm going to get you boys a snack,” Geoff's mom says, taking off. Leave it to a mom to solve any problem with a snack, and yet: They are always right about this.

We are writing to inform you that your screenplay
Double Digits
has been chosen as a finalist for the

X screenwriters

__ directors

division of the LASYF for this August.

As you no doubt know, only 5 screenwriters and 5 directors are chosen each summer, out of submissions that number in the thousands. You were number one on the wait list, and due to a technical eligibility requirement not being met by a previous finalist, we are delighted to accept you into our upcoming lab.

Please note the URGENT nature of the following:

-If you wish to attend, we will need to hear from you by August 1 for an August 18 start in Los Angeles.

-We are unable to supply housing or airfare.

-Most vitally, we cannot accept incomplete screenplays; you must supply the final pages to us by August 1, the same date as the official opt-out, or we will have to ask you to reapply again in the future.

Please reply at your earliest convenience, and congratulations again on the thrilling first draft of
Double Digits
. We look forward to pairing you with a student director in Los Angeles.

Sincerely,

Gloria Katz

Chair, the LASYF

Geoff's mom reappears in the doorway with a tray. This breaks my heart. My poor mom would never think to serve something on a tray. The snack would never even make it out of the kitchen.

“I don't understand anything anymore,” I say to Geoff. “Annabeth and I didn't apply to this. I don't understand this.”

Nobody has read that script except my sister, who found it “limited” and said it wasn't my best work of all time and was going to be “impossible to direct.” That it could use professional guidance. That she wished Ricky Devlin were still around to mentor me—“
or we could just apply to
this,” she wrote, when she forwarded me the link to the lab in LA. I printed out the application that night, feeling smug for such an accomplishment, as if the damn thing would just fill out its own pages.

“Annabeth and I applied for you,” Geoff says.

(beat) (beat) (beat)

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I say. But I am so quiet that I scare myself. Geoff's mom's lips mouth the word “Language” but they don't say it.

“If your script wins at the end of the lab,” Geoff says, taking a baked pita chip from the tray, “
Double Digits
will get screened on some festival circuit.”

I bounce a little, as if prepping to spring away to the moon, or even better, directly into the sun. “What are you—that is the, like, working title. That isn't even—nobody was supposed to see that, except her. I specifically
didn't
apply because the screenplay wasn't
ready
.”

“I know,” Geoff says, droll. “But Annabeth and I were tired of seeing you being so precious about every last little thing.”

“
Sweetie
,” his mom says, and he snaps at her: “Give us some space, Mom.”

Never mind. He doesn't snap. I forgot that in some families, the men are able to ask for what they want without violence edging their voices like burnt paper.

“I'll be right upstairs,” his mom says. She's forever working on her architecture plans, forever constructing buildings to behave just the way she wants them to. I get this completely.

“It's a huge opportunity, dude,” Geoff says, as if he's Mrs. friggin' Kelly in the cinder-block counselor's room.

“Then why are you
crying
?” I say, and he really is, his face running like Fallingwater again, an unlimited brook of tears.

“Thousands of applicants, screenwriters
and
filmmakers, and you got in.”

“We were on the
wait
list,” I say, folding the paper in half.

“You got in.”

“Then why,” I say, again, “are you crying?”

“We sent in the first three-quarters of your screenplay, which wasn't even allowed—it had to be a complete script”—(yes, I know;
that's why I didn't apply
)—“but you got in because you're that fucking good. . . .”

I unfold the page and look at it again:

We are writing to inform you your screenplay
Double Digits
has been chosen as a finalist for the

X screenwriters

__ directors

“But the thing is,” he goes, “Annabeth didn't want . . . um.”

But the way he says “um” makes me know this is not just an
um
. There's always an
and
with Geoff.

“What?”
I say. “She didn't want
what
?”

“Annabeth didn't want to check off the director's box,” Geoff says, a thin film of saliva breaking across his mouth, like the giant bubbles we used to play with back in the summers, when everything was possible. “It would have been the easiest thing to do—to send in her reel and see if she'd get in too—but she was cool just letting this be your thing, Quinny.”

“
No.
That doesn't even sound like h—”

“She always said your dialogue was what made the movies pop,” Geoff says—and strangely, right at the climax of the scene, right when John Williams would bring in the saddest, lowest horns, to make you cry, Geoff doesn't keep crying. The tears stop and he offers a wounded smile, like a truce. “And she was obviously right.”

I look at his mom's vase. “So, wait—now you actually expect me to go to, like, Los
Angeles
and get paired with some anonymous person who isn't your dead girlfriend?
This
is how you want me to celebrate my birthday?”

Never mind. He's crying again. Geoff's Adam's apple jumps up and down like the trampoline in our neighbor's yard. He can't speak. “Mhmm?” he finally manages to hum.

I am all out of dialogue. I walk very slowly to the tray of food, and I pick up the whole thing and almost throw it against his perfect wallpapered wall—it would make for such a strong, complicated goodbye.

But I am not going to be that guy.

So all I do is set down the tray and tear the paper in half, and crumple it up, and throw it at Geoff.

“She didn't want this dream, Quinn,” he says, finally, when I'm putting the bowling shoes on again, with my back to him. “But you do. Or did.”

I push through the French doors. I don't even stop when Geoff's mom tries to hug me by their kitchen island. And by the time I'm ten minutes out of the good part of town, I get this somewhat fucked-up idea for how to turn my birthday around. How to even the score with my best friend, with the universe. How to play catch-up with my sister.

“
What was that you said
,” I text Amir, just as I'm getting to my neighborhood, “
about getting me laid tonight?
”

O
ne shower later, I'm sitting outside on our crumbly front steps, picking at a scab on my knee that I didn't even know had been scabbed. What I'm
not
doing is I'm not walking up the street and waiting for Amir to pick me up there. I'm just letting him show up outside our house in plain sight. I suppose I'm coming out in twelve easy steps.