Play Me

  “Stop it,” she says, but I can see the smile twitching at the corner of her mouth.

  “Fine,” I say, marching over to my SUV to get my wrench and screwdriver from where they’re buried under a mound of extra clothes and papers. “I’ll install your precious battery. But I don’t want you ogling me while I do it.”

  She shakes her head. “I’ll try to control myself.”

  She leans in close while I work, so close that I can smell her hair—soap and apples. Unfortunately it’s an easy job and doesn’t take me long. I’m just hooking up the cables when Lucinda says, “Sorry to make you hang around and do this.”

  I glance up. She looks as if she’d rather swallow her own tongue than say she was sorry about anything. I decide not to mess with her.

  “No big deal.”

  “I don’t mind asking my brothers, but I didn’t want to bother my parents with this. They go a little overboard. They would have sent a tow truck and possibly an ambulance. And they would have come, too. Probably with my entire extended family. It would have taken hours and then I’d have to deal with them worrying every time I got into the car. I wanted to handle this myself. I wanted to handle something myself.”

  Handle it herself? Okay, I’m going to mess with her. “You mean you wanted to stare at my butt.”

  “I’m not staring at your butt,” she says, but, of course, her eyes flick to my butt. I snicker.

  “I really hate you,” she says.

  “Didn’t we have a conversation about using and abusing me?” I slam the hood shut and wipe my palms on the front of my jeans.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” she says. “You’ve got grease all over your hands.”

  “So do you.”

  She inspects them, then wipes them on the front of my shirt. “That’s better.”

  It takes me a few seconds to register that she (a) just ruined my favorite T-shirt and (b) her touching me might be worth the ruin of my favorite shirt. “Now I’ll have to throw it out.”

  “What a shame.”

  “Have you got something against dill pickles?”

  “No, just self-absorbed redheads.”

  While I’m wondering if she’s seen Riot Grrl 16, what she thinks about it, she jumps into the car to test the new battery. The car starts right up. Her smile is like a flash-bulb going off.

  She leans out the window. “Thanks, Eddy. I really appreciate this.”

  “How much?”

  The smile dims and the I’ll-tenderize-you-with-my-racket expression is back. “Not that much.”

  “Jeez,” I say. “I didn’t believe the other boys when they told me, but they were right: you girls really do have one thing on your minds, don’t you?”

  She throws her head back and exhales loudly. “If you didn’t just fix this car, I’d run you over with it. What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about a game of tennis. I want to find out how harsh you can be. How’s Saturday?”

  She eyes me for a long minute, inspecting me, studying me. I think she’s going to say no, and for a minute I worry that I’ve played this all wrong. Then she says, “I have practice till noon. After that…” She trails off.

  “How about I meet you at the courts at twelve thirty? Unless you’ll be too tired.”

  “No, no,” she says. “I’m never too tired. You’re on. Saturday. Twelve thirty.”

  “Good,” I say. I turn and start walking back to my car.

  She calls after me. “Hey!”

  “What?”

  “You know I’m going to kick your ass, right?”

  I feel the goofy grin stretching across my face and hope that’s not the only thing she’s going to do. “I’m counting on it.”

  Clerks

  It was my mom who got me into movies. We rented new ones by the dozen and her favorites over and over again: Casablanca, Chinatown, Bonnie and Clyde, Harold and Maude, Rear Window, and every other Hitchcock ever made. She ate movies like other people eat potato chips, one after the other, never getting enough. As soon as the final credits rolled, she was pawing through the stack she’d rented, saying, “What should we watch next?”

  But it wasn’t just the classics she wanted. She was hungry for independents, blockbusters, foreign, animated, you name it. It made sense. Ever since she was a little girl, she wanted to be an actress. My grandparents thought it was a waste of time. They wanted her to be a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher, something practical and steady and boring as hell. She told me that when she was in high school in the eighties, she used to take the bus to New York City on Saturdays to take acting classes. Her parents thought she was babysitting for the Rosenblatt family around the block. She did that for two years until they caught her, and by then she was eighteen and there was not much they could do about it. For the next nineteen years, she auditioned for every Broadway play, every TV show, and every film she could. Sometimes, in the middle of a movie, she would press pause and then act out the scene, playing all the roles herself. Sometimes, maybe most times, she was better than watching the film.

  Movies were her life. Everything else was strictly cutting room.

  Anyway, it was because of my mom that I got to know Rory. It seemed we were at World of Video every few days with a new list of movies she wanted to rent.

  The first thing he ever said to me was: “Dude. Your mom’s a hottie.”

  The first thing I ever said to him was: “Dude. Don’t make me break your face.”

  “You probably could,” he said mildly and with no fear whatsoever. He was so small he was probably used to getting the crap kicked out of him. I noticed that he had a fading bruise under one eye and that his glasses were taped in the middle.

  He watched my mom browse the shelves in the drama section, her finger under her nose as if she smelled something bad. “I’ve seen her somewhere.”

  “Duh,” I said. “We’re here practically every minute.”

  “No, somewhere else.”

  I hadn’t told anyone about my mom yet and I was bursting to do it: “She’s in a movie.”

  “What? Get out!”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Which movie?”

  As soon as he asked, I got embarrassed. It wasn’t out yet. My mom told me that they were still looking for a distributor. “You probably never heard of it.”

  He shook his head in disbelief. “You do realize that you’re standing in a video store, right? I’ve heard of every movie ever made and every movie that is getting made. And if I haven’t heard of it, my parents have.”

  “Where are your parents?” I said. “I’ve been in here a million times and never seen them.” Rory’s parents were infamous around town for successfully blocking the opening of a giant Hollywood Video, mostly due to the fact that they were distantly related to the mayor. Because of them, World of Video was the only place around to get movies. Most of us were used to the strange smells in the store—new car smell in comedy, vomit in drama, lemons in foreign, baby powder in horror. The restroom smelled like a restroom—circa 1890. Most kids in school called World of Video Smellovideo and Rory’s parents the Smellovidiots. No wonder Rory’s glasses were broken.

  “The ’rents are around somewhere,” he told me. “Mostly they let me run the place.”

  “Really,” I said. He was short and skinny and about thirteen years old, same as me. “They let a seventh grader run their store?”

  He shrugged his tiny, bony shoulders. “Cheap labor.”

  “As in free?”

  He shrugged again. “They feed me. I can’t complain. So what’s the movie?”

  “She just had a small part,” I said.

  “There are no small parts; there are only small actors,” Rory said.

  “Where did you hear that? My mother says that all the time.”

  “See? We were made for each other.”

  “I can still break your face.”

  “Yeah, yeah. What’s the movie called, Clint?”

  “Clin
t?”

  “As in Eastwood? As in, ‘Go on, make my day’? Dirty Harry?”

  I shook my head.

  “You’re obviously hopeless,” he said. “A classic, dude, a classic. Clint carries a gun about a foot long and shoots everybody.”

  We were getting off topic. I would discover later that off topic was one of Rory’s favorite places to go. “My mom’s movie’s called Villerosa.”

  Rory frowned. “Huh. That might be the one movie in the world I haven’t heard of. What’s it about?”

  “The main character’s this mob guy named Villerosa, right? But everyone keeps mispronouncing it because of the two l’s.”

  “What l’s?”

  “The l’s in his name. V-i-l-l-e-r-o-s-a. It’s a Spanish name. The two l’s are pronounced as a y. So that’s the joke in the movie. That people keep getting his name wrong.”

  “It’s a joke?”

  “Well, yeah. Because he isn’t a very good mob guy. He keeps getting stuff wrong, too.”

  “Okay,” said Rory, still frowning.

  I decided I wasn’t explaining it right; I was making the movie sound stupid. “My mom plays a hit woman.”

  “Sweet!” said Rory. “Does she carry a foot-long gun?”

  “She kills people other ways. Like with household stuff. A plastic knife. A soda can. A nail clipper. Like that. It’s a comedy.”

  “Have you seen it?”

  I hadn’t. “They’re still looking for a distributor.”

  “But you must have seen it.”

  “She wouldn’t let me,” I told him.

  “Why not?” he said. “Wait, I know. She must get naked in it.”

  “She does not get naked. She’s my mom.”

  “Then she takes off her top or something.”

  I held up a video. “She also kills someone with a video cover. She showed me how to do it.”

  “All right, all right, so she keeps her clothes on. Why wouldn’t she want you to see it?”

  “She says she’s too nervous. It’s her first big role. She wants me to wait until the premiere.”

  “When is that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Because of the distributor thing.” I tried not to sound too nervous about it myself, but it was hard. My mother was so anxious that it was rubbing off on the whole family. My dad couldn’t eat. Marty couldn’t sleep. The Meatball had taken to banging his head against the wall, something he hadn’t done since he was in nursery school. And I was spilling my guts to the weird kid who worked at Smellovideo.

  Rory pushed his broken glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Even if your mom’s movie goes straight to DVD, it would still be really sweet.”

  “You think so?”

  “Sure. Lots of actors get attention that way. If she’s good, then she’s good, right? No matter what she’s in.”

  I exhaled, relieved. “Right.” I was so relieved, I stuck out my hand. “I’m Eddy.”

  He looked at me as if I was crazy—I mean, what seventh grader shakes hands?—but he shook it anyway. “Pleased to meet you. I’m the Dalai Lama.”

  “Nice to meet you, Mr. Lama.”

  It became our standard greeting. When I see Rory at my locker the day after we posted the latest Riot Grrl 16 episode, the day after my world was eclipsed by a moon called Lucinda, I say, “Nice to meet you, Mr. Lama.”

  “Llama, llama, duck,” he shouts, performing one of his strange and awkward white guy dance moves that he should never do in public but insists on doing anyway. Two girls passing by whip around to stare at him. “Have you ever kissed a llama on the llama?” he bellows after them. Rory’s a lot like Tippi Hedren, always quoting the videos he sees, this one a stupid song that whipped through the web a few years ago. But unlike Tippi Hedren, I’m not sure he always knows the right time to do his quoting. One of the girls gives him a dirty look while the other one tells him what he can do with his llama, which sounds pretty uncomfortable, not to mention illegal (though probably available for viewing somewhere on the internet).

  But I’m spared the predictable animal abuse jokes that would normally follow because Gina is stomping down the hall and heading right for us. She’s recently started wearing her Riot Grrl combat boots to school. Always the queen of fashion, she’s paired them with an intriguing plaid kilt.

  “Is she armed under that skirt?” Rory mutters.

  “We’ll find out,” I mutter back.

  Both of us instinctively shrink against the lockers when Gina gets close. “You filmed me when I told you not to,” she says, stabbing me in the chest with her finger.

  No sense denying it. “Yes.”

  She stabs me again. “And you used the footage in the show.”

  “Yes.”

  “I think you’re evil. No, not just evil. You’re the devil. Tell me, Ed. Are you the devil? The fallen one? Beelzebub himself?”

  Her eyes are wide black pits. They’re sort of mesmerizing. I’m thinking I could actually get sucked into them and land in another dimension. “I don’t think so.”

  “I think so.” Stab, stab, stab. After a minute she says, “The show was number three with the voters so far.”

  “I know,” I say.

  “It looked awesome.”

  “You looked awesome,” I tell her.

  She keeps stabbing, but softer now. It’s like Shiatsu. “I still think you’re a girl-using slut.”

  “So why do you keep touching me?”

  “I’m trying to leave a bruise. No, scratch that. I’m trying to put my hand through your sternum, reach into your bloody viscera, and rip out your still-beating heart.”

  “Really. And then what?”

  “Then I’m going to feed it to my dog.”

  “Ah.”

  “Okay, Riot Grrl, that’s enough,” Rory says. “Eddy’s delicate. You’ll hurt him.”

  Gina finally stops stabbing me. “Hurt him? He’d have to have feelings for that.” She slaps me across the face, hard enough for me to feel the sting, light enough to tell me that she’ll keep doing the show. The people around us start chanting, “Riot Grrl! Riot Grrl! Riot Grrl!” as she pushes through the crowd.

  “I think you could file a complaint,” Rory says after Gina disappears through the double doors leading to the other wing.

  “Are you crazy? She’s perfect.”

  “Hot, too,” he says. “If you like the unpredictable and kilt clad.”

  “What’s not to like?”

  “True,” he says. “Maybe we should write a scene for Riot Grrl with Gina doing that stabbing-the-chest thing to her boyfriend? Are you the devil? Are you what’s-his-name?”

  “Beelze…” I say, trailing off because it’s Lucinda’s turn to walk toward us. It must be a match day because she’s wearing another tiny tennis outfit, a dress this time. Rory whistles at her and I smack him upside the head. Lucinda’s mouth twitches. I almost got her to smile.

  “Hey!” Rory says. “What was that for?”

  “Don’t whistle. It makes you look like an ass.”

  “Girls love it.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Like they love colitis.”

  “Don’t get weird on me, dude. Joe’s acting up too. Notice how much time he spends doing history these days? And what’s with the Bible?”

  I wait for Lucinda to look back over her shoulder, but she doesn’t. “I hadn’t really thought about it.”

  The bell rings and Rory scurries off to wherever llamas go to waste time till graduation. I have English, where we will be discussing Crime and Prejudice. Or Pride and Punishment. Or This Book Is So Bloody Dull Nobody but High School Students Will Ever Read It and Then Only Because They Are Repeatedly Threatened with Unjust Detentions Even Though Graduation Is Near Enough to Taste. Once, my mother tortured me with a six-hour BBC production of one of those period dramas where all the characters are trapped by circumstance and they all sit around in dusty drawing rooms not allowed to do the things they want or say the things they think. High school is a
lot like that.

  I turned eighteen in April. The first thing I did was go down to the school office and ask if I could sign myself out. I wanted to do an afternoon shoot with Gina at the beach. The secretary didn’t even look up from her computer screen.

  “No, you can’t sign yourself out. Your parents have to sign you out. And besides, we discourage that sort of thing.”

  “I turned eighteen yesterday. That makes me a legal adult. I shouldn’t have to have anyone’s permission to do anything.”

  “Really,” said the secretary. “I assume you’ll be moving out of your parents’ house and paying your own bills, then.”

  “I just want to go to the beach. What do you have against the ocean?”

  “When you’re elected president of the universe, you can sign yourself out. Until the end of June, you belong to us. After that, you can spend the rest of eternity perfecting your tan.”

  In English, I slide into my seat and try to remember which book I was supposed to have read. All around me, people are smiling and nodding. I hear, “Way to go, Ed,” and, “Great show.”

  The guy behind me claps me on the back. “Yo, Rochester. Riot Grrl rocked.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “Better than anything else in that contest.”

  I nod. “Thanks. We liked it too.”

  “That girl’s a freak.”

  He’s talking about Gina, of course. She isn’t, not really. She gets good grades; she doesn’t drink or do drugs. But not many people see beyond the big boots and the attitude and the I’ll-feed-your-heart-to-my-dog. Everyone mixes her up with her character. It’s like they’ve totally forgotten that just eight months ago, Gina was just another drama nerd. Like they’ve forgotten that Riot Grrl 16 is a total figment of my imagination.

  Cameras do that to people.

  He leans in behind me. He smells a little like lunch meat. Looks like it too—thick, red in the face. “You’re doing her, right?”

  “Who?”

  “Riot Grrl.”

  See?

  “No,” I say. “Riot Grrl’s a virgin.”

  “Too hot to be a virgin,” he says. His first name is Attila, so of course everyone calls him the Hun.