“Docufiction,” Wesley and I said together.
“It’s like cinéma vérité,” I said, “but with some narrative injected into it.”
“Stories based on real events,” he said.
“Inspired by,” I corrected. “We’re blurring the line between fact and fiction. It’ll probably focus on the trials and tribulations of being a high school senior.”
“Or a teacher,” he said.
Not something we had talked about. I glanced at him sharply.
“I see,” Siobhan said. “But what is the story?”
“It’s a slice of life,” Wesley said.
“It’s a lot of short, interconnected stories,” I explained. “Vignettes. We’re taking a scattershot approach. There’s no grand design, just like there isn’t in real life.”
“But surely there’s a theme,” Siobhan said.
Wesley and I both opened our mouths, then looked at each other.
“Well, obviously,” he said.
“We just haven’t decided on it yet,” I added.
“Maybe it will emerge while you work,” his mom suggested.
A memory leapt to the front of my mind, unbidden. Evan and I in the motel, in each other’s arms, moving together slowly, hypnotically. Jesus. So inappropriate in this chaste family kitchen. I blushed furiously, but I said, “When you don’t force it, sometimes amazing things happen.”
Siobhan peered at me. “Wise girl.” She brushed my cheek with a cool, dry finger. “Lovely, too.”
Please adopt me, I thought.
“Mom,” Wesley said. Funny how that word was both censure and affection when he said it.
“I assume you two will be working upstairs? I’ll trust you to keep it PG-13.”
Wesley blushed. I laughed. Siobhan smiled.
“I love your mom,” I said as I followed him upstairs.
“That’s because you don’t know her yet.”
I plucked that word out of the air and clutched it to my chest. Yet.
His room was enormous, but the ceiling slanted, making him crouch half the time. Pretty much what I expected: huge TV, Xbox, movie posters. Instead of the usual boy funk there was a faint herbal scent, his cigarettes and some kind of incense, maybe patchouli. He had a custom-built computer with two monitors and studio-grade speakers. And about a dozen types of video camera, in various states of disassembly.
“Are your parents rich?” I said, drifting to the windows. “Oh my f**king god.”
“What?”
“You have a pool.”
He shrugged uncomfortably.
“Wesley. Do you hate me?”
“No?”
“Please rephrase in the form of a statement. And if you don’t hate me, why didn’t you tell me you have a pool?”
Not once did it occur to me that it was because he couldn’t handle seeing me in a bikini.
“It’s too late to use it anyway.”
“That’s defeatist talk,” I said, but I grabbed a chair and sat beside him at the PC. “Let’s see the B-roll.”
He had a metric shit ton. Half from summer: oceans of wheat rippling in the wind, trains silhouetted against bloody sunsets, even the carnival, eerily deserted in the rain. The rest was from the school year: a swarm of legs walking past, the fistfight we’d seen. And me. I was in most of those shots. Staring out windows longingly or giving him my lunatic grin. Sitting in class listening to Mr. Wilke. In every single one of them my yearning was crystal clear. It burned in me like fever, made my skin glow palely, my eyes blaze, a beautiful madness. I stared at myself, breathless. I wasn’t hiding anything. It was all there in plain sight.
“Is this how you see me?” I said, almost whispering. “As an attention whore?”
“No. No way.”
“Then why am I in all of these?”
“Because you’re the only interesting person here.”
I glanced at him. “You can’t do much with this except make a film about me.”
He eyed me sideways, too. “Is that a bad thing?”
“That’s not me. I’m not some starlet. I want to make something, Wesley. I don’t want to be objectified as some pretty face.”
My words came out harsh and sibilant, like steam. I hadn’t meant to sound so angry.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
“It’s okay. That’s why we’re here. To get some perspective.”
He wouldn’t look away from his keyboard, so I flicked his ear. He gave me a dirty look.
“Clean slate,” I said. “High school in the American heartland. What darkness lurks inside this seemingly pastoral town?”
“Incest,” he said.
“Cliché,” I said. “But probably.”
We brainstormed for a while, then decided to watch some stuff for inspiration. Unsurprisingly, Wesley was a huge David Lynch fan. We watched bits of Mulholland Drive, skipping around to our favorite parts. Mine: Betty arriving in LA, full of big dreams about to be mercilessly crushed. Wesley’s: the lesbian sex scene. I laughed and asked if he needed me to leave the room for a few minutes. He threw a Blu-Ray case at me. Siobhan made baked mostaccioli, and we all ate together, showing her some of his better footage on his phone. I’d plugged mine into his computer to charge.
“Someone’s calling you,” he said when we went back upstairs.
“Who?”
“‘E.’”
I grabbed my phone. “I need to take this. Outside.”
“Who is it?”
“Hi, Dad,” I said exaggeratedly when I answered. “Just a sec.”
I could practically hear Evan’s eyebrows go up with a little comic book noise. Fwip.
I raced downstairs, flung open the patio door. The pool lights were off, the water gleaming darkly in the oozing, sauvignon twilight.
“Hi,” I said when I was alone. “Sorry about that.”
“‘Dad?’”
“Thought you’d appreciate the Freudian irony.”
He laughed softly. His voice, slightly metallic, ran down through my bones and settled warmly in my chest, like bourbon. “I can’t stop thinking about you.”
You read things in romance novels like he made me melt, knowing this is physically impossible. Girls are not pats of butter. Yet my body was doing a damned fine imitation of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Girl, dissolving against the side of the house.
“So you called to torture me?”
“I know it’s late, but I want to see you.”
My eyes widened. “Do we have time for that?”
He laughed again, a little guiltily. “I actually just want to see you. Even if it’s only for a minute.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes what?”
“Yes, it’s late. And yes I want to see you.”
I pictured him smiling. “Can you meet me?”
Wesley was messing around online when I went back upstairs. “I’ve got to run. Family shit.”
I had to convince him to not walk me home. I sang out a goodbye to Siobhan, and for a moment I was reluctant to leave that bright, happy house. But something even brighter was waiting for me.
I stopped at home to brush my teeth and change clothes, because I’m not above vanity. The lights were off, Mom’s van gone. I wished she’d never come back. That Siobhan would pull into the driveway, saying, Come with me to your new life, lovely girl.
When I biked out to the water tower he was already waiting.
I hopped off and let my bike ride on without me and ran to him. He pulled me down to the grass to a blanket he’d spread. I ended up atop him, my hair in both our faces. He held me, his arms coiling and relaxing, again and again, one hand buried in my hair at the base of my skull. Crickets made a creaking heartbeat around us. Cool aloe musk rose from the grass.
“I’ve been thinking about this all day,” he whispered.
I brushed my cheek against his. The earth sank beneath us, pressed by the weight of the whole universe above. How could it set us up like this, every planet precisely aligned, if it didn’t mean for us to collide? His heart crashed against mine, fierce and steady.
I pushed myself up on my palms. “You’ve done something to me.” My voice was quiet, too, a ribbon of breath threading into the breeze that stirred my hair. “I feel like I’m waking from a long dream, and everything is so much more beautiful than I remembered.”
His eyes were pale and bright in the starlight. The hand in my hair pulled me to him.
I kissed my teacher in the shadow of the water tower, beneath the stars.
I’ve been pretty honest so far, haven’t I? So I’ll admit: it wasn’t innocent, blind love. His age drew me to him in the first place; now it was being my teacher that gave me a wild, terrified thrill every time we touched, infusing me with adrenaline, making my skin prickle. The danger was an electrode buried in my brain, lighting up my most primal fear and pleasure circuits. There was more to it, of course. Something was unfolding in me that had never opened before. But I wasn’t kidding myself. The forbiddenness was part of it.
I rolled onto my back and stared up at the sky. We propped our knees side by side. A tiny cut of light opened in the star-freckled face of the night, a shooting star. I raised my hand and closed a fist over it. When I opened my fingers, it was gone. Part of me now. You’re a creator. Wesley had seen the person he thought I was, some obsessive, narcissistic teenager. Evan saw both who I was and who I wanted to be.
“Why did you become a teacher?” I said.
He sat up, leaning on an elbow. “There are two types of teachers. The first kind always wanted to be teachers. They train for it. They’re passionate, caring, good people.” I could hear the smile in his voice, bittersweet. “The second kind wanted to be something else, but couldn’t. Crowded field, not good enough, not driven enough. Whatever. But they have a lot of specialized knowledge, so instead of letting it rot, they become teachers.”
“Which kind are you?”
“The third kind.”
“As in Close Encounters of?”
He pinched my upper arm. “The kind who doesn’t know how he got here or where he’s going. I was on my way somewhere else, but a detour came up.”
“Where were you going originally?”
“Promise not to laugh?”
I sat up too, intrigued. “Maybe.”
“You can’t promise ‘maybe.’”
“Cross my heart, hope to die.”
“I was going to be an actor.”
My jaw dropped. I could see it. That f**king gorgeous face. The way it filled with light, looking more alive, more feeling, more human than anyone else.
“Is that pleasant surprise, or ‘don’t quit your day job?’” he said.
I turned it into a grin.
Evan laughed, eyes downcast, actually shy. Or maybe acting shy. I looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. The lips that had been sculpted so delicately they stood out more than his other features, the eyelashes like gold dandelion seeds. I pulled out my phone.