Last Night at the Circle Cinema (21 page)

Livvy digested those words. “I have repeated that so many times—that question. I don't think it matters. I mean, he'd still be dead. We'd be saved that image of him, I guess. He just got his timing wrong—he thought we'd stay there, that his dad would find him probably.”

In a fit of honesty, we had braced ourselves and dashed up the stairs, past the photos of kid Bertucci on the walls, taken back before any of this was happening maybe, and burst through the door hoping to surprise him, to rattle the unflinching master of planning. “When I see him, and I do ... I mean, a vision of him ... he's still wearing that shirt.”

Livvy nodded. “You are here.”

“We are here.” I stopped. “All night I saw him too. Outside, I swear I could see his creepy eyes. How he'd want Twizzlers and make silly comments in the art gallery. Do you think I'm nuts for talking to him?” I looked at her. “Out loud. I mean, I talk to him out loud, Liv.” I took a breath. “I'm serious when I say I saw him here. Not just talked to him but really, I can, like, conjure him up.”

“Me too.” She chewed her lip for a minute. “I see him all over the place, his actual mannerisms. I fill the conversation with what he'd say.” She pushed her hair out of her face. “I think we will. Or, I will, for a while. Maybe always. I don't know.” She held out her phone. “I still text him.”

“I know you do.”

“The thing is, I know he'll never read them—he probably wouldn't have even when he was ... alive. But it feels better to me.” She palmed the phone like it was Bertucci's unmoving hand.

“I owed him eight hours,” I told her. “When you were in Morocco, buying those death masks?” Livvy shuddered. “We were bored. I planned this fun day. Or, I thought it was fun, visiting all the tollbooths in the New England area.”

“Why is that fun?” Livvy asked.

I shook my head. “It wasn't. I think ... maybe I was trying to make things normal. For Bertucci. Like the Day of the Meters.”

“Night of 1,000 Escalators?” Livvy licked her lips. “The thing is, it wasn't normal. It was ... those were all signs.”

“I know. I know. Of mental illness. Believe me, I've been over this fifty times with my dad. But anyway, the tollbooth thing was expensive—the Pike is like five bucks. And it was lame. Eight hours of driving around, and I forgot to bring the mix I'd made—with money songs on it, of course.”

“And?”

“And when we got back, Bertucci got out of the car and leaned in the window and looked at me in that way he has—had.”

Livvy knew what I meant. “This look? The kind but glaring look?” She demonstrated. I nodded.

“All he said was, ‘You owe me these past eight hours back.'”

Livvy reached for my hand and I squeezed hers. “I think you paid him back,” she said. And then, because I could tell it wasn't really what she wanted to say, she added, “It wasn't your fault.”

30

Livvy

We stayed in the projector room for what felt like a very long time, so long that by the time we emerged, making our way from the main theater out to the lobby, the light had shifted. Early morning. The same time of day we'd left the beach and returned—unexpectedly—to Brookville.

Codman went over to the ticket booth and picked up a large painting. “Bob,” he explained. I loved that he only had to say one word and yet there was a whole story in there. That even without Bertucci, the story existed.

The cat meowed, and I realized that I now had a pet for the first time. And that Codman had a painting he'd take with him to college or wherever he wound up. What a weird collection of things we had.

Codman cleared his throat. “I just—I need you to know that even though Bertucci was the planner ... I had ideas, too. Not like his. But ...” He held the painting of Bob against his leg and I knew—knew with absolute certainty—that Bertucci would manage to send postcards—via Bob—from the grave. They might not arrive right away, but I had a feeling they'd show up.

I shifted my pack around to get a look at Schrödinger and, once I'd confirmed he was okay, slid the pack back. “You shouldn't have left me at Bertucci's,” I said. “Not just because his dad was wasted and his aunt was screaming. But ... I mean, my parents stayed. You should have stayed.”

“I know.” Codman's face was lined with sorrow, his mouth turned down into a quivering frown. “Not that I'm trying to make excuses or anything .... I just want you to know.” He took a deep breath, preparing. “One time, I went over to pick you up. I don't know—we were meeting at Bertucci's.” Codman shook his head. “He was studying and fairly calm at the time—I understand now, he was medicated—and anyway, I had this thought: what if we—just me and you, Livvy—drove off together. Anywhere.”

I looked at him and felt nervousness—not just the same shakiness I'd had since finding Bertucci but the one I'd experienced the night before, at the beach house. A good nervous.

Codman continued, “Anyway, you came out of the doorway, and I was nervous so I looked down, and all I had on me—all I had in the car—was two drumsticks, a fork leftover from a salad I ate watching that tennis match against Brookville West, a jawbreaker, and a condom.” He paused. “Not that I had any hope in hell of using it at that point.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I don't know.” He paused. “No. Wait. I do know! You and I didn't run off together. In fact, you might remember I didn't even suggest it; instead I think I bored the crap out of you with my stories of camping as a kid. But ... what I'm trying to say is that I know now I couldn't have done it then. Run off with you. It had to happen the way it did.”

I nodded. “And it did. Happen, you know?”

He'd left me there in the dirty sunlight of Bertucci's kitchen, cups of Diet Coke and lukewarm beers near the sink. But he'd also left me after what we'd done the night before.

Codman came close to me, carrying his painting as though he were worried about leaving it behind. “Livvy. I do not. For one second. Regret anything that happened on the beach or with you.”

“Even though it was sort of the precursor to everything else?” I asked.

“I think that's the thing. You and I have to figure out how to ... not skip over that, because we can't. But sort of have it be two stories. There's the story where you and I are at the beach and falling in love—” He looked at me for a sign of approval, and I gave it with a smile. “And then another story, right?”

“The one where we're too honest for our own good and come back too early and find what we're not supposed to.” I nodded.

Outside, the city was waking up. Inside, so were we.

“Ready?” Codman walked toward the side door. “Hey—the Slice delivered?”

“Yeah—two calzones.” I paused. Two grads. Not three. “I ate mine without you. Sorry. It's probably cold now.”

“Like that ever stopped me?” Codman said and unwrapped the tinfoil, holding the calzone in a football grip. He ate it quickly.

I held open the door, the same one we'd broken into the night before, though it felt like longer, as though it had happened to someone else a long time ago. “You coming?”

Codman nodded, wiped his mouth on a waxy white napkin, and threw the food into a trash bin.

I opened the door and something landed on my head. Should I have known better than to look up? Probably. By now, yes. But I looked up and so did Codman and we were pelted; chocolate-covered raisins, Junior Mints, gummy bears, all manner of tiny edibles—stale and thus even harder than normal—rained down on my face, sliding down the back of my shirt.

“A gummy bear just landed between my breasts!” I tried to duck and dodge the storm of sweets, but I couldn't.

“Oh, to be a tiny, chewy bear,” Codman said. I kicked him lightly. “What? I gotta be me. Where'd he get all this?” He paused. “I mean, it was Bertucci, right? All of it?”

“He rigged it to spill only on leaving.” I pointed up to the twine and bucket. I nodded. Then I put another piece together. “The dead snack bar. The boxes were all empty.”

“So he gathered them?”

I plucked a green Jujube from Codman's head. “It's ... I don't know ... it's sad to picture him.”

I could see it, Bertucci methodically undoing each box of candy, dumping the contents into a bucket, and then carefully sealing the boxes back up as though nothing had been removed. Even though I'd stopped crying before, I felt it well up again and realized I might have more tears, more images that would filter in. Not just today or this week, but all summer, next year, as an adult even. That in order to get the memories back the way they actually happened, I would have to let all sadness come in and wash out. Then I would be able to look back on the Day of the Meters or Memorial Day with a smile maybe, not regret and melancholy.

“You know that nostalgia literally means pain from an old wound?” I said, thinking how Bertucci would have said he knew that already. And he would have liked that I knew it and felt he was a little better than Codman because he didn't.

Codman started laughing and, in the laughing, tearing up. “I mean, it's kind of hysterical, really. Bertucci sitting with a cat, probably feeding it all this time and dealing with eighty pounds of stale candy, calling the Slice five months in advance ... and a fake skull.” He paused. “Oh, shit, where's my skull?” I pointed to his head. “Ha, ha. Thanks, Anatomy Girl. No, I mean my little blue skull. It kind of got me through the freakazoid nature of my night.”

“He was really good at it,” I said.

“At what? Making candy rain on us?”

“No. The grand gesture.”

Codman nodded, tried eating a piece, and spat it out on the floor. “Anyone can make some big gesture. All dramatic and showy. The question is—and I thought about this while we weren't ... when you and I weren't ...”

“When we weren't speaking. It's okay. We are now. Just go on.”

“Well, Bertucci kicked ass at all kinds of stuff, right? But remember when he helped that guy Matthew with the prom dilemma?”

Everyone at Brookville fell prey to the pressurized spring tradition of the grand prom gesture—asking people in creative ways, each one cooler than the next, showstoppers with balloons in class or singing telegrams. “So, Bertucci helps Matt, right? And they cover the girl's car—the entire thing—with Post-it notes.”

“It looked cool,” I said. You could see them blowing in the breeze all the way from the science labs.

“Anyway, so they go through all this trouble and she says yes and they have to peel all the sticky things off the car and some of it got stuck and I remember Bertucci got roped into washing it off with some special solvent or something.” Codman paused. “But he never showed.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Matt. He forgot to pick her up. He blew off the prom.”

“And this is Bertucci's fault?” I asked.

“No. Kinda. No—more like Bertucci was so good that the idea and the execution. But he sucked at the
after
. He was all planning. Think about it—he disappeared after the hiding wall, the desk assemblage, my room on the ceiling.”

I swallowed. “And us?”

“Well, I think that's what he's saying. We are the after.”

I looked at the giant package of Twizzlers still unopened on the counter. “It was nice of you to put those out for him,” Codman said. I nodded. “You want to take them?”

“What, and throw them into the air at graduation?” I asked. “I don't think so.”

I put my hand into the doorway, stepping outside for the first time in over eight hours. The rain had left puddles that reflected the blue sky now. “Maybe you were supposed to leave the skully thing behind.”

Codman opened his mouth to protest but then nodded. “Yeah, probably.” Then he looked at me. “I'll be quick!” And he took off.

Even in the daylight, I felt fear, familiar and sickening, come back. He'd gone into the cinema again. With everything clear, the building itself looked precarious, disintegrating before my eyes. What if Codman never came back? I'd be stuck inside—in Schrödinger's box—forever.

I checked my watch. We had a little under two hours until we were supposed to report to the gym for cap and gown fittings and another hour in which Codman had to figure out what he was going to say in his speech to memorialize Bertucci.

He appeared next to me, emerging from the rubble panting. “Got it!” He held up the skull.

31

Codman

“There's something you need to see,” I told Livvy. It was obvious she wanted to leave the cinema, and I did too, but I tugged her back through the lobby to the far right of the main room.

“What're you doing?” Her voice pleaded. “I just ... we have to get out of here once and for all ....”

“Stop overthinking everything. For once.” I put my finger on her mouth and she was quiet.

“Follow me,” I said, and I hoped she would.

The door was all white, camouflaged with the wall, and I'd noticed it when I went back to retrieve the skull. “Let's just see. I think it goes to that outside staircase.”

Livvy wrinkled her nose. “The creepy dilapidated wooden one?”

“Yeah, as opposed to the other finely kept features,” I said.

The door opened easily, as if oiled recently, and we stepped out onto a wooden platform. The paint was peeling, and the staircase was functional if not in great shape.

“Is it possible we've had enough exploration?” Livvy asked. She wrapped her arms around herself, and I wanted to do the same.

“Look!” I pointed to the ladder.

“Emergency exit?” Livvy asked.

I shook my head and went to test it out. “No—this must be how they changed the movie titles.” The ladder was made of thin metal, flaking white in the sun, bolted to the building by rusting screws. Looking up, I could see the giant display sign.