Last Night at the Circle Cinema (6 page)

“That boy loves his pranks,” Bee had said one afternoon while Codman and Bertucci tried to clean out the study downstairs. Bertucci told his mother that it was because he couldn't stand the mess any longer, but Codman and I knew the truth: he had to empty the room to make space for her hospital bed, the kind with electric up-and-down functions, the kind that hospice brought in as a last little comfort. I kept Bee company upstairs, feeding her leftover Passover matzo ball soup with a baby spoon. Which was worse, that Bee had kept one of Bertucci's baby spoons and now had it turned on her? Or that the soup was another symbol of freedom from our family Seder, while Bee was trapped in her body? I fed her tiny bits while Codman helped our best friend set up his mother's deathbed, something so cruel and sad I could hardly breathe when I thought about it. The only thing worse, I guess, would be having a mother do the same for her child.

“Actually, I'll tell you something, Bee,” I'd said as the bed got delivered, clanking through the metal screen door as Codman swore. “I'm not convinced it's all Bertucci. It just seems like a lot of planning and execution for one person to pull off.”

Bee looked up at me, her unwashed hair in oily ribbons on the pillow, her lips dry. “I don't for a second think you doubt Bertucci. He's a master of planning. Even as a boy, that's what he did. Formulas, elaborate dinners that involved chemistry and smoke, chess matches.” She fell asleep as I continued a Bertucci story, but I told her anyway, feeling that some of her son's grace and skill would filter into her dreams.

Senior Start Day was always a big deal. Seniors started a day after the rest of the school—presumably so we wouldn't be bothered by the bumbling newcomers. When we finally arrived on campus, banners wriggled in the new fall wind and potted begonias from the Parent Committee flanked the main doors. Everyone shuttled past the pillars and into the familiar hallways that already seemed small and distant, as though we were looking back on ourselves yearbook-style. Seniors had their own hallway of lockers reserved for them, and the entrance to that hallway was known to all as the Senior Doorway. The doorway itself was nothing special, just double-wide and with the school logo painted on either side. But it was something, to have a door just for our grade, the top of the student hierarchy. I'd arrived early like I always did, and stood around outside talking to Lissa in the hopes she might produce Codman—they liked each other already—all the while scanning the tops of people's heads for Bertucci. He was always my savior in crowds, anchoring me.

It was good luck to stand in the Senior Doorway, lingering as if under mistletoe, and I had a plan to make a wish as I stood directly under the center. But when the first group of us made our way toward the Senior Doorway, something looked weird. “The door's gone!” Codman said in his whisper-yell. I shook my head, sure he was wrong, but by then the football team had noticed too, and Mark Denvers, drama king in a lacrosse jacket, was pounding the newly-scrubbed walls to confirm it. “What in the hell happened? Where the fuck's our door?”

Did we have proof that Bertucci was behind the hack? No. But I knew. Or at least I thought I knew. He—or someone—had covered the doorway with sheets of plywood, then placed fliers and announcements on the plywood so it blended in with the rest of the wall. The entire entrance was covered, camouflaged.

“Who manages to hide an entire wing of the building?” I had asked him at lunch. “Did you plan for long?” Bertucci had his napkin on his lap as though we were fine-dining, though he scarfed up the daily sloppy joe.

“I do not know of what you speak,” he'd said.

••••

Now I wished I had Bertucci to anchor me. Or that Codman hadn't ditched me for whatever was down the other corridor. What was that story we had to read, “The Lady, or the Tiger?” In one door there's a stunning woman and in the other a beast that will rip you to shreds. You have to go through one of the doors. The teacher had used it as an example of an unsolvable problem—because you just can't know what's on the other side of the door.

In the narrow tunnel, I felt fear creeping up my limbs. I also began to resent Bertucci for putting me in this situation in the first place. I narrated for no one or everyone as I inched my way in the inky air toward what I hoped would be a place where I could finally see what was happening.

“You know I know about all of the pranks, right? Even that last one?” I started to laugh. Bertucci had switched his mother's regular toothpaste with confectionary sugar and water. He wasn't really one for easy gags, but this was probably all Bee could handle. He brought the kidney-shaped plastic pink dish beneath her chin, and I held her upright as she brushed her teeth. “Ack! Phelllahghh,” she spat out in to the dish, her mouth angry but her eyes laughing. “You're too much, Sweets. Too much.”

••••

At the movie theater I kept going into the dark, afraid of something jumping out at me or pinching me from behind so I turned to press my back into the wall as I stepped. An eerie orange-red glow seeped out from around the far corner at the end of the hall. I figured it was probably the Emergency Exit sign, still illuminated. The color was the same as the dried blood on Bee's lips that I had wiped down with a washcloth and gone to rinse in the bathroom at Bertucci's.

I had opened the door without knocking since the downstairs bathroom was hardly used, and when I saw Bertucci standing at the sink, I flinched and apologized.

“Sorry, sorry! My fault. Always knock,” I said and blushed.

“I forgot you were here. It's my fault. I should've closed the door.” Bertucci's body was beautiful and it was difficult for me to turn away. He dressed in worn-out plaid shirts, slim-cut dark jeans, and an old mechanic jacket, and I'd never seen him without something like that covering him. He was pale but lean, and his arms suggested he'd been lifting.

“When do you work out?” I asked. I felt betrayed; I thought I'd known all there was to know about Codman and Bertucci, what they ate, their grades, the songs stuck in their heads, their workout schedules.

Bertucci was arranging medicine bottles on the cabinet shelf. He did not reach for his shirt, which hung on the towel rack to his right. He counted pills and swept some into his hand, letting them fall from his palm into the toilet in a pebble-like shower. His mother was fading; the pain meds weren't working. “At night sometimes. Mostly when I can't sleep.”

I held out the bloody washcloth so he wouldn't think I had other reasons for being in the bathroom with him—except now I kind of did. Had I ever thought about Bertucci as boyfriend material? Not really. My parents were very big on proper steps to a solid life. They'd met in medical school, and though my dad had moved out only last fall, they both agreed that my future was not really up for grabs. Instead of feeling like everything was wide open to me, I walked around with the walls closing in. I had tennis and good grades and was expected to attend a fabulous college, without taking a gap year, and pursue a future that “made sense.”

So there was a part of Bertucci that appealed to me because he didn't live his life that way. True, he had won awards and had more on his résumé than most adults. And UC–Berkeley awaited. But he wasn't about that. We'd sit outside the cafeteria, having carried our trays onto the main yard at his suggestion; it never would have occurred to me to eat anywhere other than the sticky-topped cafeteria tables. We'd sit there and Bertucci could come up with fifteen different ideas for that weekend or that afternoon or for the rest of my life. He was the king of ludicrous suggestions—bring cake pops to the derelicts at the bus station or take homeless kids around the world by train or create a music camp for special needs teens. All good ideas I'd never think of myself but also, I realized when I saw him in the bathroom, scenarios that involved caregiving.

In the bathroom at his house, I continued to steal glances at his shirtlessness as he went through the medicine cabinet. Could I have flirted with him? Maybe. But it felt like a language neither of us was capable of speaking.

Bertucci twisted the hot water on and I stepped forward, rinsing the blood out of the cloth I'd used to dab his mother's dry lips, watching the red slide down the chalky sink. It felt so raw, so intimate, standing there with his bare torso next to me, his mother's blood in the sink, his actual mother dying in the next room, Bertucci doing God knows what with his methodical pill-counting.

My hands began to shake. Bertucci slipped his hands under the water, half–washing his, half–dancing with mine. I looked at his reflection in the mirror and expected to find him gazing at me in the way he sometimes did, in the way I thought maybe I could gaze at him right then. As if, when I dropped out of college to go to space, he could be with me. But when I looked at his face, his mother cried out and we both stopped what we were doing to rush in to her.

We arrived breathless at her bedside, ready to do CPR or call 911.

“Gotcha!” she said with a huge smile on her face.

11

Codman

The skull and I walked along the corridor with a renewed sense of purpose. Bertucci was a planner, that I understood. With one exception, everything he'd ever done since I'd known him had worked out exactly right.

I thought I heard his lumbering footsteps up ahead. “I have the distinct impression that your goal is to split us up, Bertucci,” I said. Not that there was an
us
between me and Olivia, per se, but it made sense that our last night together involved dividing. Now that we had, I wasn't sure if I resented him for it or if I'd end up being grateful. “Even if you aren't saying it, I know I'm supposed to figure out your puzzle.”

I kept walking, slowing my pace to see if I could hear where Olivia had gone.

Bertucci was known for his puzzles. “Remember the carved stone,” Bertucci had said, and it felt like a warning. Like we were all in danger of forgetting the details of senior year, of all of high school. He'd changed the carving in the stone over the main entrance, which usually read: “Brookville: A Great Place to Learn!” On Halloween, it read simply, “Boo!”

I bent down to cuff my jeans because the wetness bugged me, and when I crouched I thought about how subtle about some of Bertucci's hacks were, how over-the-top others. Like a lot of things, it sort of depended on his state of mind. “Why'd you do it? That thing last August?”

Livvy had been taking an art history class in Prague while her mother guest-lectured there, and I was touring East Coast schools and reporting back to Bertucci and Olivia, wondering if maybe college wasn't for me, if maybe the future wasn't where I was supposed to be. When I'd returned home, Olivia had picked me up from the Amtrak station in her parent's BMW and we rode with the windows down to my house, the late summer air thick as honey. Olivia was still jet-lagged and hungry at the wrong times, tired when she should be awake, and looked the same, good. Really good. But she seemed different somehow. European, maybe.

“You know, I actually had the balls to ask her if she missed me,” I told Bertucci now, even though he didn't seem interested. I'd asked her in a way that I have that's half-joking, and she had only shrugged. “She told me she'd been talking and writing all the time with you.” I hadn't liked the burning sensation that created in my stomach, and I turned up the volume on the French punk disc she had so obviously gotten from Bertucci. I sang along in a bad French accent and thought how nice it was, how relaxing, not to fully understand what they were singing about. “I had a plan, you know, to sort of confront her about ... stuff. Her. Me. But then—you just stole the show, right?”

Bertucci winked at me but didn't apologize—that was never his style.

When we'd gotten to my room, it was exactly as I'd left it a week before, only entirely upside down. The desk—complete with notes about various colleges and scholarships, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's book of stories open right to where I had marked it—was bolted to the ceiling. The red diner chair I used as a footstool was somehow screwed into the ceiling too, next to my mail carrier bag containing my cleats, which I could smell even at a distance. Olivia buckled over laughing. I didn't know if she'd been in on it or not—or if she knew how to go about getting everything off the ceiling. I only knew that looking at her and looking at my room, I was rattled. Too rattled to tell Olivia I'd missed her, that I'd had trouble sleeping because of it.

“Why'd you do that?” I asked Bertucci now as though he could follow my train of thought.

“Because I could,” I could hear him say, but I couldn't locate his voice.

Underneath a fading Exit sign at the theater, I found a door and opened it only to be met by a gust of wet wind. The fire escape. I breathed in the cold, rainy air, my face wet after only a few seconds on the platform. It was hard to believe that high school and everything about my youth was coming to an end. It was like those songs I used to sing in French—and German, too, though Bertucci and I decided that rapping in German sounded decidedly sinister, not funny like French. Because I didn't know what I was singing, the songs just sort of ended when I wasn't expecting it. That's how everything felt then, that everything I understood and knew was yanked out from under me, caps and gowns beckoning, but for what? What was I supposed to do? What mattered?

From the fire escape, I could see night seeping onto the city, the rain-wet streets, the trains slowing their service. I stood there for what could have been twenty minutes or five—I didn't know because my watch was broken—watching the lights slip into the puddles, the cars zoom through the rain. A few determined smokers huddled by the bar across Chestnut Avenue.

“That stuff'll kill you,” Bertucci yelled, showing up unannounced as usual. He had a habit of voicing his opinions, like a walking PSA. “Not the most environmentally friendly choice of car, my friend,” he'd say to someone in the Target parking lot. Strangers always looked surprised, some angry, some just taken aback—enough that a few put out their cigarettes.