The Great American Whatever (19 page)

I look back at the Incline, wishing I were on it.

“I dunno,” I say—and then I pull out my secret weapon, my magic trick, the ace to beat all hands: “The whole situation makes me feel guilty. You know, 'cause Annabeth never got to kiss anyone.”

Carly says, “O . . .
kay
,” into her beer, like she and the foam are in on a secret, and I pull the cup away from her lips and over Carly's “Hey” I say,
“What?”
thinking she's being funny or something. Thinking, I dunno, maybe Carly and my sister practiced kissing on each other once.

“Nothing,
nothing
,” Carly goes, doing a tipsy thing my dad used to do where he'd have a secret but he wouldn't give it up until you begged.

“You're being an ass,” I say, and I drop my 7UP cup between my feet and try to kick it around to look cool. But: “Okay,
fine
. I'll bite. What are you not telling m—”

“It's
not
my place to say, Quinny,” Carly says, reaching forward to do something with my collar. I smack her hand away, too hard, and feel horrible about it, but she doesn't even register it. Her eyes are now fully fogged over with beer, and so I make like a lighthouse. A lighthouse never sways.

“Not your place to say
what
, Car—”

“I just think you've got this image of your sister as a
nun
, but she was a
fun
girl, Q. I just don't think Annabeth was like an all-time
saint
.”

“I'm not
saying
she was a saint, but she
was
a virgin, and that fact isn't going to change anytime soon.”

Carly gulps back one more swig of beer and comes up for air. “Yeah, well, you might want to check in with Geoff about that.”

The fireworks stop. Amir's head appears from the stairwell downstairs, and he goes to call something irrelevant to us, but I don't let him.

“What did you just fucking say?” I say. I touch Carly's chin, just like Amir did with me, but God knows I'm not going to kiss her. “What did you just say? Is that some kind of
joke
?” I knock Carly's cup out of her hands.

Now Amir's standing between us like Lou Fillipo, the bow-tied ref in
Rocky
. “Uh,
guys
? What's going on here?”

That's when the fireworks start up again, right back to the same colors as the beginning, an entirely repeat show. Amir ducks down and covers his ears, but Carly looks right at me and says, with a frightening kind of clarity that only the truly drunk can summon: “Geoff and I had a bet going. I honestly thought you knew.”

“Knew
what
, Carly?”

“That he and your sister were a thing.”

were a thing

were a thin

were a thi

“I think that's enough,” Amir says, but I'm already stepping on both of our red cups, and crushing them. Then I push past Amir and Carly, and I slip down the wet steps and twist my ankle, but I immediately find the captain, who is hanging out with a couple of sorority girls, and I say: “Amir wants you to take us back to Station Square now.” My voice is shaking, and I am, and the captain goes: “He just said he wanted another forty-five minutes, kid,” but I say louder than the fireworks: “He changed his fucking mind.”

EXT. STATION SQUARE – NIGHT

Quinn stands in a line of people at the boat dock, waiting to board the shuttle bus back to the South Hills.

The fireworks continue to explode overhead, and the crowd around Quinn is admiring the sky, taking selfies, but Quinn is lost in his own world.

CUT TO:

INT. SHUTTLE BUS TO THE T – NIGHT

Quinn is now on his phone, on the shuttle bus, reinstating all of his social networking apps: scrolling past months of well-wishing and rainbow pictures and smiley faces and frowny faces, back to before.

QUINN

Aha.

He lands on one of Annabeth's posts, at the beginning of December, before she was killed. He is looking for clues: when were she and Geoff seeing each other?

How did Quinn not know? How could the two closest people to him have been carrying on such a secret and secretive backstory without Quinn's knowledge?

How. How could they not have told me?

“Move up, dude,” somebody says. I'm still in Station Square, in line for the shuttle back through the tunnel and to the T, so that we can all go back south. No—so that I can go to Geoff's house and bash his face in. I will figure out the theory of why my anger at him is white hot like a griddle sometime between Beechview and Keystone Oaks.

“What the actual fuck is up with these fireworks?” I say to the guy behind me.

“They're shooting some movie.”

And that is all he has to say.

As if perched on stilts that have a brain of their own, my legs walk me away from the shuttle bus, which is expelling a black smog that coughs and hiccups like Carly back on the boat of secrets. My stilts are taking me to this temporary chain-link fence that I now realize isn't typically found in Station Square, which is a sort of upscale mall place.

There are handsome, fit men all around, who don't look as if they're from Pittsburgh, standing at a kind of gated entrance into a massive area where the Summer Jam series offers concerts that Mom never lets me come downtown for. But there's no band playing tonight.

Tonight the temporary floodlights spill over and practically compete with the fireworks above, and I see a giant movie camera high in the sky, and a woman looking into the monitor, and she yells,
“Cut!”
Not twelve seconds later the fireworks stop and some background extras clap.

I know what this is.

“Hey, I am—I'm with
South Hills Apprentice
,” I blurt out to a guy with a clipboard and a walkie-talkie. He holds his finger up to me and says into a little mouthpiece, “Yeah, we're going back for one more take. Have Bryson go to makeup.” And then he's with me, kind of. “What did you say?”

“I'm with
South Hills Apprentice
,” I say, certain I'm getting this right. This has to be it. I know it is.

“And you are?”

“Quinn Roberts. I'm with Ricky Devlin's entourage.”

Lies spill from my mouth as fully formed sitcom pilots.

The camera behind the fence descends and the woman hops off. A P.A. hands her a bottle of water. This lady huddles up a crew next, and I am immediately as enamored of the shooting of
South Hills Apprentice
as I have been with any film ever.

I want to be in this world. I want to get past this guy at the gate and go to craft services and eat free cheese, and get lost.

“Do you have a badge, or what?” the guy says.

“I forgot it in my trailer,” I say.

Rookie mistake. I wouldn't have a trailer if I weren't an actor, but one thing Ricky Devlin taught me: Write dialogue fast, fast, fast, because people don't think before they talk. Make it real. Make it true. But it didn't work so much this time.

“Why don't you show me your ID, then, and I can check the master list.”

But I know there's no way I'm getting past this guy.

A mosquito lands on his neck and I don't tell him, and I see, behind the fence: the skinny star and the frustrated director having a little fight. “Having words,” my mom would say. The actress pulls from a discreet pocket in her skirt a piece of a script—just one page—and they are arguing over dialogue. I know this. I know this because Annabeth would call me when she was shooting our films, to say:
So-and-so feels stupid saying this line
, or,
The weather changed and now it's ridiculous to refer to the sun; can we just say “the clouds,”
and I would tweak and rewrite over the phone, and that is what is happening. I know it. I know this conversation.

“So, you kind of have to get lost,” the guy says to me, because—UPDATE—I'm now leeched onto the chain-link, pressing my chin through it. At this moment a new guy arrives onto the scene: too muscular, with hair too long to make up for a bald spot that shines in the floodlight, as if he is lit from within and his lid has come off.

“Ricky Devlin!” I yell, I really do, but he can't hear me. The extras are making so much noise that I want to shush them, but there isn't time, because a strong hand is on my shoulder and peeling me from the fence, just as I'm watching Ricky Devlin get pulled into the director/star conversation, all three of them swarmed by the many bugs that populate a midwestern summer night.

“You're too young for me to call security on you,” the guy says, “so let's not make a scene.” He looks away from me and nods at someone, and goes, “Go on through,” and when I turn, I recognize the someone, but how? He is short, handsome, has a bartender vibe. He has a badge, too. And then: “Juan!” I say. Ricky Devlin's boyfriend looks at me, startled. His lips are big and I see immediately the appeal they'd have.

“Do I know y—?”

“Tell Ricky Devlin that Quinny Roberts is here and is desperate to see him.”

The man with the hand is saying, “Security to gate two” quietly into his radio thingy, but Juan puts his palm up and goes, “Quinn Roberts,” and I say, “Quinn Roberts,” and Juan goes: “This kid's with me” to the man with the hand, who backs down and seems sad to have to let go of his small window of control.

I am brought through the gates to Ricky Devlin.

“Rick,” Juan says, “you're not going to believe who I found.”

Apparently I've been spoken of.

But Ricky Devlin doesn't care who Juan found, because Ricky is squatting down with an old-school pencil—he always wrote first drafts with a pencil—and rewriting something. He has moved out of the glare of the floodlight and knelt next to a drinks cooler, with a firefly hovering over his shoulder as if to light the page.

“
Rick
,” Juan says again. “It's your first fan.”

Ricky Devlin finally glances up and goes, “Not now, Juani,” but Juan literally pushes me forward, and
now
Ricky Devlin looks at me, hard, like I'm a ten-minute timed essay that he doesn't know how to start, and I go: “It's me, Ricky Devlin.”

Perhaps nobody has Charlie Browned his name in a long time, because the script page falls from his lap and blows against the chain-link fence, and the actress reaches for it and murmurs these newly-written-on-the-spot lines out loud to the director, and Ricky Devlin doesn't care.

He is up now and gripping my triceps, if I had triceps, and looking as if he might weep.

“These lines are perfect,” the skinny star is saying behind him. “It's what I've been asking for all along—finally.”

That's when one stray firework goes off in the distance, and nearly hits a passing airplane. But Ricky and I don't flinch.

W
e are in a makeshift tent and I am eating, eating, eating, so much free stuff you'd think it was my birthday dinner, which, it turns out, it is. You wouldn't believe the amount of free cheese and chips and even burritos and celery and stuff they've got on a real Hollywood film shoot, but they do, my God, they do.

“I was extremely sorry to hear about Annabeth, over Christmas,” Ricky Devlin says. He is fiddling with one of the puka-shell necklaces that hot California surfer boys wear. He is too old to be wearing it, but maybe not.

“Yeah, it beyond sucks,” I say. I am stuffing myself with carrots. My mouth isn't sure how to react to such subtle flavorings.

“I probably have to get back on set soon,” Ricky Devlin says. “Big night. Fourth of July scene.” He keeps trying
not
to look at something happening behind me. I'm picturing one of the people in a headset, glaring at Ricky Devlin and pointing to a watch on her wrist, as if to say: Time is money in Hollywood, if not in Pittsburgh. In Pittsburgh, time is just endless. “But you're welcome to hang around tonight, as my guest. I really hope you do.”

I push the plate away. There is so much to say and ask, and the truth is, I feel like I've arrived at Ricky Devlin as if he's the mentor in my own hero's journey, so that he'll give me the sword to go and find Geoff and kill him. But that would put me square at the beginning of the film—you always meet the mentor at the beginning—and God knows I have to start wrapping this up.

“Ricky Devlin, I'm lost in my screenplay.”

“Whoa! I'm thrilled to hear you're still writing!” he says. He holds up a pointer finger to the person behind me, as if to go:
One more minute with this charity case and I'll be right there.

“No, I mean: the screenplay of my
life
.” I realize how this sounds. I don't care. It's my fucking birthday. “There's a lot of shit that went down this week. I came out of hibernation. My mom started finding old money from my grandpa. I, like, went to Kennywood.”

No, no, no. These aren't the important details. Jesus, Quinn, always cut the prologue.

“I'm not totally following,” Ricky Devlin says. His eyes don't twinkle anymore. They used to twinkle.

“I met this really cute
guy
this week,” I say.

“Wow!” Ricky goes. “Little Quinny Roberts, all grown up.”
Now
he's twinkling. “God, what are you, like, eighteen?” And leaning in. “I can't believe you're this cute
man
now, with, like, a
butt
.”

“Uh, no.” Weird. Ignore. “I'm seventeen, as of, like, ten hours ago.”

(beat) Ricky leans back. (beat) I lean in.

“So . . . anyway, I met this boy and I really
like
him, but I also just found out something
crazy
about my sister and my best friend, and I can't tell if this is the part where ‘shit happens' or where I go home ‘beaten up but a little wiser.' ”