The Great American Whatever (8 page)

“The
mustache
,” the manager says—to
me
!—“wasn't professional-looking.”

Geoff gently puts his head against the refrigerated food case and closes his eyes like he's really embarrassed. I take a step toward him. He looks up. The manager turns to the next customer. Geoff winks at me.

“See you later—girlfriend,” he says.

“Geoff. I'll kill you.”

But there we go again. Laughing.

I pivot away, and hold the icy cup up to my neck in preparation for the smack of heat outside. But just before I'm out the door, Geoff goes “Psst!” like we're seven years old, making a couch-cushion fort in his basement. Back when our parents were friends and our big sisters took ballet together and we weren't gay or straight, we were just Quinny and Geoffy.

“Yeah?” I say.

“Amir Turani,” Geoff says, louder than Annabeth would have directed him to speak, “thinks you have a cute butt.”

I
'm late for Staring Practice.

“Like I said,” my therapist goes, adjusting her laptop screen and giving me a nostril view that one could describe as “vivid.” “We can use your remaining time however you'd like, Quinn.”

We're thirty minutes into our regular forty-five-minute Skype session, but we're really just three minutes into it; see, it wasn't till Geoff and I had taken seats in the almost sadistically powerful air-conditioning of his Corolla and each had a foot-long hoagie (I waited for his lunch break) that I even realized I was missing the only Thursday therapy session I've ever actually wanted to have.

You've never seen a guy pedal home so fast. Sparks flew from my wheels, at least in my mind.

“I've just got a ton to figure out today,” I say, still willing my heart to slow down.

“Start from the beginning, then.”

I can barely concentrate, though, because hovering just above my laptop screen is Amir's handwriting on the slip of Celebrity paper.

Incoming boner.

“I met a guy,” I say, in a quiet way. “At this party.”

My therapist barely conceals a smile. “I
see
.” She stares, and stares. Dammit. She has picked up on my techniques and mastered them.

“Am I allowed to, like, talk about sex stuff with you?” Gah. I want to slam my computer screen shut. My therapist is the stepmom of this second-tier boy at school. She sees me for a “deeply discounted” rate because her son was friends with Annabeth, and they feel bad for us.

“Of course you can talk about sex stuff,” she says. “For many people, that's all they talk about.”

Wow. “Okay,” I say. I look out my window. No lemonade stand in sight. “So this college guy said I have a nice butt.” Gah. I can't believe I'm saying this to a, like, mom-lady. “I mean, he didn't say it to me—he said it through friends. That I have an okay butt or whatever. Through Geoff's sister.”

“I see,” my therapist says, and I take over staring duties to make her talk. It works. “People have long noticed you for your looks, Quinn, but now one
particular
boy has. How are you feeling about that?” I lower the volume on my computer. Mom is snoozing in the sunroom, but suddenly I develop a theory that the air vents in our house deliver sound better than I've made note of recently, since I'm so frequently in earplugs.

“Well, I don't know how to communicate with him,” I say.

“Most people start with honesty.” She laughs—a therapist joke, I guess. Hard to tell. Her side of the screen is always blurry because I truly believe people over the age of fifty aren't willing to splurge for good Internet. “Okay, that's not always true,” she says. I have her pegged at fifty-three, by the way. “But it's
best
to start with honesty. I advocate for honesty.”

“No,” I say, talking faster than I mean to. “I mean: I literally don't know how to get
ahold
of him.”

“Might this be the time to finally power your phone back up? Would you like to turn it on during this session? Together?”

No way. “I'm not even sure where it is, to be honest. It's somewhere here, but I don't know where. But I'm
not ready
.” I say that part loud, because he who's loudest wins, at least according to Dad.

So, scratch that theory, actually.

“All right, then,” my therapist says. I don't remember about what.

“The problem is, I have this amazing idea,” I say. “I kind of want to ask Amir out, but not like on a date, but like on a group situation, I mean.”

“Could you send out an e-mail?”

I wave my hands. “I hate e-mail. Nobody checks e-mail.”

She begins playing almost flirtily with her silk scarf. That's a first. “Go old-fashioned, then,” she says. “It's very Quinn Roberts to buck trends. Ask him out through Geoff. That could be charming to an older man.”

I chuckle. “ ‘An older man,' that's hilarious. Amir's only, like, nineteen, I bet.”

“The difference between a sixteen-year-old and a nineteen-year-old can be substantial, Quinn,” she says, even though I'm seventeen this Sunday. “But I'll leave that for you to discover.”

Great. Now my stomach is a wooden roller coaster going off the rails. I don't want to discover anything. I want to just write it exactly the way I'd like it to play out onscreen.

“Unfortunately, our time today is up,” she says. “But when you have a chance, I really do need you to ask your mom to open the mail sometime soon. We're now about three months behind on payment, and at some point—”

“Totally clear,” I say. “I'll mention it to her today. See? I'm making a note of it right now.”

I jiggle my arm just enough in the camera's frame so that it looks as if I'm writing something down on my desk. But I'm not. What I'm mainly doing is I'm thinking,
Thank God Mom's disability checks just get deposited straight to her bank account.

“Thank you,” my therapist says.

Her buzzer goes off, and she winces. This makes me happy. I have entertained her.

She likes me.

“Quinn, I have to get that,” she says.

“Of course.”

I'm already opening another tab on my screen, anyway: this torrent site to rip a few movies to binge on tonight.

“But I wanted to say something,” she says.

“Uh-huh.”

I consider downloading
The
Philadelphia Story
. Maybe I could study Cary Grant and actually, you know, learn something about romance. I've never tried to woo a guy before. The closest I've come is that I once poured chocolate milk over Tommy “the Tank” Foster's mashed potatoes, in third grade.

LIFE HACK: Never pour chocolate milk over the mashed potatoes of anyone nicknamed “the Tank.”

“Quinn, I'm logging off now, but—”

“Great, so, next Thursday.”

“—did you hear what I just said? A moment ago.”

“Oh.” Shit. Minimize screen. Click back to Skype. Blink. “Sorry.”

“It's okay,” my therapist says. “But I said something important.”

Jesus, maybe that school counselor of mine was right. Maybe multitasking
is
a dangerous myth.

“Okay?” I say.

“I said I'm proud of you.”

It's so quiet in my room that I think I can hear Mom snoring downstairs. Our vents really are connected. I knew it.

“For what?” I say. My therapist has never been proud of me.

“I shouldn't really say this,” she says, “but—this is our first session in which you didn't mention your sister.”

W
hen I was ten years old, a new family moved in across the street. It caused a stir. Most people don't move
to
Pittsburgh.

Tiffany Devlin was my age, but I was immediately more interested in her substantially older brother. He was tall, and
nice
. At ten years old,
nice
wasn't the first adjective I'd have used to describe grown-up men.
Loud
, maybe. Or
sad
. But not
nice
.

Tiffany's twenty-two-year-old brother, Ricky Devlin—Tiffany was a “wonderful surprise,” I remember her mom saying once to my mom—had helped his family move in, but he was only staying for the summer. “Just the summer.”

“Why?” I asked Ricky once, weeks later, when he was babysitting me and Tiffany and Annabeth. “Why would you move in with your parents?” This boggled my mind—willingly living with your mom and dad, once you don't have to anymore.

“Well, I'm a screenwriter,” he said.

“Don't movie people live in Hollywood?” Annabeth said, because Annabeth intuitively knew everything. Always.

“The ones who sell screenplays do,” Ricky said, and that answered that. Something about it wasn't pathetic though. Ricky was golden, perfect.

He stayed in the Devlins' attic, and when it would get really hot, he'd put an oscillating fan in the center of the floor and hold a stick of deodorant up to it to give the room a “clean scent.” Which apparently really stuck with me, ha. Ricky had a photo of the Hollywood sign taped to the sloped wall. He drank a lot of green juices and was always smiling, and he was never loud and never sad.

I wouldn't have consciously known Ricky was gay, but he must have been.
Please
, he ate raw almonds before it was trendy to, he didn't have a beer gut, and when he cried at the end of
The Shawshank Redemption
, he didn't wipe away his tears. I was embarrassed for him, and then I wasn't.

I fell in love with movies that summer.

I mean, if Ricky had been in love with dentistry, I'd have a whole other story. Maybe I wouldn't even see my life
as
a story at all, but I do. Ricky showed me how.

We started by screening the basics, something I'd never done with Dad. Classic films like
Old Yeller
. Man, how I bawled at that one. I guess I used to let people see me cry. While Annabeth and Tiffany were busy downstairs playing “fashion runway” or “house” or whatever, Ricky and I would go to the attic and watch like ten movies a weekend.

Nothing about it was creepy, so get your mind outta the gutter.

He taught me about this mythic story structure that a lot of screenwriters use. I was comforted by the idea of a time-tested way of telling a satisfying tale—because that was the summer when Mom and Dad started openly fighting, and when Annabeth became obsessed with “achievement” as a general concept, and when my A.D.D. began showing up in all sorts of mysterious and charming ways. That was the summer, I mean, when I started to not like the way my life story was going.

But if I used Ricky's time-tested method to plan out my plots, I'd always be able to find my way back home again.

Ricky printed out his version of the Hero's Journey for me once, and from then on out, whenever we'd hit a mythic story beat in a movie we were watching, he'd pause it and go, “See! That's the hero ‘deciding to go.' That's the hero's journey, Quinny.”

He made me promise to keep it safe.

RICKY DEVLIN'S HERO'S JOURNEY

We meet the hero in his ordinary world (at home, at school, etc.).

Hero gets called to action (aka the inciting incident).

Hero refuses the call to adventure (stays at home, makes excuses, plays video games instead, etc.).

Hero decides to go because: whatever.

Hero gets into a ton of trouble, but also has adventures and meets allies.

Shit happens.

Worse shit happens.

The worst shit happens and the hero's life is basically over.

But then the hero thinks of something amazing to break into the third act of the screenplay.

And he does.

And he learns something vital and true that he didn't even know was possible.

And he goes home smarter, if a little beaten up.

And I'm using “he” generally, but obviously a hero can be a she.

And if it's written really well and comes in under 110 pages, the screenwriter gets a house in the Hollywood Hills with a small pool.

“So does
everybody
have a pool in Hollywood?” I became enamored of the idea of having my own little pool. I was going to make it in the shape of a
Q
, and the slash at the bottom of the
Q
was going to be the hot tub.

“Not everybody,” Ricky said. “Only people who sell screenplays.”

And so I started making up little scripts for movies, basically because I wanted a hot tub, ha. “These are good,” Ricky said. He'd shown me how to format them on Mom's clunky old laptop, from the days when she worked for Alcoa, before she got injured and the disability checks starting rolling in. “But you need somebody to film them for you!” Ricky said. “Otherwise it's just words, and not a movie.”