Here are the questions we needed to answer in our report:
What do your characters want? What are they trying to say? How do they go about achieving their goals?
How are you like/unlike your assigned characters? What traits do you share? What traits are completely opposite from you? Would people who know you agree with your assessment?
How would your characters like living in Norman, NJ? How would your characters dress and speak differently if they were living here today? (Please utilize a visual aid for this portion of your project.)
I was pondering investing in some posterboard for the visual aid aspect of our presentation when I realized Trip was taking an awfully long time in the bathroom.
Oh, dear God. Please tell me he’s not pooping in there.
My suspicions turned out to be unfounded when I heard a noise coming from down the hall.
I moved down the hallway to my bedroom where I saw Trip standing at my dresser, giving the once-over to all of my things.
Thank God I made my bed that morning, but what if he’d gone snooping through my dressers or something? I had a brief recollection of the set of pink, flowery, days-of-the-week cotton panties that were shoved to the back of my undies drawer. I never wore them, but couldn’t bring myself to throw them away. They were a gift the past Christmas from my Aunt Eleanor, who always used the excuse of having four sons to buy the cutesiest, girliest things possible for me. They were so, so, so very uncool. My reputation would have been destroyed.
“What are you doing?”
He looked up just then and smiled. “Just checking out your room. It’s the best way to get to know someone, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, I guess. Or, you know, maybe you could just ask them stuff.”
I watched as he ignored me and picked up one of my glass atomizers. He gave a quick squirt of Anais Anais in the air and took a sniff. “Nice.” He put the bottle down and rifled through a dish of change, coming up with a guitar pick. He held it up, impressed. “This yours?”
Yeah, right. My cousin Jack tried to teach me only a million times, but I was a total sped. I could never get my fingers to bend just the right way and it got so frustrating that I decided it just wasn’t worth it. “Nope. My cousin’s.”
He tossed the pick back into the dish before noticing my jewelry box. He ran a finger across the intricate lid, saying, “This is pretty awesome, all the carvings. It looks old.”
“It is.” I don’t know what prompted me to continue, but I added, “It was my mother’s.”
Trip’s hand stopped over the engraved surface. He didn’t look up as he asked, “Was?”
God. It had been so long since I had to talk about this. Everyone I knew at sixteen had been in my life at twelve... I’d already been through the story with anyone who I considered a friend. Everyone else just made it up. I didn’t think I wanted my mother’s desertion to be the first thing Trip found out about me.
I tried to sound casual as I shrugged and offered, “She died a few years ago.”
I wondered if he was fooled by my attempt at nonchalance or if he could actually hear the lump in my throat. In any case, he pulled his hand away from the jewelry box as quickly as if it had burned him. I hoped he wouldn’t ask too many questions- it was my first attempt at lying about the situation and I didn’t really like how it felt. But he didn’t even raise his head as he simply offered, “I’m sorry.”
Again I shrugged, trying to seem unaffected. “It was a long time ago.”
He refocused his attentions on the photos taped around the perimeter of my mirror as I tried to ignore the knot of guilt growing in my belly. He was pointing to a picture of me as a little kid; Dorothy Hamill haircut, sitting on a Big Wheel, wearing a white karate uniform and an American flag draped across my shoulders. “Is that you?”
I leaned over his shoulder, pretending to get a better look. My arm grazed his back, which caused me to shiver. And I may have imagined it, but I swear he flinched a little from the touch as well.
“Yeah. That’s me, all right. I was pretty obsessed with Evel Knievel back in those days.”
Trip started laughing. “That’s hysterical.”
“I was kind of a tomboy.”
“No way. I’m not buying it.”
Then in one fell swoop, he grabbed my snowglobe off the dresser and flopped down backwards onto my bed. He propped some pillows behind his head and crossed his feet at the ankles, shaking the thing like it owed him money.
You’d think I would have been a nervous wreck having Trip first in my room, then in my bed. The sight was definitely surreal, but more phenomenal than terrifying.
“Make yourself at home.”
“Oh, no. I couldn’t impose.”
At that, he flashed me a devastating grin and held up the globe for me to see. We both watched as a blizzard overtook New York City, before the storm subsided into harmless flurries.
“It makes music, you know,” I said. I walked the few steps over to my bed and sat on the edge. I wasn’t even self-conscious as I overlapped my hand around his and turned the globe over to wind up the bottom.
Trip gave it another good shake, instigating another snow storm as the plucky strains of “New York, New York” filled my room.
I remembered the Christmas my mother bought it for me. We’d taken a trip into the city, just the two of us, to see the tree at Rockefeller Center. I felt so cosmopolitan- even if I wasn’t able to put that description to it at the age of eight- walking around amongst the noise and excitement of New York with the crisp, winter chill all around us. She was wearing this phenomenal green velvet coat with fur-lined trim. I loved the way it felt against my cheek whenever I’d lean into her throughout our sightseeing. It felt special to have her all to myself for the whole night, a rare event that didn’t occur too often after my baby brother came along. Even before then, I remember the feeling of always wanting to keep her close so she wouldn’t just slip away.
I watched Trip balance the snowglobe on his chest with one hand and tuck the other one behind his head. He had such a contented look on his face that it made me feel calm, too. Maybe a little too relaxed.
“She didn’t die.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My mother. I lied. She didn’t die, she moved out. When I was twelve.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t even know why I lied about it. I guess you asking about her just caught me off guard. I thought it would be easier to just say that she died. Not that you wouldn’t have found out eventually anyway. It’s just... I never had to actually tell anyone about it before.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, everyone around here already knew everything. Or thought they did. I never had to explain, you know?”
“Why’s that?”
“Small town.”
“Oh.”
The song ended and Trip looked up to meet my eyes. I couldn’t really discern the expression on his face, but I hoped it wasn’t pity. He broke the silence when he asked, “You want to talk about it?”
I reached over and grabbed a scrunchy off my nightstand and started playing it with my thumbs. “Not really. Is that okay?”
“It’s your life, Layla.”
In that shared moment, he continued to lock my gaze to his, holding me prisoner with his eyes, and I suddenly realized he was going to kiss me. Oh my God this is it! My heart slammed against my ribcage, probably so violently that Trip could actually see it. The seconds of quiet seemed to stretch out into eternity as I sat frozen, staring into that beautiful face, waiting for him to move first.
Without another word, he bounded off the bed and returned the snowglobe to my dresser, breaking the moment. “Hey, I’m starving. Whaddya got to eat around here?”
Okay, then!
I resisted the urge to nudge the snowglobe a half inch into its rightful place and instead led Trip back to the kitchen.
He sank into one of the chairs and cracked his Coke while I called out an inventory from the pantry. After much deliberation, he finally settled for some regular Doritos, lamenting the fact that they weren’t Cool Ranch. Through a mouthful of chips, he started, “So, I was thinking... this assignment we have to do.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, I figure most everybody is gonna get up there and give some stupid report, you know, just read off a piece of paper or something.”
“That’s normally how one gives a report, yes.”
“Yeah, but we’re supposed to do a visual, too.”
“Uh-huh. I was planning on picking up some posterboard or-”
“Well, I was thinking of doing something a little different, maybe.”
I watched Trip lounge back in his chair with a mischievous little grin on his face and realized I’d be submitting to whatever scheme he was cooking up.
I was in no position to deny him anything when he looked at me like that.
Chapter 11
THE GRIFTERS
As it turned out, Trip’s scheme entailed the brilliant idea to film our own version of Romeo and Juliet, set in Norman, New Jersey, circa 1990.
We spent the rest of that first afternoon deciding on how we were going to answer some of those questions in Mason’s booklet and outlining our filming schedule.
The plan required me to “borrow” a video camera from work, which I did without guilt. It’s not like I was going to keep the thing, but at the cost of renting it for the next couple months, I may as well have bought one of my own. At the pathetic minimum hourly wage Totally Videos was paying me, that thought wasn’t even a possibility. Because they paid me such a lousy salary, I decided to justify my liberation of said camera as an early holiday bonus. It just happened to be three months ahead of the holiday, is all.