From Twinkle, With Love by Sandhya Menon (3)

Three

Tuesday, June 2
School bus

Dear Nora Ephron,

Maddie didn’t meet me at my locker. I wish I could say I’m used to it and I don’t feel bad, but I’m softer inside than I look on the outside. Like a slightly stale jelly bean.

So I was standing by my locker like a total loser well after the last bell had rung, in case Maddie showed up late, when Brij Nath came by. Brij is Indian too, so I’ve always felt a little bit of solidarity with him even though most of the time when he talks I can’t understand what he’s saying because he functions on a completely different level from my own. I mean, it’s sweet that he thinks I can keep up with his thoughts on the approaching technological singularity and human-machine interfacing, but yeah.

Anyway, today, out of nowhere, he gave me these notes he’d taken in econ (to be more precise, they were photocopies of his notes. And they were bound together in a little folder. And they came with a cover letter, which I’m pasting below).

“I noticed you were writing in your journal and not exactly paying attention,” he said, smiling a little.

“Wow,” I said, taking the folder and flipping through quickly. “These are really detailed. Thanks!” I put the notes into my locker and rummaged around for my umbrella.

“Uh, no problem,” Brij said to my back. “Some of that stuff is complicated and I remember you saying you hate econ.” Huh. I had said that, but I was pretty sure I’d been muttering to myself during a test. “So, if you want to get together to study or if you want me to explain anything, let me know.”

I turned back around with my umbrella, a little confused. “Oh, no, thanks. That’s okay.” Then I laughed. “I mean, the less time I spend on econ the better.”

Brij laughed really quickly before getting serious again. “Right. If you want to study something else, I can help too. How’s your grade in calculus?”

He wanted to know my calculus grade? What was he, Principal Harris’s spy? “Um, it’s, you know, fine, as far as calc grades go …,” I said vaguely, edging forward. “But it’s getting late and I’ve gotta go or my dadi begins to troll the Missing People’s hotline. Talk to you later! And thanks again!”

“Yo, Nath!” It was Matthew, Brij’s friend, waving to him from the computer lab.

With one last look at me, Brij walked way.

What was that about? Was he just trying to be friendly? Nora, you always said boy/girl friendships were complicated pits of madness, and if that was an example, I was beginning to understand why.

But maybe Brij was scoping out the competition? Indian people could get pretty intense about grades, and maybe his parents were putting the pressure on. Ha. As if I were even anywhere near Brij’s GPA league. He needed to spy on Maddie if he was worried about his future valedictorian status.

Thinking about Maddie made me feel pathetic and unwanted all over again. Why was I so desperate for her friendship when she obviously didn’t value mine even a little? Ugh. My excitement about making a movie for Midsummer Night felt damp and wilty. If I had a cell phone, I’d angry text her right now.

Brij Nath’s Economics Notes, Cover Letter

The one thing I can’t figure out is his weird signature at the bottom—is that a special code? Okay, Brij, maybe you don’t know this, but my IQ is not higher than 1,890 and therefore, like 99.9 percent of the population, I do not speak binary.

Tuesday, June 2
My room

Dear Ava DuVernay,

I walked up our cracked sidewalk and in the front door to find Dadi sitting there in her white cotton sari on the couch, with her hands on Oso’s cheeks. Oso is our little black Pomeranian. Also, Dadi thinks he’s the reincarnated form of my dada, my grandfather and her late husband, Chandrashekhar.

I told you, as grandmothers go, Dadi’s pretty out there.

“Twinkle, tum aa gayi,” she said in this mystical voice. Oso’s beady black eyes rolled toward me, like, Help. She’s doing it again. “Dada told me you would be arriving soon.”

I kissed her on the cheek and crossed the tiny living room to the kitchen to wash my hands and grab a banana. “Right, Dadi. Dada told you.”

When I flopped down beside her, Dadi sighed and put her arm around me. Oso, sensing her distraction, made a hasty escape. “Such a skeptic. Perhaps one day you will understand, Twinkle. Perhaps one day you will accept this gift.” She cupped her bony brown hands to her chest and then held them out to me, but I gestured with my hands full of one whole banana, to show Dadi why I wasn’t accepting her socially unacceptable gift of aatma. That’s what she wanted to give me: a piece of her soul.

So we’re clear, this isn’t Hinduism that Dadi’s practicing. When she immigrated to the United States with my parents before I was born, she enthusiastically embraced American New Age culture like a long-lost friend. She still practices her own version of spirituality, which she cobbled together from too many Deepak Chopra-esque books and TV shows. The rest of us mostly put up with it because, well, Dadi’s just Dadi, and so what if we have a few dozen crystals on our windowsills and we’ll probably never get the smell of sage out of the couch and we’re on a first-name basis with the county firefighters because of the number of times her “scrying” experiments have gone awry? If Dadi wasn’t all hippie-dippie, she wouldn’t be Dadi.

“Are Mummy and Papa working?” I asked, biting off a chunk of banana.

“Yes,” Dadi said. “So it’s a Twinkle and Dadi night.” She grinned, genuinely happy, even though we had “Twinkle and Dadi nights” all the time because my parents are workaholics. I try not to take it personally, but it’s hard when your dad would rather spend his time with kids who aren’t his own and your mom pretty much pretends like you don’t exist because, through no fault of your own, you happened to be born in a different country than the one where she wants to be.

Fidgeting with the edge of a couch pillow, I thought about making that movie with Sahil Roy. “Dadi … how do you know if a decision is the right one to make? Like, what if you could opt to keep the status quo or you could make a scary decision and shake things up? Which one would you pick?”

“Hmmm.” Dadi nodded and closed her eyes for so long, I thought she had fallen asleep. Then she snapped her eyes open and looked at me, her irises like shiny brown stones. “First you must ask, am I happy with the status quo?”

I took another bite of my banana and thought about it. “Not exactly,” I said finally, thinking about how, if things didn’t change, I’d never be able to share my stories with the world. And what if there was another girl coming up behind me? What if I could be her Ava DuVernay or her Mira Nair? “But … change is scary. What if I fail at what I’m trying to do?” What if no one likes the movie I make? I’ve never directed anything before. Making YouTube videos about Dadi or Maddie is totally different from managing an entire cast.

“You might fail, munni,” Dadi said, cupping my chin. “But when you’re off in college, will you wish you hadn’t taken this chance? Or that you had?”

I stared at Dadi, easily the wisest person I knew, just thinking of how many lives I could change if my movies went mainstream. You might say, Okay, but when has a working-class Indian-American girl with a kooky dadi and ripped jeans ever become a famous filmmaker? And you’d be right. It’s never happened. But there are people out there, people exactly like me, who need someone to come along and tell their stories. To explore all those different universes for them. So why can’t I be the one to do it?

Maybe Dadi’s not the only kooky one, eh?

That’s when I knew: I had to take this shot. I had to go talk to Sahil Roy tomorrow and then, unless he wanted to make a movie about people hurting baby pandas, I had to do it. Just carpe the freaking diem by its hairy chest.

Somehow, I think, Ava, that you would approve.

Love,

Twinkle

Wednesday, June 3
Homeroom

Dear Jane Campion,

If life is a fairy tale, I’m pretty sure I’ve been cast as the princess. Huh? you might be asking yourself. What’s she blathering on about now? Well, let me tell you, my friend.

I got to school early because I was super excited about the movie thing, but also because Dadi kept asking if she could cleanse my essence, and there is not enough caffeine in the world for that ritual. So I was getting a few books out of my locker in the empty hallway when someone grabbed me around the waist.

I spun around, ready to karate chop the crap out of whoever it was, and found Maddie grinning at me. “Nice reflexes,” she said, nodding appreciatively.

I let my hands fall and stared at her for a long moment, waiting.

“What?”

An apology. That’s all I wanted. We were supposed to meet at my locker. You stood me up, I wanted to say. Do you honestly have nothing to say about that?

I shook my head, too much of a groundling to speak up. “Nothing. What are you doing here so early?”

She held up her AP calc textbook. “I have a test, so I thought I’d get an extra hour of studying in before school starts.”

“And you call me a nerd.”

Before she could respond, we heard footsteps behind us and turned.

That’s when I died.

Okay, not really, but almost. It was definitely an out-of-body experience. Because walking up to us, smiling, was Neil freaking Roy.

I don’t know what I did to deserve two close encounters of the Neil kind in less than a week, but I wasn’t about to question my good fortune. I gazed dumbly at him as he stopped a few lockers down from mine. “Hey, ladies,” he called breezily.

I shot Maddie a panicked look. Just like before, I locked up and couldn’t think of a single thing to say. She shook her head at me and said, “Oh, hey, Neil. Aren’t you supposed to be at pre-Olympic training?” She looked and sounded casual, but she couldn’t fool me. Her voice was higher and squeakier than normal. Even Maddie was slightly starstruck, and her social stratus was adjacent to Neil’s. So what hope did I, a mere groundling, have?

He got a few books out of his locker, slammed it shut, and sauntered over to us. I stopped breathing. “I still have to keep up with my homework and tests and stuff.” He made a face and ran a hand through his perfectly spiked black hair. I kept darting surreptitious glances at him while also looking straight ahead, as if I had no business gazing directly at this perfect likeness of an Indo-Greek god, high school edition.

“So,” he continued, “who’s your pretty friend? It’s Rinkle, right?”

My eyes widening, I stared at him, full-on this time. Did he just say PRETTY?

“Um, it’s Twinkle,” Maddie said, coming to my rescue. “Twinkle Mehra.” She accidentally-on-purpose jabbed me in the kidney with her fingers.

“Right,” I said, thankful for the pain that broke my paralysis. “Twinkle.” Oh, great. What a genius thing to say. Just repeat your name like some half-brained parrot.

Neil snapped his fingers. “Twinkle, right. Anyway, I better get going. They make us do twenty extra laps if we’re late.”

“Ouch,” Maddie said, laughing freely. How did she do that? I, meanwhile, croaked out a laugh that sounded like a rhinoceros in heat.

Neil waved at us, spun on his shiny Nike-clad heel, and was gone.

“Oh my God,” I whispered at his retreating back.

Maddie grinned in my peripheral vision. “Did you hear that? He called you ‘pretty.’” She paused, frowning a bit. “And ‘Rinkle,’ which is slightly annoying.”

I turned unsteadily toward her. “Um, was that whole interaction real?”

Her grin returned, wider this time. “Oh, it was real. And you know what this means?”

I shook my head silently, but inside I was thinking, Look, it’s already happening. Maddie stood me up yesterday, but one small encounter with Neil and we’re bonding again. Imagine if shiny, future Twinkle was Neil’s girlfriend? I wasn’t worried about that Twinkle being struck silent in his presence. Once I was her, I wouldn’t be intimidated by someone like Neil. By then I’d fit seamlessly into Maddie’s circle. And then it would be like this all the time.

“This movie you’re doing with Sahil?” Maddie continued. “Like I said before, the bonus is it’ll get you closer to the hotter brother. The one you’ve had a crush on forever?”

I felt a tug of discomfort. It wasn’t about “hot” versus “not hot.” It was about taking a hammer to my life and completely rehauling it. It was about breaking apart Invisible Twinkle and putting her together again, only as a shinier, impossible-to-miss version this time. “They’re twins, Maddie. They look the exact same, so Neil can’t possibly be the hotter brother.”

She waved a hand. “You know what I mean. Come on, Twinkle. This is your chance. Neil knows who you are now, and he thinks you’re pretty.” She shrugged. “You just need a chance to get in his vicinity, which you can one hundred percent do once you and Sahil become friends doing this whole movie thing.”

I felt a slow grin spreading across my face. “You’re right.”

This movie could be the answer to all my dreams. It could be how I finally shed that cloak of invisibility. God, I’m so ready.

Love,

Twinkle

Wednesday, June 3
Lunchtime, on the green

Dear Ava DuVernay,

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

Five measly minutes and Sahil will be here. How do I know? you ask. Well, because I ran into him in the hallway and he said so. Apparently, he had to go update his blog. This might be the beginning of incredible things. The chance to show the world all the stories I have crammed inside me, just waiting to get out. Like in Supernatural, when those Leviathan things were in Castiel’s tummy and you could see them stretching the skin and stuff. I mean, ew, but also an illustrative way to show you what I mean.

Oh, crap, there he is. Sahil, I mean. Not Castiel (though how cool would that be?).

Wednesday, June 3
AP English

Dear Jane Campion,

Ms. Langford is showing us that movie The Crucible. It’s super cool because Arthur Miller adapted his own play into the screenplay for this movie. (Patrick O’Cleary and Caveman Callum don’t seem to care. They sit right in front of me and are doodling pictures of different kinds of boobs. They think they’re being all sneaky, BUT I HAVE EYES.) Imagine if I did that one day. Not the drawing boobs thing, but the writing plays thing. I could be a playwright and a director. Jane, your films were about sticking it to the man, snapping back at the patriarchy by showing strong female protagonists who didn’t conform to gender roles. I could be one of those protagonists. They’d call me Twinkle the Glass Ceiling Smasher, and the world would be engulfed in a veritable tsunami of movies and plays and stories by women.

That reminds me:

I’m going to be directing a real movie for Midsummer Night!

Sahil and I made it official at lunch.

I was sitting on the picnic tabletop when he came up to me and, grabbing my hand to shake it enthusiastically (even though I hadn’t offered it), said, “I like your T-shirt.”

It was my female filmmakers shirt, with a picture of you, Ava DuVernay, Sofia Coppola, and Haifaa al-Mansour. “Oh, yeah.” I looked up at him and smiled. “It’s my favorite. I like yours, too.”

He was wearing a vintage Night of the Living Dead T-shirt. When people love something so much it fuses with what they wear, I feel this instant connection to them. The melding of passion and fashion is the song of my people. Sahil pulled at the front of his shirt and turned pink. “Hey, thanks. So, um, you want to talk about the movie?”

“Sure.” I patted the tabletop beside me. “Hop on up.”

After the slightest pause, Sahil dropped his backpack on the ground and climbed up to sit beside me. You’d think close proximity to a boy would make me nervous, but I was way, way too excited to care. Pulling my notebook and pencil out, I scooted closer to him. “So, I’m super psyched about this. I think it could be great!” I was flinging my hands around (I like to talk with them), and the pencil flew out of my grasp and landed on Sahil’s lap.

“Oops, sorry,” I said, and without thinking about it, I reached over and grabbed the pencil. My hand brushed his thigh through the thin fabric of his shorts. His upper thigh.

We both froze.

“Um, so s-sorry,” I said, jerking my hand back like I’d accidentally touched the surface of the sun. “I just, um, the wood of the pencil …” I trailed off, horrified. Why was I talking about wood?? “I mean, um, it was slippery and—” Aaaahhh. Now his face looked all pink and sweaty, which I’m sure complemented my purple, sweaty one. TWINKLE. Stop talking. “Anyway. Um, movie?” I finished, apparently no longer able to speak in complete sentences.

“Yes,” Sahil agreed, sounding relieved.

I squinted up at him in the sun. You know, I’d never noticed before, but his black hair has glints of red in it. It’s gorgeous. I wonder if he gets that from his mom (she’s white). I wonder if Neil has that too. Anytime I’m in his vicinity, though, my senses go completely dead from shock, so I haven’t noticed. “So, do you have an idea of what genre of film we should make?”

His face, which was still stupefied-looking, suddenly became animated. “YEAH! Yes. So, I was thinking we could do a remake of Dracula. Like, the really old, classic version from 1931?”

I stared at him, nerves back once again, internal panic building. I was supposed to be the film expert here. The only acceptable answer to that question would be, Why, yes, Sahil, I know exactly what you’re talking about. But I totally didn’t. I’m more of a documentary and modern movies kind of girl. I mean, I’ve watched some Alfred Hitchcock, but that’s about it.

Okay, Twinkle, I told myself. Time to fake it till you make it. You can’t sink this now. Especially not after your pencil disaster. “Oh, right, Dracula,” I said, nodding intelligently.

“Right.” Sahil returned my nod, only his was super enthusiastic. He was clearly pumped (as I’d been before I realized I was about to be exposed as a charlatan). He had clearly watched the stupid movie. “So, I have my own ideas of what scenes we should shoot, but what are your faves?”

Crap. Okay, what do all vampire movies have in common? “Um …” I tapped my pencil on my notebook, trying to buy time. “Well, I liked the one with the … ah, bat? And the, ah, castle? It was such a great castle.”

Sahil studied me. The corner of his mouth twitched. “You … haven’t seen Dracula, have you?”

I hung my head, feeling pathetic. What sort of film expert has never watched Dracula? “No, sorry,” I mumbled.

Laughing, he said, “Totally okay. This gives me a chance to convert another unsuspecting human to becoming a Bela Lugosi nerd, which is my mission in life anyway. I’ll bring you the DVD tomorrow.”

I grinned. My (as yet nonexistent) street cred as a director didn’t seem to be damaged. It was pretty cool how Sahil accepted my shortcoming without judgment. Maybe it wasn’t that big a deal to anyone but me. “Wait. Did you say DVD?”

He nodded.

“Wow,” I said. “That’s pretty old-school.”

Sahil raised an eyebrow. “It’s kind of my thing.”

I snorted. “Okay, but if you want to capture people’s attention at Midsummer Night, you have to go all out. You can’t have a plain retelling. We need to put a spin on it that no one’s done before.”

Sahil frowned. “So, what are you thinking?”

I gnawed on my pencil eraser. “Ooh.” I sat up straighter, an idea growing. “What about this? Dracula, but gender-swapped. Like, a Dracu-lass!”

Sahil beamed. “Bella instead of Bela! I love it!”

“Excellent.” I hopped off the table and began to pace in the grass, energized now. “So, we could have our Dracu-lass be a total man-charmer like Dracula was a lady-charmer. All the roles in the film could be gender-swapped.” I glanced at Sahil, realizing fully how important this idea was to me. Changing lives could start right here, right now. “Are you okay with most of the cast being female? Because I think probably a movie made in 1931 had mostly male leads?”

Sahil nodded immediately. “It did. And I’m on board. It’s about time someone shook up Dracula.”

I grinned, my heart all warm and happy. It was all … clicking. We were on the same page about everything. Maybe making a movie with Sahil wouldn’t be as hard as I thought. “Precisely what I was thinking.”

“So, we’re going to need to get costumes and props. Maybe we could go this weekend.”

I pursed my lips, feeling that bite of tension I always felt when the people of PPC, who seemingly had limitless pockets from Narnia, talked about money. I’d love to easily say, “Sure! Let’s do it!” But my family doesn’t have random spending money. Every dollar I use is taken from someone’s lunch or clothes allowance or Support Group for Reincarnated Individuals and Those Who Love Them fees. “Um … I don’t know if I can afford too much. …”

Sahil waved a hand. “Don’t even worry about it. I’m bankrolling this operation.”

Was it charity? I didn’t want charity. I studied Sahil’s expression closely. “Um, are you sure? Because that can get expensive.”

His face was pity-free. “I’m sure. I’m the producer. All I want you to worry about is making the most kick-ass movie you can make.”

I smiled at him, relief making me slightly giddy. “Now, that I can do.”

I’m trying to be calm and casual about this, but inside I keep screaming, I’M OFFICIALLY A DIRECTOR! LOOK OUT, WORLD, HERE I COME!

How the heck do you have so much chill, Jane?

Love,

Twinkle