“WRONG!” OREN SHOUTS AFTER HER, HIS HEAD STICKING OUT OF HIS doorway. But Hayley doesn’t turn around, and then she’s gone. Oren sees me standing right there. “Oh, hello.” He pats down his bright-yellow long johns, seemingly not at all concerned that he looks like a crazed banana.
“I’m going to bed,” says Jude, gesturing inside our room with his thumb. “I’ll let you guys chat.” I nod at him, and Jude slips into our room, closing the door behind him.
“What’s going on?” I ask Oren.
“We were running lines.”
“Running lines? For what?”
“Ummm . . . we begin principal photography tomorrow?”
“Are you acting in the movie as well?” I didn’t even consider that.
“I wear many hats,” he replies, brushing back his frizzed, static-electrical hair. “Literally, sometimes. And yes. I’m acting in The Killer Cauliflowers.” He looks around the hallway, and then he beckons me. “Come in, come in.”
Oren has Mother of Tears, another Argento film, playing on his dusty, twenty-year-old TV, which is perched on a banged-up dresser with underwear poking out of every drawer. The volume is turned down, but I can sense the malevolence of the world from the pace of the images, the gothic soundtrack thrumming faintly in the background.
Oren starts rummaging, throwing papers around. “I’ve been tweaking the script,” he says. With a grunt, Oren removes a pile of what I think might be dirty laundry from a desk chair. A vintage olive-green Smith Corona typewriter is revealed on his small wooden desk. “Ah!” He rips a piece of paper from the machine and then crawls under the desk, collecting more loose pages.
“You write on an old typewriter? Who are you, Orson Welles?”
Oren hops up at the name, as if he and Orson Welles are frequently confused. “Well, I—” A gust of wind blows through the open window, scattering the pages out of his hands, while simultaneously blowing his hair into a spiral of mad-scientist madness. “Merde!” he exclaims, slamming the window shut before chasing after the escaped pages.
Despite my brother’s frenzy and general slobbery, the mustard-colored walls of his room and its nestling lived-in-ness, are weirdly soothing. He also has a small fire crackling in his fireplace. I sit on the edge of his futon, moving a plate with a half-eaten ham sandwich that’s slowly turning green out of the way. “Why were you yelling at Hayley? She looked kind of mad.”
Oren is frozen in space, hands slightly grasping, trying to remember something. Then he just slowly gathers a few last pages off the floor. “She gives me criticism on my writing. We don’t always agree, but sometimes her feedback can be . . . helpful, I suppose.”
“Oh, yeah? What were some of her suggestions?”
“Oh, people and their suggestions, you know.” He thrusts a bunch of pages at me. “I have a lot of faith in this script! I’d be interested to know what you think.” I start reading the first page, but Oren interrupts me, intoning: “We begin in the moonlit vegetable patch of a lonely widowed farmer named Juston Bieberman, played by me.”
“What?”
Oren scowls, annoyed by the interruption. “What.”
“Justin Bieberman?”
“That’s my character’s name. The lonely widowed farmer.”
“Seriously? Justin Bieber is . . . like a huge pop star.”
“Ah,” says Oren. “I knew I heard that name somewhere. That happens during the creative process.” He flutters his hands around. “You get lost in the words. The rush of ideas, images. We should rename? How about—”
“Just let me read this, man.”
“Mort Sephiroth?”
I stare at him.
“No?”
“This guy is a rural farmer, right? You can’t name that kind of character after someone who sounds like the Jewish grandfather of a Final Fantasy villain.”
“So what you’re saying is . . . we should mull this further?”
I move to the door. “I’m going to bed.”
“Wait.” He piles a huge stack of pages in my arms. “That’s the whole first act.”
The title page reads: The Ciller Cauliflowers by Oren Jacob Heyward.
I knew he was going to spell killer with a c.
I give him a wary look.
“I was thinking,” says Oren, “your friend might make a great antagonist in the film! How would Jude feel about being an actor rather than working behind the scenes?”
“He’d be thrilled, I’m sure.” I smack the pages against my leg. “Should I read all this tonight?”
“Yes. I’ll get the next hundred and fifty pages of the second act to you by morning. I’ll have Gavin or Franklin or Peter or Linda wake you and let you know where we’ll begin our day.” Oren continues picking up pages from the floor as he blathers on. “Sharon should get some breakfast over to you boys, or it might be Peter, or Gavin. . . .”
I leave the room with him crawling around in an unraveling fog of his scattered thoughts. It’ll probably be a few minutes before he even realizes I’ve left.
Jude is snoring when I return to our room. Careful not to wake him, I go inside the closet, turn on the light, and drop Act One of Oren’s screenplay onto the floor. He’s given me nearly seventy pages. I sit on the floor and lean against one of the empty steamer trunks. When I was a kid, I used to hide in this closet.
I’m scribbling in a leather journal. Sometimes I write about playing Alastair. And about my life: wanting to be someone else, wanting to be somewhere else. Sometimes I write stories. A lot of them are escape stories. I don’t have any books. No one reads me stories anymore, so I write my own. I give some to my dad for inspiration, written out on separate pieces of paper, but he always says: “Don’t distract me, Dario,” and crumples them up right then and there.
Aida gave me the journal, along with a ballpoint pen with my initials engraved on it, for my tenth birthday. When things get bad there’s a buzzing that rises in my ears, like a hornets’ nest broken open. Writing makes the buzzing ease off a bit. Sometimes I just don’t know what else to do.
The door of the closet opens and Hayley stands there with an ice pack in her hand. I turn away and the journal falls into my lap. I don’t want her to see my face.
“I always know where to find you,” she says, kneeling in front of me. “Look up.” She lays the ice pack right below my eye, where it’s swollen and throbbing. We’re both quiet. I only hear our tight, clutched breathing in the enclosed space, and suddenly I’m aware of what it’s like to really show my bruises to someone—inside and out.
I pull away. “It’s getting cold.”
“It’s supposed to be fifteen minutes on, fifteen off.”
“My face is freezing.”
Hayley blows her hot breath onto my cheek.
There’s more silence. I don’t know what to do with silence, so I take her chin in my hands and kiss her on the lips. It’s the first time I’ve ever kissed a girl, and I don’t expect the feeling—like I’m giving a piece of myself to her that I’ll never get back. It makes me afraid. And she doesn’t react like I thought she would. A tear comes to the edge of her eye and just trembles there, caught in an eyelash.
“What’s wrong?” I say, reaching forward and lifting the tear delicately off her eyelash like it’s a tiny piece of precious glass.
She shakes her head.
“What?”
She looks up at me. “I want to tell you to do something.”
“So tell me.”
“But I don’t really want you to do it,” she says.
I take her hand. I wish we could never leave this closet.
“It would hurt,” she adds.
“Then I wouldn’t do it!” I say, laughing, confused.
“I mean, hurt me.”
“Then I really wouldn’t do it.”
Her lips tremble. “Yeah, but . . .”
I hand her the journal and the pen. “Sometimes writing stuff down is easier.”
She flips to the next page, hesitating, biting the tip of the pen.
“No, no,” I say, flipping to the end of the journal. “Write it on the very last page.”
“Why?”
“Because if it’ll hurt you, I don’t want to read it. I just want you to write it.”
“Then what’s the point?” she says.
“Tell me part of it. Right now. Tell me only the last word. And write the rest.”
She leans in. Her lips tickle my ear. “Away,” she whispers. She flips through blank pages; she stops on a page, scribbles something, considering it carefully, tapping the pen against her teeth.
I want to kiss her again but I don’t.
She closes the journal, clips the pen onto it, and hands it back to me. “I didn’t write it on the very last page. It’s toward the back. You’ll have to search to find it.”
“So it’ll always be there if I need it.”
I feel safer with Hayley around. She knows this and has been on set, as much as possible, during the filming of my scenes. My dad behaves differently when she’s there—he doesn’t push me around as much. He knows he’s tamer when she’s there, so he’s been getting sneaky about the shooting schedule.
Hayley presses the ice pack against my face, determinedly, until the cold melts away. It’s like she’s trying to freeze something broiling in us both. Then she looks down at the dead ice pack. “I think we have another one.”
We walk down the hallway into her parents’ suite. It’s dark in there. In the bathroom, I hear Hugo and Aida arguing. I always had this dumb impression everyone besides me was happy-go-lucky around here. This is my first glimpse of something else. “Wait here,” says Hayley.
I hear Aida sobbing.
I hear Hugo: “Can’t let him touch you again. I’ll murder him . . . have to just go, Ai. Before . . . something . . . maybe it’s time.”
“. . . doing to that poor boy. It’ll be worse for him if we go.”
“. . . take him with us.”
“That’s kidnapping.”
I just stand there, unable to move.
Aida and Hugo burst out of the bathroom, releasing a plume of steam and a triangle of light like they just tumbled out of a magical dimension. Hugo has a towel around his shoulders. Hayley appears from another room, shaking a fresh ice pack.
“Oh!” says Aida, grabbing the ice pack from Hayley and making a beeline for me. She embraces me; when I wince and pull away, she raises up my shirt, revealing a web of bruising on my side. My dad shoved me again, and I fell on something hard.
Aida turns to face Hugo, fingers still gripping my shirt, breathing hard through her nose. Hugo is leaning against the bathroom door, sipping from a metal flask. When he sees me, he looks down. Aida presses the ice pack gently to my face and says to Hayley: “Take your dad downstairs, collect our laundry, and bring me up a seltzer with lemon, please.”
Hayley and Hugo leave the room.
Aida takes me over to the bed, and like I’m six or seven years younger than I am, sits me right on her lap, and starts rocking me. She has strong arms, but everything else about her is so delicate. “There will come a time when you’ll need to be strong and leave this place for good. You’ll know when the time is right. And then you need to go. But when you go . . . let the wounds heal. Don’t let them sink under the surface and fester inside you. Promise?”
“Promise.”
“And once you go, you can’t ever come back. Promise me that.”
“Promise.”
“One day you’ll look back on your time here, and all of us, and you won’t feel the pain you do now. When that moment comes, you’ll know you’ve made it through all the darkness God drew for you, and come out into the light.”