Everything Leads to You

Charlotte peers over my shoulder.

“You know the cross street by heart?”

“Of course.” I say, handing her phone back. “Is it weird that I feel relieved right now? It was kind of awful to think it was over.”

“I don’t think it’s over,” Charlotte says. “There’s so much we don’t know yet. I kind of feel like it’s only over if she doesn’t ask us for anything, but it’s possible she’ll need help figuring more out, and if that’s the case we should help her.”

“I hope she asks us,” I say. “There’s no way Clyde Jones’s granddaughter should be living in a shelter and working the overnight shift at Home Depot. It’s, like, against the laws of the universe.”

Charlotte laughs.

“I really liked her.”

“Yeah, I bet,” Charlotte says.

“No, really,” I say. “Not only because she’s, like, heartbreakingly beautiful. She told us things about her life. She wanted to stay and hang out. She doesn’t even know us. Not everyone would do that.”

“Yeah, I liked her, too,” Charlotte admits. “We’ll see what happens tomorrow.”

The sun hovers low over the water, the clouds around it all pink and violet.

“I’ve been wondering,” I say. “You know what I said the night we found the letter? How I felt like there was something significant about it?”

“Yeah, I remember. It’s the only time you’ve ever said anything like that.”

“I’ve just been thinking that maybe Ava is someone I’m supposed to know.”

“Know?”

“It isn’t just because she’s so pretty. Or because of Clyde. I know it sounds crazy but I swear there’s this thing about her. I feel like I was meant to know her.”

Charlotte traces circles in the sand.

“You don’t think she’d be interested in me,” I say.

“I’m not saying that.”

“Yeah but you aren’t saying anything. That says a lot.”

“You should give yourself some time to get over Morgan. Start slowly.”

“Why do you have to be so practical?”

“One of us has to be. We could end up being Ava’s friends.”

“I’ll need more of those once you’re gone.”

“I’m not going to be ‘gone.’ I’m going to be away for college.”

“But then who knows. You’ll go be an amazing museum director somewhere. You could end up in New York. You could end up in Chicago. This might be it for us, right now, on the beach. After this everything will be different. You’ll forget your love of palm trees and fear of snow. You’ll spend all your time in a fancy office bossing people around and discovering stolen seventeenth-century sculptures.”

I have a lot more to say, but Charlotte is pushing me over into the sand.

I try to continue in spite of her assault: “You’ll be recruited by the Louvre. You’ll live in Paris and marry a handsome Parisian who is, like, half French, half Moroccan, and looks exactly like my brother and when the time comes to renew your American citizenship you’ll say, Who needs les états-Unis anyway? Sand in my eye!” I gasp.

She stops pushing me and stands up.

“Let’s go,” she says. “You’re ridiculous and I have work to do.”

I stand up and follow her.

“You’ll start saying that American movies are stupid, all spectacle and no substance, completely overlooking the hundreds of beautiful, quiet films that come out of the US every year, let alone the fact that spectacles are, in themselves, incredible.”

Charlotte stops walking and turns to face me. She puts her hands on my shoulders.

“I’m going to Michigan because it’s the best school for what I want to do. I don’t know where I’ll go when it’s over. But you will always be my best friend, and I will never be the kind of snob who says that all American movies are stupid. If I ever make a gross generalization like that, please point at me and laugh until I feel sufficiently humiliated.”

“Okay,” I say, and a tightness forms in my throat. She smiles at me, a smile of sympathy and her own sadness, too.

I didn’t even mean for this to be a heartfelt moment, but I guess I need it. It sucks to lose your best friend, even if only to distance. Even when it isn’t really losing her at all.

~

I start reading at eleven thirty, when Charlotte is asleep. I’m lying on the couch with a small brass lamp (snagged from my grandpa’s garage) turned on so the light doesn’t wake her up. The average screenplay is between 90 and 120 pages, one page per minute of screen time. This one is 111, which means that I will be able to get through it tonight, or at least get a good-enough sense of it to know whether I want to take this insane opportunity.