“What’s this?” I hardly recognize it.
“You may have it back,” she says. “Under one condition. You talk to me. I don’t expect you to tell me everything you’re thinking or feeling, but let me know if something’s wrong. If I can help. Even if you don’t think I can. Don’t shut me out. Okay?”
Dad stops eating to look at her, then at me, like he’s suddenly noticed a pair of deer have walked into the room and are grazing at the table.
“Okay,” I say.
Mom nods and smiles, and dabs her napkin to the corners of her eyes.
Dad says, “And they all lived happily ever after.”
We laugh, and for a moment it feels like that might be true. But my story isn’t over yet, and I’m not sure how it’s going to end.
I pick up the phone, which is completely dead, and it feels like a thin, smooth brick of nothing. I’ll plug it in later, maybe, if I feel like it. But for now I feel like watching a movie with my parents, which is what I do. We pick Boyhood, a movie filmed over a period of twelve years, the length of my friendship with Jenna. It is weird to watch someone grow up like that, and grow away. But maybe that’s what happens. People just grow away. Mom cries at the end like Patricia Arquette. I hug her, and she cries harder. I’m nothing like the boy in the movie, so I’m not sure why she’s crying, and she doesn’t say.
Sometimes you just need to let stuff out.
I set my phone on my dresser that night when I go to bed. I don’t plug it in. I’ve managed to stay away from Vicurious all week, aware of her activity only by what I hear around school. I haven’t posted anything since the self-care image on Thanksgiving, but Ellen has apparently Photoshopped us skydiving together. I’ve reached two million followers, so I’ve heard, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. It is both empowering and terrifying. It seems almost everything is a balance of yin and yang.
I add the mixed feelings over my growing number of followers to a new mental list of things I’ll talk to Mrs. Greene about, when I talk to her. Which I will. Soon.
Most of my weekend is spent with Lipton, finishing the Siege of Jerusalem project and fiddling around on Minecraft. He shows me how it works. “Adam would give himself a concussion if he knew about this,” he says.
But I’m curious, and I like the fantastical worlds you can create on there. Lipton has a whole island, with castles and waterfalls and farmland and shops. Even a bowling alley. He switches over to a different server where there are other players, and monsters, and he’s this sword-wielding, fire-throwing ninja. When he comes across little figures who are standing idle, their “masters” having stepped away, he picks them up and tosses them off a nearby cliff.
“Did you just kill him?”
He grins at me.
“You totally threw a completely innocent person to his death. Without even blinking.”
“He’ll regenerate.” Lipton shrugs. “Serves him right, standing around like that in the middle of a battle.”
“Remind me never to go to the Grand Canyon with you.”
He laughs as I pantomime falling off a cliff. And we get back to work. Aside from a kiss on the cheek when I arrive both mornings, we’ve managed to keep our hands off each other. Mostly. It helps that his sister keeps flitting in and out of the game-slash-homework-slash-craft room, making puppets out of paper bags.
Lipton gets permission to banish her when it’s time to record my voice-over, though. He also gets permission to close the door while we’re recording.
Even in my state of relative calm, I can’t do the whole script without messing up, so we record it in sections. Lipton keeps saying it’s great, but when he plays it back to me I sound like I’ve swallowed sandpaper.
“Is that what I really sound like? It’s awful.”
“Everyone’s voice sounds weird to them because you only hear it from inside your head,” he says. “It sounds different out here.”
“It sounds awful.”
“It sounds amazing.”
“If you like the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard.”
“I do,” he teases. “I love that sound.”
“Oh, God. Do I really sound like that? I can’t do this.”
“You don’t sound like that.” He laughs. “And you did it. It’s done.”
We layer the sound over the visuals. Lipton lowers the lights in the room and we move our chairs back to watch it all the way through. He leans forward to push the play arrow and then settles in next to me and takes my hand in his.
I cringe when I hear my voice, but it plays smoothly. The script matches up with the images. The ending is my favorite part. We show the modern-day photos of people at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, including close-ups of prayers crammed into all the tiny crevices. I found some blog posts and articles written by people from all over the world who visited the wall and had really touching experiences there. I pulled quotes of hope and love and understanding from their stories, but instead of reading their thoughts aloud, I typed them in so they scroll down the screen with the photos in the background. In silence.
When it finishes, I turn to Lipton. “Do you think it needs music or something at the end?”
He clears his throat. “No.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
He gets up and turns the lights back on, but doesn’t look at me right away. He busies himself downloading the presentation on two USB drives, just in case one of them is lost or malfunctions or gets swallowed or accidentally-on-purpose thrown out a window in an attempt to avoid the whole thing. (Though he made me promise I wouldn’t do that.) The way he’s not saying anything makes me worried he’s disappointed, that it’s not as good as his Battle of Thermopylae and he won’t beat his other grade.
“Do you think they’ll ask questions?” I’m terrified of this prospect. Obviously.
“They’re more likely to be stunned into silence,” he says.
“It’s that bad?”
Lipton closes his eyes and sighs. “You really have no idea, do you? It’s brilliant. You’re brilliant!”
I laugh. “And you’re delusional.”
He steps closer and tips his forehead down to touch mine. “It’s great. Trust me.”
“Okay,” I say, unconvinced.
He leans away then, an incredulous smile forming. “You don’t trust me.”
“It’s not that.”
“You totally don’t trust me.” He thinks it’s funny. Sort of. But there’s a hint of hurt behind his eye. I know what it looks like.
“I’m just nervous,” I say, “about getting up there. If they . . . what if they laugh? If they point and stare and I mess it up and I can’t, what if I can’t get up there?” My breath starts to get choppy. “I think I . . .”
“Whoa. Here.” He holds me up by the arms and guides me into a chair. “You okay?”
I drop my head between my knees. Take deep breaths. The room spins. I lower myself to the floor. I curl up.
“What’s happening?” Lipton is on hands and knees next to me.