The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

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Tyler’s keys are jingling again, his leg all jumpy, and for a second it feels like no time has gone by at all, except Deepti’s cheering section has taken the day off.

I’m back in the screening room, and I’m staring at the ceiling to make sure that if I actually do throw up, I will at least choke to death on my own vomit rather than embarrass myself by getting it all over the floor. I made my parents sit in the back instead of with me, because I just couldn’t handle the look on my dad’s face if Professor Krauss rips my film. Cannot. Possibly. Handle it.

“It’s tight, Wes,” Tyler whispers to me.

I grunt in response, because I’m too nervous to talk.

I’m feeling good about Most. I think.

Mostly.

Ha! Hilarious, Wes. I am hilarious.

I remind myself that I don’t really know any of these people. Not really. If it turns out that Most sucks, then who cares? I’ll get a C, I’ll go back to Madison, I’ll finish my communications degree, and then . . . and then I’ll . . .

Then I’ll work in a shoe store and spend the rest of my life reliving the moment I almost had everything I wanted.

Well, it doesn’t matter, because none of these people will be there, whatever I do, and in a year nobody will care that some kid from the Midwest showed a crappy, self-indulgent documentary film during his summer film school workshop screening. Only I will know.

Somehow this thought doesn’t do anything to calm me down.

“Okay, simmer down, kids,” Professor Krauss says from the podium. We’re all restless, the faculty as well as the students. Summer is winding down to an end. “Our first victim is Mr. Diegetic Sound himself, Wes Auckerman, with a digital video documentary he’s calling Most. Hit it.”

That’s all? No intro, no welcoming parent blather, nothing? We’re just going to . . . watch it?

Remember, I tell myself. You don’t actually know any of these people. If they hate it, it doesn’t matter.

But nothing I can say to myself will make any difference. The fear is there, and it’s eating at my entrails like a parasite, and I want so badly for the movie to be amazing and I’m so afraid that they will laugh, and nothing I can do now will make any difference. The lights go down, my classmates settle into a hush, the numbered countdown begins (I cut it in, because it’s my movie, and I’ll do it how I want it done). And then, the screen lights up with what should be a hazy, out-of-focus shot of Annie’s face. That perfect mole, those bottomless black eyes. I hold my breath, and my classmates do, too.

But the screen only shows the empty bench by the lake where Annie van Sinderen told me what she wanted the most in the world.





EPILOGUE


I’m still laughing when I step out of Professor Krauss’s office and peer at my phone and find a text from Maddie.

U coming over? it asks.

Yes, I reply. What time?

How’s now?

Perfect, I respond, and stuff the phone in the pocket of my cargo shorts.

I pause in the vestibule of the film department, looking up and down the hallways lined with posters of movies made by Tisch grads. A couple of girls walk by, giggling under their hands and pointing at me. I don’t recognize either of them. After a second of debating back and forth, they come up and one of them goes, “Um, excuse me, but are you the guy?”

I can’t stop myself from grinning.

“Um. Yeah,” I say, tugging at my Ramones T-shirt. “I’m the guy.”

“Oh my God,” one of the girls says, laying a hand on my arm. “I could not believe what people were saying about your film.”