The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

There, hovering in freeze-frame, half obscured behind the velvet curtain, stands the girl with the hipster-curled hair. That milky skin. God. She’s so beautiful that for instant I’m afraid I’m going to be sick.

She’s peering around the curtain like a little kid playing hide-and-seek. Her hand holds the curtain next to her cheek, and I can just see a pale shoulder where her dress is slipping down. The crease of flesh at the top of her armpit is showing, and the contrast between collarbone and swell of girl flesh momentarily distracts me. Her dark eyebrows are arched, and she’s looking at something just offscreen. Her face looks curious, maybe even surprised. She’s standing just behind Maddie, who sits in frozen attention, bent over her phone.

“What’s she looking at?” I ask. My voice sounds hollow in my ears.

“Who cares?” Tyler says, flicking his fingers against his thumb as though tossing away an invisible cigarette butt. “The point is, I can’t put this online unless I have her release. And you didn’t get it.”

“What?”

“You didn’t get it. You were too intent on buying pizza for some skank.”

I glare at him, a hot burst of rage exploding in my chest. I work my jaw, and my molars grind together.

“You can still present at workshop. Who cares?” I point out.

“Who cares about fucking workshop?” Tyler yells. “Listen, I know this is just, like, summer school for you, or whatever, but you are aware that this is important to me, right?”

I’m surprised and annoyed by how upset Tyler seems. When we met the first day of class he’d made a big thing about how he actually grew up in the city. He called it that, too: the city. As if there were only one in the entire world. He knew all the subway lines, and he knew how to hail a taxi, and he taught us not to take the black cars ’cause they’ll rip you off, and once he got us into a nightclub by being on the list. And he wasted so much money on film stock, it was ridiculous. I mean, who doesn’t shoot digital? You might as well get a thousand dollar bills together and light a campfire with them at the lake. So from the first week I’d assumed he was some rich Manhattan kid who was parked in summer school so his parents could get him out of the co-op while they got divorced in peace. There’re people like that in Madison, too. I just wasn’t friends with any of them.

Tyler fixes me in a stare that is boiling with rage, and then looks away. Swallowing my own anger, I lower back into the chair next to him.

“I’m sorry,” I manage to say. The words feel sour in my mouth.

Tyler doesn’t look at me. He shrugs a dismissive shoulder.

“No, you’re right,” I force myself to continue. “I said I’d help you with the sound and the releases. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

I wonder if this will be enough to get him to chill out. I wonder if I will ever have the nerve to put my own work ahead of other people’s. I wonder why I let myself get pulled into these situations over and over again.

Tyler meets my gaze. For a second I’m worried he’s going to cry, and the possibility makes me panicky because I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, and because I know he’d be angry at me for seeing that, and he’d be a dick to me afterward.

He takes a long breath.

“Okay,” he says at length.

“Okay,” I agree, though I’m not entirely sure what I’m agreeing to.

“At least she wasn’t blocking the whole shot like I thought,” he goes on, wiping his eye with a fist. “She doesn’t turn up until that part at the end. It means I can use all the table shots for transition.”

“Yeah.” I nod. Something vaguely bothers me about this. But I’m not sure what.

“My workshop’s in three days, so you should have plenty of time.”