The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

“What’s option one?” I ask.

He fixes me with an innocent stare, and says, “Find her some other way. Duh.”

“Excellent. This is a good plan. Simple, and to the point. Thank you.” I stare at the countertop. I am the pizza of dismay.

He hands me the champagne flute and smiles. “You’re welcome.”

I start to make my way back to the dressing room, where Maddie is waiting. Maddie. That name feels kind of cool in my mouth, too.

“Seriously, dude,” Eastlin calls out to my back. “There’re cameras in there.”

Back inside the dressing room, champagne stashed on an end table, lighting a perfect rose-colored scatter totally devoid of shadow, I pull out my video camera and train it on Maddie’s face. Her eyes are closed, and she’s rubbing a cheek against the silk of one of the dresses behind her. I creep nearer, zooming in without zooming in. I let the camera study her, traveling over her half-closed eyes. There’s something. Yes. She’s very . . . I get in so close that I can’t see her Bettie Page bangs anymore or her neck tattoo, just the round planes of her cheeks, and a soft dimple where her smile deepens. She looks different, this close up. Younger. She looks . . .

A laugh erupts out of my mouth, and I pull the camera away from my eye and stare at her in surprise.

“What?” she asks, eyes flying open at the sound of my laughing. “Do I look weird?”

“No, no,” I reassure her. “You look good. You look actually . . .” A smile pulls at my cheek while I decide. “Beautiful,” I say.

Then I say, “Malou.”

She stiffens, her feet scrambling over the dressing room floor as though she’s thinking about bolting. But she doesn’t. She just stares at me, hard, waiting to see what I’m going to do. I smile at her, and bring the video camera back to my eye. The pixelated image of her face in my viewfinder relaxes. Her cheeks are framed by tulle, and she gazes at me with heavy lids, watchful and steady.

Maybe it wasn’t coincidence, Maddie turning up in my image search for Annie. Maybe I’ve been looking for the wrong girl all along.

“Guilty,” she whispers, gazing down her nose at me.

“So tell me, Maddie Miss Madwoman Malou,” I whisper, my camera moving over her skin, lingering on her mouth. “Tell me what you want most in the world.”





CHAPTER 9


That Friday night, fiction film workshop night, the screening room is packed, and I’ve never seen Tyler so nervous. The guy is barely holding it together. He’s dressed up, for him, in skinny black jeans with a rubberized wet-look finish and extra eyeliner. His black hair is gelled up higher than usual. And he keeps rubbing his nose, which looks red and raw underneath. He looks like the guitarist in a Japanese Sex Pistols tribute band.

“Are you okay?” I whisper to him.

“What?” he whispers back, distracted. “Yeah, sure.”

His left knee jiggles so fast I can barely see it, and the jiggling is rattling the keys in his jeans pocket.

Tonight all the live-action fiction kids’ projects get shown in front of the professors and the rest of the film students, including animation, whose workshop is Monday, and documentary—we’re up next week. Up until this point we’ve seen snippets of one another’s work, but nothing complete. Everybody’s films have to have music, sound, credits, the whole shebang. Workshop is half of our grade, but more importantly, workshop is when we’ll judge one another, silently. Taking the measure of one another is even worse than being graded.