Chapter 11
Thisbe is waiting in the front hall with her stuffed goldfish in her mouth, wagging her tail in anticipation.
When I pull open the door, Luke’s texting something—or someone—on his phone.
“Sorry,” he says, not looking up. “Give me one sec.”
He’s wearing a hoodie, black sweats, and a pair of sneakers I would bet are every bit as expensive as they are cool. Behind
him, a bright red vintage Bronco is parked in our driveway. It’s pristine, and so clean its silver grille sparkles. The whole
scene is a reality check, and I’m grateful for it.
Thisbe woofs to remind him that she’s waiting for a hello scratch.
“Okay.” He clicks off his phone and puts it in his pocket. “Sorry about that.”
“Don’t apologize to me,” I say, pointing at Thisbe.
Luke crouches down and grabs her neck scruff. “Hey, you beautiful girl.”
Thisbe closes her eyes, basking in his attention. Her tail is going at least twenty miles an hour.
“So. Are you ready for a riveting experience?”
Luke stands, grinning. “Always.”
“I’m kidding. It’s going to be boring.” I stop at the stairs and motion at them like I’m an assistant on a game show. “Usually when I get home I’d change into pajamas before starting on homework, but I’ll spare you.”
“You sure? I don’t want to mess with your system.”
“You saw me in my homework uniform yesterday. Use your imagination.”
“Will do.” He closes one eye and frames me with his hands. “Enormous Halloween pants and an oversize hoodie. Got it.”
“They’re not enormous,” I say, though the banter is helping me relax a little bit.
“What next?”
“Homework in the kitchen,” I tell him, even though it’s a bit of a lie. Usually, I do homework lying on my bed. But I’m not
about to do that with him.
We sit down and I take him through my classes and my workload for the day, which includes what I didn’t finish yesterday.
Even as a hyperactive kid, he was a good listener. I’m glad to see he’s still like that—what I’m telling him about is objectively
boring, but he’s nodding and watching me carefully. He listens without rushing to give a response. He just listens and absorbs.
“Damn,” he says, scrolling through my schedule page on my laptop. I’m trying not to have a heart attack thinking about him
clicking into my internet history, where he would find his name plastered all over the results. “Four APs. Even I know what
those are. Not bad.”
“Got to get into college somehow.”
“Oh, that reminds me.” He reaches into his pocket for his wallet and pulls out a folded check. He slides it across the table
to me.
“But I haven’t done anything yet.”
“It’s just the first part. I figured I’d pay you some now, and then the rest at the end.”
I unfold the check, which is made out for ten thousand dollars. I’ve never held something worth so much money in my hands,
ever. “Thank you so much, Luke.”
“No. Thank you.”
Then I notice the check isn’t the kind I get from working catering jobs for Mom, which are more official business checks.
This one is a personal check from Luke. I point at his name. “Why is this made out from you?”
“It’s long and boring so I’ll spare you the details,” Luke says. “But basically, it’s easier for production to reimburse me
than to pay you. Should we get started?”
I fold the check in half again and set it carefully aside. Even if he’s paying me now, I won’t cash it until we’ve finished.
It doesn’t feel right to deposit the check until I’ve held up my part of the bargain. Then I slide a few scraps of loose computer
paper and a pen toward him.
He takes it. “What’s this for?”
“So you can draw or something while I work. Do you still make comics?”
“Sometimes, yeah.” He laughs and uncaps the pen. “I feel like a little kid. Like I’m visiting my mom at her office, and she’s given me ‘work’ to do.”
I’m curious about his mom, about his whole family, but I figure it’s better to focus on the task at hand. I push over “In
the Waiting Room,” the Elizabeth Bishop poem I have to analyze for AP English. “Feel free to do the real work if you want, too. I need a three-hundred-word
reaction to this by tomorrow.”
“I’ll do it for you if you don’t mind a failing grade,” Luke jokes.
“You can at least give it a try,” I suggest. “Consider it an exercise.”
“All right. Fair enough.” Luke surprises me by settling in to read the poem more closely. He clasps his hands in his lap,
and he’s so tall he has to bend his neck down to read it. He’s wearing a thin silver chain that disappears beneath his hoodie.
For the first few minutes, I can’t focus with him sitting next to me, but eventually I’m able to get into the right mindset
and start on my calc problem set.
And just like that, an hour passes, the two of us sitting side by side at the kitchen table.
“Done,” Luke says, sliding a piece of paper toward me. “My reaction to the poem.”
It’s a drawing. In it, a woman is sitting alone on a chair in an almost empty room.
There’s a potted plant and a stack of magazines next to her, making it clear she’s in a waiting room, but then it grows into darkness.
The crosshatched blackness curves around the edges, creating a globe-like effect.
It isn’t clear if the woman is an adult or a child.
It’s like if you look at her face from different angles, she could be either.
The overall feeling of the drawing is one of overwhelming loneliness.
“Wow. This is so good.”
He laughs. “Don’t sound so surprised.”
“I’m not! I mean it.”
“It’s always been easier to draw out my thoughts than to write them. Took me, like, five go-rounds to read through the whole
poem.”
That’s another thing about Luke: he’s dyslexic. Sometimes when we had to miss a couple of weeks of school for the show, we’d
have a tutor together on set so we wouldn’t fall too far behind. Or at least I missed school. Luke switched over to a full-time
tutor much sooner than me. He always resisted the reading and vocab work, made jokes about it, until one day he finally told
me why.
After that, we did a lot of our ELA work together. Then we started going through our lines together, too. I would read everything
out loud in silly accents until we both had our lines memorized.
I sit back in my chair. “Do you want to go for a walk?”
“Don’t you have more to do?”
“Yeah, but I like to get Thisbe out before it’s too dark, especially on days my mom is working late.”
“And that isn’t too public of an outing for you?”
“As long as you wear a ski mask it should be fine. There’s one in the coat closet.”
Luke stares at me.
“I’m joking. There’s a nature preserve down the street. We can take one of the less-popular trails. Thisbe loves it there.”
Fifteen minutes later, we’re on one of the trails, Thisbe trotting twenty feet ahead of us with a huge stick in her mouth.
It’s not even five o’clock yet, but the sky is starting to darken, the crispness of the air solidifying into true cold, with
that rich, earthy smell of decay.
It’s the second week of October, prime foliage season, and the woods are ablaze in reds, yellows, and oranges. The sun is
low enough that it streams through the trees, lighting their leaves from behind, making them look like they’re glowing. We
walk by two kids who have a guilty, hands-in-their-pockets energy that makes me think they came in here to smoke weed, and
they do a double take when they see Luke. So does a middle-aged woman in head-to-toe Lululemon walking her goldendoodle. They
don’t even glance at me, so I try not to let it stress me out too much.
“So when does production officially begin?” I ask.
“Early November. So a little less than a month.”
“You came out pretty early for it.”
We never filmed on location anywhere for Bricks—we were always on set at the studio—but some of the other actors did for other projects.
I don’t know how preproduction works on movies, since I was never in one, but I assume with a star as big as Luke, they wouldn’t want him on location for any longer than necessary.
“Yeah. My team wanted me to be here. Specifically Cal.”
“Is he your new manager?”
“Not exactly new. We’ve been working together for almost five years now.”
“How did Elaine take it? Your ‘breakup’?”
“Like you’d expect. She was incredibly gracious, happy for me,” he says. “I still feel bad about it. I wasn’t even looking
for a new manager; a friend introduced me to Cal, and before I knew it, he was taking me out to lunch and explaining what
he thought my career should look like for the next ten years. He even called Elaine on my behalf.”
“Seriously?”
He winces. “I know. But it felt good to have someone just . . . tell me what to do. Elaine always wanted me to make the final
decision, tell her what I thought, wanted to know if I was happy. Cal is strategic. He doesn’t care about any of that. He
just wants to grow my brand.”
“Wow. He sounds so warm and fuzzy.”
The leaves crunch beneath our feet as Luke lets out a laugh. “Yeah. That’s Cal, all right. He’s the reason I’m an EP on the
movie. Which is why I’m out here so early.”
“Are you trying to get more into things on the production side?”
“No. Well, maybe? I don’t know. Cal thought it would be a big step up if the movie goes where he hopes it does.
And I’m excited about it, don’t get me wrong.
But sometimes I’d love to take a break. From all of it.
Just chill for a little, see where else life could take me.
I’ve been doing this since I was nine years old, so it’s the only thing I know. ”
One of my last memories of Luke was a one-sided text conversation where he sent me link after link of all the coverage of
his casting announcement for his first movie. I don’t think he even noticed that I barely responded. I’m having trouble squaring
that up with his current ambivalence.
“Then why don’t you?” I say. “Take a break, I mean.”
“It would throw off the plan. Cal broke his back getting my career to where it is now. I don’t want all that work to be for
nothing just because I wanted a break.”
“I don’t know. Sometimes a break can be good.”