CHAPTER 10

ROHEED WAS SPRAWLED out on Charlie’s couch, a wet washcloth draped on his forehead, covering his closed eyes. He was massaging his temples when his phone made that awful sound that phones make when a video call is coming through. He answered it. Florence’s face popped up on the screen. She saw the state that Roheed was in and laughed.

Roheed was grumpy. “It’s not amusing.”

“Aw, I’m sorry, ’Heed.” Florence did that cute thing where her eyes were smiling but her mouth frowned in an overdramatic display of sympathy. “You just look pretty cute with your little washcloth on your head.”

“Anyway,” Roheed rolled his eyes, “I did this to myself because of you.”

“What?”

“I went out drinking after I saw you with him.”

“Who?”

“You know who.”

She did. “Al? Yeah, he was at the club I played last night, along with three thousand other people.”

Roheed was pissed. “Were all three thousand people also your ex-boyfriends? And before you answer, you don’t have to, because I’m being facetious. I know you’ve had significantly fewer ex-boyfriends than that.”

Florence was getting heated as well. “If you don’t trust me, then I don’t need to be talking to you right now. Maybe call me back when you’ve adjusted your attitude.”

“Maybe call me back when . . .” Roheed sputtered, “you’ve adjusted your . . . uh, gratitude . . .” He searched for words, but like a prop gun in an old Western, he came up blank. “Never mind, my head hurts.”

“Green’s not your color, babe,” Florence said, and then her face disappeared from Roheed’s phone with a whoosh and a zoop.

Roheed wasn’t sure if she meant green with envy or that he physically looked green because he felt so sick. It didn’t matter. He seriously considered throwing his phone across the room into the wall, but the way his brain worked, it played out a million micro-scenarios and he just couldn’t let himself do it. There was no upside except for a brief moment of satisfaction, he reasoned. Instead, he simply set the phone down gently on the floor. Then he lay back on the couch and slid the fuzzy, faded light blue washcloth he had been nursing his headache with down over his face to block out the world.

• • •

Jonathan was sitting in his office polishing his whistle—seriously, that’s not a euphemism; he was actually making sure his coach’s whistle was nice and shiny. He had a little thing called pride, after all. Chris entered, and even though Jonathan’s back was to her, he sensed her presence.

“You should have told me she was coming,” he said, not turning to face her.

“Would you have met with her if I did?” Chris asked.

Jonathan thought for a moment. “No.”

There was a pause, and then Chris replied, “There you go.”

Jonathan did a half-turn in his chair so that Chris could see his profile. He spoke quickly and passionately. “You don’t get it, your dads are cool. Your dads went out of their way to adopt you and neither of your dads are even dead. What the h-e-double diving boards?” He got quiet. “My dad, who was my best friend, died, and then my father figure even died. You still have two awesome dads.”

Chris pulled up a chair next to Jonathan and put her hand on his shoulder. She could have said a lot of things, but they wouldn’t have been helpful in that moment. She could have told Jonathan stories from the orphanage, where the caretakers treated her poorly, and where because she was older than most of the other kids they all said she would never get adopted. She could have told Jonathan about the hoops her dads had to jump through to adopt her because it was “frowned upon” for two men, who couldn’t get married at the time, to adopt a child. She could have told him the hateful things her classmates in high school had said to her about her dads and the things people still posted on the internet about the subject. But she didn’t; he already knew. And it wasn’t the right time to bring those things up again.

Instead, she said, “I know it still hurts, and what your mom did in reaction to your dad’s death hurt you, too. But think about it from her perspective. You lost your father. She lost her husband.” Jonathan hadn’t thought of it that way. Chris continued. “I’m sure if she had it to do over again, she would have done it differently.”

“This isn’t Hot Tub Time Machine, she can’t just do it over,” Jonathan said sadly, angrily.

Chris tried to stay with the movie references. “But maybe you can forgive her, uh, like in Unforgiven.”

“I don’t think that’s the best example of forgiveness, a movie called Unforgiven.”

“I haven’t actually seen it,” Chris confessed.

“Me neither.”

Chris got back on task. “She’ll be at the rehearsal dinner tomorrow night,” she offered.

Jonathan was indignant. “Who says I’m going to be there?”

Chris just gave him a look.

“Yeah, I’ll be there,” Jonathan admitted. “Damn it, I just love your damn self so damn much.”

“I love you too, Pooley.”

“Can we just like, talk about things from now on? No more surprises?”

Chris nodded. They hugged. It was sweet.

They kissed and kept kissing and then suddenly tongues were involved and it was a little much. They fell onto the nearby cot and pulled a fuzzy, light blue pool towel over them, size XL for the Xtra Long lovemaking they were about to do.

• • •

Roheed slid from his face the fuzzy, light blue washcloth that had been keeping his thumping headache at bay. He looked over and saw Charlie sitting at the table with his computer. Charlie was just staring at the screen until he registered that Roheed had stirred.

He adapted a faux-nurturing voice, “How you doing, little buddy?”

Roheed blinked his eyes separately, then together. “My cranium feels like it’s less affected by gravity than it usually is.”

“You’re lightheaded? Yeah, after the hangover and the ibuprofen you’ll feel a little woozy.”

Roheed steadied himself against the arm of the couch. “Are you back to writing?” he asked.

Charlie prepared to say yes, but then chose honesty. “No. I mean, it’s just like before the summer at the pool; I just sit here and I’ve got nothing.”

“What happened with In Sheep’s Clothing?” Roheed asked. “Why is Jerd McKinley making it into a movie that you have no part of?”

Charlie looked away. “I still don’t want to talk about it.”

“Yes, you do.”

Charlie sighed, “Okay, yeah. I really do.” And he began to spin a yarn like a dizzy sweater-knitter.

• • •

Charlie flashed back to his In Sheep’s Clothing table read. He had held it to hear his words up on their feet and get the opinions of some close friends and family and anyone else willing to spend a couple of hours listening to a very amateur screenwriter’s debut attempt. It was held in the Helen Phifer Memorial Auditorium and Musical Studies Annex on the Yellow County Community College campus. Charlie sat at the head of a long table, the chairs filled with actors reading from scripts. A few scattered audience members, including Jonathan, Chris, Roheed, Florence, and Charlie’s parents, Art and Hilda, sat in the stands.

Jerd McKinley was also there, watching intently. He looked exactly how one might think a nerd who created an Internet-based reality web series to get close to the popular girls in school should. His ticker ticked as he listened to Charlie read the scene action from the script.

“Leonora Sheep hangs up the phone.” Charlie said, making sure to read slowly and enunciate. “She pulls out her calendar and checks the date the event planner gave her.”

An actress read the character Leonora Sheep’s lines. “The eighth, why does that date sound so familiar?”

Charlie added some bass to his voice for the next line. “She flips to the eighth and gapes in horror.”

The actress had been in several tacky local commercials, including the one where the family is trying to figure out where to eat dinner and they settle on an establishment that serves pizza and fried food and is governed by a large purple ape. “The eighth!” she exclaimed.

She is doing quite well, actually, Charlie thought.

“The eighth is the next full moon. I can’t put on a career-launching fashion show. . .” she paused, “if I’m a werewolf!”

If she had been holding a microphone at that moment she would have dropped it, boom. But since they didn’t have microphones and were just trying to project through the large auditorium, she didn’t drop a mic. Instead, she took the blue BIC Round Stic she was using to follow along with her lines and make notes in the margins of the screenplay and placed it down on the table gently.

After the script was read, the audience filed into the adjoining reception hall. Overall, the table read went well enough, Charlie guessed. He didn’t want to beat himself up too bad. He was taking baby steps, but this was not what he had envisioned for his life. He guessed that he was relatively young, and this was the first thing he had written, and, admittedly, it did kind of suck and the structure wasn’t perfect, but he had put words on the page and done the proverbial damn thing, and damnit, he was damn proud of his damn self.

After munching on brownies his mom brought, Charlie asked for feedback from her, his dad, and his friends. Each offered the obligatory positive but relatively vague feedback: “Great dialogue!” and “Very promising!” and “Did that really take more than two hours? It flew by!” Then, Charlie was approached by who he had thought was a student there at the community college, but in actuality was still a high school student at East Yellow High.

“I have a question,” the young man said.

“One second,” Charlie responded, saying to his friends, “Thanks again for coming. I hope to see you again soon. Come into Popcorn Movies whenever. I can get you free rentals.”

They said their goodbyes and walked away, leaving Charlie with the young man.

“Yes?”

“You were delving into some pretty complex themes. I was wondering how you were able to relate so well to a werewolf.”

And just like any artist at any stage in their creative life, no matter how newly burgeoning, Charlie began to wax poetic. “You see,” he began pretentiously, “I, too, used to have a secret I kept, much like the protagonist of my screenplay. I have webbed toes.”

But the young man cut him off, sensing that Charlie could potentially go on for a while if not reined in and kept on track. “How is having webbed toes like being a werewolf?”

“It’s a metaphor,” Charlie replied.

“For what?”

Charlie thought for a moment. “Like shame, I guess?”

“Sure,” the fellow said. “Anyway, I thought the script was pretty cool.”

“Thanks.” Charlie finally recognized whom he was speaking to. “Aren’t you the Rich B Words guy?”

“Jerd McKinley.” Jerd stuck out his hand for a shake. “Florence invited me. She knows I’m into this kind of thing.”

Charlie obliged, extending his hand. “Thanks for coming.”

And with that, he thought the conversation was probably done—or close to it—so he shifted his weight to go get another one of his mom’s brownies, but Jerd surprised him by saying, “Hey.”

Charlie stopped.

“So, I’d love to develop this script with you.”

“Really?” Charlie scanned Jerd’s face with his built-in BS-o-meter and the reading came back negatory.

Jerd continued, “I’ve made some connects through Rich B Words out in Hollyweird and I bet we could get this thing made.”

“That would be awesome.” Charlie had written the script expressly for the purpose of being discovered, like those Good Will Hunting boys his aunt brought up every Thanksgiving, and whisked away to Hollywood to write movies. But he had never thought that it would happen so soon.

He was already daydreaming about what actors would play which roles and wondering what snacks would be at the craft services table on set when Jerd said, “Yeah, it will. Send me the document and I’ll send you some notes.”

Charlie was still in a far-off, palm tree-lined world. “Wow, okay.”

Jerd and Charlie shook hands again; this time, Charlie was more excited about it. Jerd turned to walk away but stopped one last time.

“Oh yeah,” he said, as casually as a cat in comfy pajamas, “go ahead and send me the Final Draft document.”

Charlie was confused. Final Draft was the screenwriting software he had used to write the script. If Jerd had that version of the document, the original .FDX file, he could make edits to it himself instead of Charlie, cleaning up any commas, or run-on sentences—Lord knows he wrote a run-on sentence or two. But why wouldn’t Jerd be satisfied with a read-only PDF?

“Won’t a PDF be fine?” Charlie asked.

“Nah,” Jerd replied. “I’d prefer the .FDX.”

“It’ll have to be an .FDR,” Charlie said reluctantly. “I have an older version of the program.”

Jerd smiled. “That’s fine. I can upconvert.”

Charlie was optimistic despite the minutiae of what kind of file he would be sending. Jerd walked away confidently while Charlie watched with a look on his mug like he had just won the life lottery.

Charlie did, indeed, send Jerd the .FDR file of his In Sheep’s Clothing script. He sent a PDF as well, as a subtle reminder to Jerd that he should look but not touch.

The very evening Jerd received the email with the aforementioned attachments, he went to work. He sat in his dark bedroom clacking on his keyboard and cackling like a kooky caveman. He erased Charlie’s name entirely off the title page of the script. The cursor blinked for a moment. Then his fingers did some walking and his name, Jerd McKinley, popped onto the page. He sipped from a Mountain Dew as he made the monumental Mountain Don’t.