Only in the Movies (4 page)

“C
ARE TO JOIN US
, Mr. Blanchard? That is, if you’re not too busy.”

I looked up from my screenplay to see the Vulture aiming his beady stare in my direction. “Sorry, sir.”

“The nunnery scene, Jake.
Hamlet
? By William Shakespeare? Ring a bell?”

“I’m there, sir. ‘Get thee to a nunnery.’”

“Indeed,” Locheed replied, refusing to acknowledge the double meaning.

I called Mr. Locheed, my English teacher for the second year in a row, the Vulture not only because of his appearance—the lifeless hooded eyes, the beaklike nose, the wattles of loose skin that hung under a chin so weak as to be a non-chin—but because he seemed to swoop into your personal space and peck away at you until there was nothing left.

Two weeks into the first semester, on a Monday morning, the Vulture was at his customary station, perched behind his lectern at the front of the classroom. He had taken attendance, his fat blue fountain pen uncapped and busy in his clawlike hand. The clock had struck nine, the strains of the national anthem had faded away, the morning announcements had come and gone. I had settled back in my seat, doodling on my
R and J
screenplay, ready for an hour of stupefying tedium as Locheed picked apart
Hamlet
line by line, like a raptor searching through a pile of bones for bits of meat.

The course was called Modern Drama, but Locheed was pushing us through
Hamlet
as an introduction. He had told us that
Hamlet
was, psychologically, “strikingly modern.”

He had begun to drone on about the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia when the classroom door flew open as if someone was trying to tear it off its hinges in one pull. I looked up from my notebook. A stranger took a couple of steps into the room. She was wearing a paisley vest over a long cornflower blue dress that fit loosely on her slender frame—not exactly the height of fashion. She had tucked her right thumb under the strap of the leather tote bag hanging from her shoulder, its weight pulling her slightly off centre. Her skin was light brown.

“Excuse me, sir,” she said.

What would have been a fairly attractive face—large, dark eyes with finely arched brows, full lips, black shoulder-length hair with a tight natural weave barely restrained by a blue plastic barrette over each ear—was dominated by the biggest nose I had ever seen. Long and straight, except for a little bump in the middle, it projected from her face like a
balcony. It was an edifice, a marvel of genetic engineering. It was …
big
.

“Sorry,” the girl said in Locheed’s direction. “I thought the door had one of those plunger things at the top that makes it hard to open, so I … But it doesn’t. Is this English 4A? The office told me—”

“Well,” Locheed interrupted, eyes drooping. “
You
certainly know how to make an entrance.”

A few titters sparkled from the class. I saw something, a shadow, an almost unnoticeable reaction, cross the stranger’s face. Her smile dissolved, and her brow crinkled a little. A hard light came into her eyes.

“Name?” Locheed enquired, uncapping his pen and opening his daybook again, managing to convey the impression that he had been greatly inconvenienced.

“Well, see, that’s the thing,” the girl said earnestly, her voice a little less friendly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Thing,” she replied. “The thing.”

“The thing?” Locheed echoed.

“Yeah, the thing. The situation. The, um, existential state of affairs I find myself in. See, when I woke up this morning I had a headache and, you know, a sort of generalized, all-over listlessness. As though somebody had taken away my bones and put Plasticene there. You know the feeling. I’m not myself today, I thought.”

She paused—to give Locheed a chance to agree, I supposed. But all she got was the carrion-bird stare. She shifted the tote bag to the opposite shoulder.

“And I’m lying there,” she went on in what I recognized as an Irish accent, which sounded odd coming from a
brown-skinned girl, “tangled up in the blankets, the radio alarm buzzing and the news lady droning on about the Middle East, thinking, No, I’m not myself at all. Funny expression, that: ‘I’m not myself.’ Then it hits me. If I’m not myself, I must be someone else. It’s only logical, isn’t it? But then, who could I be? That’s a very disconcerting thought at seven o’clock in the morning. Especially in the fall. In the fall I’m really—”

“I need your name for the attendance book,” Locheed cut in. “The rest can—”

“Ah, but that’s just it, y’see,” the girl said patiently, as if she was talking to a five-year-old.

Beginning under his almost-chin, a pink glow spread into Locheed’s face. Although he did it to us all the time, he hated to be interrupted.

“If I’m not sure who I am, it’s hard to come up with a name. You know, until I solve this thorny if-I’m-not-myself-then-who-am-I thing. I mean, who knows? This could be bigger than I think. Cosmological, even. The Hindus say that the whole world is an illusion and it’s all just Vishnu lying on a lotus leaf, dreaming the universe, or something like that. The entire cosmos is a dream. At least, I think it was Vishnu. I didn’t read the whole book. So it’s more than just a problem of
identity
; it’s a problem of
reality
and—”

“I need a name,” Locheed repeated, his reedy voice a trifle louder and firmer.

“—and what we
think
is real is … All you want is a name?”

Locheed offered a thin smile of mock tolerance—his famous air of superiority. His fountain pen hovered over the daybook.

“But I’m trying to explain—”

“Name!” Not an inquiring voice this time. An order.

“Um, okay.” She consulted the ceiling tiles, then said, “Louise Riel.”

Anyone in the room who hadn’t, so far, been drawn to the conversation now focused on the new girl with the mellow voice and the nose even more startlingly prominent than Locheed’s beak. With a decisive snap, Locheed recapped his pen and pointed it in her direction. “You’re telling me that you are Louise Riel.”

“Well, y’see, that’s what I’ve been trying—”

“Is your name Louise Riel, or is it not?”

“I was leaning toward Glenna Gould, but I don’t play the piano. Well, actually I do, but not as well as—”

“One last chance.”

“Okay,” the girl said. “Louise Gould, musical revolutionary. From Winnipeg, Man—”

“Turn yourself around,” Locheed commanded, each word crusted with frost, “go out the door, turn left, don’t stop until you get to the main office. Maybe they can teach you some manners.”

“Manners, is it?” she replied calmly. “Sure I’m not likely to pick them up here.”

Then she turned on her heel and glided regally from the room, without closing the door. A wave of murmurs, mumbles and giggles swept through the classroom, setting heads bobbing in its wake. Instant Grady threw me a look and a wicked smile that said, I like her, don’t you? I was already thinking of the exchange as the Battle of the Beaks.

“That’s enough!” admonished the Vulture as he opened his well-thumbed copy of the play, his mind
already on higher things. “I believe we had just reached the nunnery scene when class ended yesterday. Now, as you will remember …”

But I tuned Locheed out. Who was the stranger, I wondered, and what on earth had she been talking about?

F
OR THE REST OF THE MORNING
I couldn’t get the girl who had called herself Louise Riel out of my mind, and I was still thinking about her when I slammed my locker door and made my way through halls ringing with lunch-hour mayhem to the dingy cafeteria in the basement of the school. What had she been up to? I wondered. It was easy to see why, after Locheed had treated her in his usual half-contemptuous manner, she wanted to shove a verbal sliver under his fingernail. Not many people stood up to him, and even those who did settled for swearing under their breath or dropping a snarky remark and taking the detention that would follow. But she had done a number on him that would have made Hamlet proud. The Prince of Denmark had pretended to be a little crazy when he wanted to throw King Claudius off his game. Was that her strategy, or was she a little off kilter herself?

And somehow her routine sounded so much more elegant and witty in her melodious voice and her faraway accent—especially because she was so calm. As if she had been playing a part in a drama—or maybe a comedy. Locheed hated to be made to look foolish, and he loathed it when somebody bettered him verbally. He thought he was mankind’s gift to the English language. Who was she, I wondered, and where had she come from?

She was in for a rough ride for a while: it was inevitable that she’d be peppered with snide remarks about her schnozz. Maybe, I thought as I took a seat at an empty table in the rollicking cafeteria, a lifetime of fending off personal insults was what made her so tough. Maybe that was why she could handle intimidating characters like Locheed with such ease.

My lunch was the usual dull, sturdy sandwich (ham and cheese today) and fruit (an apple) and juice box. I watched enviously as kids strolled into the cafeteria, lofted their brown bags in a graceful parabola toward a garbage can and took a spot in the food line for chips and gravy or a wedge of lukewarm pizza. I couldn’t bring myself to do the same. I’d feel guilty tossing away the health-conscious, nourishing, no-additive—and tasteless—lunch Mom had made for me, and I’d hear a Dad sermon in the back of my mind running on about wasting food when half the planet’s poor people … blah, blah. So I bit dutifully into my sandwich, looking around for my friends.

And that’s when I saw her come in, alone, her deep brown eyes darting back and forth. She didn’t look so confident now. To my surprise, she headed toward me and stopped at my table.

“Are these seats taken?” she asked, as if she expected me to say yes.

“Er, yeah, sure,” I said. “I mean, no. No, they’re not.”

A pause.

“So would you mind?”

“No, go ahead,” I replied.

She dropped a brown bag on the table and set her carryall on the floor. “Thanks,” she said, sitting down opposite me. “You were in that English class I visited this morning.”

Close up, her nose seemed even more prominent and impossible to ignore, like a refrigerator in the middle of your living room. You had the sense that maybe you should say something about it and get the awkwardness out of the way. You found yourself wanting to ask questions like, What
is
that, anyway? Or, Is it real? Or, What’s it like when your nose enters the room five seconds before you do? Or, Can I give you the name of a cosmetic surgeon? Or, How did you manage to get to this point in your life carrying
that
around with you and still hang onto your sanity? But at this point I wasn’t convinced that she was entirely normal.

One of the exercises Locheed liked to give us on the few occasions when he pretended he wanted us to be creative was to make up similes describing something “succinctly and poetically.” As I chewed and swallowed, I found myself trying to think up nose similes.

She must have read my thoughts. “If we’re going to be friends,” she said, “you need to get past appearances and think about the essence of things.”

I hadn’t said I wanted to be her friend. “Okay,” I conceded. “I’ll try.”

“Fair enough.” She held out her hand. “I’m Vanni.” Her fingers were long and tapered.

“So you’re not Louise Gould?”

She laughed. “Not today.”

“I’m Jake. Your name doesn’t sound Irish.”

“One of them does.”

“Um, okay.”

“There’s a story there.”

“Well, I’m not doing anything,” I said, taking her up on her unstated invitation.

“Would you prefer the long or the short version?”

“Short.”

“Okay. Surname: O’Riada.” She spelled it out for me and pronounced it
O’Raydee
. “My da wanted to call me Siobhan”—she enunciated
Shiv-awn
—“after my Irish grandma. My ma preferred Bhavani, which was the name of my Indian grandma, Bhavani Gopalan. The Bhavani is a river in southern India. Ma said I couldn’t be Siobhan because my short name would be Shiv, which sounds too close to the god Shiva, who some people think is a negative figure because part of his job description is the destruction of the universe. So they compromised on Vanni, which could be a short form of Siobhan or Bhavani. Spelled with two
n
’s, because with one
n
people would pronounce it
Vay-nee
. Vanni sounds Indian
and
Irish. I was raised in Ireland—all over the island, because of my da’s job. That’s why my accent is sort of a hybrid. I … What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I was just trying to imagine the long version.”

She laughed. “My da’s a musician. He plays the Uilleann pipes in a traditional band.”

“The—”

“It’s like a miniature bagpipe that you hold on your knee,” she explained. “Instead of blowing into it, you pump an air bag under your elbow and make the notes with your fingers. The band’s very well known over the ocean. Da’s the leader. My mom’s a writer of little renown. They decided to give North America a try.”

It’s hard to describe her accent, which wasn’t as strong in normal conversation. The word that comes to mind is “musical.” But there was an undertone of mockery—not as strong as sarcasm, but definitely enough to make you listen carefully for true meaning.

“Is your mom a poet?”

“She writes existential short stories that only she can understand.”

“Sounds like you don’t think too much of them.”

“Oh, I do. They’re grand. But most of them are beyond me.”

“You know, you’ve used that word twice since I met you.”

“Which?”

“Existential.”

“You’re quicker than most.”

“I try. What does it mean?”

Her reply was drowned out by the bell announcing the end of the lunch period. She shrugged her shoulders and said, “What do you have next?”

“Dramatic arts,” I answered.

“I’ve got”—she fished a timetable from her shirt pocket and looked it over—“biology.”