Project 17 (3 page)

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MIMI

I HATE ART CLASS.
But when I got shut out of music this term--because all of those classes are reserved for people who actually
have
musical talent--my adviser insisted that art is the elective someone like me should take.

Someone like me who likes to wear black clothes. And black boots. And dye my hair to match. Because I wear dark makeup. And carry around a camo duffel bag for my books. And have a faux diamond stud pierced through my lower lip.

It obviously must mean that I enjoy stuff like art. Yeah.

So while Ms. Pimbull, my art teacher--more commonly known as "the pit bull"--sits at the back of the room working on her grad-school stuff (an installation of watercolor hell: eleven paintings filled with nothing more than pastel dots and lines), we're all free to draw whatever we want.

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I'm sketching a chicken head. It's got a hand gripped around its throat in a choke hold. It's not that I love or hate chickens. It's not that I'm some fanatical vegan trying to make a statement for PETA. And no, I'm not sketching out what happened during one of my moonlit rituals--as some of the administration imagine about me. (No joke. I once got called down to the principal's office, accused of vandalizing Winter Island beach with stuff like sacrificial dead fish and a giant pentagram made out of driftwood.) I'm just trying to piss people off--to feed what they already think they know about me.

When none of them have even stopped to really find

out.

Derik
LaPlaya
LaPointe moves from his table across the room and plops down on the stool beside mine. "Hey there, Miss Sweet," he says. But he isn't talking to me. He's talking to the girl sitting across from me at my table. Nicole glances up at him but then resumes sketching a portrait of her boyfriend. She's got his junior year picture propped up in front of her for inspiration.

"Hey," she mutters, less than enthusiastic to talk to his sad self. She resumes her sketch.

"Is that Sean you're drawing?" he asks.

Nicole nods, all but ignoring him.

"How are you guys doing?"

"Great," she says, perking up slightly. She actually looks at him for two full seconds.

"I missed you at Maria's party last Thursday night," he

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says. "It was awesome. I guess her mom kicked out that boozer-ass of a boyfriend she had and then took off for some weeklong retreat thing. The place was packed. How come you didn't go?"

"I had to study."

"Come on, a brainiac like you? Haven't you heard, the weekend starts at three on Thursdays?"

"Which is why you're flunking out of school," I say, cutting in.

"Are you talking to
me,
Halloween?" Derik asks. "If the point-zero-seven GPA fits."

"For your information, I have a better plan than school."

"Male prostitution?"

Derik turns his back to me and continues to badger Nicole. "I'm doing this film project," he explains. "I thought that maybe you and Sean might like to give me a hand."

"Why?" she asks.

"Why am I making a movie?"

"No, why would we want to help you?"

Derik's mouth falls open but nothing comes out. "What's with you?" he says after a few moments.

Nicole shrugs, but she doesn't answer.

"It's for this reality TV contest," he continues, not giving up.

The idea of it--of Derik LaPointe making anything other than a play for some girl surprises me. I take a

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second glance at him, noticing how jacked the boy is these days. He's got on this incredibly tight long-sleeved T-shirt that shows off the bulges in his chest and arms.

"I don't think so," Nicole says, grabbing a strand of her frizzy hair. She brings it up to cover her mouth.

"I haven't even told you all the details yet," Derik continues. "I'm filming it at the Danvers crazy hospital."

"On the hill?"

He nods.

"Then
definitely
count me out." She adds a twinkle to Sean's eye with a yellow pastel, only it makes him look jaundiced.

"Come on, it'll be fun. Maybe you can get Kelly to come."

"Kelly's not even talking to you. And she's barely talking to me."

"They won't let you up there to make a film," I say, butting in again. I grab a red pencil from the center of the table and use it to draw droplets of blood spurting out from the chicken's neck. "They don't even let people tour the place anymore."

"Are you still talking, Halloween?"

"You're such a jerk," Nicole says to him. She gets up and moves to another table.

Meanwhile, I turn completely toward Derik, watching as he lets out a sigh and runs his hand through his gelled-up brown hair. "She's right, you know," I say, before he can get up. "You
are
a jerk ... and an idiot, too. Because

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everybody knows it's impossible to break into that place at night."

"I have my ways."

"Oh, yeah? So you know about all the added security at night? That after five they shut the grounds down completely? No last-minute peeks. No final good-byes. They even lock all the gates."

Detach readjusts himself on the stool, as though finally ready to listen.

"I hear there's been something like thirty arrests there in the last month alone," I say, resuming my drawing, shading in the black fingernails of the hand throttled around my chicken's neck. "Everybody wants one last look before the place gets torn down."

"How do you know all this?"

"Let's just say I have
my
ways, too. I also know how to get past all those security guards."

"Yeah," he says, looking me over. "I guess that kind of thing is right up your twisted alley."

"Fine, forget it," I say, pretending his lameness bothers me. "If you're going to be an ass, I won't help you."

Sheer cave-age. The guy is absolute putty in my palm. "Okay, sorry," he says, utterly predictable. "Forget I said that."

I shrug and turn toward him again. "I could tell you, too, you know ... how to get in, I mean. But first you have to tell me about your film."

"Why?"

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"Because you won't get into the place unless you do. You know my father is on the zoning board, don't you?"

Derik crinkles his brow, not grasping that last part about my dad. And why should he? It's not like the zoning board committee has anything to do with the security business at the asylum. Still, Derik doesn't argue, instead climbs farther into the web I've spun.

But it's not like everything I'm saying is a lie. It's true about the arrests for break-ins--but the number is more like ten or twelve for the month, rather than thirty. My father, who
is
on the zoning board, told me he heard they've been beefing up security at the place--but I have no idea if that means they shut it down at five on the money.

Regardless, Derik fills me in--tells me all about his idea for a film and how he wants to enter it into some contest.

"I still need to get a cast together," he continues. "I want to use people who are different--people who'll spark lots of drama."

"Look no further," I say, completely piqued by the idea.

"Seriously?"

"Why not?"

Derik's pale blue eyes grow wide. He looks around the room to see if anyone's listening, and then lowers his voice. "Are you free Friday night?"

"Sure," I say, matching his tone. I add a little shadow under the bulging eye of my chicken head. "Is that when you plan to film it?"

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He nods. "So what's your real name, Halloween?"

"Mimi." I sigh, annoyed that he doesn't know it-- since we've gone to school together for four years now-- but unsurprised nonetheless.

"What kind of name is that?"

"It's short for Miriam."

He nods as if it finally clicks. "So you can seriously get us in?"

"Sure thing," I say, since I
do
know how to get in. Thanks to online maps and chat sites devoted to asylum spelunking and urban exploration, I know exactly where to park, what time to go, how to dress, and what to bring. I must have planned out the trip at least a hundred times inside my head. I've just never had the nerve to go through with it.

That haunted asylum is the one place I've purposely avoided--the same one I need to see once and for all.

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DERIK

AFTER GETTING THAT
first bite, all I can think about for the rest of the school day is who else I can get to be in my film. During math, I come up with a list of potential candidates, trying to pick people from different cliques, imagining a
Real World
kind of thing--the pretty girl, the angry-on-'roids guy, the religious freak, the tree-hugging naturalist chick.... But nobody else is biting--seriously, I think I've been rejected by at least two-thirds of the senior class.

I know I could make this a whole lot easier. I could totally ask my buddies to come along with me--any one of them would join me in a heartbeat. But I also know that none of them would take my project--or me--seriously. They wouldn't follow my direction. And they'd sure as hell be shit-faced before we even got inside.

I need people who are gonna help me win.

So, after an entire afternoon and evening spent trying

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to master my dad's mystery meat loaf recipe without any luck--the guy actually uses pickles, eggs, and ketchup-- I head over to my uncle's place. Because I'm not giving up.

My Uncle Peter's a rebel, so I kind of look up to him. He's my father's brother, and he basically said "screw you" to working in the greasy-fry business, and now he teaches video production at Lynn Tech and works as a wedding videographer on the side. Once when I was in middle school, he complimented me on my cinematic eye, said I did a good job taping my cousin's Communion.

"Come on in," he says, opening the door wide. "You smell like your dad's meat loaf."

"Thanks, scumbag."

"Don't mention it, buttwad."

Me and my uncle have a pretty cool relationship.

He plops down on the sofa and cracks open a beer, clicking the mute button on the ten o'clock news, wanting instead to hear all about the details of my film. And so I tell him--about the contest, about how the thought of working at the restaurant until I retire or win the lottery feels more like a prison sentence than a way of life, and how I have less than two weeks to pull this thing together.

Uncle Peter doesn't say much, just nods his head, taking it all in. He's wearing the Celtics T-shirt I bought him last season--that and a pair of torn-up jeans and a Red Sox cap, like any one of my buddies. He's only a couple years younger than my dad, and looks so much like him in some ways--same wavy dark hair, same light blue eyes, same

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squarish jaw--but he also couldn't look more different. My dad looks harder, duller, a lot more tired. I wonder if that's what working in the restaurant does to you.

"Well then, that settles it," Uncle Peter says finally. "You've gotta win this thing. No other way about it."

I nod, thinking about my basically nonexistent cast. "Can you help me?"

"You came to the right place." He gets up and leads me into his studio, where he's got all his equipment set up. We spend the next couple hours talking about digital video machines versus Hi8's. He shows me features I'll need to shoot my movie--stuff like image stabilization and a 12:1 optical zoom. Then he has me adjust the lighting for the studio as a test, and makes me explain the benefits of close-ups, point-of-view angles, and extreme long shots.

"When you first get there," he says, "you'll wanna get an extreme long shot of the place--so we can see how massive the bitch is."

"Right," I say, "and I'll want to save extreme close-ups for when people get totally freaked out."

"You're really good at this stuff, you know that?" he says, nodding at my lighting setup.

"Thanks."

"Don't thank me. Thank that eye of yours. You can teach technique, but you can't teach vision." I smile, pumped that I got it right. "Come back tomorrow," my uncle says. "It's getting

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late. I don't want your dad to think you were kidnapped by a pack of beer-guzzling aliens." He cracks open another cold one. "This stuff is shit for you, you know."

I nod, smiling wider. It's just so weird--so weird because for once I got something right.

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DERIK