You Look Different in Real Life

Justine?”
    “They’ll be super awesome.” At eleven I’m fast and loose with the double adjectives.
    “Rephrase part of the question in your answer, please.” She still needs to remind me.
    “The next five years will be super awesome.”
    “Why? What’s going to happen?”
    “I’ll be in junior high and then high school and be a teenager and get a boyfriend and wear makeup. And I’ll be a great guitar player by then too.”
    “That does sound awesome,” says Leslie, and you can hear the smile in her voice. Not because she wants that for me too, but because I just gave her a great sound bite.
    “Yeah, I can’t wait to be sixteen,” I say. And of course that’s what they use for the last line of the movie. I would bet the classic anime shelf of my DVD collection that they’ll use that in the trailer for this next one, too.
    I couldn’t wait to be sixteen. Now I am. I don’t have a boyfriend, and actually hate wearing makeup except for ChapStick and a little eyeliner. I stopped playing guitar three years ago. I feel so sorry for eleven-year-old me.
    Don’t rush, Justine! You may have peaked in fifth grade!
    It still blows my mind, sometimes, that so many strangers watched me go through what I did when I was six. Those tests they did in the hospital, the alien probes that snooped around in every possible orifice. My parents let Lance and Leslie film some of it (not the gross parts, but certainly the tense parts), because my father the pediatrician wanted other parents to learn from his process of figuring out what the hell might be wrong with his kid.
    The doctors found nothing. The pain kept coming. Eventually, they suggested it was caused by stress and I should see a therapist. One of them dared to wonder if it was related to the experience of being the subject of a documentary , but of course that didn’t appear in the film.
    The cramps went away for a while, so the therapist idea did too. I don’t tell anyone, but they come back from time to time; we seem to have a drop-in-whenever arrangement. I’ve developed tricks for dealing withthem. The tricks seem to work. I am fine.
    Except right now.
    Get inside the pain . Okay, what does this pain feel like?
    The way it felt to see Lance and Leslie by the library. The way it felt to wonder why Ian came to sit with me at lunch. The way it felt for everyone to look and whisper and question.
    Olivia’s words from this morning are in my head now.
    You can just say no if you want to.
    I know she has an ulterior motive. My sister came off terribly in the second movie: a fourteen-year-old airhead who represented everything I didn’t want to be—obsessed with clothes, boys, and hair, like she ordered her entire personality from the back pages of a teen magazine. Plus, she hated how it all affected our family. When our parents split up, so perfectly timed after the film experience was done, she accused them of keeping things together just long enough for the cameras to go away.
    Olivia was right, of course, but they didn’t have the guts to admit it.
    Could she be right here? Can I just say no? That seems impossible. Or maybe it’s one of those things that only seems impossible because you’ve never questioned it.
    Dad still has a place at our table, even though he hasn’t lived in our house for almost four years. When he sits atit, every Thursday night without fail, he reminds me of a little boy who’s been plopped onto the driver’s seat of a fire truck. He’s not really in control, but he likes to pretend to be, and by the look of pure pleasure on his face this must be the highlight of his week.
    After Five at Eleven came out and the publicity died down, my parents took Olivia and me to our favorite mini-golf place, and in between the pirate ship at hole nine and the giant caterpillar at hole ten, told us they were splitting up. “We decided that we’re better off not married,” said my dad. My mom just nodded, and then later when we were driving home with ice cream cones, decided to add, without looking at us, “You can love someone, but not be in love with them.”
    So now they “love each other” but are not married, which equals the Thursday night dinners. When Mom doesn’t have another Three-Week Boyfriend and Dad isn’t dating one of those moms who think pediatricians are automatically hot, he stays over—and it’s not on the couch—and he makes breakfast the next morning like there’s nothing messed up about it. I chose to