You Look Different in Real Life

because there’s no interaction there,” Keira’s father is saying in his booming English-professor voice. He’s a tall, stunning African-American man. Everything he says sounds automatically correct. “How can we use our imagination or problem-solving skills if we’re just passive consumers of a medium? Instead, my family plays. We play games, we play with toys, weread books to one another, we do activities outside. It’s old-fashioned and we like it.”
    Then we see Nate. He’s sitting in a miniature plastic chair covered with cartoon characters, eating dry cereal out of a bowl, two feet from a giant TV blaring cartoons.
    Everyone in Felix’s basement cracks up, just like they’re supposed to.
    The camera pans over to Nate’s mother, sitting at a nearby table in her dental hygienist’s scrubs, talking on the phone. For a full ten seconds all we hear is her saying, “I know . . . Oh my God . . . yeah, as if . . . ,” to whoever’s on the other end, and Nate crunching his cereal so loud I wonder if that wasn’t juiced up in the editing room.
    I glance over to Felix, but his face is too shadowed for me to read his expression.
    One of the kids on a couch yells, “Go, Nate!” and I know what’s coming next. That will be Rory and me, dressed in princess costumes, dancing around my kitchen while The Nutcracker blasts through the stereo.
    This is an excellent time for me to go to the bathroom.
    For a few minutes, I just listen to the audio I know so well. And then, laughter from Felix’s basement audience. Ian, surely part of that laughter. I cover my ears.
    I’ve been in there a while—too long, apparently—when Felix knocks on the door.
    “Justine? Are you okay?”
    “I’m fine.”
    “Can I come in?”
    “Uh, no? Gross.”
    “I know you’re not doing anything in there.” He’s right, of course. I’m sitting on the toilet, but it’s closed and I’m dressed.
    I sigh and unlock the door. Felix enters, shuts the door behind him, and leans on the sink. It’s a salmon-colored thing, with chipped gold-toned fixtures, lost in the seventies. The rest of the Cortez house has been beautifully remodeled, but Felix refuses to let them alter the retro-cool vibe in the basement.
    “You’re missing the best parts,” he says.
    “Felix, I’ve seen this movie. So have you. I wonder who’s seen it more?”
    He shrugs. “It’s different when it’s not just you in the room.”
    “It’s different when you know it’s all going to happen again.”
    For a second, I forget that I’m not going to be part of it. Then I remember and realize I’m going to have to tell him.
    “It’s nice to talk to someone who gets it,” he says softly. Then he looks me square in the eye. “Let’s go out this week. I’ll buy you dinner.”
    And now we’ve got this again.
    “We’ve been through that stuff before, Felix.”
    “But I like you so much !”
    I can’t even feel flattered.
    “I like you too,” I tell him. “You’re one of my favorite people in history. But, uh, how fake would that look, that you and I start dating right before shooting starts? Lance would probably force us to dump each other just so nobody would accuse him of setting it up.”
    “So if they weren’t coming, you would say yes?”
    Okay, I walked right into that, and now I have to tell him the thing he doesn’t want to hear.
    “No, Felix. I wouldn’t. I don’t think of you that way and I don’t think you think of me that way either.”
    “I’ve always thought of you that way, Justine. Forget that total douche Ian. You and me, we have a connection.”
    “Yeah, courtesy of Lance and Leslie ten years ago.”
    The thing I won’t tell him is that, fabricated or not, I love our connection. Talking to Felix is sometimes like talking to myself.
    In the years after Five at Six , we were always in different classes and when I did see Felix, at school or around town, we were both too shy or weirded out to say anything to each other. Then Five at Eleven was released. There was all the attention and the controversy, and then suddenly there was no more of either, and one day in the cafeteria I found an apple cider donut in my backpack.
    It was tucked into a Ziploc bag with a bow, alongside a sugar-dusted note that said, simply:
    You look sad. Please don’t be.
    I held the donut in my hand and thought about what I did to Rory, and Keira’s face in that scene in the film, and my dad moving out, and then put those thoughts away in a