You Look Different in Real Life

place so deep inside me, they could bang and bang and I wouldn’t hear a thing.
    I ate the donut, licked the note clean. After school I asked my mom to drive me to the Hunter Farms store and found Felix in the back room, arranging strawberries in green paper containers.
    “Hi,” I said to him.
    He turned and smiled, and just like that, I wasn’t alone anymore.
    Now, Felix is staring at the wall—also salmon, with iridescent gold flecks in it. “I would feel this way without the films, I swear.”
    So would I , I’m about to tell him. But I stop myself. Felix grows suddenly quiet and I don’t know if it’s because he knows I’m going to say that, or because he’s listening to the movie in the other room. It’s Nate’s voice, answering questions on-screen.
    “Listen, I could use some advice,” Felix says after a few moments, taking a deep breath. “Nate emailed me after our little standoff in the caf.”
    “What? Contact? ” I ask, exaggerated, but Felix remains serious.
    “He wants us to agree not to talk about certain things on camera, when shooting starts. You know Leslie willask why we’re not friends anymore. I mean, in Five at Eleven there’s that whole scene with us down at the pond, catching salamanders, like we’re freaking Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.”
    I try not to think about that scene, because it reminds me of Rory.
    “But we were never real buddies,” he continues. “My parents work for his grandparents, so I’m basically hired help. Sometimes I think when we were little, they all bribed me to spend time with him. His mom was always giving me his old toys.”
    Now, of course, I’m dying to hear more because this is the most Felix has ever talked about Nate, but he’s come to me for help and this feels good and I don’t want to blow it.
    “So what do you want my advice on?”
    “Well, you’re always great at avoiding the question when Leslie asks something you don’t want to answer.”
    “Am I?”
    “You make some funny smart-ass comment and it’s like gold, and then nobody cares that you didn’t answer. They only care that you gave them something good on camera. I need some tips in case I get into a corner. Because I’m not like you. I find myself wanting to please them so bad, I’ll tell them anything.”
    “You make it sound like torture.”
    Then we look at each other and laugh. We both know that it is a little like torture. Or, a lot.
    “I guess that’s the difference between you and me,” I say, and think hard about how to put this into words. “You like to please them. I like to piss them off.”
    Felix snorts, then smiles and takes my hand. “The real difference, Justine, is that pissing them off is your way of trying to please them.”
    This statement rolls over me like something big and fast with a hundred wheels. I can’t recover from it right away, and I can’t deal with what it means, and I don’t want Felix to know either.
    Finally, I compose myself and offer this: “Try to think of every question they ask you as the setup to a joke.”
    “Oh, that’s good,” says Felix, taking his notebook out of his back pocket.
    As he writes, it echoes in my head. Pissing them off is your way of trying to please them. Something rises in me.
    “I have something to tell you,” I say. Felix lifts one eyebrow into his hungry, gossip-munching look. I take a breath deep enough to push all the words out. “I’m not going to do the movie.”
    His face is empty for a few seconds. Then he bursts into laughter. I’d be totally insulted by this reaction if I didn’t expect it.
    “Ha! Good one.”
    “I’m serious, Felix.”
    “Let me see.”
    He leans in to examine my face now. I keep my mouthin a flat line and nod slightly. He leans out.
    “Hmm. Well, maybe you are. For the moment. But there’s no way you’ll stick to that.”
    An F-sound dances on my lips and I know it would feel so good to say the word, to throw it at him. Candy good. But post-Ian, I’ve been fighting my potty mouth tendencies.
    Instead I just say, “I can prove you wrong.”
    He smiles. “Keira said no too.”
    “How do you know?”
    “I have my sources. But I guess Leslie talked her into it.”
    “Of course she did,” I say. Leslie’s left me two messages that I haven’t returned.
    A sudden roar of laughter from the other room draws Felix’s attention from me, and without a word he bursts back through the bathroom door to check it out. I follow him.
    There’s me on the