You Look Different in Real Life

love to see it.”
    “Okay,” I say, and leave it at that. I have more than “anything.” I have quite a bit. But I haven’t yet decided to share.
    We’re all quiet for a few seconds and then Lance says, “Well, then. I think we’re ready to get this girl on camera.”
    “I love it,” says Leslie, looking around, even though there’s really nothing special about my room. The walls are teal green, because I liked that color for six minutes three years ago, and the only thing breaking up the obnoxiousness of it is my bookcase full of DVD’s, my bulletin board, and a big denim chair.
    I don’t respond to Leslie because I’m too busy sizing up the unnervingly tall person in the corner. His name is Kenny, and he’s the sound guy. Lance and Leslie called him in from the car after we were finished with our getting-reacquainted session. Now he adjusts the boom microphone on a stand and I’m reminded of how muchthe mic looks like something you’d use to dust window blinds: a furry gray thing attached to a long metal pole. When we were six, we’d take turns petting it and giving it names.
    Lance walks over to the chair and asks me, “Is this where you want to sit?” I nod. “Can we move it away from the window? There’s some glare.” Then he does it before I answer, to a spot underneath my bulletin board.
    Fortunately, I’ve already prepped that, knowing it would be in a shot. I removed some of the weirder stuff, the celebrity tabloid headlines I like to cut out and post out of context, the collages where I take two magazine ads and blend them together into one extremely screwed-up one. Front and center are a few pictures of Felix and me, and one of my cat, Blue. Then I’ve carefully posted a few of the photos I’ve taken with my cell phone and printed out. A shot of a trail leading off into woods. One of Olivia in a yoga pose, talking on the phone to a boyfriend. They are fuzzy and low-res, and the colors are off, and I think that’s what makes you look twice.
    “You should learn how to do photo editing,” my mom said one day, peering at them. But I liked when they came out this way, random yet perfect.
    “Are you all right?” asks Leslie now, and I snap out of it.
    “Yeah. Well, you know. Jitters.”
    “You? Of all people?” She smiles warmly, but her comment has just made things worse. It has just made theceiling lower, the floor higher, the walls closer.
    “Can we get started? I’ll be fine once we start.”
    “Is it cool if I put a mic on you?” asks Kenny, stepping close. I nod. We’re all quiet, serious, as he attaches the tiny microphone to the collar of my sweater—a lavalier microphone, I know they call it—and it’s a strangely intimate gesture, as if he’s pinning me with newly gifted jewelry. Kenny then hands me the wireless transmitter, so I can clip it on the waistband of my jeans. I run the cord under my sweater and plug it in. Amazing how quickly this stuff comes back to me.
    The transmitter will send my voice into Kenny’s mixer, a big electronic box with enough knobs, jacks, and cables to stump a bomb squad. He wears it in a case slung across his chest and it looks heavy, unwieldy, but he’ll never complain. He’ll just listen with his headphones and make sure every sound that goes through the mixer on its way to Lance’s camera is sound they’d want in the film.
    “Can you sit down and then talk for me?” Kenny asks.
    What? Oh. He wants to test the mic. I sink into the chair. “My name is Justine Connolly. Are you ready to rock?”
    Lance and Leslie laugh, and Kenny grins while he fiddles with the mixer, but the tension-break is over in a nanosecond and now, if anything, the Dread is worse.
    Blue, who’s been curled on the floor by the heating vent, jumps into my lap. He is black and because I’mwearing black, I actually wonder if the cat will make me look fatter.
    “Is it okay if Lance and I sit on the bed?” asks Leslie. “It’s a good angle.”
    “Sure,” I say, swallowing what feels like ash in my throat, it’s so dry. I don’t remember being like this before.
    “Try to forget that we’re filming and that this is a documentary,” says Leslie, picking up on how nervous I am. “We’ve known you since you were six years old, Justine, and we really want to know how you’re doing.”
    In one of my interviews for Five at Six , I’m lying on the grass with my head resting on my hands. They shot it while standing on a ladder above me. I wiggle