You Look Different in Real Life

sob.
    The camera does not move.
    For twenty long seconds, she weeps, and we watch. When the camera does cut away, it’s to a shot of Keira and her mother walking along the old Rail Trail that runs through town. Mrs. Jones—Allison—is a willowy blonde with skin several shades lighter than Keira’s, and she’s always seemed a little in awe of her daughter. In this brief scene, she ambles along behind Keira. Keira realizes she’s gotten ahead of her mom and stops, waits for her to catch up. Reaches out her hand. Mrs. Jones takes it and for a few steps they’re connected like that, until she releases Keira’s grasp and bends down to pick up a rock.
    She tosses the rock into the woods and the camera catches it bouncing once, then twice, then skidding to a stop in the dirt.
    To put a child’s worst moment on film, to turn her unspeakable heartache into entertainment for the masses, is absolute exploitation, said one critic. Don’t believe for a second that it’s anything else.
    Later, in interviews, Lance and Leslie said that Mr. Jones wanted them to film this scene, so somewhere out there, his ex-wife would know what she did. So other parents in similar situations, who had to have equally horrible conversations with their children, would feel less alone.
    But it was the way they did it , argued one writer. That unflinching cut. Most of the audience glances away from this girl’s face. Out of instinct and decency. Why didn’t the filmmakers have the same instinct and decency?
    Lance and Leslie never really answered that question, and that’s probably because there was no good way to do it, and they also knew they were wrong. I could see it inLeslie’s face during one interview that I sometimes watch online.
    Meanwhile, Keira disappeared from school for a while. Mr. Jones took a leave of absence to teach in Paris for two years. When they came back, Keira had changed, and not just because she had clothes everyone swooned over and this way of tying a scarf that defied physics. There was something confident and powerful about her, about the straightness of her neck and the glow of her skin. It seemed organic and not processed, and people flocked to it.
    When it came to Mrs. Jones, the parent grapevine offered up only a few tidbits. She was gone, for sure. Divorced, definitely. There were rumblings about mental health problems for which she refused to get treatment. Where she was, and whether or not Keira ever saw her—that was anyone’s guess. They guessed a lot, and then eventually, as the news got old and something else took its place, they stopped guessing.

SIX
    L eslie once told me that a film isn’t made by shooting stuff but, rather, by editing it. The shooting is the inspiration and the ideas and the paint palette. The editing is the artist actually picking up the brush to accomplish the doing , the making something out of nothing.
    I think about this as the alarm clock snaps on with a radio commercial at 6:30 a.m. This is a big day. My first—and maybe only—Follow Day, where the crew will be tailing me morning to night, hopefully getting a wide and colorful palette full of Justine. Everyone else will get atleast one as well, but for some reason they’ve chosen to start with me.
    The alarm is unnecessary, because I woke up at 3:00 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep, thinking about the Follow Day. Outlining it in my head. Punching it up with jokes here and there. For instance:
    Justine comes down for breakfast and opens the fridge. Upon seeing all the foil-wrapped blobs of ULOs (Unidentified LeftOvers), she says, “This isn’t a refrigerator. It’s a halfway house for good food gone bad!”
    Funny. Like she used to be. Back when she didn’t have to try.
    After I get out of bed and take a shower, I put on my pajamas again, which feels just wrong but this is what’s been asked of me. I open my door to call down to Lance, Leslie, and Kenny, who are waiting in the kitchen with my mom.
    “Fancy meeting you here,” I say as they appear in the upstairs hallway. Yes, that’s a gem I came up with at 4:23 a.m.
    “Another day of cinema vérité,” says Lance, yawning.
    “We’ll make it a good one,” says Leslie, but without any of her usual enthusiasm.
    Kenny just nods at me. He’s a quiet type; maybe, as a sound guy, he’s used to letting other people make all the noise.
    As we prearranged, I let them into my room so theycould get some shots of me picking out clothes. Surely to be intercut