You Look Different in Real Life

from the other boys. He’s apparently heard the commotion and come out the back door.
    “Go away!” Felix yells at them, but only after some hesitation.
    One boy turns to him and makes a dismissive gesture with his hand. “Felix, YOU go away,” he says. “Go back to picking fruit or whatever it is you people are good at.”
    “He has to protect his boyfriend!” says the other. “That’s so sweet!”
    We can see Felix take that double hit, absorbing it, letting it explode inside him but trying not to let the aftershock show.
    “Yeah,” he finally says. “We’re boyfriends because we hang out together. I guess that makes you guys boyfriends too. Should we all have a gay party?”
    One boy lunges at Felix but the other catches him, his eyes on something else: a mom, who comes out of the store now and ushers them away. Felix watches them disappear, then turns to look at Nate.
    We don’t see Nate’s immediate expression because when the scene cuts back to him, a few minutes have passed. He’s standing up straight again and Nimbus is moving on the table, and Nate’s been asked a question.
    “No, the names don’t bother me,” he says flatly, like one of those computerized voices. “Those guys are jerks. Felix didn’t need to stick up for me.”
    He looks at the comb in his hand.
    “They can call me Bunny Boy all they want. They don’t understand the rabbit thing. My grandmother says it’s just ignorance.”
    The camera zooms in on the comb, the way Nate is fidgeting with it, his fingers running over the teeth in search of some kind of reassurance tucked between them, where it’s hardest to get.
    It’s a shot that will get repeated later in the film. The nervous, searching fingers plucking at the metal of the comb. It’s the day Nate comes home late from school to find the hutch empty, Nimbus nowhere to be seen.
    They found Nimbus in the orchard the next morning, alive and well and just as fluffy as ever. She’d been rabbit-napped but otherwise unharmed, unless you count the licorice someone had fed her, which resulted in a memorable scene involving red-streaked rabbit poop and Nate yelling, “She’s bleeding internally! Call the vet!”
    Everyone assumed it was Aidan and Tony, the two boys who taunted Nate on camera. What you saw on film was only a tiny bit of what we saw in school. They persecuted Nate relentlessly, and everyone but them got bored and annoyed by it. Even the teachers stopped paying attention, until the thing with Nimbus. Nate’s grandfather visited Aidan’s parents in person. That’s another great scene. So great—an old weathered farmer, a pillar of our community, ripping those people a new one—that sometimes Iwonder if Lance and Leslie put him up to it.
    But Aidan and Tony denied the bullying, and nobody could prove otherwise. Mr. Hunter asked Lance and Leslie if they’d shot anything that would prove how badly Nate was being persecuted, but they claimed they had nothing. It was the people who didn’t believe that who helped make Lance and Leslie’s life hell when the film came out. The thing with Keira was bad enough, but if they had footage that could make sure these kids got disciplined, why wouldn’t they share it?
    It’s always been easiest for me to believe they were telling the truth.

SEVEN
    I f I could edit together a montage of Follow Day at school, from my point of view and not the camera’s, it would look like this:
    The faces of people who don’t normally sit with me at lunch, sitting with me at lunch.
    The thin blue lines of my class notebooks, filling up with much more writing than usual.
    The lacrosse goal in gym class as I smack a ball into it, because I’m secretly terrific at lacrosse.
    The reactions of other students as they notice the crew, then pretend they don’t notice, but act differently anyway.It’s fascinating to watch how some don’t seem to care and some care way too much.
    Oh, and the whole sequence would be set to electronic music that’s pretentiously dramatic and slow, because that’s how it all feels.
    I can’t stop thinking about what the lens is seeing as I move through my routine. I open up a little screen in my mind where I can imagine how the shot is framed as I sit uncharacteristically quiet in class or eat tomato soup in the cafeteria. (And why did I get soup anyway? Nobody looks good eating soup.)
    So it’s not only the camera watching me, but me watching me, and by last period Spanish, I am damn seriously