You Look Different in Real Life

back?” she calls.
    Felix and I look at each other.
    “Give us a minute,” I yell, and grab his hand. I pull him around the corner to a water fountain nook, where Leslie can’t see us.
    “We should go back.”
    “I have a feeling they got what they wanted. They got something exciting.”
    “You don’t understand,” says Felix. “They’re planning to focus on me this time. I don’t want to jeopardize that.”
    “Just tell them what you told me, about Nate. They’ll want more time for you to talk about it all.”
    Felix thinks for a moment, a flash of panic in his eyes.
    “I’m not sure I want to.”
    “Why not?” I ask. It seems obvious to me. Nate looking bad. Nate’s image, smudged. I like that.
    “It’s complicated.” Felix peers back around the corner toward the library. “I can’t go back there. Not today.” He takes a deep breath, then reaches out and grabs my hand. “Will you leave with me? I can call my cousin for a ride. If we take off together, it won’t just be me they’re mad at.”
    “You can say I made you do it. They’re permanently annoyed with me anyway.”
    “Deal,” he says, taking my hand and pulling me toward our lockers. “Let’s get our stuff and then get lost.”
    Merengue music from a stereo system fills the backyard of Felix’s parents’ house, and because of this, nobody can stop moving. Technically, officially, it’s a birthday party for Felix’s younger brother, Gabriel. But there are more adults than kids here because they’ve invited every family member within a sixty-mile radius. So there’s a lot of people and a lot of food and a lot of noise. An elderly aunt and uncle start dancing an elaborate Latin ballroom routine and a circle forms around them to watch.
    Felix doesn’t join the circle. He’s busy carrying his brother’s newly gifted toys, armload by armload, into the house. He dumps some of the toys on the sofa and collapses down next to them.
    There’s a cut to Ana entering from outside through the sliding glass doors in the kitchen. “Felix, you’re not going to stay in here again, are you? The cousins will think you’re rude!”
    “I talked to them. I ate those beans Naomi always makes.” Felix turns to the camera and pretends to put his finger down his throat, just so we know what kind of sacrifice that was.
    “It’s your brother’s party and he’ll be very upset if you’re not celebrating with him!”
    “Mami, he’s like high on sugar and running around with that new squirt gun. He doesn’t give a crap where I am.”
    “Don’t curse at me!”
    Felix looks at the camera again and shakes his head, rolls his eyes.
    “Ten minutes!” snaps Ana as she leaves to go back outside, a bag of ice in her arms. “You come out in ten minutes!”
    Felix waits until she’s gone, then starts shuffling through his brother’s loot. He’s looking for something in particular, and when he finds it, he smiles wide. It’s a kid-size electronic keyboard, packaged so you can play it without removing it from the box. Felix glances over his shoulder to make sure nobody else is around, then starts fiddling with the keys, stringing them together one by one into aimless melodies.
    Another cut. Felix has been asked a question. We can tell because his brow is furrowed in concentration.
    “I’m not embarrassed by my family,” he says. “I wish I could relax and have fun like they do. I just . . . sometimes I don’t know where I want to be. When I’m hanging out with Nate at his house, I never feel like I belong there. Then when I’m here with everyone, I don’t really fit in either. So it’s hard.”
    The camera stays on Felix as he continues to mess around with the toy keyboard.
    The next thing we see is Ana coming back into the room, calling Felix’s name. But he’s gone. One final shot of the scene shows us Felix sitting cross-legged in the bed of his dad’s pickup truck in the driveway. He’s playing something on the toy keyboard, but it’s completely drowned out. His fingers move and his head sways and he seems to be in a good place, but all you hear is his mother shouting and music he didn’t make.
    Lance and Leslie got some heat for how Felix was portrayed in Five at Eleven . Of course, the one kid who’s a full ethnic minority gets reduced to a supporting character , people complained.
    It was much smaller heat, just a puff of warm air really, compared with the criticism over that scene with Keira and questions about