You Look Different in Real Life

so far away, though, that I can’t hear her conversation.
    “The Walkway is incredible,” says Leslie to Lance. “We’ll come back when you’re feeling better. What’s up?”
    She paces and listens. I pan across the width of the bridge, shooting whatever I see. A family on bikes. Two men running in tiny tight pants. One woman walking a whole mess of mismatched dogs.
    “I don’t understand,” says Leslie. I look away from the camera at her, and at that exact moment she looks back at me, then moves farther away so I can’t hear her anymore.
    But I can see her, and I just keep the camera on her, zooming in on her face as she frowns and shakes her head and sighs. It doesn’t feel intrusive at all. It’s just another story. When she notices me shooting her and turns her back to me, well, that’s when the story starts to get good.
    After a few minutes, she turns and walks back to me, tucking the phone deep into a pocket of her vest. I keep the camera on her, not ready to look at things without it yet. Her face is sagging like it can’t hold the weight of whatever she’s thinking about.
    “We have to go,” she says.
    “Bad news?”
    She smiles, but sadly. “Hopefully not.”
    “Will you tell me?”
    Leslie winces. “Eventually.”
    “Why wait?”
    She stares out at the river, looking more depressed by the second. “No point in putting it off, I suppose. Let’s walk over to the side so we’re out of the way.”
    Yeah, this can’t be good.
    When we get to the railing, Leslie reaches out and takes the camera from my hands. I force myself to uncurl my fingers, let her reclaim it. She clutches the thing to her chest and gazes at the water, sighing deeply in preparation for something.
    “We had a long conference call with our coproducers last night,” she finally says, avoiding my glance. “You know, they’ve seen a lot of the footage so far. We’ve talked about our general vision for this film.”
    “You have to have a vision?” I ask. “I thought your vision was as simple as showing people what the five of us are up to now that we’re sixteen.”
    Now she turns and meets my eyes. “Well, there has to be an arc. You start the film at one point and end at another. There’s a little high point of drama along the way. And we lucked out with the first two films. There were arcs. For better or worse, they happened naturally. But this time . . .”
    “No arc,” I say.
    “Not yet. We’ve had some . . . ripples, shall we say. But they’re not coming out on their own.” Leslie searches the distance again. “I’m sure if we could have extra crews and follow you guys around for months, the stories wouldemerge. But we don’t have those luxuries. And it seems like these ripples only happen when certain people get together. Like that scene with you and Rory, or in the library with Felix and Nate.”
    I’m starting to see where she’s going with this, and it scares me.
    “Last night, one of the Independent Eye people suggested the idea of asking the five of you to participate in a special kind of experience . Together.”
    “That sounds gross and sexual,” I say.
    “Not gross and sexual,” says Leslie calmly, and now she reaches into her backpack and pulls out a folded sheet of paper, opens it. “Team-building,” she reads. “Self-realizing.”
    She shoves the paper toward me and I take it.
    “Lance called just now to tell me that the head of production loves the idea and is insisting we make it happen.”
    I unfold the paper. It’s a printout from a website. “AIKYA LODGE YOUTH RETREATS,” it says, above a photo of a smiling boy and girl holding menacing-looking papier-mâché masks, covered in sticks and feathers. I remember Josh Gordon made one like that in fifth grade art class. They sent a note home to his parents about it.
    “I know what you’re thinking,” says Leslie. “This is not what we’re supposed to be about. This is fabricated and fake and not observational documentary at all.”
    I might have been thinking that.
    This is where Leslie starts to lose it. She takes a deep breath and it comes out in short, shuddering bursts. Her eyes well up. “I cried when we hung up from the conference call,” she says. “It’s that far from what we originally planned. But we’re sort of . . . trapped. We need the Independent Eye backing, and we need the distribution. Lance says he agrees with them. Lance says he’d rather make no film at all than a film that doesn’t add