You Look Different in Real Life

utterly natural, even Felix’s hesitant chord changes and reedy vocals sound exquisite.
    I’m sitting with Felix on one of the couches in the great room. Nate, Keira, and Rory have gone upstairs. My skin, clothes, and hair smell like campfire and I can’t stop sniffing them.
    “I’m counting to five hundred,” says Felix. “That should give Nate enough time to get settled into bed.”
    “I may have to go to a thousand,” I say. “You know. Girls.”
    We’re silent for a moment, listening to the shuffling sounds coming through the ceiling. The back door opens, then footsteps through the kitchen and into the great room. Pam.
    “You two okay?” she asks, taking off her jacket.
    “That’s a relative term at the moment,” says Felix.
    Pam laughs. “This will sound cruel, but that’s actually the kind of reaction I like to get.”
    She gets paid to make people uncomfortable, to force them to do and say things they don’t want to do or say. The people are supposed to be glad about this. It seems like a line of work worth pursuing.
    “We do have a strict lights-out policy here,” says Pam, removing a notebook and pen from her jacket before hanging it on a hook in the foyer. “So how about, five minutes and you guys are in your rooms? It’ll be an early start tomorrow.”
    Felix and I just nod, then watch her climb the stairs, her notebook and pen tucked under one arm. We sit in total silence now, Felix running his finger in strange patterns on the couch, making the microsuede change grain back and forth. I pick at a mysterious scab-dot on the back of my left hand. Gradually, the shuffles from upstairs die down, and then we hear Pam call from the top of the stairs, “It’s time,” and we rise.
    Once we’re up in the hallway, I hug Felix goodnight and watch him disappear into his room. When Iopen my own door, the room is only half-dark. Rory is in bed, clutching Misty and reading with a flashlight. Keira’s bed is empty. The bathroom too.
    “Where’s Keira?” I ask Rory.
    “Not sure,” she says, not looking up.
    I grab my sweatshirt and pajama bottoms out of my backpack, along with my toiletry case, and disappear into the bathroom. Once I’m changed and washed up, I return to find Rory’s eyes closed, her mouth open, the flashlight still on but rolled down into the bed so it’s shining on her face and looks very dramatic. I watch her for a moment. I can stare at her right now. I can really stare.
    Her features have changed a bit since our sleepovers, the nose longer and chin pointier. Those nights when we whispered in the dark until one of us passed out first and it was always her. “I’m not asleep,” she says suddenly, not opening her eyes. Scaring the shit out of me.
    “Okay,” I say.
    “Why are you standing there? Are you watching me?” Eyes still closed.
    I don’t know what to say to this, so I just turn around and leave the room, mortified.
    I hear murmurs down the hall and light glows from under the door of Lance and Leslie’s room. Where is Pam and her lights-out policy enforcement? I inch closer, floating heel to toe on the wood floor, mentally chanting no creak no creak no creak .
    The murmurs are a little clearer now. I press my ear to the wall.
    “That’s all we could find so far, and we’re not sure she still lives there,” Lance is saying softly.
    “But you must have a cell phone number or something!” It’s Keira’s voice.
    “It’s not that easy.” Leslie.
    There’s a pause. “But you’ll check out the address?”
    “We told you we would, and we will.” Lance again.
    Suddenly there is movement in the room and I panic, darting back down the hallway and through my door. I hear another door open, then close, then footsteps. Within moments I’m up on a top bunk, burrowing under the covers like something small and hunted.
    Keira enters the room quickly but then freezes, switches gears to close the door slowly and silently. She moves to the bed and climbs in, and it shakes a bit. This is when I realize that in my haste I’ve chosen the bunk above hers, and wonder what she’ll think of that.
    We told you we would, and we will.
    It all makes sense now. Keira agreeing to do this film. Agreeing to do whatever they asked of her, in exchange for something.
    She’s lying underneath me, and I listen to her turn over and sigh. It’s like her pissed-off energy is radiating upward and then there’s the weirdness of her knowing I picked her bunk, and the extra