Film of Blame

A companion story to ‘Rebirth’ and to ‘Monster 43’

Author’s Note: the events of ‘Rebirth’ occurred on January 20th, 2006. It’s an important part of this, and it’s told in detail in that story.

I only wish this story could have ended in real life the way it did in here, even as open-ended as I finished it. Instead, I remember April 28th as the day of no fruition. But that shouldn’t stop the enjoyment of the story.

Play.

April twenty-eighth, 2006. East centre.

Sneaking through East centre is no longer a new feeling for me. Sneaking through East centre knowing that we won’t actually get caught is a different thing. “Why are you shaking?” Devin asked me.

“I want to know if it’s true,” I said. “And I want to know what he’ll do.”

“Kill you with his bare hands,” he suggested.

“Devin!” I exclaimed. He leaned down and kissed me on the head. “Don’t worry babe,” he said. “He can’t do nothin’.”

“Hey!” a voice whispered from around the corner. “They’re inside!”

“That’d be Steve,” Devin said.

I nodded and we began our walk upstairs.

February tenth, 2006. The student centre.

Bart, Tali, and Louis are late, as always. I’m sitting on a couch with Steve while in a fit of ‘anger’ and ‘hurt’, Devin has decided to sit between Georgia and Allison instead. The boys are complaining about their lateness, and Steve says something out of the ordinary:

“You know what they do over there, right?” he asks.

I shake my head. He makes a motion that at first glance looks like a cigarette being smoked, which isn’t anything out of the ordinary since both Steve and Georgia are smokers. Then I assume he means they smoke pot, which Allison does sometimes but that Bart said he would never do again.

“Tali and Louis smoke pot?” I ask.

“No,” he says, in a low voice, and then he begins bouncing on the couch.

Sex. He thinks they’re involved in some sort of ménage a trois or something. And suddenly it all makes sense. Why he would hate Steve, the most perceptive guy I know. A bisexual who had once had a one-night stand with Tali and Louis. Nevermind that he was trying to hook me up with Devin instead of him… he didn’t like Steve because there was a good chance Steve already knew his secret.

January twenty-sixth, 2006. My living room.

I’m online and my friend Edward just happens to IM me. And for some reason I can’t hold back what’s going on anymore. I have to tell him about everything that’s been going on for the past couple of weeks. I have to tell him about Bart lying to me about college and our future. I have to tell him about how Steve finally convinced me to go out with Devin and about how we’ve been making plans for it all week

The only two I’ve told so far about Bart’s lies are Megan-- my best friend-- and Devin himself. Megan’s response was the typical “All men suck” and then an entire afternoon of listening to me and trying to help me sort out what to do.

Devin promised me he’d keep my secret and then suggested some things to do on our date.

Edward, though…

Please don’t be mad at me, he writes. There’s something I haven’t told you. In Chicago, Barthookedup with Monicaand told her “What happens in Chicago stays in Chicago.”

I don’t believe you, I write.

Well, it’s true… you should break up with him.

April eighth, 2005. The Fieldhouse balcony, my high school.

“Why can’t you keep your promises?” I scream. “You say the situation’s changed like that makes it all better, that just because someone’s paying for you to go means you can mess up one of the last weekends we’re going to have together when you told me you wouldn’t back in January!”

“We have all the time in the world,” he pleaded. “I’m only going to be in Kent, you can see me anytime you want this summer. We’ll still have the weekends.”

But there was more than just that. All those girls… Monica and Caley, mostly. Little sophomores always hugging him and hanging off of him. And so while I agreed, there was something there that I still needed to prevent.

April fifteenth, 2005. Bart’s bedroom.

I am no longer a girl.

I start laughing, remembering one of the items I had scrawled into my list of ‘pros’ kept in my palm pilot: If I have sex with him, he won’t cheat on me while he’s in Chicago. I tell him about this.

“Why would I cheat on the perfect girl?” he asks, snuggling with me.

“I don’t know.”

But I am not reassured, even as I snuggle with him.

June twenty-seventh, 2005. My bedroom.

He finally is picking up his phone, but I know he’s still at Austin’s house, because his mom picked up at home and told me that. Still, I figure we might be able to get together to do something like he said yesterday.

“So, what’re we doing?” I ask.

“Hey, sorry baby, I’m still at Austin’s, tomorrow maybe?”

“WHAT?” I demand. I have been listening to the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack for the last half hour and am in no mood to be disappointed with broken promises.

“Sorry, plans change,” he says.

I begin screaming at him about how I must mean nothing to him anymore and how he’s been at Austin’s practically every day for the past week and how he promised me that I could see him today and if this was how things were going to be he had better re-think this relationship.

He calls me twenty minutes later telling me he’s driving home because he wants to see me and be with me. I cry some more.

January thirteenth, 2006. My bedroom in our ski condo in Utah.

“I had a dream last night where I was in the air force,” he tells me. “I was fixing planes. It was cool.”

Even from a comment as innocuous as that I am repelled. “Um, okay,” I say. “That’ll never happen.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about it.”

“You’ve got to be kidding, “ I say.

“Nope. I actually think it would be kind of cool.”

Images flood my head. Him in boot camp, flying-- wait, he’s legally blind, he can’t fly-- doing WHATEVER-- living at air force bases…. him dead somewhere in Iraq.

“No, no, no,” I whimper.

October ninth, 2004. Lentine’s music shop.

I am here to rent a piccolo and learn how to play it for one reason and one reason only. Vincent Sarico.

Vincent Sarico is my school band’s former piccoloist, but he’s in his second year of college now. I haven’t seen him since June eighth, 2003. (This date will become important again on October twenty-eighth, 2005, by the way). But what he did do was invade one of my dreams and tell me to play the piccolo.

Which I am now practically obsessed with doing.

January fifteenth, 2006. A ski slope.

There’s only so much I can take before I give up. But I never give up completely. Even after three days of sleep-and-food-deprived skiing, I can’t tell him to just go ahead with whatever plan he has cooked up about joining the air force right away.

“Wait a few months to enlist,” I beg. “Until I’m in Seattle. And try to get stationed somewhere around there after basic training.” I hate these words: enlist, stationed, basic training. They are words I never wanted to be part of my life. They are the words associated with college flunk-outs joining the military: someone who I never thought I would be associated with.

But he agrees to wait. And I focus on making new fantasies out of this new life I am having to build. Fantasies that no one can know about.

January ninth, 2006. My bedroom.

He has just told me that he got kicked out of school for flunking every course.

He has just told me that his stepdad may not let him live at home anymore and that he’d have to move in with his dad in a trailer in St. county. An hour away.

“And when will I see you?” I demand.

“I can’t expect you to stay,” he says.

But there’s an appeal, and even as I should be studying for my final exams, I pray to God that it goes through. I pray to God that this will work.

Because somehow, over the last month, I have become even more attached than I was before. Whether it is my separation from Devin or just simple renewed love, I can’t bear to be away from Bart now.

And I can’t tell anyone what is going on for fear that they will hate him.

January nineteenth, 2006. A gas station.

I read the text message from Bart, sent from his physical. He was supposed to call me last night and didn’t. I am on my way over to his house now.

The message reads: Hey, guess what, you get your wish. Apparently my eyes are too bad for me to be eligible for service. Congratu-fuckin-lations. Just what you’ve always wanted.

He explains it all away as having just read some of the notes that I wrote to him while I was in Utah right before taking his eye exam. But I’m not stupid. He seriously must have thought that I caused this. But what am I, psychic?

Maybe. Sometimes. I see connexions between things. Eerie connexions: one man’s height to a day three years ago. 6’8,6/8. How Mill street in Ak. was the site for so many things-- a recurring theme. But I’ve never been able to curse someone’s eyes. And right now I don’t want to. Even if he did break his promise about calling.

He says that the eye exam mess-up was mistake and he’ll re-take it. He says everything will work out.

At his house there’s a white piece of paper on his headboard with his name on it and all the information about his status as far as the air force goes. I lie there for a while while he is downstairs talking to his mother. Then I get bored looking at this hated white flag and I take out the latest issue of Mars to read of the love lives of shy Kira and tall, handsome Rei. I want to have this volume finished at midnight exactly so that it can be good luck for when I see Devin again.

November fourth, 2005. The student centre.

“Come with me,” Steve says. He drags me to the Rat. to talk to me, and I know what about. It’s so obvious.

“You’ve been watching Devin all night,” he tells me. “Which is fine with me, I’m not the one you’ve got to be worryin’ about. Your boyfriend is sittin’ right there.”

I nod, and I have to ask him. “Does Devin notice me, too?”

“Devin notices. When you and Bart were upstairs for a while earlier, me and him and Tali were talking about how hot you look tonight. So he notices, but he’s not gonna say anything.”

I continue to give my attention to Devin that night and all the ones following it.

January twenty-eighth, 2006. My bedroom.

“So are you still going to go to D&D?” Megan asks me.

“Yeah,” I say.

“I don’t think you should. I think it would be like rubbing things in Bart’s face.”

“I have to go,” I say. And I do, to see Devin. I don’t know how often I’ll get to see him otherwise, but my mind is made up.

February seventh, 2006. The downstairs hallway, school.

“I have no control over who I like,” Megan says to me. “I mean, there was William, and now… well, you’ll never guess who I like now.”

The smile on her face gives it away perfectly. “Oh no,” I say. “No, no, God no. Not… oh my God you like Bart.”

“I don’t know how it happened,” she said.

“He is such an asshole!” I exclaim. And all the while I’m thinking: He’s going to turn her against me, I’ll have no one. “What do you see in him?”

“The same things you did, probably.”

But you don’t get it, do you? I think. Those things are gone.

March third, 2006. The school chapel.

“…and we’re going out tonight…”

“Tonight?” I ask. “Tonight’s Friday.”

“Yeah, I know. He’s not going back. He says Steve makes him feel uncomfortable.”

I’ll bet, I think. But she doesn’t know about the secret and I’m not about to tell her.

November eighteenth, 2005. The student centre.

Steve kisses Georgia, me, and then Bart: on both cheeks and then the lips. I start cracking up, then Devin comes back from the bathroom to pick me up as Steve decides this would be a good time to start humping me from behind. But that has no effect on me-- I just like being close to Devin’s cheek, absorbing his smell.

I wish he would kiss me but I know he won’t.

January twenty-seventh, 2006. K. Hall.

I have been practicing what I am going to say for the entirety of the evening. It has to sound nonchalant, though. I should be thanking Ang Lee for this, as it was his movie that gave me some of the necessary inspiration.

And now that we’re lying on his bed in his dorm room, and I can smell him so close to me, I have to ask because I have to know what I truly am in this situation.

“If you weren’t dating Valerie, would you want to date me?” I ask.

“Of course,” he says, and we kiss again as we have been for the past hour or so.

Later on, I look at him and smile. “What?” he asks.

“You’re so different from Bart,” I tell him.

“In a good way?”

“Of course. Am I at all like Valerie?”

“No.”

“Better?”

“Of course. Why else would I want to be with you instead of her?”

And later still, walking to my car, picking me up in his strong arms so that my feet are thirteen inches off the ground and my head eighty. “When can I see you again?” I ask. This can’t be the end.

“Sunday,” he says.

“Wonderful.” Sunday is perfect.

April tenth, 2006. The commons, school.

I can’t take much more of the abuse being laid on me by William and Megan. At least William’s being fair, but Megan seems to think today is Fiona-bashing, Bart-loving day. Because she just can’t see that for every little thing that I did during those months, he was lying to me the entire time.

I didn’t know it, of course. But now that I know it… a little flirting with Devin really isn’t bad in comparison. Especially considering how confused I was during that entire time: the familiar or the unknown? Bart or Devin?

Especially considering that EVERY way became unknown.

And I just don’t think I deserve this sort of abuse from someone like Megan, someone who promised to always be on my side. I think she’s desperate for love.

I think something has to be done.

Play.

April twenty-eighth, 2006. Eastway centre.

The noises coming from inside Tali and Louis’ dorm are louder than the ones from inside Devin’s dorm ever were. Three voices matched with one another in that loud sexual fury. I swallow, now knowing there will be no surprises.

All Steve does is remove one screw and the door swings open.

“Well, hello, oh orgasmic ones!” he greets them as he steps in. I follow, hands clenched, inhaling the stench of days of unwashed sex and wanted to gag. I’ve only been in here once before but I remember how bad it smelled.

Bart, the coward, tries to hide underneath Louis’ blanket. “Oh yeah, that’s perfect, a one hundred and fifty pound lump in the covers,” I crack. “You bastard.”

He finally shows me his face. “So,” I say, looking him straight in the eye. “Does what happens in Kent stay in Kent too?”

He manages to speak, to angrily spit out: “What about what happens in Pen and Mace and then in Kent?”

I calmly reach my hand out and slap him across the cheek. “Don’t even try to pull that one with me now. I told you about that the very next day and I left you. How long has this been going on?”

“October. When I met them. When you were in Seattle.”

I stare him down. “A weekend in Seattle led you to this?” I ask. “And what about when I got back?”

“I--”

I cut him off. “I don’t give a shit about me,” I said. “This isn’t even about me anymore. This is about…” I took my cell phone out. Tzipporah, as I called her. I pressed the 7 button-- for Megan. “Tell her.” I said. “Tell her what you’ve been doing, you horny son-of-a-bitch.”

“Why should I?”

“Because,” I say. “Here’s Tzipporah. Here’s Freya.” And I take out my digital camera. “One of the two of them is going to tell her. You can’t escape this one.”

I am practically crying now, and Bart looks about ready to kill me with his bare hands, but Devin grabs onto me and Steve glares at Bart. Tali and Louis stand wordless in the corner.

I never hate Monica after what Edward told me. But then again, I had always sort of liked her to begin with. “I don’t blame you guys,” I told them. Then I shook my head. “Yes I do. You have each other. Why did you have to pull him in?”

“He came willingly--” Tali says.

I nod. “Then I can’t blame you as much, can I?” I ask. And I wait for Bart to make the call.