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“Bring her to me!” a muffled voice called from the rear of the van.
Chris glanced back dubiously at Andy and Debbie,
walking with their arms around each other. Andy merely shrugged. Debbie sighed and looked at him with a wry grimace. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” she said. She like Vera and she regretted allowing Andy to talk her into setting up this blind date.
Andy grinned and kissed Debbie. Behind them, the rear door of the van opened and a chubby figure in faded jeans and a navy windbreaker came out, wearing a white mask and brandishing a huge knife.
Chris glanced at Andy and Debbie and shook her head. “Sex, sex, sex,” she said. “You guys are getting boring, you know that?”
“So what would a weekend in the country be without a little sex?” said Andy, grinning.
“Cool it, Andy,” Debbie said quickly, nudging him in the side and giving Chris and anxious glance.
Andy looked contrite. Debbie had told him what happened to Chris last summer, telling him to be careful of what he said around her, and he had already blown it. “I didn’t mean it that way—” he said, apologetically. Chris interrupted him, not wanting to pursue it.
“I know you didn’t,” she said, reasssuring him. The one thing she didn’t need, especially this weekend, was to have her friends walking on eggshells around her because of what happened to her. “Look, guys,” she said, “I want you to have a good time this weekend. What happened to me at the lake happened a long time ago. I’m fine. Really. Forget about me.”
Debbie looked concerned. She didn’t fail to notice the way Chris had stiffened suddenly or the strained note in her voice as she tried to sound casual, as if it didn’t matter. “I’m supposed to forget that we’ve been friends for—”
Andy yelled with surprise as the masked figure crept up behind him and plunged the knife into his back. The rubber blade bent as it struck his shoulder and Andy spun around angrily, grabbing the toy knife away and giving his “assailant” a hard shove.
“Damn it, Shelly!” he snapped. “Why do you always have to be such an asshole?”
“I beg your pardon,” Shelly said stiffly from behind the mask, his tone arch and stagy, like a second-rate thespian’s. “I’m not as asshole. I’m an actor.” He broke the word up into two distinct syllables, so that it came out “ack-tor.”
“Same thing,” Andy said with disgust, angry with him for acting like a fool. Debbie and Chris walked away, shaking their heads. “Look, Shelly,” Andy said, his tone softening, speaking to Shelly as if he were an awkward little brother, “you’re my roommate and I like you . . . most of the time. But you gotta quit doing these things! Now, I set up this date for you, didn’t I?”
Shelly remained silent, like a sullen child who was being scolded for misbehaving.
“Didn’t I?” Andy persisted, leaning closer to him.
“Yeah . . .” Shelly said, morosely.
“So don’t embarrass me,” said Andy. “Just relax, be yourself!”
Shelly pushed the mask back up on his head. “Would you be yourself if you looked like this?” he said miserably.
There was actually nothing wrong with the way he looked, except that he was very overweight, which gave his body and his features a round and pudgy softness. His light brown hair was very curly, and while he wasn’t ugly, by any means, his poor self-image gave him sort of a hangdog expression that telegraphed his own unhappiness with the way he looked to others. And when Shelly was unhappy, Shelly ate, and the more he ate, the heavier he got, the more his unhappiness increased. It was a vicious cycle. Frustration led him to seek gratification in food, which only made the problem worse and led to more frustration and size double-extra-large.
Disappointed with reality, Shelly found escape in fantasy. Movies were his drug. He saw several each week, often going to two or three in a row on weekends. At first, it had been enough merely to sit inside a darkened theater and watch another reality unfolding on the screen, but as he got older, he became more and more involved with his fantasy world that he preferred so much to his own.
He became a walking encyclopedia of movie trivia. He read up on the art of filmmaking and learned about camera techniques, special effects, and makeup. He became an expert on who was doing what in films, always staying at the end of every movie to see the credits and remember who had done the editing, the special effects, the stunt work, the music, and the costuming. He began to experiment with theatrical makeup and latex molding and soon everyone he knew became exposed to the many faces of Shelly Greenblatt. The drama club at school was not enough to give vent to his creative impulses; the whole world became his stage. The only problem was, he often did not know when to stop.
He and Andy had been roommates since they had started college, and although Andy knew Shelly well enough to understand him and make allowances for his behavior, it was often extremely frustrating trying to make excuses for the way he acted. He often wished Shelly wouldn’t try so hard. He had hoped that taking Shelly with them on this weekend would help him to unwind a bit and drop the goofball act. He had even asked Debbie and Chris to fix Shelly up. Yet now it looked as if the whole thing might have been a bad idea. The pressure was apparently making Shelly very nervous, he acted like a nerd. Andy hoped the weekend wouldn’t turn into a disaster.
They walked up the front steps onto the porch of the white house and Chris rang the bell. Shelly hung back slightly, looking like an inmate about to walk his last mile on death row. The door was opened by a middle-aged Hispanic woman who spoke to them with a slight accent.
“Yes?” she said, eyeing them cooly.
“Hi, Mrs. Sanchez,” Chris said, with a smile. “I’m Chris. We’ve come to pick up Vera.”
“She’s not going,” Mrs. Sanchez snapped, and slammed the door in their faces.
They exchanged startled glances. They had absolutely no idea what had caused such a reaction. From inside the house, they heard Vera and her mother shouting at each other in rapid Spanish.
“What’re they saying?” said Chris, glancing uncertainly at Debbie.
Debbie shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know,” she said. “I flunked Spanish.”
