AllFreeNovel
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“For some of us, these A grades are novel,” I say.
“Oh, cry me a river. See you at four?”
“I’ll be counting the moments.”
When Dee comes in at four, he’s bouncing off the walls. “Never mind thinking outside the box—we got to look inside the box.” He holds up two DVDs from the media center. The title on one reads Pandora’s Box, and there’s a picture of a beautiful woman with sad, dark eyes and a sleek helmet of black hair. I immediately know who she is.
“How are these going to help us?”
“I don’t know. But when you open up Pandora’s Box, you never know what’s gonna fly out. We can watch them tonight. After I get off work.”
I nod. “I’ll make popcorn.”
“I’ll take some leftover cakes from the dining hall.”
“We know how to party on a Friday night.”
Later, as I’m getting ready for Dee, I see Kali in the lounge. She looks at the popcorn. “Having a snack attack?”
“Dee and I are watching some movies.” I’ve never invited Kali anywhere. And she almost always goes out on weekend nights. But I think of the help she’s offered, and what she said about being a friend, and so I invite her to join us. “It’s sort of a movie/fact-finding mission. We could use your help. You were so smart with your idea of trying to find the brother in Rochester.”
Her eyes widen. “I’d love to help. I’m so over keg parties. Jenn, wanna watch a movie with Allyson and Dee?”
“Before you say yes, be warned, they’re silent movies.”
“Cool,” Jenn says. “I’ve never seen one before.”
Neither have I, and turns out to be a little like watching Shakespeare. You have to adjust to it, to get into a rhythm. There are no words, but it’s not like a foreign film, either, where all the dialogue is subtitled. Only major pieces of dialogue are shown with words. The rest you sort of have to figure out from the actors’ expressions, from the context, from the swell of the orchestral music. You have to work a little bit.
We watch all of Pandora’s Box, which is about a beautiful party girl named Lulu, who goes from man to man. First she marries her lover, then shoots him on the eve of her wedding. She’s tried for murder but escapes jail, going into exile with her murdered husband’s son. She winds up sold into prostitution. It ends with her getting killed on Christmas Eve, by Jack the Ripper, no less. We all watch it like you’d watch a slow-motion train wreck.
After we finish, Dee pulls out the next one, Diary of a Lost Girl. “This one’s a comedy,” he jokes.
It’s not quite as bad. Lulu, though she’s not called that in this one, doesn’t die in the end. But she does get seduced, have a baby out of wedlock, get the baby taken away from her, wind up cast out and dumped in a horrible reform school. She too dabbles in prostitution.
It’s almost two in the morning when we flick on the lights. We all look at each other, bleary-eyed.
“So?” Jenn asks.
“I like her outfits,” Kali says.
“The outfits were indeed extraordinary, but not exactly enlightening.” Dee turns to me. “Any clues?”
I look around. “I got nothin’.” And really, I don’t. All this time, I’ve been thinking I was like Lulu. But I’m nothing like the girl in those movies. I wouldn’t want to be.
Jenn yawns and opens a laptop and pulls up a page on Louise Brooks, who apparently had a life as tumultuous as Lulu’s, going from A-list movie star to a shopgirl at Saks, winding up a kept woman, and finally a recluse. “But it says here she was always a rebel. She always did things her own way. And she had a lesbian affair with Greta Garbo!” Jenn smiles at that.
Kali grabs the computer and reads. “Also, she pioneered the short bobbed haircut.”
“My hair was cut into a bob when we met. I probably should’ve mentioned that.”
Kali puts the computer down and takes my hair out of its ponytail and folds it up to my chin. “Hmm. With your hair bobbed, you do sort of look like her.”
“Yeah, that’s what he said. That I looked like her.”
“If he saw you that way,” Jenn says, “it means he thought you were very beautiful.”
“Yeah. Maybe. Or maybe this is all some game to him. Or calling me Lulu was a way to distance me, so he never had to learn anything about me.” But as I throw out the less romantic scenarios—and let’s be honest, the more likely ones—I don’t feel that usual clutch of shame and humiliation. With these guys at my back, nothing feels quite so fraught.
