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Display a printable version My Rough Cut
She was the kind of girl that you saw everywhere, but only from an angle. You've got to learn about angles if you want to be a director, or so they say, and that semester I saw Amy from only the most obscure of them. Dutch, obtuse, even Birdseye, if I looked out the fourth floor screening room window when she was walking to her car. Everything I knew about her I had heard from someone else. She wasn't beautiful, or even pretty, but it didn't stop me from wanting her. Amy was primal, a force of nature. She was so damn alive you couldn't help but get pulled into her sea. The college had arranged a private showing of "Pulp Fiction" for us, because Tarantino likes to tell himself he's giving something back. When I got inside and sat down, the hair on my arms stood up. I looked over to see Amy Elliger in the seat next to me. She was watching me with a deep, unblinking gaze that it seemed like she'd had a lot of practice using. "I don't know you yet," she said, her hands lightly latching on to my arm. She made me feel like one of those guys who get eagles to land on their arm. "I'm Amy." "I'm N-" "Nick Ballantinos, I know. You went to Woodbridge, last year, and Tustin the year before that. You major in film, you're obsessed with black and white", she wrinkled her nose and my heart beat faster, "and, at a guess, you're going to hate Quentin's tacky use of blood and the fact that he thinks daring filmmaking involves using the word 'fuck' a couple of hundred times." "More than Goodfellas?" "Way more." I groaned. Jealousy and amazement at Tarantino's mainstream success aside, the movie sounded like it would be trying really hard to impress me. "I thought you said you didn't know me?" She shrugged. "I know your name, and a few other little things, but I don't know you." "In the biblical sense?" It's an old joke, but she must not have heard it before. She laughed but didn't blush. The screen made her skin redder anyway, every time Travolta pulled the trigger. I'd never been this close to her before. Amy had small hands, and she'd painted all of the nails on her left one black and let the uncolored ones on her right hand grow out. She leaned against my arm, and I waited for her to breathe, to see if I could feel her breasts rise against my skin. She let go of me and faced front, though. The theatre was crowded. Everyone I'd ever seen on campus was there, choosing hack movie directing and dialogue that sounded like it was written by the fortune cookie guys over real homework any day of the week. We watched the movie together, sharing the popcorn that I'd bought and dueling over the armrest with our elbows. By the end we'd compromised. My arm lay on the rest and her arm lay on mine. The movie was amazingly bad, but it still managed to be the greatest movie ever, and when it was over we held hands through the credits. When the lights came up, she gave my hand a squeeze and stood up. "That was a lot of fun, Nick. Thanks for the popcorn." She's been running her black nails over the back of my hand for the last twenty minutes, and I wasn't quite ready to stand up, if you know what I mean. When the lights came up, I realized her left eye was hazel, while her right was so blue I wondered if she could see out of it. It was too beautiful to serve a function. She turned to go. "Amy, wait up, I'll give you a ride home." "I've got my car here." Wow. It had been so long since I'd gone on a date that I'd forgotten how to ask for one. I'll give you a ride? That hadn't worked for a couple of years, at least, when I was a senior in high school and the younger girls equated having a license to being a roadie for Metallica on the coolness scale. "Sorry," I said, "of course you do. Do you have to be somewhere, though? I mean, we could go get something to eat, or have a coffee, or something, if you want." She shook her head. Her hair fell in haphazard curls across her face and over that pale blue eye. "Not hungry." "Okay." My friends, Jimmy and Charlie, were waiting at the exit, hanging around and doing Travolta's dance moves at me, to see what I'd do back. I ignored them. "I liked the movie," I said. "No you didn't." "Well, okay, it sucked, but watching it, with you, I mean, was ..." She'd been giving me the smile and nod routine for the last couple of seconds, but when my voice trailed off she stopped and hooked her curls out of her eye, watching me. This was it. Lame or not, I could tell that what came out of my mouth next was going to make or break my life with Amy Elliger. My voice stuck in my throat. "Go on," she said, sitting back down next to me. My friends threw their hands up and left without me, and she and I had the theatre to ourselves. "Well, what I mean is, watching the movie with you was..." She leaned forward, her blue eye bright now and the hazel one, well, that one just kept on being a color that meant home and warmth and love to me. I did my best Roger Ebert impression. "Well, I'd give it two thumbs up, Amy." Crap. That's why I want to be a director. So I can re-shoot the dumb shit that happens and edit in something better. She smiled anyway and leaned forward. It was a long kiss, the longest I've ever had. Her tongue was soft, and I've been told I kiss okay, so I wasn't too worried. At least, not until she started this weird kind of suction thing. At first it just made the seal tight, but the power of it increased until it felt like she was breathing my air right along with me. I didn't want to be the one to break the kiss, in case she took that the wrong way, but by God, I kissed Amy so long I almost passed out. She let me go, so I guess we broke it at the same time, but her smile told me she could have gone on for much longer. Maybe forever. "Sorry," she said, and winked her hazel eye at me. The blue one glittered and her hand slid under my shirt. She ran her hand across my stomach, then slid it to my side and hugged me, laying her head on my chest, which heaved as I struggled to suck in enough breath to speak. "Amy?" "Yes?" "I'm no good at these things. Please don't do this to me if it isn't going to last." "I wouldn't, Nick." She laid her head on my chest again and listened to my heart. I closed my eyes and put my arm around her. I could feel the ridges of her spine through her shirt, round little bumps like rocks the ocean had set aside to make into marbles. When she said she had to go, I nodded and sat there on my own. The guy who had to clean the theatre kicked me out a half hour later. *** I was cutting class the next day. At IVC they've made it clear that we're adults, and if we choose to squander our parent's money and our futures by sitting in the quad and shooting the shit with our good-for-nothing friends, than so be it. So we did. A lot. Jimmy found me first. He was a homosexual, this week, though he wouldn't let us call him gay because he said he hadn't earned the right. He'd been an architect a couple of months ago, and then a poet. His poetry was terrible, angsty crap about the last drop of the summer wine, or twin suns falling across the curve of the land's womb. He read it out loud to us, putting on a ridiculous French accent he thought made him sound worldly and wearing a beret that made him look about three times gayer than the pink cardigan he had on right now. "Hey, Jimmy. How's it going?" "Nick! Fabulous! How about you?" "Good, actually. That girl at the screening last night? That was Amy Elliger." He nodded. "And?" "And she's amazing." "Fabulous!" he shouted, so loud that a couple of other kids who had also chosen to squander daddy's paycheck turned around to look at him. Apparently, fabulous was Jimmy's word for today. I nodded slowly, the way you do to a guy waving a gun and making demands, and the other kids in the quad went back to doing whatever they'd been doing, which was really just loosely organized nothing. "It is. It certainly is." I heard a scuffle of sneakers and Charlie launched himself over the bench and landed beside me. "Talking about Amy?" I rolled my eyes, but Jimmy sat up a whole lot straighter, and even more camp, if that's possible. "Why yes, Charles, we are. Tell us, what did you think of their kiss?" he asked, patting Charlie's knee. Charlie hit him on the arm. He isn't a homophobe, or anything. Charlie hit him when he was an architect and he hit him when he was a poet too. It was just the best way to make Jimmy get on with it. "Well, the movie ends, and Nick here's plays it cool. They chat, a little. Next thing I know, the lights are coming up and he's trying to crawl down her throat." "It wasn't like that," I said. Jimmy clasped his hands over his heart and said, "What was it like then, loverboy?" I shrugged. "It was like coming in out of the rain, I guess." Charlie cocked an imaginary gun and pretended to blow his own brains out while Jimmy batted his eyes skyward. I thought that would be it, and it probably would have been if Amy hadn't have chosen that moment to cross the quad. Jimmy nudged me, and I whacked his hand aside. Amy had her head down, and the three of us watched her walk across the quad for a second. She looked up and saw us and gave me a little wave. She even did me the courtesy of keeping the smile on her face when Charlie stood up and started yelling. "Hey, Amy," Charlie shouted, hands cupped around his mouth. "Come on over." She veered toward us, and when she started in our direction it was like the whole world came toward us right along with her, as if she rode on the crest of a wave that had swept up the trees and the buildings behind. "Wow," said Charlie. "Yeah." Jimmy had dropped the lisp, the gay thing momentarily forgotten. "She's hot." We all kind of rocked back a little on the wide stone stairs, and then she got closer and everything behind her went back to normal, gray and drab and faded and not at all worthy of serving as the backdrop to Amy Elliger's stage. "Hey guys," she said, when her lithe shadow had crawled its way across our legs. I looked down, just to savor the silhouette of her head in my lap. "Hi Amy," Jimmy and Charlie said together, squinting up at her. She smiled at me and came over to sit on my left, leaving the other two blinking up at the sun. "Heya, Nick." "Amy." Maybe other times it was a name, but that time it was a place, a feeling. An adjective. She got what I meant and slipped her right hand into mine and placed her left one, nails still painted black, over both of ours. "What're you guys up to?" She was the perfect girlfriend so fast that I almost couldn't imagine sitting there without her. She leaned into me just enough for our bodies to touch, and those mismatched eyes took in the three of us. Amy didn't leave Jimmy and Charlie out, but she included me on a level that was starting to make me dizzy. Charlie just looked at us, a little bit stunned, and if Jimmy hadn't stepped up and answered I think the four of us would still be sitting there waiting for Charlie to find his voice. "We were going to go out for pizza." News to me. I still had two classes that day, and one of them was an exam for "The Birth of Film" that I really wanted to nail. "Really?" She wrinkled her nose up again, and knocked her curls out of her face with the back of one hand. I saw a silver line, fine and pale as spider web, only a flash of difference against her tanned skin, but when I looked at her other wrist I saw one there too. Scars. Faded with age, perhaps, but matching scars nonetheless. "Yeah," Jimmy said. "Want to come?" She looked at me. "But what about Nick's exam?" Charlie found his voice. "He can skip it. I'm sure they'll be a make-up one next week, and if there isn't, his mom can just do what mine does; call the school, say we had a family emergency, and raise hell until they let him take the test again. Easy." Her hand trembled in mine. I didn't think she was interested in getting the third degree from these guys over lunch, so I jumped in. "I better not, guys. I studied, for once. I might as well spit out the answers while they're still in my head." Jimmy and Charlie took it better than I thought they would. Seduced by a pepperoni pizza looming large in their future, they shrugged and gave me a few sly winks Amy couldn't have missed, and wandered off together. Jimmy tried to hold Charlie's hand a couple of times, batting for his new team, and Charlie had to finally knock him down to make him stop. "Are you guys close?" she asked, which is about the same as asking someone "Is this your dog?" "Kind of. I went to high school with them." "They're lost, though. They're just kids, pinning a tail on every donkey, trying to work out who they want to be." "Aren't we all?" She shrugged. "I'm not. Maybe you're ready to stop, too. We'll see." It was my turn to shrug, and I did, a big one that ended with my shoulders up around my ears. "I want to be a director, but that's an easy thing to want, I guess. I mean, who wouldn't? It's the grownup equivalent of wishing you could be a pirate, or a ninja, or whatever. But, I'll probably just end up waiting tables or washing cars or mowing celebrity lawns like the rest of the nobodies do, waiting for a big break that'll never come along." "Don't talk like that." I saw another little scar in a thin, exact line that crossed her neck. She caught my gaze and turned away, and when she felt me looking down at her hands she let go of mine and stood up. "Hey," I said, "I'm sorry. Don't go. I won't look, anymore, if it bothers you." Her eyes were tearing up, though, and, desperate to say something that would fix the situation, I tried to bring her back to what we'd been talking about before. "Amy?" "Yes?" She wasn't crying, not in the way most people do when they give themselves over to it. She was fighting it, but a tear slid down her cheek just the same. Her blue eye held storm clouds. "What do you want to be, Amy?" I asked, looking up at her, trying to see her against the backlight of all that sun. "Yours," she said. Another tear fell and landed between us, and she turned and hurried away. *** I didn't see her for a couple of days. I guess I was avoiding her on purpose. I kept thinking about what she said, about people looking for themselves, and how she knew what she was already. But what was she? When I told Jim and Charlie about the scars, they just nodded sagely and drew up a list of the possible causes. I thanked them and took the list home with me. I locked myself in my room and read it, hoping that my hypothesis, the sick little theory that had been growing in my mind would be on their list, too. Then I wouldn't feel so guilty for thinking it. It was. They started with the obvious stuff, botched suicide attempts and genetic skin defects, but, down at the bottom, between "freak guitar tuning accident" and "because God hates her" was the word that had run circles around my head ever since it was the answer to the first question of that "Birth of Film" exam I'd studied for the other day. Frankenstein. I refolded the list. *** That night, everything spooked me. The wind dragged branches against the roof, and my closet door wouldn't stay closed. It was almost a relief when the window squeaked open and Amy climbed into my bedroom. She was naked in the moonlight, pale skin and mismatched limbs; patchworked gossamer and silver scars. I'd made a mental list of things to check next time I was with her, and seeing if she breathed was at the top of it. I stared at her chest, and she smiled, but the sway of her when she came toward me took my own breath away and didn't leave me much room to think about hers. "Amy." "Does this matter?" I didn't know the answer. I sat up in bed and she came over to sit next to me. Did it? Really? She took my hand and held it to her throat. Here the scar was thicker, crisscrossed with a fine spider web of old stitches. It was soft beneath my palm, and she went still. The only pulse I felt was in my own thumb, just like they teach you in Health. She dragged my hand down to her sternum, between the cold orbs of her breasts. I felt my own heart thud in my chest, but hers was as tranquil as the grave. "Does this matter?' she asked again, here blue eye huge and all but lost in her curls. "Should it?" "It would, to a lot of people. It means there are a lot of things I can't give you. Children. Space. I'll need you like you need the air, Nick, like the push of blood. I'll need you so bad." I knew she meant it. Outside, headlights tracked through my window and slid across our skin. She stood out stark and white in the glare, and kept pressing my hand between her breasts. I felt the roughness of a "Y" incision, the kind they give you at the morgue when they want to open you up and weigh the stuff inside. Amy looked down and saw my hand against that long, rough scar, and dropped it. I wasn't expecting her to let go, and when my hand fell high on the coldness of her thigh, I left it where it landed. We sat like that for a while, her lap getting warmer and a cold chill crawling up my arm by degrees. I pulled her down beside me on the bed and she turned and wrapped her thin arms around my body. I shivered and kept her close. I felt my pulse slow, despite her lack of clothes, and when I remembered to breathe she brought her mouth up to mine and shared it with me. That was as far as I got with Amy Elliger that night. Lying next to that dead girl was the most alive I ever felt. *** In the morning, the sun slid along where the moon had gone before it. Amy still lay beside me, her head on my chest. I traced her scars with my fingertips. The slope of her breasts sat in the curve of my hip. She crawled over me after a while, the tips of her hair dangling in my eyes. "Your parents?" she asked. "Laughlin. A charity run. They'll be back tomorrow." She tapped a dark-nailed fingertip on the DVD case I had on my nightstand. Bride of Frankenstein. It was next week's homework. "Research?" "Homework." "Let's watch it." "Okay," I said, unsure. She reached out and pressed the 'play' button on the remote. Built-in DVD, you see. I watched her, because what I knew was about to happen on the screen suddenly felt like voyeurism. The TV flickered to life, just in time for Frankenstein's bride to do the same. "She's alive. Alive!" The doctor shouted on the scream, in his best 1935-or-not-Academy-Awards-here-I-come voice. Amy mouthed the words right along with him. In the corner of my eye I saw Elsa Lanchester's Bride darting her head around like a bird. I could tell Amy was stopping herself from matching the movements. I swallowed hard. I knew the movie by heart. Here came Frankenstein, Karloff, staggering in like a big puppy, not ugly to my eyes but terrible to the Bride's. She screams. Everything was scarier in the thirties, I guess, and things go downhill for them all from there. Amy pushed 'stop' on the remote. I felt guilty, like she'd found a mistress of mine, and we sat in silence. "It wasn't like that," she said, after a while. "I mean, it shouldn't have been." "What do you mean?" She shrugged. "It's a fiction, that's all." She said it quietly, the way you apologize to someone when you know the words come to late to be of any use. "At the end of the book, the Monster demands a bride. A payoff, you know? If the Doctor makes him a wife, he promises to leave everyone alone. So Frankenstein does, but then he has second thoughts, and destroys her." I nod. I'd had to read the book in senior year. Thank god for CliffsNotes. "But he didn't do that either. Mary wrote it true, the first time, and changed it when she realized what the truth would doom me to. If the Doctor made her and she didn't go off with the monster, then where the hell did she go, you know? I guess it'd kind of ruin the book, too..." Amy looked at me, and I got the sense that she was trying to see me for the man I'd one day be. "So that's you?" I said. She shrugged. "Almost the whole thing's made up, you know." "Yeah," I agreed. "Aside from the whole stitched-together resurrected corpse thing, the whole damn thing's bullshit." I took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. "Sorry." "That's okay." "So, where do we go from here?" "Wherever we want. But I'm not going to get any older, Nick. I'll be your girlfriend until you make me your wife. After that you can call me your daughter, when people start to ask, then granddaughter. I'll be whatever I need to be, for as long as you have." "I think that's what I want. I mean, I want it to be what I want, you know?" "If it isn't, one day, then we'll both know. You'll wakeup and I'll be gone and we'll both know some things aren't meant to be." I nodded. Something new was taking root in me, something I'd been missing without knowing it. Love. Amy smiled and I pulled her to me. I'd never made love to anyone, despite the lies I'd told my friends. It was so cold, inside of her, and at first she bit her lip like I'd burnt her. "Nick?" "Amy?" "Please don't do this to me if it isn't going to last, though, okay?" "I wouldn't." Ridge and rise and fullness and hollow, she made me hers and I made her mine. Afterward, even though it was still light outside, we slept. I knew that when I woke up, she'd be there to make me whole. END
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Irvine Valley College isn't known for much. We go through the motions and force our smiles while we try to save up enough money to go somewhere better, which makes us a lot like strippers, I guess. The film department's okay, though, which was all I cared about. At least it was, until I found Amy Elliger.
Christopher Green was born in the United States and moved to Australia at the age of 20, after meeting his wife on the Internet (she wasn't his wife at the time). He attended Clarion South in 2007 and therein found the crucible he needed, like-minded authors who didn't flinch at talk of autopsies, alien implants, and the evolutionary purpose of elf ears. His fiction has been published in the anthology Dreaming Again, and on the Internet at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Nossa Morte and Abyss & Apex. He lives in Geelong with his wife and their two perpetually muddy Labradors. Visit him on his blog at