We Are the Light(34)
I knew Jill was really excited about the movie when she refused to bill us for the meal, which is when Mark and Tony said they would be counting on Jill to be the film’s official caterer, only they called it “craft services.” Then Mark declared, “And we’ll pay you well too!”
“Well, at least scale,” Tony added.
When Eli told them about the budget we had created using his four hundred dollars and the money that Jill wrangled from the life-insurance company after Darcy’s alleged death, Mark blinked a few times and said, “You really don’t know how the movie business works, do you?”
Eli and I exchanged a glance of admitted naivete before Tony said, “You boys are the talent. We’re the producers. Which means we’re in charge of securing funding and paying everyone involved.”
“We’re going to get paid?” Eli said.
“Well, no,” Mark said. “But you won’t have to put up a dime of your own money.”
“In exchange for what?” I asked, worrying about the integrity of the project again, wanting to stay on mission.
Tony reached across the table and grabbed my hand, which he patted as he said, “We want you two to make the movie exactly as you’ve written it. We want to do this for The Survivors. We’re just here to assist you.”
“Like fairy godfathers,” Mark said, and then laughed heartily, which made Tony shake his head and roll his eyes. “But seriously,” Mark said with much more gravitas, “we do need movies to watch together communally. We need to laugh and cry in the same room and this is the perfect way to reclaim our sacred space, as you so eloquently pointed out last night at the library. And we need to heal.”
“Boy, do we ever,” Tony echoed.
“When do we start shooting?” Eli finally said, ending a pregnant pause in the otherwise lively conversation, at which point we discussed next steps.
Eli and I would distribute hard copies of our script—each copy watermarked with the name of its recipient, of course, so no one could leak our intellectual property without legal repercussions. Tony and Mark said they had a contact who would begin working on wardrobe immediately, including a new heat-shedding and ultimately safer monster costume that they promised would look exactly like the original, which Eli and I had agreed to temporarily surrender to their care. They had another contact who would begin obtaining the necessary props, including securing the help of the police, because we’d written into the script many cruisers with flashing lights and wailing sirens and dozens of men in blue uniforms. At this point, I told our producers to contact Bobby the cop, explaining that he was a former student of mine and would almost certainly be sympathetic to our cause. They made a note of his name on Mark’s phone and said they’d get right on it.
“What do we need to do?” Eli asked, to which they replied that after distributing the scripts we needed to memorize our lines and get into character, which seemed easy enough, as we had written the lines and based the characters of the monster and his unlikely father figure entirely on ourselves.
“Perfect,” Mark said, concluding the meeting, and then we all shook hands.
On the walk back to our home, Eli and I were practically floating. We couldn’t believe our luck, especially after the disaster that had befallen us the night before. But when we turned onto my street, we heard a woman screaming at the top of her lungs and we knew our fortunes had changed.
“Hide!” Eli yelled, pulling me behind a bush before leading me into Mr. Underwood’s backyard, where we began hopping fences and crouching low to the ground as we snuck our way to our house.
In my backyard, we saw that the orange tent had been trashed. I quickly keyed into my back door. Eli and I slipped inside, turned the dead bolt so that the house was secure, and then slithered on our bellies—military-style—into the living room, where we listened to the crazed woman pounding on the front door with her meaty fists and screaming things like, “You stole one of my sons, but you won’t steal two!” and “What kind of a sicko houses a teenage boy not even related to him by blood?” and “I’m going to take you down if it’s the last thing I do!”
“Who is that out there?” I asked Eli.
He gave me a long quizzical look.
When he finally said it was his mom, my stomach sank. It felt like someone was trying to pull my soul out of my belly button again, and I wished we were in the kitchen so I could look at the clock minute hand steadily moving its way to the place where I could simply hang up and, therefore, free myself from the sticky web of what you Jungians call “the dark goddess,” for at least another week anyway.
“I think the hospital might have called her because of the insurance,” Eli explained, and that made a lot of sense, although I wonder why it took her more than half a day to visit our house once she knew her son had been seriously injured.
“Where did she think you were all this time?” I asked.
Eli just shrugged and then said his mom wasn’t right in the head.
One of my neighbors must have called the cops because suddenly I was hearing Bobby’s booming voice outside and he was telling Mrs. Hansen to calm down and walk away from the house and that he didn’t want to have to use force, especially considering all she had suffered—all while the woman kept yelling, saying that she wasn’t afraid of him and asking if he was going to shoot her and saying this was exactly why everyone hated policemen these days.