Call the Shots (Swim the Fly #3)(58)

“I agree.” Matt nods. “I think you’ve found a hidden talent, Sean.”

We’ve gathered at my house prior to my double date at the mall. If I had any balls, I’d just bail. Call the whole thing off and save myself the misery. Instead I’m just trying to pretend it’ll all go away. Which is why I’ve given the guys the latest script pages. So we can talk about the movie instead of going over Coop’s way-too-complicated game plan.

“There’s one thing about the script that keeps bugging me, though,” Coop says. “The main characters’ names. I think we need to change them before we start the real filming.”

“You don’t like Jack and Stacy?” I ask.

Coop wrinkles up his nose. “They don’t grab me by the meat pouch — know what I’m saying? We should make something up. Something cool and video-game-esque. What about — and maybe this isn’t it — but what do you think of”— he marquees his hands —“Rogart and Nashira?”

“Really?” I say, looking over at Matt, who’s sitting on the floor, petting my ferret. “I don’t know. I kind of like Jack and Stacy.”

Coop gives a dismissive wave. “You gotta trust me on this one. We need heroic names. Jack makes me think of jacking off.”

Matt laughs. “Everything makes you think of jacking off.”

“True,” Coop says. “But that’s not the ish. Jack-off is not the guy you picture when you think about the dude who’s going to save the world from a zombie-vampire-chimpanzee apocalypse. Let’s call him Rogart instead. And let’s make him less of a *, okay? Ya gotta give dude some balls. Right now he’s just like a limp schween.”

I look down at the script. “He’s got some balls. He’s just —”

“A wimp. But that’s okay. It’s an easy fix. You’ll work on it. And then there’s Stacy. We can’t use that name because it rhymes with lazy.”

“No, it doesn’t,” I say.

“Close enough. It’s what came to my mind and if I thought of it other people will too. We want this girl to be badass. Like Lara Croft or Selene from Underworld. Let’s call her Nashira Axe. Rogart Crush and Nashira Axe. Those are names that will kick zombie ass and also look good on T-shirts, collector cups, and lunch boxes. What do you say?”

To be honest, Coop’s names sound kind of cheesy to me. But he does know how to sell things to people, so I cave. “Sure, okay, I guess.”

“Great.” Coop waves the script pages. “Everything else is spectac.” He flashes a quick smile, then looks all serious again. “I mean, yeah, there’s a thing here or there we can tweak as we’re shooting, but nothing major.” He turns to Matt. “What about you? Anything you don’t think works?”

“I don’t know,” Matt says, the ferret curled up and sleeping on his leg. “It seems like you added a lot of kissing. Jack and Stacy —”

“Rogart and Nashira,” Coop corrects him.

“Right. Whatever.” Matt shakes his head. “They seem to kiss, like, two or three times in every scene. It just feels a little excessive.”

“Yes.” Coop points at me. “The kissing. I wanted to talk to you about that too.”

My neck and ears suddenly get hot. Sure, maybe I added a bit more making out after Leyna auditioned — fantasizing as I wrote that it was me and her playing the leads, even though I had no clue how I’d make that happen — but I didn’t realize it would seem so obvious.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I just . . . That’s their relationship, I guess. It’s how Jack — I mean Rogart — calms Nashira down. And . . . they’re not sure how much longer they have to live and stuff. They’re taking advantage of what little time they have.”

“Hey, I’m not complaining, dude,” Coop says. “I’m all about sexing this puppy up as much as possible. I’m just thinking you might want to make it part of the plot. Like, okay, what about this? What if Rogart has zombie antidote in his glands — I don’t know, maybe he got a little of the virus in him in a fight with one of the humanzees and it acted like a flu vaccination or something — doesn’t really matter, however you do it — and the only way to administer this vaccine or antidote or whatever is by Frenching Nashira all the time. Or, you know, maybe later on, his saliva isn’t strong enough and he has to give her the antidote intravaginally.” He waggles his eyebrows. “Which actually addresses another problem I had with the script. I wasn’t going to bring it up, but there seems to be a distinct lack of gratuitous nudity. We need to show major boobalas if we want to bag the serious coin. You should think about having Nashira take a bath at some point, or maybe she gets her shirt torn off by one of the monsters. Or, you know, she could do a sexy webcam show before the outbreak. Things like that.”

My mind flashes to an image of Leyna taking off her clothes in front of my friends and I get a serious pang of jealousy. I need to divert this train before it heads farther down that track.

“I don’t think we have to stoop to that level just to sell tickets,” I say. “I mean . . . I don’t know . . . As the writer of this film, I just don’t see how nudity adds to the story. I don’t think it makes it any better.”