“Any new Blume today?” Terrence asked, wandering back to the book area.
“No. It’s sad, really,” I said.
He laughed.
“No practice today?” I asked.
“Canceled due to the movie,” he said. “So is this what you and Max like to do for fun?”
“Yeah, it’s exciting,” I said, trying to sound as deadpan as humanly possible.
“Dad and Edna are working late again,” he said, picking up Smart Women.
“It’s still really weird hearing my mom’s first name,” I said.
“The same goes for me when I hear you call my dad Dennis,” he said, walking over to the comic books. “So what’s good?”
“I can’t believe you just asked what’s good,” Max called, still in a trance in front of the TV screen.
“Don’t mind him,” I said.
“I never do,” Terrence said with a laugh.
“Ha-ha. Very funny,” Max said, not losing eye contact with the inanimate object. I shuffled over to the comic book section. Terrence hung over my shoulder, eyeing the comics curiously. Unlike Max, I was happy to give him a tutorial and tell him what was good.
“This one is Peter Parker and the Amazing Spider-Man.[50] It’s pretty good. I’m more of a Firestorm[51] girl, okay, but the X-Men? I freaking love the X-Men.[52] Are you into DC[53] or Marvel?[54] Because I like both. But DC has the best supervillains…” I broke off, looking at him looking at me as if I’d been speaking in Russian. “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
“No. But it’s cool,” he said.
I smiled.
He turned and picked up a copy of Batman, near the bottom of the rack. “A lot of superheroes are orphans,” he said.
“Batman, Superman, Spider-Man,” Max said, listing off the super orphanage.
“Why?” Terrence asked.
“Character development,” Max said. “It’s great to give them a tragic backstory.”
“I’m not an orphan, but I feel like one,” I said, not thinking before speaking.
Luckily Terrence never asked what I meant. He just listened to me talk.
“I’m not an orphan in the traditional sense, like Annie, but my mom is newly married to your dad, and my dad is off—”
“Saving the world from annihilation,” Terrence chimed in, finishing my thought.
“Funny that we are dealing with the fallout,” I grumbled.
“Survivors of the aftermath,” Terrence said in a dramatic doomsday voice. When I laughed, he added, “Sorry. It’s the comic books. They’re messing with me.” He glanced at the snowy image on the TV screen at the front of the store. It looked like the local news… sort of.
“Now, what are your thoughts on Star Wars?” he asked.
“Oh, I’ve got thoughts,” I said. “The first one was really, really good. The Empire Strikes Back was even better. But Return of the Jedi was… Honestly, I think they made it just to sell merchandise.”
“Did you know that the movie was originally called Revenge of the Jedi?” Dewayne Smith asked from behind the register, eyes on the TV. “They made, like, only a hundred T-shirts. I got one. And when the time comes, I’m going to sell that merchandise and retire.”
He might have been a grown-up, but Dewayne Smith was an even bigger nerd about movie and comic book trivia than we were.
Max hopped off his stool and walked over.
“Speaking of Star Wars, you two are like Luke and Leia,” he said. “You know, Return of the Jedi Luke and Leia, when they find out they are brother and sister and Leia can officially be with Han.”
“Are you Han in this situation?” Terrence asked with a smirk.
“Oh, goodness, no,” Max said. “I’m more like Chewbacca.”
I shook my head. “You’re C3PO and you know it.”
Max gave me a death glare.
Terrence shrugged. “At least nobody here said I was Lando Calrissian.”[55]
Chapter Twenty-Three
We shouldn’t have been so excited to see Astrid Ogilvie die. But we were. Beyond excited, I’d say. It made the hassle of coming to the fairgrounds and sitting through take after take so much more bearable. It had only been a couple of days, and still I knew I never wanted to be an actress—even if it meant being a world-famous millionaire.
I found her sitting on a cloth chair with her name on it. It was facing away from the action. She was reading a copy of Vogue. It was as thick as a telephone book. I tapped her on the shoulder.
“Astrid, I hear you’re dying today,” I said.
“Why, yes, I am,” she said, smacking her lips and not looking up.
“That’s nice,” I said.
“It is, isn’t it?” she chirped.
“Have a nice death.”
“Thanks, love. You too. Now, piss off.”
The fire department was there in case it got out of hand.
It got so real so fast. Astrid’s stunt double got injured in a trial run, which meant that the scene had to be cut, but that wouldn’t do for Mr. Edman. He had his heart set on killing Astrid Ogilvie—I mean Martha Wells. He wanted everything as realistic as possible.
“I’m not afraid,” Astrid said over and over to the director.
The producers were not going to be happy. All the ways it could go wrong. Her suit failing and her dying was another. But it was decided. Astrid Ogilvie would be set on fire.
“You’re insane,” Freddy said as we watched her get fitted into her fire-resistant suit.
“I know, but I’m kind of being bamboozled into it,” she said.
“You can say no,” I told her.
“Unlikely.”
Dylan was going to do two shots. One with her in her regular clothes and then in the fire-resistant suit, which was, as the suit was ironically named, set on fire. In production they’d mesh them together—or so they said.
Astrid was going to die, all right.
She was looking at herself in one of those handheld mirrors, practicing her lines. She must have been a reincarnated silent movie actress because all her facial expressions and gestures with her hands were so overexaggerated.
“Stare much?” she asked, catching me looking at her.
I looked away.
“Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha,” Astrid said, holding her abdomen.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She buzzed her lips and then scrunched her face up tight.
“If you make a face like that, it’ll stay that way,” I said.
“Unlikely,” she said.
“I warned you.”
“As I was in Arkansas I saw a saw that could saw any saw I ever saw saw. If you happen to be in Arkansas and see a saw that can out-saw the saw I saw saw I’d like to see the saw you saw saw,” she repeated, looking into her handheld mirror.
“We all do this,” Owen said as he walked up to me. “It helps us say the words in the script better.”
51
DC. Ronnie Raymond is a high school student and Martin Stein is a Nobel Prize–winning physicist; an accident fused them together. Their first appearance was in
55
The smooth-talking friend of Han Solo played by Billy Dee Williams, the one black character in all three films.