Page 4 of White Lights
Sam levels a familiar gaze, imbued with old and absolute power. “Keep my secret as long as you can. In the meantime, look for advantages.” He nods at the woman on the pier. “That could be one.”
“She isnotan advantage.”
Sam lifts a shoulder casually. “When the teacher is ready, the student will come. I think that’s how the saying goes.”
“Here’s your coffee, cutie,” the waitress says, setting down a steaming cup in front of Sam. “And one for your friend. Hope he shows up before it gets cold.”
HOLD A GUN TO DESDEMONARae’s head and tell her to name her worst enemy? She’d say the deep fryer at her Uncle Bob’s Dairy Barn on the outskirts of Death Valley, California.
Dez is scared of little, but the deep fryer holds a special place of loathing in her heart. It scarred her, twenty years ago, before anyone else had yet had the honor. The first pain she remembers, four years old, is trying to help stop her mother, pregnant then with Dez’s younger brother, from dropping the sizzling pan on her way out to the dumpster.
Dez keeps her left wrist covered now. Doesn’t trust the deep fryer any further than she can throw it. Saves cleaning it for last when she’s working the night shift at the Dairy Barn.
She heads to the closet and grabs the mop, wheeling the bucket toward the center of the restaurant. Dez doesn’t mind closing time at her awful job. Sucks at it, obviously, but kind of likes the quiet hours when the doors are locked and she’s alone. She’s come to look forward to the meditative swish of the ancient mop against linoleum.
Uncle Bob texts Dez videos of his orthopedic shoes making thesehorriblescriiiiitch scriiiiitchsounds anytime he opens the Dairy Barn and discovers a sticky spot from the night before, which is always.
She mops badly, restocks the freezer chaotically, according to her mood, and when it comes to the postapocalyptic hellscape that is the bathroom at this family-run dining institution, Dez closes her eyes, squirts some cleaner in the toilet’s direction, flushes with her foot, and hopes for the best.
She knows she’s the worst employee the Dairy Barn has ever had. If you were in a generous mood, you could say Dez sucks so badly because her mind is always elsewhere, because she’s destined for other things. Not necessarily greatness, though she’d take it. Just … more than this. A ticket out of this dust devil of a town.
And even if destiny is a farce, as Dez sometimes fears it might be, even if Dez might be going absolutely nowhere fast, Uncle Bob can’t fire her or Dez’s mom will kick his ass.
Her paycheck is an insult, but she needs it. After tonight’s shift, Dez will have enough cash on her debit card to pay the hundred-dollar fee for her grad school application to the American Film Institute in L.A. Dez loves movies, wants to devote her life to making them because in film, there’s never a wasted moment. Not in a good film, anyway. Everything means something. Together, all the frames, shots, close-ups and fade-outs, every music choice and line of dialogue adds up to something larger than their parts.
In real life, Dez can rarely understand why one thing happens as opposed to another. In her films, she gets to decide. She gets to pay off the metaphoric promise of an opening image with the final shot. And she doesn’t need a happy ending. Tragedy seems to follow her, and that suits her fine. What she does need is an ending of significance, of resonance and power. And since she can’t count on that in life, she makes it in her films.
She dumps a stack of brown plastic trays in the sink to spray down.She thinks of her latest short film, shot two weeks ago on the pier in Ventura. The one she’s submitting with her film school application.Glimpselives on the hard drive of her Chromebook on the couch where she works in her mother’s garage. She thinks of it traveling through the internet’s labyrinth, to a faculty committee in Los Angeles. Filmed on a magical day when Dez and her friend Silas pooled their gas money, drove four and a half hours to the beach, then blocked, cast, and shot the whole sequence in the fading rays of a summer sunset—it’s good, and Dez knows it. The kind of thing you watch with your breath held.
She thinks, for the thousandth time, of Asher. The random local Ventura guy they cast to star opposite Dez in the film. By the end of that day—hell, from the very first moment—Asher felt anything but random. Dez hasn’t spoken to him since, but she’s spent trillions of hours studying his features, his mannerisms, and his inexpressible Asherness while she edited her film.
Since that day, she’s been too focused on finishingGlimpse, on getting in this application, to think about texting Asher. Or to wonder what it means that he hasn’t texted her.
She knows what she would say if she could take the time to text him. And tonight, after she clicks Submit on the application, who knows …
Hey. That thing we made? I finished it.
Something happened that day between Asher and Dez, something bright and true and lovely. It started in the parking lot, when Silas thwacked Dez’s arm to draw her attention to the beachfront skate park. To the spinning shirtless creature seeming to levitate above the half-pipe. Dez stared. Then warmed inside with a glow of intuition.
That one.
After a series of impossible aerodynamics, the skater reentered the earth’s atmosphere, and Dez beelined.
“I’m making a film,” she said, eyeing the light sheen of sweat alonghis collarbone, the way his fine golden hair half obscured his eyes. How small she looked in the reflection of his silver mirrored sunglasses compared to the towering man in front of her. “You’re perfect, and I want you in it.”
“There are pickup artists,” he said, taking in Dez’s freckles, flip-flops, fingerless gloves, her short black baby doll dress and dark hair so long it skimmed the hem of her skirt. “And then there are legends.”
“Is that a yes?”
He brushed his hair out of his face, and she saw his eyes were a very light hazel, reminding Dez of the sweet, sun-warmed dates that grew on the young palm outside her kitchen window. Dez ate them by the fistful, could never get enough.
His front teeth grazed his bottom lip as he thought. “I don’t like living with regret.”
“Isthata yes?” Dez asked. She was smiling through her impatience.
“Not gonna be that guy who looks back on his life and says, ‘Why’d I let that strange, adorable, very forward woman get away?’”
“We don’t know what the hell we’re doing,” Silas chimed in next to Dez. “Just saying.”
