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morning hunger that was distracting her.
    Meanwhile, Gunnar was still talking. "I bet they story-boarded this whole movie," he said. "That's when they illustrate the film, like in a giant comic book. They show all the angles, and how the camera is going to move. It's especially important on a film like this one, one with lots of action."
    "I made a comic book once," Kevin said. "In the sixth grade. Problem was, my teacher wanted it to be about Jamestown, and I wanted it to be about Batman . "
    "Sometimes they storyboard the whole movie," Gunnar was saying. "And sometimes they only do it for the action scenes. It depends on the director."
    "I did the whole story of Jamestown," Kevin said. "But if you look in the background in some of the panels, you can see Batman in the distance."
    My head throbbed. It was only eight fifteen in the morning, but between Kevin's nervous prattle and Gunnar's ongoing film seminar, I was almost ready to call it a day.
     
    *   *   *
     
    It was true what they say about making movies: it's mostly just a lot of sitting around. But for a newbie like me, just watching them arrange the lights and position the cameras was interesting.
    For Gunnar, meanwhile, it was like a spaceship had descended from the sky in the shape of a gigantic electric birthday cake, and aliens had emerged in the form of naked women with enormous breasts.
    They had made us extras up as members of various high school cliques (which is why we couldn't just wear our own clothes). They'd dressed Gunnar and me as computer nerds, and Kevin as a jock—both arguably decent casting choices. They'd also given us all green socks. I wondered what the socks were about, but being a lowly extra, mine was not to question why….
    As for the girls, they'd pegged Em as a goth girl and Min as a cheerleader. (And for the record, just seeing Min dressed up as a cheerleader made this whole moviemaking experience worthwhile, no matter what happened next. She looked completely stunned by her costume assignment, like a cat who'd just fallen into the bathtub.)
    According to Gunnar, the scenes of most movies are not shot in the order in which you watch them. But in our case, the first scene they shot really was one of the very first scenes in the movie. It was the scene where the main character, a new kid in a small town, comes to his new high school for the first time.
    We extras were just supposed to mill around in the hallway, acting like members of our various cliques. Meanwhile, to play the jocks and cheerleaders in the foreground, the ones with speaking parts, the producers had hired real actors (who, incidentally, looked nothing whatsoever like real high school students; I doubt any of them were under the age of twenty-five or had even a single zit).
    The production assistants got everything set up for the scene, with all the extras and "real" actors in place.
    Then the star of the movie walked onto the set.
    Declan McDonnell.
    Yes, that Declan McDonnell! The one who played the womanizing best friend of the star of that big sitcom a few years back? He'd also done a few movies, but nothing breakout.
    He was totally dreamy. He had straight black hair that he parted in the middle, a crooked smile, and blue-green eyes that were supposedly the color of the ocean. (Full disclosure: I had a picture of him, shirtless, on my computer.)
    I desperately wanted to meet him. Thing is, I knew that could never happen, even if he wasn't an internationally famous movie star and I wasn't a complete nobody. After all, they had specifically told us that we couldn't talk to the stars.
    I pulled Gunnar aside. "That's Declan McDonnell!" I said breathlessly.
    "Who?" he said.
    It figured he would know nothing about movies that had anything to do with actual human beings.
    "He's famous," I said, deliberately dialing it down. "He's been in movies."
    "Oh," Gunnar said. "Huh."
    Right then, the director called "Rolling!", which meant that we extras were supposed to start