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there.”
    “Footage from
what? When I was getting older?”
    “Yeah, and
enough time had passed that I was able to bring a fresh eye to the material,
and to the kind of film I initially intended to make—”
    I scooted my
chair back. I couldn’t believe my ears. “What are you saying, Wes?”
    He bit down on
his tongue. “Cam, don’t freak out. I haven’t done anything yet. But I just
wanted to see… you know… if I could get your permission to make the movie I
originally intended to make… the story of those hellish two-and-a-half months.”
    “ What? I thought we were past this.”
    “Plus, now
there’s an ending.”
    “What ending?” I
was upset, to say the least. I didn’t realize how loud I was being until I eyed
at least five customers behind Wesley staring at the two of us with obvious
frustration.
    He smiled. “You
and Liesel floated up in the air at graduation for nearly thirty seconds. The
two of you said it was a special effect, some kind of optical illusion with
invisible wires…”
    I stood up from
my chair. At this moment I felt two things—one, that Los Angeles had
completely robbed Wesley of any humanity he had left, and two, that I didn’t
want to ever see him again. “I’m outta here.”
    “Cam… hold on a
sec…”
    I stormed out of
the coffee shop, and he followed close behind.
    “Cam, don’t get
mad.”
    “Mad? Why would
I be mad? My best friend has turned into an egomaniacal piece of shit. And
you’ve only been in L.A. for four months!
I shudder to think what you’ll be like four years from now…”
    “I just want to
know what happened, Cam. Something happened that night, didn’t it? At
graduation?”
    I unlocked my
car door and jumped inside. I turned on the ignition and looked out the window.
    Wesley stopped,
calmly put on his sunglasses, and lightly tapped on the windshield. My face was
red with anger but I decided to roll the window down. “What?”
    “I’m sorry. I
got carried away.”
    “Yes, you did.”
I tapped my fingers against the steering wheel. Unexpectedly I started to tear
up. “Please… Wes. Please destroy that
footage . I don’t want to ever see it. All I’ve been trying to do these last
few months is forget what happened. If you bring it all back… I don’t know if
I’ll ever be able to recover…”
    Wesley removed
his sunglasses. I could see in his eyes that the mind-numbing time in L.A.
slowly turning him into a total douchebag finally started to erase itself from
his face. “You’re right… you’re totally right.”
    “Promise me you
won’t do it.”
    “I promise. I’m…
I’m sorry. Forget I mentioned it.”
    “OK.”
    “OK.”
    “Put
it in the fire,” I said, “and just let it burn.”
    ---
    The alcohol was
flowing through the house, and not even my parents seemed to mind. The one nice
thing about having younger parents, ones still in their early forties, is that
they weren’t much sticklers about my consuming alcohol, especially around the
holidays. And when they did strike up a fuss, I had to always remind them that
I’d technically already turned twenty-one, and that it had been legal for me to
drink for months now.
    Liesel appeared
before me in the downstairs family room area, as I exited the bathroom. Kimber
stood up behind her. “Did you go number one or number two?”
    “Number three,”
I said, kissing Liesel on the cheek and peering down to see that they had been
playing the board game Clue. “Was it Professor Plum or Miss Scarlett?”
    “It was both,”
Kimber said. “They’re in love.”
    “That’s not how
the game works,” a cracking voice said from the couch in the back of the room.
Kimber’s new on-and-off boyfriend Tommy, who looked a bit like Wesley but with
blond hair, tiptoed up to her before he started tickling her. I still couldn’t
get over the bizarreness of seeing my little sister trade kisses with a member
of the opposite sex.
    “It is midnight
yet?” I asked, pulling Liesel close to