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stuff we smoked is great. Why is it illegal? I feel fantastic.”
    Inside, maybe twenty-five people chat or flip through their textbooks. The teacher is a guy with a big Walt Whitman beard. He shuffles through a dozen video cassettes.
    When Marcie sees us, she waves and heads our way.
    “Ben! You made it, and you brought your new hair. Where’s Grandma?”
    “Fundraising. For AIDS, remember?” I tug at Colleen. “Oh, say hi to Colleen. She’s got a boyfriend, so we’re just pals. Barely friends. In fact, it’s some sort of deviation in the time-space continuum that we’re even in the same room together.”
    Colleen holds out her hand. “Hi. Don’t pay any attention to him.”
    “Sit in the back. I’m second, so you can slither out after mine if you want.”
    We settle into the chairs, me with my good side next to Colleen. The teacher gives a little speech, thanks his former students for letting him use their videos, then slips in the first one, which is a Claymation-style film called
Kiss Me Till I Melt.
    It opens with two clay figures face to face; then the filmmaker irises in to show us some time has passed. Scene two shows them lying on top of each other. More irising in. In scene three, you can’t tell who’s who anymore. There’s just a big lump of clay.
    Nervous laughter. Lights up. Applause, applause.
    Then Marcie’s movie starts. A lady sits in a lawn chair outside one of those giant motor homes. She wears a kind of white coverall, sunglasses, and a baseball cap with NASCAR on it.
    “We were on our way from Michigan to Texas Motor Speedway when Bobby just up and died on me. I was driving and he was supposed to be taking a nap. We just happened to be going through St. Louis when he came up behind me and said, ‘Sweetheart, I don’t feel too good.’ And those are the last words I heard him say.”
    She reaches for a tall glass of iced tea. “Hell, we just liked to follow the stock cars: Little E, Dale Jarrett, Mark Martin, and those boys. But the fella who got Bobby’s heart likes to read books and grow vegetables. Don’t you think that’d be like going to sleep in the middle of Speed Week at Daytona and wakin’ up in Leisure World?”
    Even Colleen laughs and sits up a little straighter. I scoot forward in my seat because I like this little movie. Also, I feel really good.
    Marcie uses an establishing shot next: the Altadena sign at the city limits, then a street named Poplar, then a little living room with big furniture and a tiny woman dressed all in green like an elf.
    “I don’t have much to say. Mark was playing football in the street when a car hit him. The boy who got his heart was also named Mark. For a while I heard from him real regular. Then not so often. Then only at Christmas. And lately not at all.” She rubs the edge of the coffee table. “He’s just a boy. Mark is. The live one. Boys get distracted easily. I know that for a fact.”
    That’s when Marcie splices in some stock operating room footage: the chest cracks and opens, some doctor’s gloved hands probe, a big bloody sponge balances on the sternum.
    “Oh, gross!” Colleen buries her face in my shoulder.
    I’ve seen this a hundred times. Not the stuff on the screen, but a girl hiding her eyes, her hair against some boy’s neck the way Colleen’s is against mine. His comforting arm around her shoulders, the way mine is.
    “Is it over?” Her warm breath seeps through my Brooks Brothers shirt and into my skin.
    “Uh-huh.”
    Marcie opens with a slow pan across a McDonald’s menu, goes close on a bin of French fries, then across some Big Macs all wrapped up in their swaddling clothes. The camera settles on a big guy in a white T-shirt tearing into a Quarter Pounder. He never stops eating while he says, “I went to the interview with the transplant people right after my doctor found what he found, but when I heard, ‘Trade death for a lifetime of medical management,’ I said the hell with it. I’m not going