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It’s a salmon-colored thing, with chipped gold-toned fixtures, lost in the seventies. The rest of the Cortez house has been beautifully remodeled, but Felix refuses to let them alter the retro-cool vibe in the basement.
    “You’re missing the best parts,” he says.
    “Felix, I’ve seen this movie. So have you. I wonder who’s seen it more?”
    He shrugs. “It’s different when it’s not just you in the room.”
    “It’s different when you know it’s all going to happen again.”
    For a second, I forget that I’m not going to be part of it. Then I remember and realize I’m going to have to tell him.
    “It’s nice to talk to someone who gets it,” he says softly. Then he looks me square in the eye. “Let’s go out this week. I’ll buy you dinner.”
    And now we’ve got this again.
    “We’ve been through that stuff before, Felix.”
    “But I like you so much !”
    I can’t even feel flattered.
    “I like you too,” I tell him. “You’re one of my favorite people in history. But, uh, how fake would that look, that you and I start dating right before shooting starts? Lance would probably force us to dump each other just so nobody would accuse him of setting it up.”
    “So if they weren’t coming, you would say yes?”
    Okay, I walked right into that, and now I have to tell him the thing he doesn’t want to hear.
    “No, Felix. I wouldn’t. I don’t think of you that way and I don’t think you think of me that way either.”
    “I’ve always thought of you that way, Justine. Forget that total douche Ian. You and me, we have a connection.”
    “Yeah, courtesy of Lance and Leslie ten years ago.”
    The thing I won’t tell him is that, fabricated or not, I love our connection. Talking to Felix is sometimes like talking to myself.
    In the years after Five at Six , we were always in different classes and when I did see Felix, at school or around town, we were both too shy or weirded out to say anything to each other. Then Five at Eleven was released. There was all the attention and the controversy, and then suddenly there was no more of either, and one day in the cafeteria I found an apple cider donut in my backpack.
    It was tucked into a Ziploc bag with a bow, alongside a sugar-dusted note that said, simply:
    You look sad. Please don’t be.
    I held the donut in my hand and thought about what I did to Rory, and Keira’s face in that scene in the film, and my dad moving out, and then put those thoughts away in a place so deep inside me, they could bang and bang and I wouldn’t hear a thing.
    I ate the donut, licked the note clean. After school I asked my mom to drive me to the Hunter Farms store and found Felix in the back room, arranging strawberries in green paper containers.
    “Hi,” I said to him.
    He turned and smiled, and just like that, I wasn’t alone anymore.
    Now, Felix is staring at the wall—also salmon, with iridescent gold flecks in it. “I would feel this way without the films, I swear.”
    So would I , I’m about to tell him. But I stop myself. Felix grows suddenly quiet and I don’t know if it’s because he knows I’m going to say that, or because he’s listening to the movie in the other room. It’s Nate’s voice, answering questions on-screen.
    “Listen, I could use some advice,” Felix says after a few moments, taking a deep breath. “Nate emailed me after our little standoff in the caf.”
    “What? Contact? ” I ask, exaggerated, but Felix remains serious.
    “He wants us to agree not to talk about certain things on camera, when shooting starts. You know Leslie willask why we’re not friends anymore. I mean, in Five at Eleven there’s that whole scene with us down at the pond, catching salamanders, like we’re freaking Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.”
    I try not to think about that scene, because it reminds me of Rory.
    “But we were never real buddies,” he continues. “My parents work for his grandparents, so I’m basically hired help. Sometimes I think