This Is My Brain in Love - I. W. Gregorio Page 0,23
enough random power-ups, shortcuts, and pitfalls to equalize the competitive advantage that Tim has as a hard-core gamer (and who doesn’t like a game where you can throw banana peels at your friends?).
By the second run, my bone-weary fatigue is gone, and my shoulders have finally relaxed. Javier waves his hands excitedly as he throws a blue shell and rubber-bands into the lead with an outraged shout from Manny. I laugh out loud as Tim hoots at Manny’s comeuppance and gets so distracted by his gloating that I use a Mushroom and race into first myself.
For the first time all day I’m completely loose, my brainpan unoccupied by business strategy, family pressures, or uncertainty about my future, gleefully mindless as I race around a physics-defying fantasy world with my buddies. For these few precious moments, life is easy.
On the way home from the Diazes’, I pass A-Plus. The open sign is no longer lit and the curtains are drawn, but the lights are still on. I imagine one of the Wus sitting at a booth tallying up a spreadsheet on their crusty Dell laptop that needs to be plugged in at all times because its battery won’t hold a charge anymore, and I feel a pang of guilt. I’m pretty sure Jocelyn didn’t spend her evening playing video games. She was probably stressing over that day’s take and what that spreadsheet would look like after a rent increase.
For the first time, I wonder what she does outside of the restaurant and school. What makes her happy? Does she plan on taking over A-Plus, or does she have other dreams? And does she find having fun as difficult as I do?
This Is My Brain on Drama
JOCELYN
A couple of nights before the Boilermaker, Priya and I Skype to work on the short film we want to submit to the All American High School Film Festival. Before we start brainstorming, though, Priya announces, “I think our film should be set in a restaurant. Specifically, this one.”
“You want to make a film about A-Plus?” Why would anyone with two minutes to spare want to waste it watching a movie about our eyesore of a restaurant? No offense to eyesores.
“Well, it wouldn’t be, like, a documentary. The story would still be original. It’d make it so much easier for you to be involved—you wouldn’t have to take time away from the stuff you’re already doing, and we could set shots up when things are slow. This is what I’m thinking.” Priya puts on what I call her “auteur look.” “The heart of the movie should be about how food can be a vehicle to show love. It’s a cliché because it’s true, right? The way to a person’s heart is through their stomach.”
I nod slowly, the pieces of the story falling into place in my head. “So one character is the ‘Eating Lunch Alone’ dude who comes into the restaurant at the end of a long, hard workday. Is that too tropey, though?”
“Maybe we can invert the trope?” Priya says, scrunching up the side of her mouth in concentration. “It’s not the customer who’s tired, it’s the waitress.”
“Maybe she just started working there, and she’s totally not into the job. And he’s a regular customer, so he orders all these things not on the menu and she’s, like, totally confused.”
“Yeah, so the guy is the one to take the waitress back to the kitchen and feed her the real stuff.” Priya goes distant the way she does when she’s framing shots in her head. Suddenly, her eyes widen. “What if the first part is in black and white and when she heads back into the kitchen it goes full color? Deliberate monochrome, like in The Wizard of Oz or Pleasantville?”
“Yes! We can have a lot of color: red peppers, carrots, green beans, bright shrimp.”
After a bit more brainstorming, Priya has to sign off (her parents are actually around to enforce an electronic curfew). Not for the first time, I wonder what my life would be like without Priya Venkatram. It’s one of the reasons I’m so desperate to stay in Utica—I’m pretty sure I’d be a miserable witch without her. Right now I’m only a melancholy one, which she’s apparently okay with, but sometimes my fear that she’ll realize that I’m the butt end of a cool-kid-and-loser friendship makes me so desperate that I want to chain myself to her person. Other times, for the same basic reason, I pull away from her, try to