Extra Life Read Free Page B

proving my creative genius to the big wigs.
    I didn’t want to plan any further than that, limit my options.
    I got a little distracted watching Savannah walk away, so Paige Davis had to punch my shoulder to get my attention. Then she had to hike up her chin to see me over the brim of her 2011 pink ribbon 5K walk-a-thon baseball cap.
    She said, “I thought the director was the one who did the don’t text me, I’ll text you routine, not the other way around.”
    “You’re a walking spycam,” I said.
    She plucked Savannah’s wireless mic from the desktop and showed it to me. “Guilty. I recorded the whole thing, so y’all could keep it as a memento of whatever.”
    “You recorded our conversation?”
    “You mean your monologue?” Paige asked. “No, I didn’t. I was kidding.”
    “You watch. She’ll fall in love with the script. She’ll do the shoot.”
    “I’m positive you’re right,” Paige said. Sarcasm so light you could never call her out on it. It went like this with Paige and me. Years ago we were on the same community little league team. Then, after I enrolled at Port City Academy, we wound up together in just about every extracurricular club. Friends was maybe too strong a word, but we crossed paths and partnered up for projects more times than I could count. She was like a yappy little dog—too cute and predictable to really annoy me much.
    Truth is, I looked forward to our bickering. Paige’s quips kept me honest. I loved to see her trying so hard to win against me in everything, even if she succeeded more than half the time. Most kids at Port City Academy weren’t worth her scathing critiques, is what I told myself. Noble adversaries made your wins more delicious and seasoned your losses with just the right bitter flavor.
    There was also the other reason you couldn’t really dislike Paige. Like Connie, she was a survivor of Cape Fear’s dark dragging undertow. Two years back, her older brother killed himself just before his high school graduation. Pills. It wasn’t anything she talked about, but everybody knew.
    I remembered her brother at our baseball games, cheering her on from the bleachers. A knee injury kept him out of varsity so Paige was his backup plan. I didn’t hear the news until summer was over, until the gossip and funeral and the earliest stages of grief had already passed.
    At school, Paige came back with a vengeance, like his suicide was totally wiped from her memory. She seemed the same, not post-traumatic neurotic. Maybe even more focused than before, but there was this cloud in her life, this thing that was her identity—The Girl Whose Brother Killed Himself—even if she totally rejected that label with everything she did.
    But you can’t catch a person’s pain from just brushing against her in a crowd. Most people in our class, even the teachers, handled Paige like her latent family illness could relapse with the slightest exposure, like one unkind word could kill her. Only a few of us knew she needed worthy frenemies to thrive.
    Paige’s dead brother, Conrad’s dead dad. I didn’t know exactly why I got caught up with these tragic family histories. Maybe because I’d gotten mostly a free ride in life and I felt the pang of privilege. Or maybe I wanted to appreciate their pain because it could help the intensity and authenticity of my scriptwriting, and of living life in general. It helped me prep for whatever twists might come my way.
    Isn’t that what great art is? A test drive for living? Play it out till you get it right? And if I managed to catch a clean stretch of truth, my movies could help somebody’s suffering. Maybe even my friends’.
    I don’t know.
    “I need to ask a big favor, Paige,” I said.
    “You want me to run camera for you this afternoon,” she guessed.
    “I’d like you to be my cinematographer , yes.”
    “Ooooh, fancy. I’ll have to see how my day goes from here .”
    “Very funny.”
    “She didn’t even trade you her number,