“Sounds like a good plan to me.”
“Speaking of driving.” Josh gestures to his clothes, neatly folded on the nightstand beside the bed, almost as if they’d just come from a cleaner who’d forgotten to tackle the bloodstains. “Reach into the front right pocket of my jeans. There’s something inside I want you to have.”
Charlie does, dipping her hand into the pocket and finding a set of car keys. She pulls them out by the plastic fob, the keys jingling together below it.
“It’s yours,” Josh says.
“I can’t take your car.”
“You need to get to Ohio somehow. Besides, you’re only borrowing it. Go home, spend some time with your grandmother, bring it back to me. I’ll probably still be here.” Josh touches his side. “And when you do, maybe we can, I don’t know, go see a movie or something.”
Charlie curls her fingers around the keys, a sign she’s considering it. Not just borrowing Josh’s car, but all of it. For one, she feels indebted to him. He came to her rescue, in spite of what she’d done to him. That needs to be acknowledged and appreciated.
Then there’s the fact that she likes this version of Josh. It’s the one she got brief glimpses of during the long, strange trip of the previous night. Now that all suspicion is gone, she thinks it might be nice to meet the real him.
But the bedrock truth is that surviving the night has left Charlie feeling lonelier than ever.
Maddy’s gone.
Robbie, too.
Now more than ever, Charlie’s in need of a new friend.
“Maybe,” she says as she stuffs the keys into her coat pocket. “As long as I get to pick the movie.”
EXT. LODGE—DAY
Charlie has to take a cab to get to the Grand Am, which is still parked at the base of the ridge where the Mountain Oasis Lodge had once sat. The cabbie, kind enough not to mention the way Charlie looks and smells, only gets as far the sign for the lodge before being stopped by a police barricade.
Forced to walk the rest of the way, Charlie eventually gets to the bridge in front of the waterfall. The chunk of railing she’d taken out with the Volvo is now covered with police tape—clearly a symbolic gesture and not an adequate replacement.
The Volvo itself still sits in the grass beside the ravine. Although Robbie’s body had been removed and carried away hours earlier, Charlie gets a chill when she sees the car. It reminds her not only about how close she had come to death but about how little she knew Robbie.
And how, when pushed, she was capable of anything.
As she crosses the bridge, Charlie wonders if there had been warning signs that she missed. She assumes there were. She also assumes it’ll take years of therapy to figure out what they were.
That and maybe some little orange pills.
Charlie knows that the movies in her mind need to stop. She can’t spend parts of her life in a dream state. She suspects that’s one of the reasons she had so spectacularly misjudged Robbie. He was too handsome, too smart, too perfect for real life. The flaws were there, but she had overlooked them in favor of preserving the movie-version boyfriend she wanted instead of looking for the real-life one she needed.
That’s the tricky thing about movies. They can be wonderful and beautiful and amazing. But they’re not like life, which is wonderful, beautiful, and amazing in a different way.
Not to mention messy.
And complicated.
And sad and scary and joyful and frustrating and, very often, boring. Charlie knows the night she’s just had is the exception rather than the rule.
She reaches the Grand Am, which had been left unlocked. Sliding behind the wheel, Charlie grabs the keys Josh gave her and starts the car. She then grabs a cassette and pops it into the stereo. She presses play and a familiar song starts to blast through the speakers.
“Come as You Are.”
Charlie bobs her head in time to the music. She can’t help herself. It’s a great song.
As the music plays and the Grand Am’s engine hums and the sun rises over the mountains, Charlie shifts into gear.
Then she drives like hell.
Fade out.
Screening room.
The middle of the afternoon.
The middle of somewhere.
The lights come up on the audience of movers and shakers scattered throughout the theater. Charlie doesn’t know who half of them are or why they’re here or what they think of the movie they just watched. But she knows the important ones.
The director, a Tarantino wannabe wearing a thrift-store bowling shirt and a ten-thousand-dollar watch. He kept his tinted eyeglasses on the entire screening.
The actress, a few years older than Charlie was at the time but far prettier. So pretty that it was impossible to hide. Throughout the movie, she was radiant in her sadness, radiant in her madness, radiant in her rage. Rather than feeling jealous about that, Charlie’s delighted that a better, more beautiful version of herself now exists. The world will see it and, hopefully, think that’s what she was really like back then.
The leading men are the opposite. They just can’t compare to their real-life counterparts, even though both are bona fide teen idols. The bad boy on that hit WB show leaning into type as Josh and the good boy from that other hit WB show playing against it as Robbie. Having seen the real deals, Charlie can’t help but be unimpressed.
After a smattering of applause, the director stands and turns to her, rubbing his hands together and giving her a smile that’s meant to be warm but comes across as predatory. Charlie knows the score. He thinks exploiting her ordeal is going to solidify his career. Maybe it will. Charlie’s long given up on trying to understand modern moviegoers.
Her main focus now is preserving the past, which is part of her job duties as an archivist at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She loves what she does. Getting to be a gatekeeper of honest-to-God film history is her dream job. She even gets to attend the Oscars every year, although way back in the cheap seats. And when she goes home at night, she leaves it all behind. No more movies in the mind for her. Those ended the night depicted in the real movie she just watched.
“What do you think?” the director says.
He wants her to say she loves it. Charlie can see it in his eyes, which blaze bright even behind those tinted lenses.
But here’s the rub: she doesn’t know how she feels.
Charlie’s issue with what she just watched is that it ironically does everything she normally likes about the movies. It’s life, made bigger, if not better. The trouble lies in the fact that it’s her own life that’s been enlarged. This isn’t the story of that night. Not the true one. And she has a hard time seeing past the liberties that were taken.