“Charlie?”
INT. GRAND AM—NIGHT
Charlie huffs out a breath, blinks her eyes, checks herself in the side mirror, and sees that everything’s in color, because of course it would be. It’s the real world. But for the briefest of moments, Charlie wasn’t living in it. She was somewhere else.
“What just happened there?” Josh says. “You started to answer my question then just stopped.”
“I did?”
“Yeah. You completely zoned out.”
“Sorry,” Charlie says. “I do that sometimes.”
Too embarrassed to face Josh, she looks straight ahead. While she was zoned out, to use his phrase, it started snowing. Big, fat flurries that look fake as they drift to the ground. She thinks of soap flakes on sound stages and It’s a Wonderful Life. Even though the snow isn’t covering the road, enough of it clings to the windshield for Josh to hit the wipers, which yawn to life and flick it away.
“Does it happen a lot?” Josh says.
“Every so often.” Charlie pauses an awkward beat. “Sometimes I, um, see things.”
Josh takes his eyes off the road to give her a look that’s more curious than weirded out. “What kind of things?”
“Movies.” Another pause. “In my mind.”
Charlie doesn’t know why she admits this. If she had to guess, she’d chalk it up to the temporary intimacy of their situation. They’re two people thrown together in a darkened car, barely making eye contact, ready to spend the next six hours in a shared space and then never see each other again. It makes people talk. It makes them reveal things they might not tell their closest friends. Charlie knows such a thing can happen. She’s seen it in the movies.
Maddy was the first person Charlie had told about the movies in her mind. She came clean the third week of their freshman year, when Maddy caught her drifting away for four minutes and twenty-six seconds. She’d timed it. After Charlie told her, Maddy nodded and said, “That’s weird. Not gonna lie. Lucky for you, I’m a fan of weird things.”
“Movies that you’ve seen before?” Josh says now.
“New ones. That only I can see.”
“Like a daydream?”
“Not quite,” Charlie says, knowing that in daydreams the world goes hazy at the edges. This is the opposite. Everything is sharper. Like a movie projected onto the backs of her eyelids. “It’s not The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”
“I’m guessing that’s a movie.”
“Starring Danny Kaye, Virginia Mayo, and Boris Karloff,” Charlie says, rattling off the names the same way baseball fans recite player stats. “Loosely based on the short story by James Thurber. It’s about this guy named Walter who has this elaborate fantasy life. What happens to me is . . . different.”
“Different how?” Josh says.
“Instead of what’s really happening, I see a heightened version of the scene. Like my brain is playing tricks on me. I hear conversations that aren’t happening and see things that aren’t really there. It feels like life—”
“Only better?”
Charlie shakes her head. “More manageable.”
She had always thought of it as seeing things in wide-screen. Not everything. Just certain moments. Difficult ones. A Steadicam operator gliding through the rough patches of her life. It wasn’t until she was forced to see the psychiatrist who prescribed the little orange pills that Charlie realized what the movies in her mind really were.
Hallucinations.
That was what the psychiatrist called them.
She said it was like having a mental circuit breaker, triggered when Charlie’s emotions threaten to overwhelm her. In times of grief or stress or fear, a switch flips in Charlie’s brain, replacing reality with something more cinematic and easier to handle.
Charlie knows the one she just experienced was caused by a mix of guilt, sadness, and missing Maddy. One of those emotions would have been enough to handle on her own. She might have even been able to deal with a combination of two of them. But put all three together and—click!—the switch in her brain was flipped and the movie in her mind began.
“You said you hear and see things that might not be there,” Josh says. “Are we talking people?”
“Yes,” Charlie says. “Sometimes people.”
“So you could see something—or someone—that doesn’t really exist?” Josh says, fascinated. “Or have an entire conversation that’s not real?”
“I could. Someone talks to me, I talk to them, and no one else can hear it because it’s all in my head.”
“And this just happens without warning?”
“Yep.”
“You can’t control it?”
“Not really.”
“Doesn’t that worry you a little bit?”
“It worries me a lot,” Charlie says, not daring to say anything more.
The movies in her mind never used to worry her. If anything, she was thankful for them. They made things easier. A balm that soothed the sting of prickly emotions. Besides, they never lasted very long, and they certainly never hurt anyone.
Until one of them did.
Now she’ll never forgive herself.
Now she just wants them to go away.
“What kind of movies are we talking about?” Josh says.
“Anything, really. I’ve seen musicals and dramas and scary movies.”
“And what about a minute ago? What kind of movie was going through your head then?”
Charlie rewinds her mind to that image of her in the side mirror. Wearing Maddy’s red coat and matching lipstick that’s definitely not there in real life, Charlie looked dramatic. But she was no femme fatale. That was always Maddy’s role.
And Josh was the handsome but wary man behind the wheel, possibly with a past. The two of them could have been anyone. Lovers on the lam. Siblings only recently reunited. Strangers in the dark who, for reasons unknown even to them, had set out across the country without a plan.
Which, in a way, is the truth.
“Film noir,” Charlie says. “Not a classic, though. Something the studios churned out on a weekly basis. A solid B movie.”
“That,” Josh says, “is oddly specific.”
Charlie responds with an embarrassed shrug. “I can’t help it. It’s how I’m wired.”
“What if this, right here and right now, were a movie?” Josh says. “Who would play me?”