14
The Manic Pixie Dream Girl
IDENTIFYING CHARACTERISTICS: Quirky yet flattering sense of fashion; accessories conveying an interest in the arts and travel.
HABITAT: Unknown; suspected hidden lair somewhere in Central Austin.
PREY: Sexually inexperienced, generally awkward North American teenage boys.
Aarti had picked him up in a dark blue Honda, obviously borrowed from her parents for that evening. It wasn’t the latest model, but Norris didn’t need to look it up to know that this was likely the best-rated American family vehicle, whatever year it was plucked from. Immigrants, his own parents included, had a way of always opting for the safest, most average option. The best way to fit in to this land whose roads they were borrowing. From the moment she’d lowered the window in the Bone Yard’s parking lot, Norris’s throat had been stripped dry of all moisture because, sweet holy mercy, did that girl know how to make an impression. They were now driving to the movie theater, and Norris, after hesitating on whether to compliment her on her earrings or her hair or her dress, had opted for all of the above by complimenting her on “the entire situation,” which he instantly regretted.
“My entire situation?” she asked, an eye on the road.
“Yeah, you know . . . the hair and dress and stuff. You look good? But not in an objectifying way or anything. Just . . .”
She’d let out a laugh, not seeming to mind his choice of words in expressing himself—which, let’s face it, definitely boded well for any long-term dating prospects.
Still, fifteen minutes into this drive, Norris couldn’t classify Aarti, which was somewhat vexing. Knowing where people fell made it easier to know how to act around them, especially as far as Anderson High hatchlings were concerned. He’d stepped on enough land mines there already to last him through prom. (God, there would definitely be a prom, wouldn’t there?) As far as Aarti went, Norris could tell there were definitely shades of Manic Pixie Dream Girl involved there, depending on which movie was being referenced.
Her interests were all over the place. She’d gone through an anime phase, a tennis phase, and now she was into local politics. She hoped to take a year off before college and disliked millennials with the fiery passion of a millennial. Norris could definitely relate there. Still, she was easy to talk to, smart and quick and not shy about that fact. Unfortunately, all of Aarti Puri’s good qualities were dwarfed by the fact that the girl drove like a freaking maniac.
“Jesus!” Norris screamed as the small car and its inexplicably manual transmission came to another stilted stop, right there in the middle of Lamar Street.
“I’m sorry!” Aarti laughed. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry!”
A string of honks came flying from behind them. Why was she laughing, that strange creature?
“It’s a nervous tic,” she said, cheeks flushed with laughter. “I always cackle in nurses’ faces whenever I have to get shots. It’s so embarrassing.”
“Right, um, so, you do . . . know how to drive, right?” Norris noted as casually as he could manage, bringing a hand to steady himself on the car’s ceiling after another brusque stop.
“I know how to drive!”
Something about her tone instructed Norris to badger the witness. “Do you know how to drive this car?”
“That’s a, uh, learning process,” Aarti answered, wrestling against the stick shift and jolting them forward one more time before the car mercifully resumed smooth progression.
“There we go!” Aarti exclaimed happily.
Their new pace wasn’t enough for the van on their right given the bejeweled, red-fingernailed middle finger that appeared in the driver’s window when it drove around them.
“Doesn’t the learning usually happen before the driving? I hear that’s a thing. Like, a state-mandated thing,” Norris ventured.
Sure, the alluring pretty girl might get offended and leave Norris by the side of the road, but that really didn’t seem like too bad of an alternative to being driven around by someone who was still “figuring out” the potential death trap they were both sitting in. Black Ice, the Quebec province’s series of driver’s ed videos, known for its spectacularly gory depictions of fatal car crashes, had profoundly marked Norris the previous year. The puddle of vomit he’d left in Eric’s backpack could attest to that.
“Boring linear thinking,” Aarti dismissed. “And actually, I asked for the stick shift.”
“Why?” Norris asked.
“Oh! Well, it’s a good skill to have,” Aarti answered in a tone that conveyed she had said these exact words before. “It’s a big world. A lot of countries only have stick shifts, and I don’t want to be caught unprepared later on, y’know?”
“Future world traveler, huh?” Norris asked.
“Future world conqueror, Canada.”
Norris leaned back into his seat and grabbed onto the side of the passenger window as subtly as he could. She sounded confident in her abilities, which had to count for something. In a weird way, she reminded Norris of his mom—a thought he didn’t want to mine any further in order to keep his brain from collapsing into a horrifying abyss.
They finally—safely—pulled into the parking lot of the Violet Crown, an indie theater. Norris had learned that movies were a big part of Austin’s culture. On top of the annual film festival that overtook the downtown area, and all the national chain theaters, there was also the local Alamo Drafthouse, a chain of hipster-ish movie theaters with monthly sing-alongs and eighties classics where shadow servers brought you food midscreening, as well as the historic Stateside at the Paramount theater downtown, and finally the artsier Violet Crown, known for its higher amenities and cinephile vibe. Everything about the lobby looked modern and hip, with fake wooden paneling, floor-to-ceiling windows, and to Norris, it felt like the lobby of some fancy Berlin hotel, complete with low purplish lights.
“I’m so excited to see this movie,” Aarti said when he handed her one of the two tickets he’d purchased, having followed through on Maddie’s advice. For his part, Norris was mostly excited to see what excited Aarti. “Trust me, you’re going to love it,” Aarti added. “The director is a visionary!”
Norris did not, in fact, love it.
The movie was sheer nonsense. Or rather, it was a nonsensical documentary about a woman in a small Switzerland town near Geneva who spent her life perfecting her own breed of origami paper art and then had died in anonymity. If that sounded dry, flat, and uncompelling in a sentence, one hundred and forty minutes of screen time did nothing to heighten the narrative. The second leg of the film was concerned with the beauty of the tiny miniature Paper Family—the translated title of the overall ordeal—she had built for herself.
There were dozens of montages of her shelves filled with white angels, purple birds, and small, faceless dogs. Not to mention the cupboards that contained hundreds of folded figures, meticulously “put away in grief.” Presumably, because the word grief was more poetic than storage maximization.
After the screening, Norris and Aarti lingered in the cinema’s café, watching various clusters of hipster university students and middle-aged couples step off the escalator and head into the screening room they had just left for the late-night show. Norris realized that they were probably the youngest attendants of the night.
Aarti was monopolizing the large pharmacy-size bag of sour candy that he’d purchased for them, fishing out a single Sour Patch Kid at a time and putting back any green one she accidentally pulled.
“So? Out with it: What did you think of the movie?” Aarti pressed, as Norris knew she would.
“I . . . liked the camera work,” Norris said neutrally, catching a discarded green candy before it could fall back into the bag.
“The camera work?”
“Very steady,” Norris mused as he chewed. “Very straight, stable perspective. They definitely had a tripod.”
Aarti let out a laugh. “Oh my God! You hated it!”
Norris paused before admitting, “Deeply,” with the fire of an anonymous internet commenter.
“I can’t believe you! It was so sad and moving!” Aarti said. “She never found her tribe.”
“Her what now?”
“There are dozens, no, hundreds and hundreds of people who are into origami,” Aarti explained, revving up for one of the high-minded debates that made her eyes shine even more brightly than usual. “She died alone, surrounded by fake paper people in a town of actual people that were dying to get to know her. She could have given them away or taught people how to do this amazing art. Instead, she was just miserable and—”
“See, that’s what bugged me,” Norris interjected. “How do we know she was miserable? How did that filmmaker know? She might have been really happy alone, doing what she loved in privacy. For all we know, she wouldn’t have changed a thing about the way she lived!”
Aarti looked at him for a moment.
“You can’t possibly believe that.”
“Some people like to be alone,” Norris offered. “The fact that people see them as being a kicked puppy for that doesn’t make it so.”
“I think that’s what people tell themselves when they end up alone,” Aarti said. “Plus, we’re both assuming that she was a good person. She was probably a shrew.”
Norris laughed. “Where are you getting that?”
“Because being alone is an unnatural state,” Aarti said with a frown, dropping a green candy only to pick out another green one twice in a row. “Chances are she made people close to her leave. When you push people away, they leave. All that’s left of you is the beautiful tragedy of your solitude. That’s what the filmmaker was trying to capture, I think.”
Norris nodded along, trying to hide his violent disagreement.
“Dynamite camera work.” He simply grinned.
“Oh, fuck you,” Aarti scoffed, throwing a lonely yellow sour candy at him. “Are you excited for your big spring-break fling, then? You’re going back home, right?”
Norris nodded, grateful for the change of subject. At long last, spring break was coming up. “Back to Canada, yes, but not Montreal. British Columbia. Me and my friend Eric are going to his uncle’s condo, near Whistler Blackcomb, the ski resort.”
“What, just the two of you?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. “For the entire week.”
“Yup!” Norris confirmed enthusiastically. He’d been counting the days down in his notebook and was starting to get positively giddy at the prospect. Bags were already packed. Eric had been emailing him photos of Whistler’s slopes curated from the web for the past week. For the longest time, it had been an abstract concept that would never come, but in a few weeks, Norris would be breathing in lungfuls of crisp, frozen air again.
“That’s cool.” Aarti smiled, but she didn’t seem very impressed. “I guess you can hit the town for some house parties and there will be some college kids cutting loose around that you can connect with.”
“I guess,” he said.
“Gotta take advantage of a week without adult supervision, right?”
Norris wanted to make an argument for just spending time with your best friend; he wanted to ask more questions to gauge if going out to parties was the only way she could picture having fun.
But more than that, he wanted to kiss her.
Before fear could talk him out of it, he reached across the small table and took Aarti’s face in both hands and leaned toward her. The artificial, grainy sugar of the Sour Patch Kids stung Norris’s lips, which didn’t stop him. As he kissed her, he could taste the candy on her lips and, more important, feel her smile against his lips. The rest of him felt like he was being electrocuted. If he had to go, this was how he wanted it to happen. No regrets on that front.
“Uh,” Aarti said, leaning away after a long moment, still grinning. Another thirty seconds and this might have been considered a full make-out session. Out in public! Norris imagined his mother chastising him.
“What?”
“Vague undertones of Quebec maple syrup,” she said thoughtfully.
“I hear it’s an acquired taste,” Norris suggested.
“I didn’t say I hated it.”
Her eyes were doing that thing again, drawing him in, making Norris lose himself in them. Did she enjoy the kiss? Had he used the right amount of pressure? To be fair, Norris had gotten the whole kissing thing down fairly early. Hours of watching every clip of every rom-com available online and fiercely making out with his own forearm sitting alone on his bed back in the sixth grade, before kissing another human being had become an actual land mine in his daily life. Since then, he’d kissed girls here and there, and done more than kiss a few.
But nothing compared to kissing Aarti Puri.